Social Media in Management

Filed Under blogging, careers, life, my career, social media

CIO Magazine’s Sue Bushell has written an interesting article, called ‘Management 2.0? That’ll Be The Day‘, on the challenges that CIOs — and companies, in general — are facing with the advent of social media technologies in the workplace.

In his book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel suggests that organizations today face a new set of business challenges that the existing management model does not match. The drone worker of yesterday is giving way to the engaged and vocal employee of today who expects a company culture that replicates the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 — in other words Management 2.0

The name Gary Hamel will, of course, be very familiar to anyone who has done any MBA and has studied the (frequently incorrectly-used) Core Competency concept.

The article is long but useful as it gives managers a lot to think about and hopefully look into:

Managers have a general sense of what Web 2.0 tools are — especially when it comes to applications they’re familiar with like YouTube, Facebook, or Linkedin. But they still struggle to understand these technologies, discover their real business value, address the risks and figure out how to best use them.

This, by the way, is where someone like me would come in: I know both management (theory and practice) and technology (uses and implementations) and can help senior management come up with an implementation of social media that enhances project management, decision making, and internal communication and collaboration.

The trick is that social media integration in an enterprise needs to be a long-term project and not something you hire a consulting firm to do for you in a few weeks. It needs to grow experimentally, possibly slowly, and from the ground-up. And while it will probably change a number of times as it develops — which means it’s not something you can really plan for in advance — you can start with a few basic governance rules (who does what and what everyone is in responsible for), some content guidelines (that cover privacy, security, and intellectual property), and a simple usage policy (like the two-word “be careful” policy that is often a good start).

Speaking of governance…

Challenges of the Multi-Generational Workforce

The discussion on how to manage a multi-generational workforce — which is an issue for many managers these days — reminds me of a blog post on banning Facebook that Toby Ward wrote on the Intranet Blog about a month ago:

Beware of Facebook! It will crush your productivity and hijack your employees!

[…]

Employees prefer to be treated as adults. Judge their performance and actions instead of counting their minutes spent doing “productive work.”

Trust me, the threat and problems stemming from a ban far exceed the embrace option. Prescient Digital Media’s Julian Mills last week highlighted the findings of one recent survey that warned of the perils of banning Facebook:

  • 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
  • A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
  • The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed

Of course “consider leaving” doesn’t mean they actually will leave but it does mean that they probably won’t join your company in the first place. Especially if they announce your blanket banning policy on the Facebook group about your company that you didn’t know existed.

I know that I, for one, wouldn’t want to join a company that bans sites like Facebook or doesn’t let you blog, read blogs, pay your bills, read the news, check your e-mail, or basically have a life outside work while you’re at work. Limiting YouTube usage makes a little more sense since there’s a bandwidth cost associated with online video but, even then, it shouldn’t be banned outright.

As Ward said in his article, companies shouldn’t be taking the Taylorist approach to management. Of course you’ll get employees who’ll take 30 minutes to make themselves a cup of coffee or spend an hour on Facebook every now and then — but that’s okay as long as they (a) get their jobs done, (b) don’t stop others from getting their jobs done, and (c) don’t use-up too many freely-provided company resources (like bandwidth or, for that matter, coffee).

I guess all I can conclude with is that, with the advent of social media and the existence of a multi-generational workforce…well, the next five years are going to be really interesting

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Chris Brogan on Social Media

Filed Under blogging, social media

Over the last couple of weeks, Chris Brogan has been writing a series of fantastic primer/best-advice blog posts about social media on his blog. Make sure you read them:

Oh, and here are a couple of more of his posts that are really good:

Awesome work, Chris! Thanks.

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Mark Ritson: Prolific Blogger!

Filed Under blogging, courses, melbourne business school

I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog that Mark Ritson, my Brand Management professor at Melbourne Business School, contributes to the Branding Strategy Insider blog. Of course, “contributing” is a mild word considering the number of blog posts he writes!

Here are some of my favourites:

Impressive, isn’t he?

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Links: Marketing, Web 2.0, Management Blogs

Filed Under blogging, social media, technology

I don’t usually do link posts but I’ve been so busy these last couple of weeks I haven’t had time to write about the following useful links in any detail:

  1. Samuel Dean from Web Worker Daily wrote a post called ‘VTC: Killer Online Tutorials, Mostly Free‘
  2. HR World wrote about the ‘The Top 100 Management and Leadership Blogs That All Managers Should Bookmark‘ [via Trevor Cook]
  3. Jeremiah Owyang presented ‘A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008‘
  4. Ross Dawson, writing in BRW Magazine, listed the ‘Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications‘

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One More MBS Blogger

Filed Under blogging, mba, melbourne business school

Add another MBS blogger to the list:

Alanna’s been blogging about her Melbourne Business School MBA since October last year but I came across her blog only recently. (Hmmm…maybe I should write a SEO primer for MBS bloggers).

Her blog is both informative and really fun to read so, for all those interested in what the MBS experience is like, hop on down and take a look.

