What this means for managers

EUAN SEMPLE, social computing blogger and consultant

With the arrival of Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, along with the more apparently work friendly Linkedin and Xing, social networking has appeared on the business horizon and is causing quite a stir. What should organisations and their managers do about these sites? Should they ban them or encourage their use? Which sites should they use? Are their staff going to become more productive through embracing these tools or waste even more time than they do now?

Business people are often jumpy even about the use of the word ‘social’ in a business context. Many of us still feel that work has to be painful to be taken seriously. We still have a mindset, established in the early industrial era, that work is about transactions, repeatable processes, cogs in the machine. There has even been a degree of suspicion of networks, with networking conjuring up thoughts of nepotism.

And yet businesses employ people; people need to trust each other to work together and get things done; and their willingness to trust each other depends in large part on being social with each other. Rubbing shoulders, passing the time of day, passing on stories, these are all ways that we learn about each other, what makes us tick, and what shared values we have. Creating environments where this can happen more readily helps oil the wheels of business and enable staff to get things done.

And informal networks have always been a major, if previously hidden, part of the world of work and there has always been a tension between the org chart and the ‘real’ organisations most of us inhabit. If you consider a network as a collection of people willing to help each other and work together to achieve things then they become more apparently indispensable to business. A network can alert you to things you need to know, and let you call on the help of others when dealing with an opportunity or a problem. You can also pass on what works after the event helping others and keeping the value of the network going.

The range of organisations realising these potential benefits is growing daily and my clients now include banks, insurance companies, governments and global commercial organisations.

As more and more people experience the connected online world they are realising that virtual networks can be as useful as ‘real’ ones and the more people they are connected to through those virtual networks the easier it is to get things done. In addition the virtual networks don’t exist in isolation as they also help build relationships in the real world. One of the biggest challenges in any large business is knowing what people are doing and where to find the right people to talk to about any particular challenge or issue. As a client said to me recently it is easier to find other people in her own company on Linkedin than it is on any of the more formal business systems they have.

The biggest benefits of these networks comes with scale. At the BBC there were eventually 23,000 users of our online forum and this meant that pretty much whatever you wanted to find out about someone would have done it before or might know someone who had. Once you start finding people chasing the same problems as you you start to form relationships and the levels of trust increase. Having tools that allow users to create sub-groups of the whole environment helps people to move from one space to another to have different types of conversations.

When we started building our combination of forums, blogs and wikis at the BBC we were consciously trying to build the online equivalent of a collection of Cotswold villages. There is a mix of architectural styles and very different buildings with lots of footpaths between them. You know where the pub and church are, you’re comfortable in the environment and are happy to stop and chat on street corners with people you know. Most corporate intranets tend to be more like Milton Keynes. On the surface they’re efficient with lots of straight lines and signposting, but you get lost because everything looks the same and there is little inclination to spend time with passers by!

And this is where the different characteristics of these tools come into play. In many ways they mimic physical spaces: we make judgements when we arrive about what the space is for, what the other people there are like, what we might use it for and whether our time there will be productive. Facebook and Bebo create a different impression, and a different type of conversation, from tools like Linkedin and Xing which project a business-like image and have appealed to those whose experience of social tools is mainly through work.

The most important factor in businesses getting the most out of online tools is how they engage with them. Language begins to matter in these environments and the word “manage” isn’t really appropriate. Often the manager isn’t in control, even if the tools are the organisations own, and the more they try to control things the less well people respond and there is a real risk that users disengage.

This doesn’t, however, mean that these spaces are unmanageable or that managers don’t share the potential vastly increased influence. If they are prepared to see themselves as yet another node in the network with their own perspectives and experience and be willing to express those, then they will discover that these networks are just as much for them as for everyone else. Being able to express the importance of business issues and seek support in solving problems are of as much interest to them as to everyone else. Even discussing in the tools themselves why those tools might represent a business risk can be very effective!

Whichever tool you deploy, or whichever tour staff engage in, you really need to be in there with them. Talking with them about what they are doing, why they are doing it, how they might do it better and how you all collectively might benefit.

The biggest risk is not to get involved. Arguably ignoring these tools isn’t an option given the numbers of staff already involved. Equally, banning them is problematic as the risk then is that you just push the online conversations elsewhere and have even less ability to influence them. So getting you hands dirty, getting involved and learning the ropes seems the best, if not the only, option.

So start working out where people are spending time online, watch them and learn from them. See who is most effective at using the tools and how they use them. Get in there and learn the ropes and then either work to ensure that the best possible is achieved in the environment they are already using or discuss the need to move and adopt newer better tools.

There will be lots of managers moved to engage with these online environments either to deal with the perceived risk or just the desire to look cool. In order not to wade in and get things horribly wrong you’d better get playing and learning as soon as you can!