Filed under: Collaboration and social, Digital workplace, Intranets
When discussing intranets and related enterprise-level software, it’s easy to get caught up in the technology. There are many features and components, so much whizz-bang functionality. It can be difficult to stay on target and focus on a piece of technology that will simply do a job that needs doing, or fix a problem that needs fixing. This can be true right across the spectrum of enterprise software, from a complex CMS system, to social media tools.
Social media isn’t a fad
There have been several waves of social media sites and services, with each new form suddenly exploding in popularity. Twitter is the obvious recent example.
Twitter has seen blistering growth and now regularly features in mainstream media. Of course, the problem is that mainstream media doesn’t give a pragmatic overview of such services. Subsequently, when an executive hears about a new service they immediately assume that it’s ‘just for marketing’, a fad, or just for celebrities. The hype overwhelms the interesting mechanics of these services and immediately places a barrier in front of any business adoption.
This happened with blogging when it became mainstream (around 2004/05). When organisations looked at using blogging software internally there were choruses of people saying it was a fad, a trend, and that blogs would die as quickly as they appeared. But they didn’t.
In fact, the mechanics of blogging: individual and author-led posts, RSS- and tag-enabled sites, comments, feedback, collaboration and interactivity, are now mainstays of a vast number of internal and external websites.
[Read the full article by Alex Manchester]