Hardly a day goes by without me hearing a senior executive at some major company cite the growing influence of the upcoming “Millennial Generation” as the reason for their foray into the enterprise social world.
But I wonder if they’re missing a trick here – look at almost any study of who actually uses Social Media in the modern world – and you’ll see that the major users are not those born in 2000+ (who are yet to get into the workforce) – but rather you see an almost even split between those in the 25-34 age and those in the 35-44 range.
Compare that then with the average working age for most industries at late 30s-early 40s, and suddenly you come to the realization that most companies must have somewhere between 25-50% of their EXISTING workforce is already actively involved in the social world – and not just active in it – but actively leading it. It’s almost like we’ve missed out on an entire “social generation” that is/should be the real driver of social technologies in the enterprise.
Although there are plenty of reasons I can think of why Millennials and their ilk don’t use social to the same extent as older generations (age and access come to mind) – the rise of Social Media in our personal lives – driven by our desire to communicate with, interact with and influence our friends, relatives, and to gain access to information which has become available at an unprecedented level – has driven the familiarity and adoption of Social Media way ahead of the expected Millennial boom.
Some organizations already get this of course – I was recently talking to the CEO of a large retailer who shared by vision that social technologies are no longer a nice to have – but rather a must have for the modern enterprise.
We live in a strange period in time where for the first time in history, our personal technology use and sophistication actually outstrips that which we have available at the workplace.
Your top employees go home and are afforded the ability to influence the world around them through online social tools like Facebook and LinkedIn – they can not only share information, find out what others are doing, work together virtually to achieve important personal projects (birthday parties, group travel, weddings, and more) and to rationalize and support the important decisions and purchases in their lives.
So isn’t it weird that we then employ these “personally powerful” people into our organizations and then don’t give them the tools to work as effectively as they can at home?
Indeed, many organizations see the demand and desire from employees for social technologies and processes in the workplace to outrank the “traditional” fringe benefits that have been the focus of Silicon Valley HR orgs since the early 2000s – pool and ping pong tables and “chill out rooms” are making way for flexible working and the ability to feel deeply engaged at a value-level via social tools to the work of their company. Social technologies in reality are no longer a nice to have, but are very much a must have!
Of course – this means wide ranging organizational changes for most companies. The Social world thrives on standards of high levels of transparency, engagement, and accountability that most organizations aren’t currently prepared for. In my mind, making these necessary changes will undoubtedly present themselves as the Change Management Challenge for the decade in most enterprises.
Do you see these at your org? – let me know!
Twitter continues to be the fastest growing social media platform at the moment – but that growth seems to be primarily led by individuals with varying degrees of success and sustainability. By now I’m sure you all have several friends who have tried Twitter – some love it, others can’t see the point of it – which doesn’t tend to help its credibility as a business tool.
The truth of it is that it can be a very valuable tool in your business arsenal – BUT – unlike other social media tools, it delivers little value until you put a significant amount of effort into developing it. Now when I say “developing” – I don’t mean in the classic “programming lines of code” sense – but rather, in order to be useful to a business – you need a defined strategy, and a sustained input from your part before it begins to yield results back. What that input is, and how long it takes you to put in enough input to yield an output, really depends on which of the main strategies you decide to pursue – and as with most applications that work on the establishment of information flows – there are two main strategies: Push and Pull.
The Pull strategy for Twitter is simple. It revolves around an understanding that what Twitter can provide to you is an unrivalled personalized information source. Whatever niche information requirements you have – chances are, there are people out there posting tweets on it. Find them, follow them, and eventually your information feed begins to deliver a constant source of valuable data – be it important headlines, links to interesting articles, relevant quotes, allowing you to follow conferences remotely, etc etc – the more careful you are in selecting the people you follow – the more relevant that data feed becomes. In pure Pull strategies – you don’t care how many people follow you – it’s irrelevant and secondary to achieving a quality information flow to your desktop. For those of you considering this strategy – Don Smith has written an excellent 
The Push strategy is a little more complex – as what you’re trying to do is be read rather than necessarily do the reading. Maybe you’re a company with a product message to distribute, maybe you’re a consultant trying to build up your personal brand, maybe you’re a store with product specials to sell – whatever you are, the basic concept is that you have a message that you want people to see and read. Here, the name of the game is to amass followers – to get the largest possible following to actively subscribe to, and read, your feed. Whilst that sounds easy – it’s far from that – you have two big challenges ahead of you:
There’s another reason to provide valuable content, especially on Twitter – Twitter is a “viral community”. That is, it works on a viral process of message dissemination to the community at large. You post something of value, I see it, and I “Re-Tweet” it – meaning I pass it on to my own subscriber list with appropriate attribution to the original poster. I get kudos points from my community for passing on something valuable, and you get exposure to my subscriber list who may well decide to subscribe to your postings too (assuming you’ve followed the three steps above to create an interesting profile page!). There’s also exists a general concept of mutual following – You follow me because I post good info, and in return I’ll probably follow you too to see what your feed is like. Of course, if you then post a load of rubbish, I’ll probably end up deleting you from the list of people I follow – but that’s up to you to establish the value to me as a reader 🙂
The Complete Innovator 