Anthony J. Bradley
GVP
3 years at Gartner
19 years in IT
Anthony J. Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research, managing teams that cover business process management, project and portfolio management, enterprise architecture, IT procurement, IT sourcing, and vendor management. Read Full Bio
by Anthony J. Bradley | April 8, 2013 | 2 Comments
Recently Gartner published a press release in anticipation of my participation in the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit conferences where I will be presenting the following:
Social Collaboration Demands a New Approach to Architecting Human-centric Solutions
and
Gartner Keynote: Driving New Business Outcomes With the Nexus of Forces
Unfortunately, several press outlets including Computerworld, and CIO Magazine picked up a misinterpretation of the press release stating, in various forms, that the overall success rate with social is 10%. This is neither the intended message of the press release nor the result of Gartner’s research.
The press release states, and our research shows, the “Provide and Pray” approach to social collaboration sees about a 10% success rate. The subtitle of the press release is, "Provide and Pray" Approach Has Just a 10 Percent Success Rate. It goes on to elaborate with the following. ”Without a well-crafted and compelling purpose, most social media initiatives will fail to deliver business value," said Anthony Bradley, group vice president at Gartner. "This provide and pray approach provides access to a social collaboration technology and prays something good comes of it, like a community forming and participants’ interactions naturally delivering business value. As a result, this approach sees a 10 percent success rate, and the underlying reason is usually that the organization did not provide a compelling cause around which a community could form and be motivated to provide their time and knowledge. In other words, purpose was lacking."
The overall message being, “Don’t take a ‘provide and pray’ approach to social collaboration. Instead focus on purpose.”
The methodology and initial data set is explained in the Gartner research report (only available to Gartner clients):
Employing Social Media for Business Impact: Key Collective Behavior Patterns
by Anthony J. Bradley Updated 12 July 2012 ID:G00173838
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | January 8, 2013 | 2 Comments
Mass collaboration is the future of competitive advantage in business. See Gartner’s infographic on the evolution of business.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter may be all the rage today. But they’re only the beginning of something really big. Their true impact is that they’re spurring a new era of mass collaboration.
Hundreds, thousands, even millions of people can effectively collaborate – like never before – to achieve unprecedented results. Yes, the marquee social web successes like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook are great examples of mass collaboration in general. But what’s more profound is the impact mass collaboration is beginning to exert on the business world. Just like mass production, mass distribution and mass marketing before it, mass collaboration is the next big evolution in expanding business impact. We now have hundreds of examples of organizations that have substantially magnified their capabilities by tapping into the power of the masses. For example, CEMEX employees as part of their SHIFT initiative collaborated across organizations and geographies to overcome sales challenges in target regions by collectively identifying successes from other regions where the challenges were similar. Or, consider a health care organization that’s using social and mobile technologies to rally their field workers, government social workers, community volunteers, and local church groups to collaborate in helping low income customers to overcome the basic needs hardships like housing, utilities and transportation that keep them from continuing their healthcare plans. Or, there’s the European auto parts manufacturer that uses a social software platform to quickly bring all of their engineers to bear against critical product performance challenges.
The business potential of mass collaboration is enormous. It can turn your customers into an extension of your sales force. It can bring all of your engineers together on your biggest design challenges. It can rally your managers to formulate and drive critical change. The possibilities are endless.
And yet, the vast majority of business leaders don’t understand or recognize mass collaboration as a means to better business performance. Leaders must upgrade their understanding of collaboration, which is evolving from an amorphous, all-encompassing, but little-understood concept to an “engineered” sets of human behaviors. For example, in researching our book, The Social Organization, we discovered that underneath just about every successful implementation of mass collaboration are four major collaborative behaviors; participant contributions, social feedback, collective judgment, and change propagation. And within each of these four higher-level activities are lower-level and more specific collaborative behavioral patterns. We are now seeing this “engineering” trend embedded in new types of collaborative applications and tools such as Answerhub, Rollstream and Spigit that businesses use to address horizontal challenges such as sales force effectiveness, supply chain management, and idea generation with well designed mass collaborative behaviors. In concert with this trend, we’re seeing more and more companies adopting gamification (the application of game mechanics to non-gaming activities) as a catalyst for collaborative behaviors. For example, Spigit applies sophisticated game mechanics with a virtual currency and idea “exchange” where ideas can be traded like stocks. People gain reputation and placement on leader boards as they accumulating “wealth” by initiating, investing in and supporting successful ideas. This is definitely not old school collaboration.
