Social Media Blog

When you get right down to it, social media can also help the collaboration and networking process among business groups. Business Week’s recent article about IBM shows that some large companies are looking to create corporate social media offerings for their employees.

Sure, we are very used to the social structures that have developed in open communities online centered on consumer interests. Corporate collaboration systems can also benefit from a side channel of professional discussions on strategies and ideas.

IBM has been encouraging social networking among its employees with in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits such as Facebook and Twitter

Good for IBM and other companies that are taking some steps toward understanding social media systems. However, it might be a little odd to have the boss and subordinate relationship in a social structure. Perhaps work groups should be focused on a group facilitator and then equal stature members without the traditional hierarchy. I’d still expect some guidelines for enterprise social media as you would not expect the combative criticisms you find in the public and anonymous identity circles.

Gopi Padakandla comments on this article at businessweek.com, ” I heard about similar success stories at Oracle and SAP with the internal social networks. This is good phenomenon - software vendors tasting their own wine and leading customers with examples.”

One of the companies in this space is Awareness (http://www.awarenessnetworks.com) located in Waltham, MA. The company provided a google video overview of their services that speaks to the web 2.0 vision for stimulating internal company discussions about the company brands.

Awareness Video - Who is Awareness?

This story was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 12:44 am in category Social Media News. rss feed for this story RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.