About Social Media Today
Last week I had the opportunity to present to a group of our clients that represented multiple verticals across Europe. The topic I was asked to speak on was the Future of Digital. You know, no pressure. And actually my presentation is more about how companies can deal with environment that our digital world is creating and less about “what’s next” for digital.
It was my first time presenting at the same event as Jon Silk (@prgeek) so that was fun. You should also watch my interview with him: 3 Tips From A Brit to Americans on Doing Social Media in Europe. You can also see his interview of me.
I’ve decided to share most of that presentation here with you in the similar style that I’ve been using recently. Each of these slides could be their own blog post and many of them are based on one or more posts so much of this may seem familiar. I’ve tried to boil down my talking points to just the high points so it doesn’t take forever to read. Plus I can’t share everything but some of it was client sensitive. Plus it’s impossible to capture the Tac-a-thon presentation style with all the extra talking points and rants that get thrown in.
Sadly unlike my personal public appearances I didn’t use any Lego, Star Wars pictures. Next time.
(Insert standard intro/background information here.)
The Consumerization of IT
I was working at HP when the first iPhone came out. Every analyst said it would fail. At best they said it would gain some niche following based on the die hard Mac fans and despite the recent success of the iPod over the years most thought it would never catch on.
As the iPhone began to gain mainstream success many analysts said that it might make a good consumer device but they all said it would never be accepted in the enterprise. They said IT would never support it.
Eventually, more and more IT departments started supporting the iPhone. In fact I would bet all but the strictest, security driven IT departments now support the iPhone.
Why? Well Apple upgraded the capability of the iPhone to make it easier to support (but not perfect). But there were really two main reasons as I see it:
1 – Employees refused to use company approved devices and used their own money to get the iPhone and if the company wanted them connected, they were going to have to support their devices.
2 – The CEO trumped the CIO. I have seen this with some of my own clients, where the CEO walks in one day to the CIO’s office or to a Sr Exec meeting and announces that his children (or grand children) have gotten him an iPhone, he likes it, and the company is going to support them. Done.
In both of these situations the employees and the CEO made a consumer decision not a business decision to get an iPhone.
While today it is the IT department that most of the talk of “consumerization” it is happening across HR, Marketing, Sales, Support, and it’s even effecting partner relations. And it is only going to get worse.
Mass-Personal
Professor Patrick O’Sullivan at Illinois State University coined the phrase Mass-Personal to describe the different reality of communication within social networks.
It used to be that there were three main kinds of communication: Interpersonal (1 to 1), Small-Large Group (groups of varying sizes from small to large) and Mass Media (broadcast TV & radio and print publication).
Each different setting has different rules governing how you behave and the effects of your communication. There are a lot of differences but the easiest way to think about it is Reach vs. Richness. The smaller the group, the richer the communication but the lowest amount of reach and relative impact. The larger the group, or audience the greater the reach and relative impact but the communication is less rich. Make sense?
The Internet of the 90′s didn’t change this dynamic. The Internet was the first medium to span all communication types but it didn’t drastically alter them. It changed a few things about reach like distance but that’s about it. Then social media came along and drastically altered this dynamic.
For the first time ever you can have both reach and richness. I can have a conversation on Twitter with only a few people and we will behave according to the rules of interpersonal or small group communications but our reach is infinite. The impact is far reaching beyond the few people in the conversation.
But one of the things that this is doing is forcing mass media (both media companies and businesses that use mass media) to behave more to the rules governing interpersonal or small group communication, which has more richness, which we respond better to.
So, along with IT, mass media is being trumped by natural consumer behavior.
Basically it all boils down to is that social media allows us to behave in the way that we want. (Remember this point for later.)
Authenticity
Sir Tom Stoppard, the late British Playwright who wrote or co-wrote such great screenplays as Brazil, Shakespeare in Love and Arcadia said:
“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
In this time of mass-personal communication there is little room for dishonesty and inauthenticity. We see this all the time with corporate internal emails that get leaked by disgruntled employees or subversive actions by corporations that eventually get discovered. It’s just easier to be authentic and honest.
