Corporations are built of very distinct pieces. People understand their jobs, their duties, and how they will be measured. This very thinking is industrial in nature. It fits well in 1900s-era thinking. If you are a machinist, your job is to turn out perfect gears. If you are a painter, your job is to paint your parts expertly and waste less paint. But in an age where pretty much everything about humanity is a mash-up (we do "work" in cafés; we build businesses by giving away products for free; we let our customers decide our designs), thinking of our organizations as specific pieces, or separate parts, might be the death of companies in the next few years.
My thoughts keep coming back to Rachel Happe from the Community Roundtable, who said that the main benefit and value of social networks (and social media, by extension) is to capture unstructured information that otherwise rushes past without a "bucket" to connect it to the "memory" of an organization. Meaning this: Lots of useful information that comes from making social media and using social networks benefits more than just one "department" at a business.
Let's illustrate this with an example:
Ravi posts on his blog that he just bought the Garglesoft Bookreader, and it's not really all that great for what he wants it to do. He's mad that it won't let him download books from other sites that aren't Garglesoft.
Natasha in Garglesoft customer relations sees this post in her "listening" RSS feed, and bookmarks it with Del.icio.us,[71] such that her colleagues in other departments will get the post in their listening feeds.
Sonya in Garglesoft engineering sees what Ravi has posted and realizes that it's not that the Bookreader can't do it, but that the feature just isn't as obvious as it seemed to internal engineers. Sonya Clipmarks[72] the part of Ravi's post she wants to highlight, drops it into an internal wiki, and then notates for the next release of the app how this might work differently. She tweets (or whatever the enterprise version of Twitter will eventually be) this update to her product management colleagues.
Sonya then blogs on the Garglesoft Bookreader project blog (an external blog) showing Ravi's post and/or posts a screencast step-by-step explanation on how to do what Ravi wants to do. She concludes with a promise to review the feature for the next release of the Garglesoft Bookreader.
Meanwhile, Ramesh in HR notes that Ravi has lots of great ideas in his previous blog posts, and he passes on Ravi's LinkedIn profile to the software engineering team, to consider Ravi for a future project.
In this example, customer relations, engineering, and HR departments all used social networks and social media. We could have layered in marketing (perhaps pointing to a collection of helpful how-to video-blog posts, etc.) and some other departments, but you get the point, right? More than one department uses these tools in concert.
Taking this kind of approach with social networks and social media will eat into the time spent working on products. That's a reasonable opinion. I can see senior leadership worrying about that, and they'd be right if their people were not actually interacting with people with an interest in their products and services.
But what better way to stay plugged into the world of your customers than to try and be where they are?
Oh, and this raises another whole point. What if your business is B2B? What if your business is totally offline? What if your business has nothing in common with the Internet's demographics.
There are still ways to participate with social media. For instance, there are some great B2B blogs out there. There are some great podcasts that give you information on how people approach things in the offline world. You've got to look for them, but they're out there. Besides, if you're reading Social Media 101, it's pretty likely that your customer base is online, or that you've already figured out how to approach the offline world with what you learn here.
Learning to play chess means understanding how all the pieces work in concert. It means understanding how other players might focus on one piece, but neglect others. It means understanding that things set up early in the game might execute later for a fuller impact. The same is true with implementing social media practices at an enterprise.
Look at your organization's informational needs. Don't start by pushing social media tools down people's throats, but instead look for the problems different parts of the organization might need to solve. In my Garglesoft example, I had Ramesh in human resources scanning blogs for potential suitable employees. Can you imagine your organization finding talented people by the media they make online? I know folks who have picked up their job from what they've put on their blog. (Um, me, for instance.)
How does your organization pass information around internally with regard to projects? Could you see your organization's members benefiting from reading external sources of information? Do you know which tools would work best for them to aggregate all they've learned?
Would your organization benefit from making media? Why not start with simple tools like Utterli, which works on any cell phone, and video tools like Magnify[73] or 12seconds.tv,[74] which let you record video straight from your browser using Flash[75]? As with learning chess, organizations probably should learn simpler tools before moving into something more complex. (Although, as a side note, thinking about training and then retraining might make organizations consider their toolset more carefully before rolling out something half-baked to the world.)
Could you see your company building social media and social networking tools into its practices? What would the barriers be? Where would your company stumble? Have you tried? What were the results? What was the push back?