Social Media Content Audit

One of the most formidable barriers to the widespread adoption of social media tools within enterprises is fear of failure.   

What if we make blogs, wikis and other social collaboration tools available and nobody uses them?  Unlike the consumer side of the web where the fact that individuals seek out, self-select and manage the social software they want to use is a reliable indication of their motivation to use it, corporations simply have to take it on faith that somebody within the organization will think of something useful to do with these new tools.

Few managers I’ve met in corporate life are willing to take that kind of risk.  Social media live or die on the strength of their content and what if nobody produces any?  What’s a social media evangelist to do to tip the scales toward success?  Two things, I think:

1) Start small with a well-defined task that you want to accomplish, then select the right social media tool to do it–not the other way around.  If you want to build a repository of information around a subject, use a wiki.  If you want to get smart people sharing their brainstorms on a specific topic–energy, innovation, social media whatever–create a blog network of experts.  Essentially, that’s what the Comments