The book makes a great point about the different nature of social media endeavors, recognizing that some of them are top-down while others are bottom-up. It does provide useful advice about how  to better plan for top-down initiatives to make them more successful, and how to create an environment that better aligns bottom-up initiatives to corporate objectives.

I would recommend reading this book to anybody who is struggling with articulating the full value of social media and wants to have a comprehensive view of what it takes to make it an effective corporate tool today.

However there is an important question that the book, in my humble opinion, leaves unanswered: what is the right balance between top-down, corporate-driven activities, and bottom-up, personal activities?

The center of the book is the enterprise and how social media can create value for the enterprise: Anthony and Mark did a great job at describing how the principles that support community building and mass collaboration relate to management principles, and how managers need to be more guides than managers.

But little is said about the critical link between the personal purpose and the corporate purpose, despite their invitation to ask the question “what’s in it for participants?”, as a key point to assess whether a community purpose is sufficiently magnetic to keep individuals together.

I believe that the future of social organizations will be one where the organization recognizes the power of the individual and accepts that individuals – be they customers or employees – will always see themselves, rather than their organization, at the center of a community or a collaboration endeavor. Communities will not be sustainable because they are cool or well designed or well managed: of course all these elements will play an important role, but the key ingredient will be to make community building and participation a tool for individuals to  succeed in their personal endeavors.

For all those who are not convinced with this position, just think about the fact that social media still is a relatively new phenomenon. People using it will be moving from one job to another, from one organization to another, over the years, and the links they establish, their social networks, the communities they participate in, will be part of their personal assets. Next time they move into a new job, they will assume (and not just expect) that those assets will be available to them and that they will be both exploiting and further developing them during their jobs.

Nobody really knows how future, community-empowered workers who are used to play across organizational  boundaries will fit into any current or foreseeable organizational structure where management principles can be successfully applied.

I am sure that some of us do realize the inherent conflict (I do think we need a stronger word than “dynamics”) between individuals and organizations, be they commercial corporations or government agencies, that social media can fuel. However we prefer not to stretch our imagination and discover even greater social media risks for organizations than those they already face today. We do so because adding more risks to the plate would paralyze the initiatives that many organizations are piloting to better understand and get value from social media.

Books like “The Social Organization” help articulate a mid-term roadmap, plan and execute successful project, but do not try to capture the longer-term future. A future where the very concept of organization as we know it might be subsumed by different ways in which individuals decide to self-organize around particular purposes. A future where what we call “enterprise” today may just live the short space of a fortnight and then be dismantled, A future where entire middle management layers may be replaced by technology and behaviors that allow communities to self-discipline.

Personally, I have no crystal ball. But I bet that the best way to figure out how that future might look like is to think more about the “social individual” than about the “social organization”.

One attendee shared that, despite the success their communications people were having in using social media, they could not get much success internally, and others confirmed they were through a similar struggle in picking the right platform or have employees make sustainable use of an existing platform. As we looked at the difference between the external success of that first client and their difficulties on the internal side, it became apparent that – once again – “purpose” is what makes the difference. Information shared by that agency on social media is about the weather and – let’s face it – almost everybody cares about the weather. But then, if you turn your head inside the organization, not everybody shares the same purpose, unless occasionally or perhaps in small teams.

This is because social media is about people, primarily a tool for employees to do their job better.

Which leads to the other point we debated: the need for a professional identity on social media platforms that is distinct from personal identity. One participant said that employees are actually encouraged to create a separate professional-only identity on Facebook and other consumer social media platforms if they want to use those for work-related purposes. However this may conflict with the terms of use of the platform and – anyhow – the way people will use social media and manage the boundary between personal and professional will be theirs and theirs only (notwithstanding the relevant social media use policies and codes of conduct).

Unless government organizations understand that what really sets social media apart is the word “social” rather than “media”, and that they are people tool and not corporate tool, most attempts at developing effective strategies will be futile.

