There have been a few interesting and controversial posts in the past few months about the topic of the adoption of social media in the organization.
Clay Shirky the famous social media expert (“Here comes everybody: the power of social media in organizations“, and “Cognitive surplus: how technology makes consumers into collaborators“) asserts in this blog post that “social networking will change business like PC, laptop, email” that it will come naturally in the organizations. Like email was a strange concept in the middle of the 1990’s we just need to let the IT departments figure out how to deploy them.
On the other hand, this HBR post on “the six attitudes leaders take toward social media” paint a less rosy picture, although they agree that there is progressive (slow) trend toward adoption.
Finally, in November CapGemini announced it would get rid of their internal email and use some sort of an internal social networking tool instead. That’s a definite adoption of social networking internally.
I see a trend where companies will first develop internal social networking tools. It’s less scary. This will greatly enhance internal global communication and demonstrate the power of social networks in terms of effectiveness.
Yet the main value will be when stakeholders and customers can be enrolled in a conversation spanning beyond the limits of the organization. Only when organizations will have the guts to move into this realm will they fully benefit of the value of the Fourth Revolution. And not many will do it. I guess that we’ll see a few of them try in 2012. Stay tuned!
