TRAILBLAZER
On Saturday morning, August 23, 2008, at 2:45 in the morning, cell phones across the globe were buzzing with the text message announcing Joe Biden as the Democratic vice presidential candidate. Throughout the weekend, those who received the text message talked in restaurants and community meetings to discuss the implications. As the media spread the story, the unique way the announcement was revealed became almost as important as the choice of running mate.
The 2008 U.S. presidential election was unprecedented in many ways, one of which was the wave of support from younger Americans who seemed to be suddenly awakened to the political landscape. The swell of energy, passion, and commitment from such a wide variety of voters, particularly younger ones, swayed the polls in favor of the Democrats. The use of social media was a key factor in generating that energy and mobilizing a large community to achieve the common goal: elect Barack Obama. Regardless of his or her political beliefs or organizational affiliation, any community activist, corporate leader, or entrepreneur would love to create and harness that kind of fervor. Imagine what could happen if this were applied at work.
If you are part of an organizationâprofit, nonprofit, big, small, community, corporateâworking with others to achieve common goals is the name of the game. Organizations of all kinds want to engage employees, clients, customers, suppliers, and partners, building brand loyalty to their products and services.
But in todayâs world, leaders face an increasingly difficult environment in which to accomplish these goals. Ever accelerating rates of change are the hallmark of our postmodern society. Economic uncertainty, shorter development cycles, flatter organizational structures, and transforming social institutions are all coevolving at a pace never before experienced. Executing with speed and excellence has become a sacred mantra of corporate survival if leaders are to keep stride with increasingly fierce global competition. 1
If leaders are committed to gaining and sustaining competitive advantage, they will need to rely on engaged and committed employees and partners. In this volatile environment, the emerging phenomenon of social media can create an extraordinary opportunity for savvy leaders and organizations to achieve this advantage. These tools are accelerating and enhancing employee innovation, engagement, and performance. Those who are actively using social media in their organizations can be confident that they have new ways to improve their business performance, create long-term capability, and ultimately sustain their success.
Leaders everywhere should seize the opportunity to incorporate social media into their organizations to improve performance and to build highly energized teams and positive cultures. The advantages also include increased organizational learning, enhanced change readiness, and stronger relationships. As leaders learn to leverage social media inside their organizations just as individuals do outside their organizations, a tremendous boost of agility and vitality is unleashed. Within organizations, social media demonstrates the new realityâthe reality that employees are cocreators of organizational success rather than servants of the company who simply salute and take orders.
The leaders we have talked with believe that social media helps them extend their personal leadership influence in uncertain times by accelerating employee development, improving succession planning, and attracting energized pools of new workers in the war for talent. It is a powerful means of continually revitalizing the spirit, heart, and soul of the enterprise. Ultimately, individuals, groups, and organizations will be able to reduce the time it takes to make decisions. This new speed will impact performance and will improve organizational and social innovation.
Why âSocial Mediaâ?
In recent years the popularity of social media has spread like wildfire. Yet just as a wildfire can evoke panic with its random and chaotic movement, the ripple effects of this technology are catching many organizational leaders by surprise. If youâre among those feeling the anxiety and anticipation about how this proliferation of social media will impact your organization, we can certainly empathize. We have felt the same sense of urgency about understanding and tapping the power of social media in our professional activities.
A short year ago, we were in heated discussion about how to improve our talent management services at Oracle. How can we engage our leaders more? How can we extend our learning process over time? How can we create communities to exchange wisdom and experience? There was a sense of urgency among the team of leaders in the Global Organization and Talent Development group. We knew that our leaders were constantly looking for ways to stay ahead in the marketplace. And we knew that a large percentage of our employees were expecting us to deliver solutions that enabled them to work and learn in ways with which they were most comfortableâonline. We were aware that social media offered us a new set of tools to accomplish this, and became energized when we challenged our assumptions about how to enable people to participate in the talent management process. We were convinced that the use of social media would encourage more involvement and better outcomes. But some concerns came out as well: Once we invite participation, how do we guide the effort so that it is most productive? How do we combat organizational fears? How do we engage those leaders who may be skeptical about changing their behaviors? At the end of the meeting, someone said, âI bet a lot of other people are wrestling with these same questions; we should write this all down to share with others.â
If youâre reading this book, you know there is a game-changing shift happening, and you are grappling with the very same questions we were. You know you should do something ... now. We based this book on our own experiences confronting the wave of social media in the workplace and wondering how to make sense of it all.
