Social Media’s Untapped Power

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. I’m talking with two of the leading thinkers on the intersection of business and social media. Anthony Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research and co-author of the new book, The Social Organization. Misiek Piskorski is an associate professor at Harvard Business School and author of the HBR article “Social Strategies That Work. ” Thanks to both of you for joining us today.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: Thanks for having us.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: Thank you.

SARAH GREEN: So gentlemen, I’d like to start with a debate that I’ve been following. On the one hand, you’ve got this one camp of people saying that social media is revolutionary. It’s like movable type or the steam engine or something. On the other hand, you’ve got this other side it says, hey, not so fast. Most of us still just use this to play Farmville. So what is your take on it?

ANTHONY BRADLEY: You’re absolutely right on both counts. Number one is it does have the potential to significantly change the way we do business. In fact, one of the things we talk about and we’re a firm believer that mass collaboration, which is what social technologies enable, is the next big evolution of business when you consider the evolution of business an amplification of enterprise capabilities where you have mass production, and mass distribution, and mass marketing.

All the ways in which a business can amplify their impact on the market, we now have mass collaboration. Hundreds of thousands, millions of people like never before can collaborate. And companies can engage communities of people to delegate work and effectively expand their impact on the marketplace.

So the potential is there. But it’s hard. It’s very hard. In fact, most people get it wrong and they fail. And so we go into this trough of disillusionment, because many organizations are simply using social media as another channel for outbound communications, like they always have. And they get limited return on that investment. They don’t get anything transformational. So they think that social media is all hype, when in fact, they’ve basically not done everything.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: I would agree with that. I see a lot of companies do do that.

And I want to come back to something that you said about just playing Farmville. There’s 250 million of us that actually play social games. So there is a lot of us that are doing this. And the second thing that we see is that Farmville per se or most of the social games are actually revolutionary.

What they do, I think what they represent is a unique set of capabilities or products that actually do two things. They actually help people build relationships with each other. We actually see people reconnecting with their friends– some of their closest friends, but also some of the friends that people have lost touch with. And at the same time, actually performing a lot of work for the company. So advertising the company to their friends and thereby saving a lot of money on customer acquisition.

So when I see this and when I look at Zynga, I don’t particularly see a social game. I actually see a new way in which we develop products. Because we have actually not built products to facilitate relationships between people. And now we see an onslaught of new companies that will simultaneously build better relationships between people and also do business.

And I think it can transform just about anything that we’ve done. Because if you take anything– hotels, transportation– any business has never been built with the eye for facilitating relationships between people. And now with the new social platforms we see that there is a huge demand for that. So I think it will transform just about everything we know.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: Yeah, you can’t underestimate the power of fun and games. And in fact, that’s one of the things I’ll say is you’re a dinosaur if you think work can’t be fun. And the power of these games is tremendous.

And not only in relationship building, but if you consider the game Foldit, where gamers basically looked at different ways of folding proteins according to a set of scientific rules of playing that game and were able to help the scientific community basically further scientific discovery by the masses playing this game on how to fold proteins.

So you can’t underestimate the power of games. In fact, there’s a whole movement now called gamification, the application of game mechanics to traditionally non-game efforts.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: And I think this will actually transform quite a lot of the way we do work. Because I think traditionally very few of us think that work should be fun. In fact, organizations go to extreme lengths to prohibit people from having fun at work.

And I think, again, with these changes we see that even the way we do work is going to actually change to help us leverage some of these things that basically build people’s engagement. We no longer have to ask people, pay people to say you have to work hard. Now we can actually design environments, work environments, which sort of automatically get people to work harder, because they’re already enjoying it. So why wouldn’t they work hard for the company?

SARAH GREEN: So this all sounds incredibly exciting and promising. But I think the frustration for a lot of companies now is that they don’t know how to get from here to there. They don’t know how to deal with self-organizing communities to enable mass collaboration. How do we get from A to B?

MISIEK PISKORSKI: I’ve done actually a lot of research on this. I’ve actually have spent a tremendous amount of time talking to companies that have failed in this business and have succeeded in this business. And to my head, it’s a three-legged stool, if you really want to get your social strategy to work inside a company. And it really has to do with what happens inside a company.

