The Executive's Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy E-Book

Mike Barlow

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: SAS Institute Inc
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 296

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Social media has already transformed society. Now it is poised to revolutionize communications and collaborative business processes. This book provides you with an actionable framework for developing and executing successful enterprise social networking strategies. Using straightforward language, accompanied by exhibits and fleshed out with real-world stories and revealing anecdotes, you will learn how to develop your own internal corporate social media strategy. Through the use of in-depth interviews with leading companies using these strategies, you will also discover best practices that will propel your business to new heights.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Half title page

Wiley & SAS Business Series

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The Grand Scheme of Things

CHAPTER 1 Speed, Scope, Complexity, Power, and Potential

THEY LAUGHED AT THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

A WORLD OF NEW CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

GETTING A FIRM GRASP ON A VIRAL PHENOMENON

WHAT’S THE HURRY?

TOO NEWFANGLED FOR YOU?

A VERY COOL SCENARIO

STEP UP AND MEET THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION

JUST WHAT YOU NEEDED: ANOTHER “CONVERGENCE”

CHAPTER 2 The New Mode of Production

SOCIAL MEDIA, TEAMWORK, AND COLLABORATION

MAPPING SOCIAL MEDIA TO RESULTS

ACCELERATING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

DRIVING KNOWLEDGE INTO AND ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION

CROWD SOURCING ...

WE’RE ALL HACKERS NOW

CHAPTER 3 The Social Enterprise

FORGET MURPHY’S LAW

MORE IMPORTANT THAN MONEY?

THE SOCIAL WORKFORCE

COLLABORATION IS THE NEW EFFICIENCY

SOCIAL HR

FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT

THE TRAIN IS LEAVING THE STATION

THE NEW SOCIAL DIMENSION

SOCIAL CRM

SOCIAL LEADERSHIP

MAKING IT STICK

LEGAL NICETIES

HIGH SPEEDS NEED SEAT BELTS

TAKE THE TIME TO WRITE IT DOWN

Part II: Building a Structure for Success

CHAPTER 4 Get Everybody Together in the Same Room

INVITE THE PRACTITIONERS, NOT JUST THE RULEMAKERS

FIGURE OUT WHAT’S IMPORTANT

WHAT ARE YOUR EXISTING GOALS?

WHAT MAKES SENSE IN YOUR INDUSTRY?

WHAT MAKES SENSE IN YOUR COMPANY?

HOW CAN YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT WILL WORK FOR YOU?

CHAPTER 5 Creating Social Media Guidelines

BE CLEAR AND CONCISE

GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA AT SAS

INCLUDE DOS AS WELL AS DON’TS

INCLUDE EXAMPLES

COMMUNICATE AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE, IN EVERY CHANNEL YOU HAVE

SPOTLIGHT SUCCESSES

LEAD BY EXAMPLE

CHAPTER 6 Staffing and Structuring

WHERE DOES IT LIVE?

HIRE OR DESIGNATE?

HOW DO YOU STRUCTURE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA?

HOW ONE ORGANIZATION PULLS IT TOGETHER

OUTSOURCING THE ROLES

CHAPTER 7 Listening, Measurement, Analytics, and ROI

A SIMPLE LISTENING FRAMEWORK

FIRST, A WORD FROM THE MEASUREMENT QUEEN

“LISTEN, YES. BUT THINK BIGGER.”

THE FIVE KINDS OF LISTENING

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS?

