Social Media

How NOT to Succeed at Social Media


Turtle on its backFirst off, I’m not an expert on Social Media. I have a lot of experience, have observed a lot, and keep tabs on the ‘best practices’. I have never run a corporate social media strategy or spent too much time analyzing how different strategies impact my effectiveness, though I have consulted on both.

I simply share what I want to share and talk to people. That is the point after all, isn’t it?

Even so, I can see when someone is doing it wrong, even without a critical article being written to clue me in to the problem. Recently I have been watching a company try to get their social media engine running and they are flailing.

FLAILING.

I want to share the what they are doing poorly.

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Privacy in Public, Gone Forever?


Central Park, Memorial DayThis post could readily talk about the disappearance of privacy in private. From Nixon to Sterling, private conversations have been recorded and shared for years. Whenever you have a private conversation, you are trusting the people you are talking with to not share it with others beyond any implied understanding.

Being out in public has traditionally offered up more privacy. Any spy movie you watch throws in at least one scene base upon that fact. They always meet in a public spot where there are a ton of witnesses but nobody who will notice two people talking. Why would they? There are people having conversations everywhere.

All that is changing.

I am not talking a police state or about all the cameras that are going up everywhere for public safety. There are a lot of siloed systems inside individual establishments that are not linked to a broader network. The world of 1984 is not here yet, no matter what television tells us.

I’m talking about social media.

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Email, the Godzilla of the Enterprise

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GodzillaI attended the Greater Washington, DC ARMA Spring Seminar recently and was able to participate in a lot of discussions around governing email. Even after all these years, many organizations don’t have email under control.

As I was sharing details from this event on twitter, I received an interesting response from Gina Minks over at Dell.

@piewords I thought email was dead?

I laughed a little at this response. We have all heard many times about email’s demise over the years. I realized…

When you get down to it, email isn’t going anywhere.

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You are Marketing, not Sales

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I was trying to catch-up on some of my reading the other day when I came across this article from ASEA (American Society of Association Executives) talking about how We’re All in Sales Now. The article covers the changing roles of the Association staffer and how everyone is now a sales person.

Except we’re not.

We are all marketing. This may seem like a subtle difference, but it is a critical one that needs to be made. The end-game and objectives are different. They need to be measured differently.

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Social Media, a Knowledge Management Tool

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I was reading an article on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network on Social Media versus Knowledge Management. Written by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald of Gartner, I was interested because I’ve discussed the topic of Social Media and Knowledge Management a few times in the past and I was pleased that the topic was still getting attention.

Then I read it.

To be fair, it started badly and got better. Here are their two “definitions”.

“Knowledge management” is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important.

“Social media” is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.

The basic precept presented in the article was that Knowledge Management is about collecting, classifying, and distributing knowledge while Social Media is chaotic and a source of concern for organizations afraid of losing that control.

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The Negative Impact of Social Networking on Relationships

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There was some talk during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week that Social Networking was having a negative impact on our relationships.  This idea was put forward by Alcatel-Lucent’s Kathleen Culver during her session (#e2onf-25), but not everyone bought into the concept.

I for one agree with the observation. What I feel we are seeing is the flattening of our overall relationship depth.  To explain this, let me talk about the positive impact upon relationships first.

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Review: Enterprise 2.0

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Enterprise 2.0, New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

Andrew McAfee

I’ve been following Andrew on Twitter for a while and have enjoyed his posts.  So when I heard that the author of the term “Enterprise 2.0” had written a book on the topic, I was initially skeptical of the value to me.  How much new stuff would there be in the book for someone who, while not an expert, was very familiar with the topic?  After hearing about some of the hype, I decided to give the book a try.

I am glad that I did.

Aside from having a handy book that I can hand people to learn about Enterprise 2.0, the book helped me crystallize my understanding of Enterprise 2.0 and helped me think of better ways to explain it to people.

So money well spent, but what did I learn?

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