The first stool, I think, is having people in your organization that actually use the social technologies. And usually these are younger people. These usually are not people who are in decision-making power just yet. But they really understand these platforms through and through. And they really understand what goes on there. And so having senior leadership actually identify these people and give them a lot of opportunities to perform is step number one.

Step number two is actually sort of getting a lot of the buy-in from the senior leaders. A lot of these ideas that these younger people will come up will be quite revolutionary. And some of them might upset some of the existing power structures inside the organization. So buying them protective cushion from the senior management is absolutely critical. Because I’ve witnessed a lot of organizations that have started on a really good path, and then a lot of the good ideas that the people had were basically killed by either the CMO or by the CO himself or herself.

And finally, actually getting organizations to invest in their own technological capabilities so that they can actually leverage the power of the social technologies that are out there with their own personal technologies that they have. Inside organizations are actually critical, because without that, it’s very difficult to get competitive advantage over competitors. So it’s always in the sort of combining the technology that the company has inside with the community and technology that’s available outside that generates great results.

And when it works, it’s absolutely phenomenal what happens. To me, the best example of that is always American Express, largely because it’s a very old company in the financial services industry. So financial services are always very, very careful about innovation. In the last couple of years, it hasn’t been a happy time for financial services.

And when we see what American Express has done, for example, by integrating its core products with Foursquare and integrating them with Facebook in ways that actually fundamentally drives business for them, is just staggering. So I think when these things work, they really are very powerful for any kind of an organization.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: I’ve seen a similar three-legged stool challenge where the first stool being that, first of all, senior leaders in a business need to recognize the value of social media and mass collaboration across multiple business functions, not just marketing. Across multiple business functions. And think of it as strategic to their business. That’s kind of the first leg.

The second leg, which is a major best practice we found in the hundreds of cases we examined of successes and failures, is the importance of purpose. You’ve got to have a purpose, a business relevant purpose, around which a community will rally, and people will engage and will contribute.

On the other side of that coin, there’s a very prominent worst practice we call provide and pray. Provide access to a social technology or a social environment and pray that something good comes of it, that a community actually forms and interacts in a way that delivers value to the business. About 90% of the time, the provide and pray fails. So the choice of purpose is the single most important decision that you can make with success in social media.

And by the way, that’s not an IT, not a finance function. That is a business function, which is why we say success with social media is fundamentally a business and leadership challenge, not a technology issue.

So this is something I saw in common with your article, Misiek, is that you have this one, two, three willingness to pay people build relationships, and they do work on behalf of the company. Well, we have something similar. We say a purpose statement has a good format to it where you talk about these people collaborating around this specific thing that delivers value to themselves and value to our business. It has to be specific enough that it resonates with the individuals and is a cause around which they’ll rally.

And the third leg to the stool is working with the broader organization to protect the health of the community. So this is protecting this community-based collaboration from IT and information security and legal and finance and helping them understand the value of a community and how community-based collaboration is different than team-based collaboration and executive leadership-based collaboration.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: I’m stunned we’ve never spoken before, and we sound as if we’ve read from the– that’s always reassuring.

SARAH GREEN: So it’s interesting. We seem to have started out in this place talking about the great future of social media. And now what we’ve come around to is that it’s all about figuring out what customers need and figuring out a way to give it to them that benefits your bottom line. That’s actually a really old-fashioned idea.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: It is, but what’s new about it is thinking in terms of what’s meaningful to a community. I would say that most business leaders would say they figured out how to make themselves productive. Many would say they figured how to make their team, their group, their organization productive.

But how many can really say they know how to make a community productive? They know how to spot a good purpose for a community, rally a community around it, get them to contribute, derive business value, and change the way they operate as a company or interact and engage with customers. That’s what’s really new. It’s this moving your thinking from what’s financially meaningful to my business and translate that on to the customer to what’s really meaningful to the customer and how do I get them to rally round what’s meaningful to them and derive, maybe even indirectly, business value from their interactions?

