Beer, plane tickets and social networks
More tech-savvy readers than myself - and that probably includes most of you - will know of Clay Shirky. We'll be hearing a lot more of the US writer, consultant and all-round expert on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies in the coming months as he has a new book out. Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations (it's kept its US spelling even for the UK edition) is about 'what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organisational structures'.
Now all this could easily be geek-speak and as a result way over my head. But after seeing Shirky in full flow at the RSA in London yesterday I could see that what he had to say would have broad appeal and should be listened to by businesses of all shapes and sizes.
It was the first time someone had bothered to explain (within my earshot at least) and without hysteria why social networking matters and that - self-evidently - its technological application is not the be all and end all.
So forget Facebook, Twitter (ask your IT department) and even blogs (ouch), the three most prevelant social networking technologies of the next year or two will be email (it's the most entrenched means of electronic communication by a country mile), the photo-sharing website Flickr (as 'even your mum is using it', according to Shirky) and old-fashioned face-to-face contact (the link here really should be a prod to go away and talk to someone. In person).
To demonstrate this, Shirky used a real-world example of a business that was suffering from warring internal factions – two departments working on other sides of the world that needed to but were failing to cooperate.
Asked by the client what social networking technology could bring these two parties closer together, Shirky's answer was two-fold: 'Plane tickets and beer'. Hasn't it always been that way?
He admitted to subscribing to the view that technology could solve everything in the past and acknowledged that too many commentators had previously predicted the death of the traditional organisation and that it was no closer to being replaced.
However, they will evole, and alternative - complementary, not supplementary - structures will emerge.
I couldn't agree more.
Collaboration is already entrenched and both real and virtual – witness the ICAEW IT Faculty’s new IT Counts website.
Similarly we're already seeing organisations (slowly) changing their views on sites like Facebook.
I heard Richard Boggis-Rolfe, the head of headhunters Odgers, on Radio 4’s The Bottom Line at the weekend talking about how staff in a networking business like his own should develop networks. In person and online.
The (virtual) social networking orthodoxy will spread, though it will never replace the compulsion for face-to-face contact, the desire to look someone in the eye and the need to kick the tyres of a business.
And it was great to hear a technological evangalist say so.
Social networks offer many great potentials for business and we have only just started to scrape the surface. Beyond Facebook and the like, which have introduced us to the medium, sites will start to come online now which offer the ability to connect with other people with the same specific interest/need. We'll be launching WeCanDo.BIZ in April to bring small businesses and commercial buyers together, for example. Expect to see more of this, which will bring real benefits to businesses in using such networks, beyond the benefits we see as indivduals.
As an aside, it makes me smile that e-mail will be significant though, as I disagree. E-mail companies have had 20 years to make that medium more useful and they didn't - hence social networking and instant messaging. And it has nowhere near the ubiquity today of mobile phones - way more people have those than e-mail, and it's always to hand. E-mail is dying, of that I am sure.
Ian Hendry
www.wecando.biz
Posted by Ian Hendry | March 20, 2008 12:46 PM
Thanks for the comment Ian. I'll have a look at your site as soon as I've cleared my inbox.
Posted by Damian Wild | March 25, 2008 9:03 AM
Growing your own network is one of the most important factors to doing business. However, we all must remember that in high value sales (Accounting, Legal, Property) purchasers are very unlikely to part with their company’s money unless they have actually met the seller. People will always do business with people. Online social networks for business is an interesting one though. B2B social networking has yet to become an integral part of sales and is quite a long way off from doing so. There will always be a big difference between networking and actually having a network. Social networks don’t guarantee meaningful relationships. Today there are so many communication channels to choose from, that as businesses we need to test to find out which ones work best to develop real relationships, not just have a heap of contacts.
Ian, I was interested in your comment about email too, so do you use instant messaging with all your customers at the moment? I work within digital communications, specifically accounting and legal firms and I must say out of all the channels they use, online and offline, email is proving to be one of the most successful. Email does not replace face to face but neither do social networking sites or blogs. It is not about any single channel but about using the right channels together at the right time, for the right message. We live in an information age and being able to deliver your message and be heard is the most important thing.
James Newcombe
Posted by James Newcombe | March 27, 2008 2:46 PM
Thanks for the comment. I hope I conveyed the message (my view and Shirky's, based on what he had to say) that all these developments have to be complementary. I fear it's still too easy to be seduced by the latest Shiny New Thing to come along and believe it will result in the immediate obsolesence of all that has come before it. That's is, of course, cobblers. New can work alongside old very effectively.
Posted by Damian Wild | March 28, 2008 9:02 AM