Why Ignoring Social Media is Stupid

Joe,

You nicely summed up what I feel is at the core of the discussion about how social media is changing how people interact. So, to take it further, how exactly do these social media tools impact relationships and ultimately, the creation of social capital. Here's a few of the most important ways I've experienced:

• Social media is a tool that facilitates the creation and maintenance of relationships, it is not the relationship itself. It's when people mistake their social media connections as relationships that we start getting into trouble.
• Social media facilitates connections. By my definition, a connection is someone who you have come into contact with in some meaningful way. Once we are connected to someone, we know how to reach them and we would have at least enough knowledge about the other person to facilitate the beginning of a more substantial relationship. Connections in other words are loose acquaintances.
• We know from the work of Mark Granovetter and others that acquaintances are our source of social influence and power. Because our acquaintances (or weak ties) represent access to information and resources that we wouldn't know about through our closest relationships, the more acquaintances we have, the more powerful our social capital. Social media makes it easier than ever before to stay connected with these weak ties, thus making it easier to build our social capital and influence.
• Social media makes it easier to maintain relationships with larger numbers of connections. While Dunbar's number suggests that we can only maintain relationships with 150 people at any given time, the tools of social media make that process easier than in the past. While it seems that social media may not make Dunbar's number any larger, I would argue that it does make it possible to seamlessly change which people we have in our 150 over time. Social media gives us the ability to stay connected to people so that we know where to find them when we need them, even if we haven't actively maintained a more substantial relationship with them in the meantime. Social media keeps the connection in tact.

So, while social media can't BE the relationship, I think that it represents incredibly powerful tools for planting, growing and harvesting social capital. By ignoring these tools, you are choosing to be less influential, less powerful and less relevant. I assume we are in agreement on this point.

So, how is social media going to impact our children in terms of how they will connect with and build relationships with others as they come of age?

-Jason

Social Technology: Best/Worst Thing Ever?

Jason, I hope that you are enjoying the shift in weather. Spring is a favorite season of mine, it always feels like a fresh start on things…especially after this winter.

On to the business at hand.

Thanks for your post teeing up social technology…there is so much noise about this issue out there. I guess I have a paradoxical view regarding social technology, I think that social technology is very underrated and very overrated. That works for me, because as you like to remind me, I am a consultant and I do not have to make sense!

Getting on LinkedIn is not going to build social capital for you. But you can use LinkedIn to more effectively build social capital. Getting on Twitter is not going to build social capital for you. But you can use Twitter to more effectively build social capital. Having 17,374,981 “friends” on Facebook does not mean that you actually have any social capital. I guess I view the rapidly evolving world of social technology as similar in nature to steroids. Steroids alone will not make you a great athlete. You still have to be a really talented to play professional sports, but steroids can make you even better (although there is clearly a number of bad aspects to using steroids, so not a perfect analogy).

I think that new social technologies are absolutely changing the way that we interact, and some of those changes are good and some of them are bad. You and I as friends, as collaborators and as business partners communicate with each other in a variety of ways. But the vast majority of our really important and serious conversations still happen face to face. We use texting, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and this blog to complement an already very real relationship. That is a wonderful thing. But when social technology is used to replace, avoid or simply create the perception of a real relationship it is bad news…whether we are talking about a 1:1 relationship or the relationship between an organization and its workforce or its customers.

So, I think that the most important question that is not being asked is what kind of relationships do we want to have? As employees, as employers, as HR leaders, as business leaders, as citizens, parents, friends, neighbors, consumers…what do we want those relationships to be like?

I look forward to digging into this further.

-joe

New Age Networking, part 2

Jason-

I surely do not qualify as a social networking expert, guru or thought-leader as the world clearly has plenty of those, but I will respond to the best of my ability. I think that despite all the chatter, and noise and expertise, there is still substantial confusion and misunderstanding about networking...what it really is, how it really works, why it is really valuable. And whether you are networking in real life or on Facebook, this confusion and misunderstanding is what negatively impacts peoples ability to build and use real social capital.

I do not think that there is any such thing as "new age networking", networking is networking. We do however have a growing array of new tools to use in our networking efforts and I think that many of them are quite powerful...if used appropriately.

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (a few of my favorites) do not replace phone calls or face to face meetings, but they do allow me to really tap into some of the characteristics of networks that phone calls, hand shakes and lunch meetings do not.

Twitter allows me to find a lot of new people and very easily develop a basic connection to them that may or may not evolve. I can bring a great deal of diversity into my network (professional diversity, geographic diversity and other types of diversity) that I would have a really hard time connecting to in other ways. As you know, diversity is one of the things that can make a network really powerful. And it is easy for me to experiment with Twitter...I can easily follow and un-follow people.

LinkedIn allows me to really tap into the exponential nature of my network, as I can not only tap into the ideas, experiences and perspectives of the people that I am directly connected to, but I can also tap into the people that they are connected to...and the people that they are connected to. The numbers get pretty big, pretty fast. The exponential nature of a network often remains hidden and under-utilized in the world of phone calls and handshakes.

So, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I think that there is nothing really new about social capital, going back to How To Win Friends and Influence People...maybe going back further than that. We do however have a lot more research on how networks form and function, and we certainly have new tools to apply to our efforts to build social capital. Regardless of what we are using it is the quality of the those interactions that makes them matter...and yes, I agree there are people that think they are doing more networking than ever before, but they are only collecting numbers.

-joe

...on The Twitter Dilemma

Jason-

I am going to push a little harder on this issue as it has become a growing source of frustration for me. I continue to encounter companies, schools and non-profits that block access to social networking sites, content-sharing sites, etc. I agree with you that this is largely an issue of leadership and I think that it is issue that allows us to see which organizations have a proactive leadership stance and which ones have a reactive leadership stance. And I would say that in the world in which we live, if you are being reactive your days are numbered.

Not only does blocking Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. show a desire to manage activity rather than productivity, it shows a complete lack of understanding about how information travels, how employees become engaged, how innovation happens and how value is created today. It also helps ensure that your organization remains largely clueless about something that is changing nearly all aspects of how we do things. There are companies that are actively using Twitter to promote their brand, to recruit talent to provide customer serive and there are those that block it, deny it and shake their fist at it.

To put it another way; some of use tools, some of us are tools.

With the rate of change today, organizations can ill afford to block, deny and shake their fist at the changes that are taking place in the world. I think there are 200 million people on Facebook right now. Some of them are your customers. Some of them are potential customers. Some of them are your employees. Some of them are your potential employees. It really makes a lot of sense for you to be there. If you are not there, I probably will be there taking them away from you.

The same is true regarding Twitter and "social media" in general. A friend of mine put it like this; "If you are doing anything of any significance in the world, people are going to talk about you. You should be there."

Closing your eyes and covering your ears does not mean the conversation stops...it just means you don't get to benefit from it.

tweet tweet

-joe