The Blogosphere:Enterprise Exploring the Depths?
The Blogosphere:Enterprise Exploring the Depths?
May 9, 2008: Much like when the dot com bubble was building, the web 2.0 bubble has been expanding with constant hype and lofty promises. The time has come though where organisations are questioning the return on investment and weighing up the risks of making a serious commitment to the blogosphere.
< p class=”noadd”>>The potential for communications to cause harm as well as good has been around since the dawn of time. What’s not so clear however is the practicality and costs of collaboration technologies for business.
< p class=”noadd”>>Contributing to this tangle of concern is the fact that collaboration strategies such as blogging can often become the main news channel for the organisation.While some companies such as Google are openly embracing corporate blogging and fast offering it up as their main avenue for news updates to the public, other companies are somewhat more hesitant to take their first step into the area.
Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, research director at Ovum says blogging is just another channel, where the main issue is about having the skill to do it well: “What companies are finding is that they need to develop new skills in social media, it’s not something they can start doing in the public realm without an existing skill set,” he says.
Hodgkinson believes those companies making their first attempt at collaboration are often trying to keep it all within the internal network of the business and are using the project as a means for employees to gain experience with the technology. This has the dual benefit of allowing the organisations to road test collaboration strategies and train staff internally without the fear of sensitive information ending up where it shouldn’t.
“It’s a hard ask for companies to tell their staff to be a public face for communication with no formal training,” says Hodgkinson.
With an army of supporters willingly singing the praises of collaboration, you’d be forgiven for thinking that blogging may be looking to supplant traditional channels of communication, both with the public, the media and internally between staff.
“It doesn’t change the traditional relationships,” says Hodgkinson. “Rather it’s another channel in the mix of channels that companies will use over time, if they discover that they can use the channel well they may shift.”
Ovum says collaboration technologies are still experimental in Australia andby no means mainstream. This has seen the larger end of enterprise starting to get on board with a noticeable reluctance among the smaller scale companies whoare looking more closely at what exact return on investment can be achievedfrom the strategy.
“CIO types are under increasing pressure from the constant media focus on doing something in the way of investigation in this space, the big organisations have more of a need for it than the smaller ones because they have a large workforce with vast communication networks,” says Hodgkinson. “With the major purpose of these technologies being the social lubrication they provide.”
A problem organisations face when usingcollaboration technologies is having the participation of the workforce to make it worthwhile. Hodgkinson says that there is a critical mass required with social networking, with around 100 people being required to get social interactions actually happening.
Realistically, a time investment is required from employees and if the group of people is too small then they won’t see a return on their investment of input. This can cause issues such as a perception of failure, or disappointment that particular project was unable to take off.
Successful social networking is usually kicked off by a small group of people actively contributing. In turn, these active contributors encourage passive ones who feel the need to wait for an established dynamic to present itself before entering the fray. Once the nucleus starts to firmly form, the rest of the pieces will often gel themselves into place.
Hodgkinson believes most companies are well and truly aware of the available technologies and are beginning to look at the opportunities. 2007 saw a rise of initial skepticism that it would just be a consumer fact but now there’s a deeper belief that larger organisations should be getting involved, with small to medium sized organisations wanting to beconfident enough that they will see a clear return on investment.