Is Social Media Killing Innovation?

Would social media have helped Thomas Edison?  Or Alexander Graham Bell?  Or Henry Ford?  Or Steve Jobs?  Subjectively, it seems that most disruptive innovations spring from the mind of one individual, or at most from a two-person partnership.  Remember the commonly held and oft cited view regarding the output of committee work?  I think there is little question that social media, when effectively engaged, can and does have a positive impact on improvement.  Product improvement.  Business model improvement.  Service improvement.  Operational improvement.  Many of the by-now “classic” social media cases showcase these benefits.  Starbucks, Ideastorm, even Comcast’s foray into Twitter for customer service – they all use the power of customer engagement and the speed of social media response to uncover and drive improvement.   How do I do better what I already do? But does social media, the ultimate collaborative tool today, really help drive innovation? True innovation requires discontinuous or lateral thinking.   Innovation reframes or redefines the underlying issue.  It’s risky.  And it rarely has immediate mass appeal or acceptance.  Is social media, then, diminishing real innovation, driving business to the mass mediocre and to only incremental improvement? Maybe.  But I think that social media can also enhance the ability to innovate.  v One spark to innovation is the intermingling of previously unrelated ideas – Social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to acquire and mix new perspectives.   Customer views, vendor perspectives, and the ramblings of random people we otherwise wouldn’t encounter potentially create more seeds to cross fertilize.  Internal collaboration tools and social platforms bring together the thoughts and knowledge of colleagues in different locations and with different expertise.  Innovation is about putting ideas and facts together in new ways; the more ideas and facts, the greater the inputs to innovative thinking. v “Edison didn’t invent the light bulb by trying to improve the candle.”  Innovation usually springs from addressing a broad, underlying need, not a short-term complaint or usage issue.  Monitoring and listening can help to reveal fundamental opportunities that few people articulate before seeing the solution. v As the economist E. F. Schumacher said, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex…It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.” At their core, great innovations generally reflect simple ideas – the execution might be complex, but the motivating concept is typically elegantly well-defined.  Social media helps simplify and focus.  Express your idea in 140 characters.  Or blog until you know what you are blogging about. Does opening up the organization to social media and the vast array of unrelated, non-linear thoughts and ideas pay off?  I think so.  Consider the Cuisinart.  No focus group or market research ever identified the need for a Cuisinart.  Carl G. Sontheimer mixed his expertise in business, technology and cooking to develop the Cuisinart.  Almost everyone has heard of the Cuisinart today, but at its introduction in 1973 most people didn’t understand WHAT it was beyond a fancy toy or souped up blender.  It took two years for the home cook to begin to embrace the Cuisinart as a new, and now indispensible, kitchen appliance.  Not an improvement on a blender, but an innovative tool.  Innovation pays off.  Sontheimer sold the Cuisinart company in 1987 for $42 million. Sontheimer’s education, experience, and personal interests gave him insights and the ability to span knowledge silos.  Social media can help others grasp those seemingly unrelated bits that drive innovation… if companies encourage engineers and techies and marketing folks to engage in social media.  If companies acknowledge that wide-ranging ideas are NOT a waste of time, that listening and learning and sharing are the sources of the seeds of innovation.  If social media is integrated into the everyday of business.  How do you make social media part of the everyday at your organization?

Creating Change – Digital is Different in the Detail

Change management is about helping people to adopt new behaviors and ways of acting, and the basic tenets seem to hold up under a storm of different circumstances.  John Kotter defined the 8 steps to change management back in the 1990s in his now classic book, Leading Change.  Those strategic steps apply broadly to most change situations.

But how do you implement that change management strategy when you are trying to move your organization to become a social business?  What do you have to keep in mind?  What is critical that was only of interest before?  Do you need to execute differently?

As social media moves from a collection of diverse and separate initiatives to more formalized, broader engagement, and ultimately to being fully integrated and aligned with the strategy (see The 3 Stages to Becoming a Social Media Organization, http://goo/gl/fb/6flCv), distinct social media enablers become increasingly important.  Four factors in particular demand new execution practices:

v Social media is real-time and all-the-time

The immediacy of social media is exciting and vibrant and down-right scary.  The change management plan needs to take those considerations into account.  How?

§  Rapid risk mitigation and damage control plans

You cannot predict every possible negative situation that might arise.  But you can define and teach guidelines for managing those situations.  Ensure that a clear social media policy is in place and well understood.  Create scenarios and practice!  Practice should focus on guidelines, not scripts, so that employees can adhere to the advice of Lieutenant Colonel Greg Reeder of the U.S. Marines, “In the absence of guidance: do the right thing.”  (Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Reeder was talking about social media! See http://goo.gl/fb/isThH)

§  Engage legal and IT on the core change management team

Social media is fluid and does not allow time for legal review of all communications.  Have legal on the core team so that employees internalize their perspectives and so that the attorneys understand the range of possible issues.  Involve IT so that the technology can be tweaked for simplicity.  Technology supports; it does not lead.

§  Plan for 24/7

Not every social media implementation needs to be a 24/7 operation, but plan how you will handle comments or problems that might arise out-of-work hours.  Will you use volunteers to cover some additional hours?  Will you follow-the-sun for staffing?  Will your site(s) specify the hours you monitor and respond?  Do you need extra staff at either end of your day?  Who is “on call” for emergencies?

v It’s personal

Social media draws in the employee on a personal basis with a name and face, a personality and a professional reputation at stake.  It also humanizes the organization.  So “personal” has two aspects that must be balanced.

§  Build the team slowly and practice together to create a common culture.  As an organization, you want only one personality.

§  Let the employees with the strongest social media skills mentor others, and base mentoring relationships not on hierarchy but on social media savvy.  Mentoring helps both to grow culture and to reward skill and performance.

§  Allow employees to use their own voices.  They have a common corporate identity, but individuality should still shine through.  Let them share a bit of themselves on-line.

§  Encourage and enable employees to become internal ambassadors for the social media activities.  

v Social media smashes silos

Once your social media strategy expands beyond discrete, limited trials, the activities will have impact across functional and business units; they will seep into new projects unasked; they will rattle independent fiefdoms.  Actively embrace integration.

§  Involve brand managers in the change management core team, even if the only implementation is for customer service.  How the customer service is handled, the words used, the policies enacted, and the customer engagement created will all affect the brand. 

§  Seed other projects with employees engaged in social media.  Bring a social media perspective to non-social media specific projects.  This type of engagement will help to create broader organizational change more quickly.

v Social media is both the change and the process for the change

§  Use social media to communicate

Use forums, videocasts, podcasts, microblogs, blogs to share widely the successes and learnings of the social media initiatives.  And don’t limit the communication to statistics and status updates; demonstrate the value of social media by sharing stories and personal accounts.

§  Make social media indispensible

Embed the use of social media into the day-to-day processes and communication.  Solicit ideas and launch initiatives on internal discussion forums; make significant announcements on a blog; provide real-time announcements (closing early due to weather!) on an internal Twitter or Yammer site.  Make sure that all levels of management engage over the new tools. 

The foundation of change management is constant.  It’s about helping people to adopt new behaviors.  The strategies that underlie change management are well established, tested and proven.  But when an organization is evolving to a social culture, the tactical steps you use to make sure the changes stick need to change.  I would love to hear what has worked for you!