A few months ago I wrote up this list and will begin to address ways social champions can address the 20 reasons NOT to collaborate.
These are the good old days. Just a new version of the good old days. Remember how the internet was going to replace the person and the businesses (.com’s) that were built around this? Some of them boomed (salesforce.com) and some busted (flooz.com). But companies like IBM and Microsoft slowly, and often to the scorn of analysts for being way too slow, saw this and began to shift, develop and repurpose existing products to meet this shift in how people were working. And not to plug any particular brand but early on the IBM Lotus brand was touting collaboration in the workplace quite successfully.
What we have today is the return of business being personal again. Oddly the recent economic dip actually made collaboration and social business tools again rethink how they sell web or enterprise 2.0 – the rebirth of the social worker. Today we have services like Klout.com, LinkedIn and internal social networks to help people do business better, find the best people and create successful outcomes faster than they may have been able to in the past. My grandfather grew up in the Rotary, martini lunch and dinner party era where I still have memo pads from his company that says, “Its best put in a memo” – today that true but our memo is(was) email and now is(going to be) your status update on your social network, twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. The premise and outcomes are nearly same.