CAREONE’S MEASUREMENT MODEL

NOT A SIMPLE FORMULA, BUT A FORMULA NONETHELESS

CHAPTER 8 The Keys to Success in Social Media

IT’S DIFFICULT IN ITS SIMPLICITY

FINDING THE TIME TO DO IT

A SIMPLE MODEL

USING ALL YOUR CHANNELS

NINE EASY WAYS TO WRITE A BLOG POST

Part III: Putting Your Social Media Strategy to Work

CHAPTER 9 Marketing

FROM STROLLERS TO SHARPIES

FROM THE NURSERY TO THE KITCHEN

SHARPIE, MEET LAMBORGHINI

BERT’S ADVICE

CHAPTER 10 Social Media for B2B

B2B AND PHONEBOOTH-TO-B

TAKING AN INTEGRATED APPROACH AT CISCO

CHAPTER 11 Public Relations

THE OLD MODEL OF PR

THE NEW MODEL OF PR

SOCIAL MEDIA PR AT MAYO CLINIC

SOCIAL MEDIA IN A CRISIS

GREENPEACE VERSUS NESTLÉ

THE POWER OF PARODY

CHAPTER 12 Sales

TURNING TWITTER CONNECTIONS INTO SALES LEADS

A DEBT OF GRATITUDE

CHAPTER 13 The Voice of the Customer

CUSTOMER SERVICE

COMCAST CARES

NOTHING IS CERTAIN BUT TWITTER AND TAXES

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

THE PHONE IS RINGING

CHAPTER 14 Internal Communications

THE “VIRTUAL WATER COOLER”

SOCIAL MEDIA AND INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS AT SAS

APPENDIX: Intuit Social Communications Policy

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

INTUIT’S SOCIAL COMMUNICATION GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Additional Resources

CONFERENCES AND INFORMATION PROVIDERS

BLOGGERS AND FREE ONLINE RESOURCES

FREE ONLINE RESOURCES

Recommended Reading

About the Authors

Index

The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy

Wiley & SAS Business Series

The Wiley & SAS Business Series presents books that help senior-level managers with their critical management decisions.

Titles in the Wiley and SAS Business Series include:

Activity-Based Management for Financial Institutions: Driving Bottom-Line Results by Brent Bahnub

Branded! How Retailers Engage Consumers with Social Media and Mobility by Bernie Brennan and Lori Schafer

Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence beyond Reporting by Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund

Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage by Gloria J. Miller, Dagmar Brautigam, and Stefanie Gerlach

Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy by Olivia Parr Rud

Case Studies in Performance Management: A Guide from the Experts by Tony C. Adkins

CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology, Second Edition by Joe Stenzel

Credit Risk Assessment: The New Lending System for Borrowers, Lenders, and Investors by Clark Abrahams and Mingyuan Zhang

Credit Risk Scorecards: Developing and Implementing Intelligent Credit Scoring by Naeem Siddiqi

Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth, by Jill Dyche and Evan Levy

Demand-Driven Forecasting: A Structured Approach to Forecasting by Charles Chase

Enterprise Risk Management: A Methodology for Achieving Strategic Objectives by Gregory Monahan

Executive’s Guide to Solvency II by David Buckham, Jason Wahl, and Stuart Rose

Fair Lending Compliance: Intelligence and Implications for Credit Risk Management by Clark R. Abrahams and Mingyuan Zhang

Information Revolution: Using the Information Evolution Model to Grow Your Business by Jim Davis, Gloria J. Miller, and Allan Russell

Manufacturing Best Practices: Optimizing Productivity and Product Quality by Bobby Hull

Marketing Automation: Practical Steps to More Effective Direct Marketing by Jeff LeSueur

Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow: How to Make Knowledge Sharing Work by Frank Leistner

Performance Management: Finding the Missing Pieces (to Close the Intelligence Gap) by Gary Cokins

Performance Management: Integrating Strategy Execution, Methodologies, Risk, and Analytics by Gary Cokins

The Business Forecasting Deal: Exposing Bad Practices and Providing Practical Solutions by Michael Gilliland

The Data Asset: How Smart Companies Govern Their Data for Business Success by Tony Fisher

The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics by Thornton May

Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean by Ian Cox, Marie A Gaudard, Philip J. Ramsey, Mia L. Stephens, and Leo Wright

For more information on any of the above titles, please visit www.wiley.com.

Copyright © 2011 by SAS Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Thomas, David B., 1952-

 The executive’s guide to enterprise social media strategy : how social networks are radically transforming your business / David B. Thomas, Mike Barlow.

p. cm.—(Wiley & SAS business series)

 Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-88602-1 (hardback); 978-1-118-00521-7 (ebk); 978-1-118-00522-4 (ebk); 978-1-118-00523-1 (ebk)

 1. Business enterprises–Computer networks. 2. Strategic planning–Computer networks. 3. Social media–Economic aspects. 4. Online social networks–Economic aspects. I. Barlow, Mike. II. Title.

 HD30.37.T49 2011

 006.7068'4–dc22

2010037966

For Jean and Conrad (a.k.a. The Mrs. and The Boy)

and

For Darlene, Janine, and Paul

Foreword

Frankly, this book is too fun to cover anything to do with the enterprise.

