I just finished reading The Social Factor:  Innovate, Ignite, and Win through Mass Collaboration and Social Networks, by Maria Azua.  She served as IBM’s vice president of Technology and Innovation, where she helped implement social networking tool across IBM’s 125,000 global workforce.   While not exactly a book about IBM’s practices, it does draw heavily on them.  Overall I found the book a little long on generalities, and thin on specific examples.  This might be exactly the book for an upper-level executive with little-to-no experience with social media.  But anyone with an active Twitter or Facebook account will find much of it too basic. 

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Recently the social networking service Ning discontinued its free account service.  They had offered a basic free version, with upgraded features for paid service.  Now it is moving to pay only (except for teachers).  These types of services are easy for groups of employees, teachers or student to sneak in the back door.   Which is a good thing, allowing rapid innovation and experimentation.  The problem comes when these become valuable parts of the infrastructure that have never been officially recognized — and then something like this happens.

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Is social media worth the time for a busy technology executive? Yes:

1. Transparency and Communication:  Probably the most obvious reason, provides a regular, less-formal way to introduce ideas and receive feedback from the community.  A blog format is  particularly good at forcing some type of regular schedule — i.e.  new post every Monday — although a smaller, less formal tool like Twitter — i.e.  at least two tweets a day — might be useful too.
2. Lead by example:  Employees already use social media, both to discuss work and while at work.  Model the behavior you expect.
3. Experience the good and bad of the technology:  How can you really judge new technology without direct experience?

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The recent Yankee magazine has a story on a social networking service started in Burlington, VT that has a very local focus.  Frontporchforum.com lets you create a social network for your neighborhood.  Sound silly?  With people’s busy schedules the days of talking to neighbors over the back fence are long over for most of us.  With a format that sounds like a mix of craigslist and Yammer neighbors can connect on everything to loaning canoes to help out a teen boat trip to loaning a cake pan.  Everything else is moving to a virtual existence — why not the back fence?

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Yammer made a big splash in our workplace late last fall.  But lately the number of user posts has dropped off pretty steeply.  It is not clear quite why this is.  For me I find my Twitter feed more useful.  Workplace colleagues of interest are already there, plus I can follow external people as well.  And in its free version Yammer doesn’t really offer much over what Twitter has to offer.   According to a recent ReadWrite post Yammer seems to be doing well, at least in the VC marketplace.

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A recent opinion article in Computerworld ponders the role of org charts and what they reveal about an organization.  They are useful in detailing who reports to whom and which department pays the salary.  But the very act of viewing an organization through this type of chart perpetuates an outdated way of thinking, with a silo’d, hierarchical structure that often fails at meeting client/customer expectations or responding quickly to changing conditions.  So what to do? Some massive reorganization?

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