I made a short trip today to see an old client. He is now working in a different company, but he is seeing a lot of the same problems we first worked on over 6 years ago.

A few things struck me about the visit. In the time since we last worked together, a lot has changed in our worlds.

Craig was obviously not just smarter than he was 6 years ago, but after having been in the trenches (he deployed an Enterprise 2.0 solution to a huge organization in 2002, totally changing how it did business) for so long, he had a wisdom about the powerful nature of Enterprise Social Software. As he spoke about the business need for social software at his new employer, where he is a Vice President, he consistently nailed every point on the value and the possibilities that this opportunity would bring.

The interesting thing about Craig is that after we did this, he quit his job and became a front-line employee (managing a branch) in which he had to use the very software he deployed in order to do his job. (I am not prettying this up, he really did quit, and he really did choose to go to the front line)

I also realized that things have changed a lot for me as well. We are no longer talking about selling big, expensive, custom-built solutions, but instead we looked at a set of tools that can help the specific needs of this company, and I was no longer selling an idea in the way we had to before, we could now talk about successes and failures not as a hypothesis but instead as true stories we had lived. I also saw that this wasn’t a “sales call”, those don’t exist for us anymore, this felt like the beginning of an adventure, the end of which is largely unknown, and the destination will be the product of its participants.

I think if you asked Craig, he would say that he is a total amateur at this stuff. I would also bet that he would have no clue what Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 or Social Software means by definition, those things have no relevance to him. Craig is one of the rare breeds of executives who sees these tools as part of a unique way to build real value for his business. He doesn’t need to flash around big ideas and fancy words, instead he’ll be busy building a team of managers and executives who are ready to dig in and learn the deep values behind the ideas. More importantly, he’ll be talking to his front-line staff and telling them the same things he tells his executive colleagues. He won’t hold back.

Enterprise 2.0 is not a career maker. I believe that in the next year you will see some real enterprise 2.0 rockstars who will be celebrated widely, they will promote themselves in a serious way and will reap the praise.

Craig, on the other hand, will be getting on with it. He’ll be transforming how things work and doing it in a sustainable way that will not be erode with time.  It is this substance that will really matter in the end, where other projects may fall out of fashion, and a lot of expensive software and consultants will come and go, a real enteprise social software project will stand the test of time.

It is easy to forget that real success is not determined by the deployment, but by latent factors which many of the current Enterprise 2.0 tools do not measure (why is this?) such as the regularity of logins by individuals, the ratio of content creation vs content consumption, the amount of views of old content vs new content, the “explorability” of the platform based on how often and how deeply users navigate beyond their usual content and the ration of shared content vs private. (there are a lot more factors, but those are separate posts).

You can “deploy” to a million users, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t participate. If you don’t have the tools to constantly understand what the participation levels really are, then you can’t respond in a meaningful way if there are problems.

There are real success stories out there. Smart people doing wonderful things that change business and that change lives. I promise to follow along on this one and let you know how it goes.