Who, in your company, is in charge of supporting your communities or social media efforts? The marketing department? Human resources department? Sales, customer relations, innovation? Dedicated off-processes community managers? If you answered marketing, chances are good that you are a brand trying to connect more deeply with your customers. If you answered Human Resources, you might be a Fortune100 company trying to leverage your workforce’s competencies through collaboration. Sales, you may be an internet pure player. Innovation, you sure are engaged into co-creation…
Delegating your social business experiments to the most involved departments is a good way to focus on successful outcome. Whether to set up a pilot or to develop a whole social media strategy, all key actors have to be actively committed. As more successes will pave your way, you will be able to measure the positive impact of communities on business, to adapt best practices to different departments, hopefully to evangelize a community-based approach and spread it through the whole company. All of this sounds great (even still a bit utopist)… on paper, but in reality, you will soon be trapped into a 2.0 Siloed Enterprise.
Different department have a different approach to business, different organizational requirements, and present processes have an interesting impact: they rationalize a company’s relationship with the different parts of its ecosystem, no matter who is in charge of dealing with a particular stakeholder. In a typical Enterprise 2.0 organization, those stakeholders’ activity and point of view influence the company’s organization, leading to very different behaviors as appropriate. Instead of nurturing an organic interactive system, communities would grow as disjoint entities.
The other day, my friend Gabriel Rossi posted three great tweets about marketing and its pivotal role inside enterprise, which we often underestimate. Marketing is one of the key activities which may act as the internal ‘glue’ to help a community-based enterprise grow, if properly leveraged. But one approach doesn’t fit all. Your company might be sales or R & D oriented, and this might have dyed its entire operation. Finding the missing link, the department which has cross over influence on your whole organization, and involving it in every of yours social media efforts is a crucial step toward Enterprise 2.0. If the only one you can find is the mailroom, then your company might be in deep trouble in the forthcoming times…
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Thierry,
Thanx for mentioning my ideas my friend! Awesome post!
Cheers from Brazil. 🙂
Gabriel.
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“Instead of nurturing an organic interactive system, communities would grow as disjoint entities.”
Very true. What is worse, is that competing systems with comparable functionality end up competing for attention and relevance. This path can cause divisive politics instead of cohesive collaboration.
Gabriel,
Thanks for passing by, my friend. Your Twitter timeline is always insightful!
Cam,
I totally agree with you. Competition for influence might taint most social media efforts in a very destructive way. Free trust, thorough vision and careful evangelism are crucial.
“People talk about “listening” as the Holy Grail for Social Media, Peter Drucker argued this 55 years ago … “
Bingo !
And Tom Peters (and many others) started talking about turning the org-chart upside down about 25-30 years ago. A touch simplistic, but the key intent of that ‘meme” remains pertinent in a networked environment / era,
That current organizational structures have remained essentially the same reveals either 1) a paucity of thinking about what management is and needs to do (as Gary Hamel would suggest) or 2) that what is (still) in place works so well that there is no real challenge to the extant model’s effectiveness (I don’t agree with this stance, by the way).