Adopting social media in 'difficult' businesses | ZDNet
Summary
The basic concerns are well understood: Financial services, medical institutions, and law firms all have serious challenges with regulatory and compliance beyond the standard ones that any large company, particularly public ones, have when it comes to engaging with the world via social media. Aimed at exploring a wide variety of current emerging technology topics including social analytics, digital identity, big data, the event helped me bring to the surface the ongoing challenges that a foundational industry of the global economy is facing as it tries to make its way into the 21st century. This then, at its root, more than other "difficult" industries, often puts the business strategies of financial services in sharp contrast -- direct opposition even -- with the basic premise of social media, which essentially says that the most productive and useful conversations are ones that are the most open, transparent, shared, and participatory. For those paying attention at Innotribe, the contrast couldnt be more evident than the presence of Doc Searls himself, whose key role ten years ago in the Cluetrain Manifesto and its 95 principles spawned whats nearly a laundry list of how financial services and other regulated and/or closely held industries still do NOT work. Fortunately, with the advent of powerful new capabilities that make automated compliance and policy rule checking easy to implement (see Socialware and LiveOffice as just two leading examples), enterprises now have more options that doesnt involve trying to solve all the hard problems with regulation and social media by themselves.