Tag Archives: social media

If You Think Tools are Strategy, YOU Don't Get It

Posted on by
2

I’m pretty fed up with read­ing advice on lead­er­ship and man­age­ment in busi­ness organ­isa­tions from people who have clearly never done either. Increas­ingly, these are the same people who view social media as hav­ing a determ­in­istic effect on busi­ness and insist that busi­nesses “don’t get it”. Oh, really?

Smoke and Fire
Photo From white­forge

In the next breath we are told by the expert how Web 2.0 and social media are driv­ing a revolu­tion in “people-to-people” inter­ac­tion, closer cus­tomer rela­tion­ships and cus­tom­isa­tion of products and ser­vices to fit the cus­tom­ers needs. Aban­don your man­age­ment and factory-thinking — they tell us — lead your know­ledge work­ers in to the new dawn of the revolution.

If you were alive before 1990, have read any books over the past 20 years and/or don’t rely on the inter­net as the sum of your know­ledge then you may be shak­ing your head slightly by now. Cer­tainly social media tools are rel­at­ively new, but enabled by cheap com­puters and fast net­work con­nec­tions, which are made pos­sible by the factory-thinking of mass-production, engin­eer­ing and glob­al­isa­tion. Exper­i­ence has shown that those engin­eers and pro­duc­tion units require a bit of good man­age­ment, some busi­ness pro­cesses and, yes, leadership.

So what is new here? Not much. It’s a sales pitch that attempts to rein­vent mere tools as a strategy that will revolu­tion­ise the way busi­ness is done.

Social media is an import­ant tool that is inform­ing mar­ket­ing and help­ing busi­nesses, cus­tom­ers and cli­ents to find out what each other are really about.

Social Media Stories

Posted on by
4

There is an inter­est­ing debate hap­pen­ing around the face-to-face activ­ity that sur­rounds on-line social media tools and net­work­ing. On one side are the busi­ness types with their talk about mar­ket­ing and profit. The other side prefer get­ting together for a chat to see what can be shared and learnt. Recently, I’ve read Sarah Hartley’s post con­trast­ing her exper­i­ence at #1pound40 with the Leeds Social Media Sur­gery and Scott Gould’s post on #1pound40 that takes off in a dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion. Carl Hag­gerty just pub­lished an excel­lent post inspired by the Twit­ter dis­cus­sion (expan­ded in the com­ments of that post) fol­low­ing the recent Exeter #tags meet-up:

…for me it is about man­aging expect­a­tions and in a more socially con­nec­ted world we can share our expect­a­tions and we can also report when some­thing fails us or doesn’t deliver what it prom­ised. I also think that the fact that these kinds of meet­ings have evolved out of these con­nec­tions is some­thing that needs to be main­tained and if new oppor­tun­it­ies for con­nec­tions are iden­ti­fied then we need to be clear about what the focus is and what is expec­ted of the people attending.

John Steinbeck on Story telling...
Photo From Jill Clardy

Over the past few months I have been to two con­trast­ing events, the Like­Minds con­fer­ence in Exeter and a Devon Social Media Cafe meet­ing in Ply­mouth. While I found Like­Minds a use­ful after­noon, a couple of hours of informal dis­cus­sion at DSMC was much more enjoy­able and absorbing.

It seems clear that whatever type of events we cre­ate around social media, they must be open to all, there must be space for par­ti­cipants to talk, share exper­i­ences and social media stories.