Organizations are also starting to inject mass collaboration into their business processes, which we call social BPM (business process management). Using social collaboration, the marketing organization of a consumer goods company is empowering their marketing professionals to collectively identify and outright eliminate low value processes to ease the process burden and allow room for more creativity. Another organization is extending their process for identifying and eliminating product counterfeiting to include all employees and customers. And hotel managers of a European chain used social collaboration wiki technology to formulate and propagate a new towel life cycle management process involving a new towel, different detergents and a new laundering protocol that saved the chain almost a million Euros in the first year.
This portends a future where mass collaboration permeates business operations. After all, who’s better at illuminating, optimizing and evolving your most dynamic and critical business processes than the people who are doing it or experiencing it every day? If they own a way to formulate change, then adopting the change becomes a natural progression. And that’s saying something since human resistance is a primary impediment to organizational change. Successful social BPM will help organizations respond and adapt to change more easily.
This is just the dawn of the age of mass collaboration. Leading organizations are driving transformation now, and mass collaboration is on the fast track. Leaders who seek competitive advantage through mass collaboration must actively drive change— and fast, as the window of opportunity for competitive advantage is closing. The next two to three years will be critical, and how you, as business leaders, respond today to the mass collaboration movement may determine, in the not too distant future, whether your business thrives, survives, or disappears.
Are you experiencing the new age of mass collaboration in your company? What are you doing about it?
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | April 4, 2012 | 1 Comment
You might think that mass collaboration is ill suited for business process improvement. The chaotic, unpredictable, messy, voluntary, often controversial and sometimes ugly interactions that can characterize social collaboration seems almost the opposite of the clean, calculated, activity centric, deterministic approach that many associate with business process management. Well, the times they are a changin’.
The most strategic, transformational, and beneficial organizational processes just might be found in the chaos of the community. Social collaboration represents a whole new frontier for business process management. I use “frontier” specifically because it will be new exploration, challenging, and fraught with both danger and great opportunity. And exploring a new frontier requires some new approaches. New approaches that can enable, unearth, examine, enhance and support processes from within communities of customers, employees, suppliers, partners, contractors, prospects, etc.
Success in this new frontier demands a few new mindsets including:
- A focus on social processes that enable business processes
- The ability to discover and nurture emergent processes
- Understanding the shift from designing “the right” process to enabling multiple experience opportunities
- And how to effectively employ community protectionism from hostile processes
Consider the CEMEX example from the book The Social Organization where CEMEX employed a social collaboration approach to increasing the use of alternative fuels in their plants. Instead of taking a traditional process improvement approach they employed social processes to enable a community of plant leaders to themselves build the processes for increasing the use of alternative fuels. Yes, it was messy and sporadic and unpredictable as they initially stumbled around trying to find their way. But over time the community got better at it and ended up wildly successful. They accomplished in about 8 weeks what they estimated would have taken about 18 months with traditional process improvement efforts. And CEMEX also believes that the social collaboration approach gave them a much greater rate of adoption. We call this Design by Doing.
I will be delivering a keynote presentation entitled “Driving Organizational Success by Combining Social Media and Business Process Transformation” at the
Gartner Business Process Management Summit on 25 – 27 April 2012 in Baltimore, MD. I’ll be discussing this exciting topic. Yes, I did say exciting!
I’d love to hear from you on any thoughts and experiences you have around “crowd processes.”
