Here’s an interesting article on how companies are integrating social media into their daily operations. It’s difficult for me to judge since we’re pretty much immersed in all sorts of social media here - blogs, the wiki, RSS, podcasting, etc. What about your company? Do you guys have corporate blogs? Other social media tools? Are we the exception over here?
I’d also be interested to hear your views on whether or not this stuff really will change how business is done. Some might see it all as hype, a passing fad. Or is it here to stay? What do you think?
Ken carroll
YES.
Even in the world of Scientific publishing the winds of change have been blowing.
In the mid 1990’s the big thing was just to get content on the web as is, intially focusing on those people who may have or be willing to purchase printed journals.
Now we have RSS feeds, community websites (slicing across magazines, journals etc in one area of interest). syndicated content, single sign on, gobal categorisation, podcasts, community software sharing, multimedia attached to articles, free content channels, online discussion, single article purchasing, data warehouses (for data mining) etc etc. Some of this is a little experimental but much is catching on.
There are occaisonal predictions that the whole peer-review journal system will come crashing down and be replaced by something more community based (ie not administered by Publishing companies), however the inertia to overcome is huge and I think when the system does change it will be managed by one of the established publishing companies (just in a different way).
Basically there is a constantly increasing amount of interaction with the people who use and provide the content. User feed back however it is obtained now has a huge impact on how our online systems develop.
It will change how some companies conduct their business - not all of them, and (I would suggest) not the majority of them. Depends on what you sell, who your customers are, and how you go to market. We’ve had web 1.0 for years now, and a LOT of companies STILL fail to understand how to build and maintain a simple website that enhances the company image, creates prospects, and adds revenue to the bottom line. I come across businesses all the time who have failed to even articulate and build a basic business plan. In other words, there are a lot of tools out there today, allready - tools that are Business 101 level, that are not beeing embraced or understood by buisinesses. Power rules the hallways of the corporate world, and social media represents a profound shift in power, so of course there will be struggles here.
So while I am hopeful, and I do feel that this is a disruptive technology, I’m pragmatic and experienced enough to know that even tho every company can benefit from these tools, many will not.
I only see the method of publishing and delivering info changing. Just a different way to do the same thing.
I’m in the process of starting a website/blog for a service organization I belong to and so far all I really see is that blogging is just a easier way to manage a website than I’ve done in the past. I feel there is definitely more hype than substance. So long as good examples of using the technology, like ChinesPod, have a sound business plan backing them up and they become profitable, they will be the lasting winners. The others will be gone as the fad passes.
As far as my company goes, we do not use much social media and this is unlikely to change. We have a tool or two that we’ve used internally for the past 8 years or so that you could call “social media”, but still nothing outside. Yes, I think ChinesePod is an exception.
It obviously depends where you are working.
The ‘ease’ element with blogging for example means that some organisations now set up blogs for their representatives visits to conventions or trade fairs. This immediately gives an interested party a number of slices into what is going on at the convention, allows managers some insight in to what their staff are doing and also is somewhere to hang a little followup activity (maybe based on the oft-seen competition entry in return for leaving your contact details etc.).
As far as publishing goes, the use of the meta-data around the information will surely change things. For example now-adays an author of an academic paper may be able to see and track citatations of his work as and when they happen, may be able to know how many times his paper has been downloaded or viewed online and my be able to join in discussions or ammendments to his works, well before the more formal peer-review process has kicked in. Erratum can be published immediately, movies added, result-set data added, custom-software written to process the data made available etc. Enhanced catergorisation may mean his work will get seen by people in other fields who would never have had the time to track it down before.
I think we have only begun to see how social media is going to change the way we do things. The article focuses more on the customer to business point of contact aspect of social media, but I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The side of social media that Chris is talking about is far more interesting. I think, as wireless laptops and internet enabled devices become more accessible to young students, the whole concept of knowledge will change from “What do I know” to “What does the world know.” This is where social media will make it’s biggest impact. When posed with a question or decision in business, research, entertainment, family, politics, etc. the successful people will not necessarily be the ones with the best logic, most experience, or even the ones with the biggest databases, but the ones who know where to look and who to trust and how to entice the right information out of the “Big Brain” as Ken has called it.
Just like the calculator worked it’s way into the school system (to the point where people today could really care less anymore if you still know how to do long division in grade 10), laptops will be an essential part of learning and you will take them into tests and tackle problems with the collective knowledge of the entire planet. Knowing how to work with social media will be so essential that it will just be second nature to involve it in everything you do.
