You’ve heard the old saying about “Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” right? I think we know that’s not true, but it’s also wrong when it comes to buzzwords in the Enterprise. Want to see your corporate leadership and legal department run to the hills and prepare for war? Say these words together, “social, media, intranet”.
“Social Media” is a buzzword. Essentially social media sites are just web applications that allow people to interact by sharing. The sharing may be in many forms (just a few for example):
• Conversations – Forums, Blogs, Twitter
• Web Site Links – Bookmark sites (delicous), News sites (digg, reddit)
• Documents – Wikipedia, WetPaint, Google Docs
• Personal Information – Linked in, Facebook, MySpace
• Pictures – Flickr, Picassa
So choose your words wisely, especially the buzzwords! Another term your leadership and lawyers might find far more palatable is “employee contributed content”. Enterprise Social Media could be called “Collaboration 2.0 – Employee contributed content that drives knowledge management. Just makes you want to puke and go work for a start-up? Dittos. 🙂