What the heck is it that we do with social media? In my mind there are a number of things that apply:
- Talking
- Conversing
- Publishing
- Collaborating
- Planning
- Exchanging
- Referencing
- Promoting
- Befriending
I started thinking about collaboration because a colleague - who I had recently shared a story about why Twitter was so powerful - came up to me later and was quite insistent that social media is simply a continuation of where 'Collaborative' technologies leave off. On one hand I agree - they often are used to further the same goals: link people, disseminate information faster, encourage collaboration (little c). On the other hand, there are some significant gaps and differences between email and team rooms and social media.
I asked my Twitter friends how collaborating and social media were different and here's what I got in response:
mukund @rhappe they r all buzzwords :)
TalentSynch @rhappe Collaboration can happen without social networking/computing but don't think GOOD social networking can thrive w/out collaboration
SamLawrence @rhappe People think email is collaborating. Social software connotes an open-dialog-driven collaboration.
SamLawrence @rhappe It's more than nomenclature as you know. :)
tomhumbarger @rhappe - to me, it feels like collaboration is more of an internal company 'thing' and...
tomhumbarger @rhappe - ...and that social computing is more of an external, outside the firewall phenomena...they are moving together, but not yet...
tomhumbarger @rhappe - maybe I feel collaboration is an internal feature as that is one of the value props that we use at iRise, but it's sharing of work
jstorerj @rhappe imho, social computing is just one type of collaboration, limited by the fact that it's confined to occur with a "computing" context
jstorerj @rhappe agree that collaboration occurs across many different constituencies & existing mental models dictate types of collab that work
stoweboyd @rhappe I disagree about collaboration as umbrella: it's so rooted in 90s thinking that its best to consider social tools as a new paradigm
vanhoosear @rhappe on your earlier question, I see collaboration as a subset of social computing
rsims @rhappe different things. Collaboration doesn't even require a computer and e.g. Twitter is social computing but not collaboration
mibdepot @rhappe I started saying that social computing must be a subset of Collaboration then wondered which came first the chicken or the egg
It is clearly not very clear what the relationship is between collaboration and social computing. As buzzwords, Collaboration has connotations that are quite a bit more structured than what people typically mean when they use social media or social computing lingo. As a word collaboration is simply working with someone else on an initiative...which can be quite small and discrete...and offline. And Social media can simply connote a tool used for dialog/conversation - without collaboration happening at all.
One of the things that I think differentiates the two most dramatically is this: you cannot create a team workspace if a) you don't have a team and b) you don't have an agenda/goal. So much of work is about having an idea (not a project or a goal), discussing its feasibility, prioritizing, and figuring out who should be on the team or how to execute it. Often you want to pull in people within the organization that you don't actually know personally. And these ideas can be customer requests, new product ideas, new approaches to a problem, new ways to present your product or service, new people your company should know, and on and on - they touch every department and team in the company. Where do those conversations happen? It has to be on an open network that everyone has access to...with information filtering tools to help individuals find relevant conversations, content, and people.
Once ideas become more than a glimmer and have an interested group of people, a goal, and some initial feasibility...well then they can use - either inside the social network or not - a team workspace.
I think I'm with @TalentSynch on this one - collaboration can certainly happen without social media but good enterprise social media efforts cannot thrive without collaboration.
What do you think?
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