Rhymes with Cars

Sam Lawrence's post last week reminded me of the push back that I got selling Y! Enterprise Messenger a number of years ago. It is a great satirical post on the reactions that companies have had to collaborative technologies throughout the recent history finishing on social software. It specifically struck a chord with me today as I was on a call with a prospect who was concerned about her employees spending too much time reading and commenting on corporate blogs. She explained that the perception was that reading the same message in email was productive but that reading it in a blog was a waste of time. Huh? It was one of those days. The major difference in selling IM vs. social software is that IM had one competitor - whatever free version of IM that the company had informally standardized on. Social software has competitors for everything that you want to do.  There are free blog platforms; there are free wikis; there are close to free project management systems; there are free social networks, there is free Twitter.  There seems to be a free or close to free alternative for everything that Socialtext, SharePoint or Connections can throw out there. Free is awesome for the consumer, but it isn't so hot when it is an unsanctioned product behind your firewall or when confidential company data is out in the open.  The challenge, as an IT professional, is implementing these technologies in a sanctioned manner before grass roots efforts, with multiple solutions crop up all over your company. Based on what I've seen, the grass roots efforts are dominating this war.  The knee jerk reaction from IT will be to attempt block these services at the firewall, at which point it will be too late.  Employees will find that these services are too valuable and they can't live without them.  That is when you will have your revolt.