Techguerilla

One of the more overlooked areas of social media is its utilization internally within the enterprise.  It won't be that way for long of course, in many cases leveraging social media concepts within the organization has a clearer path towards monetary gains than externally focused initiatives.  The slower uptake seems to have more to do with simple awareness and attention on the topic than anything else.

My personal belief is that the real barriers to these types of programs has nothing to do with technology or concepts but instead with its adoption.  Without mass participation frequently, and willingly, these programs have no real hope at success.  To that end, much of my focus has been in the adoption arena such as understanding the social/psychological triggers for participation and how various models (like game theory) can be applied.  Yet, obviously there is technology involved since you can't simply leverage the same public social networks for your internal needs.

This brings us to the question then, what exactly is internal social media on the toolset side?  Does it need to have very specific attributes to be classified as such?  It's not as if we haven't had Wiki's, threaded conversation groups, etc. in the enterprises for some time so are those tools somehow excluded?  Does it need to be enterprise-wide to be considered social? Does a email distribution list qualify? How about a tool like Sharepoint, if it qualifies does that make Microsoft one of the foremost social media tool vendors?  Is it about technology at all or simply the purpose in which we desire to use something that makes it 'social'?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Matt Ridings – @techguerilla