Companies like Google, who work with logical algorithms, rules, and massive databases will (as hard as it is to see now) eventually be seen as static, while engines like Technorati and (from what I’ve heard) Yahoo! who understand social media will be the dynamic hubs for personalized and trusted information. I notice as I try to put black on white here that I even find it hard to grasp and probably am not articulating anything of any use, but I’m convinced social media is here to stay, but it will be far more developed 10 years from now and will probably look nothing like these primitive company blogs and digg.com’s.
Although my post can tag me as a tech laggard or even a Luddite, I love new and different technology. I’ve just seen too much hype to believe it when I hear someone is “changing the way business is done.” Technology is quite often developed just to have new technology without any real immediate benefit. This is still a good thing since new ideas often only get traction when applied to something the creators didn’t envision.
Rian wrote: “the successful people will not necessarily be the ones with the best logic, most experience, or even the ones with the biggest databases, but the ones who know where to look and who to trust and how to entice the right information out of the ‘Big Brain’” This is no more true now than it was 20, 40, or even 50 years ago. In the end, no matter what info is at your finger tips, you still have to deliver a product or service and make a profit.
From a different veiw, what do the the high-tech people in a place like Silicon Valley do outside their tech jobs? My experience is that outside of work, many are offline and unplugged.
Example:
TECHIES SPENDING SPARE TIME BOWLING
Source: SCOTT DUKE HARRIS, San Jose Mercury News, July 18, 2006
Oracle’s Larry Ellison races yachts. Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy is a scratch golfer.. The geeks from PBWiki have turned to another sport: bowling. A new league opened the other night at the Palo Alto Bowl, organized by and for the entrepreneurs who, during the day, roll out the latest Internet ventures — a field labeled ”Web 2.0.”. Now, the new ”Bowling 2.0”
Social Media may be here to stay, but will it help you with your 7-10 split?
I’d have to disagree I think. Sure, collaboration and “knowing where to look and who to trust” are not a new concepts, but I would argue that social media as a tool is quite a new concept. 15 year ago when I was told to go do a school report on Poland I went to the library and pulled out the Encyclopedia and books published in 1975 when Poland was quite a different place. I referenced all my material in the “Bibliography” and got an A on a report that was completely wrong. Why? Because regardless of whether or not the information was relevant, I was being taught how to use a certain kind of tool to collect my information, one that is completely different from what is out there today. A kid would never get away with that today, and by the time my kids are doing their report on a county I’m sure it will be expected that their list of references include personal contact with people living there who are trusted because they’ve got an network of trusted contacts build up around them. That’s what social media is, and I think it requires a hell of a lot more cunning in terms of knowing where to look and enticing the relevant and trusted information out of the Big Brain than going to the library does.
I also think it will help you with your bowling game. Who’s bowling team would you place your money on, the handpicked Ford bowling champs who were probably put together by the CEO based on rumours of who was good within a limited pool of known employees, or the Sun Microsystems champs who were probably formed by matching profiles and bowling stats of every member of the company and who probably collectively know 10 times more about the Ford team members than the Ford members know about each other. Again, that’s what social media is, and that’s why I think what I said it is far more true today than 20, 40, 50 years ago.
Rian, we’re more in agreement than you might think. The difference being that we see this from vastly different perspectives.
Take blogging as an example. I’ve seen people maintaining web logs and have followed some of them for probably the last 12 years. Did they use WordPress or similar tools? Certainly not, but they had web sites that performed the same basic functions as blogs do today. As the adoption of these new tools make it easier for the masses to “blog”, you get some great blogs and some where I wonder why they even bother. Although finding information will become easier and quicker, finding what you need, separating the opinion from the fact (especially when you need the facts), is likely getting more difficult. Humans cannot think faster or better than they have in the past and no technology will speed this up. It will thererfore require “a hell of a lot more cunning”, as you put, to find it. The question remains, will they make good use of the info? As with all new stuff in the past, the smart ones will. (I haven’t used an encyclopedia in probably 25 years and I haven’t hit 40 yet (I can say that until next year
I commute past the Sun buildings every day and know they will have a better Cricket team than a bowling team. So, I’ll dust off my ball and join the Ford team any day. Besides, I don’t have a wicket and bowling is more interesting.
your blog is so interesting to read, thank you
At least one of the last two is spam, used verbatim (and punctuatim) on other unrelated blogs to create links to themselves. (ask google)
Perhaps if we didn’t have the ability to link to our personal web site when we post, there would be less attraction for spammers.