As Published in Business 2 Business, July 2009

Social Networking: Disruptive Tweetology?

By Ira S Wolfe, Success Performance Solutions

While leading a workshop on business applications for social media recently, one overwhelmed business owner sheepishly pleaded for a return to the good old days, when life was simpler –like when the sound of “You’ve Got Mail” on your computer was considered state of the art!

Well it’s been just a mere 10 years since AOL hit its stride and a blockbuster movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan charmed millions of people.  AOL technology connected nearly 27 million customers to the Internet and just a decade later it’s nearly history.  Today we struggle to make sense of communicating (and even survive) in a world of tweets, nudges, pokes, friends, fans and connections – a world where email is now considered the snail mail of digital communication.  YIKES!

As hard as it is to believe, AOL, the once-dominant Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the country, is considered a drain and a pain to Time Warner. And Twitter, a mind-numbing -140-character -mini-blog- phenomenon, is turning the elusive yet seductive Internet into the wild, wild cyber-frontier.

But underneath all this digital chatter lies a business asset often ignored and a value under-leveraged.  The messengers (social networking sites) are being targeted as everything from annoying wastes of time to causing the fall of civilization as we know it. But regardless of the business model trying to capitalize on the art and science of the six degrees of separation, there exists within every organization an embedded invisible social network.  This social structure is not new - it existed long before the Internet was even conceived.  All that MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others have done is act like a super -steroid, giving extraordinary power and influence to the invisible social structure functioning quietly behind the scenes. Think Windows® - it’s revolutionized the way we work and live but we rarely know it’s there until something goes wrong.  That’s what social networks do.  They create conduits through which information and relationships flow.  When they work, they work fabulously. When they don’t, dysfunction seizes the wheels of productivity.

Until online social networking hit the scene earlier in this decade, an organization’s social structure was largely ignored and usually weakly represented by boxes in an organizational chart.  What we’ve learned is that the org chart is a primitive representation of how things really get done in an organization.  By ignoring online social networking as a strategic application, management deliberately chooses to turn a business asset into a malignant cancer.  Social networking exists whether you want to recognize it or not.  Facebook and MySpace didn’t create social networking – it merely exposed it. But just like an MRI that reveals the body in more detail, online networking turns the org chart into a piece of art. Pretending that social networks don’t exist won’t debilitate them but will allow them to run wild – and the value of knowledge and relationships that already exists within an organization will be squandered.  Setting up firewalls and limiting access to social network sites is like placing shut-off valves on your water pipes to prevent leaks. You stop the leaks but also cut off the supply. 

Office communication just isn’t what it used to be. 
The participants defending either the pros or cons of social networking are as passionate in this debate as those who argue if Pepsi tastes better than Coke or MACs outperform PCs.  When discussing social networking, one side blames employee distraction; the other side argues for employee productivity.

Many individuals point to texting and other forms of online networking as an expensive and annoying distraction in the workplace.  A case supporting their claims was made by Basex in a 2008 report titled, The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity."  The Basex report claims “it is the first in-depth look at a problem that results in 28 billion lost man-hours per annum in the United States. Technology promised to make workers more efficient, but it has the potential to cost companies billions unnecessarily….. Managers need to recognize that 28 percent of each knowledge worker's day may be wasted due to unnecessary interruptions such as instant messaging, spam e-mail, telephone calls and the Web.”

But these claims were refuted however just weeks later in an eWeek article which listed unified communications and collaboration as two of the top corporate time savers for 2008. This is the very same technology that Basex cautioned costs businesses hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity and was now lauded by the eWeek report as a godsend for companies trying to stay connected to and collaborate with customers and employees.  

The benefit to texting and other technologies was further discussed in a column posted on BNet in January 2008.  This author claimed that distractions have always existed:

How many people store a letter opener in the top drawer of their desk these days? O.K., we haven’t done a survey, but we’re pretty confident that the number would be relatively low. It used to be that you spent a significant chunk of time each day sliding that letter opener through the top of envelopes from a variety of business contacts. Then you checked your answering machine messages, there were perhaps dozens since you left the office the previous day from people in different time zones.

In essence this author is stating that distractions are not new, just different.  He then raises several relevant questions that direct attention to the validity of the distracting claims:

“Is the “wasted” time and productivity really connected to the new technologies?”

“Is it possible for workers to be engaged and productive for 8 hours each day and five days each week, or are these distractions and superfluous conversations somewhat necessary?”

“Are all of the behaviors they point out actually wasting time, or are they providing benefits that are just more difficult to ascertain?” 

Ironically, the digital conversations that many organizations are attempting to extinguish are the ones that have the ability to create the competitive differentiation and to drive the execution that could provide a sustainable competitive edge.

We are living in a time rife with opposites. Organizations are expected to exist globally and act locally; to be efficient and innovative; to remain profitable in both the short and long term.  

Socially enabled organizations do two things well: they recognize opportunities and challenges, and coordinate appropriate responses. Both things are highly sought competencies in today’s volatile yet opportunity-rich marketplace.  These networks – whether online or face-to-face - bring powerful new insights to execution and improvement in organizational activities that are critical to the three areas vital to survival and success in a connected world:

• Alignment

• Execution

• Adaptation

To achieve alignment, the traditional management activity of moving boxes and lines around on a formal chart can make leaders feel as though they are driving alignment and organizational forces on strategic objective. But these formal changes ignore the informal “invisible” networks that ultimately will either drive flawless execution or disrupt the best laid plans.

What makes it invisible? How many of you right now believe that there is an employee in your organization with the know-how to solve a problem but without the authority to do it; how many of you believe there is an employee right now who has the knowledge about a customer that if shared could lead to more revenue – but damned if you know who he or she is; how many of you believe there is an employee who has the knowledge about a customer that if shared could lead to a reduced costs or knows a friend, client, customer, or competitor who could be an asset and valuable addition to your organization – if only you knew what box on that organizational chart they filled.

Ignoring the influence and power of what it can’t see results in a disconnect between strategic objectives and network configuration that leads organizations to underperform relative to the expertise and resources they possess. The people who make up this invisible network are the conduits through which value is created and innovation realized. Leaders should facilitate the flow of information, not create bottlenecks.

Instead of deriding social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter for the disruptions they create, leaders need to take a strategic view of how they can leverage these invisible assets already embedded within their organization. 

High costs are associated with service-inconsistency when each employee must find someone who can help answer ordinary and commonly occurring problems but they don’t know who they are. Informal networks have substantial implications for innovation and performance. They align individual and collective action with strategic collaboration.  They render the invisible visible.

Expose the stealth. 

Recommended Reading:  Driving Results through Social Networks, Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas, Jossey-Bass. 2009.

About the author

As president of Success Performance Solutions, Ira S Wolfe helps organizations find and hire the right employees and identify high-potential leaders. He speaks nationwide on hiring, workforce trends, managing the generations in a presentation titled Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization.