This week in links - week 33, 2008

Michael Sampson shares Some Thoughts on "Collaboration":

To be collaborative means that you embrace a certain way of life and work ... an openness to the ideas of other people, and in particular to how their ideas and perspectives may mold, change and transform your ideas. The heart of collaboration is openness to the ideas to others, and a stated and acted upon willingness to explore those ideas, rather than assuming that everything you think is right and correct from the get-go. To be collaborative then, is in essence a human process, that plays out over whatever modality of interaction you use with other people, be that face-to-face, email, a wiki or any other "collaborative technology".

"Social Media And US Business Familiarity, Usage And Adoption: A Research Study Of The Inc. 500" by Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson:

In early 2007 the results of a groundbreaking study into the adoption of social media within the Inc. 500, an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United States, were released.

Now, approximately one year later, that same group was studied again in an effort to look at longitudinal change in the adoption of these digital communication tools. The companies who responded were asked the same detailed questions concerning their familiarity with, usage of and measurement of social media.

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Not only is this widespread adoption being driven by strong familiarity but also from the recognized critical role of social media to a company's future success in today’s online world. When queried on the importance of social media, 26% of respondents in 2007 felt that social media is "very important" to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year. It is clear that this group of fast-growing companies considers the use of social media as a central part of its strategic plan.

"Assessing Organizational Readiness for Communities" by Rachel Happe:

All the hype as well as the overwhelming focus on using social media for outbound marketing can distract companies from really understanding how communities fit into their business processes and operations - and the considerations organizations need to account for before they decide to employ a community strategy.

Here at Mzinga, we have a couple of different assessment frameworks. The first is a framework for understanding culture and communication styles - this is really to understand how 'WE' a company is at the individual level. We have a second model too - a WE Corporate Assessment framework that lays out six operational components that will determine where on organizational maturity scale a company is.

"Social Networking at Ford: Community Is Job One" by Rob Salkowitz:

Signs that Enterprise 2.0 has gone mainstream are everywhere, and this point was driven home to me last week in an interview I did with Scott Monty, the new head of digital communications and social networking for Ford Motors.

While Ford may seem like the quintessential “old economy” company, its approach to social computing, both from the business and the IT perspective, is as far-sighted and strategic as any I’ve encountered. I was interviewing Monty primarily to discuss the relationship between social computing technology and efforts to recruit a next-generation workforce, but surprisingly (to me, at least), that element was not very high on his radar. He and his management are sold on social networking purely on the business value.

“One of the reasons for having a social media strategy is because we have so many different constituencies,” he explains. “We’ve obviously got customers -- that’s the outward facing portion. We’ve got employees for the inward facing [portion]. But we also have shareholders, we have our dealership network, we’ve got unions, we’ve got retirees -- a huge alumni population of Ford retirees. So there are many different aspects to take into account, which is why a well crafted and well thought out strategy should be able to address all of those.”