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com . Check it out!
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | March 6, 2012 | 7 Comments
I had an interesting call with a US retailer a few days ago. And by interesting I don’t mean good. They are not a Gartner client and it became clear pretty quickly that they wanted me to prove how Gartner could possibly help them since they are on the leading edge of social media.
They talked about the special relationship they have with Facebook and the Facebook functionality and related technologies they are using. They also talked a good bit about Twitter. It was Facebook, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter (with some mobile technology this and that thrown in) and apparently they have little interest in LinkedIn, Pinterest and some other social Web environments.
So I started talking to them about social media strategy best practices and they stopped me cold. They said they had the strategy down and wanted to get into the weeds. I carefully remarked that, we can talk about the weeds, but they may not have the strategy down as much as they think. This is where it got a bit contentious (which is very unusual BTW) as they really did not like that I was questioning their leading edge status. After all, they have a special relationship with Facebook!
So let me go on the record here in stating that:
If you are talking primarily about social media channels and technologies then the chances are very high that you are not leading edge.
Leading edge organizations talk about the community collaboration they facilitate and the business value resulting from meaningful participant interactions.
And, from my research, the vast majority of organizations that are building high value customer communities are not doing it on Facebook or Twitter (or LinkedIn and Pinterest for that matter). Not that there is anything wrong with them (obscure Seinfeld reference). 
Having a Facebook page and/or a Twitter account, no matter how robust, is no longer good enough to be leading edge (and it hasn’t been for quite a while). So I then went to this organization’s web site and Facebook page and didn’t really see any community collaboration facilitation going on. Though they did have a few hundred thousand Facebook “Likes.” So they’ve got that going for them (obscure Caddyshack reference).
Opposing positions welcome. I guess supporting ones are welcome also.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization." Check it out!
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | March 1, 2012 | 1 Comment
I recently returned from a two week tour of northern Europe where I met with over 20 organizations to discuss their social business strategy efforts. I started in Copenhagen, then to Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London and finally Helsinki. I’m happy to say that it seems the book, “The Social Organization: How to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Employees and Customers” is gaining a good deal of traction in Europe. Last fall at Symposium in Barcelona I was impressed with the social business mentality I witnessed. It seems to be continuing. I have two more extended trips to Europe planned for this year and will keep you posted on what I experience. Here are some of my observations from my past travels in Europe.
- Just about every organization was experiencing the less than successful practice of “Provide and Pray” approach and not gaining significant engagement. One organization spent considerable effort to develop a social collaboration strategy that was primarily technology platform based only to have it rejected by the executive board who basically said, “We don’t see the business value.”
- I was happy that the vast majority of my meetings were being led by business leaders and not IT. IT leadership was often present as an important partner in social efforts but business (or mission) leadership was in the drivers seat.
- I’m seeing growing social business\social collaboration strategy efforts in the financial industry and government (even local government) within these European countries
- Some of the most innovative ideas and plans I’ve seen for employing mass collaboration for “game changing” business or mission value is in Europe.
- The European organizations with whom I met seemed less consumed with marketing communications and the social Web (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) and more focused on creating highly collaborative organizations (internally and externally).
Now, these are general observations from my recent travels and inquiry so it represents interactions with, in total, maybe 60 organizations so it isn’t necessarily statistically representative of all of Europe. But I still think they have value as observations.
Any observations from you on the state of social business in Europe?
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | November 28, 2011 | 2 Comments
In most organizations, social media established a marketing beachhead. It served its purpose by raising awareness of a new set of technologies based on new principles of peer-to-peer discussion, openness, and cross-boundary communities. Indeed: the marketing organization has put social media technologies to work with very visible effect.
But we need to break out social media and talk about more than marketing and technology. Instead, we need to talk about what social media enables: the ability to collaborate in new ways — which is particularly important for business leaders interested in creating more collaborative, innovative, and engaging organizations.
