Editor’s Note: Brennan Direnfeld is a staff accountant working in Toronto. He blogs at Pathetically Awesome on topics such as exercising, books, accounting and other things he finds interesting on the Internet. Today he explores instances where companies used Web 2.0 as strategies themselves, instead as of tools best tailored to specific situations. An expanded version of this post can be read here.

Tools vs. Strategy

Web 2.0 and social networking are tools, they are not strategies.  Companies need to realize that social networks are not Internet panaceas:

Networks work best under two conditions.  First, they must allow people to make sincere connections with one another.  Faking this sincerity can alienate users, reducing the value a social network can create.  And second, they must adhere to the cultures already in place.  This means you can’t take an existing corporate culture and shimmy it into any social network, as Blue Collar Comedy and Deloitte have learned:

• Blue Collar Comedy
  The execs at funny or die mistook their format for their strategy when trying to promote Blue Collar Comedy.  I guess management thought “funny or die + blue collar comedy = money.” But it’s not that simple, considering that the site was taken down. The demographic that blue collar comedy targets, is not the same group of Internet savvy 20 somethings who make funny or die successful.  The site was destined to fail.
• D Street
  The opportunities at Deloitte are great, but the hours can get intense. People have been expressing this sentiment at urbandictionary.com like this.Running parallel to this problem is the fact that most employees use an external network called Green Dot Life to connect with each other.  To deal with these issues Deloitte created D Street – a social networking application – in an attempt to internalize both problems. You can get some background on D Street here.  It’s easy to tell when someone doesn’t have a clear strategy because they will compensate with a lot of buzzwords – i.e. virtual teams, or cross-division collaboration.  These phrases resemble the fluff I tried to pass off as “answers” on my second year H/R exam.

The power of social networks can benefit anyone who participates in interpersonal relationships, but the way that those soon-to-be-networkers will connect to one another can’t be addressed with a cookie cutter solution. Instead, the tools that make up the web 2.0 shift need to be tailored to specific communities. Hopefully, examples of social networking failure, like the above, will become fewer in the future.