Making Social Technologies Work

Leveraging the Power and Managing Perils of Social Technologies in Business

Ronan Gruenbaum

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137024824
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Embracing social technologies at work is not just a blog from the CEO. It is about understanding all the opportunities where social media and technology activities could improve your company from marketing to operations. A practical guide for managers and an informative window into the world of social technologies in business.

Part 1

What is it?

chapter 1

What are Social Technologies?

In the beginning there was order, not chaos. Everyone knew what was what and there was a clear direction of information flow from the top to the bottom. Large organizations such as the BBC, ABC, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, or Le Figaro would broadcast to millions through TV, radio, and newspapers. Within organizations strategies, directions, and dictats would be decided from on high and passed down to the worker bees. The only way information could flow up the organization was through forming special interest groups, such as trades unions. Businesses were run, more or less, like the military, with a clear hierarchy where one level would obey orders from their “superiors” without questioning them or suggesting modifications. The division of labor means that not only were people expected to perform one specific task, but that it was assumed they would be unable to do anything else.

This paradigm, of top-down control and dissemination of information, existed throughout society, from political movements to the arts and media; from education to shopping. The “little people” did not have the power, and those at the top controlled things to maintain the status quo.

Now there is chaos, not order, and organizations are stuck with the dilemma of trying to ignore what is happening and pretend that there is still order, or accept the fact that there has been a significant paradigm shift (please forgive the cliché!), that the barriers to entry have fallen, allowing entire industries to develop through the disparate and scattered individuals who would never have previously been able to unite towards a common goal.

This book will help any organization embrace the chaos, keeping a wary eye on the pitfalls and potholes it will encounter on the way.

New technologies, social technologies, of which social media and Web 2.0 are probably the best known examples, have completely changed society, how we live, how we work, how we do business, and, of course, how we communicate.

Anyone can do anything and organizations both large and small need to be aware of the threats to their businesses, as well as embrace the new technologies and explore the opportunities that they can offer those who have the courage to change, to experiment, to be bold, and to prepare for the future.

There have, over the past decade, been dozens of books detailing how these technologies are changing businesses and industries, but there seems to be a lack of direction on how an organization can embrace and adopt the new technologies.

Those who are well versed in what social technologies are might choose to skip through to Part 2, but the mini-case studies included in Part 1 will hopefully spark the imagination on how your organization can succeed and join the twenty-first century. No strategic analysis today can ignore the influence and effect of social technologies. Take the “4Cs”– the company, the competition, the customers, and the context.¹ The company can be far more efficient and innovative if it explores how to make best use of its human resources and, where appropriate, outsource through crowdsourcing. The competition will no doubt be in a similar situation, so the organization that is not engaging will be left behind. The customers are all using social technologies and utilizing the new opportunities to shop directly from suppliers, publish, help each other, complain as a group, or influence new product development. The context in this situation refers not just to the existence of social technologies but to their effect on the geo-political landscape, where privacy, data protection, security, ethics, crime, espionage, and freedom of expression are all influenced by, and fundamentally changed by, social technologies.

It is not, therefore, a case of needing to be aware of these new systems, but a business imperative to engage and implement them within the organization.

All of this we can, for the sake of this argument, include under the umbrella label of “old media” not because all examples were in the media industry, but because the media they used – the channels of communication (both internal and external) – contrasts with what became known in business as “new media.” In 1990, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world-wide web following his work at the nuclear research organization CERN. The networks that existed before this, and which led to the development of the internet as we now know it, were focused on peer-to-peer communication but only between academic and military institutions. Peer-to-peer communication existed for a long time before that, through such things as phone calls, letters, bulletin boards, and face-to-face meetings. The birth of the world-wide web promised a great new space where everyone could speak to everyone; and through forums and chat rooms that did occur to a certain extent. The new platform allowed access to information at an unprecedented level with new business opportunities for reaching new audiences and selling products and services online. The websites for the BBC, CNN, Yahoo!, and most other companies were, however, little more than newspapers, journals, and brochures in an online space. Individuals were able to set up websites and publish to the world, but to do so required some programming skills (or the resources to hire a developer) and, therefore, still remained the preserve of the few. The now defunct Geocities is a notable exception to this rule and many non-techies got their first taste of content creation through such tools.

Sites such as Craigslist and eBay showed how simple platforms could, however, enable the great unwashed to get online and make money from it through selling both second-hand and first-hand goods – in some cases making a living out of it.