• Do your social media policies cover different roles and how? – This was meant to discuss whether participants’ organizations have only a blanket social media policy that applies to all employees, or they have policies that adapt to specific roles in the organization
• Do you allow, enable, encourage staff to participate and how? – This wanted to explore what sort of guidance staff and their managers have to support their engagement on external communities.
• What role do you play in helping the business use social media? – This was about how comms people use social media and whether IT provides advice about how to best do so,
• Do you support bring-your-own-device policies and how do they address social media? – This was meant to explore the links between allowing employees to use their own devices and a higher propensity to blur the boundaries between personal and professional use of social media

There was less discussion than I expected. Partly due to an early start  (7:45 am is not exactly ideal in Spain), partly due to the fact that – despite the interest in the topic – organizations are still moving their first steps and are very cautious in looking at areas where there is the greatest potential but also the greatest risks, such as employee engagement.

I will be coming back to this after running two round tables on the same topic today and on Wednesday.

Smart Government

• Serious budgetary concerns are percolating through US federal government agencies and, while state and local governments have found themselves in the past in financial difficulties, this is almost totally new to them.
• State and local government remains in a tight fiscal situation and need to continue looking for efficiencies. For some, this will require IT leaders to be more radical to achieve even greater levels of efficiency, despite how tightly run IT may have become after the 2008-2009 recession.
• Government financial sustainability is being recognized as a major issue, and the Gartner messaging around smart government start resonating with people, although there is still confusion with other, more traditional uses of the term “smart”.

Cloud computing

• Cloud computing is still at the top of the list in terms of client interest on new technology (together with mobile devices and applications), but there is a real chasm between the level of interest and the actual deployments.
• Some data suggest that cloud in government may move significantly slower than expected. Only 10% of email deployments will be cloud-based by 2014, it will take a decade to reach 50% (as my colleague Matt Cain said in a public sector session today), and cloud email is the first mission-critical application to move to the cloud.
• It is not clear whether the effect of the “cloud first” policy issues at the end of last year but the then federal CIO is going to trigger a sustainable move to the cloud or just a series of relatively minor, compliance-driven migrations.
• If the market evolves slower than expected, there are questions about the return on the quite significant investments that some vendors are making.

Social Media

• There is still a good level of interest, but there has been very little progress in terms of policies and strategies.
• On the other hand, there is a better understanding that consumer social media do compete with corporate collaboration platforms, and that blocking access to the former is not a sustainable proposition.
• Involvement oh Human Resources in social media policies is still very marginal, and those most concerned remain IT and communications

Open Government and Open Data

• Interest on this topic has dropped dramatically (at least in the context of our Symposium). I had a single one-on-one scheduled on the subject, with a non US client, and it turned into a no-show.
• In one of our panels we discussed one of our draft predictions about the increase of open performance dashboard: the audience was almost evenly split between those who feel this is unavoidable, and those who were raising several concerns about the possible drawbacks of this level of transparency, especially during tough times.

All in all, a great experience as usual, and an invaluable source of data points for my research.

I was scheduled to speak after the Milan city manager, and a number of executives from media and technology providers,on the topic of “Social Media in the New Normal”, as the so-called New Normal was the theme for the event. Previous speakers covered municipal wifi investments to boost a digital market, how a major media company uses social and mobile, and the favorable outlook for mobile apps.

I was a bit concerned that pitching the secondary role that communication and marketing folks should have with respect to the rest of the business, would clash with their belief that they have to control the use of social media in the enterprise as tightly as they possibly can. In fact, I could see a few faces staring at me during the first few minutes, but then the compelling examples of how even an industry as boring as government is using social media warmed them up. In a conference where there had been a very quiet Twitter activity to that point, I started seeing people retweeting and reinforcing some of my quotes. There was a negligible fraction of skeptics and, more importantly, none of the self-appointed social network experts who animate TV and radio talk shows and have zillions of followers said or wrote anything. This surprised me since, as soon as I arrived, I was told by the organizers that one of them had promised he would grill me with questions: but although somebody told me he was around, he did not show up or introduce himself. Next time, maybe.