You’re never going to convince anyone in your company that this book is worthwhile, because it’s actually useful, and it’s interesting, and much more than this, it’s engaging and funny (I mean, snicker and blurt out a little laugh funny), and as I once racked up over 16 years in the enterprise telecommunications world, I know that funny and engaging are illegal inside companies.

How are you ever going to convince an executive that learning from other people at other enterprise companies who successfully implemented social media tools into their workplace is worth anything? By interviewing people inside and outside the gray cubicle nation, Dave Thomas and Mike Barlow are ruining anyone’s chance of thinking this book was just concocted out of nothing one day while waiting for their laundry to dry.

I don’t know Mike Barlow very well. I’m sure he’s nice, or at least types fast, because otherwise, why would you write a book with him? But I know Dave Thomas—sorry, David B. Thomas. I met him while he was working for America’s “Best Company to Work For” (well, that’s what Fortune said), which was a big enterprise company, where Dave brought enterprise social media into its fold. Because I don’t know anything about Mike personally, I’ll just say that he invented dolphins. Yes. That’s right.

I have a burning passion for enterprise culture, or, rather, whenever I visit an enterprise, I get the terrible and irresistible urge to change most enterprise cultures, because I feel like the front door was a time machine, in some aspects, and I just want to help them understand that the world outside has changed since the days of President Reagan. This book, such as it is, is a time machine set to forward, set to next.

In all seriousness, the book does what I’m doing here: It coats lots of really important subjects and lots of actionable advice in a little bit of humor, a little bit of well-turned phrase, and actually manages the impressive duty of keeping one’s eyes open all the way to the end.

This is to say, it’s NOT LIKE OTHER BOOKS ABOUT ENTERPRISE PROCESSES, CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY.

So, go ahead. Try to get this one explained away on your expense report. Oh wait. You’re not allowed an expense report anymore. It’s the future. You have to buy things out of your own pocket and hope that no one else in the building steals this book, because it’s that good.

The worst part of all this is that if you’ve smirked even once while reading the foreword, you’re probably more like Dave and Mike than you know. You’re at least a little bit like me (except maybe you don’t take your coffee black and maybe you don’t have a bunch of Batman action figures on your bookshelf thingy). And you might actually value what Thomas and Barlow (doesn’t that make them sound like private eyes?) have written.

I’m giving this book a bad review, for having 100 fewer pages than most books I’m forced to read. In fact, I’m going to pan it when it comes out in the mainstream, because, frankly, only people who want their enterprise to succeed will read it anyway, and they don’t care what reviews say. They run in search of facts and details and useful, actionable information.

In fact, maybe this book is like Fight Club. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s keep it to ourselves and appear BRILLIANT to the bosses. You with me? Say nothing.

Shhhh.

Chris Brogan, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Trust Agents, and publisher of chrisbrogan.com

Preface

When this book was initially conceived, social media was still considered a relatively new phenomenon, and the main purpose of the book was to address the sense of skepticism expressed by many top executives about the value of social media in enterprise-level business environments.

In the few months between this initial conception and the launch of the book project, the notion that social media was some kind of trend or fad had pretty much vanished. It was replaced by a more palpable sense of awareness that social media was growing and evolving so rapidly that only a fool would purposely ignore it.

This heightened sense of astonishment pushed the book in a different direction, and the finished text you are reading reflects this shift in emphasis. The original book would have started at the 40,000-foot level and stayed there for the duration. This version of the book offers a much broader and more immediately practical view of the current state of corporate social media. Most important, it includes actionable advice that can be put to use by any company, right now.

The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy is composed of three parts: Part I is a high-level strategic overview of the impact of newer social collaborative technologies on society, culture, and business. It serves as a prelude and a foundation for Parts II and III, which dive into the nitty-gritty tactical details of developing and managing successful corporate social media strategies. Parts II and III include summaries titled “What You Can Do Right Now” to help you get started and focus on the tactics that will have immediate value.

All three parts of the book are entertaining, useful, and intentionally provocative. Part I was written primarily by Mike Barlow, a business journalist and management consultant. Parts II and III were written primarily by David B. Thomas, drawing on the nearly two years he spent developing social media strategy, policy, and training as social media manager at SAS. In creating the content for this book, both authors have drawn extensively from their own personal experiences and from stories, anecdotes, and information culled from numerous in-depth interviews conducted with various expert sources.

