James Robertson has issued a challenge to other FASTForward bloggers to come up with five tips to accelerate the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. I’ll play. Here are my thoughts:

1. Begin with a social media audit. Somewhere on the fringes of every large organization there are people tinkering with the enormous variety of free social media tools and applying them to real work situations. Find those people, see what they are doing and if they’re getting positive results, support them and use their successes to forward the agenda. Social media gain their force through trusted individuals

2. Start small and keep expectations low. All big corporations have had at least one IT integration project that burned through millions of dollars and failed to deliver the expected benefits. Most have had more than one. As a result, the geeks don’t trust the suits and vice versa. Start with something modest and manageable–say, an enterprise wiki-based collaboration space devoted to a specific information-gathering project–with measurable benefits.

3. Don’t spend a lot of money. The amount of money that you spend on a social media project has no impact on success. Free tools like Wordpress and MediaWiki and gmail are as good as anything currently available commercially and they’re far more tested. When, and if, you scale up, then you need to start thinking about more robust features and security.

4. Start with a business problem and find the social media tools to solve it, not the other way around. Saying to your employees, hey, it’s okay for everybody to blog about whatever they want to is surefire receipe for failure. It may fly in the face of the democratic nature of social media to say so, but not everyone in an organization has something useful to say or a particular need to say it. On the other hand, blogs are enormously valuable ways for teams of dispersed experts to stay in touch with what their colleagues are working on and thinking about. We know that even the CIA has a private blogging network.

Enterprise wikis offer a painless (because the process is “social”) and efficient way for work teams and other communities of practice within organizations to gather and share information for all kinds of collaborative projects and to leave behind not only valuable and easily stored digial repositories of knowledge, but a complete record of the processes that created it.

5. Understand the stakes and the risks. Social media are not just extensions of traditional enterprise software that can be grafted on and presto, your networking and collaboration problems are solved. Large-scale adoption of the architectures of participation represent a revolutionary change in organizational dynamics because–by giving lots of individuals a voice and audience through a networked platform–they force decisionmaking to be more transparent, democratic and consensus-based. If your company isn’t ready to start down that route, adoption is going to be a slow and painful process.

Social media will start at the grassroots level–marketing, communications, research–and gradually insinuate themselves into the fabric of large organizations as they prove their usefulness and top executives learn that they are valuable and can be controlled. Sure, there will be resistance from the top but it will fade over time. There is a whole new generation of executives coming up who grew up on the internet. Social media tools will be as familiar to them as spreadsheets are to today’s generation.