Update: I’ve started to maintain a list of all MBS or MBS-related bloggers that I know of on a static page on this site. That way, people looking for MBS bloggers won’t have to hunt through my old blog posts, they can just look at that one page. (Though I will continue to publish a blog post every time I find a new relevant blogger.)

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New MBS Blogger

Filed Under blogging, melbourne business school

My Google Alerts tell me that we have a new Melbourne Business School MBA blogger to add to my previous list:

He’s only just started blogging, with two posts so far, and is a part-time student (our only full-time intakes are in January and September). Let’s hope he keeps it up and tells us the story of his entire MBA journey.

Of course, like the rest of us, he’ll probably go silent during the last couple of weeks of each study term while he struggles to juggle work, study, home life, and (if possible) a social life…but that’s to be expected :)

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Enterprise 2.0 Still Mostly Misunderstood

Filed Under blogging, social media

Awesome (but very long) article by CIO magazine’s Sue Bushell called Enterprise 2.0 - What is it good for?:

Canberra-based knowledge economy and social computing evangelist Stephen Collins heard a quote earlier this year that perfectly describes the Enterprise 2.0 dilemma: “If you want to find out what tools your staff are finding most useful at the moment, just go and see what your IT department is blocking.”

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Death by Blogging

Filed Under blogging, life, social media

I considered commenting on the recent New York Times’ article on blogging but after reading what Mart Andreessen had to say I really don’t need to.

Two other noteworthy reactions/comments/replies: Larry Dignan and Bora Zivkovic.

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Staffing for Social Computing

Filed Under blogging, social media

More and more companies are starting to understand the benefits of social computing. If not the benefits, at least they’re starting to understand the risks of not getting serious about social computing because, increasingly, their customers are demanding a two-way discussion with them (and the companies that do offer this two-way discussion stand out).

However, the companies that want to get into social computing/media/networking [1] don’t always know how to go about doing that. From my personal experience I’ve noticed that when companies have gone in to “the whole social media thing” without any real experience, expectations, or strategy around social computing, they’ve often made a mess of things.

What Mess?

One typical outcome is that they start by not doing the research on what their consumers want, how their consumers want and prefer to communicate, and what kinds of communication the company itself can and wants to support. Because of this, they end up doing something inadequate like installing a message board on their website and, well, leaving it at that. Then they wonder why it’s not working.

At this point they either fix things — usually by doing some research and getting an idea of what is and isn’t working in their industry — or they give up.

Why Does This Happen?

In my opinion, this mess-up happens because they haven’t really thought through their objectives of getting into social computing or even what the point of social computing is. A major factor in this lack of planning — or, worse still, a lack of awareness — is that they haven’t hired the right marketing and communications people (ultimately, all of this is a marketing exercise) and this is where the Forrester Research report called ‘How to Staff for Social Computing‘ comes in.

Two Crucial Roles

As Jeremy Owyang, the report’s author, mentions in his blog, staffing for social computing boils down to two crucial roles: (1) the Social Media Strategist who pushes for social computing internally (convinces management, gets resources, etc.) and (2) the Community Manager who actually runs the community itself (which he wrote more about in an earlier post).

Of course, all of this sounds pretty simple when put like that — you have to pay $279 or be a Forrester client to get the full-detail version — but, at one level, it really is that simple. You need the right people — who will do the right planning, the much-needed internal advocating, and the crucial open and honest external communications — to get the job done properly.

I’m glad Forrester has published this report because something like this is much needed and will be really helpful to people like me who advocate the use of social computing in organizations and, often, simply end up banging their heads against a wall.

- - - - - - - - - -

[1] Or, if you want to use the unfortunate buzz word, “Web 2.0″.

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Melbourne Business School Blogs

Filed Under blogging, melbourne business school

UPDATE: I now maintain this list on its own page.

A few days ago I mentioned to a colleague that very few Melbourne Business School (MBS) students, faculty, and staff members are also bloggers (to my knowledge: two faculty members, three students, and four staff members).

Later it occurred to me that I might have spoken too soon. Yes, I had done quite a bit of research on this in the past — which is why I was confident enough to have made that statement in the first place — but was my statement completely accurate?

To check, I did a much more comprehensive round of research on the ‘net and, whaddya know?, I found some more MBS blogs. Here’s an updated, more comprehensive, listing:

Current Students

Alumni

Staff

I know of three other staff members who blog but, since they haven’t declared themselves as MBS staff on their blogs, I’m not going to mention them here.

Also, one of my part-time MBA class mates, who is also the CIO at MBS, wrote an blog post (don’t know if he’s going to contribute there regularly) so he also gets a mention:

Faculty

I haven’t found any new faculty member blogs so I thought I’d list faculty member websites instead. Also, since a lot of our faculty members have their publications listed at the Berkeley Electronic Press website, I’ve included a link to that as well:

Have I missed anyone? If so, please let me know. Thanks.

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