A Different Perspective on Social Media

Managing the Symbolic Dynamics of Social Media

You social media strategy needs to address social media as a symbolic as well as a material reality.  The management of symbols is different from the management of technology and confusing them can lead to both wishful thinking and missed opportunities.

Symbols are emotional objects pointing to something beyond themselves. Their value derives from what they point to and if that connection weakens, the value reverts to the material, not the symbolic, characteristics.

For instance, advertisements for diamonds emphasize enduring love because diamonds are valued for their symbolic connections to love and permanence.

If a symbol isn’t durable, our relationship with it resembles infatuation.  Initially, the excitement of being in love suspends critical thinking in favor of hope that a substantial relationship will emerge. As the thrill subsides, the symbolic attraction diminishes and critical thinking returns.  If we haven’t established connections between things that really matter, we drift apart.  Meanwhile, conflicts and incompatibilities that were obscured by the initial symbolic glow manifest and require resolution.

A symbolic analysis of social media should address three broad areas:

• What and why does social media symbolize? What are the deep sentiments that attach themselves to social media and why can it hold those sentiments?
• How robust is the symbolism?  If the symbolic power isn’t durable, you’ll want to recognize the beginning of the end so you can shift your marketing, production and other initiatives to the material realities that are ascending, and
• What flaws in social media’s material reality has the symbolic glow obscured?  An awareness of them will help you avoid potentially crippling liabilities down the line and recognize emerging market opportunities.

It’s not a coincidence that social media is taking off during a financial and business crisis that’s raised deep questions about the current system’s ability to serve the economic, social and environment needs of both individuals and society.

These emotionally traumatic times are making us yearn for an alternative that:

• Is structurally different from the traditional way of working and doing business,
• Decreases the power of the hierarchies we blame for the mistakes that got us here,
• Heals the sense of alienation we’ve tolerated as the price of material wealth, and
• Takes a more holistic approach to the world, and puts business, the primary force in society, into relation with our other needs.

Social media is a viable vehicle to carry that yearning because it:

• Is a very different way of communicating and therefore holds out the promise of deep, structural change in individual and organizational consciousness,
• Subverts the hierarchies toward which so much of our anger and disillusionment is directed,
• Promises to connect us,
• Transcends the boundaries between work, individual and collective life, and
• Has a catchy name: “Social” has powerful associations with the individual and collective ideals we think have been ignored and the “media” taps into our infatuation with technology.

Each of these symbolic dimensions has a different set of parameters that determine how and how long its power exerts.

Social media’s ability to tap into a desire for deep structural change depends on both our continued desire for fundamental change and social media’s ability to maintain its status as different.

However, nothing stays different for very long because as we get to know it, it stops being new and different.

The argument for a new approach to social media metrics is based on the idea that this is a new paradigm.  The relative influence between this approach and a more pragmatic one could be a good indicator of social media’s perceived newness.

We have a love hate relationship with hierarchies, which structure religions, celebrity and many things between.  As much as we complain about our lack of influence, it’s very difficult to get sustained participation in the electoral process, public meetings, and various social organizations devoted to give people power.

Is the hierarchical structure the hierarchy’s to lose?  Will it be willing to curb its blatant excesses in order to placate a general public that has historically been willing to trade self determination for a sense of security, diversion and comfort?

Right now, we’re adrift.  If it appears we have the option to return to last year’s status quo or continue on an unknown path to a fuzzy and mysterious future, what will people choose?  If they choose to return, hierarchical thinking will return to the mainstream and the disruptive capabilities of social media may become the perceived problem instead of the hopeful solution.

The human need for connection is durable, and social networking connects us in new ways.  Which of those ways are real and which are overreactions? How can you be connected to 500 people on Linked In or follow 1500 people on twitter?  (If each of them does one tweet of 20 words a day, that’s 30,000 words each day or over 100 pages.)

