Many businesses have been, for some time, dabbling in the use of social media, usually in marketing their products and services or monitoring and responding to mentions of their brands. As we’ve seen time and time again in client engagements, these activities usually take place in silos and are disconnected from other, often parallel, business critical processes such as customer support, innovation, and product and service delivery.
There is, however, another side to the use of social tools – so called “Enterprise 2.0″ – a range of internal use cases such as document sharing, knowledge management, collaboration and new forms of engagement with stakeholders and partners.
Jeff Jarvis, a well known media consultant, author of “What Would Google Do?” and Director of Interactive Journalism at CUNY usually focuses on the social media that audiences and consumers can engage with directly. He’s a strong advocate of making editorial processes more transparent, and using open social tools and platforms to do it.
Until now, I’ve never seen Jeff discuss, much less enthuse about, a linked up approach to social media that brings audience and consumer facing propositions together with secure, internal processes and technologies. However, he was recently invited to learn more about how Howard Stern’s programme does exactly this, and more, using digital tools provided by IBM, one of a growing number of Headshift partners:
“What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet — email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging — in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected….
Only thing is, IBM had to essentially recreate the internet and all these functions to do that, both so they could integrate it all and so that it could operate behind corporate firewalls. We internet snobs make fun of that, but I understand why they do that. But as we talk about how our internet should operate — how open standards for identity, for example, should work — the irony is that we could look at the interlocked IBM platforms to see the promise of it. It’s closed, for a reason, but it shows what an open structure would look like if it operated on truly open standards. I wonder whether there’s an opportunity for IBM to offer these functions at a retail level.
Our view, based on the concepts of Social Business Design, is that linking up social media activities outside the business, whilst at the same time recallibrating business practices, processes and technologies inside the business is where things get really interesting. It’s something my colleague Lee Bryant recently spoke about in a conference presentation:
“The focus of my talk was the idea that hanging shiny social media baubles on the cold, hard external walls of a corporate organisation runs the risk of creating a false brand promise unless this work has strong internal underpinnings in the form of social business structures that can do something about the noise, insights and feedback that outbound communications generate.
The key to achieving this is building bridges between the inside and outside worlds, and recognising that we are all (corporate, as well as human beings) products of our networks, ecosystems and connections.”
Sometimes, what goes on behind the firewall needs to – for legal, competitive, regulatory or confidentiality reasons – stay there, but it often does make sense to bring the outside in, and expose some processes, people and ideas where there is a business case to doing so. Social media – we usually call it social tools here at Headshift – can be the bridge that enables this to happen.
The approach reminds me, to some extent, of the architectural ideas championed by American Prairie School, of which Frank Lloyd Wright’s work provides the most well known examples. In many of the properties he designed, Wright used locally quarried stone to build walls and other structures that are visible both inside and outside the home, seamlessly connecting the two and blending into the natural surroundings. Doors can often be opened to balconies to extend living space, which up until this time had usually been internal, outside. At Fallingwater, probably his most famous work, he built a home on top of a waterfall, filling the building with the sight and sounds of water crashing down beneath – and through – the structure.
The work we’re doing to transform businesses into more socially calibrated entities often blurs the boundaries, as in Wright’s work, between the outside and inside. Audiences can become co-creators. Consumers and brands can work together to devise innovations in product and service offerings. One time competitors can become partners. To achieve this, however, requires both the introduction of new social business strategies and the use of social technologies which support them. These strategies and tools are rapidly maturing – if Jarvis thinks the things he saw Howard Stern’s production company doing were interesting, wait until he sees the next wave of what we’re able to achieve as we continue to make the boundaries between inside and outside deliberately, and meaningfully, porous. This is where social media is getting truly interesting, and genuinely impactful.
This originally appeared on the Headshift blog.
