The Digital Tribe

Many companies feel that they might be missing out on the enterprise 2.0 benefits because their technology infrastructure and corporate procedures have not yet resulted in an internal corporate Twitter or corporate Facebook application.  And some companies may be taking the path of "vendor platform" hoping that the feature set provided by the vendor is sufficient to meet a vague need to become more "social" within business.

The drive to become "more social" within business could be stated as "less in email and more within the social media channels."  However, just forcing more collaboration into one channel with the intended depreciation of another channel is not necessarily a recipe for success.  To say that we need "less email" transactions and more "open social" transactions might not fit within the culture of the business.  And to assume that the technology platform will be a lever to adjust the culture of the business?  Well it would not be a good bet to be fully accountable for that transformation and a solid metric set.  Most any transformation at this point will be partially successful.  It will likely not achieve the intended target - especially if that target is a unification of the culture that spans different generational working styles.  

So is anybody signing up for this sort of transformational goal?  Are the new leads for corporate social computing promising increased levels of collaboration that directly impact the bottom line?  And what assurance do these initiative leads have from the vendors that their products used in a specific way will positively affect the business outcomes?  A good question to ask is what does failure look like in implementing a social platform change within the corporate environment.  If you push this question into the territory of the platform vendor, their response will range from "not enough commitment to the platform" to realize business benefits that were there for the taking - to "inability to fully communicate the business benefit of the new platform internally", thereby resulting in low numbers of users and low value in the platform, related to expense and resources to deploy.  In both cases these explanations will shift the blame onto the internal "sponsor" of the corporate social platform initiative.  And if that sponsor is astute in the internal corporate politics, they will spin the marginal benefit as success.  Others in the sponsor's peer group will honor that marginal success because that is the way of corporate politics.  Nobody will hear the truth of marginal success, the vendors will continue to sell platforms, and more customers will buy the products - not wanting to miss out on the tremendous benefits that others have achieved.