The Social Organization

Defining Social Media Priorities Amidst the Hype

If you follow the social media space or are just figuring out how to use it effectively for business, the level of hype and the number of options can be very overwhelming.  There are the 'established' social media vendors like Social Text, Jive, and Six Apart but there is a vast number of new vendors that will help companies launch blogs, wikis, widgets, toolbars, engagement tools, micro-blogs, micro-video-blogs, IM, social networking, UGC, tagging, rating, ranking...and the list seems to go on and on.

Everyone wants to get into the game...because everyone else seems to be doing it...but will consumers ever want to participate in a community to discuss their toilet paper? (My bet is no...)

So how does one approach figuring out real needs vs. implementing social media because the boss has drunk the Kool-Aid?

1) Understand your business strategy - are you a first to market company? a fast follower? a low cost provider?

2) Understand your value chain; Which functional groups have the biggest influence on your revenue? Operations, marketing, channel management, sales, partner management, engineering?

3) Map your strategy and value chain to relationships - which relationships are most important to the success of your business?

4) Assess your relationship priorities against actual investment in relationships and communication channels.

5) Survey your constituents in areas where you need to have strong relationships and evaluate their perspective and concerns.

5) Decide if you are satisfied with your relationships or if there are areas of improvement or problems to resolve.

6) Define, precisely, what you are hoping to improve.

7) Match your  problems and areas of improvement to various communications and social media tools. Different tools are good for different types of content, different speeds, different types of people.

Fundamentally social media is about relationships...and relationships can be built with all sorts of people. As individuals, we let our curiosity, interests, obligations, and leisure time determine which relationships we invest in.  Within the enterprise we need to prioritize the relationships we invest in as well because, whether we are individuals or companies, we have limited time and resources. Choose wisely.

The Case for Enterprise Social Networking

While Mzinga was twittering this morning, Neighborhood America was using YouTube:

Mzinga Acquires Prospero

I couldn't end the day without pointing to the news that Mzinga has acquired Prospero. Chris Brogan pointed out that one of the cooler things that they did with the announcement was to use social media to do the launch - as witnessed by an active conversation on Twitter this morning. While that was cool, what I like about Mzinga is:

- They have internal enterprise solutions for eLearning and HR
- They have external enterprise solutions for B2B customer and partner communities
- They now have consumer-oriented solutions
- Prospero has a very distributed architecture with APIs so social functionality can be distributed and integrated with other content and functionality.
- Mzinga has the marketing and management strength to growth the company.

But others are not sleeping: Passenger and HiveLive just raised money; Cisco early last year bought 5Across, Neighborhood America bought MOVO Mobile, OneSite bought Social Platform...

Competition is also coming from enterprise communication and collaboration applications, content management vendors, and enterprise search platforms.  Microsoft recently announced that SharePoint Server sales have surpassed $1B.  Enterprises who want to deploy communities have plenty of options and it is already clear there is huge demand for this so there will be plenty of room in the market for multiple solutions.  The winners will likely be those that not only have interesting and flexible technology but the services and experience to make companies successful.

Social Networking and the Popular Girls

It is ironic to me that the majority of voices I hear discussing social media and social networking are male. Not that there is anything wrong with that – it's great but here's the conundrum for me: high school girls, particularly the popular ones, have a sophisticated understanding of social networks that could shame many of us. The difference is that it is so ingrained with the way they operate that most of them could not articulate it….but why are we not, collectively, talking to more of them?

What is it that the popular girls know?

• Why it is important to be a hub
• How to control information for their own benefit
• How to spread information depending on their goal (to throw a party, to harass someone, etc.)
• How to be exclusive and isolate others from the group
• The importance of weak links
• How to brand themselves
• Who to trust in what circumstances
• The power of developing pent up demand

Now I am not suggesting that we want to replicate high school in our organizations (the horror); two things that most of these girls lack is maturity and judgment so they use their power for good and a great deal of evil and that has drastic consequences. However, why are we as adults relearning things that these girls know better than most of us do?

Additionally for almost every element listed above, there is a wildly successful Internet business:

• Hub: Amazon, eBay
• Control of information: Google
• Spread of Information: Digg, CNET
• Exclusivity: Facebook,
• Weak links: LinkedIn
• Branding: Google, Amazon, eBay
• Levels of trust: ePinions, Yelp
• Developing Demand: [This one I don't have a good example for]

While understanding the impact of social networking on organizations is more complex than looking at high school social relationships, it is worthwhile thinking about these girls…they know things that we are still struggling to articulate and understand.

Update:

One, Joe jarred my thoughts and Apple does an incredibly good job of generating pre-release demand for products although they are not strictly an Internet-only business.

Second, Sam Lawrence's blog post on influential women bloggers (thanks Sam!) pointed me to Anne Zelenka's blog where I found a NYTimes' article on teenage girls' online behavior although it talks more about content creation than social networking per se.