Jed Hallam

This is the second post in a series of three on the future of social media and social technologies – specifically, integrating social technology and thought into organisations.

The first post was my thoughts on how the social media industry has evolved and where the market may or may not lead. This post will look at the developing social business market and the next post will look at how brands might start to actually implement this stuff. You know, the ‘how we make money out of all of this’ post.

Every business is, in some shape or form, a social business. It relies on a simple process of creating a product or service and then selling it. To sell that product or service, you need to communicate what it is to the people that might buy it. You also need to communicate with everyone in the organisation to ensure that they understand what the product or service is and why people might buy it. So in this sense, communication is a fundamental part of business, as it’s a fundamental part of being a human. So every business is social.

But however social the principles of businesses are, organisations are still slow to move and in a hyper-connected world, this is presenting a series of issues;

• Increasingly empowered consumers
• Geographically disparate and departmentalised employees
• A lack of organisational agility or adaptiveness

In my (humble) opinion, many organisations could resolve these issues by using social technologies and processes.

The modern consumer has changed – prior to digital technology, our network of friends would be fairly local and our experiences would be shaped by that network. Robin Dunbar proposed that the number of meaningful relationships that we could hold at any time was around 150, it would be easy to suggest that with the rise of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that this number has increased, but I would argue that it hasn’t. We still maintain a similar number of meaningful relationships, but what has changed is the dynamics of these relationships and our number of ‘weak tie’ relationships has increased, giving us greater access to wider networks that transcend geography. Where my network used to be contained by Nottinghamshire, it is now global. (Of course the convex of this argument is that by spreading our network wider we become less intimately connected, but I would seriously challenge this as social media allows us to connect on a more frequent – and often more intimate – basis.)

Over the past ten years networks of people have become much more dynamic but it seems to be only recently that people are beginning to realise the effect that this change has on their lives. The scale for the potential reach of word of mouth has dramatically increased because we’ve become hyper-connected and our networks have widened.

The effect that this has on business is that a negative or positive brand experience used to be passed around in the village church or the pub and it would reach a single (but strong) network. However, the rise of communications technologies and weak-tie networks means that that experience can have travelled across the globe in a matter of minutes.  And this power-shift hasn’t gone unnoticed.

The empowerment of the consumer now means that businesses need to be more responsive to their audience. Businesses are built on communication and the relationship between supplier and buyer, and that relationship is becoming much more open because they’re communicating more often.

One of the reasons for this is the breakdown of professional and personal lives. As our networks of weak ties become wider and communication across borders increases, it’s much easier for our networks to blur. Where we once had very defined boundaries between who we socialised with at the weekend and who we worked with, we now have merged networks. Or, an alternative way of looking at it is the shift from social networks to interest networks (but that’s a conversation for another post).  What this also means is that every employee of an organisation is now a spokesperson and the ease with which a message can reach a large audience means that internal communications and a singular brand message have never been so important.

Below are two diagrams, each represents the communications flow inside an organisation, but one is pre-social media and one is post-social media. The most important point to take from these diagrams is that where we once used to control the external brand touch points (public relations, advertising, customer service) we now have every department exposed to the outside world in some shape of form.

This breaching of communications barriers means that it has never been as important to create a cohesive brand message. Businesses have attempted to create unified brand messaging for years and struggled because too many external agencies interpret the message and communicate that in their own ways. But now added to external agencies communicating on behalf of an organisation, we now have more employees doing so too.

This is where social technology can play a major role in business. By engaging with all staff in a ‘flat’ way (every member of staff receiving the same brand message at the same time) we can begin to combat the ‘multiple brand message disease’ that confuses consumers too frequently. After all, a consumer sees a brand, not individual departments or external agencies (when was the last time that you heard someone outside of the communications industry say ‘that was a great piece of work from the digital agency’?). We’ve already become more connected on the outside of the business, so now the challenge is to become more connected on the inside, and then we can begin to become more agile and responsive to our customers needs.

I was introduced to the idea of the agile business by Tim Malbon, a co-founder at Made by Many, who got me thinking about the iterative brand and how we can beg, borrow and steal from the software industry to create better, more connected brands. This idea of the agile business has been popular for a long time now, but what social media is doing is forcing the hand of business to become more agile and more responsive.

This is one of the greatest challenges in this changing landscape – businesses have been built with scale in mind rather than innovation or creativity and this makes them very, very slow to move or react to market changes. But the empowerment of the consumer and the employee now means that business needs to react quickly and, as Brian Solis believes, use social media and mobile media to become more adaptive.  Social media and social business doesn’t mean having to have a Twitter stream or using Yammer. It means having an understanding about what this new information and these new communication lines have on a business. Even on a basic level, using the conversations that take place in a forum to help understand brand perceptions and add to existing research is an effective way of becoming more social as a business. The challenge, however, remains the same.

One of the other major challenges to organisations becoming more responsive is that businesses have built departments and these departments have become silos. We no longer work for a brand, we work for our department. I do my job to deliver my outputs, I create this website for this website’s sake, I draft my social media strategy for my department. In an environment where the consumer sees only a single brand, we’ve created a culture of hundreds of ants rather a single millipede…