KARLA PORTER

Recently I read a blog post by some­one com­pletely abhorred at the notion of com­pa­nies not on-board the social media wagon.

The cor­po­rate world has been tossed a ball that they largely, with some notable excep­tions, do not know what to do with. It’s my expe­ri­ence that com­pa­nies with tech savvy insid­ers at or near the top tend to jump on the wagon more quickly. It’s still new and every­day more exper­i­ment and find their way.

Here are some rea­sons why com­pa­nies choose to sit back and wait to come aboard or not:

Social net­work­ing taken to the exec­u­tive round table gives HR a headache with all the work and dis­rup­tion new poli­cies that have to be imple­mented will cause.

If no one inside has a sig­nif­i­cant com­fort level with all the new jar­gon and giz­mos asso­ci­ated with it there is a great sense of dis­trust and feel­ing it is a time waster to hang out at a vir­tual water cooler.

For large orga­ni­za­tions to do it right there has to be at the very least some invest­ment in a newly cre­ated inter­nal posi­tions or through con­sul­tants and agencies.

It’s a lot to con­sider when the com­pany is conservative.

Early adopters (think Zap­pos) just jumped in grass­roots style, grew with (still grow­ing) and wad­dled through the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of poten­tial lose lips sink ships and air­ing dirty laun­dry in pub­lic can bring.

While many of us are biased in favor of the value of ning, Face­book, Twit­ter, Myspace and LinkedIn, in the trenches and ready to pros­e­ly­tize to the next passerby from our soap box, social media is still avant garde and in beta.…. Some com­pa­nies may never adopt it in their com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy for fear of lia­bil­ity risk and oth­ers will come on board when it becomes main­stream in a cor­po­rate sense.

One man’s junk is another’s treasure.