Sex will happen | it's how you get there
February 7th, 2008
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Does my CEO want me to add him as his friend?

I recently joined Seesmic, an Alpha-stage, fully video-based online community. In my first video post, I asked about the value and expectations around social networking inside of a company. Mostly, I was interested in:

  • What is social networking in the enterprise?
  • How could it add value?
  • How do you see using it as part of working together?

    • I received some good replies. No surprise, most of the feedback was that enterprises would be very wary of social networking. Interestingly, all the feedback had to do with cultural-push back. Here are some of the highlights (a couple of the video responses are below):

  • Executives want to enable the flow of information and connections between people but middle management is like an immune system that squashes that sentiment so they can continue the command-and-control protection of information as their leverage.
  • Minions don’t want a worklight shined on them. They’re wary of people watching them.
  • People would feel like it was a fake effort. That it could turn into an ass-kissing system for friending department heads.
  • Control structures would have little to gain by helping people lower down the food-chain.
  • People would want to have side-conversations vs broadcasting their efforts to the world.
  • Why would you want to help? People might be able to find you, but what’s your motivation to help them them?
  • Unless everyone knew why and how they’d use it, it wouldn’t work and be perceived as a failure.

    • Destined for failure, then? What do you guys think?

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