Webworld Technologies

NOTE:  Flickr is currently down right now, so I’ll post more photos of this event once Flickr comes back up.

Just attended a great breakout session at the Sharepoint 2009 Conference on Social Media, and the business case for social media in the enterprise.  The person presenting at the conference was a Daniel Rasmus, Director of Business Insights at Microsoft.  Per him, his job is to utilize advanced crystal ball methodology to give as best an insight on the future as possible, and as such he had some great things to say on the place of social media in the workplace.

First off, he noted that you can’t stop social media in the enterprise – if nothing else, smartphones make such a thing impossible.  So, firewalling off Twitter and Facebook and such is a silly exercise. 

I’ll go down some other bullets from his talk, and insert some of his slides as well:

84% of people don’t / can’t measure ROI from social computing.  Why?  The probably don’t know how, as it’s a bit different than the traditional ROI calculation.

What is ROI for Soc Computing?

• Quality of dialog
• Reduced storage costs due to centralized /de-duplicated storage
• Communal information – tap in to corporate knowledge better
• More rapid peer-to-peer computing
• Collaborative problem solving
• There’s a lot of BI that you can’t easily abstract with a chart or a spreadsheet – it’s a question that gets answered by SOMEBODY and that’s social networking to solve that
• Decreased time-to-value for new employees

Note: Click-throughs are not enough from viral video, need to give the visitor value.

Things that get placed in social media can have a long tail – i.e. a magazine ad goes away when the mag dies, but some things that are placed in the social media space keep delivering after even years.

Posts in the social media space are usually “small atoms”.  I.e. you don’t usually see someone pop up on Facebook and say, “here is the 67 page strategic plan for my company, what do you think?”  Usually more like, “OMG WTF??”

Differences between Enterprise & Personal Social Media:

No problem with “migrating from MySpace to Facebook”, but migrating from legacy systems is a big deal in the enterprise.  Also, enterprise is very document-centric, so one then does have much more of a hump to cross to implement in the business space.

Also, you need to manage how social media is treated in the corporate culture, as there will be a fear that if in corporate knowledge management, if you share all you know, then you are either “not doing your job” as you’re ‘not working’, or you won’t share all you know because then you won’t be necessary anymore.

Social Media:  Be strategic about it.  Don’t just do silly & random experiments, work out a strategy and do it.

And if you don’t build it, they will go someplace else.

Risks of not adopting social computing: