February 17th, 2011 Social Media or Social Business?
Did the Church see Gutenberg coming? I asked this question recently at an event on innovation and disruption. Those of you that are fans of Blackadder, let me use the comedic twinning of Rowan Atkinson as Bishop Blackadder and his side-kick Tony Robinson as Baldrick.
So Baldrick comes running into Bishop Blackadders bedroom as he is preparing for his day
Blackadder: ahhhh there you are Baldrick, I wondered when you might turn up
Baldrick: sorry sir, I was out last night in the Tavern
Blackadder: the Tavern Baldrick, have you taken leave of your senses
Baldrick: well no sir, but I ended up over-hearing a conversation between two men, a Johannes Gutenberg and some other geezer, that, that, that, that,
(Baldrick pauses)
Blackadder: c’mon man out with it
Baldrick: that could change the whole power base of the church sir – Gutenberg has taken a wine press and he’s going to print bibles on it sir
Blackadder just stares at Baldrick, and slaps him around the head, knocking him over and then kicks him
Blackadder: POPPYCOCK Bladrick (turning to face the window looking out onto the town of Mainz and its surrounding countryside) As Bishop Baldrick, I rule everything I see, and even that which I don’t. How on earth do you think that some fool up in a garret in Mainz with a convertible wine press is going to reform the church, and remove our strangle hold over the whole of Europe, hmmmmm?
This particular question has a certain relevancy if not urgency today, as it was through Gutenberg’s invention we as a society moved from the Dark Ages into the Reformation. The Church controlled all, its omnipotence felt by every single European man woman and child. Yet within a brief decade of the printing of the 42-Line bible and the facsimile re-creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, between 8 – 20 million books had been printed, whereas before, none had existed outside of a monastery. Martin Luther unleashed of the power of the printing press to decouple the Church from its divine power base, whilst simultaneously challenging political stability.
The lesson is – when new communication tools are not only invented but ubiquitously adopted, they can become a tool wielded for profound societal and political change, if society wills it.
So lets ask another question; which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch – once we were atomized but connected up to each other by big media but not across each other, today that power has eroded, people are using communication technology to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions.
In 2005, Facebook, and YouTube were born – we were aware of the emergence of digital communications but that was seen from afar, there but not here. Today Facebook has a congregation of 500 million people connecting and getting stuff done though its platform, Youtube uploads 20 hours of audio visual content every minute of every day of every year, Flickr holds the largest repository of still images anywhere in the world – but why all this sharing? Because, as USC Professor Henry Jenkins states, an expert on participatory cultures, we were ready for it. Linux is a co-created operating system, (which companies like IBM use) generating huge sums of money for those that build businesses around its services even though the operating code is free and the people that write the code do so for free. From a traditional standpoint it is illogical, yet it works.
At the same time we are using the words social media and social networking, which drip off our lips like an adman would say 60 second TV spot 15 years ago, it seems people are all atwitter about twitter and the CBI produces a report about how employees using “social media” during their working hours are losing the UK millions. The truth is the connection of participatory cultures, socialness and a communications revolution in the true context of our age has been misunderstood by many.
In The Enterprise of the Future a report published by IBM in 2006 – their survey of CEO’s revealed that 8/10 CEO’s saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. This is natural because as a new economy takes hold, as a consequence of the old one faltering, it unleashes a powerful set of forces that cleave the fabric of the economy along fault lines, consequently there is a catastrophic resistance to change. For example, social media from a business context is easy to dismiss, it is looked at with idling curiosity, or downright mistrust in the C-suite as it is not a core part of daily grown up business, sadly this is the same mistake which the church made in misunderstanding Gutenberg in his garret in Mainz.
The reality is people are a highly participatory social species, we are designed to work in aggregates, this is different to the logic that created firms perfected for industrial production. We are in the process of renegotiating that power relationship. What companies face today is a design problem and part of that problem is understanding that embedding socialness into the core of what makes a company work successfully is very different to thinking about social media as an addendum to what it does. It requires a new philosophy, language, media and communications literacy, tools and processes. There are companies which whether it be automotive; Local Motors, venture funding; GrowVC, scientific innovation; innocentive, YourEncore, or Topcoder which has NASA as a client, books; Amazon or book mooch, mobile marketing; Qustodian, trading; ebay, that have all embedded socialness into the DNA of the company to improve commercial success. So is it social media or social business – as answering that question might be more important than you think.
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