An executive may boast, "We have Twitter and SharePoint, and we’re on Facebook." But if you were to ask the executive how social media is positively impacting business results, you may raise a significant issue. When social media is applied to marketing, it creates activity — and in marketing, activity is a good thing. But activity alone does not create business results.
The use of these platforms can truly transform a business by moving beyond brand marketing. Social media has enabled business leaders to think differently about how they engage and interact with both customers and employees. But just because you’ve opened the door doesn’t mean you’ve crossed the threshold into a new way of working, managing, and leading. To achieve those ends — we’ve described these as attributes of a "social organization" — it takes more than setting loose the technology and praying that something good will happen.
A social organization strategically applies "mass collaboration" by combining technology, community, and purpose. It addresses significant challenges or opportunities through the creation of purpose-driven collaborative communities that are enabled by social media.
As we have said in previous posts, every organization is social, but few are social organizations. Mass collaboration gives an organization the ability to amplify its capabilities by raising the engagement, innovation, and involvement of people, internally and externally.
Thinking about social media in terms of social organization and mass collaboration increases its potential value. Social media requires more than new technology, and its application can breathe new life into business processes, practices, and challenges.
We need to move beyond social media as a technology tool. We need to determine how to apply that tool along with others in order to do things that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive.
Some organizations are already doing it. Consider CEMEX’s SHIFT initiatives, which have radically reduced cycle time and increased results via mass collaboration. Loyola University Chicago engages prospective students in ways that have raised the quality of its admission decisions, improving revenue realization by 15%. And Electronic Arts has created collaborative decision making that fosters creativity, rather than fight it.
If we don’t break out social media from marketing, it will likely join other technologies that remain popular buzzwords but have fallen short of their potential value — business intelligence, knowledge management, customer relationship management. Also, we risk breaking the promise of social media marketing when customers are served through autocratic business processes. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can create a truly social organization that can deliver enhanced value to customers and employees who expect more than marketing from these new technologies.
So as a business leader, talk about social media technology, celebrate the marketing results it achieves, but recognize that this is just a start. Break out social media from its marketing beachhead. Think about how you can create mass collaboration and become a social organization.
That will move you past brand awareness and send you on the path to breakthrough performance.
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on November 16, 2011. There is a good conversation going on around the original post.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com . Check it out!
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | November 7, 2011 | Comments Off
In the real estate world, there is a saying: "The three considerations that most impact value are location, location, and location." In the world of social media, they are purpose, purpose, and purpose.
Nothing impacts the success of a social media effort more than the choice of its purpose. Because purpose becomes the cause around which people will rally and be inspired to act, it is also the source of social media’s business value.
What is a good purpose for social media? Would you recognize one if you saw it? And if you could identify a good purpose, would you be able to mobilize a community around it and derive business value from it?
If you’re like most executives (and you’re being honest), probably not.
No wonder most organizations struggle with gaining tangible and significant business value from social media. This single most important criterion for success is also the biggest leadership skill deficiency.
That deficiency often leads to a worst practice we call "provide and pray." Leaders and managers provide access to a social technology, and then pray that a community forms and that community interactions somehow lead to business value. In most cases, adoption never really materializes; communities may form, but their activity is not considered valuable to the organization.
The lesson? People rarely rally around a technology. Success in social media needs a compelling purpose. Such a purpose addresses a widely recognized need or opportunity and is specific and meaningful enough to motivate people to participate. Every notable social media success has a clearly defined purpose:
Facebook’s core purpose is for people to easily track what their friends are doing.
Wikipedia’s purpose is for the masses to collectively build an online encyclopedia.
LinkedIn’s purpose is for people to leverage their professional networks for employment and hiring.
Yes, some social Web environments have strayed from their original purpose. But they made a name for themselves because they started with a clearly defined and tightly scoped purpose, gained critical mass, and mobilized their respective communities.
