A Briefcase Book

Manager’s Guide to Social Media

By Scott Klososky

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-175433-0

Contents

Introduction1. Social Technologies: An Introduction2. Social Technology and the Organization3. Setting the Tone: Social Tech from a Leadership Perspective4. Managing the Use of Social Tools5. Selecting the Best Social Tech Tools6. Managing Your Online Reputation7. Building Rivers of Information8. Managing the Organizational Voice9. Social Tools and Virtual Teams10. Managing Social Tech by the Numbers11. Integrating Social Tech with Velocity12. The Future of Managing Social TechIndex

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Social Technologies: An Introduction

Kim runs a marketing office with six direct reports. Four of her people areunder 32 years old and have been with the company for less than two years. Moreand more, she observes them spending time on their computers using Facebook,Twitter, and watching YouTube videos. She can’t help noticing that they sendlinks to each other and share interesting articles and videos. At times she’ssure they’re helping to expose each other to new ideas and information, yet shealso suspects they use company time to communicate with friends. Increasingly,her four young direct reports spend time on their mobile devices duringmeetings, either texting, checking social sites, or taking notes; it’s hard tosay.

Their performance still seems to be up to par, but Kim wonders if they could doa better job if all these online tools, to which they seem to be addicted,didn’t distract them. In the last six months she’s noticed that they’re puttingin less hours at the office, yet they also seem to be working after hours andsometimes on weekends. Worst of all, they seem to have command of new tools thatare regular parts of their day, and Kim has never heard of most of them. Part ofher wants to encourage them to quit spending so much time online, and the otherpart senses this is a new way of working that can be effective. What should shedo next?

Managing people is always a challenging task. Human beings can be unpredictable,emotional, and hard to organize into a frictionless team, even for the bestleader. Add to this mixture sophisticated technology tools that enable them tocommunicate for free with millions of people instantly, anywhere in the world,and you have the recipe for disaster—or stunningly good results. Today’sorganizations have never had four generations that are more different in howthey view the world and have never seen a fire hose full of free tools coming atthem like we see from the Web today.

These dynamics offer managers a wonderful opportunity to impact the way socialtechnologies get integrated into the organization’s daily activities. On theother side of this wonderful opportunity is the possibility of a tremendous messif managers are uneducated about or don’t understand these technologies.

If managers fail to provide a good example by using these tools personally, theywon’t only be failing as leaders, they’ll also create a chasm between themselvesand those they lead. It’s now clear that social technologies aren’t a fad, andthey’re here to stay. This demands that managers become knowledgeable about thefield.

A Bit of History

Without huge fanfare, the term Web 2.0 made its debut shortly after thedotcom crash of 2001. People were searching for an answer to the question ofwhere the Web would go after its overheated rise in the late ’90s, andsubsequent return to earth. While some people wrote off the Internet as havingmuch less impact than was predicted, the first signs of a new era wereappearing. Instead of people just connecting with companies offering products,they began to connect with each other.

Communities of interest began to form where people from around the world withspecific areas of commonality could find each other and share information,ideas, opinions, and files. Then savvy, young entrepreneurs began to build toolsthat let us share content and opinions in various formats—for free.Whereas Web 1.0 is all about e-commerce, Web 2.0 is about connection. Somuch so, that the term Web 2.0 gave way to a more specific moniker: socialtechnologies.

The Vocabulary

There seems to be confusion around the vocabulary of social relevancy, socialmedia, social networking, and social technologies, so let’s clear that up first.Social technologies is the umbrella term that encompasses three discreetareas of the Web 2.0 era. There is actually a fourth catchall category that Iwill just say encompasses all of the discreet tasks that people are putting theword “social” in front of, for example, social CRM and social recruiting. Forour purposes, it’s important that you understand the three major categories soyou can invest resources into being productive with all of them.

Social Relevancy

The first is social relevancy. This describes the concept of an onlinereputation or credentials, and all the tools available in this area. Theseinclude the online reputations of an organization and an individual. Both have alevel of social relevancy online today—whether they choose to influence itor not. Think of social relevancy as your online credentials. When a potentialcustomer, partner, vendor, or investor looks online to learn about yourorganization, the collection of links, user opinions, and content they canaccess adds up to your online relevancy. At an individual level, when HRdepartments, buyers, partners, or potential girlfriends or boyfriends search foryou online, they’ll also find content, opinions, and links that will compriseyour online credentials.

Social Media

The second is social media. This describes any Web site or service thatfacilitates using a piece of media to share an idea, advertise, promote, ordeliver content. Media in this sense could be documents (scribd.com),presentations (slideshare.com), photos (flickr.com), or videos (youtube.com.)For some reason, the media (newpapers, TV, radio) seem to use this term often asthe umbrella term, and that just confuses the matter. Social media is already apowerful source of information transmission on a worldwide scale. People with anexpertise in a discreet area or with something important to get across areleveraging social media sites to “talk to” 1.8 billion other people—forfree.

