Social Media Equity
So, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the heck I’m even doing with social media. I’ve always been interested in getting as much information in my head as efficiently as possible and from the best sources possible. When I had a window of opportunity to pursue an MBA in marketing, social media provided a flood of information and new concepts. I dove in head first since I had nothing to lose; there was no agenda except to learn and to experiment.
Now here I am, with over a year’s time invested in twitter and friendfeed, and still no real agenda. The MBA looks further off amid company restrictions during the financial turmoil. Twitter is hitting the mainstream but business use is by far the exception, and my industry is further behind the curve than many others.
I’m left with a choice. I could abandon this stuff except for personal connections. I could become an evangelist and try to push for others to join. But what’s my business case for engineering? What about company privacy, trade secrets, etc etc? I don’t really want that liability. I think the best use of this social media capital may be to turn inwards towards what I’ve heard called “Enterprise 2.0,” in which we use these “social” relational database apps to build internal communities, lubricate employee communication, and facilitate project teamwork.
In this day where company parties are not allowed and there are no finances for travel or for retreats, we could use some real connections, and the tech exists to do it well. We’ll need something better than webex and sharepoint, though, and there are many other barriers, too.
The most obvious is cost, but there may be open source alternatives or you may be able to make a business case based on knowledge management. I wonder if the Forrester folks have looked at project cost savings and efficiencies through improved communication and better KM.
The other big barrier is acceptance. Social media still seems like a time sink to many. Microblogging has a long way to go before it settles in like email has. But there’s no doubt it will. I just have to decide if I care about it enough to help make it happen.
In the meantime, enjoy my tweets about my lunch! :)
