New Media in the Enterprise

Would you trust your newest employee to represent your company, interact with the media, even chat informally with your biggest customers? If your newest employee is young, hip, technologically literate and comfortable communicating over blogs, message boards or social networking sites, it may be happening already. IT groups need to step up and get a handle on these and other new communication mechanisms ... before statements made there come back and bite your company's bottom line.

We're not saying to put a lid on. This genie is out of the bottle, and imposing a Draconian usage policy will do more harm than good. Disseminating your company's message solely using print and TV ads limits your audience. By 2008, 80 percent of Global 1,000 companies will have experimented with new-media concepts, but fewer than 20 percent will have successfully adopted a wide range of these technologies, according to Gartner. That's unfortunate: Try to find a college student who doesn't use MySpace or FaceBook. This is a golden opportunity for smart IT groups to help their companies beat the pack.

Impact Assessment Click to enlarge in another window

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