The Social Organization

On the 'Echo Chamber', 'Thought Leaders' & 'Experts'

I tripped across this post "Do Thought Leaders Need to Be Practitioners" about a conversation between @schneidermike and @adamkmiec. This debate reminds me a lot of the chatter about 'getting out of the echo chamber' and 'who is really a social media expert'. 

I've got a slightly different take on this whole meme... which is this:  Why is it so important to define or decide who is/isn't/etc.?  For one, we all have different and unique perspectives and experiences. Sometimes that is useful to others and sometimes it is not. Everyone is at a different place on the ramp when it comes to understanding new disciplines, including how to effectively operate on the social web. Sometimes it is helpful to speak with someone who is really enthusiastic, using tools in a personal way to do interesting things. Sometimes it is more helpful to speak with someone who has a lot of experience with really large organizations because the decision-making and operational flow are so different. Sometimes theory is interesting. Sometimes specifics are.

One thing that I do know is that it is extremely hard to have a macro and a micro view of things at the same time - or an experienced view and a new perspective on something.  I've been an analyst and in that role you see more technology and companies than anyone in an operational role ever could. See my older post on my perspective on what an analyst does.  I've run product groups and been head down for months on end and in those roles you dig in and really understand the ins and outs of customer need and functionality around very specific things... but it is really hard to transition to thinking about theory and the latest greatest thing going on in the market.  What I've seen managing groups is that it is extremely helpful to have a combination of experience and newbies - they feed off of each other- the newer people with questions forcing the experienced people to look at things differently or to articulate their thoughts better and the more experienced people guiding the newer people to ask the right questions.

I think we need all sorts of people, in all sorts of roles, to help us figure out how each of our organizations will approach the social web. It is not an either or equation. People who think so are feeling in some way threatened by the emergence of a different perspective or voice. And what about the echo chamber? To me, regurgitation is a form of learning... new people coming into the conversation and rolling the concepts around for themselves - saying very similar things but in slightly different ways. Each of us has the option to decide for ourselves who we  listen to - if you don't find someone's perspective useful, there are plenty of ways to stop listening but I for one think we could spend more time trying to understand each other.

Fast & Furious - Twitter Chat

Yesterday Marc Meyer and Jason Breed invited me to host #socialmedia chat - an excellent series if you are looking to explore various topics related to social media and 'meet' others who are interested in the same thing. Yesterday the topic was "The Difference between social media and community" which is something that I've been going on about for a bit.  The transcript of the chat is here. I don't really have a clear definition of all of the differences - and I would be interested in hearing your perspective in the comments - but I do have a strong opinion that they are different which is shared by many community managers with whom I speak. If you are interested in my perspective you can find it here and here.  To me social media is a tactic and about socializing content while community is a strategy and about the people and structure of an organization - but that is not a universal perspective, just mine.

The first question kicked off the chat: What is the difference between social media and community?

@mvacondios Social Media=tool set and Community=mindset
@cmwooll Social Media is a way for the community to interact...
@TransitionalTee If social media will enhance connectivity & sharing, it's worth considering. I'm sure many [communities] thrive w/o.
@monicawright I think there is a slight difference bt socmed and community; comm builds as the "social" happens.
@josemv a community is a group of people sharing sth in common, social media is the means of sharing
@SueOnTheWeb Social media is promotion, either of oneself or ones Co, whilst community is about the common element that binds peeps together
@jasonbreed SocMed is broad term used generically way too much. Community is understood to group people like minded or like interests
@Shanan_S You can have flash mobs within communities. This one is FANTASTIC: http://bit.ly/OzsJy [loved this!]
@RKaiser Community shares interests #socialmedia is the process to do this - so agree with some of your listeners
@monicawright @Marc_Meyer "community as a strategy" is almost like marriage, it's a commitment and requires work. Right on.

An interesting question came up in the process as well, which is: can you 'manage' or proactively facilitate the creation of a community? Participants seemed to fall on both sides of that fence but everyone generally agreed that if it felt forced it would not work.

Another thought emerged which was that maybe social media - used tactically - is the first step in the path toward a community strategy with this quip thrown in by @Marc_Meyer maybe social media is dating and community is living together...

