5 New Social Media Turn-ons for me.

Ever since Naked Conversations, I've been following social media wherever it takes me. In the SAP Global Survey on Social Media, Culture & Business, it has taken me into conversations with people in 34 countries and in an amazing diversity of situations. Most recently, with GNTV, my focus has centered on enterprise-related social media issues.

While I remain interested in all aspects of social media, the subject has become vast and diverse. One could dedicate a fulltime effort to following it in education, training, politics, tools, religion, government, and so on. There are few institutions in the modern world that are not being transformed today by social media.

I remain interested in the impact on business and culture, with perhaps, a slightly greater focus, in the coming months on business. That's because I feel the enterprise is currently where the front line of social media is being shaped. While business is retinting the picture that Scoble and I pained in our 2005 book, in fact the enterprise that has succeeded most with social media have stayed relatively true to the spirit of Naked Conversations.

In that light, there are five  new avenues that are increasingly interesting to me. There is more going on than I currently know about and I am hoping to learn a good deal more about them. All of them will be the subjects of my writing and video interviews, or at east, I hope they will be:

• Internet-enhanced productivity. A great deal has been written about social media tools. I'm more interested these days in how those tools make people, organizations, customers or partners more productive. Twio examples are how GM and Ford Motors use Virtual Reality to prototype, design and manufacture cars at reduced cost and higher speed.

• Traditional media getting it right. After nearly a decade of denial, dismissal and anger, a smattering of Big Media companies are starting to see social media as a way out of their downward spirals. Instead of competing, I am a proponent of traditional and new media braiding together. Each sides has what the other needs and I'm looking for stories of attempts and successes in this area.

• Social Media behind the firewall. Someone recently speculated to me that last year, the were more entrpise social media projects started behind the firewall than in front of it. I don't know if that's true or even how to investigate that part. What is clear is that a great deal is going on behind the firewll. I want t know more. I have no desire to break and company secrets, but I'd like to understand how social media is being used so that other companies, struggling with similar issues, might consider embarking on a similar course.

• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). I attended a major portion of a 15-person, four-hour roundtable on CSR last week at SAPphire08. Co-chaired by Steve Rochlin, head of Accountability, North America and James Farrar, SAP VP of Corporate Citizenship, this meeting got me juiced on the passion and collective knowledge of the participants. I also see a significant role for social media in convertin CSR from a lip-service to a global human service, which can often be profitabe for corporate participants.

• Community ROI. I keep going back to something Peter Reiser said during my GNTV interview with him. As Sun's Community CTO, Peter was instrumental in building a behind-the-firewall community of 9000 engineers. He talked about communities working because  of the value given and the value perceived byparticipants. Then he said the ROI for Sun is "real-time knowledge management." This is not mnetary, but it is measurable. Im not far along on my thinking here, but I want to lear more about what companies get from communities that can be measured.

Got a story for me in any of these areas? Please let me know. Just have a useful or interesting factoid? Please send it my way. Tweet me or send me an old-fashioned email.Got a story for me in any of these areas? Please let me know. Just have a useful or interesting factoid? Please send it my way. Tweet me or send me an old-fashioned email.

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Comments

[Marcel Lebrun]

I like the track you are on and I think you have picked some interesting and important categories. I am interested in hearing about examples of traditional media getting it right. I liked the presentation you did on this with NewMediaJim at SNCR.

There is a significant disruption in the traditional media business model, but that doesn't mean big media is necessarily ill-fated. I look forward to your coverage there.

Really innovative examples of social media behind the firewall will be a hot topic, I believe. It will also be interesting to see how the "behind the firewall" initiatives integrate with a company's engagement in social media outside the firewall (with customers, etc.). You could start by speaking with some of the social software vendors like Colin Browning at Mzinga and Sam Lawrence at Jive.

I'll stay tuned.

[Will Fleiss]

Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say "each side has what the other needs" referring to traditional and new media? Is it that new media has the viral & measurable components, while traditional has a greater reach? I'm in an interesting position in the 360 Degrees Digital Influence practice at Ogilvy PR as the "Digital Marketing Manager" whose purpose is to effectively tie in online advertising with social media / word of mouth outreach programs. I also work with the people who purchase television and print. I'm struggling to figure out how to better integrate traditional and social media. If you have any further thoughts on the matter I would love to hear them. Thanks!

[shel israel]

Will, good question. I was thinking about the editorial side, where Trad has the organization, filtering & some financial resources. But social media puts a great many feet on the street, serving as eye witnesses to much which is interesting or useful. In advertising terms, there remains a huge need for micro topical and hyperlocal advertising but there remains a paucity of venues. More to come, but I am just nw getting my head around this.

[Connie Bensen]

Hi Shel,
Great areas to ponder!
Social media behind the firewall & Community ROI both have my attention too.

On Thursday I listened to a great webinar by Forrester on Web 2.0 in the enterprise & summarized it on my blog. You may be interested in some of the ideas.
http://conniebensen.com/blog/2008/05/08/building-community-in-the-enterprise/

And I recently built out a wiki with questions on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise in preparation for a panel that the Minn Interactive Marketing Assoc is having next week. What questions would you add to it?
http://dualityreality.pbwiki.com/

[Michael Clarke]

Well, we're a university careers service - the big social media change for us has been switching from a traditional edited-by-two-or-three people intranet to a wiki everyone can edit. It's had its challenges but with 20 diferent people out of a hundred staff editing pages in the last week alone, it's a much more productive tool for both productive work and driving change. Now once I've got everyone trained up on WordPress...

[Dave Stangis]

Good post and I have to agree. The topic area of CSR is very well suited to the social media trend in many more ways than just blogs. I was supposed to attend the SAP Sapphire, but just couldn't make the schedule. Gary Niekerk from Intel attended in my place and brought back a wealth of ideas. He did his own post on it on Intel's CSR Blog - http://blogs.intel.com/csr/

I'm confident we'll see much more creativity and business value from this space in the near future.

[Tom O'Brien]

Really interested in building out the thinking on community ROI. The real-time knowledge management is inherent in ALL communities - not just behind the firewall communities of engineers. If I want to figure out how best to use Tivo with Comcast for my new HD TV - the community knows. If I want to help my cousin sort out his diagnosis and treatment options for indolent non-hodgkins lymphoma - the community knows.

Communities institutionalize knowledge and make it shared and accessible to people.

TO'B
MotiveQuest LLC

[shel israel]

Tom,
I think you make an exceedingly good point. How hard will it be, I wonder, for community champions to sell that to enterprise decision-makers?