Business and Blogging

Ten Things to Watch When Introducing Social Software in the Enterprise

by Des Walsh on February 17th, 2007

For anyone with a role, or simply a desire, to promote the introduction of blogging - or, more generally, social software  - into an enterprise, large or small, or with the responsibility of actually doing the implementation, Mike Spofforth provides a must-read, ten point checklist in his post Lessons Learned From Social Software Implementations.

Mike is reflecting on “social media consulting, development and implementation in corporate South Africa “over a period of eighteen months.

This is good, practical stuff, and there is some implicit indication that the learning of these lessons was not a painless process. For example, commenting on his first point, “Social Software is not for Everyone”, he writes:

Despite what us Web 2.0 enthusiasts may want to believe, not every society, community and individual can find value in 2.0-ness. Some companies do fine without it and forcing a social media inplementation on a community can only get ugly. Be as objective as you can when you draw up a strategic plan or functional specification for a project. If youre not convinced that social software can add value, walk away from it.

And on his third point, Don’t Be an IT Consultant, he comments:

Never ever walk into a CTO or CIOs office (or anyone for that matter) and try to sell the next big thing in IT. Theyve heard that pitch and it usually ended in wailing and gnashing of teeth. The fundamental function of 95% of the IT executives I’ve met is damage control.

His recommendation in this context struck me as very good advice. He says the way to go is to present your social software as augmenting their existing system. And if they take a decision later to scrap their old system it will be because they saw that as appropriate, not because you said it.

That’s almost certainly a more practical approach than I’ve been taking, which is to tell business owners not to seek guidance from their IT people about blogging, just tell them you are going to do it and you want them to help you do it. While that approach might work in small business, it might be quite unrealistic at an enterprise level.

Overall, as so much information and so many of the examples trotted out by blogging consultants, myself included, are from North America, I found it especially helpful to have some feedback of this kind from another part of the world, technologically sophisticated at one level and of course also meeting huge challenges in nation-building. 

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