The Changing Landscape
The term social media typically refers to the many relatively inexpensive and widely accessible electronic tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on a common effort, or build relationships. This may sound like the âsame old thing,â but itâs the advance in technology and the changing behavioral norms that have brought a whole new meaning to these activities, supercharging the volume of exchanges among people and extending their reach to every corner of the globe.
When we chose the definition of social media that best describes the focus of this book, we gravitated to the most simple and profound one, given to us by Richard Dennison, senior manager of social media at British Telecom: âSocial media is about participation.â That participation can take the form of simply viewing relevant information that was previously hidden from view. But most often it takes the form of communicating, collaborating, and connecting with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Itâs about the interactions between peopleâindividuals and groupsâand the great potential to share more, learn more, and accomplish more than our grandparents could ever dream possible. Unlike traditional forms of media, which have limited pages or time on the airwaves, social media is âinfiniteâ in its potential.
Social media is represented in various forms and functions: discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and may include the use of videos and pictures. Each of these tools uses a special kind of social technology (a communication platform that makes connections possible) called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the phase of the Internet that enables anyone to create information online. Youâre likely to have already used some of the popular tools, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, for social networking, Flickr and Snapfish for sharing photos, Wikipedia and Wikispaces for collaborating to share knowledge, and Blogger.com or Wordpress for sharing ideas through blogs. These are just some of the social media gaining momentum through viral marketing at the time of this writing.
The social media wildfire rages on, fed by the high winds of at least three converging forces: the nature of the business environment, changing workforce demographics, and rapid advancements in software technology that enable social connection. Although we will be exploring these forces in more detail in Chapter Two, letâs take a quick look at them now.
The Changing Business Environment
The constant flow of information made possible by the Internet has created a more complex business environmentâmore information, more technology, more possibilities for partnering, more unprecedented challenges. In addition, many organizations operate in multiple countries, and employees have become accustomed to working with colleagues across the globe. Because information is available to anyone, the ability to use it in new ways has become a hallmark of the current business landscape. We have moved from the industrial era well into the information age. Employees who are able to synthesize new information, advance research, and create new innovations are highly valued. E-commerce has changed the way we purchase goods. Trade and consumption are shifting as well. The âlong tailâ theory, first described by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired magazine article, shows how marketing and production strategies are changing; that is, companies are counting on selling a smaller volume of unique items to a wider variety of consumers over a long period of time. This theory has been applied to alternative workforces as well. For example, the work that used to be performed by employees or outsourced to contractors may now be given to an undefined larger community that will contribute via the Internet, leveraging the concept of mass collaboration. 2 This is one of the many ways businesses are rethinking how they use their human resources. Traditional ideas of the âtypicalâ career life cycle are becoming obsolete.
Changing Demographics
As the world turns, our global population distribution is shifting. With each successive generation, people are becoming increasingly comfortable working with Internet tools, which dramatically change the nature of work, whether the user is in a nonprofit organization or a commercial business, whether he is a line employee or a senior executive. Gen Yers, or Millennials, are generally extremely comfortable with communicating, connecting, and collaborating via social media. In fact, they demand that their companies provide this capability. The Obama campaign understood this opportunity to reach the younger voters where they âlivedâ through social media. Many Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, and even Gen Xers are still unfamiliar with this way of working and living. We will discuss how leaders struggling to use social media tools to recruit, retain, and develop their workforces need to remember that one size does not fit all.
Software That Enables Social Connection
Traditional mediaânewspapers, television, and radioâhave been effective means of communications. But with the advent of newer technologies, other forms of communication are proliferating at great speed. The Internet has forever changed the way we communicate. Newspapers have gone online, television news programs are now available on the Web, prime-time shows are available for replay on network Web sites, and radio programs are now available to download and play on mobile devices. Of course, the Internet has also given rise to social media aimed at enabling relationships and collaboration. The speed of this proliferation is rather unprecedented.
Various reports show that year over year, the use of global social media tools has increased fourfold and greater. Various types of social media are everywhere. We canât escape them. A revolution is under way. Organizations may choose to ignore this phenomenon at their perilâor they can actively choose to incorporate social media into their regular operations. Doing so may be uncomfortable for many leaders who fear that communicating through social media can take on a life of its own. They may not recognize the value of employeesâ engaging in a constant exchange of ideas. However, we believe that these cautious leaders will soon see that employee use of social media will prove more advantageous to the organization by harnessing information that can be transformed into knowledge and innovation.
Short-Term and Long-Term Be...
