The Conversational Corporation How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

If you are a longtime reader of my blog, you know that i have been writing about the intersection of consumer information tools and the enterprise since early 2006 and that the topic is one that is very dear to my heart- so i am very pleased to annouce this new ebook today.

Although it seems like only yesterday, it was in early winter of 2007 that the title of our new ebook 'The Conversational Corporation' came to mind based on an on-site visit to Sun Microsystems with Robert Scoble, Greg Merkle and myself, three of the four authors of our newest ebook 'The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise'. The fourth author Shel Israel was brought in later on when Robert suggested that we use this ebook as a follow-up to their Naked Conversations book published in 2006 that was focused on Social Media, especially blogging for mostly a corporate audience (and what a difference it made in corporate blogging- i know i personally gave over 20 customers copies!!). In addition to the previous collaborations with Robert, Shel had also been doing a lot of work with Enterprise companies and had interviewed more than 300 people in 38 countries on social media’s impact on culture and business that we were lucky enough to leverage for this ebook.

In the ebook which is available for free download, we look at ways that corporate employees are communicating and collaborating, and we discuss their impact on the 'Corporation'—particularly on the changing expectations of customers and employees. I am a believer that there is a very true intersection between business and social media in today's enterprise employee toolkit that is needed for their day to day work and i think that the ebook does a good job of outlining some of these opportunities.

Out of that session (the image is from the whiteboard that day), Robert's “Starfish Approach” is covered and it is a concept that i have been sharing with customers that certainly resonates with them as they begin to put together an information strategy that uses multiple tools : “...like a starfish, your organization should be able to grow, adapt and even abandon new tools (“legs”) without threatening the health of the larger organism”.

The ebook took a while to publish due to various issues (mostly time constraints on 4 plus people's schedules!) and even this weekend as I reviewed the final version there are many things that i would have liked to add which i will cover here on this blog in the upcoming weeks. The original idea was to do a themed design like my 'Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise' ebook, the layout for this ebook however is simple- but hopefully you find the content and the ideas we explore useful and valuable enough to 'start' the conversation about how you can create a "Conversational Corporation' within your own companies.

We look forward to your thoughts and ideas on how to enable and drive a 'Conversational Corporation'- Enjoy!

Additional photos from the session (thanks to Carolyn Flynn) can be seen here.