Talk about how social media is gaining traction often focuses on the hard data that prove business value, or focuses on case studies and research that demonstrate best practices or key trends.
In my role, I’m privileged to interact with people from across North America who are thinking about how best to evaluate and deploy the new social media tools, which provides a useful set of anecdotal experiences to complement the data.
And three recent exchanges demonstrate very encouraging signs about how people are using the efficiencies of social media to create value; how consumer applications are revealing business value; and that grassroots knowledge is receiving support by enlightened leadership.
Social value
One of the truly exciting features of social media is that it provides easy-to-use technology that enables people to be much more efficient at interacting with one another. It’s a simple concept, but every day brings a surprising new example of how it works.
For instance, the other day a colleague showed me Trapster running on his iPhone. Trapster is a mobile application that lets you see and share the location of speed traps right on your mobile phone or
Is this a new way of interacting with one another? No, motorists have flashed their headlights to alert fellow drivers to speed traps for decades. But now a socially-minded driver can reach potentially millions of other drivers rather than a handful.
It also demonstrates how social media creates a value proposition that vastly exceeds the older technology it replaces. In this case, Trapster is not only more effective than a radar detector, it’s also tolerated by the police. The application’s website quotes Bill Johnson, Executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, as saying: “If someone slows down because of it, it's accomplishing the same goal of trying to get people to obey the speed limit."
Consumer apps reveal business value
One of the genuinely fascinating aspects of our projects that focus on bringing social media into the enterprise—often called intranet 2.0—is observing how consumer grade software is challenging organizations to improve internal functionality for their employees.
Last week, I conducted a business requirement interview with a Vice President of one of our clients, a multi-national financial services company that is assessing how to improve their intranet. “Building in the capability to add widgets is smart,” he observed. “I would take advantage of that, but I have an iPhone with 24 apps. If we advertised internally that there are 24 apps, that would engage staff, even if it was a simple weather forecaster or what’s for lunch in the cafeteria.”
Not that along ago, a common complaint from younger workers was the executives don’t “get” new technology because they don’t use it. Increasingly, executives are starting to use the technology, and rapidly perceive how it can add value to their businesses.
Grassroots knowledge, enlightened leadership
Successful social media deployments require knowledge and commitment at the grassroots level to understand the technology and put it to good use. My experience, supported by data, suggests that the grassroots is often ahead of the organization’s leadership, which causes that important energy to be dissipated.
Last week, I met an IT Director with a large healthcare organization that is developing a new web strategy to support an important development in the organization’s direction. Healthcare entities often perceived to be trailing their users in the utilization of innovative online technology, but this Director was already anticipating how the organization’s clients would want to interact with them using mobile technology, and showed me how he uses Digg on his iPhone to follow the Linux community in which he participates.
The organization was also experiencing a common phenomenon for large entities: an employee had started a Facebook group in which employees were discussing the organization’s new direction.
A new, 50-something CEO had just come on board, and there was curiosity about what tone he would set for the web strategy. The questions were answered when he requested a blog on his first day, and joined the Facebook group.
A boomer CEO of a supposedly conservative organization participating actively in social media is an anecdotal data point that promises we are about to see some exciting new developments in the deployment of social media.
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