One of the interesting and surprising pain points that I’ve seen in socializing social media through our organization, and to the broader company, has been the shift in thinking about ownership of web domains, documents and ideas. One of the interesting things social media changes is the idea of ownership. Before the implementation process of taking a wiki, blog or web site live, the question that most comes up is, “who owns what.”
Maybe it’s corporate America. Maybe it’s that during the job performance process there are objectives, goals and outcomes developed to measure against to judge the success of an individual’s year. Maybe it’s that we’re all fearful of doing work that isn’t measured or fearful people aren’t doing things that can be measured.
Social media sort of in its own organic way tears down these ideas of ownership and promotes a greater, more empowering sense of responsibility. It’s the responsibility of managing your own content on the org’s wiki versus the old way of sending every document to one person to own. It’s the responsibility to blog about topics you want to talk about and when you to talk about them versus the old way of getting time on a PR person’s calendar to develop the story already in your head.
Of course this is just my observation. Let me hear yours.
