Tuesday I posted a question to all of you: “what do you say to a company that fears social media“. It’s a question grounded in our real client experience — companies we work with want to adopt social computing technologies, but they’re afraid of what they might get back if they turn their web presence into a two-way communication complete with user generated content and the opportunity for users to experience a completely social and “free” environment in which to express themselves.
I bring this up not as a criticism of these clients, but because I legitimately want to counsel them and others like them who are trying to engage socially with constituents –customers or employees — but are uncertain about what they’ll get back if they put themselves out there in that way.
The benefit of social media is that it gives an avenue into the conversation for voices and ideas that you previously might not have heard. But that’s also what worries some companies. I think it’s helpful, therefore, to remember that adding social media to your operation means adding avenues for expression of opinion, but expression of opinion doesn’t have to mean the written word. If you aren’t ready to engage with constituents’ comments, go in a different direction. There are ways to let people add their views and contribute to your operation without words. Here are three simple but important ones:
1. Tagging – Let users engage with content your organization already has, but give them some authority in determining how to categorize the content, what the content is, how it’s relevant, and to whom it will be useful. The beauty of user generated content is that it introduces fresh ideas from outside the closed system of your organization. Letting users tag existing content isn’t the same as letting them add new content, but you are giving them an opportunity reorganize the company’s ideas and refresh the company knowledge in the process.
2. Rating – Like tagging, rating is a way to allow users to adjust prescribed content hierarchies. Add rating systems to existing collections of content so individual users can contribute their votes as to what should be highlighted and what is most useful. Use the ratings as part of the search — highest rated comes up first — and build a “featured content” section on your web site that presents the content users have determined is worth seeing. Again, through the rating and the tagging, no one in the community of constituents has written a word, but they will have exercised considerable influence on the organization of knowledge and, thus, will have expressed themselves in a way that’s rewarding to them and useful to you.
3. Bookmarking – Why not create a feature that lets customers or employees add new content to your company’s body of knowledge and useful resources through a digg-like model? Let people add bookmarks to useful content, then let them share that with other members of the community and let the community add tags and ratings to the content that has been bookmarked — see, it all works together. With tagging and rating, users are expressing themselves in relation to existing content, and that’s a great use of social energy, but no organization can live forever on just existing content. If you’re not yet ready to let users write content, you can still leverage the community to increase your company’s knowledge by letting them bookmark good source material.
Enterprise 2.0 — social media within the enterprise — delivers value in a lot of ways, one of which is its ability to make relevant content more quickly discoverable. Empowering the crowd to shape the discoverability patterns around your content is a way for you to ease into Enterprise 2.0 and still experience significant benefit.
