Web 2.0 and Open Innovation meets Control Freak

As the medium-sized nonprofit organization where I work has begun incorporating web 2.0 tools in the way we work and communicate with our supporters, we have come up against the same idea time and again: how do we control it?

From concerns about posting video of our programs to Youtube to debating whether we want to open ourselves to comments and critiques from blog subscribers, there's a worry that web 2.0 will cause more headaches or pr fiascos than it will benefit the organization. I would have liked the two articles we read (Web 2.0 Enterprise and Open Innovation) to address the issue of control more specifically because I think it is a critical issue in getting started with a lot of web 2.0 and ensuring that your 2.0 efforts produce meaningful information and innovation.

In addition to control being a hurdle to getting started, control is a hurdle to a productive experience. I've read dozens of blog or bulletin posts by people complaining that their comments had been deleted by a company or community, but that individual had no idea why what they were sharing should warrant such a reaction. I think that paying lip service to web 2.0 and only superficially committing to distributed cocreation often is often worse at creating PR consequences and a lack of real organizational innovation than if the organization didn't engage in web 2.0 and open innovation in the first place.

Until the end benefits of co-creation and web 2.0 are absolutely, positively irrefutable, it may take awhile for the web 2.0 Enterprise to gain total traction.