As Clay Shirky recently remarked on the Colbert Report, so it must be true, "social tools aren't interesting until the technology becomes boring." And more to the point "the social effects are more important than how the technology works."
This might be disconcerting to people in the technology business an
hopefully they come realize they aren't in the technology business. But
we are still in the early stages of social software. Case in point is
how we still using the rudimentary language of features. Like "wiki" or
"blog" or "social networking." Techcrunch posts and Facebook apps are a
constant stream of feature porn.
Perhaps this is good at establishing a baseline literacy for tools.
But effective implementation can't be found in the feature matrix. In
fact, the more features you introduce, the more barriers are created
between users and the more fragmented your community can become. Eric Von Hippel
notes that technology has no value unless you again agreement from
users on how to use it. This goes for ERP, but doubly for social
software which is largely unstructured, powered by people whose roles and interests vary and requires different adoption strategies.
In my next four posts, I'd like to introduce four core Solution Areas
for Business Social Software. My goal is not just to share what we've
found as common social patterns, but how to extract value from them:
- Collaborative Intelligence for sales & marketing
- Participatory Knowledgebase for service & support
- Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services
- Business Social Networks for partners & customers
And if you can't wait, you will find a sample in my recent interview with CIO Magazine.