Acknowledgments

DAVE

Almost every name you read in this book represents someone who went out of his or her way to talk to us and share what’s working. One of the beautiful things about social media, at least here in late-2010, is how open and honest the practitioners are about what they’re doing. The people helping to bring this revolution to the corporate world are doing it not just because they see a way to increase their profits but because they know that promoting a more open and honest philosophy and methodology of business communication can truly help make this a better world.

My thanks to all of them who shared so freely of their knowledge and ideas, including Lee Aase, John Bastone, LaSandra Brill, Jeff Cohen, Len Devanna, Bert Dumars, Craig Duncan, Jeanette Gibson, Nathan Gilliatt, Becky Graebe, Allison Green, Annette Green, Patty Hager, Shel Holtz, Nichole Kelly, Charlene Li, Chris Moody, Jeremiah Owyang, Katie Paine, Christopher S. Penn, Kirsten Watson, and Zena Weist.

Thanks to my SAS boss, Kelly LeVoyer, for her support and encouragement, and to the folks in my chain of command there who saw the value of this book, including SAS External Communications Director Pamela Meek and CMO (and blogger) Jim Davis.

My SAS colleague John Balla deserves a huge round of applause and maybe a big bottle of fancy olive oil for his help with the Social Media Cookbook for Marketing, some of which ended up in this book. John and his colleagues, ably led by Deb Orton, demonstrate every day the perfect combination of level-headedness combined with a spirit of creativity and adventure that business folks need to make this stuff work.

Alison Bolen of SAS deserves a special mention as well. Even before I came to work there, she was showing people the value of these new communications channels. Working with her to bring these tools and techniques to fruition has been a joy. She has been an invaluable ally and sounding board (as well as a patient ear at those times when it wasn’t such a joy).

I’d like to thank my friend and writing partner Mike Barlow for bringing me in to what was already a greenlighted book project with a great publisher like Wiley already on board. What more could a new author ask for (other than more hours in the day)? Mike taught me everything I know about writing a book. So if there’s anything here you don’t like, please take it up with him.

And finally, I’d like to thank my dad, David Thomas, career marketer and business leader, blogger, and author of The Common Sense Manager, for providing me with a lifelong example of how to be passionate about your work and the value of sharing that passion with others.

MIKE

From my perspective, this book is largely a work of journalism. As a result, I am indebted to my sources for sharing their time, knowledge, and wisdom so generously.

I could not have written my parts of the book without the active cooperation and participation of John Bastone, Steven Bailey, Matthew Chamberlin, Kendall Collins, Ginger Conlon, Kelly Feller, Christopher Gatewood, Paul Greenberg, Jamie Grenney, Winnie Ko, Brent Leary, Eugene Lee, Liza Emin Levitt, Christopher Lynch, Britton Manasco, Pem McNerney, Hunter Muller, Jeanne Murray, Viviana Padilla, Mark Polansky, Laurie Ruettimann, Brad Samargya, Jeffrey Schick, David Meerman Scott, Euan Semple, Ruth Stevens, Luis Suarez, Lucas Swineford, Teka Thomas, Pamela Warren, and Sean Whiteley.

I owe special thanks to Don Peppers for recommending several terrific books, including The Wealth of Networks and The Rational Optimist. Don also planted several ideas in my mind that took root and blossomed during the writing of this book. For those ideas, and for the time that Don spent chatting with me on the phone, I am truly grateful.

I would also like to thank my mom, Edith G. Barlow, who remains the best copy editor I know.

Introduction

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

—Herman Melville

First, let’s define some terms. Sharing a common understanding of these terms will help all of us dodge some of the confusion lurking around the subject of this book. These definitions are vast oversimplifications, but no matter. They will get us started on our journey, more or less together.

Social networking: Humans sharing knowledge with other humans outside of their immediate pair-bond families.

Social computing: Systems of hardware, software, and firmware that enable social networking in a digital environment.

Social media: Platforms specifically designed to make social computing available to anyone with a device capable of connecting to the Internet.

Enterprise 2.0: A term coined by Andrew McAfee, a professor at the Harvard School of Business, to describe the impact of social networking, social computing, and social media on business organizations.

OK, now we can begin. Clearly, you’ve already heard a lot about social media and you’re wondering how it can help your business or help your career. That’s probably why you’re reading this book, right? Our goal is to take some of the mystery out of social media. After all, it’s just another tool.

