Future of Media Summit Blog

I just had a chat with Ariel Roda (formerly of PLDT) who apparently has a platform that flattens corporate communications in the spirit of Social Media philosophies.

During product road shows, every presentation of the platform to the typical target audience (IT managers and senior executives I'm guessing) results in consistent "We still don't get it" looks on their faces.

Experiences such as Ariel's display the challenges that slow down the enterprise adoption of social media concepts and tools.

The truth is, making an effective pitch for Enterprise Social Media should take into consideration key strategies.

Know the Market

The oft cited Mcann Wave3 Study on Social Media underlines very significant figures that should be understood and exploited. For example, some statistics vis-a-vis the Philippine internet universe of 3.7 million users are as follows:

• 90.3% of users read blogs (#2 in the world), 65.8% have written blogs (#4 in the world)
• 83.1% belong to at least one social network (#1 in the world)
• 86.4% upload and share photos (#1 in the world)
• 98.6% watch videos on the web (#1 in the world), 60.5% upload and share videos (#2 in the world)
• 61.8% download podcasts (#5 in the world)
• 45.2% read RSS feeds (#6 in the world)

Such numbers would at first glance be clearly valuable from a marketing perspective. However, from the enterprise point of view, the above points to two postulates.

1. 1. The filipinos are immersed in social media and have embraced it with a passion.
2. 2. If social media is injected into the filipino workplace, filipinos will adopt it and be expert users.

Complete the Context: Enterprise 2.0

The biggest mistake when presenting the case for Enterprise Social Media is neglecting to complete the story. The foundation must be laid to make the value leap more apparent.

Refrain from pitching a social network, or a blogging engine, or a wiki platform. What you should be introducing is a philosophy, and subsequently, tools and platforms that give life to this philosophy within the enterprise. Interestingly, the transformation into Enterprise 2.0 will not happen from the top but will instead be initiated from the bottom-up.

Value the Conversations.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is the key foundation of Social Media. The basic posit is that knowledge in a familiar context is more powerful than an encyclopedic collection of information difficult to retrieve and comprehend.

Provide the Tools not the Solutions.

The best way to solve users' challenges is to arm them with the tools to find their own solutions based on their desire lines -- their quest to get from point A to point B. Sets of tools that enable users to share, retrieve, improve, and grade knowledge is all that's needed. Given time, the users themselves will create solutions no amount of pre-planning might foresee. One needs to keep in mind though that tools aren't just software and systems. Tools also include processes, frameworks, and methodologies.

Evangelize Agility.

The effective transformation of a company to Enterprise 2.0 is significantly bound to the adoption of the Agile Manifesto. Agile methodologies allow tools to be implemented and put into use immediately. After which, use cases are observed and these tools are improved and adjusted according to continuous feedback. Meanwhile, users themselves continue to develop novel applications of these tools leading to a cycle of increasingly more intelligent solutions from the work of all parties.

Embrace the Ambient Webstream.

With the emergence Social Media tools, it is important to recognize that information retrieval no longer just becomes an on-demand activity with search powering the harvesting of information. A far more significant scale of information will flow to the user without consciously requesting it. This is already becoming apparent on public platforms such as twitter, friend activity feeds, RSS feeds, and other channels that constantly stream knowledge outside one's normal frame of web activity.

Tapping the network effect.

With knowledge as the asset, the size of one's network exponentially increases the ability to tap into crowd wisdom. The network likewise ensures the quality of knowledge and its sources through peer review. In a way, this makes every bit of knowledge that the network interacts with, a product of collective intelligence.

In light of the above, the only effective way to penetrate the enterprise with Social Media is to continue to evangelize, implement the tools for free for a certain time frame, then let the users decide to keep them and how to best use them.