I was reading a blog post, Corporations at Risk From Social Media Adoption Issues, by Brett Greene, or maybe it is an online newspaper article since it is on the Huffington Post, with the tag line: the internet newspaper: news, blogs, video, community. So is news an article and commentary a blog? These questions are not my real point but just a symptom of it.
The real point is the proliferation of social media types and the growing complexity of dealing with them. Brett was commenting on a recent Altimeter report. A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, by Jeremiah Owyang. Their research found that global corporations are trying to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts. He adds, “The genie is out of the social media bottle and he's creating new technologies and tools at dizzying speeds.” Now there are even tools to manage the tools and these tools are actually filling a real need. What have we done?
I also recently shared related research by Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research as they looked the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. They found that the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, downloadable mobile apps and Foursquare are increasing while there are reductions in the use of blogs, message boards, video blogs, podcasts and MySpace.
It makes sense that blog use is decreasing as they use to serve more functions that are how handled by an increasing variety of specialized tools. In 2004 I saw several examples of what later would be termed enterprise 2.0 or social business that were built with blogs since they were the main social media tool around.
For example, Al Essa, the CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Management at time, had each project team in his group create a blog forum for every project. Managers now provided updates and everyone in the department could access all project blogs inside the firewall. The project blogs acted as true dashboards. Al could review each project’s status on line and drill down for more detail as needed. He could also point project teams to others who faced the same issues. These status reports were now available to everyone in his department, so cross-project communication was a simple matter, a by-product of the new blog reporting platform. The instant, secure, and constant accessibility, in searchable format, that blogs brought was a huge productivity improvement over swapping project reports and commentary through multiple emails.
Now there are a variety of tools to handle these same issues. Have we gotten better? Perhaps but I would argue that the improvement is only incremental over the transformative work that people like Al did simply using blogs. We are also in danger of going backward if we push the complexity too far. This is happening both on the Web and inside the enterprise. One of the great benefits of blogs remains their simplicity. We need to maintain this simplicity as we add functionality.
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