Welcome to E Quint Consulting. If you’re new here, you may want to find out what E Quint does or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

These days when it seems that everyone is extolling the virtues of social collaboration, it may seem odd to ask if social media is social. My point here is not to question the value of social collaboration, but to take a deeper look at the underlying characteristics of the tool-set we refer to as “social media”.

When blogs first came on the scene, I don’t think anyone was able to foresee the resulting “conversation” we all now take for granted. What the first bloggers saw was, an easy way to publish, the overcoming of previously high technical barriers. The resulting conversation was emergent, not intended. If you really look at it, I think you will find that the same is true for most of the social media formats, each was initially conceived as technical solution to a previously difficult problem.

OK … so what?

If we think of the “social tool-set” in strictly social terms, we can become blinded to the value these tools can bring to other areas of information management. I refer back again to what Tim O’Reily said at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC last September, “Enterprise 2.0 is about exposing the back office.” When you think about the implication of what he was saying, there is a lot there that has nothing to do with social behavior, per se. Exposing the back office means,

• having direct access to your account information with your cell carrier;
• being able to directly schedule your own appointments to get your car serviced;
• not having to wait 30 minutes on hold to get tech support.

These are all examples of what will be the next generation enterprise applications, built on a set of tools that are inherently simple, scalable and flexible. These applications will look a lot like blogs, wikis, RSS readers, etc, but they will not necessarily be social.

The point being, that social media came into being because for the first time a set of tools existed that was able to be easily used by a broad number of people and was able to adapt fast enough to mirror real social interaction, not because the tools were inherently social.

So let’s take off the social blinders and look at the these tools as a new and better way to move information simply and easily from where it is, to where it needs to be, regardless of whether that information is social or not.