How do YOU see social networking changing enterprise communication?

How do you see "social networking" and "social media" changing communication within companies, enterprises, etc.? How do you think blogs, wikis, etc. will change enterprise communication? What about Facebook and other similar sites?

What would you say on this topic to an audience at VoiceCon Orlando this week?

That's the task ahead of Irwin Lazar and I as we talk with Eric Krapf and Fred Knight in a keynote "conversation" from 10:30-11:00am on Wednesday. The panel, called "Social Networking Meets Enterprise Communication"has this for a description:

It's no secret that world of enterprise communications is undergoing a transformation; IP Telephony and Unified Communications are changing the nature of the game. Now new forms of interaction, which began in the consumer/personal communications market -- blogs, wikis and online services like Facebook are migrating into the enterprise. Where do these social networking systems and mindset fit into the enterprise communications landscape? Join us for a discussion about what's real today and what's likely to happen in the future.

Obviously, this is a topic about which I am rather opinionated and have been writing about in my various blogs for years (including this blog, as well as on Disruptive Conversations and in my reports into For Immediate Release), so I'm very much looking forward to the session with Irwin on Wednesday.

We've already got a long list of points we can cover... and obviously won't be able to cover them all in only 30 minutes (and we've got a hard stop at 11am as what's next is a presentation with Al Gore and Cisco CEO John Chambers!). But I thought to myself - how can I do a keynote panel on the impact of social networking in enterprise communication if I don't somehow include social networking into the prep for that panel?

So here's my question for you all -

What do you see as the top one or two ways that social networking / social media will change the ways in which people communicate within enterprises?

Both internally among employees and also externally between the company and its customers and partners?

To perhaps get the conversation going, here are a few of the topics that Irwin and I already have in our list:

• interest in the opportunities to improve collaboration among employees, especially virtual/distributed
• interest in the opportunities to improve collaboration with customers and partners/vendors
• concerns over enterprise usage of public sites/services, i.e. what security is there for corporate data out on these sites?
• challenges with rolling out these services internally (from a deployment point-of-view as well as business case, who owns it, integration of different systems, etc.)
• expectations of new generation of incoming workers

What do you think? How do you see social apps/services changing enterprise communication? (Or do you take the contrarian view that it won't?) Your feedback is definitely welcome... (thanks in advance)

Technorati Tags: voicecon, voicecon orlando, facebook, socialnetworking, socialmedia, irwin lazar, enterprise, irwinlazar, danyork, dan york

Comments

[Rachel Happe]

I think social media and social networking in particular is going to have a much more profound affect on enterprises. Social technologies force an informal and conversational approach - along with that comes bad spelling, occasional mis-information, personal information, and a casual tone.

To companies, social media may feel like extreme exposure but in reality all of their long term customers and partners understand this 'corporate personality'. Putting this personality down in a persistent channel will highlight how core the corporate personality is to the value proposition of the company....and that is not something companies are used to considering as part of their products and services.

[Kristi Grigsby]

Great thought provoking post! I'd answer your question in two ways: Consumers will have greater opportunities to influence products/services as organizations begin to realize that their input is valuable. Rather than perceiving themselves as the only 'experts,' companies will increasingly open their walls to the collective intelligence of the communities they serve, whether it be consumers, employees or partners.

For the enterprise, they will begin to expect real results from this activity. This is more than a social exercise. This is a way of doing business...and business is about driving results. Social networking can no longer be excluded from these parameters. We are beginning to see strong benchmarks from those who have used enterprise social networks very successfully to drive revenue and ROI.

[Chris Brogan...]

Within the enterprise, social tools provide for ways to capture information that normally flows through email. Some of it is "read and flush," and other parts are "take action and store status." In all cases, putting these types of experiences into a social platform means a "trail" so that we can see where things go poorly, where they work, and where wheels spin. It's a great way to build information points where people can share status, shift faster, and have a better heads up on the overall status of projects.

To me, this is where information is shifting. Away from email, and into a burst messaging, asynch, mix of voice, text, video (depending on ACTUAL need), and ways to store state (like the status of a project) in a collaborative, multi-modal access (the way Twitter accepts SMS, IM, HTML, and 3rd party apps) experience.

Sure it'll be a way out, especially as SharePoint has scared a few people off with their earlier iterations (newer stuff seems really nice).

Not that I've given this much thought or effort. : )