Is Business Ready for Social Software?
So we seem to have a lot of radicals at the conference. The bad guy at the Symposium seems to be that straw man: The Big Corporation. CEOs are blind, senior management isn't listening, the faceless masses who are tagging, blogging and wiki-fying are the unsung heroes.
Now a lot of that may be true, and big companies do have problems in harnessing the powers of all their people.
So it seems to me that there are two things that we're really talking about: connecting people, and then optimizing the way they work together.
My question is, does Social Software have to achieve both in order to be successful? Or if these are two hard problems, can't Social Software first be successful at connecting people -- even if it is in the old, putatively "bad" model -- and then be successful at optimizing their behavior?
Seth Goldstein has a great quote: "We all work for Google." Meaning that all of the clicks and metadata generated by your activities on Google are really the inventory that Google ultimately sells.
UPDATE: Grant McCracken has an interesting post on the war within the corporation? that highlights the challenge that I think this Symposium faces. We are trying to do two hard things at once: create software that enables community to interact AND change the nature of those interactions. Shouldn't we try to be successful at one first and then try the other?
[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]
