Debunking The Myths of Social Media

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Moving forward I will be contributing to the Harvard Business Review when time permits. My first contribution is up, you can view the entire article here. Below in an excerpt:

"There are a few considerations every organization needs to consider when developing their blueprints for their own unique social media design. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are few things you can plan for as you review the many options before you.

Here are three to consider:

Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take into account that you’ll have to invest to grow your effort into a healthy ecosystem that can produce data, insights or even new ideas. People will be required in order to do this.

Feeding. Whether it’s a community, Wiki or internal collaboration solution you’ve put in place, it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content. Some of this can be automated and some of it can come from your participants–but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.

Weeding. A productive social business design will require efforts to prune and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a garden). In some cases, automated moderation services can do this–but in others people will be required to ensure that interactions are productive. Weeding can also include creating a separate environment–for example, Nokia’s "blog hub" encourages employees to vent freely internally (using anonymous aliases).You can bet that someone is looking at the data and analyzing it. If not, they should be."

Special thanks to Dachis Group colleague Peter Kim for developing the above framework. A nice sticky way to remember how much effort is really required for any social business initiative. I’ve also used the garden analogy before:

"The word you need to hyperfocus on is cultivate. Think of how one cultivates a garden. It takes several factors:

1. Passion for gardening
2. Patience
3. Willingness to weed, prune, seed, and grow. All the hard work that comes with producing fruit
4. Appreciation for the fruits that have been yielded
5. A desire to share the fruits of your garden with your neighbors"

Hope you enjoy the read, and it helps you think about the big picture as we all move quickly through this space and begin cultivating healthy social systems. Also, if you have ideas to the types of topics you’d like to see me cover on the HBR, leave a comment.

Image source: fredcavazza

Original Post: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/06/sbd-2.html