dan mcquillan's List: introduction to social media IS51020A - lecture 5 - social business

• A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

• Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

   

  

   

  Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal.
• Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.
• Markets are conversations.
• Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
• Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
• These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
• There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
• What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.
• To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
• • Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.  
  • Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.
• Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.
• Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."
• • Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.  
  • Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"
• • Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.  
  • Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
• • We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.  
  • If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.  
  • We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?  
  • You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.  
  • You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
• When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.
• We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

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• A new class of company is emerging—one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers. We call this new kind of company the networked enterprise.
• Results from our analysis of proprietary survey data show that the Web 2.0 use of these companies is significantly improving their reported performance.

• All Organizations Are Social, But Few Are Social Organizations
• Organizations work top down through social interactions structured around the organization chart, or hierarchy. And they work end to end structured around their business processes. These two dimensions — hierarchy and process — shape the way organizations see the world, its challenges and, more importantly, the portfolio of potential solutions to those challenges.
• We see this when people get things done by working in the so-called "white space" in the organizational structure, or by working across the "seams" of a business process. In their ways of working and connecting with each other, they do more than just what they are told top-down and more than what is defined as their job. This is the social dimension.
• Every organization has a social dimension. The challenge is that the social dimension is not accurately reflected in either the organization's hierarchy or its process flow.

• A social organization mobilizes its people — from associates to customers, suppliers and others without regard to hierarchy or position — and their interests, passions, knowledge and experience. Tapping into the collective wisdom of everyone creates a new source of competitive advantage, agility and future innovation.

    

  A social organization is one that is able to address significant business challenges and opportunities through creating this "mass collaboration." A

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• • There is no such thing as a social media strategy.
   
  • There are only business strategies that understand networks.