Some more thoughts on adoption of an Enterprise 2.0 philosophy within an organisation.

Culture, here, refers to both corporate culture as well as the smaller emergent group dynamics resultant from interaction between individuals at a micro level.

This diagram implies that a successful social media implementation must have culture as its central concern. As technology-only based solutions does not consider culture it is less likely to succeed than the bottom-up or top-down strategic approach as they do not consider the social values and behaviour of either individuals or the organisation itself. That doesn’t necessarily preclude, though, installing technology and allowing a bottom-up process to take hold. This, though, would probably be considered a bottom-up strategy.

With sufficient mass of behaviour, values, and opinion, the suggestion is that the individuals could change the group dynamic enough to affect change within the organisational culture. However, if the organisational culture is sufficiently strong, through, it would resist change and may even cause the bottom-up strategy to rescind.

Note that the inclusion of Culture and Interaction within this model takes into account the criticism of Karl Long, for example, who notes that Gene Smith’s model perhaps doesn’t take into account the aspects of social psychological elements of motivation as well as the artefacts of the group dynamic within culture that include myths, stories, norms, and values.

Obviously, the more of these building blocks in your strategy the more likely it will succeed.

M