Let's face it: Browsing the blogosphere during our nighttime occupations we take it for granted that everyone understands the sense and nonsense of all things Web 2.0. But that's quite distinct from our daytime job realities. Asking your IT department for a simple blog replacement of the outdated intranet CMS might bring you back to earth and prove that Web 1.0 might be arriving (if you are lucky) but trying to adopt social media and RSS in the workplace is like reaching for the moon.
Marshall Kirkpatrick collected answers to common objections regarding social media adoption from his 1300 Twitter friends and published them yesterday on ReadWriteWeb:
"1. I suffer from information overload already.
2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!
3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.
4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.
5. Communicators [bloggers, tweeters] are so fickle, better to stay unengaged than risk random brand damage. We don't want hostile comments left about us on any forum we've legitimized.
6. Traditional media and audiences are still bigger, we'll do new stuff when they do.
7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.
8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.
9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.
10. That stuff's fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month. We're doing just fine with the tools we've got, thanks."
Let me compile the best answers here and link you to the full article below:
1. Times change and so do information paradigms. Get used to it.
2. If learning how the market feels about your organization, engaging with your customers and driving traffic to your web work - all very realistic goals for social media engagement - aren't work, then I don't know what is.
3. You might consider this time spent on marketing or communication with existing customer base - perhaps there's something else in that department that isn't working well and could be replaced with online work.
4. You might be surprised to learn how many of your customers do already use these new tools. Even more will do so in the future.
5. Conversations are going to happen online, better to be engaged than to have it happening behind your back.
6. Traditional media audiences are also more passive - online audiences can engage with, rebroadcast and otherwise amplify your communication efforts.
7. Compared to other expenses, meaningful engagement with new online technology does not have huge costs.
8. The skills you build and the connections you make will remain with you, though. This is a paradigm shift underway more than it is about any particular tool.
9. Try asking people in your field who have some experience what tools they are using.
10. Some of these things, RSS and wikis for example, aren't passing social fads - they are emerging best practices and the state of the art.
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