It seems that several commercial enterprises are going through the same struggle as government agencies in finding out the real value and the most appropriate governance approach for social media.

Although I cannot derive too much from half a day, it seems to me that some governments are asking themselves tougher and more timely questions than their commercial counterparts. As I said at the beginning of my speech, there is a lot that commercial enterprises can learn from government agencies. While use that line almost as a joke to empathize with the audience, it looks like that is really the case.

Whereas there is no such thing as a widely recognized and “standard” sets of metrics, people use metrics such as number of followers, richness of social network as well as tools and sites like Klout.com. However, like all metrics, also social networking metrics should be taken with care. Here are a few points for reflection:

• Different people have different attitudes to how they use social media. Some accept or actively seek a high number of connections, while others are more selective. Should the former be considered better than the latter?
• Different people use different degrees of visibility of their social media activity within their networks: some show everything to everybody, others use circles and groups far more carefully. Should people less concerned with privacy and more concerned with self-promotion be considered more trustworthy?
• Different people use recommendations (such as in LinkedIn) and similar mechanisms in different ways: some actively seek and trade recommendations, while others do this more selectively or do not do it at all. Should I trust a reference-hunter?
• Different people produce and relay content in different ways: some post a lot of links, retweets, etc, while others post relatively little and mostly personal views. Should I value a content relayer more or less than a content author?

Given the diversity of use, it is pretty tough to make comparisons that hold across such a inhomogeneous user base. And yet there are people who claim clout and authority out of their hectic FB, Twitter or Friendfeed activity.

So, there is no substitute for carefully reading what people say, for looking for references about what they did in real life, for forming one’s own judgment about the trustworthiness of a person based on good old brick&mortar metrics (even if digitally-enabled) rather than trusting numbers and indicators.

The good news is that in my experience and in the field I cover, the vast majority of people are trustworthy. However they also happen to be people who I know in real life or are trusted by people I know and trust in real life.

Beware of emerging self-supporting networks, where people reference, congratulate, recommend, repost each other. They may be perfectly fine groups and individuals, but they may equally be people who would have absolutely nothing to say if they were not (at least for the time being) on the cool side of the digital divide.

In the past I have had similar conversations, where clients had been disappointed by the uneven uptake of those tools often due to the fact that man were already using consumer solutions like Google Docs, LinkedIn or Facebook to support internal collaboration. Therefore I asked him whether he had conducted any internal research or survey to figure out how employees were using those consumer tools, since he admitted that none of those is blocked on the corporate network. He exuded confidence in his enterprise collaboration strategy, and I kind of expected his dismissive answer to my insinuation that the consumerization of collaboration may be an issue in his agency.

I assumed that access to social media was a marginal phenomenon, but I asked anyhow if he had any statistics about access. I almost balked when he said that little over 50% of their bandwidth was consumed by social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn). He regularly reports to the different business unit managers the relevant stats, and he correctly pointed out that it is up to them to determine whether the use of social media is justified.

However what struck me was his assumption that employee access social media for personal use only, or at most to engage with external stakeholders. It did not occur to him that with such a pervasive use there may be a non-negligible use for internal collaboration purposes, and that some employees may now been relying on mixed internal-external communities for some aspects of their work. As a consequence the enterprise collaboration platform may not be fit for their purposes and the uptake may be disappointing.

The bottom line is that many people do not get yet that the impact of consumer social media inside the organization is going to be as significant as the external impact, if not more.

I did not follow the program until when I read an outcry of angry bloggers, social media experts, consultants, who said that the program was ill-informed and gave a very imbalanced view of benefits and risks of social media in a country that absolutely needs a boost in the adoption of the Internet. It is remarkable that in a country where almost everything is given a political connotation and opposing  parties cannot agree on anything, criticisms to the program have arrived from all corners. Also, I do not think we can say that Italy is behind the curve, with almost 18 million registered Facebook users.

