Last night Ken (Cho) and I attended an Austin Texchange event. The featured topic was “Is your company anti-social” with guest speaker Jeffrey Dachis of Razorfish and now AV fame. Dachis is putting together a sort of consultancy around social technology. A few things struck me about the event: 1) it was well attended – this topic was popular 2) most of the folks out there had heard of or participated in some form of social media/web 2.0 – with LinkedIn being far and away the most widely used (though I suspect Craigslist which was not discussed, but I would lump into the social media phenomenon is even more widely utilized). These two observations emphasize one of Dachis’s main points: people are using this stuff whether companies are taking advantage of them or not. Likewise, given the corporate representation of such an event, companies are catching on to this idea. However, I think they are still at a loss as to what exactly it all means – and they should be. As Dachis brought up in another oft repeated refrain, it is still “too early” to really know what to make of all this stuff. That said, I think companies can take advantage of social media in a variety of ways. But as in enterprise business process software like Oracle Financials or SAP, how companies use these technologies must be tailored to their goals in marketing, customer service, employee retention, and shareholder communication.

Dachis brought up a few other ideas that I am still ruminating on…so more later.