Choosing the right purpose is difficult (much harder than providing the technology). It requires a new management approach we call "purpose roadmapping" — planning how to use purpose to engage and sustain productive communities. A purpose road map shows how community collaboration and related business value can evolve over time, and provides critical guidance on the required investments and risks. It also informs all lower-level implementation decisions such as technology selection, content seeding, policy, moderating, and tipping-point marketing.
Purpose is a business decision. And business leaders must get involved in strategically choosing and pursuing the right ones. This is why success with social media is primarily a leadership and management challenge, not a technology issue.
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on Tuesday November 1, 2011.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com . Check it out!
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | October 31, 2011 | 2 Comments
We originally posted this on the Harvard Business Review blog site on Wednesday October 26, 2011. It has generated an interesting discussion so I encourage you to join it if you wish to engage.
On the surface, social media and knowledge management (KM) seem very similar. Both involve people using technology to access information. Both require individuals to create information intended for sharing. Both profess to support collaboration.
But there’s a big difference.
- Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important.
- Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.
These definitions may sound harsh, and biased in favor of social media, and to some extent they are. Knowledge should be like water — free-flowing and permeating down and across your organization filling the cracks, floating good ideas to the top and lifting all boats.
But, really, is that anyone’s KM reality?
KM, in practice, reflects a hierarchical view of knowledge to match the hierarchical view of the organization. Yes, knowledge may originate anywhere in the organization, but it is channeled and gathered into a knowledge base (cistern) where it is distributed through a predefined set of channels, processes and protocols.
Social media looks downright chaotic by comparison. There is no predefined index, no prequalified knowledge creators, no knowledge managers and ostensibly little to no structure. Where an organization has a roof, gutters and cistern to capture knowledge, a social media organization has no roof, allowing the “rain” to fall directly into the house, collecting in puddles wherever they happen to form. That can be quite messy. And organizations abhor a mess.
It is no wonder, then, that executives, knowledge managers and software companies seek to offer tools, processes and approaches to tame social media. After all (they believe), “We cannot have employees, customers, suppliers and anyone else creating their own information, forming their own opinions and expressing that without our say. Think of the impact on our brand, our people, our customers. We need to manage this. We need knowledge management.”
This is exactly the wrong attitude for one simple reason: It does not stop people from talking about you. Your workforce, customers, suppliers, competitors, etc., will talk about you whenever, wherever and however they want. Even pre-World Wide Web, these conversations were happening.
We’re long past the time to seek control; it’s time to engage people.
Business leaders recognize that engagement is the best way to glean value from the knowledge exchanged in social media — and not by seeking to control social media with traditional KM techniques. That only leads to a “provide and pray” approach, and we have seen more than our share of “social media as next-generation KM” efforts fail to yield results.
So how do organizations gain value from social media, particularly in situations where they have not been successful with KM? The answer lies in a new view of collaboration: mass collaboration.
Mass collaboration consists of three things: social media technology, a compelling purpose and a focus on forming communities.
- Social media technology provides the conduit and means for people to share their knowledge, insight and experience on their terms. It also provides a way for the individual to see and evaluate that knowledge based on the judgment of others.
- Purpose is the reason people participate and contribute their ideas, experience and knowledge. They participate personally in social media because they value and identify with the purpose. They do so because they want to, rather than being told to as part of their job.
- Communities are self-forming in social media. KM communities imply a hierarchical view of knowledge and are often assigned by job classification or encouraged based on work duties. Participation becomes prescribed, creating the type of “mandatory fun” that is the butt of many a Dilbert cartoon and TV sitcom. Social media allows communities to emerge as a property of the purpose and the participation in using the tools. This lack of structure creates the space for active and innovative communities.
Creating mass collaboration involves more than building technology and telling people to participate. It necessitates a vision, a strategy and management actions we will discuss in subsequent posts.
The point here is that while they may seem similar, social media and KM are not the same. Recognizing the differences is a crucial step toward getting value out of both and avoiding a struggle of one over the other.
It is also a step toward becoming a social organization.
