A Means to an End: Aligning Social Media and Business Strategy.

Social media is many things with many definitions. Ultimately, however, it is a collection of tools that enable us to get some things done that were difficult, impossible or just less satisfying than before.

This is a discussion is about what types of business objectives are better achieved with social media. I will look at social media as a tool for market engagement, customer service (in the broadest sense), lead generation, as well as a productivity tool, and a tool for creating high-performance corporate cultures. As with any good tool, the real value is in how its wielded – and the applications of it are limited only by the insight, imagination and ambition of the craftsmen who use it.

Lets begin with an overview of business objectives:

Market Engagement

Businesses want to engage their markets for several reasons:

- To understand market needs, wants, goals and desires so as to craft products, services, messaging and pricing to suit.

- To create awareness of their brand or offerings.

- To get new customers

- To improve their reputation Mainstream Social media has proven to be remarkably useful in each of these regards.

Enabling brand and product managers to listen to their markets, engage and discuss their needs and their offerings in a way that was nearly impossible before. Key tools: Mainstream social media sites and aggregators: Facebook, twitter, youtube, myspace, niche social networks that cater to your target market. Connections back to your own web properties is essential.

Customer engagement

Customer service in the form of providing information, support, service, updates and more for the purposes of increasing satisfaction, optimizing revenue opportunities, creating loyalty and customer advocates.

Social media has made customer engagement far less expensive while making it far more effective and satisfying for both customer and company. Key tools: Some mainstream social networking and media aggregation sites, but your own web properties play more of a starring role here. Custom Social networking sites for customer service, account management, customer communications are the primary tools, external social media tools are a place to reach out in order to bring your customers into your communities.

Employee engagement

Corporate intranets are intended to share corporate information, policies and processes with employees. In general, they are poorly designed, and disrespected as having only the most banal information. Adding a social dimension here can help increase relevance, share leadership thinking more deeply and in a fashion that garners greater buy in by employees. Employees can also be encouraged to share ideas, find answers to policy and process questions, make suggestions and generally get more benefit from the core corporate support services such as HR, facilities, finance and procurement.

Key tools: discussion forums, ratings, Q&A, idea management, blogs, microblogging.

Employee productivity

While social media is frequently thought of as a social, extra-curricular activity that may have some benefit in the brand reputation and PR realm, the same tools that allow this form of communication can also be leveraged to create super-effective, next generation productivity tools.

These tools are not toys, but leverage the new communications paradigms offered by these tools to quickly get good work done. Most organizations, particularly those that deal primarily in information and ideas – that is any company that has a significant creative, analytic or R&D arm – needs to optimize and leverage that work and those work processes to the greatest extent.

Social media tools, because of their ability to improve communications, as well as create and maintain weak ties, make it easier to support the three most important forms of collaboration and productivity:

Creative – a team can use shared workspaces and other social media constructs, such as feeds and wikis to organize work, collect individual contributions, review, edit, and iterate vastly more efficiently than only through the use of in person meetings, email and conference calls.

Connective – knowledge workers can tap the collective intelligence of the organization by finding and friend-ing knowledgeable people within the organization, spotting trends and activity that may be relevant, and contributing their own value where its relevant and valued. This type of activity can save thousands of hours in the “who knows x about y” department and research has shown that tapping a diverse set of skills and perspectives leads to higher quality outcomes in less time.

Compounding – Here’s the fundamental idea: all work should leverage, to the greatest extent possible, leverage work that has already been done. Most companies currently have the basic capability to let employees search on documents and find things of relevance (this is rarely perfect, but even so). Social media tools, however, capture not just work product, such as documents, but work processes and resources as well, making it possible to find not only a document, but how it was created, how it evolved, who contributed, and what resources were used. The ability to find and follow this type of information is vastly more valuable than having just the end product to an employee who must accomplish a similar task or bring it to the next level.

Key tools: shared workspaces, communities, friending, profiles, wikis, feeds, instant messaging, planning tools, and other technologies that promote information aggregation, communication and networking.

 

Challenges

The Challenge of acting human: As I’ve said before – acting human is an unnatural act for most corporations. They’ve been trying for so long to be perfect and distance themselves from the warmth and fallibility of humanity so as to project flawless, rock-like solidity. The problem is that in this post-commerical era, where consumers are jaded, the corporate façade is not trusted – its considered more of a sham than deserving confidence above and beyond people. People now trust people more than brands. So how do you act human without being inconsistent? Warm without looking incompetent? Sympathetic, interesting and engaging without looking unprofessional?

