enterprise 2.0 blog

Just two weeks to go and the waiting comes to an end! We are finally entering the last mile for Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT and looking very much forward to it. During the last week we have already published some very nice interviews with some of our speakers – and there are even more to come.

But as I wrote in my note on “Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2014 – what’s it all about!” – we see the conference as a big gathering of experts and practioneers to exchange ideas and experience on “how to make the social thing internally work!” So if you do not have the chance of joining us – by any other good reason than overlooking the ending of the Early Bird pricing (!) – then we want to make this blog your “hotspot” for the exchange!

As we know from the discussions so far, the value from social interactions must be experienced to be really understood. So in order to ignite a little debate we would like to know about your “aha moments” in regards to your “social experiences”! What is your little story from your general “social interaction experiences” (internal or external) that made you convinced on the additional value that is worth the extra effort in connecting with people, checking on timelines, sharing information or posting your thoughts into a network.

To start this I would like to share with you my personal experiences! They are very much related to my external social media use – as our company – Kongress Media – is not that big that we are not exchanging ideas every day. But even for this very small scaled internal use I have made some nice experiences that I would like to share.

But first regarding the general externally experienced added value of social – this relates to the characteristics of my work – I have to foresee topic and discussion trends and I need to find always new experts that are “hidden” so far but have good stories to tell. So my work is basicly depending on a good “network” that helps me to move and “produce content and ideas” fast.

While the critics might say – this is very much specific for your job as an organizer of conferences and “content publisher” – I’d answer “yes, but” – the added value of following the shared information and discussion on my network as well as my own sharing of information is in the unintentionally finding of information and experts because of references from my trusted network as well as of direct recommendations. In many projects it saved me time on doing a specific research on information or people because I knew in the back of my head that I already heard about somebody or something in a earlier discussion on the network. And sometimes I was even so organized enough that I had bookmarked or saved the information for a even faster finding.

So it’s very much about this “working out loud” of me and others that helps doing my work! (Happy to announce another piece of Rogier coming up on this shortly!)

But also internally – even on the small scale of network we have – there are good reasons for the sharing efforts. Especially the possibility of refering to something already documentated by the “working out loud” approach saves time and improves our processes on a daily basis. Furthermore the use of our “virtual water cooler” allows our team to work very much dezentralized and still knowing what everybody is working on. We can also easily integrate external partners in our daily working teams and keep everybody on track.

So this is a big business potential for us that could not be realized as effective as it is with the internal social networking.

But also for us – it took some time to learn and adopt our working routines to this. And we have not yet finished or could not still do better on this. In regards to the adoption my “aha moment” was really in transmitting the via email received questions to the social network, answering it and closing it at the “virtual water cooler” and than refering to it as solved in our weekly jour fix. Colleagues that still waited for the emailed anwer were refered to the answer and sometimes even discussion on this point on our network. So it was the radical step in stopping and neglecting an existing routine – certainly this is a way easier in a small team like ours without hierarchies and process obligations.

This is about my own personal experiences and now about you! Use the comment section of this post and write it down, put it into an own post () – or post it on your blog and make a pingback to this post or a tweet reference to this post! We are very much looking forward to your personal “moments of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension” of the added value of social interactions!