People and companies use social media for different reasons every day. While that seems like a mundane statement, break it down with a focus on “different reasons every day.” Do you see it yet?
Every single day, new uses for social media pop up. Every single day. Many of the tools that we use today were originally used as collaboration tools at the enterprise level. Twitter, for example, was built as a tool to be used while the founders were building something else. Twitter wasn’t the end goal – it was something that was supposed to help people in different locations keep track of the status of both the project as well as their personal perspectives.
The fact that I don’t remember the name of the original product that Twitter was supposed to support is both ironic and justified.
With that in mind, we are starting to understand that social media can be applied to an infinite number of purposes and solve an infinite number of problems. The medium is not hampered by technology, speed, or logistics. The only boundary, particularly on an enterprise level, is the degree of expansion of the human imagination.
This graphic by our friends at SocialCast won’t move you with fancy images or clever position of words. It’s factual, interesting, and loaded with the data that corporate employees can use to spark their own imaginations on the quest for faster/better/stronger collaboration.
No boundaries, save one. Remember that.
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Learn even more about enterprise social media on this social media blog.
About JD Rucker
Just look at QR codes as another example. They’ve been around for years – developed by Toyota (in the nineties, I think) for tracking their car parts.
@Danny – Wow, I had no idea. If someone would have asked me I would have thought they were just 3 or 4 years old.
I love the way you depict things. I do agree with your post about the evolution of technology in the enterprise.
I do see the tools evolving to fulfill a need for increased collaboration as the context of the enterprise has changed, with increasing volatility, complexity, competition etc. All of those factors have made it necessary for the enterprise to address ways of enabling new organizational designs, that are less based on silos, or hard functional boundaries, the need to reconfigure rapidly, to leverage intangible assets etc. Of course the need for communication and coordination exists in any enterprise and not necessarily only to collaborate.
I therefore see the technology as a response to a need – just as you describe in the case of twitter, its widespread adoption being driven by a commonly felt need. I accept the co-evolution argument as well and in certain circumstance, technology does lead to unanticipated innovations in the enterprise.
People are more engaged in social media nowadays that’s why most companies use social media for business purposes.
I really Like reading your articles, please keep writing!