There’s an interesting conversation starting over at ReadWriteWeb in a post entitled, Driving Change:  Selling SharePoint and Social Media inside the Enterprise.  In it Jason Harris suggests some strategies for introducing social media within an organization that isn’t terribly keen on it.  He begins with an interesting premise, but then gets trapped by his product:

Analyze your particular circumstances. Technology alone won’t fix or alleviate a business problem. Merely throwing up a wiki and publicizing it doesn’t guarantee its success. Instead, use collaborative technologies such as SharePoint to solve the problem.

The reality is that SharePoint is not a social media silver bullet.  In fact, as Christoph Schmaltz points out in his comment on Jason’s post, SharePoint isn’t particularly social in and of itself.  If anything, it’s a platform that merely facilitates the deployment of social media tools developed outside Microsoft.

Sharepoint built connectors to Enterprise wikis like Socialtext and Confluence because they realized that their patched wiki functionality could simply not do the job and help people to collaborate. Why is MS partnering with Newsgator to deliver social capabilities? MS has missed the train and they are desperately trying to catch up, because their customers are demanding more flexible, light-weight and easy-to-use tools.

Clearly there is a different approach to social media and collaboration that isn’t primarily about SharePoint evangelism, even though we all understand that SharePoint is the 800lb gorilla in the social media playroom. For those of you attending LegalTech 2009, please do stop by the Web 2.0 track on Tuesday. Christoph’s Headshift colleague, Lee Bryant, and I will be leading a conversation about how to unleash social media within law practices (with or without SharePoint).  I do hope you’ll join us.

And then, let’s see if Dewey or Truman (or McCain) wins this social media debate.

[Photo Credit:  Tony Buser, Creative Commons license]