Part VIII Roles and the Skewed Dynamics

Let’s examine the roles defined in Part VII Social Media and Enterprise Roles in turn and reveal how participation would naturally flow.  (Remember I don’t advocate metrics to change this flow).

Leader Roles

The “leader” roles, the community managers and innovators, exist to purposefully engage and increase participation; however, the most common method used to engage is through the medium itself!  This of course means that much of the effort is spent trying to get active participation from people who already actively participate! It’s like selling cable on TV. Marketing should have taught us that in order to expand growth of a product, you need to advertise to the potential product users and not the product users.  You don’t advertise beer to an alcoholic and you do advertise cigarettes to children.  Bad example? Exactly!

There is, no doubt, some penetration into the overall organization but the simple fact is that if you analyze the contribution and creation of input into the social sphere, much of it is dominated by the Social Ambassadors and aimed primarily at each other.  One only has to witness the social scene when there is a Web or Social conference – there are lots of reciprocating links: I’ll vote your link if you vote mine.  There are lots of speakers speaking to each other and, less importantly and more discouragingly, targeting each other.   I believe it is safe to say that many Community managers – working to create a brand are not trained in marketing at all but rather work through the technology.

You will in fact often hear that Evangelists are in the trenches not in the Ivory Towers….. the question that should be answered though – from where can you see further ?  Moreover, what’s important here? That you are in a trench or tower or that you welcome people properly?  This isn’t a war.

Ultimately, and ironically,  it is very difficult to infiltrate these groups and get respect.  The silent majority does try and I’ve witnessed the results.  Ever been to an internal forum or blog? Ever tried evaluating the post to comment, or the ratings ? Either you’re in the crowd or you have to be damn persistent to get feedback.   These leaders often fail to recognize that sometimes the silent majority do not feel like they get heard, they then get despondent and then they leave.

Where’s the FEEL GOOD factor? Where’s the FEEDBACK LOOP?

Keeper Roles

Lack of NATURAL positive feedback is one of the biggest inhibitors to adoption of Social Media

The “keepers” exist to promote and maintain a level of decorum and organization to the system.  It’s about documented process, it’s about metrics, it’s about business feedback for executives, it’s about everything that’s not about the natural spread and growth of the overall enterprise and platform.  The roles are bestowed upon people as “extra-credit” which means over burdened management (who often don’t care for the laissez-faire nature of networking) or the resume whore.  Neither of these parties really has a natural drive or internal imperative to broaden and expand the participation.

In addition, the keepers follow the great rule of Kings (that is, management) and must have an equal capacity to FOLLOW and LEAD.  What do I mean by this?  It means that innovation and adoption is not the singular purpose of these roles.  It is to do what they’re told and pass it on.  Perhaps this is ivory tower ?  If you’ve ever had the pleasure of working with gatekeepers you will find that they have shared solutions that are either too grand in scope, or too small to be worthwhile reusable components.  Worse still is that by having keys and locking and monitoring there’s little work done to adapt and grow these resources.  Wiki’s, repositories, and document libraries get static, stagnant and unapologetically READ-ONLY.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we encourage E2.0 by building the collaboration room and then locking the door!

Executives

The single biggest problem was the lack of clear direction from the business.  Socializing and Work and Productivity are not recognized as overlapping within the business.  Billable time does not include fraternization (in general) so justification for socializing is non-existent.  While “being part of the culture” is an admirable achievement, a typical customer doesn’t care how its high paid consultants fit in to their consultant’s company!  The culture of the social enterprise needs to be embraced by ALL levels of management but in a participating manner.  Employees cannot and will not be open about topics unless there is an absolute trust and understanding that this openness will not be abused and the surest way to see this is frank open discussion from all.

Your CEO and your CIO and your senior architects need to be involved, and not just involved, but involved  in an obviously honest manner.   What happened when satisfaction and morale reports show that the company’s employees are not happy?  Instead of shying away and then not asking the question next year acknowledge the issue and answer questions.  How can employees talk about business, job satisfaction, worries and concerns if their leaders aren’t?

This lack of trust exists on cultural lines – both the age culture and physical location culture.

All these things lead to an environment where the level of adoption is focused greatly on a specific group of people.  I would go so far as to say businesses almost create subcultures of participants.  Subcultures and cliques will not unite the single enterprise.

Executive Feedback

Ah, the great corollary.  How do the executives know that their efforts are worthwhile?

The single biggest measure is employee satisfaction coupled with employee honesty.    The metrics to provide for success of your enterprise and social media deployment already exist but they are fraught with lies.

The solution adds clarity and truth to the currently muddied waters.   This deserves a much lengthier discussion but I’m going to disappoint you by cutting it short.  The key to this is creating an environment where the employees can be candid, and moreover, want to be candid.

But what about Enterprise 2.0

The E2.0 part of the platform suffers from slightly different issues because adoption is not based on social interaction, interests, learning and sharing ideas, but is based on true business needs.  The truth is that large companies, heavily armed with legal teams, lawyers, IP protection requirements, necessary understanding and implementation of the licensing of shared public components cannot just open up the doors to the great outside.

There will be no internal cloud and external cloud – if you think there is, then you should rethink your world view; however, there will always be the data owned versus data governed and the distinction is huge.  This is something I will discuss in the future.

The enterprise solution cannot be built on a Social Media framework.   The Enterprise is built to solve business and business data problems and is built on an enterprise model.   The Social Media framework solicits, encourages bi-directional collaboration and feedback that feeds the enterprise solution.

It’s very simple, and why the winners of the social model were who they were…I will reveal all later..