Well, it takes a leap of faith. Savvy employees will understand that they are aiming to reflect well on the company as well as engender excitement and loyalty from the market. Mistakes will be made. Respect will be given to those companies who admit their mistakes immediately, and offer thoughtful, meaningful responses to them. Plan for success and plan for the mistakes

The Payoff: Trust, credibility, loyalty.

The challenge of the collaborative culture: collaborative cultures are different. They are mission focused, ego-swallowing machines where every problem and challenge is quickly surfaced, discussed and dealt with. Individuals, and the team as a whole learn quickly, act decisively, and efficiently  by quickly engaging people, harvesting their work, and letting the entire team polish and hone it to perfection.

We aren’t used to working this way, however. It takes a tremendous leap of faith that I can show my vulnerabilities and still be respected. information sharing is valued over information hording, and leadership is distilled into its purest form of setting direction, orchestrating activity, inviting and responding to new information from any part of the organization.

Management by fear and blame is left behind along with its tendency to breed mediocrity from people who either don’t want to take risks, or who have lost faith that their best contributions can be valuable in the organization.

The payoff: agile, smart, streamlined efficiency that can shine like a laser beam on any challenge. Fierce productivity.

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, team building, web 2.0

10 Reasons to wiki

I’m speaking at the Potomac Forum at the Willard Hotel (Washington, D.C.) this Friday, October 16th. Its a how-to workshop focused on government – how to create a social media campaign, how to create effective policies, how to blog, how to engage with communities, and my subject – how to use a wiki.

It used to be that wikis were techie things where you needed to know a markup language or worse to use them. But times have changed.

The last time I spoke at the forum I asked how many people in the audience had never used a wiki – so – this workshop will focus on two things – 1) the mechanics of how to actually set up and use a wiki, and 2) why you might want to.

After defining what a wiki is, I’ll walk through some of the many uses of wikis:

1. Wiki as team roster.

2. Wiki as document organizer

3. Wiki as issues list

4. Wiki for FAQ

5. Wiki is the document

6. Wiki to get organized

7. Wiki to aggregate resources

8. Wiki to build a portfolio

9. Wiki to plan

10. Wiki as knowledge base.

Next, I’ll cover some rules of engagement:

1. Make sure you have a purpose, and that you’ve expressed it to your co-contributors. Focus is the key to success.

2. Capture your roughest thougts. If you do this, you’ll always be giving yourself something to build on.

2. Be appreciative when someone else contributes, and let them know.

3. Don’t forget to go in and prune.

4. The earlier you share, the more collaborative you can be. Once you or your colleague have formalized your thoughts, its much harder to change them, and much harder to accept well meaning critisicm. So – share while you’re still open to feedback, and comment while they are. Its very hard to put hours into creating something, and then have people point out its flaws. Its much easier to remain open to new ideas before you’ve invested too much in developing them.

Last, I’ll cover some of the features to look for in a wiki, depending on the purpose you’re after, and show some examples of great wikis.

If you’d like to learn more about how wikis can bring a new level of efficiency to a team, then register here for the two-day event, or leave me a note in the comments here.

If you’re new to wikis, or  just love a really good explanation,  this video is surely the best basic introduction to the wiki concept:

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, social media, team building , collaboration, how to wiki, social media, team efficiency, wiki

The radical enabler: Many to Many Communication

What’s different about today’s internet and technology – what we’re calling social media?

Many to many communication. For the first time in human history, people can converse en mass without being in the same room. The implications are many and highly varied, and this is why people have such trouble defining the terms.

We’ve moved from letters to Newspapers, Magazines and  telephone. Modern one way media like television and radio emerged. New social media tools are truly radical in that they enable multi-way communication that is so different from what precedes it, that we don’t really even have words to describe it.

“Conversation” is the best, really the only, word we have to describe this, because the only precedent for it is social events of relatively small groups of people meeting face to face. But the term is overtaxed. Appropriate in many circumstances, “conversation” does not quite get to the heart of issues like ambient awareness, group filtering, and the strange patterns of the spread of memes, ideas and information that feel like we can almost grasp them, but haven’t yet.

David Armano and the Dachis Group have started defining the terms, if not completely yet the dynamics of this in an exciting way that promises to be a useful framework for discussion. I’ve written on the various types of collaboration that people seem to struggle to articulate (though I lack Armano’s considerable skill at illustration).

We also lack words for multi-modal communication. If i want to invite someone to call/email/IM/Tweet/Social message me in the form that is most convenient, the only word I have is “ping” – an obscure term that I got from old unix guys, who got it from even older radar operators.

