Last Tuesday I joined Lee Bryant, Andy Hobsbawm and Robin Hamman on a panel titled “Enterprise 2.0” at the Social Media Influence conference in London.
It was very interesting going back to a conference in London almost five years after the Social Tools for the Enterprise Symposium.
Five years ago we believed that we were at the beginning of a major change in all dynamics of communication within companies and between companies and their clients. Well… it looks like today we still think that we are at the beginning of a major change in all dynamics of communication within companies and between companies and their clients.
What did change in is that today a huge number of people is using social tools in their everyday life (quite often the very same people working in those same companies). Sooner or later companies will have to follow.
I guess that one of the main challenges companies face today is that they still consider communication with their clients an activity separated from the rest of their workflow, managed by those weirdos at the marketing division; expensive efforts structured in campaigns which last only few months, that must be creative and innovative, and bring sales in the very short term.
At the same time while the “rest of us”, on this side of that communication activity, might be more or less entertained and amused by these activities, what we really want is be able to communicate with simple and effective tools, allowing us to get in touch with real people inside organizations who can help us when we need them.
So while it is nice that agencies come up every day with innovative ways to exploit the fact that more and more people spend their time on social media sites, I guess that we should try harder to get companies to understand how to use these tools in the simplest way: to let people interact with other people.