One of the ongoing themes at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was the power of social media to drive collaboration and community at organizations.
My Take: Social media is just a tool.
It doesn’t create collaboration. It doesn’t create community. It just helps facilitate it.
People create those things. Social media tools simply amplify and enable your culture.
If you want more collaboration and community, social media can definitely help. But you need to make sure you’re creating a culture that supports those things first.
What do you think?
I couldn’t agree more. Let’s not make SM sound like the mother of all solutions. It’s just a tool to help you “get through” in a more dynamic, efficient and perhaps, effective way. But, it still will not cause people to change, if they chose not to or if they prefer to hide behind a mask.
As Jim Collins found, some of the level 5 leaders were virtually unknown and unheard of in the media or public. Did they have to depend on SM like facebook, etc.? Getting ahead is important, but being straight is even more important. What if I don’t have a facebook? It’s not as if without SM, we would all revert back to the dark ages. The cliche is, the world is moving at such a fast pace with the advent of all these IT gadgets and stuff. Does this mean we are on a collision course somewhere down the line? I wonder where? Has SM made the world a lot more safer and better with less conflicts, more team work and environmental protection. People spend more time communicating via the PC than spending quality time with each other? How can SM help bridge this?
Where are we heading? There’s no denying SM does help contribute to reaching out to help with some of life’s pursuit, but is there no downside to it?
Thanks for the comments, Yuva!
I read so many posts about social media, but so few take any time at all to acknowledge that social media is our creation and businesses and individuals who use social media are in control of it- not vice versa. According to so many blogs, people think their social media creates their business, when in reality their business creates their media. Too often the term”harness” is used to describe social media, as if it were some sort of untamed beast. Get real! Social media is our creation, is controlled by us and can be molded into another helpful community tool. You make a great point, realizing we choose how to use social media, but how do we turn it into the community tool it can be?
@Caitlin – I love this quote: “People think their social media creates their business, when in reality their business creates their media.”
I think transforming social media into a community tool is about two things:
1. Having a culture that supports and enables a strong community in the first place.
2. Talking about topics that are interesting to the people who use the media.
The rest is just time and patience.
Cheers!
Chris