The concept is, imho, very simple. Social Software in the Enterprise is about consolidating the intellectual capital (IC) of the company. IC does not comprise only what is stored in ECM; most of the IC is “transient” in the sense that it is shared among people, it goes hidden into a drawer, it gets forgotten into “C:”…
I think that the consolidation of IC is one of the major gains that Social Software can bring into the picture. Something that goes beyond churn, drawers, hard-drives. And, I think, that this may be one of the possible selection criteria that a company may use to validate the choice of a product: “does product XYZ help me to successfully consolidate the IC of my company?”

What I tried to do was to reformulate that same concept for different profiles in the enterprise in order to try to address the question “What is in for me?” at different levels. This because we frequently get objections of the type:

• “I do not have enough time to do it…”
• “my people are here to work, not to talk…”
• “Seems interesting… but what is the ROI of this?”

I have shared a previous post on this point, where I acknowledge the ideas I have found in a very nice article about being able to set the right priorities. I want to share my approach with you.

For Executives: What is in for me ?

Executives should care most about the consolidation of IC:

• People join a company and leave it.
• New opportunity arise where it is important to quickly deploy skilled resources.
  How to nurture skills? How to ensure that experiences become part of the background?
• Each company needs to develop its differentiators in order to chase new market opportunities.
  Corporate culture is what makes the difference, it is the ground on which talents can flourish… How to build a corporate culture based on living experiences?

So, for executives the “What is in for me?” may translate into : how is it possible to consolidate IC and develop my corporate culture in an incremental way? What if people in the company would be able to contribute, each one of them with her own experience, a little glass of water to fill the ocean?

For Managers: What is in for me ?

A Manager has all the interest if her team would be a model in consolidating the corporate IC! Why shouldn’t she encourage people in her team to focus on what really matters for the company and, slowly but steadily, contribute to the culture?

I mean; of course it is fundamental that each person in the team fully concentrates on the priorities and on the schedule. Here we are not defending any anarchical idea whereby people develop long term personal  interests instead of doing their work: here we are saying that instead of leaving good ideas, great discussions, living experiences fall on a stony ground, it may be wiser to have them falling on good earth so that seeds could develop into flowers and trees.

A manager should be proud to drive her team to meet the goals of her company.

For Employees : What is in for me ?

And how does this translate for an employee?
Well, in the current work environment, where we are all deployed on different projects, we are doing several tasks at the same time and where it is more difficult to build strong relationships based on proximity and on long term planning, the possibility to be “the seed which brings a flower” is a career opportunity. It is source of recognition.

And, why not, it is also a possibility of developing interests that go beyond the small perimeter of the projects on which people are deployed (and that are not always chosen by employees….)

When you choose a Social Software platform for your company, make sure that you choose a platform that allows People (Executives, Managers, Employees) to properly build together a company culture by consolidating the corporate IC! Do not choose a platform which only allows people to collaborate or to partially share some information. Choose a platform that puts People at the centre of the experience. As my friend Louis Richardson says: “do not change your business in something different but make your business social!”

I myself sometimes find it hard to get the time ad the attention. I feel caught into a spiral of activities and what in the morning seemed to be a great day, full of long-awaiting tasks that I will finally be able to do…. in the evening turned to be a stressful day, in which I worked head-down 12 hours without accomplishing any of the things that I planned in the morning.

Sounds familiar?

I read last week an interesting article : “How to be productive and still get 8 hours sleep”. It has nothing to do with Social Software but a couple of things caught my attention:

1. Set a Value for your time
2. Determine your priorities
3. Do a time audit

In effect, what I start to realize when  talk about the transformation that is required in organizations and individuals in order to become a Social Business, is that it is all a matter of answering the question “What is in for me?”. If I would strongly believe that my job is important for my personal evolution and is important for the good of my company (which pays me my salary), contributing to the value of my company becomes my priority (during my work hours at least). There are many things to do, for sure. And we all do many of them during each hour we spend at work.

But is the value associated with each of the things we do aligned with my (and my company’s) top priority ?

Am I sure that, once I do an audit of my 12 hours, I could add the time associated to each minute to the value that I expect from my work (and that my company expects from my work) ?

What a change.

On Flipboard, for instance. I have my Twitter channel…. But it is NOT like reading tweets on Tweetdeck. It is like really harvesting the intelligence twitted by people and consuming it in the most appropriate format.

