A 2005 BusinessWeek story, Blogs Will Change Your Business, gets so much traffic on the web that the magazine just released a follow up article to update what’s what. Honestly, what are folks doing reading a 2+ year old story about new media!?

In any case, the new writing does a nice job of comparing then and now. The first acknowledgement is that the article title now should be “New Media Will Change Your Business”. Blogs are a great communication tool—a conversation tool even—that can connect a business with both consumers and employees. But perhaps collaboration and networking tools are more valuable to a business, and more impactful to day-to-day operations? The story of those types of tools is what folks should be reading in 2008. So hats off to BusinessWeek for the update. New Media will indeed change your business. But which applications, and when?

Just a couple days ago, Financial Times reported that many companies offering Web 2.0 products aren’t making any money, and therefore may not survive. Perhaps you’re thinking, “How can these products change my business if they can’t even make a buck?” A relevant question, but one I think can be answered by two points:

It’s not the proper noun Web 2.0 that is not making money, it’s companies that develop and sell Web 2.0 products or services and that’s an important distinction. When the printing press was invented I can assume that only those that made good products made money over the long haul. The printing industry itself was not the cause of success or failure for those that chose to enterprise within that medium. Web 2.0 or new or social media is a means of communication, not a product. Time and users will determine which implementations of that media work and which are profitable, but make no mistake, new media isn’t going away.

Ah, the users will determine…Who are the users again? If you’re asking that, then it’s likely that the users are younger than you, sorry. I don’t know about you, but I got a mobile (then “cell”) phone in 90-something, way after college. I own one, and use one, but I can’t say it’s an appendage like it is for my teenage relatives. Same goes for social media online. You or I may use it, but the up and coming workforce relies on it. Young workers will consider a work place social network or wiki-based project development tools as a given just like you and I consider Microsoft Outlook and Word a given. New recruits will be looking for work environments that taking advantage of new collaboration and networking tools. The sharpest young workers are ready for them, so if you don’t offer the goods, those bright kids will go work somewhere else.

BusinessWeek shared two good bits illustrating both the leap into new media in the work place and the potential value. First they paraphrased J.P. Rangaswami, who runs technology at BT, the British telecom giant.

“He acknowledged that for organizations, the thought of implementing new media tools can be a bit of a leap of faith. Over 10,000 of his employees are on Facebook, but will they use an intra-office tool? He says he can’t force anyone to use it. It would be fruitless to try. To hear Rangaswami describe it, all his team can do is provide tools and watch.”

While they watch, let’s watch what happened at Best Buy:

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research detail an example from Best Buy in their new book about social media. In 2006 two marketing managers at the company worked weekends to create an in-house social network, Blue Shirt Nation. Now it has grown to more than 20,000 participants, 85% of them sales associates. In a company with a 60% annual turnover rate, this group churns at only 8.5%, blogs Gary Koelling, one of the founders. And Blue Shirt Nation gets results. A promotional drive on the site helped persuade 40,000 employees to sign up for 401(k) retirement accounts. This bottom-up approach moves a whole lot faster than initiatives that wind through a corporate approval process.

Makes our comfy relationship with Outlook and Word seem a little stale, eh?

Today in the Washington Post, Columnist Stephen Barr, laid out some survey results indicating that roughly a third of young Americans would consider working for the federal government if they were encouraged to by folks close to them, like parents or teachers, but also if such a request came from our next president of the U.S. That sounds like great news in light of the retirement wave that is getting under way as baby boomers exit civil service. Except that the critical phrase is “IF they were encouraged to.” Apparently no one is asking America’s new workers to join federal service.

At first that seemed like an easy problem to fix; start encouraging them. But with what and how. I mean after that parent or teacher or president says, “Hey, you should check out working for the federal government,” then what? Where will that person look? What will s/he find? How will s/he be engaged?

What moves someone from consideration to motivation? And on the flip side, how does a particular government agency convince that now motivated person to pursue that one agency over any other? We can try to think of our government as one giant employer, one big happy team, but when workforces get thin agencies will absolutely be competing against each other for good employees. So how do you get yours?

Barr quotes Patricia McGinnis, president and chief executive of the Council for Excellence in Government, who dropped one hint as to how to move beyond encouragement to inspiration. She says 18-to-29-year olds are “more responsive to interactive communication and personal attention than people have realized.” Time to start realizing it people.

Social networks, live chat customer service, user-generated content, they all fall into that category of interactive communication and personal attention. Young Americans, certainly well-educated, tech-savvy young Americans (AKA prime job candidates for federal agencies) rely on interactive communication as much as other generations came to rely on the evening news or the morning paper. Remember when PR was getting mention in the op/ed section of the paper? Or maybe even a mention on the news? What a coup! It moves a bit faster now. It happens a little lower in the weeds now. It’s person to person, or may I suggest employee to potential employee.

Based on the survey results Barr references, it sounds like the federal workforce stands to benefit from at the least some encouraging words, from parents, teachers, and even Mr. or Mrs. President, to explore a career in federal service. Beyond that, it’s up to each agency to shoulder the load and move young Americans from curiosity to engagement. How will you do it? Well for starters you can check out a white paper written by some of my friends here at Mind & Media, “Recruiting the Next Generation of Government Using Web 2.0”.