This strangely, but radically new form of mainstream many-to-many communication is the unique thing that social media enables, and its no surprise that we’re still grappling with its implications. We’re still figuring out what to call it.

Lawrence Lessig gives a breathtaking review of what “read-write web” means (if you haven’t watched this yet, you really should), but I think there are other basic issues that many-to-many unearths:

- We’re not completely sure how to listen. We use each other as filters, but we’re still working this out.

- We’re still working on how to engage. Best practices exist and are developing, but we’re in early stages. So what’s my point here. As always they are several.

1. We are just beginning to unpack the value of many to many, and will be doing so for the next decade or more.

2. We need more and better vocabulary to describe what we have and what we want. if we can’t discuss it, we can’t easily get it.

3. Along the way we will be articulating, demonstrating and leveraging what many of us already sense in our guts about the many ways information and insight travel from mind to mind. This hints at the astonishing power to truly connect minds, harness enthusiasm and make nearly all human endeavor more productive and efficient.

Filed under: best practices, social media , collaboration, hive mind, many to many, signals, social media

Intel clear on ROI of Social Media

While businesses around the globe are trying to understand their social media strategy, their ROI, what it all means, and how they should participate, the US Intelligence and military communities are well beyond that.

In the Intel community, it is well understood that they need to tighten the intellectual mesh of minds they have in order to improve situational awareness, and ensure they understand the implications of what it all means. They need to do this in a way that transforms their ability to deliver on their mission. Its a mission critical, life or death capability.

Intel understands that things like preventing the next 9-11, assessing the capabilities of enemies, details that make interdiction possible, require mining the full and varied expertise of everyone – not just those focused on that particular problem.

The goal for them is to maximize the likelihood that patterns of activity are identified, and that relevant info and expertise finds the places its needed.

The Problem

Imagine 10,000 people on 17 teams, working on 100,000 jigsaw puzzles. Now imagine that some of the pieces have been randomly distributed among the other players. Nobody knows how many pieces are in each puzzle. And some pieces may be missing entirely, or fit into multiple puzzles simultaneously. Each person has a limited number of puzzles that they are aware of, and some may be working on the same puzzle without realizing it.

They need a system that will make it possible for people to know what pieces the others have, for the pieces themselves to find the holes they might fit into, and – here’s the odd one – the holes can describe themselves to the pieces. This one needs one with some blue in it, or a fairly oval shaped connector. No problem! Actually, social media can deliver on this bizarre metaphor.

The good news, is that there is good news.

1. We now have  tools that can help the intel community on its way – first generation social workplace products such as Intellipedia and A-Space have demonstrated value for the community, and are laying the foundation for great things to come. By demonstrating their worth, they are paving the way for the next round of innovation and adoption. Further, those products (and others) have also created a level of credibility, experience and expertise in the community that is ready to go further.

Second generation products are appearing commercially (I officially work for Open Text and their new Social Collaboration product), and the vibrancy of the gov 2.0 and social media communities are moving the intellectual and thought barriers further each day.

2. The intel community – in conjunction with the military – will be blazing the trail here. I predict that we’ll see the commercial sector referring to what happens here over the next couple of years as a way to justify their own investment.

3. The Intel community is investing significant time, dollars and talent here, and they will make progress.

Challenges for the Intel Community

1. The US Intelligence community is purposefully silo’d in two dimensions.

- By subject area and by level of sensitivity of data. There are good reasons for this – they bulkheads that limit risk in case of an information spill or leak. But these same silos need to be carefully connected in order to be able to harvest critical insights and information that cut across areas. This needs to be done carefully, balancing security imperatives with the imperative to “connect the dots” in order to identify patterns of activity or unexpetedly relevant knowledge from various parts of the community.

2. Cultural Silo-ing.

- The  silo-ed and the clandestine nature of its business has not lead to a “sharing” cutlure. People within the community tend to keep things very, very close to the chest. I’ve heard it said that there are people within the community, who when they get ahold of a really, really important piece of information that is really, really sensitive, they’ll protect it to the point where they won’t tell ANYONE about it. Hmm.

- Further complicating the problem, the intelligence community is comprised of 16 different agencies (plus the Director of National Intelligence, a significant agency of its own), each with its own mission and subculture, and territory. The cultural imperitives for collaboration (Shared mission, respect, trust, commitment to continual improvement) are building, but still in  early stages.

