Thursday, December 30, 2010

Is it Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business?


During the Holiday break, I jumped into Quora, the growing crowdsourced Q&A site. If you have not given it a try yet, you should check if out. There are some sharp people there.

I could not resist when the question came up: What are the distinctions between Social Business & Enterprise 2.0?

My answer is posted here. but I figured, hey, this is worthy of a blog post. I hope you agree (about the blog post part.). This is my view as a practitioner / player in this space. There is no right or wrong answer since this field is quickly evolving, just lots of opinions. (you can read other answers here.) Therefore I respectfully submit mine.

Q. What are the distinctions between Social Business & Enterprise 2.o?

A. In my view Enterprise 2.0 involves social networking within a large enterprise. This includes a single profile of each employee, communties made up of those employees, and an activity stream tying it together (alerting colleagues to activities and events with those profiles and communities). Microblogging is another aspect of E2.0. #E20 is the twitter hashtag for Enterprise 2.0

In parallel, we are seeing other aspects of social media make it's mark (reputation monitoring and marketing through consumer channels such as Facebook, YouTube, flickr, twitter). #socialmedia is the common hashtag.

CRM systems are starting to expand to enable engaging with customers and partners in a meaningful dialog. This is commonly called Social CRM. #SocialCRM or #SCRM are common hashtags.

E2.0 activities evolve to include mixed communities made up of employees and external business partners. There are some camps that continue to call this Enterprise 2.0 and others that want to call it something else (external Collaboration for example).

Social Business pulls it all together to convey any business use of social media or web 2.0 activities and practices. Just like E-Business pulled it all together in the early e-commerce days, I believe Social Business pulls it all together for corporate web 2.0 applications today. #SocBiz is the hashtag.

These terms are used mostly by vendors and practitioners. Most corporate leaders prefer to speak in business terms referring to professional networking, collaboration, or online communities, among other generic terms. I seldom hear the terms Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business among business executives.

Do you have another view? Please tweet it or post below in the comments. Or just let me know what you think on twitter at @jimworth .

Friday, December 17, 2010

Your eNewsletter is Old School


I still get many e-newsletters in my inbox. Many of them have very good content, but I am finding that I get more and more frustrated with the lack of social integration. I receive something interesting, I want share it with my network. If I were "old school", I would just forward that email to all my friends...yuck.

So I look for the share features that are starting to emerge. I received one recently that had a link to share it on twitter. I clicked it and got a twitter window with a very cryptic preformatted tweet (ugly headline, shortened URL, and a hashtag ad for the newsletter platform)...double yuck.

It got me thinking...as I look at these e-newsletters that were all the rage just 5 years ago, it is painfully obvious to me that it is time for these companies to "get social". I'd like to share some strategy and tactics just in case you find your e-marketing method "old school" and are longing for a way to break out and get social in 2011.

Here is my short list of recommendations. These were created with an event management company in mind, but probably translate well to anyone using e-mail marketing to promote their organization.
  1. Leverage your e-newsletter into a ongoing twitter campaign
  2. Build a community with your audience using a microblogging tool (maybe from Socialcast) and a community platform (maybe from Jive)
  3. Update your website and communications with various "share" features (see this example blog)
  4. Utilize YouTube and Flickr to share the excitement of your events with your audience
  5. Encourage blogging from and about your events
  6. Add a twitter hashtag to every event and promote it in all literature and communications. Register it on what the hashtag
  7. Utilize a wiki to crowd source and then archive tweets, blogposts, and user generated content about your events

If you would like to expand on these recommendations, share example best practices, or just add you 2 cents, please tweet it or comment below.

Let's make a resolution to drop the "old school" e-marketing tactics of the 2000s and move full speed into the "new school" social media tactics of the 2010s.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

None of Us is as Smart as All of Us



It's a quote from "One Minute Manager", Ken Blanchard. It's also the perfect title for this short blog post.

I've been gathering tweet logs and blog posts from several conferences over the past year. I do a little work to set the stage and the crowd adds content. It's a great model.

If you have any interest in the latest thinking in Social Media / Social Business / Enterprise 2.0 / Crowdsourcing and the like, I think you will find this wiki valuable. It provides full social web coverage for two Enterprise 2.o conferences, the European Enterprise 2.0 Summit, Defrag 2010, and a local Barcamp that I am very proud of helping to organize.

Check it out and make it better: E20 Wiki Workspace

(btw Look here if you want more witty crowdsourcing quotes.)