Social Networking

The third part of social technologies is social networking. Thisdescribes any Web site or service that facilitates people communicatingone-to-one, or one-to-many, in a conversation. This includes MySpace, Facebook,Ning, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, Foursquare, blogging, etc. Social networkingincludes everything from eCommunities to broadcasting communications throughtext, audio, or video in a live format. Social networking is about connectionthrough conversation among people independently or through organizationsspeaking with an organizational voice.

There is actually a catchall category that should be mentioned, and that is allthe “socially augmented” services that are now being identified by putting theword “social” in front of the activity. For example, social CRM (customerrelationship management) and social recruiting, just to name a couple. It’slikely that for the next decade we will attach the “social” moniker to manytasks and will eventually just drop the need to specify that people are usingsocial tools to augment the task.

Describing What Social Tech Really Is …

There seem to be many people—especially in the older generations—whostruggle to understand the whole phenomenon of social tech. It can seem like adangerous place where privacy is thrown out the window and security does notexist. They cringe when they see a teenager texting at the dinner table. Theyhave little idea why someone would watch YouTube as if it were a TV channel, andthey clearly are confused by the concept of Twitter and why people would sharetheir thoughts and activities with the world five times a day. Social tech feelslike an amorphous trend that is growing quickly, in lots of directions, with noinstruction manuals.

We can define this pretty easily if you think of social technologies as acollection of new forms of communication and community.

With the Internet acting as a transport service, hundreds of Web tools are beingbuilt (and offered for free in most cases) that provide various ways to connectwith others. These connections can be with people we know personally, orcollections of people who share our interests. They often provide informationstreams in real time, meaning that, for example, information about an event isshared as it happens or that someone has a thought to share and puts it outthere. Along the way, we have also developed ways to search and findindividuals, and to connect to them in ways based on the information stream weprefer to receive or provide.

These tools aren’t restricted to a chosen few. They’re offered to anyone withWeb access, and that number is growing by millions of people a month. This is anamazing thing because never before in human history have we had the ability totalk to nearly two billion people in a free and unfiltered manner. Not onlythat, there’s a growing list of possible ways we can “talk” to the rest of theworld. We can communicate through mobile devices by texting and e-mail, withpictures, videos, in 140-character microblogs, and with full-sized blogs.

We can use free tools to call someone anywhere in the world, and oh, by the way,you can add a video to a call as well (Skype). The scale and speed of ournewfound ability to communicate with each other is staggering.

With every blessing comes a curse. For people who manage others, this newfoundcapability adds to an already-growing list of complex areas that needsupervision. This isn’t a collection of new tools to ignore, block, or forbid.Too many people rely on them in their personal lives and to enhance theirbusiness careers, especially the younger generations who have adopted thesetools quickly and fearlessly.

Understand this: social tech is more than Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Froman organizational standpoint, these applications are a tiny part of the overallpicture. We explain in detail many of the concepts that now fall under thesocial tech umbrella. By the end of this book, you’ll have a broader vision ofhow pervasive this new field will become. Hence, leaders need to developmanagement skills to leverage social tools instead of being frustrated by them.

How Did We Get Here?

Before we discuss best practices for managing how people can use socialtechnologies to enhance performance, let’s step back and examine why social techis exploding at all. Nothing like this happens without a reason behind whatdrives the heavy adoption of a tool.

Understanding these dynamics can help us envision where it might go. It’s aninteresting scenario we find ourselves in. The youngest people in the workforcehave naturally adapted to many of the new social tools, while the oldestgeneration only picks it up after its clear value has been proven.

The Drivers of Usage

When viewed from a high level, what drives social media and social networking ispeople’s basic desire to connect and communicate, which for most of history hasbeen limited by geography. As transportation improved in the twentieth centurywe were able to expand our reach in communicating and connecting. For thatentire century, we used the telephone as a connection device that couldelectronically allow us to reach out and “touch” someone. Just as new inventionslike the telephone and the automobile changed our lives in dramatic ways at thebeginning of the last century, social tech is changing our lives in thiscentury. It’s all about connection and communication—plain and simple.

This Is Nothing New

Social tech has not created a new human dynamic; it simply has enhanced ourability to communicate with others—anywhere, anytime, in multiple ways,and usually for free. It also has allowed us to build communities of interestthat don’t concern themselves with demographics, geography, or language. Itprovides a giant database of conversations and content that can be searched tofind patterns in news, subjects talked about, or information about a person orcompany.

This enhanced ability to communicate is a powerful tool for organizationsbecause a huge part of the success of organizations is communicating withconstituents. This could take the form of branding, messaging, sales,relationship building, or simply informing. Once communities began to form,organizations could participate in the community or advertise to the members.This form of advertising has huge benefits because these eCommunities providethe advertiser with concise demographic information on their members.

It’s not clear why people are having a hard time accepting that tools likeTwitter, text messaging, Facebook, and YouTube are becoming commonplace. Itharkens back to the days when people were afraid to use the telephone or whenpeople refused to send e-mail on the computer because it was more comfortable tohave something in print and to answer it with notes written on the bottom of thepaper. Social tech is simply a variation of tools with specific purposes forenhancing our ability to communicate and connect.

