SoCon08 – Atlanta: Saturday Recap & My Take
Didn’t quite arrive at the conference on Saturday until 9:40 a.m or so but I did catch all of Chris Heuer’s keynote. Key themes that bubbled to the surface in the morning were:
- Know yourself/intentions matter
- Personal vs. professional
- Education vs. control
- My favorite: Tolerance
1. Know Yourself /Intentions Matter
Social media gives us an even wider variety of ways to connect and communicate with each other. Just how much is too much really depends on our personal thresholds. Josh Hallett talked about deleting the number of RSS feeds he subscribes to at the beginning of this year to 400! I only read 100 feeds or so and I am sure most of us read fewer than that on a daily basis. Message is — we get to select how engaged we want to be and it’s perfectly ok to throttle back our activities online based on the ebbs and flows of our personal and professional lives.
When we do engage and share; we ought to do so with authenticity and a sense of purpose. Not because it is a rule written by some social media guru but because it is the respectful thing to do. Taken in a business context, intentions and authenticity matter also and perhaps even more.
Business is global and in an increasingly flat world, competition can be crushingly intense. A major equipment manufacturer whose customer base was being targeted by its competitors decided to develop an interim product designed to staunch sales attrition and by extension give the company’s stock value a boost. They commanded their sales force to go forth and sell this interim line to their existing customers who had no reason to disbelieve what they were being told. Unfortunately, the product did not meet user performance requirements (something that the company’s engineers knew to be the case before launch) and this led to a serious erosion of trust between customer and company. The company is “sunsetting” this line in 2008 and will be replacing it with a true upgrade to what their customers were previously using.
Is the damage done reparable? Will customers give this company a chance to make good on their mistake? Guess the jury is out until the 4th quarter when they’ve had a chance to launch the new replacement line and the market has had the opportunity to respond.
2. Personal vs. Professional
Saw a whole lot of heads nodding in agreement in the audience when Chris talked about the blending of our work and personal lives online and how this was impacting our personal and professional lives.
With all the social networks that we belong to ( many in the audience belonged to more than one), there is a real fear of exactly how much to reveal and who to “friend.” For instance, a client recently actually gave a “talking to ” to some of their younger employees whose greatest transgression was posting on their MySpace page photographs of themselves posing with friends, adult beverages in hand. Was it the employees’ fault for accepting their supervisors’ request to “friend” or was it the supervisors’ fault for overstepping their boundaries?
Am not entirely sure of the HR protocols but I can’t imagine “friending” my boss in a personal social network scenario no matter how cool they are. Nor would I proactively “friend” my employees’ in an online community that was clearly social in nature out of respect for their privacy. But that’s just me.
3. Educate vs. Control
The debate on allowing employees to engage in social networks during work hours got quite a few attendees fired up! On the one side we had advocates of a laissez-faire approach and on the other we had those who preferred a command-and-control style. Attendees either rallied behind the attendee from IBM and his interpretation of the organization’s policy of encouraging internal collaboration or the few who lamented the decrease in productivity at their workplace because people were “goofing off” online. Unlike the paralyzing bipartisanship that has been a blight on our political landscape the last 16 years, many seemed interested in understanding the merits of both approaches.
I can’t agree more with Chris’ statement: Give in order to get. Employers and employees have a legally binding covenant where the former provides financial compensation in return for work that is performed by the latter. Within the knowledge industry where answers can come from any level in the company’s employee base, wise employers would want to extend their employees no only respect but also some measure of ownership in the problem-solving process that is appropriate to the company culture.
4. Tolerance
Finally, the matter of tolerance came up during the morning’s discussion. Tolerance for values, ideas and behaviors that are different from ours. In this area, the blogosphere is no different from our every day interactions. There are cliques and hierarchy. Perhaps it is less pronounced in the blogger community but it’s still there.
Intolerance is still an issue. Here’s a small but poignant example, one of the afternoon’s discussion leaders made a statement that social media will make advertising irrelevant. Like most broad statements, this is tragically flawed. The individual is confusing the content and context with the medium. I will now make a sweeping statement: Mass advertising will always have a place in the mix. Instead the content and context will evolve.