I co-authored a book “The Social Organization” on Amazon.com . Check it out!
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | October 26, 2011 | 2 Comments
"Social media" is one of those terms that means different things to different people. Some history: it was originally associated with Web 2.0, the Web’s shift from publishing to a platform for the masses to share content and opinions. Then the corporate world caught on that social media wasn’t just for consumers; the term Enterprise 2.0 emerged to take Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, and the phrase social media expanded to include both.
Now with the huge and growing popularity and influence of Facebook, Twitter and, more recently, Google+, common use of "social media" is swinging back to the Web, but with a more limited scope — synonymous with consumer-side social networking.
Dizzy yet?
For some clarity, let’s look at the three ways the phrase social media is used today:
- As an umbrella term that covers all uses of the new social technologies — aka social collaboration, community collaboration and social computing. It connotes an online environment established for the purpose of mass collaboration. But it must have a purpose — e.g., Facebook is an online environment for the purpose of interacting with a large number of friends. And new social technologies (such as wikis, blogs, social networks, idea engines, etc.) enable it, although the technology platforms are secondary.
- As a term for environments on the Web — aka social Web, collaborative Web, ReadWrite Web and Web 2.0 — referring to social sites open to the general public. This usage gets most of the press, with the 700 million or so users on Facebook, massive Twitter traffic and the huge Web blogosphere. Though it’s becoming standard for large organizations to maintain a marketing communications presence on the major social sites on the Web, this unfortunately can drown out other, more impactful, mass collaboration opportunities.
- As a term for environments created by non-Web organizations to enhance collaboration between employees or between a business and its customers, prospects, suppliers, etc. — aka Enterprise 2.0, social business, social enterprise and social organization. It is here where many leading organizations are experiencing truly transformational business value.
In our new book, we focus on number 3: achieving real business value from social media. And one of the first steps on this path is understanding how your enterprise can tap into the power of what we call mass collaboration. We believe that achieving this distinctive kind of collaboration is the true “so-what” of social media.
Success involves adhering to six core principles:
Participation. Mobilize the masses to contribute. You can’t capture the wisdom of the crowds if the crowds don’t participate. The value comes not from the technology itself but from user participation and the user-generated content this facilitates.
Collective. People must swarm to the effort. They go to the content to contribute their piece to the whole. This act of going to the content to contribute is a fundamental shift in behavior that enables the scale of mass collaboration.
Transparency. Allow the community to validate and organize content. It is not enough to collect contributions. Participants must get to see, use, reuse, augment, validate, critique and rate each other’s contributions. Through this transparency, the community improves content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates emergence and propels its own advancement.
Independence. Independence delivers any time, any place, any member collaboration. This means participants can contribute independent of any other — no matter where they are or whoever else may be posting content at that time; no coordination of collaboration or pre-existing relationship is required.
Persistence. Contributions must endure for scaled value, captured in a persistent state for others to view, share and augment. Members learn from, reference and virally propagate the best content. An innovative idea, a solution to a problem, an astute observation that could otherwise be lost — all gain value when the masses can seize and act on them.
Emergence. Communities self-direct for greater productivity. The behaviors cannot be modeled, designed, optimized or controlled like traditional systems. They emerge over time through the interactions of community members. Emergence is what allows these communities to come up with new ways of working or new solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
These are the pillars of collaborative success. Conversely, a sure path to social media failure is stifling mass collaboration, the main reason so many efforts fizzle out. As we’ve said, the technology itself is not what matters; no social technology is great enough to save efforts that ignore the fundamental principles of mass collaboration.
We have talked to many clients who are struggling with the term social media. When they use it senior business leaders tend to turn off. They view social media as either something that they don’t need to know about (it is for those marketing folks), that is fraught with risk, or that is almost entirely foreign to them. So here is another reason that I like using the term mass collaboration and the relevant mass collaboration behaviors. Because it makes more sense to business leaders. They would not be leaders if they didn’t understand collaboration already. So this “social media movement” is really about scaling collaboration and deriving value from communities. They can grasp it more easily. Also, collaboration is about behaviors whereas social media is about channels and technologies. This is another important and relevant distinction for business leaders.
