Social Media and Business:Computing Shift

Business Users & Social Media:Creating Natural Influence

There’s little doubt that the coming explosion of social media will greatly impact how businesses will interact in the future. The problem is that many of us who will influence businesses through our consulting, speaking and writing are mostly talking to each other and preaching to the choir so to speak.

The general consensus is that authentic communications, not technology, must drive social media initiatives. I agree with that. But the more I talk to traditional businesses of all sizes, the more I hear concerns about the short and long-term integration of internal and external social networking with their enterprise systems.

So I’ve been following Microsoft’s direction as they re-position their business and enterprise systems for social computing on the server platform, the cloud platform and combinations of those. I don’t approach projects from the technical side but I’ve come around to the importance of aligning social media strategies with corporate computing strategies. That means understanding how both are evolving and corresponding, as well as following Microsoft’s direction.

The graphics show my preference for shifting power to end users by giving them the choice, independence and synchronized data inherent in cloud models. Although this is an ideal, its likely a long way off for most traditional businesses. I don’t need to be in I.T. to understand the implications and that none of these proposed enterprise system change models are simple.

But I do think that an effective traditional business social media strategy must incorporate the clients’ enterprise systems: what they have now, what they plan for the long-term and Microsoft’s social computing direction. For business social media initiatives, technology doesn’t lead, but it matters.

RedShift Social Media-Network Model for Business

Businesses across all industries are paying more attention to social networks which are predicted to explode worldwide. Although clearly there’s tremendous opportunity and potential it can be overwhelming to grasp the rapid disruption happening and the voluminous information getting pushed out.

Decision makers need help discerning what’s valuable from what’s hype and in taking a direction that makes sense for them. My goal is to help them do that with a unique 4-stage map that is more strategy than tactics and more visual than wordy.

My posts on stages 1-3 are:

• Social Networks Part 1: Community Segmentation

• Social Networks Part 2: Integration

• Social Networks Part 3: Qualitative ROI

The purpose integral to my model is that businesses of all size increase their natural natural influence by using social networks to expand their social capital, brand awareness and sense response skills and abilities.

The quantifiable return in my model is the sum of actionable metrics that follow the qualitative experiential learning of the earlier phase. Its nearly impossible to assign a dollar figure to every social media action. Its more reasonable to present ROI as a story of the benefits of your social media initiative. What’s most important in the very organic world of social networks, is patiently directing the movement, or progression from one stage to the next and not losing commitment to authentic community relationship-building in the quest for ROI.

I developed this model to support a practical approach to social media with recommendations including:

• Determine if and how social networks can help you grow your business and/or improve profitability.

• Accept the disruption resulting from a shift from seller to buyer power.

• Involve people in the decision making process who will challenge assumptions and habitual responses to change and disruption.

• Understand that it will take two years to measure returns on integrating social networks, whether external, internal (behind the firewall), or both.

• Model natural and authentic communications both offline and online and give incentives for participation.

• Don’t wait, over-plan, over-control, micro-manage or over-analyze. Adopt a test and learn approach to social networks.

• Be open-minded and creative about results and metrics you choose to track, knowing that you could get an unexpected equivalent result, or something even better.

• If the above don’t convince you, consider the cost to your business of doing nothing.

Today I read something that brought up a memory so uncomfortable that I had largely repressed it. I was working as a strategy consultant for a growing company trying to get itself bought. We were a tight-knit group and although the bloom was fading from the dot-com rose, it was a mostly optimistic organization. In an effort to make everything look as professional and capable as possible to investors, there were frequent re-organizations, mostly designed by people who had never previously heard the word.

I was the last one called in to be briefed on the last re-org before the company was sold. The owner who I was meeting with looked pained and was nervously chattering. He started going down the org chart…and down….and down… And there I was, not just at the bottom but barely even connected to anything, like an org chart dangling participle. My response was visceral and I thought at the time, totally out of proportion to the event. I was assured that I was highly valued and respected (and I was well compensated and got good projects). It was just that they “didn’t know where to put me”. And I could see why. I was happy to jump from project, to account, to consulting. I cared little about politics or management and always preferred to do creative work, rather than manage others doing creative work. I was, am and always have been a creative, entrepreneurial generalist.

