OVERCOMING THE FEAR FACTOR: Nothing scary about social networking for business and government

Ken Chapman

IT’S THE CULTURE STUPID!
The critical differences between the traditional communications culture that government and business enjoyed for over a century was that they created and owned the message. They controlled its timing, distribution and decided who received it.
In the command-and-control, top-down hierarchical world of conventional government and business the “leader/boss” was all powerful. Not anymore.
Now anyone with a computer and an Internet connection is a media and a message creator and a publisher too. They are also critics, thought leaders and trend setters, with real reach and attentive audiences. Message control and distribution is decentralized.
The network-connected world spawned by the Internet makes attention getting within the reach of anyone with a resonant message and Internet access.
The power has shifted to the individuals from the institutions. Now it’s about shared power among people. It is no longer about having power over people by small groups of dominant elites. The informality of social media makes contact more “associational” than the “systematized” approach of the conventional corporate and government culture.
The power of communicating by simply clicking a mouse makes the power of a message grow virally as well as virtually. This organic informal distribution of communications is in sharp contrast to the conventional formal approach of traditional public relations and advertising one-way message broadcasting. All this adds up to red flags of fear and pangs of angst for those who still hold to the hope that they can control the media, the medium and the message.
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE?
It’s all about overcoming the constraints of the conventional corporate/governance culture.
Contact and communications with customers or citizens is no longer mediated by a small cadre of mainstream media editors and reporters. It’s not the only game in town any more. Bloggers broke every major story in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, according to John Ibbitson who covered the election for the Globe and Mail.
It seems that the leap from command-and-control, one-way messaging to the social networking chaos of the Internet is too daunting for those in policy making positions in industry and government today. If it is true and the world has really changed, then how do these conventional minded moguls ease into this brave new world to help them overcome their fear?
Personally, I believe, the answer lies with LinkedIn. First, I want to explain the various platforms and their mandates and merits so you’ll understand why. 
IS SOCIAL NETWORKING THE GAME-CHANGER?
The arrival of social networking is creating and amplifying an amazing array of cultural changes in our society and economy, whether business and government are ready to face it or not.
The almost ubiquitous use of social media platforms is enhancing how people connect, share, find and form communities, find and do business and even how they come to meet people in person.
Social networking has caught on in many segments of society all over the world as a new tool for interactive connectivity through a variety of platforms.
I won’t even try to list all the options but will share my observation of the characteristics of some on the major services. What is interesting is the hesitation of government and major business segments, like the oil and gas and energy sector, to embrace the opportunities these new trends and technologies offer.
Part of the wavering by corporate players is the very informal and casual nature of the dominant and populist social networking platforms. It is not about any reluctance by government and industry to accept new technology—they do that all the time.
Instead, the unwillingness to embrace social networking is about a communications culture clash of traditional command-and-control message broadcasting and the new reality of the interactive and participatory nature of social media.
The most omnipresent social networking platforms are Facebook, Twitter and blogs. There are social media platforms that fit more appropriately into the business relationship culture. Among the best known and highly respected is LinkedIn. It offers more comfort and hope for business and government early adopters to engage in a professionally based interactive, participatory and business oriented social networking space.
Before I go further into the merits and methods that LinkedIn offers, it may be helpful to better understand something about the more populist social networking platforms that seem to baffle business and government. I hope this will put some context around their uncertainty to adopt and adapt to the advantages of social networking.
The Facebook experience is about friends, family and creating communities of interests. The sharing of experiences and events with people of like-minds and related interests helps to form quasi kinship relationships. It is becoming an events promotion and a place for expressing personality and perceptions but at a “friend”-based model. I find Facebook effective in communicating more personally with people using the direct message feature. For example, I have used it extensively to share information and insights with a number of politicians on public policy issues and concerns.
MySpace is similar but seems to attract a different demographic. I am not involved in MySpace, but get drawn into it on occasion because of my love for music. It is a competitor to Facebook, although not as popular. I see it is an effective haunt for many struggling and established musicians who use it to independently self-promote their talents.
Twitter is something else again—one of the most interesting tools for information sharing. Twitter itself is not much. I consider the streaming scroll of chronological disparate messages in the form of “tweets” to be an enormously frustrating waste of time. However, using tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to organize messages into subject areas or themes all of a sudden makes Twitter a cutting edge community-building and connectivity tool.
The Twitter culture has adopted the use of “hashtags” (the number sign to the uninitiated) to organize the “Twitterverse” into themes. Embedding a hashtag into a message means users can follow an amazing range of subjects. Another clever adaptation is the use of airport call letters instead of city names. So if you want to know what is happening on Twitter about Edmonton, you search #yeg and all the recent action will appear for you. I dare say there is likely a hashtag for every aspect of life on the planet. If you can’t find one, you merely start one. 
SOCIAL NETWORKING: TOO PERVASIVE TO IGNORE
Here are a few scary statistics to give you a sense of how pervasive social networking is globally. Looking at Facebook, we see over 350 million users worldwide and 50 percent of them are active every day. There are over 55 million status updates posted daily, and over 2.5 billion photos uploaded and posted every month. Add to that the more than 3.5 billion pieces of content to web and blog links, photo-sharing and news stories. There are over 700 thousand local businesses with active Fan Pages. Speaking of Facebook Fans, there are over 5.3 billion of them now.
Twitter is a newer platform that had about 30 million users in July 2009 and 73 percent of them joined in the first half of 2009. About 62 percent of them in the USA and Canada are in fourth place in total accounts in the world. Only 30 percent of all users account for over 97 percent of activity… so the concentration of users is high. You either get Twitter or you don’t—those who do are big-time participants on the platform.
Bloggers are big Twitter users. While a recent study showed that only 14 percent of Americans used Twitter, it is well used by bloggers: more than 80 percent of self-employed and corporate bloggers Tweeted to promote their blogs… over 60 percent to check out the “buzz” about their businesses… and, for marketing purposes, by 73 percent of self-employed and 55 percent of corporate bloggers. 
LinkedIn is more of a professionally based networking platform that still has all the relationship finding, creating, building and nurturing elements of the other platforms but is more focused on networking for doing business.
One of the most successful evangelists for LinkedIn as a business and government based social networking site is Olivier Taupin, the CEO of BizNetO (otaupin@bixneto.com) out of Seattle, Washington. He has been coaching corporate executive on the use of social media for more than five years now.

