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?

    Published in Productivity on February 7, 2008

    Things people have said about this post

    MyAvatars 0.2 From Marshall on February 7th, 2008 at 4:55 pm

    More great content here Sam. I tell ya, when my boss at my last job joined Twitter - it really changed the experience for me!

    MyAvatars 0.2 From sam on February 8th, 2008 at 2:06 am

    Yeah. It’s funny watching all the Jivers tweeting away at work. I like it. :)

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