The Social Organization

The Downside of Being Popular on Twitter

As social media has gone mainstream, the more articles, lists, and projects come out like The 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter and the Fast Company Influence Project.  Some of these things make sense - after all for the uninitiated it can be a confusing space so having a place to start is helpful.  However, so many others are ill-conceived because influence and popularity is confused or because they are biased or because they are not well constructed.  I keep moving around and falling on and off the 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter list which I think is kind of appropriate... popularity and power are fleeting after all.

There is a deeper issue going on though - many people and organizations still see social media as a numbers game or a popularity contest.  Popularity is OK - certainly it brings with it recognition but it has some disastrous downsides depending on what it is you want to do.  I learned fairly early that if you are too perfect and shiny there is a lower likelihood that people would take you seriously... people interact and use beautiful and popular people and they take their other qualities less seriously.  I actually used to feel badly for the really beautiful girls in high school because most of them were ONLY that - beautiful.  They had a hard time being thought of for their personalities, their intelligence, or their athleticism.  It seemed I had an easier time being multifaceted because I didn't have one quality that overpowered everything else.

As people and as organizations, it is worth thinking about what persona we want to have in the world.  Do we want to be the shiny object with fleeting popularity? Do we want to be thought of as serious, fun, reliable, comfortable, intelligent?  Social media channels should reflect those basic core 'brand' attributes.

I'm a bit wonky...with a slightly off sense of humor and I don't take myself too seriously. I'm OK with that... and you can probably guess that if you are a regular reader of my blog or Twitter stream.  I don't trust popularity or beauty... it is too elusive and transient although I do occasionally like hanging out with the cool kids because the spotlight is fun in small doses.

Time to Fire Your Customer

I was as amused as everyone else by the news this morning that a JetBlue employee quit in such a spectacular fashion this morning despite also thinking he was a bit crazy to do so in the way he did.  If you haven't caught the story, see below:

The thing is - I think most of us that spend any time on planes can empathize with him.  There are always a handful of people that make the experience pretty trying and I only have to deal with them for a very small part of my time.  If I were a flight attendant I would likely go ballistic at some point too (which is part of the reason I am not... but I digress).  My real point is, there are plenty of customers that are not right - particularly in their behavior in airports and airplanes.  I think companies have as much responsibility to protect their employees as they do to protect their customers and that it is OK to very clearly set behavior expectations for customers and 'fire' them when they cannot commit to those standards. 

The real problem is that I don't see companies wanting to clearly, vocally, and regularly set those expectations - it's like they are afraid to do so for fear of customer retribution.  However, I think most customers would delight if an airline posted and regularly broadcast that if customers swear at each other or at their employees, they will be asked to get off the plane... or if they hit people with baggage... or push people.... or cut lines. As the entity creating the environment that customers experience,  ensuring that the environment creates a positive experience for everyone is part of the product and brand experience.

If a customer is creating an environment that is negatively impacting your ability to deliver a positive experience to other customers (whether directly or indirectly by creating a hostile work environment for employees), I say it's time to fire the customer.

Social Media's Pull: People Want Comfort More Than Food

We don't often like to compare ourselves to children or monkeys but the truth is that we're not that different.  As adults, we often hide our needs, desires, and disappointments but when looking to understand the behavior of adults, it is useful to watch children and animals because they have no artifice masking their instincts.  One of the most powerful and heartbreaking experiments ever done was by Harry Harlow on how baby monkeys form attachments and how important comfort was to their existence.  The video below shows that baby monkeys will take comfort over food - in effect starving themselves in order to feel OK.

I can hardly watch the video but the point is that animals and people (we're not biologically all that different after all) will choose something comforting over a more obvious need like food.  To me, this gets at the heart of why the social interactions facilitated by social media and social software can make such a big difference to the individuals that interact with organizations.  Individuals will flock to organizations that offer comfort (personalized attention) even if the 'food' - i.e. salary, product cost, partnering costs - does not make economic sense for the individual. 

For organizations, this has a couple of implications:

• Resources and time spent on effective personalized experiences with employees and customers will see the returns in the form of higher margins, lower operating costs, and increased retention rates.
• The recent conversation about applying business process and integrating 'social' into existing processes should be very carefully pursued.  If the social element becomes just as standardized as current processes, it won't have much impact.  The business processes themselves must become more flexible and adaptable to individuals which is now possible because social software reduces the cost to support that flexibility.

The issue many of us have is responding to requests to quantify how much comfort is enough. In essence, we are being asked to put a dollar amount on feelings. If you have any suggestions on how to do that, I'm all ears. In the absence of being able to do that, each organization will need to experiment (which, I'm sorry to say, will cost some money) and turn the dial up and down until they find what balance of 'comfort' and 'food' works best for them given their unique market and the unique constraints of their organization.