Early this morning www.twitter.com/newsgang shared this article from CNN.com about how Wall Street arrived at its financial crisis and how to avoid it in the future. It highlights how short-sightedness and incentive compensation plans contributed to taking on higher risk. Another aspect of the crisis is how financially connected we are globally.

It is a long held belief of mine that some aspects of our corporate culture, finance, and legal to name two, need to change if social media is to become integrated into America’s regular business environment. Today social media is discounted by corporate executives at worst and politely accepted as a pilot project by most others. Yes there certainly are corporate leaders like Sun, Coca-Cola, GM, Ford and others, but I don’t think I’d get an argument with the statement “social media is still in an early adopter phase in corporate America.”

The connection between the Federal bailout of international financial services firms and social media is captured in some of the elements that I believe will be part of the response to this mess. Those elements are:

1) Greater transparency and disclosure – social media loves and rewards both
2) Institutional incentives that are longer term in nature – this will allow more discussion about imperfections in a company without as much hysteria of how it will impact this quarter’s investor call.
3) Accommodations for the interconnected nature of economies – social media connects individuals from different cultures all the time, perhaps we can take this from a micro level to a broader understanding without it becoming an issue of national pride, but instead one of social growth (Robert Scoble told me this is more a wish than a reality, but I’m an optimist)

Last year at the Society of New Communications Research symposium we had several excellent group conversations about the limitations placed by the finance and legal departments on social media implementation in a corporate environment. Finance is clearly concerned about monthly and quarterly impact to stock price and other metrics within its jurisdiction. Legal is concerned with that any admission on the web, direct or indirect, of imperfection would be seized upon by a zealous trial lawyer in our litigious society.

We surely have a long way to go in addressing these cultural obstacles. As the dust settles around Wall Street, the blame assessed and the remedies constructed to prevent a reoccurrence, watch for these elements of longer-term corporate perspective incentives and greater disclosure. These characteristics will help social media advocates change a corporate culture in ways that will allow the organization to see greater benefit from social media.

By the way, the next Society for New Communications Research symposium is being held in Boston, November 14, I’m sure we’ll pick up this topic and many others, here’s the social media and PR agenda.