Social media in business: Is it time to join the social club?

Responsibility for formulating a business strategy for social media may fall to the IT leader in an organisation, simply because senior management sees social media as “an internet thing”, and therefore under the remit of IT.

In this respect, businesses use of social media parallels the early days of the web in the mid-to-late 1990s. Back then, the head of IT was often given the task of crystallising what is now known as internet access policy – who was allowed to do what online - before human resources (HR) and the legal team realised it was too risky to trust to technology people alone.

Besides, it makes sense for IT to be involved in policy decisions, because IT has to administer the infrastructure social media interactions run over and manage the data traffic they generate.

There are also parallels with today’s business use of social media and the early days of mobile email: whether the company officially sanctions its use or not, it is happening anyway.

Employees will be posting status updates on Facebook and tweeting to friends who know where they work. Or maybe they are pitching in on forums relevant to their specialist area.

Diverse drivers

The savvier members of the IT department are likely to have been early adopters of social media and may have already built up considerable nous worth tapping. But the driver for official adoption is more likely to come from outside IT circles.

Marketers may see social media as a way of engaging with customers by giving the organisation’s brand a human face and voice. HR might have been persuaded that social media is an ideal tool for recruitment, even if that boils down to plundering LinkedIn to match prospective candidates’ profiles with their CVs.

Such mono-focus can be helpful. Given its reach into all spheres of human interaction, business rationale for social media adoption can be diffuse, a “change everything” mission that distracts rather than transforms.

Indeed, the pressure for adoption of social media may well come from messianic (or misty-eyed, depending on your level of cynicism) MBAs who have bought wholesale into the “Facebook-isation of the enterprise” a la JP Rangaswami.

This isn’t to denigrate Rangaswami’s vision or suggest that IT leaders should be curmudgeonly about social media. A socialised and transparent organisation would be a wonderful place to work and likely be highly effective. But disciples of a vision have a tendency to mistake the tools for the value system, the ceremonies for the spirit; whereas, as Rangaswami points out, the technologies alone won’t achieve the vision.

Faced with a hierarchical and secretive organisation, the social media disciple may put undue trust in tools to achieve transformation.

Dot days

This highlights another parallel with the early days on the web. The dotcom boom and bust wasn’t just about venture-bloated startups with a one-page business plan and disrespect for the conventions of accounting. Thousands of ordinary businesses blew millions of dollars on “web presence”, which often amounted to little more than static “brochureware” and a hosted .com address.