Or is it? Saying that social media is just another tool is a little bit like saying the telephone is just another tool or the Internet is just another tool. OK, maybe you’re right. They are all tools. But from that perspective, fire is just a tool. The wheel? Just another tool …

Well, hold on to your hat. At first glance, every new invention looks like just another handy tool. But isn’t it funny how some inventions wind up changing the world? The light bulb. The atomic bomb. The disposable razor. The birth control pill.

COUNTRY VILLAGE OR GLEAMING CITY?

Euan Semple speaks frequently about social media to corporate audiences. Based in the United Kingdom, he was director of knowledge management at the BBC, where he helped developed the BBC’s first social networking tools. He has since served as a social media consultant to major organizations such as Nokia, the World Bank, and NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

Euan sees social media as more of an enabling technology than a driving force. The distinction between enabler and driver is important, because it underscores what seems to be the inevitability of social media emerging as a common, worldwide platform. Here’s what Euan told us in a recent conversation via Skype:

As is the case so often, it’s not so much the technology that’s driving the changes—it’s that the technology has come along at a time when things were changing anyway.

The implicit or explicit contract between individuals of the organizations they work for has changed over the last decade or so. The old promise of stability and safety in return for allegiance has fallen apart. The days when you had a job for life are gone.

As a result, more and more people are aware of their need to build up their own capabilities and their own networks and start looking after themselves, if you like.

Euan paints a picture of a world that is very different from the one described in most textbooks on corporate management. In this world, social media isn’t just an emerging and potentially very useful business tool; it’s the salient feature of an evolutionary—or perhaps deevolutionary—trend in which people are rediscovering their personal economic fragility and, as a result, gaining new perspectives on their responsibility for shaping their own destinies.

At the same time, corporations are rediscovering the intrinsic business value of their “humanness” and are making room for practices that encourage more participation and more engagement from their employees and their customers. “I think we’re trying to get back something that we’ve lost over the past 30 or 40 years,” says Euan.

From the Industrial Revolution until very recently, business has been all about “tidying and linking and categorizing things” into big chunks that appear manageable. But there’s a price for this illusion of manageability and control, says Euan.

I’m more and more convinced that we’re actually losing a lot in the process. Very often, the interesting bits happen in the cracks between the big chunks—in the unpredictable, in the unlabeled, in the unexpected, in the messiness.

The willingness to embrace that messiness, to work with that messiness and to make it effective, is really important.

I’ll often use the analogy of old villages that grow up haphazardly. There’s no predetermined architectural style, there’s no uniform color to their roofs. They’ve got windy paths and lots of human-scale architecture.

People can relate to these old villages. People feel comfortable in them. They know where the church is and where the pub is. There are these well-worn paths that people feel comfortable using. And people feel comfortable standing on street corners talking to each other.

Modern cities, however, can be cold, large, unfriendly, and ultimately confusing. “The scale of the buildings is inhuman. Each street looks much like the previous street. You don’t feel like hanging around and chatting,” says Euan.

One of the lessons he learned when starting up the BBC’s social media program was to keep it simple and let it grow organically—much like those old villages. Having too many rules—or setting expectations too high—can frighten people away from social media programs.

You don’t want to coerce people into using social media. You can’t force people to blog. You need to entice them into participating by offering something that’s attractive and interesting.

Patience is the key virtue when introducing a social media program, he says. “Whatever you’re trying to accomplish with social media will happen one person at a time, and for their reasons, not yours.”

Corporations themselves face a choice, he says. They can model themselves to resemble old country villages or new cities. With social media, perhaps they can have both: the gleaming efficiency of the modern metropolis and the comforting messiness—and humanity—of the country village.

BEYOND DISRUPTIVE

There’s no question that social media is a game-changer. It touches and transforms so many aspects of our lives that we’ve already lost count. Calling it “disruptive” somehow feels like an understatement. For the moment, let’s focus on what social media is–and how it can help make our businesses more efficient, more effective, more customer-friendly, and more profitable.

We recently caught up with marketing expert David Meerman Scott, whose bestselling book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, is considered the gold standard for practical advice about social media. David believes that social media is already revolutionizing business communications. Here’s a snippet of our conversation with him:

We’re going through a revolution in the way people communicate. I think it’s the most significant revolution in communications since the invention of the printing press.

