When I first entered the workforce in 1996 the place I worked used Lotus cc:Mail for its internal email system. We were a satellite office of a large state government department, and the cc:Mail system only worked within our small group of 35 people.
The larger department had an Oracle Mail system which could connect to the Internet, however only one or two people in the office had access to this.
If you wanted to send an email to someone on the internet from within our office, you had to cc:Mail it to one of those folks and they had to copy and paste it in to the Oracle Mail system, send it on, and relay any response back to you.
Email was risky back then, a new frontier, it gave anyone access to easily represent the organization to people on the outside.
This feels a lot like social media today in many organizations. Twitter is risky, Facebook is risky, they give people the ability to represent the organization to people on the outside. It might get found out that companies are made of real people. Everything gets routed through a designated Social Media Manager, the post-2010 “Webmaster”, the new relay between your company and the outside world.
This wonderful enabling technology is hamstrung by this artificial bottleneck.
Sure, once everyone got email viruses and chain letters spread like wildfire, but with everything there’s an adjustment period. It’s time for organizations to train people in the right way to use social media — as a listening and communications channel — and be prepared to get around the learning curve to a better, more connected future.
Edit: A discussion around this post has sprung up where I mentioned it on Google+
