Over the last five years, the emergence of Social Media and its impact on society has been well documented. Social Media connects people with similar interests through technology, enabling them to share ideas/thoughts and media and collaborate around common interests. What separates Social Media from all of the previous technology-enabled movements is the dramatic paradigm shift in who drives and owns the content. Check out this great YouTube clip, which illustrates this point and demonstrates how Social Media works.

A recent Harris poll found that 49% of Americans are using Social Networking tools. This is an amazing statistic if one considers that most of these tools did not exist several years ago. The growth and popularity of these tools is going to continue to grow as they continue to gain acceptance and utility within the workplace. Some might argue that the adoption and use of these tools represents the next great opportunity for corporations.

But, how exactly can corporations use Social Media? To answer this question, it is important to understand the value that Social Media brings to a corporation. There are several key reasons why corporations are using or plan to adopt Social Media. These include:

• Communication – Enabling people to communicate with each other when they need to and about topics they find most important. Some examples of applications that are now in use include Blogs (Blogger, WordPress, and Vox), Microblogs (Twitter and Yammer), Social Networking (LinkedIn), and Events (Meetup and Upcoming).
• Collaboration – Tools to enable people to work together more efficiently and share common information that they deem important. Some examples of these tools include Social Tagging tools (Delicious and Digg), Wikis (Wikipedia), Virtual Environments (SecondLife), and Ratings Tools (Answers sites).
• Media Sharing – Sites and tools that enable people to share media about a specific topic or area with each other. Some examples of these tools include Photo Sharing (Flickr), Video Sharing (YouTube and Vimeo), LiveCasting (Ustream and Justin.tv), and Audio Sharing (Podcasts).

We are interested in finding out more about how your organization has implemented or plans to implement Social Media. Use the comments box below to submit your ideas and discuss them with us.

Tags: Enabling Technology, Five Key Drivers of High Performance, Social Media, Social Networking

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 10:33 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.