iStrategy: Social Media Conference – Enterprise 2.0 and beyond
Received an invitation to attend the iStrategy conference early December and I’ll have to say it was a conference with a difference, right from the welcome desk to the conference content itself – great team behind it, insights and sharing all around.
Two general trends that surfaced that were of interest:
1. Organizational structure
One of the key things that seemed to come up often was how various corporations and institutions had shaped themselves to adapt, in light of the “social media revolution”. This is sort of a cliche phrase, because social media is not really so much of a revolution anymore, but I believe in varying stages of adoption into the mainstream.
It’s all too common to look outside (what leads can social media bring to my business, what new customers can I engage) that it would be a paradigm shift for most to view it as a very powerful tool for internal stakeholders as well, which brings us to the next point.
2. Enterprise 2.0
Don’t just take my word for it, the good folk over at Mckinsey have also recognized this, and they have data to prove that performance is markedly improved.
A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers. We call this new kind of company the networked enterprise.
Web 2.0 use of these companies is significantly improving their reported performance. In fact, our data show that fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.
So, how is your organization structured to accommodate/harness social media?
- A single digital executive that is cross functional and supports many different teams?
- A full team dedicated to this purpose? How big is the team? How big should the team be?
- Who does social media “belong” to?
- How will the majority of large corporations, mostly still somewhat mirrored after the very top-down hierarchical structure of the military, accommodate or react to the largely bottom-up, non linear values of social media?
These are really thoughts that are just skimming the surface, and I’ll try to share more in some case studies. Strategy has always been an innate interest, and I’m always keen to find out more about how different corporations adapt to new landscapes. What is it that most companies want to achieve, is probably a more important question before anyone can figure out what it is that must be done, to get there.
p.s: There’s a brand new Facebook fanpage I’ve created, please Like it (in support of my first attempt to conquer FBML). Still learning, page will continually evolve!
Thanks for reading this, and I’m looking forward to 2011!
