The Social Organization

It's the Trough of Disillusionment and So Much More

2009-10-26T18:03:07-04:00

We're in for an interesting ride. The social software market is going through a bumpy patch. The 'trough of disillusionment' is the third phase of Gartner's Hype Cycle and I think we are in its valley in the social software market. For those that aren't familiar with the model, it's below:

Why are we here? Well everyone got pretty excited about social tools ability to spread information and the adoption rate by individuals has been phenomenal. If you need a refresher on adoption rates, re-view What is Social Media (not for polite company but gets the point across). So all you have to do is listen to the conversation and jump in, right? That works quite well as an individual or even a small company.... but it doesn't take much size before an organization gets wrapped up in their own operations and drama, used to the way things are, and pretty rigid when it comes to change. And what I think many people have not gotten is the magnitude of the change we need in organizations to take advantage of the new information environment - this is not just about a software category - it's about the fundamental nature of information exchange and relationships. It comes luring us with a 140-character text box - what could be simpler? But it amounts to complex information arbitrage - something I wrote about back at the beginning of 2008.

Business structures have been set up and optimized for an environment where information was very unevenly distributed. They used that inequity to maintain their margins, keep their employees, distribute profits, etc. Most large organization can't change very quickly and are largely operating as if that environment still existed. The problem? Information barriers are crumbling quickly outside organizations and savvy customers can easily know more about their vendors than the vendor employees do - with a little research. Customers can easily find other customers to confirm experiences. Customers who use a product day-to-day often know more about it than their vendor account manager who doesn't actually use the product. The days of glossing over a problem or using a 'smoke and mirrors' approach are dying.

What is a large organization to do? Setting up a Twitter account should be the last of their worries. Not only do customers have better information, the cost of sales has dropped and companies still have a huge sales and marketing organization that can't just be lopped off. They've got customers demanding answers that they may not know or have a great answer too. Because of the prior information inequality, relationships were not the highest priority thing to attend too. Even recently, I've seen a lot of senior customer advocates being cut from marketing departments because they don't have direct ROI and in tough times, they are the first to go. But relationships are becoming the core competitive differentiator. If I as the customer can get somewhat equal products for the same price (and increasingly that is likely because the customer has access to information by which to negotiate), I am going to do business with the company I trust and like - not the one that professes to be perfect but seems highly disingenuous. Middle management is used to being the conduit for information and the hard truth is we just won't need as many layers of management as we used to. For the managers we do need, we need a very different style of leaderships - one that facilitates rather than directs, that promotes others, and that ensures cross-functional alignment and consistency.

Structure drives behavior and today's organizational structures are not set up for today's information environment. Companies need to manage their communities of constituents like consenting, opt-in adults. Winning that trust from people is hard when starting from zero but many companies have created antagonistic relationships with customers and so have even more work to do. So they start down the path - by creating a blog or setting up a Twitter account... and it looks like a lot of effort without the direct reward in the scale or timeframe of more traditional initiatives. And it can look like that for a pretty long time, because customers' validly developed skepticism is a hard thing to turn. And that's where we are generally. Companies are looking at all of these social initiatives and re-assessing. Some community managers are being let go. Other companies don't even realize they need a community manager. Some are slogging through and doing the hard work of change management.

The rest of 2009 and 2010 will separate the pack - those organizations that see the changing information environment and realize that it links directly with how they engage customers, partners, and employees will start seeing results after months or years of investment. Others will leave social initiatives on the side and ignore the changing dynamic at their financial peril. The power has shifted. The organization needs to be shaken up. We are just at the beginning of where this shift gets really interesting. Who's along for the ride?

Note: just saw a note on Twitter about how the head of BMW's US Marketing group moved all of his people into new roles... great example of how the break some long held habits and 'think differently'

The Social Media Fear Factor

2009-09-29T17:55:25-04:00

For social media enthusiasts, it is sometimes hard to understand the trepidation and anxiety that social media engenders in others, particularly in the business world. The truth is - and this is coming from someone who is pretty immersed in it - social media does a lot of exposing. There are not only a lot of potential critics out there, there are also a lot of prospects and competitors out there. If you are not on your best behavior, they may see you at a moment of weakness and they may not stick around to see if that is who you really are or not.

Starting a business has reinforced and heightened the recognition of the social media fear factor for me. It was bad enough when I was blogging on my own behalf with no revenue attached. I worried that people would judge me for my poor spelling, my quick posts, my occasionally sarcastic sense of humor, my lack of enough cross-linking, etc., etc. I have a brand of self-analysis that causes me to believe that I could always do better. On my worst days it can be paralyzing because no matter how much I work on something, it could always be better. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that way. I think it is a big reason that people are cautious about using social media for professional purposes. It is far easier to have a team of copy editors and reviewers making sure content which is published is professional (never mind if it strips out the personality). It is not helped by a general cynicism in our society that tends to make people believe the worst in others, not the best.

There is plenty to be anxious about in considering using social media for business. Among the considerations:

Are you, as an organization, self-aware enough to know what your boundaries and limitations are - both legally and culturally?
Are you set up to provide a place that is open enough to encourage frank criticism?
Are you ready to respond proactively and without artifice to the criticism you do get?
How much are you comfortable sharing with competitors? Does your business rely on IP or on execution? Do you have a collective sense of what you are comfortable sharing?
Do you have enough interesting content and programing so that prospects will hang around long enough to get to know you even if they see a spelling mistake?
Does everyone know what they are legally obligated to stay silent about - whether because of their industry, their customers' industry, or because of SEC regulations?

Many look at all their valid fears - whether they are as simple as having un-edited content in the public eye or whether they are concerned with law suits - and decide it is too much to take on. On the other side, I hear a lot of social media enthusiasts recommend a 'Just Do It' approach. Like many things, the reality for people concerned about the ramifications of using these new communication mechanisms is somewhere in the middle.

Let me share my own experience which I often cite as a way to get started. I had an anonymous blog for almost three years where I experimented with the whole concept of blogging. I'll out myself - you can find that blog here. It wasn't professional and it wasn't all that interesting - I used it to catalog amusing things that I found online. But it got me used to the practice of blogging which was important and I shared it with a limited set of people and got used to the idea of 'exposing' my ad hoc writing. I also, at the same time, used an internal blog at work where we all posted links and information about the industry. It became the resource for any external information and research. Do you need to practice for 3 years? Maybe, maybe not - it depends how quickly you pick it up. When scaling to do this at an enterprise level, a couple of years of practice is not a bad thing. Things you can do to practice:

Use Yammer internally
Train and encourage people within your company to have personal blogs. Run competitions.
Introduce smaller work groups to wikis
Implement an enterprise-wide social network (emphasis on social)
Create group blogs to comment on industry news and events that are only accessible internally.
Pretend to blog for an external audience before you deploy an external blog.
Form communities of practice internally and learn how to 'manage' them

You get the idea. Practice is critical. It takes courage to start putting more of yourself and your company in its raw form out in the wild. I do it every day and still constantly remind myself that it is about the long haul, not about today's retweets. Building relationships is messy but in the end more rewarding and to build robust relationships requires some degree of exposure. It occasionally makes me anxious but I do believe it is the right thing to do so I forge ahead.