3. The intel community serves many customers.

- Their customers include the executive and legislative branches of government as well as the military. Delivery of information – in a very timely fashion is critical. As is security. How then do they provide sufficiently rich, appropriate, timely and accurate information to these people in real time?

A variation for the military.

The military is also aggressively pursuing these types of solutions, and their initiatives have backing at the highest levels.

The Army has created a list of 12 principles for knowledge management: http://fcw.com/articles/2008/09/05/army-retools-knowledge-culture.aspx, the Navy, Coast Guard, and other armed services have been pursuing similar objectives.

Increasingly, as the military fights increasingly complex wars with increasingly complex enemies and environments, the people on the ground are the ones with the most up to date information. They see, think and act.

Increasingly, this is part of their training as well – to think on their feet. With all that seeing thinking and acting, there’s a lot of information and learning coming in from the field that needs to be distributed both to others in the field as well as to command and control. This needs to be quick, accurate and include feedback mechanisms for questions and discussion.

Again there are security issues, again there is a careful and urgent balance between security and information diffusion and the ability to identify experts in real time.

Social Media Helps

Social media concepts and constructs can help make progress here.

What keeps intel and military up at night? Its not the bad guys so much as its the “we don’t know what we don’t know” problem.

Social Media, properly leveraged, creates a way for information to rapidly diffuse through the community, enables instant identification of experts on the new random topic of the hour, (anyone speak Urdu and Kurdish and while expert in Spanish geography and Lama imports?), and the ability to rapidly collect and iterate on information as a team rather than as a gang of individuals.

It may not solve the “We don’t know what we don’t know” problem, but it ameliorates it with the advantages of “We know what we know” and “we learn very fast” .

Social media supports the development of a heavily symbiotic relationship amongst and between people in the community – people who’s goals are aligned, who trust and respect each other well enough to listen carefully and debate rigorously.

This maximizes the opportunity for relevant information to find its home, for patterns of activity and expertise to be found and exploited, for people to share, solve and overcome life and death challenges for all of us.

These communities present the most interesting and most pressing test of the capabilities of social media, and there are still some crucially unanswered questions (we’re working on it).

- Tight collaboration is a cultural, not a technology issue – but how fast and how tight can social networks grow? What are the rate limiters?

- What about misinformation and self-correcting systems – what do we know about how mis-information propagates and gets corrected? How can we use that to make predictions about the quality of information?

- How can we attempt to measure the likelihood that the right information gets to the right person? Is that even asking the right question?

As a geeky-American,  these issues feel to me like our generation’s moon shot. We know its possible. We have the technology, but perhaps not as much sophistication as we’d like – yet. But these are the problems – of Intel and Military, but also of Business, Academia, Government and even personal lives.

We don’t always think of governments as blazing innovation. But history has shown us that in the realm of technology, war has been a very effective innovator. As we solve problems for the military, we drive technology and innovation throughout the civilian world.

Filed under: Government 2.0, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media

collaboration is not a technology

Collaboration is not a technology – it is about people choosing to cooperate. Its a cultural thing.

The tighter and more explicit the collaboration, the more sensitive it is to the culture in which it resides. I’m a big fan of workplace collaboration. If you have it, you’ll recognize that it makes work thrilling, makes you invincible, and as I’m fond of saying, amplifies our strengths and diminishes our weaknesses.

If you actually read this blog, you’ll find it repetitive of me to say that collaboration is not a single behavior, but a constellation of them, that I broadly categorize as Creative, Connective and Compounding.

But the underlying human construct of collaboration is a sense of team. An esprit de corp of some kind or magnitude. And here are the attributes of teams:

1. A shared sense of goal or mission (even if that’s to identify a shared goal or mission).

2. Mutual respect.

3. Trust

4. A commitment to continual improvement. (this is the hardest one, because to improve, one must admit imperfection, must make it a virtue to go looking for trouble, and see it as an opportunity).

What these things together allow is a powerful, compounded beam of intellect focus on the issues at hand rather than on the politics, insecurities or personal quirks of the contributors. ie – the fastest route to success.

Without these, all the microblogging, profile, yammer, twitter, wiki-tech in the world will not help. Of course if you are powerful enough to build such a culture, those tools will grease the skids in delightful ways.

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media

We are “The Sims”

I like to think that sometimes my posts are pithy and clever, but I know that sometimes they are a bit abstract. This is usuallly cause I’m using this blog as a way to work through what i’m thinking about. This is one of those posts.

Back in the late 90’s, i spent a few years studying, designing and implementing “agent based simulations of complex systems “. I was studying emergent behavior. These were somewhere between “boids” and The Sims in their depth.

