2.0 will come back as mainstream in corporate communications soon...

After a long Balkan club night in Zagreb, I head a surprisingly lively discussion with colleagues from south eastern europe on social media and enterprise 2.0 in corporate communications. The topic has broad attention - in contrary to what some experts or evangelists seem to experience.
In a group of 50 communications professionals, almost everybody participated in the discussion. The most attractive issue, of course, are the hot brands: Are you on Twitter or Facebook, what do you do there, and does it make sense? These top brands are attractive - but they blind you. They are brands, readymade products; they allow more interaction and a broader editorship - but still, they work like classic media. In an online newspaper, you can read or do what the editors want you to read and do; there is prepared and packaged information and there are some very well controlled rating- or commenting-features. - In Facebook, you may have more control over the content, but the rules are still those of the company - the user is only a user.
What does make a difference, is the combination of a lot of different tools, channels and features, a combination, that may actually lead to a new way of dealing with information.
I don't read online newspapers; I mostly work with RSS Readers to combine feeds from different sources. That puts me in the role of an editor, away from the scheme of a passive user. I add Twitter- or Facebook-Widgets in my readers and I use the statuslines to post information about things I read. My Twitter- or Facebook-Feeds thus become media on their own - filtered and edited by me. They are a source of information for friends, an archive for me - and also a tool to work on my reputation and impact while writing online.
This is probably less spectacular than creating new services or doing marketing over facebook, but it is a generic approach that does not create dependencies from specific tools (it applies to a lot of different (social) media and networks), and that gives us a foundation to work on. How should you react on social media and social networks in your daily communication work? That's a very common question, and looking at media as tools, not as brands and products, and considering the shift of editorship (which is at the same time a loss of control for the sender), we can formulate some basic principles that may be helpful in daily business:

• Don't care about brands. If your strategy makes sense, it will also work with the superstars.
• Do care about your audience: Whom can you reach where? Which channels and tools can you add to your communication mix to grow your impact?
• Don´t try to adapt to specific tools: Communicating for Facebook only is like addressing only one VIP-Journalist. Create your messages and add variations as you need it (if you have time for it).
• Adapt your messages to the situation you face when using new online media:
• They must work without the surrending of your webpage (people may use them in an RSS Reader).
• It must be easy to link to them and to retrieve them (integrate bookmarking services like Digg or Delicious, create urls for detail pages as readable, persistent beautiful urls, add basic meta-information (publication date, author)
• Use existing channels (communituies, networks, bookmarking services - whatever fits best to your needs) as additional distribution for you contents.
• And something different, so that we also cover this aspect: when using additional channels - be generous. Don't always only talk about yourself, do also promote other content (that is - if they fit to your needs, of course). That's a boost for your credibility.

So it does not have to be Twitter and Facebook - they will probably be outplayed by the next cool thing. But there are general structural changes, and they are here to stay. I hope we can get some of this also in our daily PR work a general strategy still has to be worked out.

It may be an option to ignore Twitter and Facebook, but it is not an option to ignore changes in communication and in the future general structure of media. The trendy topics like Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Media may possibly disappear soon from the trend radars - but only to come back even strionger, and as generally accepted mainstream trends. Maybe simmplified, but nonetheless powerfull. That's a common pattern in emerging media...