Making use of social media for business

Social networks and social media are confusing concepts for most companies and corporate executives. Most know that the dramatic growth of companies like Facebook and Twitter have transformed the web, but few understand what the business opportunities – and pitfalls – of social media are.

To try and answer these and other questions, I interviewed Gartner analysts Mark McDonald and Anthony Bradley, two business friendly social media experts and the authors of The Social Organization. Below is an edited version of our conversation:

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Q. What’s the most common misunderstanding about social media and its potential for business leaders?

There is a common misperception among business leaders that all you really need is a Facebook page and a Twitter account and then, voilà, your organisation is social. This is a limited and dangerous view. The vast majority of significant, even transformational, business benefits of social media come not from marketing communications, but from productive communities.

The real business value of social media is that it can be used as an enabler for communities to collaborate, en masse, to achieve otherwise impossible results. It is this mass collaboration that sets social media apart as a phenomenon.

Never before have thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people been able to simultaneously create content, share experiences, build relationships and engage in other forms of productive work and meaningful activities.

Q. But surely there is a communications element to social media?

Of course you can use social media for marketing communications and collaboration. But we have found that “social organisations” know that mass collaboration presents a multitude of opportunities to amplify their performance and extend their capabilities.

Social organisations successfully engage communities of employees, partners, customers and prospects in mass collaboration directed at achieving their most important business goals, addressing their biggest challenges and improving the business processes that give them competitive advantage.

In other words, the leading organisations do not relegate social media to just marketing. They view the communities that social media enables as strategic to their business.

Q. So what is the potential of getting it right?

Social organisations are able to tap into the collective genius of their employees, partners, customers and prospects to transform their business and drive business results.

Think of your best project, team or group, the ones that seem to work together seamlessly. How much value do they create? Multiply that number by the number of teams, projects or other collaborative opportunities you are, or could be, pursuing and you have a rule of thumb for the potential energy that lies untapped.

We found that one social organisation utilised social media to deliver a 25 per cent improvement in the productivity of their 500-person engineering team in two months, simply by giving them the purpose and the tools to collaborate faster and smarter. It is easy to see the value of 500 employees doing the work of 625.

Q. In a nutshell, how did this company achieve that?

Well, you won’t get this kind of result asking people to tweet to each other. It goes to the heart of what we call mass collaboration; the ability to bring together large and diverse groups of employees, customers and partners to purse a mutual purpose that creates value. Social organisations are using this to beat their competitors.

We have all seen this in action in our own organisation. We say it’s when the ‘stars align’. You have probably seen how much better that team worked and how successful they were. A social organisation has the ability to ‘align those stars’ repeatedly.

Q. How do you measure the value of social media?

You can’t measure the value of social media. Social media by itself has no value. How do you measure the value of a hammer? Or any tool for that matter? You can only measure the value of the business results you achieve by applying social media. This means, to gain value, you must apply social media to a well-defined business purpose.

All too often during our research for the book, we saw a prevalent bad practice we call “provide and pray”. This involves simply providing access to a social media technology and praying something good comes of it. We estimate that “provide and pray” fails almost 90 per cent of the time. It fails due to lack of purpose. Purpose is the cause around which a community will rally. It is the inspiration for their participation. And it is the source of business value.

We advise business leaders to apply social media to a specific business purpose with clear business metrics for measuring its success. Business leaders should not be satisfied with activity statistics like the number of participants, the unique visitors per month, the number of fans or the number of likes. These are important measures to understand the robustness of the community. But they do not measure the value to your organisation.

Q. Will social media impact the way everyone works in the future?

Social media and all-things Web 2.0 are technologies, and technologies come and go. What endures is the new ways of working that people perfect using these technologies. That way of working – mass collaboration – is what we found to be the value of social media. Creating mass collaboration is not luck, but rather a combination of leadership, readiness, culture and technology that when it exists together, provides employees with the opportunity to work in ways that improve and amplify individual ideas and contributions into organisation-wide change.

Leaders are already starting to work in this way. For example, Cemex, the building materials group, has turned over its strategy execution to collaborative communities. The result accomplished significant measurable change in five weeks rather than eighteen months. When we asked about this new way of working, the business leader remarked, “Now that we have done it this way … we will never go back to the old way”.

We believe mass collaboration is the way people will work in the future. Rather than bureaucratic environments that discount individual experience, limit knowledge sharing, limits recognition and curtails motivation, leading businesses will use social media to nurture borderless communities with a shared sense of purpose that delivers a more meaningful human experience and greater business results.

Mark McDonald and Anthony Bradley are the authors of The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees, published by Harvard Business Review Press.