So why could I not get past it? To everyone’s surprise I left very shortly thereafter although it required relocation for a new position. Although I’ve stayed in touch with many of the people on that dreaded org chart, I never again spoke to, talked about or even looked at the person I met with that day. But I killed the messenger many times in my fantasies while at the same time beating myself up over my big fat jealous childish ego.

So today I read about a new NIMH study of the brain, specifically the medial prefontal cortex (involved in sizing up others), the striatum (the reward center) and the amygdala and posterior cingulate (emotional pain processing). The researchers scanned the brains of participants involved with a game that resulted in reward and loss of both money and status/reputation.

“We found that the brain reacts very strongly to the other players and specifically the status of the other players,” Zink says. “We weren’t expecting that profound a response,” she adds, noting that the subjects seemed to be concerned with the hierarchy within the game even when it was of no consequence to how much money they could make.

So now I understand; mine was a normal brain reaction to a perceived loss of status even though I was never a person who cared about titles or climbing the corporate ladder. But this new knowledge is even more important to me as a change facilitator and executive coach because either real or perceived loss of status is a major factor that should be considered and communicated when leading large organizational or small business change. Leaders who can increase their own awareness and emotional IQ about the impact of status change on their people and culture, will more effectively help others through, and consequently increase the success likelihood of, their change programs.

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leadership, organizational culture, self-awareness

Getting clients to write, or in some other way ground, objectify and embody their change experience is like pulling teeth. We’re in the habit of thinking mostly about what we don’t want, and then talking about how we’re justified in having these negative beliefs, thus further locking them in.

Think of your belief system as your internal operating system that drives your life experience but has never been re-booted or de-bugged. Before you can clean out the bad code and replace it with an updated version, you need to dig into it to understand how it drives, or blocks, your fulfillment. Getting your beliefs down in writing, or in a recording, or in a visual are how you get them out of your head, where they spin and spin but nothing really changes.

If you avoid the step of objectifying your change process, and I’ve seen this so many times with clients, it takes much longer to understand your complex system of beliefs that direct, or counter-direct, your personal, professional and organizational responses to change. When you don’t know what you don’t know, you’ll continue to feel powerless as you’re buffeted by the changes impacting your life, your business and your organization.

One caveat about creatively examining your individual or organizational belief system: don’t make it difficult by trying to make it perfect. If writing about your shift feels hard and stressful, then you can be sure that there’s an unwanted belief blocking your progress.

A lot of new-age and mass-market personal improvement material is unconcerned with doing the work that results in a deep level of self-knowledge. It appeals to the desire for a quick fix for being stuck, or getting the fulfillment that eludes. Its understandable why we’re seduced by simplistic positive thinking and creative visualization self-improvement models. But all too often, they just add more layers of “code” on top of an already buggy personal belief system. Improvements are fleeting, action plans are abandoned, and results are often disappointment and frustration. The reason is that hidden beliefs in what is not wanted continue to drive, even if they are hidden and ignored. Until recognized, examined, accepted and released, they will without fail, block quick fix attempts to get to something better, more meaningful and lasting.

The process is the same for collective beliefs as it is for individuals and its critical to leading and facilitating an organizational culture shift. Organizational cultures are collections of beliefs that largely determine the likelihood of success of any change initiative. To ignore, or not examine cultural beliefs is, like with individuals, a path to failure and frustration.

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self-awareness, leadership, organizational culture, self-knowledge

How Executives Will Fill the Leadership Chasm and Transform Their Organizations

This is my first eBook and a labor of love created during the dead of winter 2008. My goal is simply to create a spark in people who are leading change initiatives, perhaps for the first time.

You can either download the pdf version or view the single page web version.
Download pdf file (1.1 mb)

Web version (no download)