Is the numeric accumulation of connections any different than the numeric accumulation of money or other status symbols?

Can social networking break down the barriers between work, individual and collective life as long as businesses have a legally mandated fiduciary responsibility to make a profit?  Social responsibility may be a good strategic position in some markets, but that even makes the balance more lopsided because a healthy society becomes part of the business equation instead of its own justification.

When the excitement about social media dies down, what are some of the enduring features of human nature that we’ll discover it’s been repressing?

There’s a tension between social and privacy and the excitement about being able to be social has caused us to overlook some of the ways it inhibits privacy. How will people feel when they learn that very little they do in a social media environment is private and all that information starts being used to sell them in intimate ways?

The ability to communicate leads to the expectation of communication.  The standard is approaching an immediate response even though this is contrary to almost all time management theories.  The need for solitude is real. Will the ability to connect anywhere, anytime stop being exciting and start becoming a burden?  Will our intimate relationships suffer from constant interruption?

Do social media cause cocooning? Because they let us create our own social networks, we may tend to minimize challenging environments in favor of nourishing ones.  Being adrift in a sea of productive friction can be a good thing.

Social media is both a symbolic and material reality.  A significant part of its current appeal relies on it symbolic power, which is based primarily on our dissatisfaction with the current system and yearning for something new.  There are opportunities to participate in these symbolic dynamics, but it’s important to realize that these underlying drivers will not last for long. Symbolic analysis and management can help you recognize the signs of their decay so you’ll know when to shift your emphasis to the material realm and both capitalize on social media’s functional capabilities and provide solutions to some of its previously ignored shortcomings.

Base Hit Innovation

Base Hit Innovation is the unsung hero of innovation.  It doesn’t grab the hearts and minds of the thought leaders, headlines, business school cases and conference presentations.

Home run innovation is the killer app, the sensational new toy that sells out, the cool new digital audio player or video recorder that takes popular culture by storm, or the new social networking platform that doubles in size every month.

Its stories are the heroic journeys of power point slides and pep rallies that make us feel individually small and collectively big. Even the strike outs inspire us to go out and swing for the fence because failure is part of the quest for greatness.

But what about someone who spends a morning reorganizing the copy room and as a result 15 people each save a minute each day?  15 minutes a day, 1.25 hours per week, 65 hours a year for a 4 hour investment in time.  More than a 1000% return in the first year alone. 

Who’s going to dream about reorganizing office supplies?

Who’s going to write this up in a business journal?  What innovation consultant will put this in their portfolio, include it in their presentations or even notice it on their radar?

Who is even going to give this person the recognition they deserve?

Innovation is both a dream and an everyday occurrence.

But, while the headlines in the morning papers scream about someone who hit two home runs in last night’s game, the number of base hits will be barely acknowledged.

If we’re in the business of innovating, we need the glorious achievements of our home run hitters.

If we’re in the business of delivering sustainable revenues, we need to honor the base hitters and use them as role models to inspire everyone to innovate even if they can’t imagine on a grand scale.

Home runs keep the dream alive.  Base hits do the work. It’s a lot easier to win the game without hitting any home runs than it is to win it without any base hits.

What do you think?

Social Media as a Learning Environment

Social media is essentially an interactive technology that supports two learning dynamics: learning from and learning with.  The general view of it as a communication tool that lets us add to and listen to the global, unstructured data stream emphasizes the “learning from” dynamic:

• When you read a blog entry that tells about an experience someone had with your company or industry, you learn something from that entry,
• When you read a Facebook wall, you learn something from it,
• When you read the twitter stream, you learn something from it, and
• When you post to these media, people learn something from your post.

The environmental movement can teach us something about data streams.  If they’re polluted with hostility toward your products you can’t have a lasting effect by cleaning them up as they flow by.  You need to get to their source.  And if a data stream sparkles with good impressions of your brand, you can’t maintain that purity unless you protect the source.

