e2.0 blog

First of all: you’re not alone. Thousands of companies understand that social media is here to stay and might provide useful tools for communication, both internally and externally. But, as always – you can’t really just tell people “do it”, without telling them how. Of course, you could – but that would in that case be your Social Media Policy. And a very weak one, too.

So where do you start off with a Social Media Policy? Truth is – nobody really knows. We live in fascinating times where we can experiment and try out different methods. Fortunately, someone else has already begun and can show us how they did it. Over att Social Media Governance you now find no less than 108 documents that may function as templates for your own Social Media Policy.

It does not end there. All companies are carefully segmented by industry so you can easily look up one that is closest to your own and let the inspiration flow. Some are more social than others. Some are strictly referring to special tools, such as Facebook and some are very general and broad in scope.

In any case; it’s definitely worth having a look: http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php

Interesting blog posts around the web this week:

Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?

Leveraging Social Networking During Your Job Search

Internal micro-blogging can be intimidating

Some testing is better than none

Do you have more good links from this week? Post them in the comments and share with us all!

Companies do nothing if there's no money involved. In an era that keeps us surrounded by soft stuff, as marketing trends, marketing expectations and marketing values, it's sometimes easy to forget that in the end it all comes down hard stuff, to money. A company should make money it it wants to survive. Like it or not.

This said - social media for companies is no different. In a recent post in Swedish blog, Same Same But Different, Michael Zackrisson tells us that social media is not about money at all. At least not now.

"Social media is simply not about money. It's about reaching our goals in life - and in doing this we use the tools that exist." [my translation]

And while that may be true for many individuals using social media - it is not the case for companies. Even though social media has changed many things about communication, it can hardly change the need for a positive surplus in a fiscal report. And social media can in fact make money for many businesses, but not in quite the same manner they first thought.

Zackrisson is probably correct in his notion that social media change people's focus from money to something else; publicity, relations, love or even fame. People do things on the web today for free that, if they charged for the man-hours, would cost a lot but nobody probably would pay. This is no less than a revolution and when companies ask themselves - how can we make money on this? - they start from the wrong end. Why? Because social media, as we look upon it today on most sites, is not the social media you can make money on.

What you can make money on is the understanding of how social media encourages people to share knowledge and thoughts instead of keeping it to themselves. The problem with most intranets and other knowledge sharing communities in companies today is that they either contain nothing at all or a multitude of irrelevant information. Either way, they do not save or make money, quite the contrary. Social media at companies work best when they are used on the inside - when it encourages employers to really share and grade information on a level that is more useful to the company. After all; more information about how a company is doing can be found at coffee breaks than in most official economic reports. People want to cooperate and social media is, as far as we know, the ultimate cooperation tool.

In this respect social media is all about the money, but perhaps its not the most selling way to describe it. Maybe we need to say it in a different way?

"Maybe social media is not all about the money. It's all 'bout the dumdumdada-dumdum."

Thanks to Oscar Berg I found this article by IDG - saying "Collaboration Tools Worth the Investment, Survey Says" which is wonderful news. Not just becuase it's actually a good investment, but finally there are some numbers on this fuzzy term Enterprise 2.0.

The survey doesn't focus on any specific technology or feature such as wiki, instant messaging, etc - more collaboration tools in general - which results in that you can't really tell what delivered the most. I can't exactly agree on saying that VoIP falls under the umbrella collaboration, which was included in the survey.

However - pleasing to see that the business functions that had the most out of it was sales, marketing and R&D. The result is of-course faster development and more revenue - now we're talking money!

One interesting insight was that the users found the collaboration tools helping them balance work with their personal lives. I think it's interesting purely because it's a "non-figure-value" that they found and choose to highlight. In my opinion that is one of the huge benefits of working with collaboration tools such as wikis and blogs internally - it sets the spotlight on the individual - "you can make a change, your voice is heard and respected".

That individual satisfication - of being respected regardless of title on your business card - can't be measured in bills & coins.