Suw has a great post on social software, failure, and success over at Strange Attractor.
She was riffing on something from the cognitive surplus talk -- "The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out" -- and she goes into why most businesses still don't understand failure modes in social software, and how important sheer pigheadedness on the part of the founders can be in driving the successes:
Every now and again I'll be talking to a client or a journalist or some random person at a conference, and they'll ask me if I think that social software is a fad. Invariably they'll have anecdotal evidence of some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The problem with this interpretation is that these failures - which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed - are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I'd even call them necessary as they would allow us to learn what does and doesn't work. Sadly, we don't often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together.
Read the whole thing.