Same with Zite and its “Sections”.

Great tools.

This site implements a strong reputation system which allows individuals to find craftsmen to deal with the issues that any home-owner encounters each day.

Individuals “vote” for the craftsman who just did some reparation at home. And everybody else can choose craftsmen based on the viral marketing that is generated.

Of course, nothing new in principle….
But I liked this implementation of Social Networking to this aspect of our daily life.

"Don’t get me wrong: all the things that made You You in 2006 are still there. All year long, You were YouTubing, Facebooking, Twittering, chronicling Your life and community, scrutinizing the candidates and the media, videotaping Yourself getting upset on behalf of Britney Spears.

But who made the big noise in the Web 2.0 world this year? It was Them. The professionals, the old-media people, the moneymen — all of Them, conscious that there was profit in Your little labor-of-love socialist paradise. Story of Your life, right? You make the discoveries, They make the Benjamins.

So if 2006 was the year of You, 2007 was the year of Them. Big media companies (like this one) stuffed their sites with blogs, podcasts and video. "

This is, actually, true. And I think that, overall, this has been a good progress for everybody.

The fact that anyone can e-mail us for free, if they have our address, means that people frequently and persistently e-mail us. But that quickly creates immunity, and simply makes us value face-to-face communications – and the communications of those we already know and trust – all the more.

When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen.

During this period I am seeing many posts around "Resolutions for the New Year" which explicitly state that inbox-zero is one of the priorities. So, we could say that

The proper use of Social Software can actually be the cure for immunity. 

And Lotus Connections can actually provide a big help in looking for Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen inside your community.

You remember when Miranda asks for the yet-to-be-published copy of Harry Potter?
The way in which Andy manages the situation, by delivering two copies of the book to the twins before they take the train and giving an additional copy to Miranda, anticipating her objection and exceeding her expectation, is so great that I could not resist from immediately thinking to a sentence that I often use in my presentations for Lotus Connections or Web 2.0:

It’s not what work you expect Employee #1234 to accomplish per person-month of work……
It’s the work you never expected would happen, that suddenly creates new business

I hope that no one has to do impossible things in order to really create a new opportunity, but the example was so sharp and sticky !
It really, I think, makes it clear that it is important, today, to be innovative and clever in whichever action we do, in order to apply the passion that is inside us.

In general, people chose friends of similar age and race. But if the friend lived down the hall, then age and race became a lot less important. Proximity overpowered similarity….
We’re friens with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.

I remembered those sentences when, this morning, a colleague sent me an email pointing me to this site: SAGA Zone.
It is a social site for people over 50. Hey, next year I can subscribe to it! There is also an interesting article that explains what the site is for.

Communities are springing everywhere, now that the new synthetic universe is giving the possibility for people to share. The proximity, the possibility to occupy the same space is no more limited by the typical dimensions where we live (space, time). The new universe gives the possibility to “do things together” with people that “live down the hall“…

There is, though, a sad side of this story, in my opinion; it is the sense of loneliness that these initiatives bring together. Apparently, it is more and more difficult to have normal relationships with other humans.
Don’t get me wrong. Technology is opening new frontiers that are certainly enhancing our “social attitude”. It should be “enhancing”, though, more than “substituting”. At least, this is what I would think of myself in the 3rd age…

In this quote from Luis’s post, please find the details about how to get to the live screencast that IBM made available:

As you may be able to see from the Web site where the screencast is stored, you can watch the demo live or rather download it
so that you can view it a later time offline. Whatever is easier for
you. And also for those folks who may be looking for the script of the
screencast you can also download it from here.

Thus without much further ado and without taking too much time off from you for the demo itself, I would strongly encourage you all to take a look into the screencast on Lotus Connections and find out some more as to how IBM
is planning to progress further into adopting social computing within
the Enterprise and beyond. I bet that you will find it quite
entertaining and enlightening. Because, above all, you will be able to
see something very important and which may not be just related to
Connections, nor to IBM itself: the fact that you can conduct effective business
using social computing to address real customers issues and find
solutions for them in the shortest time possible by empowering people
to reach out for information and connect with other knowledge workers. Yes, that is right. Putting together the best of both worlds: knowledge and the people behind that knowledge. Can social computing get better than this? I doubt it.