12 posts tagged “shel+israel”

There are many FUD-related reasons for companies to hesitate about social media, and while sometimes it seems that the leading lights are too far ahead of reality to be relevant, along comes Shel Israel's recent experience on FastCompany TV.

Here's someone who has tried something new for him, and understandably is learning as he goes along. No big deal? Like 24-hour rolling news, everything has the potential to be a big deal in the blogosphere. And like the stand-up blogger he is, Shel has openly accepted the feedback and moved on. He even points to Tyme White, who says that Shel "is his own best story of how social media can impact a company and a brand."

And that's the point for companies. They may think that they can avoid getting involved in the conversation, but that doesn't stop the conversation or its impact on a brand. As Kami Huyse says, you can't control the conversation, but you can - and should - take part.

Fast Company changed its business model and brought in Shel because the world changed. In comparison, CBS has buried its corporate head in the sand while the world keeps on turning. Rob Paterson warning is apt not just for CBS, but for companies who continue to wait for all the right answers: "Moving to this new world is NOT ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY. It is about culture. If you are imbued with their old culture, it is unlikely that you can make the shift."

Trying is nearly always better than wondering what could have been.

Get beyond the fact that they are tech-related companies and in IBM and Dell you have two great examples of social media in action:

• Dell embraced blogging, listened, took part in the conversation and reacted. in that order. Simple and effective.
• IBM loves podcasting, and it has taken off four years after it started blogging. Both grew virally.

Send your examples to the ever-inquisitive Shel Israel for his SAP Case Studies project.

But here's the kicker. Planning for 2008? Here's a snapshot of E2.0. Now what's your social media strategy?

Enterprise2.0 will not go mainstream until Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Google come together. Fat chance? They already seem to skirting around the edges of late. As Steve Larsen said to Shel Israel @Demo; "Constraint spawns creativity."

The E2.0 constraint is  the fear, uncertainty and doubt that the agents of calcification are using to delay the inevitable. Meanwhile, the behemoths sense an all-out land grab may not be a zero-sum game. Enter open source.

Gartner says that open source is impossible to avoid. That will bring the behemoths together and that will deliver Enterprise2.0 solutions that the vast majority of companies will see as the future of choice. For now, as uplifting as the E2.0 success stories collated by Bill Ives are, it is only the start of the beginning, as all these examples are despite what happening with the big guns.

Microsoft may finally have woken up, although it might be ganged up on by the others (and copying them) while tryng to deal with an operating system that is, says Hamish Newlands, a "late, bloated and unpopular failure".

Meanwhile IBM is giving away Symphony to rival Office, Google is some way off from a PowerPoint alternative, though it shows it's social creds with Shared Stuff, and there's excitement about the Flock social browser from Firefox.

If open source can get them main players to come together, maybe we can soon look back at some point in the future and say that that was the tipping point for E2.0.

Has corporate social media - that is Enterprise2.0 - reached its tipping point? Shel Holtz thinks it has - imho, it has not.

Malcolm Gladwell says tipping points have three rules:

1. Law of the Few
2. Stickiness Factor
3. Power of Context

Rule 1: Now corporate social media may have ticked the first rule - companies everywhere have evangelists for social media, those who are experimenting either off or on the company clock, and companies are increasingly supporting these individuals. Chris Brogan talks enthusiastically about social media toolkits and social media strategies. The latest Melcrum Blog has a podcast of IBM's Michael Kiess also talking about how to develop a social media strategy.

Rule 2: As for the stickiness factor, the jury's still out. In many cases, wide-spread adoption is still seen as technologically risky and, as Brenda Hodgson says, the theory is sound when talking to specific companies,

"...while telling people what not to do is generally easy, the challenge is always coming up with "best practices" within these niche areas."

Rule 3: The final rule is not yet met. Gladwell says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem. This one could require the generational tipping point from X to Y to be reached, as fear, uncertainty and doubt masquerades as derision.

That's not to say that companies shouldn't prepare. Shel Israel's rather excellent SAP Global Survey is coming to a close, and his early findings (bold added) suggest exciting times ahead:

• Social media is active and growing on all continents and most major islands of the world.
• As innovators start looking past blogs, blogs are taking off in the enterprise.
• All social media tools get adopted first by non-corporate users, then seem to catch on in the enterprise two years later. Video is hot now among consumers. Watch for massive corporate adoption in 2009-10.
• Social media tends to start with kids. Think of what that means to your enterprise moving forward.