I was doing an incredible amount of online research, and realized that if I ever wanted to do related research it would be very difficult to re-trace my steps, bookmarks not withstanding. If I wanted OTHER people to be able to retrace my steps, it would be very difficult to share HOW I’d found what I’d found, in addition to the what.

These two issues put me on a tear to understand tacit knowledge.

So – I wrote a whitepaper that I titled the Self-Organizing Knowledge Manager. The idea was this. People are not very good at tracking things, but computers are. we could get a computer to track where we go and how we get there and what we do when we’re there, and amek it so we can retrace our own steps and share our pathways with others. You wouldn’t have to be explicit about what the relationships between the linked items were, just the fact that there were links at all. People are really good at divining meaning – unlike computers. So leverage what each does best to capture and share tacit knowledge. Simple, right?

Then I asked smart people how to build software that would track click paths, what files were open at the same time, cuts and pastes, etc. They told me I’d need a database as an operating system and it didn’t work that way. hmph.

So the punchline here of course is that Social Media tools are the perfect substrate for capturing this information. Micropublishing, in the form of wikis, blogs, tweets, etc, are capturing the little bits of insight and information, connecting them together – along with the people who contributed – to achieve a self-organizing knowledge system.

So – now people can

a) track the links between people, objects (content) and each other, capturing a ton of tacit knowledge in the process

b) enable people to participate, much like the “agents” in my old simulations, to create emergent behavior.

Unbelievable. I was reminded about all this stuff, and how (perhaps surprisingly) relevant it is in understanding social media. David Armano’s engaging and relevant talk about how his effort to help a homeless family connects the dots.

So – what do we know about tacit knowledge, and what do we know about emergent behavior.

1. We know that most people think those terms are inscrutable.

2. We know that neither are easily tangible or predictable

But – if we apply the study of complexity theory, emergent systems, and what Stephen Wolfram calls “A New Kind of Science” (the first couple hundred pages of which are fascinating, but while I love Stephen (i know him from way back) he could use an aggressive editor, the book weighs about 10 lbs (and thanks to Salinger for teaching me the art of the multiply embedded flourish of parens – there’s a quote somewhere)) and the study of communities and collaboration, then, I think we can help enterprise, government and society develop a language for expressing ideas in this area, and start to really pursue the possible.

I promise my next post will make more sense.

Oh – the title – “The Sims” is a very popular computer game which is, in essence a sophisticated agent based simulation. It is unpredictable in its behaviors and outcomes, and yet elucidates cause and effect very well. Try it and you’ll see. My obscure point here, is that the read-write web has turned its participants into real-live actor agents in a giant simulation game. We can’t predict its outcomes, but we can learn a great deal about cause, effect and the important drivers of various outcomes.

Filed under: social media, web 2.0 , collaboration, complexity theory, emergent behavior, social media, tacit knowledge, web 2.0

power shift from hording to sharing

At the Canada 3.0 conference, I met a headhunter.

He asked me how social media helps him

My first thought was “you’re in the networking business, how can you not get how social media helps”? But fortunately, i paused long enough to ask another question of him. “Do you use linkedIn?”, I asked.

“Yes, sort of ” he says, “but I’m afraid that people will see my contacts and steel them”.

Oh – fear. Now that’s something that I can understand and relate to.

So I asked him if he could see other people’s contacts. What if its sharing and not stealing? I asked him if that could make him the “go to” guy and if he’d see that as a good thing.

I started my spiel about information sharing replacing information hording as the new source of status and pride.

And then he asked the key question. The KEY.

He said – “Once I empty my little cup of knowledge for someone, what value do I have left?”

He nailed it. The source of Social Media fear.

I did my best on the spur of the moment to answer his question with sensitivity and wisdom (not sure how good my best was, but I tried), so here’s what I said, and perhaps a bit of what I should have.

Information has some value.

Insight has more value.

Capability even more.

The  ability to reliably  find any of the above is perhaps most valuable. So a headhunter should be near the top of the food chain. But he did not see it that way.

So – how can someone like my smart, but worried friend move forward in this world? He’s got 2 key things he needs to do.

1. Become more familiar with Social Media in a non-threatening way. Take little steps that don’t feel high risk. I recommended some a while ago.

2. Start to think of himself in new ways. If he was useful when he horded information, he can be more useful, more influential when he starts giving it away. Just ask google. When people know that you’re the one with the info, they go back, they listen, you get an audience.

My new friend is worth much more than his rolodex.

