I am doing a program for ISPS Charlotte, NC in a couple weeks.  Someone from there just called to ask a few questions so that he can properly introduce me at the event.  And the answers I gave surprised me.  Before I get to that, I have to say that yet again I am blown away by the power of questions.  We work and we do.  But how often do we let others question us as an exercise for introspective purposes?  Slow down.  Ask questions. You, too may be surprised at your answers.

Now, back to our regular programming.

What put me in the right frame of mind was Luis Suarez’s on-the-spot post, “Forget Social Strategy, Think Social Philosophy: Hippie 2.0” and the questions I was asked on the phone.

And here is my realization:  We are taking the natural first step by trying to figure out how all this social stuff fits in to the way we work.  It is a perfectly logical thing to do, and we will be thinking about this for some time.  Our answers will be (and have been) good.

But there is another step very few have started to take and which holds so much more promise than the 1st step that we would do well just to skip it and move on to this one: How do we change the way we work, organize, manage, communicate, reach our goals now that we have the capabilities we have?  Therein lies the golden nugget.

I have a sign in my office that reads, “Redefine Engagement.” I don’t remember where I heard that first, but it is the KEY to the second step, the step that holds the real value and the future of what we will see.  Don’t just do things with new tools – redefine how we work now that we have the capability to go so much further than what we are used to.  Don’t fit it in current traditions / processes / organizational constructs, make new ones.

To quote Luis, “having the same mind set about social networking inside the corporate world, as the one we have been having for decades is not going to get us very far! Quite the opposite!

If we don’t make this leap, nothing will really change.  We will be doing the same old things in a slightly new way with new tools with the same ineffective and inefficient processes toward sub par goals.

When the possibilities are so much better, why settle?  It is time to create the new.

photo credit: Lazurite

Here is another ‘ah-ha’ moment for me.  Again, it was something that I always knew, but the importance of it became even more glaringly obvious.

I was reading a ReadWriteWeb post from back in September on Personalization.  To make their point, they quote Ken Fromm as saying,

“The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.”

Much of our focus is on sharing data.  To do that we want to create web pages and portals – the vehicles of web information. But that is seen from the creator side of the pond.  Look at the consumer side: I want information to come to me. And only on topics I find interesting. I want to follow the streams of interesting people and learn from them. I want to share information that I find useful. And I want it in one place, if possible.  But if not, I want to control where they come to and what it looks like. (Notice the number of ‘I’s.)

We all know about RSS, about Twitter and FriendFeed applications that pull in streams of information.  None of this is new. What is new is that we, as providers, need to focus on that instead of how to get the information out there.  Personally, I care only this much about where it is and in what form.  As long as I can a) quickly find it or the experts,  b) have it ‘delivered’ to me in the way I want to see it and c) be able to collaborate on it, I don’t care where it originated.  It could come from X and as long as I can collaborate on it in Y, that is fine with me (but let me define Y).

So the focus is even less on the site (how to share the information) and much more on enabling those in an organization to create their own personalized way of receiving shared information. Yet it is SO easy to fall in the trap.

Yet, the main problem is that most people are accustomed to the ‘web site’ mentality and will default to that to get and share information.  Our job is to first provide a way for them to personalize information transactions and second, to help them understand that the personalization they want is there and how to use it to their advantage.