Social Media Snippets

July 4th, 2008

Tags: Blog, corporate ownership, references, social media, titles

Now and then I come across thoughts and snippets that don’t really warrant their own post, but are interesting nonetheless. Here’s a collection of a few regarding social media.

You cannot own social media

There were a few really good articles on corporate response to social media here, here, and especially here, and the originating post that got me to really think about it here. In a nutshell, the desire to organize around social media campaigns is… well, Jeremiah says it best:

“It’s important to note, that in the end, these skills (the ability to communicate online) will disperse and grow to many employees. Generation Y comes to us with these abilities built it as a “digital natives”– yet the need to organize will still occur, it’s a knee jerk reaction to every corporation.”

The bottom levels, or ‘fringes’ of our workforce are starting to fill with people accustomed to communicating online with such speed and frequency that most senior levels of management have a hard time even comprehending. Normal corporate reactions such as blanket internal social media policies inevitably feel heavy handed, and the inevitable reaction is an unfortunate social backlash.

In the long run tweeting, blogging, Facebook, etc etc etc will be seen as ubiquitous as chatting or texting, and we all know how useful restrictions on those have been over the last decade (that is to say, not at all). The long-term shakeout will likely be similar: Keep it to yourself, don’t do anything discriminatory or illegal, and in return we’ll respect your right to free speech.

There’s nothing new about Social Media

Methinks I’m going to piss a few people off by saying this, but there’s really nothing new about Social Media. We toss around these terms and definitions to try to give shape the world around us, and when we come across a neat new interesting way in which people are communicating we like to slap a new label on it. Social Media is no different – we all love it, it sounds cool, it’s the hip word of the day, but in reality all it comes down to is that the social networks that used to exist in communities, neighborhoods and college campuses have increased in speed and scope. All the same social rules still apply: insulting people is a bad idea, buying people off is cheating, and actually smiling and listening to someone will earn their trust faster than treating them like a random statistic (regardless of whether you act on it). Even the ability to create communities isn’t new, it’s simply grown beyond the local.

Titles are meaningless, references are everything.

I had an interesting exchange with Steve Weiss at O’Reilly, in which we talked about the term “creative” and how it’s used. It’s no secret that I feel standard classifications are nonsense ( Designer vs. Developer? Strategy vs. Marketing? Leadership vs. Management?) but even moreso I take the statements of pretty much every self-proclaimed expert with a grain of salt. Anyone can call themselves a Guru, so without the reference of someone who’s opinion I respect I treat them with a rather large grain of salt.

Furthermore, the prevalence of reference sites, spam referrals and self-flagellating social cliques makes such trusted references suspect in and of themselves. See, I can find 100 people who will say something nice about me (say, on linkedin) simply if I ask them. Why? Because it’s rude to say no, and spin is easy. It is in-person face-to-face referrals that are far more substantive, especially if they’re unsolicited. Does someone casually mention another name during a conversation? Do their eyes light up about someone else’s ideas? It’s this complete lack of formatting that makes a reference more genuine, believable, and far more valid.

You can talk a lot. You can blog a lot. But can you act on it?

Self-declared expertise is all well and good (or not, as you see above), but unless you can take your ideas and implement them you’re just another windbag. That’s why I have such a strong love of Google’s internal policy to let the engineers drive the company – say what you will about the lack of advancement opportunity there, they certainly know how to execute. Similarly I have a strong distaste for any company that only shows their marketers, sales people, or public relations guys to the customer. Give me a project manager, give me an product designer, give me a financier (in the case of investment firms), but please, don’t give me someone whose key career skill is based on saying what I want to hear.

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