Yesterday and today I participated in an interesting event, the Enterprise 2.0 Rave. This was a virtual event that was held instead of the originally planned live event slated for NY City. The Rave was hosted by Francois Gossieaux and included a great group of panelists, including:

• Euan Semple
• Andrew McAfee
• Jerry Bowles
• Jenny Ambrozek
• Jim McGee
• Jevon MacDonald
• Susan Scrupski
• Joe McKendrick
• John Musser
• Bill Ives

The event was two separate WebEx/Audio conferences. The discussion was among the panelists and attendees could submit questions using the webex tools.

All in all it was a good conversation, though I wish we would have had more time in order to dive deeper into the topics. I am hoping that the conversations will continue on the "Ning" social network site that was set up to support and extend the event.

My best take-aways were:

• This thing we are calling Enterprise 2.0 is necessarily messy. It cannot be effectively created/implemented by a controlled, managed process. It has to be emergent. This will be a hard concept to swallow by those that are currently in power.
• In the long run, success will only happen if there is a broad and strong organic base of people using the system and living the culture. That means that success will not be immediately evident or easy to see. Again a hard concept for the ROI crowd.
• So, even as optomistic as I am about this way of working, I must accept that everyone is not going to be as enthusiastic as I am and I must learn to be patient and persistent.

Keep the faith.

I just got a call from Francois Gossieaux that the Enterprise 2.0 Rave has been canceled. Francois is going to try and put together some sort of virtual gathering instead.

I just started reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams. In just the first couple of chapters I can see that the authors have synthesized a lot of what has been rolling around in my mind for a while, but was unable to effectively articulate.

Probably first and most importantly is that the revolution that is happening in our society today is a cultural one not a technological one (though of course technology has been an enabler).

The fact that organizations will need to include those outside traditional boundries is becoming inevitable. Giovanni Rodriguez over on The future of communities blog cited Dell's IdeaStorm as an example of the same cocreation/wikinomics referred to in the book.

After many months of conversation, proposal writing and just trying to figure out how to make it happen, it finally has. Effective Monday (2/5) I begin my new job as the Social Media Guy here at GlaxoSmithKline. This position will be part of the Communications function and my first objective will be to work with all the Communications team members and look at how we can improve the socialization of our media efforts. I am still looking for a good job title. Any suggestions?

I want to thank Ben Edwards at IBM. Much of what I baked into the job description was modeled on Ben's job.

I have to agree with Nathan, I really enjoyed the dinner last night. I am always skeptical getting together with a group of people you have never met. Tried it a couple of times to no avail, but this time it was a good connection. When I got home I told my wife that it was really nice to have a conversation where everyone else had more experience in blogs, and social media in general, than I did. I really hope we get the local Social Media Group off the ground!

That's me in the middle...

Hi, it's me again. Been away for awhile, mainly working on the dark blog. Anyway, I am heading off to my first blogger meet-up tonight (if you don't count conferences). Nathan Gilliatt of Net Savvy organized the gathering. Here are the details, not that anyone will see this in time to make any difference.

Looking forward to it.

Also looks like big news on the job front here. Not 100% official yet, so I have to wait to tell all, but soon...

The goal of corporate social media is to afford every stakeholder an equal opportunity to be heard by decision makers.

I have spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out the silver bullet for implementing a Social Media infrastructure within a corporate (non-tech) environment. I think I am beginning to see wherein the difficulity lies...

Up to now my focus has been on getting the technical infrastructure in place. And also up to now I have always said that the cultural issues would be a bigger hurdle than the technical ones, but I wasn't really sure what that meant. I think that part of the cultural puzzle deals with understanding your existing culture. If I were able to magically snap my fingers and have a world-class social media platform in place, I don't believe that it would go anywhere, at least not immediately, in a fundamentally authoritarian culture. The culture shock would be too great. The norms for operating in an open transparent environment would not be in place.

I believe the answer is organic grassroots growth. Bite off small chunks, start with small groups where trust and openness are already working assumptions. Let those groups be the ones to tell the story. "Be the ball." Use word-of-mouth as the engine to make the case for using social media.