12: The Future of Managing Social Tech
One of the key duties of a manager is to guide your subordinates toward a future vision of success. In a changing environment, merely continuing to execute on the current plan is not going to suffice. You will need to predict what is coming and prepare for it.
For social media, this entails a great deal more risk: new tools are constantly emerging, and it's difficult to tell which are just hype and which have staying power, meaning you will be investing time and budget in things that won't last.
For the same reason, flexibility is important. You can put together a five-year plan, but there's little chance of actually executing on it, but will be more likely to adjust and change. No advice from the author on a planning horizon, just the indication you must "carefully consider" how far to look ahead.
Making Good Decisions Today
Tactical decisions should begin with recognizing the social tools that are currently mainstream, and assessing which tools will also become mainstream in the next few years. Recall that the network is more important than the features of a given tool, so swimming against the current to cling to a feature-set is inadvisable. The author suggests looking to younger employees, those 25 and younger, and the tools that they are using or experimenting with: they are likely ahead of the curve insofar as knowing what will be the next phenomenon.
The approach of following popular trends should not be taken to extremes. You will need to familiarize yourself with the technology so that you can assess whether a popular tool has a business application that holds potential value to the organization. Also consider longevity - whether a tool seems to have staying power, or whether it is a fad that will pass quickly.
How Embracing Social Tech Can Lift Your Career
Becoming an evangelist and though-leader for social tools will also help you move forward in your career: you will be seen as a strategic thinker who delivers real value to your firm, and such individuals are valued. The alternatives, going along with others' ideas or merely being a naysayer, makes you a follower or a liability rather than an asset. At the same time , if you go too far and insist on the adoption of every bleeding-edge tool that comes along, you will be seen as reckless.
Even in a firm that takes a reluctant or resistant position toward social media, being literate in the technology and using it personally gives you exposure outside your present firm - potentially to a forward-thinking firm that has an eye to recruit people with social-medial skills.
The author bullets some specific benefits for the individual:
- A much-improved network of business contacts.
- Access to the "river of information"
- Being recognized as an expert, or at least an active participant, in your industry
- Improved ability to manage and communicate with remote workers
- Developing an online reputation for those who wish to gather information about you
- A reputation within your organization as a leader with skills and vision
Another bulleted list of benefits for the team:
- More frequent communication./engagement among team members.
- Better access to information for all members of the team
- A happier workplace (in which fewer individuals feel cut-off or excluded from the clique)
- Greater ability to tap into resources and sources of knowledge both within and outside of the organization
- The ability to be exposed to and discover better ways of doing things than business as usual.
- Maintain competitiveness with teams and competitors who are already leveraging social
What Are the Next Big Things in Social Tech?
The author suggests that we can extrapolate from current technologies to determine what is likely to be coming up in social media. Granted, there's always the chance something will pop up unexpectedly, but in many instances, you can see things coming a year or so in advance. Given the present landscape, the author suggests a number of trends (EN: And I couldn't help weighing in on each, as his vision is a bit too rosy and aggressive from what I've seen ... it could be interesting to check back in a couple years, maybe in 2014, and see which of us was right.)
- Standardization. Presently, using seven different social tools requires a person to create seven different accounts, none of which communicate with one another. (EN: I'd say that intercommunication in the nature of a mash-up rather than standardization seems to be the trend: using an FB login to participate in a discussion group, linking up Twitter to your blog, etc.)
- Centralized Profile. Each site requires the user to create a personal profile unique to that site. In future, one profile will be supplied to all. (EN: In the same way, some sites leverage Facebook - bit I can't see it becoming universal, as we may wish to disclose different facts to different groups: your photo and "about me" is different on Facebook and LinkedIn for a reason, and I don't' see users embracing the notion of crossing those wires in some instances.)
- Centralized Directory. As with a centralized profile, a centralized directory becomes the white pages on the Internet, listing the names of everyone and telling you which sites offer information about them so that, if you wish to connect with someone , you know where to find them. (EN: Ditto, and even more so given the potential for misuse. Most services enable cross-links, and some sites will aggregate content, but the notion of a central directory raises too many concerns for individuals to buy in.)
- Virtual Worlds. The author suggests that as bandwidth increases and 3D rendering gets better, we will see a resurgence of virtual worlds. (EN: Totally disagreed. Second Life tried that and failed, and given that mobile has less, rather than more, bandwidth, it's likely clients will become less immersive and more specialized to specific tasks.)
- Crowdsourcing. As more an more people get connected worldwide, there will arise many more opportunities for businesses to outsource small tasks to large groups at minimal cost. (EN: while the infrastructure is there, I don't think business has quite figured out how this can be applied to most projects. It's not unreasonable, but is likely further in the future than the author imagines.)
- People-rating. One of the most serious impediments to trust online is that we don't know if people are who they claim to be, and the author sees this as a major area of growth. (EN: there is some experimenting with this on dating sites, but its' problematic. Aside of privacy issues and the potential for misuse among bickering parties, business is more interested in getting this information out of the database than users are in putting it in - unless one person opens multiple accounts or colludes with others to support a scam. More likely we will still rely on the existing friend/colleague associations people make on social sites to assess the validity of an online identity.)
- More information, easily searchable. Much of the information posted to social media sites is bottled up on those sites, and there is great demand to be able to sort through all the various places these bits of data are stored to bring forth what is truly relevant to our needs. (EN: Agreed that the need is great, I don't see any firm stepping up with a solution, or even getting close. Getting "good" search results has always been a problem, even for just the Web, and no-one seems to be showing much promise.)
- Game skills in the business world. Their considerable experience with playing video games has given the younger generation problem-solving skills that they will be able to apply to real-world problems, and firms will seek to harness these skills. (EN: Strongly disagree. The game designer has good modeling skills, but game players are limited to solving puzzles that others have created for them, which means playing by the rules and within constraints rather than thinking innvoatively. The only trend I have heard is consumers who try to "game" businesses by taking advantage of procedural loopholes and technicalities in contract verbiage, which is an ethical gray area I don't expect many businesses have much use for, other than to swindle others while being attuned to ways in which they might be swindled.)
- Paid promotion. Given that word-of-mouth is more credible than paid advertising and gets more attention, businesses will seek ways to give people incentive to speak positively about them by sponsoring influential communicators or having a pay-per-mention program to generate buzz, and there will soon be "an explosion" of methods to generate positive buzz. (EN: Disagreed again. When a person is discovered to be pimping product for personal reward rather than giving an unbiased opinion, it destroys their reputation and they quickly lose esteem and friends. I don't expect marketers will find a way to goad people into saying good things about them except by delivering good service experiences - and if they press their luck, they will poison the well. Fortunately, people are aware of the potential problem, and as online reputation becomes more valuable, people will be more cautious about damaging themselves in this way.)
While social technology has progressed over the past decade, the author feels we are still in the early days - there's a lot of potential for innovation and discovery that will change the landscape as we move forward and it gains maturity.
As such, this is an exciting moment in history, rife with opportunities for the manager who will seize them before others do and carve out a niche for themselves before the landscape stabilizes and the prime real estate has been claimed.