Social media: Rocket fuel or snake oil?

There's a lot of talk around about whether corporates "get" social media.  The word among those with an opinion (social media fans) is that they don't.  

Maybe part of the problem is the handle "social media" and the way it has become a buzzword. Hypsters and knee-jerk neophiles have proclaimed it the answer to everything, so cynics and knee-jerk neophobes have dismissed it as snake oil.

Social media:  Rocket fuel or snake oil?  Strip away the jargon and the froth, and what have we got? New ways for people to do what people have always done: connect and converse with each other.

I suspect that one reason why social media have not penetrated deeper into the the corporate mainstream is that many, if not most, organisations have very little idea about connecting and conversing in whatever way - online or offline, among themselves or with the outside world.

There's an excellent book by John Seely Brown called The Social Life of Information (my Amazon review here >>>>) where the author describes the difference between process and practice among Xerox technicians. Process is what the manual and the system tells them to do to fix customer problems; practice is how they meet up mid-morning at a cafe and swap stories and tips. Guess which achieves the results....

Connections and conversations are the means whereby problems find their way to solutions, whereby bits of the puzzle find each other, whereby fragments of ideas come together and ideas find people to turn them into reality. Social media are "just" a way for people to connect and converse more widely.