Interesting Enterprise 2.0 Readings - Week 5 2010
Eric Fulwiler: "The horizontal flow of trust"
Social media has intensified the loss of consumer trust by creating a new channel in which consumers no longer need to trust businesses, they can simply trust each other. Social media allows people to grow their own communities to supply resources, one of which is consumer trust. If we are interested in a new product, we don’t have to trust what the ad on TV says, we can sit at the computer (or phone) and in 5 minutes access a community of thousands of reviews and suggestions. Businesses must acknowledge that their traditional channels of trust may be broken.
Casey Hibbard: "How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation"
"Be yourself.” It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real—or you won’t be followed. Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message? It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week’s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries? At IBM, it’s about losing control.“We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation. “We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”
In a collaborative organization, senior leaders reach out to salespeople for unfiltered, real-time information and input into decisions. Salespeople, in turn, engage and collaborate across leadership levels and across functions, business units and regions. Presence-enabled tools enhance this by letting people find each other and collaborate in real-time, enabling salespeople to share intelligence with senior leaders, R&D and others. But tools can only enhance and extend collaboration. For salespeople to contribute to product development and strategy, the organizational culture must support informal, spontaneous interactions regardless of level or title.
Dion Hinchcliffe: "Exploring Why Social Business Will Drive 21st Century Enterprises"
I believe the shifts above are being driven by the following forces:
- Ambient communication - Today, everyone can talk to anyone, just about anywhere for nearly (thought not at) at zero cost.
- Global information flows - The largest, fastest growing, and most freely flowing source of information available is the Internet. This trend will only continue into the future as all information platforms move online.
- Social computing - Social models for communication, collaboration, and business are proving to be more effective and fundamentally better than non-social ones.
- Market discontinuity - There is both space and demand for major changes in the way we do things in business today.
- By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
- By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
- Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
- Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
- Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.