Social Relevancy: The (Sometimes Unintended) Outcome of Communication

As mentioned earlier, one of the branches of social technologies is socialrelevancy, which is a different animal than social media or socialnetworking. Social relevancy is all about the online credentials or reputationthat gets formed from the content and comments posted about an organization oran individual.

This is a byproduct of all the communication and connection that is now goingon. We’re creating digital shadows online, and these shadows paint a moredetailed picture of us all the time. What others say about us is at least asrevealing, or more so, than what we say about ourselves.

The Growing Inventory of Online Content

A typical organization with a Web site has, for the last fifteen years, workedto make sure that when someone types in the firm’s name, its Web properties comeup at the top of the list. Now we are quickly reaching a point where a search ofan organization’s name might deliver a stream of mentions on Twitter, YouTube,SlideShare, Scribd, in blogs, and discussion groups, all on the top search page.Their Web site might be at the top of the page, but it’s surrounded by snippetsof conversations. This now gives a searcher the ability to quickly assess whatthe Internet Herd thinks of a brand or organization.

In addition, any content the organization has published through its”conversations” on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs is quickly visible, as iscontent posted in social media sites. In other words, it’s now possible todevelop a quick opinion about an organization by aggregating what you findonline that does not exist on the organization’s Web site. Rather, thisinformation is supplied by people who have come in contact with the organizationor are individuals within the organization who have posted thoughts andopinions. The fact that firms can no longer control the message has deep impacton the brand, the reputation, and the ability to sell products for companies.

The same situation exists for people in general. When you search the name of afellow employee, a sales prospect, or a job candidate, you can access a growingdatabase of information provided by that person, and more importantly, by peoplearound them. By reviewing the content a person has posted, people’s reactions tothat content, the number of people the person is connected with, and thecomments made by others about this person, you can often literally establishtheir credentials.

Posting Is Forever, and You Need to Be Listening!

Because we’re in the early stages of using these new social tools, few peoplerealize that what they post is forever, searchable, and public. This has led towell-publicized stories of people losing jobs, opportunities, and friends overwhat they posted without giving much thought to the repercussions. Recently, ayoung woman blogged a negative comment about a company that was holding anannual convention at her employer’s hotel. The besmirched company ran alistening campaign online and immediately spotted their name in a negative blog.They called the manager of the hotel and complained, and the employee wassummarily fired.

We talk more about online reputations later in the book. The takeaway from thisearly mention of social relevancy is that it is critical to manage your onlinereputation and that of your employees. Perhaps you’re thinking that maybe you’lltry to separate yourself from all of this by staying as far away as you can fromonline sites. It’s not a positive thing to be invisible online, and the truth isyou won’t be able to stop others from talking about you. We need to learn how tofind what is said, and manage the positive and negative content as best we can.

All this newfound capability has come to us because we’ve mixed our desire forconnection and communication with the digital plumbing system that is theInternet. History has shown that what we crave as human beings, we often figureout how to supply. We wanted to fly, and we learned how. We wanted to movequickly from place to place, and we coinvented the automobile. We wanted to beentertained in our homes, and we created radio and TV. We wanted to cook mealsquickly and developed the microwave. We want to cure all disease, and we’remaking a dent in that. We have missed the boat on developing a vegetable thattastes like rum raisin ice cream, but who knows, maybe that will be next. Wewanted an instant and robust ability to talk to any other human one-to-one, orone-to-many, anywhere in the world—for free. Now we have it.

Along with that, we’ve created an archive of conversations and content that hasturned the word “privacy” upside down. Instead of seeking to hide informationfrom the rest of the world, we’ll need to provide lots of information about ourthoughts and actions so we can move forward in our careers and connect to peoplewho are looking for us. This may sound like heresy to people who have grown upfor years being taught to hide personal information, but the truth is the gameis changing, and it’s not going back to the way it was. Another truth is thatsome people go way too far in providing information and lack the discretion tosee that certain facts are dangerous to supply to the world.

Why It’s Critical to Actively Manage Social Tech Usage at Work

With all these new capabilities being brought to work by users, we’re seeing alot of chaos inside organizations as to how managers and employees use andgovern social tech. An unfettered ability to communicate and connect is shakingup how people work, how they talk to each other inside the organization, and howcontent is provided internally and externally. We lack the rules, mores, andregulations to assure that these powerful tools benefit the organization insteadof drain it.

You’re standing in the breach. Harnessing the power of social technology isgoing to happen as millions of managers execute important leadership tasks tohelp their people learn and integrate these tools. The first job is to put inplace cultural rules for how people access and use social tools at work. Thesecond is to document and institutionalize the policies for communicatingexternally with social tools. Finally, you’ll need to provide the vision andtraining so employees learn to appropriately leverage this growing inventory oftools. If managers don’t perform these tasks, organizations will stumble aroundfor years trying to figure out what this field is all about.

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(Continues…)Excerpted from A Briefcase Book by Scott Klososky. Copyright © 2011 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
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