(Originally posted on Enterprise Strategies: http://enterprisestrategies.com/2012/09/26/improving-organizational-communications/)

To help social business emerge from hype to mainstream adoption, it is important to demystify how social business improves people’s jobs. One area that social business can benefit across a wide range of areas inside of companies is the Communications Plan. Today, communications plans have wide application across many areas of business:

• Projects
• Programs
• Change Management
• Marketing
• Organizational Change (re-orgs)
• Crisis Communications
• Product releases

What is a communications plan?

According to Hieran Publishing a communications plan contains the...

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So much of the public discussion of social media monitoring and analysis focus on commercially available platforms that are more or less ready to go to work. Somebody has to set up the queries, and there may be some dashboard configuration, but the tools are generally pay-and-go propositions. A recent article points out that some companies are going for something much more customized to their needs.

In its big list issue on companies doing IT well, Information Week mentioned Toyota's new social media and CRM tool:

The tool took 60 hours to develop, largely using software Toyota already had. Oracle Endeca Discovery handles data discovery and search analytics, WiseWindow and DataSift aggregate social data, and Lexalytics analyzes sentiment.

Toyota is using the tool to improve customer service, product forecasting and quality, and lead generation. It plans to feed information to dealers in the future.

If the usual model is off the rack—software-as-a-service from a single vendor, up and running with minimal configuration in minutes, hours, or days—this is

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Last week in San Francisco the world of everything cloud gathered for what, at least according to host Salesforce.com, was the largest tech conference ever. Whether its true or not, it was very well attended, well planned and executed nicely. Dreamforce is always an energetic event and this year was no exception, with celebrity guests like Sir Richard Branson, who did a fireside chat with CEO Marc Benioff and former Secretary of State and retired Gen Colin Powell, entertainment like MC Hammer as part of the opening keynote and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and high profile Salesforce customers like... Read the article

“To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none…”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Economist and best selling author John Mauldin expands on Nietzsche’s thought in a recent article:

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I spent the first part of this week at VMworld, mostly catching up on two acquired products, SocialCast and Zimbra, as well as the Horizon product line. I continue to be impressed with the feature set and depth of the SocialCast product and I have to say that the strategy and direction for the product are really shaping up nicely (more on that in a minute). Along with the barrage of press releases from VMware this week, you may have noticed an announcement from IBM about another acquisition, Kenexa. Now IBM acquiring another application company has become pretty common over the past few years, but this acquisition, I think is interesting more for the implications of strategy than just from the additional assets added to the IBM solution portfolio.

Over the past few years I've focused quite a bit on some emerging technology that falls loosely into the category of social applications. We've gotten more... Read the article

I am often asked how to support social collaboration in the workplace. As I showed in my recent blog post, there are some big differences between learning in an e-business and learning in a social/collaborative business.

So it is not just about adding new social approaches or social media into the training “blend”, supporting social collaboration is underpinned not only by new technologies but by a new mindset.  In other words, it means ..

1 – moving from a focus on organising and managing training (which includes e-learning and blended learning) FOR others, to helping  individuals and teams address their OWN performance problems.

2 – recognising that most learning already happens in the workplace – informally and socially – as people connect and work with one another – as well as outside the organisation in their professional networks. It means...

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