The Social Organization

Assessing Corporate Readiness for Social Media

While over 30% of corporate users are using intranets, blogs, wikis, and social networking on a regular basis, corporations themselves are at various stages in their ability to make the most use of social media applications and standard enterprise best practices are still evolving.

What are the questions that can help organizations assess their readiness? Here are some - do you have others?

Political
- Is the CEO is OK with the idea (OK, this is sort of a meatball...but an important one)?
- What percentage of managers have a favorable impression of social media tools?
- What percentage of employees speak directly, unmoderated, to external audiences?
- Does the company have regular open-format discussions with employees?
- How often do employees get updates about corporate performance and events?
- Can management articulate why community is important to the company?

Resources
- Are there identified community managers?
- Is there one executive responsible for community?
- Is there budget for offline community events?
- Has the business modeled out community development and its benefits - i.e. is there a community business plan?
- Are there resources assigned to proactively engage with people discussing its products and services online?

Awareness
- Does the company track the number of online mentions for the company, its products, and its executives?
- Does the company track the number of positive and negative online mentions?

Process
- Is there a articulated process for taking ideas from communities and incorporating back into products, services, or processes?
- Which corporate functions pro-actively solicit feedback from employees, partners, and customers already?

Participation
- What percentage of employees participate in corporate activities not directly related to their work responsibilities?
- What percentage of employees blog - either personally or professionally?
- What percentage of  employees are members of a consumer social network?

"Publishing is for Acting"

I went to hear Clay Shirky last night at the Berkman Center speaker series - really interesting for a number of reasons.  One, I've been reading snippets of his stuff since I worked in the micro-payments space...he was really not a fan but I think the market ended in a draw.  Independent payment vehicles like Bitpass didn't work out but iTunes and Amazon have shown that you can sell individual songs successfully at low prices...but perhaps not in isolation.

Clay's biggest point last night was that he thinks we are moving into an era of collective action - made significantly easier by the online communication channel.  He gave a number of very interesting examples which are all in his new book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations".

The point that I found most interesting however was "Publishing is for Acting".  For years we have made the collective assumption that reading news (or I supposed any published media) is to be 'informed' or 'entertained' vs. to spur an action on our part. 

While Shirky's point was illustrated primarily with consumer examples, this is similar to a point I often make about enterprise information repositories, including email and search. My question is always: what are you going to *do* with the information once you have it?  A lot of enterprise search and BI apps are just starting to provide workflow around information access so that the user can collect, organize, summarize, comment on, pass along, link to, and rate the information they find.  This is partly why I find the Zimbra email application that Yahoo! bought last year so interesting. It automatically recognizes dates, locations, names - and if you integrate into ERP systems PO #s, project IDs, clients, etc. and right from an email the user can either drag and drop a date into an OpenTable or a Expedia 'zimlet' and get reservation or flight information or, in the case of enterprise info like a P.O., accept or reject it directly from the email.  Now that is a profound change in how we perceive an email exchange - it makes the exchange part of an activity...not just something to read and dismiss or 'save for later' when so often 'later' becomes never.

Definitely something to think about and leads my to evaluate my information sources and what I need to *do* with all the information I access.  My job is to summarize, synthesize, and highlight the interesting bits but how often do I do that effectively and what are the practices and tools I need to do that better?

Why Social Technologies Matter

Management by committee  has always had a negative connotation.  In the physical world, communities are very good for social connection but fairly bad at governance and decision-making. Why?

• Understanding all the concerns and issues of various constituents is time consuming and often asynchronous.
• Getting consensus can require multiple conversations with a variety of stakeholders - some of which get on board with a decision only to change their mind and then need to be convinced again. This process is typically fragmented and time consuming.
• Decision-making is often exclusive.  Because inclusion and mass consensus is so costly, small exclusive groups often make decisions for the entire community and this drives a lot of political maneuvering.  Those with the best political skills often are the ones to get decision-making authority regardless of experience.

How does online technology change this?

• Transparency: anyone in the community can see discussions and, critically, relationships between people.
• Inclusiveness: More people can be involved in vetting ideas because the discussion can be centralized, structured if necessary, and ongoing over time.
• Persistence: Decisions and the concerns that are vetted are available as long as needed and can be referred to by everyone to ensure that execution is consistent with the original decision.
• Conversational: Roughly 70% of information is unstructured...being able to capture conversation is critical to knowledge management and knowledge retention and comes with layers of meaning (tone, participants, etc.) that formal documents may not.
• Low Barriers to Participate: Online people can lurk, they can rate, they can comment, or they can create substantive content - whatever they are comfortable with and ready to do.  This has huge value in getting more people involved and engaged.

Technology enables organization by committee in a way that is not long and torturous and thus, opens up the floodgates for more input, better decisions, and more engaged participants.

If you are and IDC client and interested in hearing more, I will be giving a presentation at Directions in San Jose on March 11th and in Boston on March 19th based on a research piece I wrote called The Social Enterprise: How Social Networking Changes Everything.

What is your perspective on this?  Why does technology matter?

Trepidation, fear, and the red herring

I spend a lot of time talking to people about social media - everyone from social media experts to vendors to companies that deploy it to investment companies.  There are enormous disparities between what I'll call the social media fans (I don't think we've got 'natives' quite yet) and marketers or technology types and everyone else.  From a selfish perspective, this makes my job more difficult as it can be challenging to start a discussion at the right place - I've both bored people and left others completely speechless. But I am starting to wonder if it is a little like the digital divide - will it leave some people disenfranchised? or alternately - is it all fuss over nothing?  Communities - even online communities - have been around for years. What is so different now?