That source is the deeper personal convictions and sensibilities that are built over time as people construct meaning from their experiences.

 “Learning with” environments create and change those perceptions from the inside out because they “empower learners to design their own representations of knowledge rather than absorbing representations preconceived by others.” (http://www.coe.uga.edu/~treeves/EM99Key.html)

In a paper (ibid) associated with his keynote address at the 1999 ED-MEDIA conference, Thomas Reeves of the University of Georgia discussed learning “from” computers as instructors and learning “with” computers to construct knowledge:

“research indicates that various interactive technologies are effective … to learn both ‘from’ and ‘with.’ … Preliminary findings suggest that in the long run, constructivist approaches may have more potential to enhance …learning than instructivist models (Jonassen & Reeves, 1996). In other words, the real power … may only be realized when people actively use computers as cognitive tools rather than simply interact with them as tutors or data repositories.”

(Cognitive tools are “artificial devices that maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function and that affect human cognitive performance.” (http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Cognitive_artifact))

Because social media can function as cognitive tools, they can “support the deep reflective thinking that is necessary for meaningful learning.” (ibid)

“Learning with” social media is more demanding and complex than “learning from” social media. It would be great if a system of bots that monitors and reacts to the twitter stream, Facebook walls and the Blogosphere could actually change deep seated beliefs about your company and give you true insights into your customers and other stakeholders. 

Unfortunately, educational theory and practice don’t support that fantasy.  “Learning from” can reconfigure weak connections into opportunities but is powerless to effect lasting change because it operates on the surface of consciousness. 

Only an environment in which everyone learns with mutual curiosity and wonder can create the shared knowledge which is an essential basis for the compromises and adjustments that form the foundation of strong and lasting relationships.

A complete social media strategy should combine “learning from” components that harvest the weak connections from the data stream and “learning with” components that construct the robust connections that form a shared understanding at the deeper source.  Here are some guidelines for developing and implementing such a strategy:

• Your “Learning with” component should involve everyone because:
  • Participation is the only way to stay engaged, and
  • It’s not about you learning from them or them learning from you.  It’s about building a cognitive common ground that includes new, different and deeper knowledge than either of you had about yourselves and each otherYour “learning from” component should monetize the meaningful relationships and deep connections you develop by “learning with.”  People who are listening for you and receptive to your message are the low hanging fruit who need to learn about opportunities that resonate with them. 
• You may “learn with” a different group than you learn “from.”  For instance, you might focus on developing deep and meaningful connections with thought leaders because they can leverage what they “learn with” you into the market.
• “Learning with” and “learning from” require different metrics.  Subjective, social metrics are more appropriate ways to evaluate the former and objective, financial metrics are more appropriate for the latter.
• Construct your social media environment from the bottom up, not the top down because “The source of the tasks or problems to which cognitive tools are applied should be learners, guided by … other resources”  See my separate blog post “Use social media to plan your social media strategy”

What’s a wiki and when should you use one instead of email?

A wiki is a collaboratively created web site.  Instead of sending out an email with an idea, a person puts that idea in the appropriate place on the wiki.  Instead of responding to an email, people go to the wiki and elaborate or edit.

This article contains a brief overview of how wikis and email lists differ on three levels:

• The degree to which the participants are “on the same page,” i.e. they share a common understanding of the project as it evolves,
• The ability to include the best information, and
• How efficiently they use peoples’ time.

The situation I’ll be discussing is a project within an organization.  However, most of the points are general.

COMMON UNDERSTANDING

What’s the current status of the collaboration?

• With an email list, everyone aggregates all the emails in their own way. 

  • They might not have the same set of emails 
  • Emails could be missing
  • They could be ordered differently

• Different knowledge, interests and meticulousness will lead to different 

  • Interpretations of the points people make in their emails,
  • Understandings of which comment each reply addresses, and
  • Levels of detail

• With a wiki there’s one common document.

What topics have been resolved?