Organizational Silos
I once asked my brother (@TJSonofAnder) what the strongest shape was for building really tall structures (I already knew the answer but wanted to make sure I was right). The answer is a cylinder. If that was the case I asked him why they don’t build those really tall corporate buildings as cylinders? His answer was telling: “Cylinders can’t support the facades we put on them.” Now of course he was talking about the architectural facades.
If you work inside or with really large (and not so large companies), every day you have to work within silos. Most of our frustration in deploying social media at large companies come from those same organizational silos.
The intrapreneur in me hates silos. I used to want to try and destroy silos and stood on my soap box trying to convince people that the flat open savanna organizational structure was better. I still do believe a better organizational structure exists but I don’t think current enterprise organizations can adapt to it I think new disruptive companies will create it in the near future.
But the truth is that silos help companies achieve great size and that most employees also like silos. Silos are reassuring. They define roles, responsibilities and job descriptions. They also identify what you can control and what you can get in trouble over. Most employees really like their silos.
A Series of Tubes
But Cylinders Are Good For Another Purpose.
The Internet may just be a series of pipes but your organization should be a series of tubes. There are the organizational silos that represent management structures and org charts but those charts don’t really represent the way work gets done. Work really gets done in informal paths.
When I work with clients in trying to put together internal processes and procedures to get the right information to the right people in order for their companies to participate in social media, I inevitably hear some version of: “Oh I just go ask Bob for that.”
“Bob” doesn’t show up on any of the org charts I was given and his job title isn’t represented by any of the stakeholders we’ve brought together. Bob, is a tube stop not on the map. Bob, is a work around to the system Sr.. execs depend upon to get them the information they need.
Bob, invariably is someone who’s been at the company a significant portion of time, and he knows things. Bob is the organic, human answer to the realities of working inside a soulless company.
Most of my job, when helping companies put together scalable, long lasting social media efforts – the kind of efforts I know are going to significantly transform their company, culturally and structurally – is helping them identify those non-formal ways that work gets done and formalizing them.
Tubes help companies act like a group of human beings not a legal entity. Tubes are also help you, fulfill that mythical corporate mandate; “Do more with less.”
Emerging Markets Get Social
By emerging markets, I mean both the traditional type of emerging market and the other type.
Emerging markets like Africa, India, Brazil and China get social. They are more social by nature. They think first of their community before they think of themselves individually. They don’t believe in getting personal gain at the expense of others, especially at the expense of members of their community. I am of course talking about the members of those nations not necessarily their governments.
I still believe that we will see massive disruption and change in the digital landscape as these countries gain greater access to the Internet. The things I’ve seen coming out of Africa and the services I’ve seen them launch that have most of the functionality of sites like craigslist but are only accessible via SMS. Wait until they have reliable Internet.
The other emerging markets are equally disruptive and more immediate. These are the startups that are built from scratch, only have a few dozen employees, or even a few hundred at most, and challenge market leaders because they don’t have the bulky, slow infrastructure that all of a sudden becomes a liability, whereas before it was barrier to entry for others.
These “emerging market” start-ups run on a series of tubes and don’t have the challenges that silos bring. These start-ups are more in touch with natural human behavior because they are naturally closer to the customer. Tubes are meant to connect, silos are meant to keep apart.
We Live In Exponential Times
Not only is the rate of change increasing at an exponential rate but the degree of change is also increasing exponentially. This are getting crazy out there.
As one example just look at the amount of growth in information being shared on social networks. Things are going to get worse and as we move into the internet of things and, as IBM says move from the World Wide Web into the Web Wide World, the amount of information being shared and capable of being shared is going to go super nova in a way we can’t imagine. Get ready for the flood. we’re going to need a bigger boat.
Again we see the distinct differences between silos and tubes. Silos collect and store, they aren’t meant to facilitate sharing. Tubes enable sharing.
We can’t get rid of our silos because they do serve a purpose but we need to get better at building tubes.