I often tell people that the trepidation that many people seem to have over the 'loss of control' is really a red herring because any sense of control was a figment anyway.  Customers have always controlled the brands they buy.  Cadillac did not go out and market the Escalade to people in the 'hood and yet that is a major market segment...and it has had a major influence on how the SUV is perceived by the entire market.  The same is true internally to organizations - managers may think they have 'control' but employees have always gossiped over the water cooler about issues in companies. 

The real questions are these:
- Do you really want to know what your constituents are saying?
- Are you prepared to respond to your constituents?

Companies are definitely coming around but there remains a lot of people that feel quite threatened by social media.  Are they people that can be won over or will they impede companies from effectively deploying social media? What is your take? 

Relationship development is a process, technology can (sometimes) help

Business is all about relationships and information...and ultimately information is used (read, trusted, re-purposed, acted upon) based on how trusted it is...essentially based on our relationship to the source.  So, at the most conceptual level, it is not far fetched to say that all business and the economy in general is based on our relationships, whether those are intra-personal or with institutions and organizations.  Good marketing and sales people have always known this - relationships can overcome a host of sins from mediocre products to non-competitive margins.

The biggest question then becomes: How to scale the creation of trusted relationships.  Relationships are not something you can get by sending out more email marketing, they instead suggest a two-way exchange.  Technology - particularly internet technology - has exploded the number of ways we have to communicate and created one-to-many communication channels that start to let us scale individuals and our conversations but picking the right tool for the job is not at all obvious.  Relationships mature and as they do, the intensity and depth of conversation needs to increase or the relationship will plateau. 

Thinking about how relationships evolve between individuals is helpful. 

The first stage is the encounter.  Sometimes this is random and at other times it is more orchestrated by one of the individuals. This encounter can be  physical or virtual and the channel (in person, over the phone, email, webinar, etc.) will partially determine how quickly the relationship moves to the next phase.

The second stage is recognition.  This happens when both individuals can put a name/face with a context (i.e. "That's Joe from my daughter's playgroup").  There are a number of ways to get from the encounter stage to the recognition stage and this is where a lot of people go wrong.  Often recognition comes from repeat encounters but that can take a long time, particularly if the parties in question are overloaded with information (and I would argue most people worth building relationships with - in the business environment - are overloaded).  The fastest way to get to the recognition stage is to have an interaction that is highly relevant and has something to offer - an idea, a perspective, an experience. When this is the case an encounter and a relatively brief interaction can lead instantly to recognition.

The third stage is relationship development.  Once two parties recognize each other they can move into building a relationship.  To build a meaningful relationship there much be a joint initiative.  Whether that is going to an event together (in the social world) or working on a joint project (in the business world) there must be some reason to stay in touch that is relevant.  An old colleague used to occasionally send funny Dilbert cartoons out to his contact list and I get Plaxo update requests all the time but neither is sufficient at developing my relationships with the individuals in question other than reminding me that I haven't actually had an substantive interaction with those past colleagues in a long time.  Those activities are not necessarily bad but they are not advancing the relationship.

The fourth stage is friendship.  Friendship - whether in the social or business realm - represents a degree of trust above that of colleagues.  People often lose sight of this stage of a relationship in business - myself included.  We get wrapped up in getting to the end goal and think that friendship is ancillary to the process - and depending on the project or goal, it may not be necessary.  However, for certain business relationships which are strategically important, friendship is incredibly useful and it allows initiatives to proceed more quickly than if people are not friends above and beyond the work relationship.  A true friendship will allow two people, ironically, to operate more autonomously because they trust each other and the decisions they will make so constant re-calibration and discussion is not needed - and that saves a lot of time.  Additionally, successful people usually have more than enough work and projects to choose from and because they have to choose, they will prioritize projects with friends more highly because they are more enjoyable, easier, and faster. 

The fifth stage is intimacy.  This stage is not appropriate for most relationships - there are a limited number of people that anyone can have an intimate relationship with - and by intimate I mean close and enduring, not necessarily romantic.  In the business world intimate relationships do have a place - some bosses, mentors, and colleagues will progress to this stage and it enables even more synergy and speed but this stage is difficult to achieve and can rarely be achieved through the intent of one person.  There are some business situations where this is ideal - co-presidents of a large organization (Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns at Xerox seem to have achieved this level of partnership) - but intimate relationships are typically formed outside of business structures and demand a level of compatibility that is hard to find anywhere, let alone within the bounds of a business structure.

Now think about all the ways in which we can encounter, develop relationships, and create friendships - essentially all the communication tools we have available to us: in person meetings, email, phone, IM, social networks, webinars, video conferencing, and virtual worlds.  Each of those channels allows interactions but some are better than others at advancing relationships.  Some tools are only good at broadcast (email for example) while others provide layers of meaning that provides important context (phone conversations come with intonation, video conferencing displays gestures, etc.). 

Mis-use of communication channels is rampant - and I am often guilty in this respect.  Email should never be used before recognition is achieved because why would anyone read an email from someone or a company they do not know in an age where we are overloaded with incoming streams of information? If someone gives you the opportunity to meet with them, don't use it as a broadcast session, use it to have a conversation that enables future recognition - information can then be sent via email and it is likely to be read if the person has found you relevant and interesting.

There is a huge range of communications options today and understanding how much meaning they convey and matching that with your relationship maturity and your goals is critical. 

What do you use the following tools/features for?
- One-on-ones
- Meetings (physical)
- Email
- Phone call
- Voicemail
- IM
- Text message
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Social Networks
- Webinars
- Video conferencing