Enterprise 2.0 is about changing behaviours

At the Enterprise 2.0 Future Exploration…..

One fundamental change will be in the day to day way in which people in the company work.

Euan Semple a former leader in BBC on knowledge management spoke of the difficulty to counter some of the arguments against leveraging the social networking and collaboration tools like wikis, blogs and RSS in the Enterprise. The fear is that people will be wasting time roaming around other people’s blogs or reading feeds or taking part in meandering conversations.

One approach Euan took was examining the old ways if the new ways were so frightening.

One of my favorite quotes by a systems scientist Marilyn Ferguson, a system theorist, is around change and the difficulty with it…..”it is not so much that we’re so in love with the old ways but change is like being in between trapezes…..”. Part of the solution is taking those for whom letting go is too hard by the hand and giving them a sample of the experience.

Those who are already in flat and less hierarchical organisations are likely to have embraced these technologies as they fit neatly to the behaviours already. The transparency and level setting technologies bring about visibility to the dead wood and the meetings which do not advance the organisations agendas.

It is fundamentally about how we all change our behaviours and our role in the organisation. Us vulnerable people need to deal with our fears.

The unbearable lightness of ‘saying’

Judging young net companies by their current state and making that an immutable

“It is not the social network sites that are interesting — it is the social network itself”

This is just one of the sorts of quips I have read lately on the state of affairs on the net.

On the positive side is a basic importance of the social graph. It would seem somehow we have rediscovered the meaning of our connections in our lives [the number of research, articles and blogs on it]. We’re addicted to the activity that tells us we matter. Social networking provides the means to count our value in other ways than money and show it like peacocks to all and sundry.

Yes I would agree that most, if not all of the social network sites are rather mundane today and do not offer much value nor focus to make them part of the lives of the members, beyond counting the said ‘I matter’ points.

I read some research on the percentages of social network member revisits over the last 12 months [looking for the research]. The numbers were surprising – around 60-70% of the members had NOT been back to facebook as an example. Do we read about large unique visitor numbers as there are new people joining, or? Within the top ten Yahoo and MSN tended to have better revisitation numbers. Even adding all kinds of applications onto these sites at a rapid pace does not really solve the problem, perhaps it just adds to it.

The quote, taken as it is, suggests that social networking sites are without merit or purpose and it is only what the social graph(s) make of it. Comments which seem to suggest that innovation ended about a few years ago get to me.

A survey on plaxo education group showed results from a survey asking how many social networking sites might survive beyond 2012 and the results are an interesting mixture of views on where social networking is going. Out of 521 votes 1 says 1 and 1 says 2, 92 say 2-6, 73 say 6-10, 83 say 10-100, 62 say 100-1000, 98 say 1000+, 15 say none, 96 people believe social networks will be transformed into something else. I found this today and it pretty well sums it up.

Social networking is old for humanity and it is young on the net and there is plenty of work to do before the dust settles on social networking sites.

I would be interested in finding out more from the social network owners on their actual numbers. When I find the research on revisits I’ll post a link to that.