It’s so critically important to understand what’s happening right now. This revolution will be transformational for all kinds of businesses—big and small, private and public, B-to-B and B-to-C. It will be transformational for non-profits and government agencies too.

Organizations that don’t understand the consequences of this revolution will be left in the dust. They will miss opportunities and they will leave themselves open to new dangers.

David also notes that social media is eliminating the need for many of the physical meetings that tend to occupy large portions of the typical workday.

In the old days, you went to work in the morning and you stayed until the evening. Everything happened in the office or at meetings you attended. Very little work got done after 6 p.m. or on weekends or on holidays.

The first generation of home offices and “virtual workspaces” didn’t offer much in the way of improvement. They were physically similar to traditional offices—you sat at a desk in front of a computer, tethered to your telephone and your fax machine.

Today, thanks to a growing variety of collaborative social technologies, people can work virtually from anywhere, at any time. “It doesn’t really matter anymore where you are,” says David.

Social media, he says, “allows us to compress time.” It gives us the power to decide when we want to join a conversation. So instead of being locked into back-to-back meetings, we can contribute meaningfully to dozens of online “meetings”—without offending or displeasing anyone.

The ability to “time shift” our work, much in the same way that we “time-shift” TV programs with our digital video recorders, represents a fundamental change in our approach to doing business. As David says, “the manifestations of time and space go away.”

It’s almost too good to be true: The everyday cost of doing business drops, and productivity goes up. Are we dreaming?

Nope, it’s real. Social media is revolutionizing the way we do business—and the revolution has only begun to get started!

You don’t have to be an economist to see the advantages of digitally enabled social networking in a business environment. And you don’t need to be an especially visionary leader to see why your business needs a social networking strategy. It seems pretty clear that social media is a productivity engine. In the same way that PCs changed the way office work is performed, social computing is changing the way all work is performed.

STEP ASIDE, FRED TAYLOR …

Social media, it seems, is about to stand Frederick Winslow Taylor on his head. Taylor, as you know, was the father of scientific management, and his quest for efficiency was legendary. He believed that the key to productivity was standardization. Under Taylor, jobs were broken down into tasks that could be precisely timed and measured. Inefficient practices were rooted out and abolished. Woe to the worker who brought his or her own sense of individual purpose—or, worse yet, creativity—to the assembly line.

To be fair, there are some sectors of the economy—such as manufacturing—in which Taylor’s methods still make sense. But as manufacturing becomes more automated, and as the rest of the global economy shifts more and more toward services, Taylor’s relentless focus on worker efficiency is beginning to look a bit old hat.

Until someone figures out a way to automate creativity, we’re going to need workers who can think fast and respond appropriately to increasingly complex challenges posed by increasingly complex markets. The best way to make these kinds of workers productive is by giving them a platform that supports and amplifies their natural human creativity. That platform is social media.

SOCIAL MEDIA OR WHAT?

When we began conducting interviews for this book, one of the first questions our interview subjects would ask was “Is this book about social media or enterprise 2.0?” or words to that general effect. Our standard answer was “Both!”

After a couple of interviews, however, we realized that what people were really asking us was “Is this another book about Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube?”

For most people, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and all of their various digital cousins represent the “social” face of social media. So our typical response was to say something like “No, we’re writing a book about the business uses of social media.”

Unfortunately, that response would usually elicit a reply that went something like this:

Oh, you mean like how Disney Pixar has a Buzz Lightyear page on Facebook to promote Toy Story 3 and Lady Gaga has a MySpace page for The Fame Monster where you can download “Telephone?”

And then we would say something along these lines:

No, actually we’re writing a book about how some companies are using social media to promote and support collaboration, teamwork, and communication across the modern extended enterprise, which includes stakeholders and partners within and without the traditional corporate boundaries.

And we’re also looking at how really smart companies use social media to generate leads, identify prospects, improve customer lifetime value, and drive down marketing costs.

Then the person we’re interviewing usually says, “Oh, that’s what I was hoping you’d say,” or words to that effect, and the interview begins in earnest.

WHY NOW?

If the hype around social media seems particularly breathless and frenetic, it’s because most of the experts, pundits, and hypesters (pronounced hype-sters, like hipsters or hamsters) who are talking, writing, and blogging about social media are actually way behind the curve when it comes to understanding the technologies driving its widespread adoption.