• With email, it’s very difficult to ascertain that everyone has finished discussing a topic.  When they have, it’s then difficult deciding what they’ve agreed on.  If someone has more thoughts later, the topic needs to be reopened.
• With a wiki, all topics are open all the time.  A closure process at the end can let people add final comments.

How easy is it to get up to speed on a project?

• With email, a newcomer has to acquire the entire email thread and then summarize all the points.  In addition to the problems related above about the current status, the newcomer is at the further disadvantage of not having been able to ask questions and clarify as the project progressed
• With a wiki, the newcomer just reads the wiki.

THE ABILITY TO INCLUDE THE BEST INFORMATION

How diverse is the input?

• With email, only people on the discussion list know what’s going on and can participate.  The criteria for being on the list are usually
  • The project is a high enough priority so they’ll have the time to keep up on an ongoing basis, and
  • They have a threshold amount of common knowledge to bring to this project.
• The entire organization (and even outsiders) can be given access to the wiki
  • People for whom the project is a low priority can participate on an ad hoc basis because they don’t need to invest the time keeping up with the email thread.  They may have expertise or ideas about a specific area or areas.
  • People can bring uncommon knowledge

How asynchronous is it?

• With an email list, you need to keep up or topics will escape you and the conversation’s focus will move ahead. 
• With a wiki, you can participate on your schedule.  If you’re very busy for a while, you can take a break and catch up later. If you want to participate 5 times a week you can.  If you want to participate once, you can.

How detailed are the contributions?

• Generally, email discussions enforce the tyranny of the average.  People with above average interest or expertise need to hold back so their comments don’t confuse people or take up too much of their time.  People with below average interest or expertise feel pressure to learn enough so they can make intelligent comments about topics they’d just as soon ignore. No one wants to slow down the conversation with stupid questions.
• With a wiki, people can focus their energies and interests where they will make the greatest contributions. You’re not forced to deal with topics you’re not interested in and possibly waste people’s time responding to your obligatory comments.  You can also add unformed ideas to elaborate on at a later time.

EFFICIENT USE OF TIME

With an email list

• Part of each meeting is spent reviewing progress and re-synchronizing people’s understanding, and
• Everyone needs to integrate each new email into their overall understanding and refresh that understanding every time a topic surfaces.

With a wiki, there is one central understanding.

Use social media to plan your social media strategy

If you’re getting involved with social media, you must believe the premise that it gets you better and more robust ideas than a consultant could deliver.

So then why use a consultant to feed you social media ideas?  Instead, use social media to get ideas from your employees and other stakeholders.

There are at least four benefits to this approach:

• It’s a way to get familiar with how to deploy social media, its organizational friction and your comfort level with its consequences before you go public,
• You’ll learn who in your organization ‘gets’ social media and they’ll be great helps when you roll out larger systems,
• You’ll benefit from the power of social media to give you a larger quantity and a greater diversity of information about the social media world as it applies to your company than any consultant can deliver, and
• The process and the result have the same DNA.

The team managing this process needs some IT people, but should be heavily weighted towards facilitators (If you have an organizational development area, that’s probably a good place to look.) The role of your social media consultant should be as a resource for this team.

Because collaborative thinking works best if you have a critical mass of shared assumptions, start by setting up a wiki and asking your employees:

• How your company, your competitors, suppliers, customers, the public and they themselves are using social media, and
• What’s being said about your company and industry in social media? 

After a while, assign a team with heavy representation from the major contributors to clean up the wiki so it’s succinct and understandable.

Next, incorporate some more social media tools to solicit and discuss ideas about how people might use social media in their areas and what other applications they see (Metrics will be both key and controversial.) 

This will leave you with a robust set of ideas that are:

• More numerous than would have occurred to a dedicated team or consultant,
• Comprehensively analyzed from a number of perspectives by the people who will benefit from them and implement them, and
• Owned by the people who’ll determine their success.

What do you think?