Taming Social Media: How Organizations Can Align Business Goals
Recent political headlines illustrate the shortcomings and dangers of social media. At the same time, it has proved an invaluable, if not challenging tool for many organizations. Dr. Lorraine Kisselburgh is a leading researcher in the field of social media, innovation and networks in organizations at Purdue University's Brian Lamb School of Communication. She’s also on the faculty of the Center for Education & Research in Information Assurance and Security. She spoke with WPNT’s Stephanie Nora White on the subject.
Nora White: When it comes to organizations, do you define social media and its use a certain way?
Dr. Kisselburgh: The term social media is used broadly to define technologies and applications that facilitate communication and information sharing. We call them social media because they are more open, participatory, and interactive (thus, “social”) than traditional mass media. Generally social media provide ways to participate in the creation, rating, and sharing of content and information. Social media can include applications like blogs (and Twitter), collaborative platforms (wikis, Google Apps), streaming media (YouTube), and social networking sites (such as Facebook and LinkedIn). Each of these tools has unique characteristics, audiences, and uses. For example:
- Facebook/SNS provide a way to connect people through new online venues that emphasizes an air of informal, interactive sharing among friends – this engenders trust and commitment, and at the same time “spreads the word”;
- Twitter and other mobile social media create an immediacy, and a sense of “being there,” which satisfies our expectations of having quick, easily accessed, and brief information about news and events at global and local levels. They also have tremendous social value in crisis situations where traditional information infrastructures are compromised. But mobile social media can also be used to challenge traditional power structures, and can be both productive and destructive for political, governmental, and institutional authorities;
- Wiki and other collaborative platforms like Google Sites, or Purdue University’s HUBzero™ platform, provide a dynamic way for groups to share resources about a project or topic, and also build a community around the sharing that contributes to scientific and business collaboration in important ways.
Nora White: So many organizations are wrestling with how to most effectively use social media but just when they think they've got their arms around it, the technology and/or the rules have changed? What's a company to do?
Dr. Kisselburgh: The constant and dynamic nature of social media is an inherent property; these technologies are highly fluid and adaptive by design, and constantly evolve to reflect emerging practices of the people who use them. This represents a challenge to organizations that expect stable and predictable tools. The key is to embrace the dynamic and generative nature of these media, and to recognize the opportunities these media afford for new business practices. Some organizations are realizing significant benefits from fundamentally changing the equation not only for how they communicate and how they organize, but also how they create and produce material and information goods.
Organizations around the world have realized that social media can be leveraged to address specific business goals, whether they are in the business of finding new ways to improve the development of ideas and innovations, finding more effective ways to communicate for enhanced productivity, enhancing marketing and brand management, improving client relations, or understanding your competition. In other words, strategic use of social media that is aligned with business goals, can realize tremendous new value for organizations.
Nora White: The blogosphere has leveled the playing field when it comes to the notion, 'information is power.' How would you counsel an organization on separating the wheat from the chaff? It can be overwhelming. What is your counsel in developing a preliminary strategy?
Dr. Kisselburgh: There are blogs that exist in every genre, and there are millions of voices participating in social media contexts – over 500 million Facebook users posting 25 billion pieces of content each month, an average of 27 million tweets each day, and 2 billion YouTube videos viewed every day and 24 hours of video uploaded every minute. That’s a vast amount of content, so it’s easy to be overwhelmed. But quantity is not quality, and value and credibility are defined in many ways. The key, as you’ve noted, is that the power of information creation and distribution is now greatly distributed rather than centralized with key organizations and figures.
It is tempting to feel compelled to adopt and embrace many of the popular tools. For organizations, I think the challenge is to maintain a clear focus in thinking about how social media can be used strategically to advance particular goals of the organization. I think preliminary strategies should address the following questions:
- What are my organizational goals?
- Where should I participate? (what audiences, markets, voices do I want to include)?
- What information do I want to share?
- Which tool best facilitates these goals?
- How will I measure the effectiveness of the tool in meeting my goals?
