E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Archive for August 25th, 2009

Work The Web

Posted on Aug 25, 2009 | Categories: Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise2.0, IBM, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Tools, Personal KM, Productivity Tools, Social Enterprise | 8 Comments

How many times have you heard already, and over the last few months specially, how Social Computing (And social software along with social networking for that matter!) is still very much in its infancy. After all, a relatively close term like Enterprise 2.0 was just eventually coined by Andy McAfee in 2006. So you would think that all of this hype going around Social Computing is something we have just gotten started with and perhaps we are going to see plenty of it still. Well, maybe not…

Last week I bumped into a YouTube video, which is actually a commercial, that I thought was rather shocking! Why? Because more than anything else most of the key core principles from everything related to the 2.0 movement were detailed in there quite nicely. Yes, I know, that’s not much of a shock in there, is it? I mean, there are thousands of YouTube related videos on this topic. But what would happen if that clip was eventually from 1998? Yes, you are reading it right: 1998!

Would that change your opinion? Would that make you think that perhaps we haven’t been as innovative in this 2.0 space as we thought we would be with the current state of things? Would you believe that back them a bunch of people already got to understand some of those various principles that regulate our 2.0 experiences today… 11 years later!?!?!

Whoah! Yeah, I know! That’s exactly how I felt when I went through that commercial video clip. Even more when it came from the company that employs me, IBM, and just about a year after I joined its workforce, where I was doing customer support for the Mainframe (Yes, the good old VM Mainframe). As if I didn’t have enough already to add to that shock! Mind you, when I first started thinking about social software and how I would use it at work it was probably around 2002 or thereabouts and it still took me a while to engage (December 2003).

So nearly five years early it looks like it was all thought about in this space of social software and even more when all along I have been saying that social networking is all about everything but the tools. It’s a social and transformational phenomenon to humanise and personalise the corporate environment, so that we would have an opportunity to foster and boost our own personal business relationships in order to help us collaborate closer and share our knowledge with other knowledge workers in much more powerful ways. In short, work smarter, not necessarily harder.

And then I bumped into Work the Web. A two and a half minute video with some very very powerful messages that I bet we could all relate to, specially if you have been involved with social software for a little while. You would need to do a little exercise though. Strip out the Blank! from the video and that’s when it would become much more shocking and revealing altogether. And if you don’t believe me, here is the embedded version of it, so you can judge for yourself:

I told you! Amazing, wasn’t it? All of our efforts from the last few years it looks like they were already out there as far back as 1998. And I am not just talking about the consumer space. That clip was perceived under a business context and, even better, the byline that permeates throughout the video, which, I think, transmits a very clear challenge of what we still face, 11 years down the line, as our main key challenge for Enterprise 2.0 to change the corporate world as we know it: