Last week Kristin English and I looked at some of the defining characteristics of social enterprise, collaboration, and alignment. Collaboration and social enterprise are central themes at PR+MKTG Camp East where we will examine how marketing and PR can work more effectively with customer service, sales and community management to maximize engagement.

This week, we explore posts about how social enterprise  functions. Social enterprise continues to evolve with new tools and new ways to use these tools.

Consider a Forbes.com interview with Dan Woods, where Jeff Schick, VP for social software at IBM,  gave his perspective on enterprise social media.

In regards to a “payoff” for using enterprise software, Schick said it was two-fold. First, and somewhat obvious, is to avoid mistakes and do a better job. The second is more in-depth and forward thinking. Schick said social enterprise provided the opportunity for the “creation of an institutional memory and a playbook that expands and changes as the work of the company evolves to meet new challenges.”

Schick also shared his perspective on encouraging buy-in from employees. He stated that it was important not to rush anyone into participating. Instead, employees should be able to see its effectiveness. That will allow enterprise social media to become integrated into an organization’s culture.

What do you think? Where do you see enterprise software providing the most benefits? How difficult is the task of integrating it into organizational culture?

Will e-mail be replaced in Enterprise 2.0?  Ethan Yarbrough, President of Allyis, posited this question in his post “Email’s Role in an Enterprise 2.0 Environment: Signal Not Source.” (Ethan was a speaker at PR+MKTG Camp Seattle.)  Yarbrough discusses how he has “railed against e-mail in the past,” and presents a scenario for why holds that opinion. He then presents a solution using his company’s software. By creating a central system for people to respond, the software eliminates missing parts of conversation and people being left “out of the loop.” A key aspect of this post is that e-mail is used to alert parties there has been a change in the conversation, prompting them to respond. However, it does not facilitate or organize that conversation.

How do you use e-mail? Are there more efficient ways of managing conversations and sharing information within an organization?

You know what social enterprise or enterprise 2.0 is, now where do you go for more in-depth information? Daniel Hudson (@webtechman) has a great post titled “What is Enterprise 2.0 Intelligence” providing a collection of resources to help people who are looking for everything from a concise definition to points on selling the idea to your organization. The main focus of the post is establishing standards and garnering support for collective intelligence.

The post features Hudson’s “fav five videos”  including a definitional video by Andrew McAfee of MIT and an introduction to the semantic web. Another one video briefly presents nine examples of how organizations have utilized collective intelligence to benefit their business practices. Organizations represented include Overstock.com, Stubhub, the Georgia Department of Transportation, and National Australia Bank.

In addition to the five videos, there are five blog posts with more in-depth discussion surrounding enterprise 2.0, a presentation from Acando Consulting and five people to add to your Twitter feeds and “Fantasy Innovation Team.” Included in the team are PR pro Brian Solis and founding partner of the Altimeter Group, R. Ray Wang.

Are those resources helpful? What would you add to the post?

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