As Twitter becomes more mainstream, it is tantalizing to think about what could be a powerful component of Enterprise 2.0. And, before anyone thinks that I am against such tools, think again. My purpose as a leader is to drive the dialogue that leads organizations to flawless execution of change. This is what most people would consider “doing the right things right”.
But, anyone who is even moderately social on Twitter can easily become impeded by what I would call the three “S’s”: “Scam”, “Spam” and “Slam”.
“Scam” would be loosely defined as the dominance of “multi-level marketing”, success coaches, “law of attraction experts”, follow-me follow-you services and get-rich quick snake oil. It can also take any other form of human frailty-fraud, abuse, theft, misrepresentations, malware, trickery and all other forms of maliciousness.
“Spam”, closely-related to, and a key tool of the Scammers, clogs up the timeline with auto-generated inoccuous inspirational messages, timed bursts of 5 or 10 tweets, incessant direct messages to your e-mail accounts, and all other ‘junk’ that floats into otherwise fruitful conversation.
“Slam” is, for now, a catch-all term for the impact of living in a social media world. For the individual, it may be dealing with the potentially addictive and distracting time sink of being social with an ever-increasing network of friends and follwers. It takes time to fall in line with learning the lingo and understanding the norms, following the trends, etc.
For an enterprise, “Slam” will be the tidal wave of dealing with establishing policies, legal implications, regulatory compliance i.e. SEC, confidentiality, intellectual property, employee rights, training, security, user support, integration with other communication channels and methods.
At the end of the day, “Slam” will be the biggest headache of all. Why? Because it involves linking the outside world to the inside world in ways that have, to this point, been rudely rebuffed by the corporate firewall.
If you want to think about it another way, what will the new meaning become to this well-known phrase: “what’s said in this room, stays in this room”. Consider that within the last few weeks, Twitter became the voice of a country (Iran) as it was experiencing wrenching social change. It was able to take us to places that no other medium was able.
Now, consider a multi-national enterprise. Are they ready to go totally social – all ‘books’, meetings, presentations, hallway conversations, strategy sessions, pricing discussions, competitive intelligence gathering – flung open, total transparency? No way. Controlled ‘experiments’ and gradual learning, perhaps.
I saw a really great blog post that documents one company’s attempt at opening-up Twitter at an all-employee meeting. After they conducted the meeting, they evaluated what had happened:
“The after-action review surfaced one of the primary concerns about using Twitter in the enterprise: security. While most employees are and will be sensitive to providing sensitive information about the company on Twitter, it’s always a risk. In this case, the corporate IT security folks had raised a (very big) red flag about using Twitter for the employee forum, but the CEO decided that, for this short duration experiment, the risk was manageable.”
In my opinion, you’ll someday see a ‘corporate’ version that is sanitized, monitored, partitioned with strong ID and credentials management. But, the ‘door’ to the outside world will, for the foreseeable future, remain closed.
It has been about two weeks sine the big launch of “Bing”. Great name. Love the hype. Cool TV.
Why would I care?
I already have a hammer in my toolbox – Google. If Bing was there first, perhaps it would be in the box instead of Google.
Every time I open a browser window, Google greets me with little fanfare, an occasional art curiosity to add a subtle touch to the spirit of a holiday or some other social theme.
I even switched my default home page to Bing, to see how it felt. In a day, I was back to Google.
There is a lot of money to be made with every point of share of the search engine pie. Bing is a curiosity, at the moment, and has picked up a few points. Maybe that is a good thing. Market leaders should always feel the hot breath of a competitor from time-to-time.
But, this is Google’s ‘turf’. Live Search with a new paint job just isn’t enough innovation for me.
To be fair, I have a potentially opposite situation with browsers. I have been using Google Chrome to see if it can pull me away from IE8. Say what you want about IE. But, like Google search, IE was in my toolbox first. I have built my online existence around it. IE8 is nice, although IE7 almost lost me.
So, what’s the thing with Bing? For me, interesting, but not worth trading.
Also, there are more and more seasoned, veteran practitioners of information technology (“IT”) that have been at conferences, had prosepctive suppliers call on them and, in a number of cases, carefully “dipped their toe” in the water on a self-contained project.
But, at the end of the day, does anyone really know what cloud computing really is? I am sure this video with a number of well-known names will clear it up for you:
“…the survey was undermined by the fact that most of those surveyed admitted to not knowing what cloud computing is. The reason is not ignorance, but the many and various ways the term is used. The common strand is that it is something to do with the internet, but even that is undermined if we describe virtual on-premise servers as a “private cloud”.
The closest that I ever came, as a CIO, to entrusting my large company’s e-mail and office apps to a third-party vendor, it was Google that I considered. Unfortunately, a merger got in the way of making good on that idea. But, looking back, the most incredible thing is that I was willing to get serious about doing something that drastic almost 4 years ago!
In this age, 4 years is like a thousand eternities. Since then, Google has only gotten better — way better.
They have an impressive record of producing not only the user-facing eye-candy, cool widgets and very useful, quality applications, but they are world class in mundane-but-important functions like data centers, networks, accounting, project management and support.
It really seems to focus on contacts – on people – which we feel is the direction communication is taking. Email applications currently focus less on people and more on the content of the message. We think tools like Facebook and Twitter better balance the need to know the person behind a message and the message itself. Google Wave moves in that direction…… Overall assessment: It’s already got certain aspects, like navigation, absolutely right. With some great 3rd party apps and greater customization, Google Wave could actually match its hype.
So, Google Wave will be launched soon and will unify web communications in such a way that it will be the container for everything else. It is being built on open source technologies which will create huge developer interest and many add-ins and extensions.
I don’t own Google stock or am associated in any way with the company. But I have to say that I truly believed 4 years ago, and feel much stronger about it now, that they could make certain large software, hardware and services companies irrelevant in just a few more years. And, when that day comes, I would hope that the company stays true to its values. And, when they say that they are the best, all they will have to do is immediately follow with that famous line, “.. no brag, just fact.”
