The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees by Anthony J. Bradley

A guidebook for principles of embedding self-sustaining collaboration within organisations. Primary message is have a good reason to create each social community, make sure it's aligned with teh business, nurture it and then let go.



One of our more striking discoveries is that most social media initiatives fail. Either they don’t attract any interest or they never create business value.Read more at location 145
“Operationally, we work as individual countries and regions or markets. The challenge is to get everyone involved regardless of location, job, or language. SHIFT enables us to develop initiatives at incredible speed by taking the structure of the company—and a person’s place in the organization—out of the discussion, so that we can all work together and move faster. SHIFT creates a truly global organization.” Based on the success he’d seen, he said, “With SHIFT, I know that we can mobilize the company faster and more effectively.”10Read more at location 219
Think of the three components this way: Community is the people who collaborate. Social media is where they collaborate. And purpose is why they collaborate. Social media plus community plus purpose create mass collaboration. And extensive, repeated success with mass collaboration in collaborative communities characterizes a social organization. Simple. But, like much else in organizations, this simple idea can be hard to execute well.Read more at location 289
Mass collaboration is defined by six fundamental principles or defining characteristics. Participation, collective, transparency, independence, persistence, and emergence, in combination, set it apart from other forms of communication and collaboration. A social media implementation that doesn’t display all these principles won’t enable mass collaboration.Read more at location 299
What if CEMEX management had taken the more traditional approach of (1) assembling a team to go out and audit all plants to identify the practices of the best ones and then (2) directing other plants to adopt those practices? It would have taken much longer, achieved a lower-quality assessment, and faced huge adoption challenges. Most likely, dozens of plants would have dragged their feet or claimed, “We can’t do that here.” In the end, management said the engineers had accomplished in six weeks using mass collaboration what would normally have taken two years.Read more at location 390 •
this requires a new and different mind-set. The people in a social organization no longer think entirely in terms of hierarchy and traditional management. They don’t automatically respond to a challenge by assigning its resolution to some person or group or by creating a structured process to deal with it. Because they’ve integrated community collaboration into the way they work and think every day, they ask instead: “Can a community do it better? Can we form a community to deal more effectively with this?” If the answer is yes, it takes that approach.Read more at location 453 •