The internet was, therefore, still characterized by the paradigm of a one-to-many communication with most internet usage focused on accessing sites owned by large organizations to consume content or buy products online. Some now choose to refer to that period of the development of the internet as Web 1.0, to differentiate it from the new buzz-word Web 2.0, which was reportedly first used towards the end of the 1990s² but only took its current meaning in 2003 when coined by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media who organized the first Web 2.0 Summit in 2004.

In 2005, O’Reilly said “Web 2.0 is about systems that harness collective intelligence”³ and he defined the core competencies of Web 2.0 as:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability.
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them.
• Trusting users as co-developers.
• Harnessing collective intelligence.
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service.
• Software above the level of a single device.
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models.

There is now more power in the hands of the users

This definition has stood the test of time and could be applied to the broader set of social technologies. There is now more power in the hands of the users, using online services rather than traditional purchased software, tapping into the “wisdom of crowds” by making use of the extra data they bring and making everything easy for normal users, not just being the preserve of the technically minded.

The terms “social media” and “Web 2.0” are essentially synonyms. “Enterprise 2.0” was a term coined by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School in a MIT Sloan Review article where he defined it as “those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers.”⁴ He later defined Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals”.⁵ By “emergent social software platforms” (ESSPs), McAfee refers to all tools (such as the publicly available sites Facebook and YouTube) where the digital environments allow users to connect and collaborate online and where the software allows people’s interactions to become visible over time through links and tags.

According to McAfee, ESSPs share common technical features (which he calls SLATES for the acronym), such that they are searchable, they link to each other, they allow for anyone to post, they can be tagged for easier search and horizontal navigation (which shall be discussed more in Chapter 6), they enable content to be repurposed or the tool to be reinvented, and they allow for users to know when new content is published. The following terms are used throughout the book and are all examples of social technologies and all contain the SLATES features.

Crowdsourcing

The outsourcing of a project or task to members of the general public (the “crowd”).

Crowdfunding

The public, the crowd, funding projects (entrepreneurial, artistic or “causes”) with small investments and usually no equity in return.

Blogging

Online journals, now also used as easy-to-create personal websites.

Microblogging

Small messages that are “broadcast” to followers of that account (such as Twitter).

Folksonomies/Tagging/Social Bookmarks

The labeling of content by users that makes it easier to find.

Wikis

Websites (or online platforms) that can be edited by any user.

Podcasts

Audio and video content distributed online, often created by non-professionals.

Social Networks

Platforms that allow users to keep in touch and interact with their friends, colleagues and contacts.

Widgets/Apps

Small programs that usually do just one function on a website, a desktop, or a mobile device.

Internet of Things (IoT)

When technologies are social, where everything is connected and sharing information so that the technologies can “decide” what action to take without us needing to give any input.

Location-based services

Such as Foursquare that allow users to “check-in” to physical locations to show others where they are.

Mashups

Combining technologies to achieve a new functionality.

Virtual Worlds (VWs)

Three-dimensional graphical online environments that allow users to interact with each other through their online personas, known as “avatars.”

Gamification

The use of features of games to motivate greater engagement with a product or service.

Whilst this list is not exhaustive – new platforms are being produced every week that seem to provide new connectivity that challenges once more how people interact – it covers the most important and most common tools.

Many readers will no doubt know all of the above vocabulary, a number will know some, and there are those who will only have a cursory passing knowledge of what the terms actually mean and include.

The terms social media, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are, therefore, used interchangeably here to refer to any of the following tools used for business purposes, be they internally or externally focused. Part of the reason for this is that while McAfee suggests Enterprise 2.0 revolves around using internal platforms, it ignores much benefit that can be gained by using the same types of tools externally. Furthermore, those in business are often unsure of terms like “Enterprise 2.0,” whilst others feel that “social media” refers only to social tools that have no place in an organization.

Social media, however, suggests media – means of communication, publication platforms, connection through social networks. It does not necessarily include the concepts such as crowdsourcing, mashups, maker communities, or hackathons, which, rather than being separate developments, are all part of the same mindset that allows social media to exist and thrive. That is why it is better to think of these innovations as social technologies – innovations that have grown through the combined efforts of many and, often, can only operate with the input of the crowd. For these reasons, “social technologies” will be used here on in: It includes software and hardware; public and private platforms; for both social and business use.

Social technologies are s...