So I recently blogged on a white paper by Martijn Linssen. I got the chance last night to read it more in depth and thought I would post my thoughts on where I agree and don’t agree with his views on a Social Business Revolution………or lack thereof.
Martijn makes some good points
- We need a tool to help us connect with those who are further away and who have relevance to us. You can easily connect with a small number of people close to you.
- Social isn’t a fix for everything
- There are specific relationship to look out for: Customer to company, employer to employee, employee to employer
- Social business tools can really help with the mass producers with short lifespan products. It’s hard to be relevant to people when your product is consumed in less than a minute. That’s why you see a lot of social media efforts from the a number of consumer product goods companies.
- Social has always existed. Yes, it has. We have created the equivalent of the watercooler or the smoke break but instead of depending on random chance who you meet it now runs around the clock and lets you find people whether or not they are at the watercooler.
- Social business deals with exceptions. If it hasn’t already been automated by technology, there’s probably a case for social networking software to enable knowledge workers to take care of this exception.
What I don’t completely agree with
Martjin says”
Over the past years, social (business) evangelists and devotees have described what social is, how it would work, and how it would evolve – mainly focusing on society or the customer, and not so much on the employee
However, the focus of Lotus Connections, Jive, MOSS 2010, Teligent, and other tools is on the employee. I think Martijn has just seen so much emphasis on the consumer side without seeing what’s been happening on the business side……..and a lot has been happening on the business side.
Martjin says:
What is Social? Does Social exist, really? Hasn’t it always existed? Some people argue for the latter, but the truth is that many people are getting connected to each other simply because technology and price allows them to. The people’s revolution of Tunis and Egypt weren’t made possible by Social, but by technology: flat rate Internet access, and mobile to access it, turning each and every one of them into a mobile headquarter and / or journalist.
Yes and no. For anyone who has used old style collaboration tools that focus purely on document sharing and made you do it their way………well you know that just because access is available doesn’t necessarily make it something you will use. What if you had flat rate internet accss and a mobile phone but sms didn’t exist. No text messages. No video easily pushed from your phone to all your friends. The application of technology has significance here. The changing views enabled by the consumer side pushed everyone on the business side on a far different path than the centralized admin model we all know and hate.
Martijn said:
Yet, Social is about connecting unknowns to unknowns, turning them into knowns: at some point there will be no more unknowns to know, simply because you’ve reached information saturation.
Yes………and no. It is about connecting the unknowns to the knowns. I disagree about reaching a point of unknowns. Map out how many possible connections exist at a company of just 1,000 people. It’s a VERY big number. Now move up to companies that have tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees. You can NEVER reach the point where all the unknowns are known. Social Business software makes it possible to realize you don’t know something and then either go find the answer or go find the person who knows the answer.
Martijn said:
Do I foresee a Social Business Revolution? No, none at all. I do foresee a slow Social Business Evolution, in some departments of some companies, which are employee-driven and facing unknown customers. I also foresee a small, slow Social Enterprise Evolution for those companies where knowledge sharing and management has failed for decades – then again that encompasses the vast majority of companies…
Again, yes……….and no. Yes, compared to key transforming technologies like internet everywhere, this is a relatively small change. It can be compared to more of an evolution. That said, we are talking about a fairly fast evolution. When a tool finally meets the needs, you would be surprised how fast it can be used. I gave a social business 101 session at a health insurance company. At the end of the session, I asked who wanted to be a guinea pig as we rolled out social networking software and enabled them on these technologies. 8 out of 10 raised their hands. Keep in mind, this was an insurance company and not a high tech company. The demand is there as long as the tools provide value for the way in which people are willing to work.
Then look at the activity streams in these tools and how they are enabling these streams to read, respond, publish, and even transact straight from the stream. Now that’s a fairly big change from how you work today. That’s coming quicker than you think.
Summary
Martijn has a lot to say about the Social Business Revolution or as he believes, the lack thereof. I think perhaps he focuses a little too much on the consumer tools of this “revolution” (no caps). If he looks beyond facebook and twitter, I think he will see there’s more to it. It’s not a complete revolution. He has a point. But it’s bigger than he thinks.
