I had an entirely different blog topic planned, but I'm going to stick it on the shelf for a day because I just saw a blog from Ustream that really caught my eye. Their blog is titled "Events No Longer Bound by Location", and while they are referring to their own streaming of the event I took it to mean much more.
Like many other tech aficionados, I spent Monday morning following the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). I was in a room on FriendFeed, chatting on the (ponderously slow at the time) Twitter, and following liveblogs at Gizmodo and elsehwere. I knew what was being discussed, what people were thinking about it, what was hot (and not) and I didn't even have the audio or video streaming my way. I was entirely following it in "back channels" and didn't miss a thing.
That's what a lot of this social media effort is all about - giving people access to information and experiences in whichever way they choose. Tearing down walls! Blogs help cut through organizational silos by letting people come to you, finding people with a common interest. Other social media tools also help cut through both physical and geographic boundaries like we saw with WWDC. Finance may get all excited about this being a way to save travel expenses, but it is really a way to build engagement and get people actively participating.
The trick is people don't always want to participate the same way. Streaming video may work for your company, or maybe you'll need something more. This is where IT needs to lend value in the discussion around social media, demonstrating how these tools are more than buzzwords and can fundamentally change the way the people in your company connect with each other and the outside world.
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