Some of those who have been most vocal in attacking the journalist and her program are the proponents of the Italian Digital Agenda, which I commented on a few weeks ago. Interestingly enough some of the discussion on Facebook has been so heavily polarized, that the few who tried to defend the journalist saw their posts deleted by some of the self-appointed experts who keep appearing like parsley on blogs, newsmagazines, TV programs.

It appears that being critical of the Net and phenomena like social media and search, and advising about their risks does not make anybody many friends. One wonders why warning against risks could not be seen as an attempt to train better educated potential clients rather that an attempt at arresting development.

There is no doubt that there are issues to be dealt with and people must be made aware of the risk they and their relatives are vulnerable to, in order to take the necessary precautions.

On a personal note, I am appalled by those parents who believe they are successfully raising their kids, and let those kids wonder on Facebook and other media without any supervision, so that I can see on their (public) walls that they have really questionable acquaintances, drink alcohol under age, or post pictures which leave very little to the imagination. But I am equally surprised by self-appointed social media experts who do not understand the difference between posting something personally or on behalf of their employer, or those who, despite a respectable resume, fight like kids in pissing contexts about who-said-what-to-whom.

As a wrote a while ago, we must not forget the essential principles behind social and professional relationships, the need to teach people – young or uniformed or both – how to act responsibly, the urge to expose the charlatans who claim to be experts of something they barely understand, the importance of  “guarding the guardians”.

Opposing and controversial views are helpful to look at both sides of an important phenomenon: they should not be seen as a threat by social media supporters, but rather as a stimulus to do better. Unfortunately this is also a fertile ground for “religious” battles, and the vehement attacks of those supporters is the clearest symptom of the frailty of their arguments.

A couple of days before the earthquake, a Japanese colleagues had sent me an email asking for information about written research that we may have on certain topics but he had been unable to locate.

As I was busy traveling and doing other things, I put that on my to-do list for this week. However, after the earthquake and the tsunami stroke, I replied to his email asking my colleague how he and his loved ones were. He replied almost instantly, telling me that everybody was fine but as he was at work when the earthquake happened and public transportation had been disrupted, he had purchased a bike to ride back home for 30 kilometers.

I admired his promptness and adaptability, and replied t his original email shortly afterward, with references to the research he had been asking for. To my surprise he replied the morning after, apologizing for the late acknowledgment of receipt. I mean, it must have been 7 am at his place and I had emailed overnight for him, and yet he was apologizing for not acknowledging earlier.

I thought a lot about him these days, and the invitation earlier today made me reflect that if there is one way we can concretely support our Japanese friends is by helping them return to normal or keep conducting business as usual as best we can.

Indeed international companies are likely to limit travel to those areas, in consideration of their employees’  safety, as well as taking into account travel advisory from foreign affairs departments and insurance implications. However there are a few simple measures that could help:

• If travels are not possible, then extending business hours and using teleworking facilities to increase the overlap between working hours in Japan and in western countries should be considered.

• Employees may be asked to donate time rather than just money, and be available longer hours to take calls and have virtual meetings with Japanese colleagues and clients.

• In conversations – either over the phone or through email – we should refrain from asking about the situation, unless our colleagues or clients do so, beyond a polite salutation when making contact.

• Response to emails should be timely, but according to the timing suggested by the colleague or client request. Replying too fast or changing the normal pace of interaction – unless this is clearly dictated by the specific case – might be perceived as us not considering such interaction as business as usual.

Social media may also play a role in supporting more informal exchanges on topics that may be relevant to overcome these difficult times.

Like this blog, I hope.

No more specialized offices, no more social media silos, no more experts or consultants building new strategies. Social media is a tool, amongst many others, for public affairs professional to do their job more effectively and efficiently.

The next step is to realize that every single employee and soldier will end up using social media. Not for fun or as an additional task, but as one of the many tools to do their work. Be that communication, intelligence, administration, or combat.

I always find intriguing that the best examples of social media use come from the military, a domain that one would expect to be less at ease with this topic, especially after the Wikileaks case. I suspect that this is because defense organizations have usually clearer purposes and a stronger sense of mission than other government entities: and purpose is the secret sauce for social media success.