Here’s what you have to know about social media so you can fully understand why it’s not about to just go away or vanish or be replaced by another cool trend.

The reason social media is expanding so quickly is partially accidental. Yes, social media is another of those pesky worldwide phenomena, like influenza, that ride the tricky roller coaster of fortune. It’s always difficult to step back and say, “Wow, that’s pretty random,” especially when it’s something affecting your business, but there it is. Luck plays a role, and there’s no point in denying it.

The reason social media looks more like a tsunami than a trend is that, like a tsunami, the real action is taking place beneath the surface.

You can ask yourself, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” all day long, but it seems pretty obvious that social media got its biggest boost from broadband and that it will get an even bigger boost from wireless. When cloud computing really kicks into high gear, social media will get another huge lift.

Social media lives in the global information technology (IT) infrastructure and travels across the global communications infrastructure. So it makes sense that the faster and more powerful those infrastructures become, the faster and more powerful social media will become.

A few years ago, it seemed as if everyone were talking about the “convergence” of telephone, cable, and Internet service. That convergence was made possible by huge investments in new infrastructure by the telecoms and cable providers. Today, we enjoy the fruits of that labor, even as we curse the monthly costs.

A similar convergence is driving social media. As companies invest more heavily in advanced mobile computing and cloud computing technologies, social media will get what amounts to a free ride.

If you’re a history buff, all of this should evoke thoughts of the influenza pandemic of 1920 and its aftermath. What’s genuinely fascinating and unique about social media, however, is that it’s self-propagating. It’s the medium and the message, rolled into one handy bundle. Where’s Marshall McLuhan when we really need him?

SO, WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO SKIN A MASTODON?

Social networking is not a new phenomenon. It’s been a part of human culture for the past two million years, give or take a few dozen millennia. When our ancestors started organizing themselves into social groups of hunters and gatherers, they also began communicating and sharing information with each other.

Although there isn’t much evidence to suggest that these early humans developed more than a rudimentary kit of tools, the fossil records show a surge of creativity about 40,000 years ago, in what archeologists call the Upper Paleolithic Period.

Suddenly, people were using specialized tools and working together to perform increasingly complex tasks, such as hunting, trapping, killing, butchering, cooking, and consuming large prey. This isn’t a minor detail in the evolutionary history of humankind; it’s the killing and eating of large prey—big animals that are chock full of protein and fat—that gives humans the edge over any potential competitors.

The hunter-gatherer clans of the Upper Paleolithic Period functioned as real teams. Members of the clan communicated with each other, shared knowledge, and collaborated to produce results that far outstripped the accomplishments of other primates. Within these primitive “corporations,” critical knowledge was transferred socially, from one person to the next—there weren’t any other mechanisms available.

About 10,000 years ago, humans developed agriculture. Over the next several thousand years, clans and tribes were gradually replaced by villages, towns, cities, and eventually nations. It took a lot of knowledge to sustain a growing civilization, but somehow our early relatives figured out how to pass the knowledge around and keep it from getting lost.

Again, the primary mode of transmission was social—one person telling something to someone else. Of course, if you had a loud voice, you could pass your knowledge along to several people at once. And yes, writing enabled some people to capture knowledge and store it on various media (stone, clay, papyrus, vellum, parchment, etc.), but unless you knew how to read—and few people did—you couldn’t access that knowledge.

Everything changed with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century. Suddenly it was possible to share knowledge widely. There had been a pent-up demand for knowledge during the Middle Ages; Gutenberg’s press set off a revolution that fed on that repressed demand. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment all swiftly followed.

The accelerating pace of innovation and progress began to resemble a natural force, a fierce storm sweeping aside all vestiges of the past. The nineteenth century brought the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio; the twentieth century brought television, computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

And now, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we contemplate the emergence of the newest branch of Gutenberg’s expanding revolution: social computing.

Social computing brings social networking—an activity that began in the Stone Age—into the here and now. Fortunately for all of us, the timing could not be more perfect.

QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD BE PREPARED TO ANSWER

OK, maybe you’re wondering whether it would really be a good idea to include a slide of early humans hunting down a mastodon when you’re trying to justify more spending on social media. Fair enough. Let’s focus instead for a moment on the most pressing and most relevant questions you are likely to face from skeptical internal audiences. (Don’t worry, the answers follow!)

Q. Why does our company need a social media strategy?