Breaking through Social Media Barriers: What and How?

I am speaking at this year's online information conference and really look forward to reconnecting with colleagues and friends. I feel bad that I have not update my blog for a while and I have a good excuse. It has been a very busy few months since I change job, and I have been going through a steep learning curve and I have had some great experience so far. The beauty of changing job from a learning perspective is that it throws me into a totally different and unfamiliar context, and makes me challenge my own thinking and practice. Luckily I have colleagues who are patience and tolerance of me asking silly questions and are willing to bring me up to speed and help me to understand the business.

I have to say I am amazed and delighted that businesses increasingly see the opportunity to use social media to help employees work smarter, to efficiently share knowledge to meet customers' needs, to spot opportunities and threats to shape business strategy and ultimately to drive top line and bottom line business results. Social media implementation increasingly becomes main stream projects.

On Nov 30, I plan to talk about "what" the barriers in introducing social media in the business context are and "how" we can overcome them. I will refer to some real world examples which challenge these grand statements:
1. We must align with the business strategy
2. It's about cultural change, it's about people, it's not about technology
3. Build it and they won't come, so we must drive user adoption and get to the tipping point

And I will conclude with two fatal barriers to implement social media in the business context, and stress the importance of Leadership 2.0 and "Knowledging" if we want to take social media implementation to the next level.

If you happen to read this blog post before the event, do let me know if there is anything specific you like me to cover by leaving me a comment or drop me a email.

If you have come to my session, I welcome the opportunity to connect with you and further the dialogue on this blog. Tell me how my presentation connects to your work? How did it help? Which part of the presentation did you struggle with or disagree with? I hope to learn from you.