Social Media isn’t about the software – it’s more about the culture change that has to happen. I’ve seen wiki implementations where the organization created a process where everything that went on to the wiki had to be approved before it could be uploaded. While the technology is technically doing its job in this example, I’d argue that the organization didn’t even implement Social Media; rather, they’ve simply used a new tool to continue doing things in the same way they always have. This is why successful implementation of Social Media depends on integrating technology, people, and processes from the very start. All the Social Media technology in the world won’t do any good if people aren’t shown how to incorporate this technology into their work and understand that the same old processes don’t work. I hope that someday the major software developers will be cognizant of this fact.

Social media/enterprise 2.0/whatever you want to call it is a crazy and fascinating mashup of disciplines that traditionally don’t come in one package and tend not to play all that well together – marcom and IT. We all have a lot of learning and exploring to do on our way to figuring out how it works best – whether the big guys will recognize that the rules/needs are different in time to leverage their size and relationships to dominate the market is the big question.