Getting Started with Social Media – Euan Semple at GuruOnline

This is a nice set of interviews, well rather short one question one answer dialogues with my friend Euan Semple.

Euan is a very thoughtful person and – obvious with his experience on the use of social media within organisations – the fifteen questions get good answers. And I like his little remarks (like social media being so un-business like from the outside, how it helps to keep the I small in RoI).

Right, to get involved with the social web both inside and outside of an enterprise does not present an immediately obvious ROI like process automation of old did. But it can empower organisations to become more adaptive and able at learning, ie. improving knowledge retention, creating collaborative environments, and encouraging a knowledge sharing culture.

Unluckily the player can’t be embedded (well, embedding 15 videos is a drag anyway) so you have to got to guruonline to watch them.

Euan explains how most companies are starting to feel pressured to jump head first into social media because everyone is talking about it, although it would be imperative for most businesses to at least investigate social media, throwing too much at it isn’t necessarily going to help.

Euan also acknowledges that social media can be perceived as being a tool for the younger generation, but that generation is now starting to work within your organisation and with them they will bring the tools which they’re used to using on a day to day basis. This doesn’t mean you need to ban social networking sites like Face Book and MySpace in your office, it means you need to encourage these staff to use these tools in a manor that can benefit your business and you need to trust them to do this. Euan justifies this by pointing out that they may be more likely to ask their existing peers within that network if they encounter a problem rather than going through the usual time consuming channels. This example is not just limited to the more junior employees; encouraging staff to participate in social media can speed up trouble shooting and enable any solutions found to be shared.

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Martin Koser

Latest posts by Martin Koser (see all)

• Interview with Frank Schoenefeld – “Getting Enterprise 2.0 on track” - 03/11/2009
• Adidas’ Internal Communication Team on Enterprise 2.0 - 22/09/2009
• Social Media Revolution – really? - 17/08/2009