Choosing community collaboration over traditional approaches will challenge the organization and individual managers within it. Companies that prefer to operate via prescribed processes, are obsessed with defining roles and responsibilities in great detail, and place great store in formal hierarchy will struggle to become social organizations. Managers who consider formal authority the primary tool at their disposal for influencing others will wrestle individually with their roles and functions in managing a community. And all managers will need to reconcile the tension between their continuing responsibility for outcomes with their inability to mandate or control what a collaborative community will produce.Read more at location 476 •
From all the cases we’ve studied, we can identify a few common reasons for failure: Social media initiatives fail most frequently because organizations focus on the technologies when they should focus instead on achieving a purpose through the new collective behaviors that those technologies make possible. New behaviors aimed at purpose, not technology, provide business value. Social media technology is a crucial component, but it’s an enabler with little or no value by itself. Its worth arises from what it allows. They fail because the organization lacks knowledge of the fundamental principles of mass collaboration. Not even great technology will save those efforts that ignore or omit the basic characteristics of successful social initiatives. They fail because not all challenges are well suited to mass collaboration. Organizations need to understand where collective communities are most likely to provide real value. Using mass collaboration in settings where it’s not appropriate wastes people’s time and the firm’s money and can even expose organizations to the possibility of mismanaging important information. Finally, they fail because the organization’s executives and managers lack the confidence to assign compelling purposes to communities and then allow the communities to find a way to fulfill their purposes. Managers stifle innovation with interference and excessive oversight, and, when the community does innovate, they lack ways to turn those ideas into organizational change.Read more at location 518 •
The term guide refers to the role of those managers who sponsor a community and are responsible for its results. In a real sense, the preparation that preceded this step was largely about “planning to let go.” Once the initiative has been launched and a community forms, it will take on a life of its own and, in large part, become the master of its own destiny. At this point, control will shift from the organization to the community and those in charge until now will move to a role of guiding rather than directing or controlling. Think of it as “managing by guiding from the middle.” It’s a difficult shift for some managers to make.Read more at location 646 •
Your aim in this meeting is, first, to identify those goals where collaboration is appropriate and, second, to articulate at high levels how community collaboration can foster progress toward achieving them. In addition to goals, you can use major business activities and known significant collaboration challenges to spur brainstorming.Read more at location 896 •
specific enough to motivate an identifiable target audience to participate. It also clearly articulates the benefits to community members and the business value to the organization. No longer than a paragraph, it answers four basic questions: Who are the target participants? What is the nature or focus of their collaboration? What’s in it for participants? What value will the organization realize?Read more at location 1024 •
viable community you need at minimum thirty to fifty active participants.Read more at location 2008 •
This places two requirements on managers: (1) that they allow control to rest in the hands of the community itself; and (2) that they create a supportive organizational framework within which the community can form and do its work.Read more at location 2100 •
communities with essentially the same purposes that compete for resources and members. Putting ideas for spin-offs through the No, Go, Grow process can help avoid this kind of overlap and confusion. Also, avoid spin-offs that pursue the same purpose as the original community and are different only because they focus on a particular business unit, geographic region, or some other distinguishing factor besides purpose. Repeating the same purpose in a different part of the organization can easily create community silos and artificial distinctions that diminish the power of mass collaboration.Read more at location 2443 •
In addition, after some experience with the community, Loyola moved student discussion boards off the university site and onto Facebook. “We adopted the principle that we needed to be where the students are, not make the students go where we wanted them to go.” said Roberts.Read more at location 2570 •
its ability to function more or less independently creates the potential for competition with traditional corporate functions. Consider a community whose purpose is to find ways to improve the workplace. The potential for conflict with HR is obvious. While such a community may include HR personnel, it is not led by HR in the same way that a task force on working conditions would be. Such tension can lead corporate functions to dismiss communities or actively oppose them.Read more at location 2608 •
Time taken by people involved is another cost factor finance uses to assess social media–based collaboration. They tend to see time spent collaborating as time away from work or as an additional burden. Point out where collaborating is or should be a normal part of community members’ jobs already. In fact, collaborative communities are almost always a more effective and efficient way of doing what must be done to carry out current plans and meet current budgets. Communities often don’t create new work. Instead, they provide a new and better way of doing the regular work that has to be done or provide a way to achieve valued objectives. When Gilberto Garcia, the sponsor of global collaboration on CEMEX SHIFT, was asked about the time people spent, he simply said, “Successful people collaborate. It’s already part of their job. The rest need to collaborate in order to learn how to do their job better.”3 AcknowledgeRead more at location 2699 •
the now-common practice of provide-and-pray, in which organizations simply make social technologies available with the expectation that good things will happen spontaneously. They won’t in almost all cases unless you start by understanding and embracing four fundamental success factors:Read more at location 2954 •
It’s about the masses: Enabling mass collaboration is what makes social media unique and transformational. Mass collaboration requires the combination of three components: social media, community, and purpose. It’s more than a technology.Read more at location 2957 •
Make the purpose matter: Mass collaboration rarely happens by itself. That’s why simply providing the technology almostRead more at location 2959 •
always fails. Technology doesn’t attract participants—and without participation and contribution, there’s no community. If a community does form by chance, it rarely does anything useful for the sponsoring organization. You must actively nurture mass collaboration around a compelling purpose that is both meaningful to the participants and produces value for the enterprise.Read more at location 2960 •
Adhere to the six principles: A group that collaborates, no matter how large the group, doesn’t necessarily equal mass collaboration. To be truly collaborative, a community must possess six defining characteristics or principles: participation, collective, transparency, independence, persistence, and emergence. Take away any one of them and the activity is no longer mass collaboration.Read more at location 2963 •
Repeat and embed in your organization: Mass collaboration should not be treated as another organizational tool but made a core competence that’s woven into the fabric—processes, culture, systems, and practices—of your firm. The goal is to become a social organization so that, when facing any problem or opportunity, you and your colleagues throughout the firm always ask, “Would a community be a better way to deal with this?” If the answer is yes, you’re able to use mass collaboration to tap into the knowledge, experience, creativity, and passion of all those involved.Read more at location 2967 •
Move the corporate culture to one where it is commonly understood that every employee’s value to the company is much more than what they know. It’s what they share.Read more at location 3131 •
What happens when your competitor successfully turns its customer base into an extension of its sales staff? It could, in effect, turn your potential customers into your competitors. Social media has revived and energized theRead more at location 3267 •
Will you be a social organization? Or will you be competing against social organizations? In the next ten years, your ability to evolve into a social organization may determine if you thrive, survive, or disappear