In the final point, confirming business value is essential, and there is a growing array of social media research tools that allow organizations to track what is being “said” – by certain people about specific topics – in order to measure effectiveness in social media use, as well as understand emerging needs in the competitive landscape.
Nora White: President Obama has emphasized innovation as a path forward for revitalizing the economy. What are the overlooked opportunities for using social media in organizations generally, and specifically for innovation and collaboration?
Dr. Kisselburgh: Some of the most interesting developments in social media come in the tools that facilitate collaboration among scientific and knowledge workers in ways that can enhance the innovative capacity of organizations, and ultimately our nation’s economy. Online collaboration, crowdsourcing and collective intelligence tools have exciting potential for intellectual and economic advance.
In our research here at Purdue with engineering design teams, we are evaluating and building infrastructures, devices, and applications that facilitate innovation among global teams that are both co-located and virtual. There are tremendous challenges in facilitating processes such as idea generation, as well as collaborative decision-making in teams that cannot meet face-to-face, and these challenges are amplified when the information, processes, and equipment are complex. We feel that social media platforms, which are inherently interactive and social, provide unique environments for collaborating teams and can influence the quality of the design and ultimately the success of innovations that are produced. We are evaluating some of these concepts now, using interdisciplinary research collaborations among Engineering, Communication, Industrial Design, and Education faculty.
Nora White: WikiLeaks has made some companies gun shy about using social media as they don't believe in the protections that are offered. Is it true that anything in the virtual world can ultimately be made public?
Dr. Kisselburgh: I would say, generally yes. However, keep in mind that our virtual world includes the Internet infrastructure, an array of devices that we use to access the world (servers, desktops, handhelds, consumer devices, etc.), and a vast set of applications. Some applications, devices, and infrastructures are more secure than others, and protection can be effected in many ways. I don’t think our virtual worlds are like the Wild Wild West, though. There are many layers of protection, including legal protections, technical protection in information security management, institutional protections in terms of policy implementation, as well as social protections in the norms and practices that are created by the participants of these environments (which can be highly effective at influencing behaviors).
However, in general, social media technologies are harder to “control,” and this is inherently the challenge faced by organizations today. It’s important to recognize that social media are not simply alternative distribution media that provide new ways to distribute information to broad publics, but have unique characteristics. This means that organizations need to adopt models regarding communication and information use that are less hierarchical, in order to benefit from the increased participation of multiple and diverse voices.
Furthermore, the boundaries defining what is considered private to an organization (as well as to individuals) are much more transparent than they were in the past. Today we live in an era of highly connected, networked publics. This creates a sense of transparency or “hyperpublic” state that continues to challenge how we define norms and rules for what should be shared and distributed with others beyond conventional definitions of personal and professional relationships. However, in spite of what appears to be a culture of “oversharing,” our research at Purdue on social network users indicates that most individuals are generally cautious about what they share, and with whom, whether in social or professional relationships.
Nora White: What should organizations be most concerned about when it comes to social media's impact on an organization, whether it's driven internally or externally?
Dr. Kisselburgh: Our research with McAfee Corporation found that, globally, 75% of organizations have adopted social media, although concerns about the risks of these media remain a concern for over 50%, and result in a variety of restrictions on social media use. In addition to conventional concerns about compromised security that can occur when devices and people external to the organization are introduced (infiltration), one of the greatest concerns from social media is the risk of data exfiltration, or the leaking or loss of information from within the organization.
It’s important that organizations be very clear about the risks that come with making information available to broader publics. Certain kinds of information needs to be carefully secured, protected, and is generally not suitable for social media environments. In the same way we used to caution people about using email for confidential and secure information, we now caution people about sharing sensitive information and data via web-based, cloud-based, infrastructures. Similarly, in the same way it would be inappropriate to discuss classified information in a cocktail party setting, it is inadvisable to share certain kinds of information in social media settings where it can be “overheard” and shared with others. Social media policies and guidelines, particularly in organizations that handle confidential and proprietary information, can be beneficial in helping to raise awareness and to clarify organizational expectations.