Anthony J. BradleyRaise your hand if you believe you can change your corporate culture or market dynamic by providing access to a software tool? What, no one.
And yet that is what we so often expect from social media. Provide access to a tool and sit back and collect accolades as the collaboration wonderfulness ensues and grows to change the world or business as we know it. How surprised we are when adoption is minimal and activity practically nonexistent. Why, because it isn’t about the technology it is about carefully employing the tools to foster new mass collaboration behaviors. Yes, the new technologies are critical enablers of collaborative behaviors at unprecedented scale, but the value comes from the behaviors.
After examining over 200 cases of social media collaboration success (see my post explaining the difference between social media collaboration and communications), we have identified a set of collective behaviors that underlie almost all successful efforts. They are collective intelligence, expertise location, emergent structures, interest cultivation, mass coordination, and relationship leverage. See a recent Gartner press release for descriptions of each.
Organizations are facilitating these behaviors for a variety of business use cases. We have identified the predominant patterns of social media collaboration success including what business value was gained from what business use cases benefiting from what collective behaviors enabled by what social media technologies. A sample of some of the key pattern findings include:
- 11% of the 200 cases involved collective intelligence (enabled primarily by wiki and blog technology) applied for operational effectiveness through product delivery improvements
- 7% of the 200 cases involved expertise location (enabled primarily by social networking technology) applied to improve customer service for sales and operational effectiveness
- 18% of the 200 cases involved interest cultivation (enabled primarily by suites of social media technology) targeted at market effectiveness through product delivery, product utilization, and brand awareness
See my recently published research “Employing Social Media for Business Impact: Key Collective Behavior Patterns” for all the patterns and details on how companies are using social media and engaging communities in collective behaviors for enterprise gain (research available to Gartner clients or for a fee).
Category: Uncategorized Tags: new behaviors, social media
4 responses so far ↓
1 Mauricio Godoy March 2, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Dear Anthony,
Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson on how to effectively introduce and establish a new form of collaboration within an organization.
As a person in charge with introducing new tools and methods, I have personally witnessed how forstering “new mass collaboration behaviors” instead of focusing on the tools can be the most effective approach.
Thank you for authoring this blog post.
Enthusiastically,
@MauricioSWG
2 Aaron Eden March 3, 2011 at 2:26 am
You’ve got valid points here and businesses should keep in mind that customers are more social, smarter and tech-savvy these days. You can’t simply use all those old tricks that worked before; you have to be more creative than that. I believe that sharing is the future of business and believe it or not, Napoleon Hill has been right all along when he wrote decades back on the power of the mastermind – the coupling of ideas and minds into one powerful mastermind. Nice insights you wrote here so thanks!
3 Best of the Week! - Mar 04 2011 | Position² Blog March 4, 2011 at 6:56 am
[...] Gartner Research: Social Media – It’s About New Behaviors Not New Technologies. [...]
4 Alexander Chalkidis March 23, 2011 at 11:21 am
I think that the negative, spiteful and destructive side of social media is much under represented. We are working on platforms we don’t control. At all! http://alexanderchalkidis.com/?p=783