Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management: Interview with Stephen Collins

Picture courtesy Ruth Ellison

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Stephen Collins, Founder and CEO of acidlabs, a company focused on supporting enterprises with the organization and management of knowledge.

After speaking with Stephen, I’m even more convinced than previously that private and public sector enterprises need to address seriously the implications of the social media revolution. “Wait and see” is a recipe for going backwards.

Stephen is passionate about this. As his website says and as the interview shows “Stephen is more than a little passionate about leveraging great social applications as a way to help people and organisations do their jobs better.”

We talked about:

• how Stephen works with companies (if you are looking for someone savvy to help your company or to partner with, you need to listen to this)
• how valuable and enjoyable he found it to meet others with related interests at Office 2.0 in San Francisco last year and how those meetings were made easier using social networking tools
• how risk-taking is inherent in corporate social networking and how to manage the risk, e.g. by starting within the firewall
• how younger employees are using social media tools even though they are not provided by the enterprise
• how companies implementing social networking can and should engage employees in a conversation about acceptable use obligations that come with the provision of tools

The interview runs for about 30 minutes. You will notice that in the lead-in and exit comments I mention that this interview is part of the Social Media Show, the new podcast show I’m setting up. The site is actually being set up over the next 24 hours: once it is up the interview will be posted there too. (Update Dec 2012: that was a site I had for a while but then closed.)

Listen to the interview

Stephen and acidlabs are partnering with Ross Dawson’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, billed as providing “a pragmatic overview of how Web 2.0 and social media technologies are being applied inside the enterprise to create business value”. The Forum is to be held next Tuesday, February 19, in Sydney, Australia, with a great lineup of speakers, some of whom we will be watching and listening to via live video streaming from the USA and Europe. If you are going to be there, I hope you will say hello on the day.

I’m hoping to interview, over the next week or two, some of the other partners and participants in the Forum.

Des Walsh

Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.