Going Social? Don't Forget the Fun!

I dropped by a couple of conferences in London last week, both dealing in one way or another with the emergence of social businesses... whether they call themselves that or not.

There were a number of 'good news stories' as established corporates told delegates of the successes they'd had in rolling our enterprise social networks as well as some of the challenges they faced.  I even told a good news story or two of my own.

One thing I did notice, however, was that a couple of these organisations had sought to implement 'social' as if it were A.N.Other bog-standard enterprise application.  The fundamental differences of social technologies and their implications for culture and behaviours hadn't been ignored, but they'd certainly been deprioritised in favour of the C-Suite's preference to deploy a tool aimed at boosting productivity rather than anything that might be seen as fun or, God forbid, be described as Facebook for the enterprise.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, these rollouts were being cited as successes, but I do think there is a risk that the opportunity to taste secret sauce inside an enterprise social network may be lost if corporates feel that the only way to implement is to pretend it's another SAP upgrade from the 1990s.

Some of the best implementations take seriously the boosts to productivity which can be gained through enhanced collaboration and the power of sharing... but they don't forget the fun.

Photo:  Bethany Weeks