Early in my career a computer hardware vendor (who shall remain nameless) tried to get me fired after a seminar I had conducted. These are the true events of this story: My company had arranged a technical education day for small and medium businesses. In the morning, a session conducted by a colleague focused on computer hardware—what computers were good for, what computers could do, what type of things to look for in a computer (this was before the PC, when computers were the size of desks and were only owned by businesses), and so on. During the lunch hour we had arranged for several hardware vendors to display their computers. Attendees could walk around, see and touch an actual computer (wow!) and speak to the various hardware reps. In the afternoon my session focused on software, and my message was pretty simple: I told people that it was most important to focus first on what you wanted to *do* with the computer. Once you knew what you were going to use it for, go out and find the best software available for that application and buy whatever computer it ran on (this was back in the day when most software was only available on certain proprietary systems).
You can probably guess where this is heading: One of the hardware vendors called my boss the next day, complaining that I had trashed his hardware company (I hadn’t) and that he’d had five computer orders cancelled after the seminar because of what I had said. Fortunately, my boss had been at the seminar and knew the real story. He knew that the orders had been cancelled because no one at those organizations had ever thought about what the computer was going to be used for.
Fast forward a few years.
In the mid 90’s, I was managing application development for one of the major telecommunication providers in the US (who shall also remain nameless). This was about the time the Internet was just beginning to sweep through the halls of industry as “the next big thing.” At one meeting, the head of our division issued a mandate to--and I quote--“do something with the Internet.” Well, with direction like that it’s no surprise that the only thing we were able to do with the Internet was fail!
Fast forward to today.
Social networking is now the new “next big thing” for many organizations. Executives are familiar with Facebook and Twitter (at least enough to ban use of them from company computers) so certainly there must be some opportunities there. So more and more CI’s and IT department heads are being told to “go do something with social networking.” Sound familiar?
Unfortunately this leads us right back where we started with this post. Many enterprise social networking initiatives are doomed to failure almost from the word, “Go” because companies go out and invest in a social networking solution without giving a lot of thought to how they are going to use it. Do you have specific, measurable goals set for your social networking strategy? As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are going, it’s going to be hard to tell when you get there.”
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