As much as we like to imagine otherwise, the average technology-aware CEO is less likely to view social media as a path to greater organizational collaboration and teamwork than as hidden weapons of a dangerous potential insurgency.   

To believers and practitioners of traditional top-down, command-and-control, for-me-to-know-and-you-to-find-out management (which is to say most of the people who run large business organizations–even those who talk a good participatory game), blogs, wikis, social networking sites are IEDs littered along the road to organizational stability.      

They have already seen ordinary angry citizens armed only with blogs bring down Trent Lott,  Dan Rather, and Joe Lieberman.  They have seen powerful newspapers and magazines and TV networks forced to back down on stories because there are now millions of fact checkers out there.  They have seen famous authors busted for plagiarism.

They now know, if they didn’t already, that if a guy with a small videocam can so easily capture a political candidate making an ass of himself in public, all powerful people are now fair game.  Want to see yourself falling down drunk at the Christmas party on YouTube? 

We even have internet publications that spend a lot of time cruising Facebook and other social sites for photographs of the young progeny of the rich and famous behaving badly.  (Here and here and here, in case you’re curious.)

Social media are not just extensions of traditional enterprise software that can be grafted on and presto, your networking and collaboration problems are solved.  Large-scale adoption of the architectures of participation would represent a revolutionary change in organizational dynamics because–by giving lots of individuals a voice and audience through a networked platform–they force decisionmaking to be more transparent, democratic and consensus-based.  Whether or not that is a positive thing for enterprises is fodder for legitimate debate, I think.  Having nearly been trampled during the blowing up of the balloons on the night before Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, I have zero faith in the wisdom of crowds.

In my experience, most leaders do not want to operate their organizations as experiments in democracy or collective intelligence.  Not even our Presidents and Congresspeople want to do that.  That’s why resistance to Enterprise Web 2.0 technologies is likely to be understated, but fierce, at the upper levels. 

To gain a foothole, the new collaboration platform vendors are going to have to initially target already receptive areas like marketing, PR and corporate communications departments or divisions with specific projects which need networking and collaboration.  Small projects, smaller budgets, no need to involve the CIO.  Over time, who knows, if the technology proves safe and harmless enough, other departments will start demanding it. 

As Leonard Cohen might put it:  “First, we take Manhattan.  Then we take Berlin.”

Update:  Woke up this morning with an afterthought to my “they have seen” riff above.  Throw this graph in where it fits. 

Perhaps, most frightening of all to CEOs who are paying attention to the new trends, senior executives at Microsoft discovered, long after the fact, that a relatively low-level employee had become one of the most popular bloggers on the web and the de facto “voice” of Microsoft–although he was in no way involved in making policy or even officially reporting it.  Robert Scoble’s decision to move on had to be a huge relief to Bill Gates and the other top dogs who could hardly make a fuss once they discovered what he was up to.  This is not meant to demean Scoblizer who is a bright guy whose initiative leveraged himself into a better job.  It’s merely one more example of why the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is not about technology, it’s about who gets to control the flow and pace of inside information.