Company leaders afraid of losing control by using enterprise social networks should know their company needs to communicate with networks as much as individuals using personal social media, says Yammer’s co-founder.
Like any new form of marketing, there was plenty of trepidation when social media began to go mainstream. And some senior executives still feel the jury is out when it comes to investing large chunks of budget in it. They want to know how it’s going to feed back into the business, and rightly so. So while the first phase of social media—the one where people jump online and create profiles—has already happened, companies are still figuring out how to make the central theory behind social media (conversation, not broadcast) relevant to the entire business.