Fear, Greed, Ignorance, Liars - Blog'it
True story: I received a phone call from a marketing manager who works at a large engineering business that is headquarted in the US but has offices in NYC where several of upper management work. Nice guy, we had a great talk about social software - enterprise blogging mainly, and supporting services like technorati, furl, pubsub, del.icio.us et al. I shared with him some of the information I found from a search on technorati (mostly bad stuff). So, I mapped our methodology for implementing a large scale blogging system since the company employs 10k plus. The guy knew his stuff and was really impressed and could see the rich rewards of connecting all the employees, suppliers, et al. using an enterprise blogging system. What happened next was startling.
He brought up our discussion to the VP in charge of corporate communications and another senior manager, where he learned that they've decided to use the "wait and see" approach to blogging. When he said that he's been keeping his finger on the pulse of the blogosphere because things can get out of control, virulent quickly, they responded with, yes, that's the problem, there's no control over them. Funny thing is, this company has a problem with employee attrition; so much so that in the past 2 years they have doubled the "finders fee" for anyone bringing in a new employee.
Ross, "Suddenly your brand is being watched, augmented, de-located. ...executives unfortunately fear their employees more than they trust them. An even greater risk to their brand, they fear, comes from within." Fear, Greed and Social Software by Ross Mayfield, Many-2-Many "Enterprises are adopting social software out of both fear and greed. Fear is the primary driver for corporate blogging, while greed is driving adoption of social software within the enterprise."
Let's take Seth's idea of telling a story and turn it inward to the enterprise and ask ourselves what is management's story? Is J. D. Salinger a Liar? Are You? Seth, "...telling a story that is inauthentic, inconsistent, hollow or filled with unstated side effects isn't just wrong, it's stupid." I would venture to say that lies are what puts most executives back on their heals about adopting inter-connected, scalable blogs - bookmarking and idea discovery. Here is our story, it is not rocket science. We have a simple solution (software and more importantly - services ) that addresses complex problems. We have figured out the hard problems of social software - enterprise blogging, innovation, ideation, and particpation so that the process of implementation and adoption is fun, hassle free, and meaningful.
Ideascape -
1) connects employee wisdom with corporate strategy to create, innovate, and adapt offerings, processes, and skills.
2) prevents lost opportunities and the loss of talented people to better-positioned, more-interesting organizations.
So what happens when transparency and CSR (corporate social responsibility) GE 2005 Citizen Report are made public. GE is a "citizen" of the world, and people have a right to understand how the business thinks about and acts upon on such topics as greenhouse gas emissions, offshoring, and globalization. The document notes that 368 disciplinary actions were taken against GE employees over integrity issues in 2004; it is also quick to point out that “the rising rates of concern is a sign of our healthy integrity and compliance culture.”
This site Corporate Social Responsibility - A growing movement across the world, aims to be a resource for people who want to be change agents for corporate social responsibility within their businesses.
What is your company's attitude toward corporate social responsibility? More importantly, what will you do about it?
With this update from Dan I am stretching the idea that businesses, internally and externally, need to adjust to the new forms of media reporting and distribution.
Update from Dan Gillmore, "What Professional and Citizen Journalists Can Learn From Each Other ... please allow me to restate the central theme of my work. Something important is happening in the world of journalism: It's an evolution from the lecture model, to which we in mass media have become accustomed in the past century, to something closer to a conversation. The shift stems from the collision of technology with media.
This evolution is having an effect on all three major constituencies of journalism. The most important of those is what I call the former audience -- the people who until recently were our readers, listeners and viewers, who until recently were either buying our lectures or not."