Social Media is a buzz word, there’s no getting around that.  Some people would like to toss out the lessons of social media, simply because they don’t like the buzz word or social media’s frivolous image.  This would be highly rash, social media has a vast array of lessons to teach business and, in fact, business has been using social media for years.

If you are a software company, your bug tracking system (like BugZilla) is an excellent example a social media application.  If you are in sales, Salesforce would also be one.

So let’s demystify the whole "social media" world by saying that social media is any object you can imbue with value and then exchange with one or many people.

In general, social media applications (those programs that exchange social media) have four traits:

  • Community – most social applications allow users to congregate in groups or form affiliations.
  • Collaboration – social media usually allows people to collaborate to create a product.
  • Communication – social media also greatly reduces transaction costs in communication via direct or instant messaging  or microsharing.
  • Permanence – this is very important. Social Media is permanent. Things written on social media stay around forever. This is great for building a large library of artifacts that can later be easily searched for and retrieved.

We employ social media tools and concepts in the service of better management.  Reduced friction for communication, shared storage, reduced transaction costs for dissemination, documented decision making, real-time status updates for team members and streamlined work flows are but a handful of potential applications with immediate business value we have worked with.

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