The importance of face to face interactions came up as did the use of social media for bringing an offline community into the new online medium - I think this was a great point as to the importance of cross-platform programming.

The 2nd & 3rd questions were:
- What should a company focus on
- What are the metrics of success for each

Neither of those questions got into sufficient discussions. Which is where I segway into what I learned from facilitating an online Twitter chat:

• Doing multiple questions is hard because the tools are not really meant for synchronous chat so the delay and rapid fire nature of the conversation made it hard to shift gears. The first topic had by far the best discussion.
• There are only so many things you can really dig into in an hour. If you want to get beyond the high level summary of a topic, an hour is only enough time to get specifics around one relatively niche subject.
• The tools are not quite meant to do this... Marc has built a great interface at http://hashtagsocialmedia.com/live to help but I had to switch between that, Twitter search, and Seesmic desktop for different reasons.  One - using a new interface for the first time on the day of the chat... not ideal. Two - real time search was a bit more real time in different places... very erratic Twitter API from what I could tell.
• Twitter chats are a great way to meet and have a topical discussion on Twitter. Most of Twitter is a lot of snacking and some bursts of conversation for me so Twitter chats are a great specific time to dig in and broaden conversations to more people.
• While not hard, chatting on Twitter is like a secret handshake that is pretty opaque to people unfamiliar with the concept. For the record, it is a set time with a set topic and a defined hashtag (in this case noon EST on Tuesdays where participants all include '#socialmedia' in their tweets). It's a great example of a groundswell conversation - anyone on Twitter can participate if they choose to.
• I'm not sure if it annoys people who follow me - I do wonder that it might.
• As an individual, I could not keep up. I dropped a lot of conversational balls and comments or questions directed at me specifically. So - if I didn't respond and you participated and wanted my perspective on something - please let me know!

It's fast, furious, and fun - always something I enjoy. Thanks to Marc & Jason for having me and to everyone who participated - great conversation!

Why Organizations Need 'Social Labs'

My background is in product development management and processes.  One of the things that you learn is that the R part of R&D has to be managed and measured very different than the D part. Most large technology enterprises have dedicated teams focused on research that will not be commercially delivered for a number of years - or even decades. The expectations that management sets for those groups and the associated measurements are very different than those they use to measure the product development pipeline.

I feel strongly that because of the very different approach to customer engagement that is being brought on by the social web, marketing and customer support teams should think seriously about creating social labs whose mission is to experiment and try new techniques and processes - and give them the funding necessarily so that they have the tools and resources to adequately test their hypothesis.

Why? Social processes cannot easily be bolted on to existing processes.  David Alston of Radian6 who is one of the new generation of social CMOs recently explained his approach as "I focus on community first and then layer on more traditional marketing programs, not the other way around". That is a fundamental shift. 

The other issue with this shift - which companies are currently struggling with - is that CxOs want and need to see these new approaches replace the volume they currently get with traditional methods. The problem? Current methods of marketing investment are linear - you spend X in direct response marketing and you get y in return... and there are fairly robust benchmarks to indicate whether you are on target or not. It also scales up and down predictably - if I spend twice as much I get twice the response rate.  Communities look more like hockey sticks.  Initially they require a lot of investment - and have disproportionately low returns. From a measurement perspective, they look like failures for a long time before they look like successes. Over time however, communities see geometric returns that you simply can't achieve from traditional methods and that is when the costs start dropping dramatically relative to the returns.  But that gestation period is different for different types of communities and it requires an act of faith to invest heavily is something for a long enough period to see those returns start to happen. In mature communities, membership doubles in increasingly small increments - SAP's SDN & PBX communities have over 1.5 million members, a year ago it was 1 million... and that was three or more years in.

Which gets me to social labs.  A marketing or support organization cannot switch overnight - there would be a huge drop in performance while the community is in it's incubation stage... a stage that requires a limit to the number of community members in order to consolidate and build a core of passionate advocates which will enable the hyper-growth stage later. Today, too many groups are trying to either add on 'social' to existing processes or expect the same performance out of social initiatives - often trying to skip the critical incubation phase of community development ensuring they will never reach the performance needed to replace traditional practices. So, give your social initiatives an incubator - and don't start judging right away - it doesn't work the same way that you might expect it to.