Have you been successful with the term social media (outside marketing efforts)? Does it present a hurdle? Do you use a different term? If so, what is it? Let’s find a better term.
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on Monday October 17, 2011.
I co-authored a book "The Social Organization" on Amazon.com . Check it out!
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Anthony J. Bradley | October 24, 2011 | 1 Comment
Slowly but surely, org cultures are shifting in attitude toward social media — from seeing it as a threat to discovering its very real opportunities.
And attitude matters, a lot. Social media is about people, not technology. Its business value does not come from social software or a snazzy website, even one with 800 million users. Its value stems from how organizations, from senior executives to managers to line employees, use it to foster new collaborative behaviors that materially improve business performance.
Organizational culture is critical to social media success. It is among a company’s most fundamental social media asset — or liability. Here are the six basic attitudes toward social media:
Folly
Organizations with this predominant attitude consider social media a source of entertainment with little or no business value, and they typically ignore it. Where a folly attitude prevails, the approach to a social media strategy must emphasize direct business value tightly tied to well-known and recognized organizational goals or challenges — and it must avoid flabby value statements around improved collaboration and stronger relationships.
Fearful
Fearful organizations see social media as a threat to productivity, intellectual capital, privacy, management authority, regulatory compliance and a host of other things, and often discourage and even prohibit its use. This attitude can reduce the potential risk, but it also stifles any possible business value. To counteract fear, the strategic approach should focus on relatively low-risk initiatives, even if other, higher-risk opportunities might offer greater business value.
Flippant
Leaders and managers may not ignore or fear social media, but they don’t take it seriously, either. This typically leads to a technology-centric approach where the company simply provides access to social media and hopes that business value will spontaneously emerge. This rarely bears fruit. Important in countering this attitude is convincing leadership that purpose matters, and that they should progress beyond the technology and identify good purposes for social media — causes that are strong enough to catalyze and mobilize communities of people to act in a way that delivers value to the community and the organization.
Formulating
Formulating organizations recognize both the potential value of social media as well as the need to be more organized and strategic in its use. The right approach here should build on this positive foundation, emphasizing the broader strategic value of social media and mass collaboration, with a succinctly expressed set of business opportunities that (1) demonstrates social media’s potential impact across many areas of the business, and (2) is strong enough to capture the attention of the most senior leaders.
Forging
In companies with a forging attitude, the whole organization is starting to develop competence in using social media to assemble, nurture and gain business value from communities. To keep progressing, leaders should recognize previous successes, capitalize on growing momentum, advocate continued evolution and increase investments. They should also promote additional grassroots social media efforts as critical in becoming a highly collaborative social organization.
Fusing
This is the most advanced attitude, and still rare. Fusing organizations treat community collaboration as an integral part of the organization’s work, ingrained in how people think and behave. This is a description of a social organization, and in such organizations the need for an explicit vision and strategy subsides — all business strategy and execution already include community collaboration where it’s appropriate.
How do most organizations shape up? Right now, our analysis indicates that leaders of most organizations have yet to progress to the Formulating stage, which accounts for the high social media failure rate. We know treating social media as strategic can lead to tangible business value and competitive advantage, so the goal is for business leaders to move quickly past the Folly, Fearful, and Flippant stages and get right to Formulating. Ignoring social media, or throwing it over the fence to Marketing or IT could create serious business risk.
Where does your organization stand?
Take Gartner’s free Social Readiness Assessment and find out. The assessment is 4 questions and takes about 5 minutes. It provides a mapping of where you fit on the 6F model, comparison to where others fit, and a report that provides guidance on how to move forward from where you map. You will need to register (free).
This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on Monday October 17, 2011.
I co-authored a book “The Social Organization” on Amazon.com . Check it out!
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
