A Converted Skeptic is a Powerful Thing

Pre-S: I am at training this week for my firm.  I hope to post daily, but I unfortunately can’t make any promises.

I would think that most people who have actively fought the social-software-in-the-enterprise battle will tell you that we are really in the business of evangelizing.  It’s sad to say, but really what we are doing is akin to building a religion, winning over one convert at a time.

So last might, I heard a motivational speaker-type and he said something that caught my ear: A converted skeptic is a powerful thing.  And I don’t think that this applies to anything in business more than it does for social software in the enterprise.  As a trainer/blogger, I like to think that part of my job is to win converts; and yes, I often get people in my trainings that are just there because they are told to show up, not because they want to learn or perhaps change the way they work.  However, and I think many will agree, if you can manage to convince just 1 in 10 or so of these folks that social software is worth a shot, I believe that I’ve had a successful session.

So, I suppose Lipkin did his job.  I’m now motivated to take these people on in a conscious way.  Bring on the skeptics and I’ll try to send you away an enthusiastic believer.  Nobody tells a better story than the guy who can start, “Now I’m a major convert and I thought this stuff was all crap”.  Because in the end, I’m not going to be able to talk to everybody about social software (and since probably only about 10 people read this blog, none of which are in my organization), so I need to train an army of social software believers to do the evangelizing for me.

The Zero Day Web/Building My Own History

How would I spend 30 seconds in an elevator with a C-Suite executive talking about Web 2.0? This was is my task this morning: How can I convince somebody who may have read an article or heard some buzzwords and been to Wikipedia that they should come to me to discuss how they can benefit from employing some combination of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasts, or social networking software?

As I sat here at my dining room table with a miniature white board, I went through all the various ways that I’ve heard Web 2.0 described (or roughly sold) over the last years, including the ways that I’ve done; however, I was not quite satisfied with my previous thoughts on the subject. The latest formulation on the topic is reduced to three words: Speed, Agility, and Transparency. I’ve even managed to come up with a new(ish), buzzword-heavy sentence to sum it up in a cutesy way: Web 2.0 is the web’s adaptation to the ever-increasing speed of information.

From this, I seem to have settled on a new little marketing formulation, drawn from the darker side of the internet, warez: The Zero-Day Web. This helped to frame the way that I think about information over the course of my work day/week/month/year.

• 1 day information is old
• 1 week information is archived
• 1 month information is outdated
• 1 year information is history

Web 2.0–namely instant publication–is the way to make sure that information is out before its old, archived, outdated or even history. Put in the opposite way, traditional publishing is wholly unfit to serve the knowledge worker who is expected to be at the zero-day front of new information.

So you see, Mr. Executive, Web 2.0 technologies can equip your workforce with the tools they need to keep up with the data tsunami that threatens to overwhelm them everyday.

Oh. And most of the best Web 2.0 platforms are basically free.

Post Script: To me, it is rather unimportant that when I look at this post a year from now, I will probably laugh/mock/not want to read it because of how much of a part of my professional history it will have become. I know right now that I will think it ridiculously dated (as I feel about my first ever blog post, which is void of original thought and unfortunately on a protected intranet).