Olivier Taupin

Taupin has created a number of interest-based “groups” of business people using LinkedIn. The largest is in the human resources and recruiting area called Linked: HR. Another is the largest group of business people in the oil and gas sector called Linked: Energy.
His message is straightforward and emerges out of the conventional models of business and government network, but he puts it on steroids through a professional based social networking culture. As a social networking evangelist, Taupin tells both sectors they cannot ignore this relationship and business building revolution any longer.
According to a Neilson Online study in March 2009, social networking was the fourth most popular use of the Internet, e-mail was fifth. ComSource said in May 2009 that social networks had 147 million unique visitors in the USA—74 percent of the entire American Internet audience. Anything that big and powerful and pervasive cannot be ignored.
The Internet culture hates broadcasting and spam but it loves authentic virtual relationships and those generate word-of-mouth messaging from friends and “influentials”. Word-of-mouth is the most effective means we know of to get a message out. People trust other people more than they trust advertising. To prove this point, Taupin quotes a July 2009 Neilson Company survey that found the degree of trust from various forms of advertising was the highest when recommendations came from people you know—a whopping 90 percent trust level. Online consumer opinion polls and newspaper editorial content were trusted at the 70 percent and 69 percent level respectively, while TV was at 62 percent.
WHAT IS THE ACCEPTABLE SOCIAL MEDIA ANSWER FOR GOVERNMENT AND BUSINESS?
There are a lot of government and corporate communications people anguishing over that big question. They are in a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” conundrum.
Many big institutions that have used their current communications and relationship building culture and ventured out to populist social networking have been burned—some badly. The consequences have been for the commanders of the control model of communications to proceed cautiously or not at all. Many businesses have adapted and adopted the new world disorder as a new normal for relationship creation, building and nurturing. Many are seeing the benefits of being authentic, genuine and authoritative about their efforts and enterprises in the horizontal, trust-based, open, transparent, accountable power-shared world of social networks. Governments, not so much!
The powers-that-be in these conventional sectors know they are losing the battles for public attention. They sense that they are losing the benefit of the doubt about the legitimacy of their social licenses to operate. The old-school thinkers are sensing they are in some serious jeopardy in both the marketplace and at the ballot box.
IS THERE VALUE FOR BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT?
Businesses see themselves using social networking for the same reasons, whether it is a Fortune 500 enterprise or Fred’s Shoe Shine: According to a recent study, 81 percent use it for enhancing customer/client relations and brand building. Brand building is the perceived value, but the actual reasons are networking and finding out and influencing what people are saying about a business—equally applicable to to governments but, obviously, with a political and public consultation twist.
There are other practical uses of social networking. Recruiting is a big one, both finding and inquiring about qualities and qualifications of staffing opportunities. But, the big payoff for convention-bound traditionalists in business and government is finding communities of similar interests at the executive, management and professional levels. These are the folks who are the change agents in most organizations—usually the same people who are reluctant to make the necessary changes to take positive advantage of Internet based social networking.
Using tools like groups in LinkedIn, these upper level leaders can ease into social media in a way that is more of an extension of the conventional business networking models. Groups comprise like-minded, similarly engaged people at comparable operational and management levels. They join to gather around and share information and opportunities in an area of mutual interest. Someone once called LinkedIn Groups Facebook for grown- ups.
The ability for business and government mangers to find new strategic partners and alliances and to validate suitability can be done virtually via LinkedIn. The principles of engagement are just as they are in the traditional golf clubs, professional lunches, and industry conferences and conventions. LinkedIn is faster, cheaper and easier… an extension and enhancement of the traditional way to recruit staff, find strategic partners, and keep up on what is happening in any area of interest in the familiar “real life” model.
This sense that LinkedIn Groups is more an extension and enhancement of existing behaviours will likely be comforting enough to warrant tentative steps toward Internet based social networking. It’s these manageable, familiar and incremental steps into the networked world that will be more acceptable than the wholesale rethinking of finding, creating and sustaining relationships at the heart of populist social networking.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Business and government will eventually adapt to the rough and tumble world of Internet based social networking out of necessity. In the meantime, they need to start somewhere. They need to stop being paralyzed by their fear from the culture shock of this horizontal, community-based, power-sharing communications reality of the Internet.  
If engaging in transformation is not part of your culture, then default to incrementalism as the go-forward strategy.
A smart starting place for incrementalism engagement might be in the professionally based social networking platform of LinkedIn. And, although it’s not the finish line for effective engagement in the wider and wilder world of social networking for either government or business, it’s definitely a good place to start.
Bottom line: Be brave. Embrace the elephant in the room that is social media. If you don’t learn to live with it, expect to be crushed as it rolls over on you.

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