Gen Y, Social Media, and the Enterprise
Posted by Timothy Fisher Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:20:00 GMT
Generation Y includes those in the age range 13 to 31. This is the largest
generation ever, even surpassing the population of the Baby Boomers. In total
their are about 80 million “GenYers”. This is a generation that has been
brought up on technology. They have always had computers, cell phones,
email, and instant messaging. They are now very familiar with Web 2.0 and
social networking. This is also the next generation of employees that companies
will be hiring over the next decade. This generation will come into your
company with the expectation of Web 2.0 technologies, just as the previous
generations expected email. Using social networks is as natural to GenYers
as email is to GenXers.
GenYers have seen how Web 2.0 technology can be used extremely effectively in
their social life and will expect nothing less in their professional life.
They will wonder why a large company is not using a social network
to enable and connect employees. They will wonder why their company is not
using blogs to spread their message and respond to thier customers in a very
transparent manner. Blogs and social networks allow GenYers to build networks
of friends and associates. The good news is that these are all questions that should
be asked because they have the power to transform your business, and if you
are not asking those questions internally now, your company will soon be left
behind in this new I.T. revolution. This new revolution is one that brings
Web 2.0 technology and culture into the enterprise and it is often referred to
as Enterprise 2.0.
Even as Enterprise 2.0 takes hold in many large corporations, there are still
many other corporations that remain ignorant of this revolution. Some mistakenly
think that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is just about technology. They are the
companies that are adverse to taking risks on new technology, so they quietly
ignore the Web/Enterpise 2.0 revolution. The truth is that Web 2.0 and Enterprise
2.0 are not about technology. They are more about culture, social interaction, new
ways of uniting your employee base, and new ways of effectively marketing your brand.
Enterprise 2.0 brings with it a massive change in culture
that many companies are not ready or able to deal with. Companies that rely
on strict top-down hierarchical organizations have the most to fear from the
GenYers and the Enterprise 2.0 revolution. Enterprise 2.0 expands
the power of the masses in your company at the expense of the power of the
senior management and executives. When individuals act together socially,
whether it is for personal projects or business related projects, their power
becomes much greater than what they could have achieved working as an individual.
GenYers expect their thoughts and ideas to be listened to and acted upon if
they are good ones. They are not willing to sit back passively and follow
the direction of someone simply because they are higher up on the “corporate ladder.”
Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to harvest ideas and innovations
throughout the company rather than from a select few that sit on the top floors
of their headquarters. Authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff refer to this inversion of power and
influence as the Groundswell in a new book titled Groundswell: Winning in a
World Transformed by Social Technologies, published by
Forrester Research.
Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow a company to open up a bidirectional
communication path between itself and its customers. Any single company is
limited in terms of their internal resources and the
amount of innovation and creativity that can be sourced from them. However,
a company that can effectively use a much larger global community of social
networkers can expand its abilty to innovate on a massive scale. If your company is
not taking advantage of this ability to collaborate globally, your competitors are,
and they will quickly surpass you with their ability to innovate.
Social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn allow individuals
to meet more people, expand their social networks, and get more and better
information faster and easier. Used inside of a company, social networking
communities can energize an employee base and build a massively linked
platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration. This platform will be
a vehicle to capture tacit knowledge in ways never before possible.
IBM has an internal social network called Beehive that has over 30,000
employees on it. A social network like this used internally will not only
help your company share knowledge but you will find developers collaborating
on innovative uses of technology, sales people mining new leads and exploring
new sales opportunities, and management with a tool to monitor the pulse of
the company.
A social network can also be used very effectively to create buzz around your
brand and to increase your brand visibility. The book Groundwell describes how
a company can make use of Web 2.0 technologies to get great benefits in
marketing, product development, and customer support. Enterprise 2.0 is also
where you will need to turn to find the best and brightest employees amongst
the GenYers. More people, especially the younger ones, are moving away from
large job boards like Monster and Dice as sources of jobs and instead finding
jobs through their online social networks. Are employees at your company blogging?
Does your company have any presence in the Web 2.0 world? If the answer is no,
your company very well may be left out of the employer pool considered by the
best and the brightest employees.
Large I.T. companies including IBM, Dell, Salesforce.com and even retailer Best Buy
are already using Web 2.0 technologies both internally and externally to communicate
with their customers, enhance their brand message, enable broad collaboration, and
leverage the power of the global community to speed up the process of innovation.
I recently finished reading two excellent books that I believe should be
required reading for anyone in a leadership position in any company today.
These books are Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and one
the other one I’ve already mentioned,
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. These
books show how your company can thrive thorugh Enterprise 2.0 culture and technology.
They are both filled with case studies of how existing companies are embracing
Enterprise 2.0 as well.
Read more…
Beyond Blogs, Business Week, May 22, 2008
The “Millennials” Are Coming, CBS News, May 23, 2008
Groundswell
Wikinomics