Shel Israel's rather excellent SAP Global Survey attracts a response from the rather excellent Chris Shipley - credited as the person responsible for coining the term 'social media'. In her response, Chris reiterates that:

"By social media, I meant that community would play a fundamental role in shaping content. At that point, we thought that content might be seeded by writers/editors, but that the community voice would ultimately speak louder than that of the original writer. We saw the role of the media company as a facilitator of the conversation, not the producer/editor/arbiter of news and information."

Now, in a corporate environment, community is employees, content equates to information, and writers/editors equals managers. And in business, communicating is the single most important skill of a manager, whether it's face-to-face or in writing, down or up the hierarchy. Bernie Charland asks, with the advent of Web2.0, if managers are still the most critical and effective communication channel for employees?

Were they ever? If you believe that what gets measured gets managed, according to a 2004 study by Melcrum, only 21% of companies measured the communication performance of managers.

However, though these line managers may no longer to be gatekeepers of information becasue of Web2.0, a good manager's job goes beyond being a conduit. He/she also should be a trusted source of information - the sort of 'friend' you might want on a social network. So for social media in the corporate environment to even come close to supplementing this, businesses would have to follow Amazon's micro-store for every shopper approach, and develop a wholly unique communication experience for each employee. No wisdom of crowds here.

PS: Belated birthday wishes Shel! 

Can Web2.0 help ensure corporate communications is relevant and real, and not off the radar for employees? Well, if the evidence presented by Scott Karp on Publicis and Digitas' move into all-digital advertising is a leading indicator of the degree of personalisation to come (think hyper-personal ads in Philip Dick's The Minority Report), then communicators rejoice!

Communicators frequently try to work out how to make a single publication relevant to different parts of the same business. I'm hearing increasing anecdotal eviodenc of businesses again questioning the point of an all-employee printed publication. Been there with Web1.0, and maybe this time there is some real momentum behind the argument.

Karp highlights that the New York Times profile of the Publicis/Digitas strategy is predicated on "greater production capacity...to make enough clips to be able to move away from mass advertising to personalized ads." Some US companies already run multiple versions of an ad for one brand.

Communicators still get one all-staff publication, a newsletter and an intranet site. As with ad agencies, maybe the number of iterations will grow as technology improves. How will depend von a similar accpetance that print is finally dead, even for those parts of the business that cannot yet access digital media. So that's no access to a kiosk, mobile phone or computer outside of work (ah the digital divide). Really?!

As in the ad world, imagine a verically integrated corporate communication function: the digital platforms are there, providing they are wrestled away from IT and the bean counters. And it's possible to get enough content to personalise even the most corporate of corporate messages, as "the personal media revolution and its inexpensive tools are enabling people to cover what's important to them for themselves," says Digital Journalist Terry Heaton (props Shel Isreal for the link and encouragement to take 15mins out to read the post).

So what would the corprate communicton future look like? Personalised digital news for each individual employee, accessible whereever, whenever, however. 

So there is an acknowledged time lag between the real world and the business world when it comes to technology. But it seems that when that gap closes, then the technology is normalising. Blogs are now normalising, according to Shel Israel. So parents getting to grips with the technology is no longer the acid test then!

Okay, Shel Israel has returned to a question he asked recently around whether blogging is passe? Shel thinks that blogging has normalised - become more embedded in everyday life while newer systems pop up. At about the same time today, I got a newsletter from BNET that includes a video interview with Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of Wordpress. The subject? The future of blogging.

Now it might be, as Shel highlights in his post, that already the world is looking back at how quaint the initial round of social media systems (read 'blogging') were. But that's in the real world. In the corporate world, social media remains at the early adopter/fast-follower stage. It won't last long, but that is still where it is. So the pressure is for internal communicators and companies to catch up!

The latest respondant to Shel Isreal's SAP Global Survey into social media sees him describing 17-year old Ethan Bodnar as the 'future of social media'.

Quite an acolade, but one I agree with wholeheartedly. Not becasue I know Ethan - but becasue of his age. While internal communicators are trying to work out what to do with social media and explaining to peers and line managers why it should be part of the communication mix, it is second nature to those of Ethan's age.

There remains a small opportunity for companies to get up to speed - something that could be accelerated by giving a 17-year old licence to operate. Speaking to a colleague yesterday, we talked about how difficult it was finding people who really understood what communication was about. Similarly, when it comes to social media, most of us are just killing time until Ethan's generation come in and do what's natural to them.

Send Shel Israel your own answers to his SAP Global Survey. To be honest, I always thought he was going to ask those interested to send in their thoughts. Got to get my thinking cap on now.