Benefits of social media in the workplace

I rediscovered this old Hinchcliffe blog post recently, which articulates a still-valid set of benefits for enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 tools like OpenTeams:

• More ad hoc collaboration between employees who can find each other’s work and team together.
• More globally persistent, discoverable business information is made available over time.
• Social media tends to capture more institutional knowledge that’s reusable.
• A deep hyperlink infrastructure begins to form, built by continuously by workers using social media. tools to forge links, making business information more discoverable.
• Tagging and other emergent organization methods allow business information to be organized and cross-referenced from every point of view.
• More efficient access to information as more business information becomes available internally and externally via syndication.
• Potentially higher levels of innovation and productivity as more previously unavailable enterprise thinking is available to be accessed, repurposed, and built on top of.
• Increased efficiency in conversations: social media scales up to mostly resource and time friendly conversations among thousands of asynchronous participants, yet excludes those uninterested in them, unlike e-mail distribution lists and conference calls.