Yesterday I was having a conversation with an architect about how his company should embrace social media. I talked about collaboration between people who currently worked independantly would be a powerful differentiator and would empower the junior members of staff.

I know you are trying to dispel fear with comments like “Ultimately its just a buzz word for today’s internet.” I would like to differentiate Social Media from media. Maybe Social Media is just buzz for Internet conversation. Granted this isn’t true with the restricted meaning of the word conversation. Consider applications providing links to other applications such as Delicious. But in a abstract way this is conversation also.

One important result of the Social Media movement, is the shift in publishing from content centric to conversation centric documents. Alone this may not seam like much. But consider how many business processes that today are document centric, that will be impacted by a change in publishing content to publishing conversation!

In this way, Social Media has the potential of changing many of today’s business processes. This is a rich area for process innovation, that would exist without social media, and a new publishing environment.