Beam me up to THIS planet, Scotty

clip_image002Thanks to Ross Mayfield I stumbled on this HBR article on “How Social Networking Has Changed Business”. The central point is how work has changed thanks to social networking.

Fascinating view points. And, incomprehensible parallels between consumer social networks and enterprise social networks, no matter how you look at it. I suggest you read it in its entirely.

Its these kinds of posts that really get my goat. On one hand, it trivializes the effort required to really solve business problems and casts enterprise social networking as some one size fits all model that can magically address challenges and opportunities that matter most to executives. On the other hand, it does little justice to the promise of enterprise social computing by equating it with Twitter and Facebook usage scenarios when in fact were just starting to see pointed benefit in Customer, Partner and Employee performance.

Lets break it down…..

All thanks to Facebook

“During the year, social networking morphed from a personal communications tool for young people into a new vehicle that business leaders are using to transform communications with their employees and customers, as it shifts from one-way transmission of information to two-way interaction. That’s one reason Time magazine just named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year.”

Um…no. I don’t think young Zuckerbergs bestowed adulation has any thing to do with how we communicate with employees.  Yes a lot of inspiration came from consumer social networks but that’s where the world of business takes a sharp right turn to fix gnarly performance problems. Interaction with customers, maybe. Though even there, the numbers are hardly proven.

On Authentic Executive Communications

“Leaders like IBM’s Sam Palmisano, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Carlson’s Marilyn Nelson, and Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria are all active social network users. Why? Because these social networks are a unique way of broadly communicating real-time messages to the audiences they want to reach. They can write a message anywhere, anytime, and share it with interested parties without any public relations meddling, speech writers, airplane travel, canned videos, or voicemail messages. Now their words are much more authentic and can be remarkably empowering.”

Yes, there’s far more authenticity but to drive messages through the appropriate channels, where’s the proof that there’s been a whole scale shift in PR, Lead Gen and Call Center budgets from traditional channels? Channel augmentation, sure, but not really in terms of displacement value. And that’s what matters. Also, “broadly communicating real time messages” is a kinder way to describe “broadcast” – something that’s existed forever. We just have more efficient mechanisms for broadcast in Twitter. Twitter itself admits that it’s not a social network.

On the evaporating need for Middle Managers

“The biggest threat presented by social networks is to middle managers, who may become obsolete when they are no longer needed to convey messages up and down the organization. The key to success in the social networking era is to empower the people who do the actual work — designing products, manufacturing them, creating marketing innovations, or selling services — to step up and lead without a hierarchy.”

Possibly, the most promising benefit of enterprise social networking is in fact for middle managers. Middle managers get to stay intimately involved with remote and matrixed teams, report more meaningful metrics to management based not on some stale performance report or estimate but based on live, in the flow progress as seen and facilitated by enterprise social networking. Middle managers get a clearer idea on employee performance by seeing work happen, instead of guessing who did what. I can go on and on with other benefits but you get my point.

And my absolute favorite on ‘Flattening Organizations’

This put me over the edge when I considered breaking for 15 minutes to write this up…

“Social networking is also flattening organizations by distributing access to information. Everyone is equal on the social network. No hierarchies need get involved.”

On which planet? Professor, this translates to what our customers in the business world call “rogue”. Social Networking in the enterprise when done right, actually gets more work done – by flattening access to both those up the food chain as well as the best experts in the trenches. But if “no hierarchies get involved”, it remains a mickey mouse effort that never becomes part of the arsenal of tools and utilities that help get serious work done. In the real world, the hierarchy will remain. Michael Dell remains CEO of Dell Inc. Its just that now he’s involved at every level where he chooses to participate.

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I’m just not sure which planet offers such a distorted view of the benefit of enterprise social computing. The article starts off with a claim that Social Networking is the most significant development of 2010 and rivals the revival of the auto industry. I wish the author had stuck to a more scientific view of the impact on consumer networking instead of carelessly jumping the electric fence into the office park.

<end of rant>

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