Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
Is the problem ’social’?
So here’s the thing. Some businesses are getting quite into social media, having realised that these tools are really rather useful. But I think it’s fair to say that social tools aren’t a runaway success - I’m certainly not seeing any evidence of massive adoption from my vantage point. I’m not fighting off clients with a big stick, for example, and the people I do talk to have little budget and are frustrated because they’re not getting the buy-in they would like.
I wonder why. There are all sorts of reason why, once the tools have been installed in a business, they fail to proliferate, and I’ve spoken about many of these before. But could there be a reason why businesses are slow to even evaluate social tools?
The week before Kevin and I got married, we rescued a lovely ginger cat who was lost on the main road outside our flat. We managed to reunite him with his owner a few days later and then went off to be married.
A couple of weeks ago, Orlando’s owner, Monica, invited us round to dinner, and we had a lovely evening talking to her about her time programming Ferranti Pegasus valve computers at UCL. When she asked me what I do, I said I was a social media consultant and I explained what that was.
Monica thanked me for the explanation, saying that she was glad I had elaborated as she had thought, and I hope she forgives me for paraphrasing, that ’social software was something awful, like social workers’. That really made me think, and I haven’t quite got to the end of where that throwaway comment has led me.
Is ’social’ the problem with social software? Certainly in the UK, ’social’ has some rather negative connotations: Social workers are often despised and derided as interfering, and often incompetent, busybodies. Social housing is where you put people at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Social sciences are the humanities trying to sound important by putting on sciency airs. Social climbers are people who know how to suck their way up the ladder. Social engineering is getting your way deviously, by using people’s weaknesses against them. Social security is money you give people who can’t be bother work for themselves. Socialism is an inherently flawed system that is prone to corruption. Social disease is venereal.
Whether or not you agree with all of those descriptions - and for the record, I don’t - you have to admit that the word ’social’ does have a bit of a bad rap. I wonder how much that influences people - in business and elsewhere - to dismiss ’social media’, ’social networks’ and ’social tools’ before they have even found out what they are and what they’re good for.
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August 3rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
Suw I’ve got a blog post in draft about this - it occurred to me at 2gether that we were all using the word social to mean 3 distinct things.
We (y’know, you and me and most people reading this blog) mean it in the sense of connecting people together to build relationships and get stuff done.
The other connotations are, as you say, to do with “social issues” - ie usually problems and often used as an antonym for ‘commercial’ - ie the kinds of social enterprise who gathered at 2gether08. Or else it’s social as opposed to work - “do you know him socially, or through your job?”
In either case, without some careful explanation it’s an easy assumption to make that social software has no place in most corporate environments where people’s social problems and social activities are usually considered to be inappropriate to even talk about.
August 4th, 2008 at 7:44 am
I started writing a comment, and it became a post:
http://bit.ly/socialmagic
August 4th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Lloyd,
Yes, you’re right. And I wonder how the last two connotations - “social issues” and “social vs. business” - are playing into and negatively affecting people’s perceptions of social tools. Especially given the current credit crunch, where people are bound to act more conservatively. Even if they are not directly affected by the housing meltdown, all businesses are going to feel the increase in fuel costs, as those hikes percolate through the system raising prices generally.
If you feel that times are financially risky, are you really going to start investigating something that, from the outside, sounds a bit like left-leaning liberal namby-pamby-ism? I can just imagine the thought process: “Social media? I don’t need people gossiping and watching videos when they should be working, dammit!”
I wonder if it’s too late to start using other terms. I worry that ‘collaboration’ also sounds a bit alienating to people who don’t know what it is we’re talking about. This train of thought almost makes me prefer Web 2.0, because that’s vague enough that people who don’t know what it means can’t make many assumptions about it. It’s clearly more advanced than Web 1.0, and it’s about the web… beyond that, it could mean anything. And maybe that’s something we need to see as a good thing, instead of a negative.
Kevin,
In your post you say ‘Perhaps the problem is that the social realm is the realm of trust, so saying things are social is asserting “trust me”.’ And I couldn’t agree more. We are asking people to just trust us, not just because that’s how the social realm works, but also because we are in general asserting that social tools are constructive, when they see social behaviour as chatting, hanging out in the cafeteria, going for a fag break, all of which are things that don’t involve - ostensibly, although we know the opposite is often true - the doing of any work.
Quick anecdote: Kev once worked on a radio show, helping to get callers to discuss the hot topics of the day. He did all his work via a browser and email, visiting blogs, finding people with first hand experience of the day’s topic and then contacting them electronically via comment or email. His colleagues did all their work using the phones. They got really annoyed with him because all they saw was him online, surfing the net. One colleague said, when Kev asked them why they were getting huffy with him: “We only use the internet to shop or book holidays, so that’s what we were assuming you were doing.”
So we’re creating confusion and distrust around ’social media’ simply by using the word ’social’, and not considering the very negative connotations it has in people’s minds. It’s like we’re the car manufacturer that decides to call their new car something that turns out to be insulting or unappealing in another language. We come from the land of Web, and we’re happy speaking Webbish, but some of the people we’re talking to are hearing something very different because they’re speaking Businessese and the words mean something different to them.
August 5th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
. . . so one answer would be to ditch the ’social media’ and call it ‘networked media’.
August 5th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Ah, but then we have the problem of how one interprets “media”. After all “the media” focuses on broadcast, not collaboration or conversation…
It’s hard, I think, to find a properly descriptive name that doesn’t have inaccurate or bad connotations. But I also think it would be harder to get that new name into widespread use. (Those who dislike the term ‘intellectual properly’ have so far failed on both counts.)
So I don’t have a quick or easy answer to the problem.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Social is something of a negative word in the UK. But I’m not convinced ’social media’ needs to be called more than ‘cool things you can do on the internet’.
Your post inspired me to write my own, and so I have: http://www.walkerjon.com/social-media-is-a-myth.html
August 11th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
This seems to be a common experience - “social” has some many perceived meanings. I’ve previously agonised over possible alternative descriptors, but I haven’t come up with anything that can really apply the true potential of what “social media” tools can offer business.