Social Media vs. Business Culture
Jeff Pulver made what I thought was an interesting observation in a recent conference call. We were talking about my guest blog over at Pulver.com, and he happened to comment about how in his pre-social media guru days, he was an IT guy at a brokerage house.
His job was to bring technology innovation to the 125-person operation, and what he recalls facing daily was “124 people fighting me, wanting to keep things the way they were.” It struck me how true that is, that people get comfortable with the current state and not only don’t see the benefit of changing, but actively resist change. From bringing PCs to the enterprise in the 1980s and 1990s … to becoming web-centric in the 1990s and this decade … there’s always an element of cat-herding, cajoling, and “threatening” involved. My guess, though, is that the migration to adoption of social media tools won’t pose quite as much of a battle as the introduction of some of the earlier “radical” tools.
For one, we’ve got a much more tech-savvy workforce than we did 20 or more years ago. Second, so many of the people coming into the workforce now are already comfortable with social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and others. In fact, in many ways, there isn’t really new technology that people need to learn. Sure, enterprises may need to embrace new ways of using these tools, or new formats such as mobile integration and wireless technologies, to be sure that their employees can leverage social media anytime and anywhere, but there’s no real learning curve involved for end users.
There is however, an obvious culture shift involved. Lots of people still see either little point in Twitter, don’t “get” it, or are hostile to it (my advice…if Twitter is boring to you, you are following the wrong people). They may see no value in getting their company on Facebook or leveraging YouTube or other video sites for internal communication, promotional or customer-connecting purposes. They will come to see the value eventually, especially when “everybody’s doing it,” but the early days are always the hardest.
Beyond the culture shift, there’s also the change in business processes to consider. Social media is, unavoidably, a democratizing force, in contrast to the typically hierarchical structure of most companies. It is also a bureaucracy-busting process … having no place for endless processes or avoidance of responsibility. That will take some getting used to by any organization … much less, those in the C-suites. Nonetheless, it’s a reality they will have to face.
I know that businesses are process-oriented with good reason, but they need to understand that social media is fluid and collaborative. Reacting to something in the Twittersphere or the blogosphere may demand creativity and instant responsiveness in order to take advantage of an opportunity or, in a more negative scenario, to preserve a company’s reputation. It may also mean not controlling the message as tightly as an organization would prefer. This is a real challenge to the typical three-or-more-day business process of getting signoff from five executives and the folks in legal just to make a change to the website or put out a news release.
So for better or worse, people on the front lines will be much more influential in the Age of Social Media. They’ll be the ones feeding real-time, real-world information back into the enterprise, and they’ll be the first responders when it comes to proactively … and reactively … putting information out via social media. This is why it is so important to make sure the network infrastructure enables these first responders to stay connected.
-Steve
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