More critically the point here, if I failed to make it yet, is that information isn’t the treasure, its how you got it and what you’ll do with it, and Fear is the only thing keeping you from discovering your post information, insight-economy value.

Filed under: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, web 2.0 , canada 3.0, enterprise 2.0, fear, information hording, social media

canada 3.0

Canada 3.0 – a quickly organized conference designed to bring together canadian government, students and tech industry to get some excitement flowing around the new Stratford institute for digital media- a joint venture between waterloo university and Open Text.

Beginning  a great conversation -  It forced an initially awkward close-quarters interaction between people who would normally never meet -  interesting to watch. It also brought a lot of people who hadn’t a clue about social or digital media together with people who did.

I didn’t get into most of the track talks, as I was working the show floor, but I got to speak to a pretty wide assortment of the highly varied attendees – everyone from students to government ministers, retired school teachers, consultants and analysts.

Canadian Keynotes – they all had a  strong theme of canadian nationalism – the message  – that if canadians want to lead, all they need to do is step up to the plate. The government, the institutions of higher learning, industry – they’re ready to do what they can to enable it.

a couple  things could have made it more valuable, I think.

1. An intro to digital media track. we could have given the people new to the industry more of a vocabulary to work with thru the rest of the camp. We from otex used it as a place to showcase our wares – which was fine, and many people, I believe were excited about it. But it could have been an opportunity for us to talk about what digital media and social media is, what some of the ideas of the future are, and given more people a truly interactive way of learning about it.

2.  More interactive, please – there was a lot of presenting – even people (gasp) reading their speeches – this community is still learning what listening is – and it does take some getting used to. but after attending a few unconference, barcamp, startup weekend events, I can attest that the quality of the conversation that emerges is very impressive.

An advantage -  it was much less self-referential than many of the events in the U.S. since this is an emerging community there was less of the “we’re all experts affirming one another” thing going on than you sometimes see when the same cast of characters shows up time and again at various events. This is a great chance to develop a community with its own distinct personality and objectives.

Website done fast, well and in real time -  very slideshare, twitter, hash tag, youtube enabled, and updated with content in real time.

Key take away – its the beginning of a potentially awsome thing. we all know that this type of excitement fades fast. And in reality, they could work on building up the participation and excitement Should have been thousands there. That said – it was a solid beginning, and, if followed up fast and tangibly, could add up to something big.

Filed under: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media , canada 3.0

14 slides on enterprise 2.0

I was asked to put together a very fast deck suitable for internal evangelism – something that someone could use to convince other (technical) people in the organization that collaborative technology was something they should care about. I had one day to do it. Here it is – I’ll be working on it to make it more convincing, would value your opinions.

Filed under: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, web 2.0 , collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social enterprisel

we all just want to be valuable

So we all talk about the benefits of collaboration (or at least all of us within a very narrow circle), but I rarely hear any discussion of one of the most critical components to unlocking potential productivity.

Most knowledge workers I know (and this varies widely with where they work) do not feel as though they are living to their potential.

When people have a sense of mission, that they are striving toward something meaningful, and that their contribution is making a significant difference along that path, then they are motivated and focused. They make decisionss, they don’t waste time, they are excited to be there.

This is the role of leadership. To ensure tht people have a mission and a vision that makes sense to them and that it is clear to them how their work forwards those goals.

Another great thing this does is to help people make the many decisions they need to in a way that will always tilt toward the goal. Including finding problems or challenges that would prevent the organization from reaching that goal, and sharing them in a way that they can be addressed and solved.

FOr example. I’ve never seen a team get really excited about “we’re going to launch these 10 features by March or else!!” Woohoo! rallying cry. Nope. And every one of you knows it.

Now try “We’re going to take this product to the next level, and become the most useful widget this market has ever dreamed of. And we can do it by getting these 10 things done”. Better.

A collaborative environment helps people get constant affirmation that their expertise is useful and their work is valuable. A well lead collaborative organization has a fine set of leaders at every level who understand that their role is to have a mission and include their team in it.

A collaborative environment keeps people engaged and focused on the work at hand – and that makes people happy. Really. There are several books on the subject. One of the most readable is called “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, though there are many academic articles and books on the subject.

So imagine a workplace where the vast majority of people are engaged, valued, “Flowing”, toward your corporate mission. Would that be more productive than what you have today?

This is the goal of enterprise 2.0. A fully engaged workforce where the product of that work is instantaneously available where its needed anywhere in the organization.

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, team building , engagement, enterprise 2.0, flow, leadership, productivity, satisfaction