Where every organization should include specifics for social media use, if your organization does not have a separate, superfluous social media policy (that’s right, a social media policy is largely superfluous if you have proper governance and content / editorial policies in place. Someone will make a point of arguing this with me and I will wipe the floor with them), are specific rules in the Terms of Use that spell out the dos and don’ts for contributing content. Additionally, these rules should also be covered, if not already, in your Employee Handbook or Employee Conduct Manual, that all employees agree to at the time of employment (if your organization is responsible enough to have one).

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.

I have run into the connotation of social as a term that has associative connotations to the hippy movement (the slide image Andrew uses with his presentations), socialist (non-capatalist or anti-capitalist tendencies), redundant term to use with business, and more. While most of the people who I engage with inside organizations do not have the negative connotations of social, there is normally a senior manager with ability to veto a project or put it under great scrutiny who has such connotations. I hear many people say that it may be easier to get these individuals to change their definition, but that is as naive as saying they can get a Boston Red Sox fan to believe the New York Yankees are a lovable baseball team. This transformation is rarely possible, thanks to the Cold War, 60s anti-establishment, and years of reinforcing the associations of the term social to strongly negative connotations.

While this is hard to avoid, it’s extremely problematic. Very different approaches and tools are lumped together, people discover they aren’t talking about the same things, and strategic thinking is impaired.

At the risk of causing more confusion, I would like to draw a line between two different approaches.

Tools for collaborating on information

There is a rapidly growing collection of tools to help people work together, sharing information and collaborating on creating new content. These are spreading like a virus through organisations, and include:

• wikis
• team spaces
• personal working spaces (“my sites”, etc)
• forums and discussion groups

These are all about information, how it is created, updated and communicated. I’m going to call these collaboration tools.

Tools for connecting people

There are also tools that specifically target the social and professional networks within organisations, and are about finding and connecting people. These include:

• “internal Facebook”
• “internal Twitter”
• expertise directories, and other extended staff directories
• instant messaging

These tools are all about people, in a very direct sense. They are about recognising, building and sustaining the human connections within organisations, which underpin how work is really done.

I’m going to call these social tools (or perhaps social media tools).

Blurring the lines

There are, of course, tools that don’t fit neatly into these categories, or span both. You could even argue that the best tools are ones that incorporate aspects of both, bringing together people and information.

Why does this matter?

These two classes of tools work in very different ways. They have different goals, practices and methodologies. They address different needs within the organisation, even as the goal is to bring them together.

I believe there are two very different discussions to be had in the context of today’s tools. I’d therefore like some lines drawn, so we all know what we are talking about.

What are your thoughts?

I’m reading an increasing amount of stuff taking swipes at social media along the lines of … it was all just hype … it’s not delivering what it promised etc. I guess it was only a matter of time before we switched from build-it-up mode to knock-it-down mode which so often seems to pervade our culture these days.

While agreement around the core concepts of “social software” has remained elusive, the underlying phenomenon is quite real. To date, industry analysts have quite properly focused on the cultural and organizational aspects of social software technologies (blogs, wikis, tag clouds and such) in the enterprise. “The sociology is more important than the technology,” you often hear, and I couldn’t agree more.

But the technology still matters, and it turns out that social software tools differ substantially in functionality, maturity, approach and support. Moreover, social software applications have raised concerns in the enterprise: around privacy, security, intellectual property (IP) protection and compliance. IT managers also face more prosaic but equally important considerations of reliability, scalability and sustainability of the software and vendors alike. So let’s look a bit more closely at what constitutes social software.