Kids that are entering the work force this year have been using social media in one form or another since they started high school. They grew up with MySpace always being a part of their vocabulary. The iPhone came out during their freshman year of college. Twitter to this generation is a tool for older folks although I think that’s changing. Theses kids have posted video’s to the web of teachers talking on the phone in class. They have recorded phone calls where parents have lost it and posted the audio. They know how easy it is to use multimedia and integrated it with social media to get buzz, publicity, notoriety, and make things happen. This group completed homework assignments through social network platforms and have even used it to cheat, although cheating will be considered collaboration now that they are in the work force.

So what does this mean for business? The younger workforce will continue to be more and more comfortable with social media, and building online brands, and collaborating together online. While some of the older generation does not feel you get to know people through social media, this generation knows that you are who you project yourself to be. This trait of projecting personalities can be very valuable to businesses if they take the opportunity to cultivate the values they want their employees to project. If your business wants to project honesty, commitment, hard work it’s very easy to do and a benefit to projecting these values through social media is that the values often manifest themselves in real life. It’s hard to project one set of values and live by another. I know personally I’ve become a much better person because of my projections.

The additional value collaborative tools provide is the ability to maximize the employee knowledge base. Collaboration through micro-blogging allows the community to see status on all projects that are currently in progress and provides the opportunity to provide input if the community has expertise to provide. Of course there need to be policies in place so that these tools are not abused but most people at work use the tools for work and if the larger community is using the tools correctly then they will police and moderate the community for you.

Finally on individual projects tools such as wiki’s provide the ability for a team to collaborate on documentation, decisions, and email like communication that should be captured via a company knowledge base. Tracking these communications via a wiki allows for the companies knowledge capital to be centralized and available. Now anyone can see why a decision was made even years later. This process allows future decisions to be better informed and made with all detail necessary. The best wiki tools search all attached documents as well as standard wiki pages and they allow you to convert or attach emails, documents, spread sheets and presentations to the wiki. This provides truly powerful knowledge content management and the new workforce is not only comfortable with it but will demand it from their employers.

Don’t forget that providing these tools helps to raise the moral of your work force by provide better communication and delivering on their expectations. Moving to Enterprise 2.0 technologies is no longer an option but a necessity. It’s only a matter of time if you haven’t started the process already.

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According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Twentieth Century Fox paid a high school valedictorian to plug a movie “I love you, Beth Cooper” in her graduation speech. The idea was to create a viral buzz for the movie. This idea came from a company called the Intelligence Group which Fox hired. Obviously the name Intelligence Group falls quite short. Companies have been very unsuccessful over time trying to mimic situations to get viral buzz. It seems buzz only really catches on when the buzz occurs independent of a companies efforts.

The book Citizen Marketers provides a load of excellent case studies of why and how viral buzz catches on and what it is that creates the buzz. One of the most important factors to buzz is the trust of the community and full disclosure from the company. If you want a message to go viral the community wants and needs to trust the message if they don’t trust the message the community will not only squash the message but they may give you a bunch of bad press as well. I’ve seen a bunch of cases where bad press was the viral buzz that ended up being created and in some cases such as EA games “acts of lust” contest they probably achieved their objective because bad cheep press is better than no press at all and they have created quite an anti EA buzz.

Case in point the Wall Street Journal article while not terribly critical of Fox does put them in a bad light as the speech and video failed to go viral, the school expressed disappointment, and the parents refused to comment. It seems to me Fox would have done better to consult one of there own companies to understand what creates viral buzz better by asking the folks at MySpace what really gets a viral campaign to take off.

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