Two recent articled I’ve read have had some what complementing opinions about the role and contribution made by Social Media to organisations around the world.
The McKinsey Quarterly publishes the results of a world-wide survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies. The article is full of facts and figures and concludes that in 2011 companies have improved their utilisation of social technologies and are using them to better run their operations and identify and exploit new market opportunities.
Some of the key findings of the survey are that:
1. % of respondents whose companies use Social Networking has increased by 25% (from 40% in the 2010 survey to 50% in the 2011 survey). The magnitude of this change is even higher if we take into account the fact that the number of actual responses has increased by almost 30% over the two surveys (from 3,249 in 2010 to 4,261 in 2011).
2. Industries with the highest adoption level of social technologies include High Tech and Telecommunication (86%), Business, Legal and Professional Services (77%) and Public Administration and Pharmaceuticals (74% each).
3. While the reported internal benefits from using social technologies remains flat over the last three years,those identifies for Partners and other External purposes have demonstrated an on-going increase.
4. The survey identifies statistically significant correlations between self-reported corporate-performance metrics and certain business processes that networked enterprises use. For instance,a high correlation was found between companies who reported market share gains and those who used social tools to scan the external environment and use internal social tools to match employees to tasks.
5. Maintaining the benefit associated with the use of Social Networking require constant effort and companies who do not maintain that effort lose previously achieved gains.
6. Social Technology tools are used primarily to scan the external environment and find new ideas, with the most used tools include Social Networking and Blogs.
7. 19% of the respondents indicated that use Social Networking as a Project Management tool, with further 17% indicating the use of Wikis for that purpose.
In “Social Media versus Knowledge Management” (read here) the authors challenge the premise that Social Media and Knowledge Management (KM) are similar. On the surface they both involve people and technology to access information and both require individuals to create information that would ultimately be used for sharing and they both aimed to promote collaboration. So are they really the same?
The authors, Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald, suggest that there’s a big difference between the two, as outlined below:
- Knowledge managementis what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important
- Social mediais how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.
To obtain value from Social Media require the establishment of Mass Collaboration which consists of three things:
1. Social Media Technology– theHOW;
2. Purpose– theWHY, and
3. KM Communities– theWHO
As the authors conclude“Creating mass collaboration involves more than building technology and telling people to participate. It necessitates a vision, a strategy and management actions…The point here is that while they may seem similar, social media and KM are not the same. Recognizing the differences is a crucial step toward getting value out of both and avoiding a struggle of one over the other”.
My take from these two references is that although there is an expansion of Social Media Technology (representing the‘HOW’), organizations are still lagging in determining the purpose and objectives behind these technologies (the‘WHY’) and this result in various degrees of community participation (the‘WHO’), resulting in fluctuation in tangible business benefits.
Think about it.