Are you are deploying social media, business collective intelligence, collaborative forecasting, innovation subsystems or social CRM? If yes, forget what you know about traditional enterprise deployments like executive sponsorship, project management, wireframe specs, lifecycles, platforms, etc. They don’t work for social media.

Gartner says, with these traditional practices, you enterprise social media efforts will fail 70%. That’s conservative. It’s really much higher. See:

http://networksingularity.com/2010/09/09/gartner-reveals.aspx

Probably the worst of this old-fashioned deployment mindset is the so called practice of ‘executive sponsorship.’ C’mon, everyone knows this is simply a codeword for command and control. It is outmoded and harmful.

Executive sponsorship is counterproductive to social media deployments, particularly social networks, business collective intelligence and unstructured content flow, like blogs. These key network patterns are only served, never controlled.

The new executive role in the social enterprise is coordination, cultivation, conversation and collaboration. The Social Enterprise requires you fundamentally re-think your approach. Specifically, the rule-based management style of the 20^th Century has given way to the rise of ideation cultures.

Sure, hierarchy, bureaucracy, mandate and control are important for resource management, continuity, budgets and so forth. However, they are a barrier and obstacle to authentic conversation, collaboration, innovation networks and flourishing employee ecologies.   

Today’s leadership is developing and nurturing the ebb and flow of fluid knowledge-based constituencies that gives rise to conversation, productivity, innovation and overall prosperity. In short, conversation is good business in The Social Enterprise.

http://networksingularity.com/2010/09/11/conversation-is-good-business.aspx

Social media are complex adaptive systems. You must focus on social networks. Strive to understand, use communities and other simple network patterns. It’s critical to get a command of social network analysis. That’s the thrust of The Social Enterprise. See:

https://www.regonline.com/DFW101

Can you really afford to allow 70% of your social media initiatives to fail outright as Gartner forecasts with confidence?