In her post yesterday, Amber Naslund talked about the need for a shift in the way that we think about how social technologies fits within companies — instead of thinking in terms of tools or specific functional areas where social media will be used, we need to be looking at it as underlying infrastructure for communications and information sharing. Amber says:
“What if you could redefine the departments in your organization not in terms of their function but in terms of creating a more uninhibited flow of information and results from company to customer?…What social media is changing is the foundation of all that communication. It’s very fabric. We’re engineering new bedrock for how communication works, whether we realize it or not.”
Fabric is the exact right term, in my view. Companies that leverage social media across their organizations as “communications fabric” will be provided with a competitive advantage that’s both significant and sustainable. The mainstream market will then follow. It may take a while for this to happen en masse, but given the potential value, I just don’t see how it can’t happen. As Peter Kim said in a recent post, “social business is simply how work needs to be done.”
So if that’s where we’re headed, who should we be looking at to see what it’s actually going to look like? What types of companies will lead the way?
Well in the past, if you wanted to see how technology was going to change the way we work, you looked to see what the very biggest, most IT-centric companies were doing with new technologies. New technologies typically started in the enterprise and flowed down.
In the ERP world, SAP permeated the enterprise, which eventually led to products like Great Plains for the SMB market. In the systems management world, products like IBM Tivoli and HP OpenView led to departmental and SMB solutions like SolarWinds and Freshwater. For CRM, Siebel led to Salesforce.com (which eventually led to BatchBook, Highrise, etc.). Typically the big financial services and manufacturing firms would implement the technologies, their best practices would then flow to the rest of the Fortune 500, and eventually a simplified, packaged version would make it’s way to smaller companies.
So should we look to these same companies to see how social media will get implemented as communications fabric in companies? Not a chance. It’s just not going to work that way for social media because of a fundamental difference in the value that it provides. For these other technologies, “command and control” is a defining part of their value proposition. I.e., help me centralize things so I can control the complexity across my organization – control over my supply chain, control over my IT infrastructure, control over my sales and marketing processes, etc.
Social media is exactly the opposite. To truly unleash the value, you have to put power in the hands of the individual and give up control. Want to know exactly what your customers want in your product? Set up a GetSatisfaction account, show them exactly what you’re thinking of building and let your customers design it with you. Sounds great…but pretty hard to do when product ownership goes through five layers of management and when “guarding the roadmap” is ingrained in the corporate culture. Want to get the word out about a new product? Let employees build relationships on blogs and twitter with influencers and potential customers…but realize that you’re not going to be able to control the conversation.
At it’s heart, social media is a bottom-up phenomenon. So if you want to see what the “social media fabric” is going to look like, don’t look to big companies. Look at the way that small and mid-size businesses are innovating right now. Look at how Peldi is defining requirements for a killer feature in Balsamiq. Or how Pam leveraged a viral campaign to build links and create buzz at NetQoS. Or how Kyle is engaging with people to understand customer needs and drive leads at BreakingPoint. Or, my new latest favorite, check out how boxee is using their blog to get market feedback, humanize their business and build their brand. These are companies that are building on top of that fabric as we speak.
Which companies do you think will be the trailblazers? Who should we be watching as best practices examples of how social technologies should be relied upon as foundational infrastructure?
3 comments
@Pam – No doubt that predictability isn’t part of the package with social media…that’s a really hard thing for even small businesses to deal with. When your in a big company that’s got built-in processes for killing anything but the most certain ROI projects, it gets that much harder.
@John – Agreed. Instead of viewing it as a corporate program, the bottom -up approach is about scratching a specific itch. Much more likely to add value.
Another point I would make about the bottom-up approach to social media is that when it starts at the bottom it’s often used for much better ways than just getting out a marketing message.
Look at @comcastcares for example. A very bottom-up example where someone in the organization wanted a better mechanism for reacting to negative feedback than just sending out a standard “We regret any difficulties…” message.
By giving up control, companies are much more likely to get real, actionable insight because they’ll have to listen more than they talk. And that’s a good thing.
Thanks for mentioning us Paul. You and Amber have hit on some important points– social media is indeed a bottom-up phenomenon and must be a company-wide endeavor. For most of the folks I speak with, the real obstacle to building support for social media seems to lie in the issue of “command and control.” Most marketers and business leaders want some level of predictability in their Marketing programs. They want to ensure that their investments are producing the right results and be able to predict how those investments will impact revenue. But social marketing doesn’t really work that way. At least until you reach some level of critical mass. Right now, we must focus on giving up control without losing insight and shape the care and feeding of our community to ensure it is relevant to our business. Then measure the trends and adjust. It takes time, creativity, patience and a few great productivity tools. It was oh so much easier in the old days but I’m having a lot more fun today.