Alan Wilensky at

“Strategies for Social Media, in particular, have been a challenge when soft pedaling my services in the outreach phase. Companies want to just jump in and create systems from whole cloth, offer white box services, or create Facebook apps – all without a thought as to what interactions they are trying to foster, who they are endeavoring to connect or enable, or what model they are trying to exploit. Forget any reality checks for monetization, even in the soft sense of labor savings or process streamlining.

No, when an organization has made up its mind, the strategic issues are often put aside, and the project proceeds apace to implementation. Bad for me, good for the latest crop of Social Media systems designers; all power to them. We will see how it shakes out, long term.

But I am a staunch advocate of applying New Age solutions to Old Economy problems.”

I interpret this as creating technology projects that are NOT aligned to a company strategy; i.e., they should not be created in the first place, or if underway, should be disbanded because no strategy is linked to the project.

Alan’s comment about New Age solutions is fantastic. Recently a support manager in my software firm told me how much time Webex (an on-line capability that allows sharing of computers) applications have saved her and increased customer satisfaction. Prior to Webex they would fax screen captures back and forth to solve problems. Same problem but now a technology has enabled a process that solves it. I think the social networking phenomenon should be looked at in the same way- how can social networking enable your company to satisfy your customers?

So, watch out for doing social network projects with no link to company strategies. Make sure that an “old economy” problem is being solved. Let me know what you think. Should technology like social networking simply be implemented because all the employees want it? Why is it a waste of money to implement technology without a link to a strategy?

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Post from: EveryJoe

Social Network Positioning: “New Age Solutions to Old Economy Problems”