MISIEK PISKORSKI: I couldn’t agree more. And the problem is that a lot of these things that we’ve learned about how to make product does not apply to how to make a community. I always give the shampoo analogy. When you make shampoo and when a customer buys the shampoo, the shampoo doesn’t run away. The shampoo doesn’t have a bad day. The shampoo doesn’t get upset, doesn’t get angry. The shampoo’s just there and washes your hair.

Well, quite honestly, that’s not the case with communities. With communities, when people interact with each other, a lot of wonderful things that can happen. But you also have to manage these communities in ways that you didn’t have to manage your shampoos. So it’s a very different set of skills that are required to actually help build these communities. Even if you know what kind of community you want to build and what value they will do it, the actual steps that you have to go through are actually very different.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: Yeah, when I talk to senior executives about the risk– because they fear what if my customers revolt, because indeed they aren’t shampoo bottles– I use a similar analogy. I say, well, it’s social. So we have to remember that it’s about people. And there will be misbehavior.

And I quiz them. I say, how many of you belong to a social structure that you call your family? Everybody raises their hand, usually. I say, well, how many of you consider your family’s social structure to be a good, positive social structure? And they raise their hands. And then I say, well, how many of these good, positive family social structures are devoid of bad behavior? And nobody raises their hand. So I say, well, how many of you are about to jettison your kids or your spouse because of the bad behavior? And of course everybody laughs.

But the point is that there will be bad behavior. In fact, going back to the social analogy, one of the things my wife taught me is how we go into whatever caused our argument is much less of an impactor on how our relationship comes out of it than how we actually interact with one another because of that conflict. We can have a conflict, and we could come out of it with a stronger relationship based on how we interact with one another during that conflict.

Same exact thing with social media. Bad things will happen. But how you engage as an organization with your customers or your employees and come out of it can mean you actually have a better relationship with them afterwards.

And if you think you can avoid those conflicts, you simply can’t. Because if you do something so bad that a large portion of your customers are going to quote unquote revolt, they’re going to do it on Facebook or Twitter. And if you have no way to respond to them other than to issue some corporate press release, you’re in big trouble in the future.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: And I want to throw in a little bit of research into this. I actually wrote a paper on this looking at Wikipedia and conflict that’s inherent on Wikipedia. And as you can imagine, there’s a lot of conflict on Wikipedia related to writing articles. And what we find with a big data set is exactly that, which is individuals who actually engaged in conflict that came out correctly afterwards in which they felt like there was an appropriate resolution are actually more likely to stay and stay committed to Wikipedia than those that never experienced any conflict at all. So some conflict, if it’s correctly resolved, will actually get you a stronger community.

SARAH GREEN: So tell me a little bit more about how conflict can actually be a constructive force instead of, say, something you want to avoid?

ANTHONY BRADLEY: Well, you have to remember that social media doesn’t create conflict. It exposes it. So the conflict is really already there. It’s a matter of whether you and the broader world has greater visibility towards it, and then therefore your response to it can also have greater visibility.

With United Breaks Guitars, social media didn’t create the fact that United baggage handlers might damage some baggage. But social media enabled this individual to elevate that conflict and have it gain momentum in social media, which kind of forced United to take a more human social media-based response to it. So the conflict exists out there, but social media now gives the people the power to pile on and basically have a united voice. We don’t like that you do this.

And so whether companies like it or not, their conflicts, or at least a portion of them– and there’s a whole bunch of examples, like Motrin Moms and Skittles– they’re just getting more air time and people pile on. And you need to be able to have visibility and respond. So it is, by and large, a positive.

SARAH GREEN: Misiek, did you have any thoughts on that?

MISIEK PISKORSKI: No, I would agree with that. Provoking conflict is obviously not something that you want to do. But I think that there’s also, in terms of the communities that you design for sort of like the ones that you brought up earlier on about creation of content and they will discover something for you, you do want to make sure that they don’t sort of force people into groupthink. You do want to make sure that various voices are heard.

And you want to have really concrete rules about solving that conflict, but out of the conflict between the producers of content, actually. So this is not a company to producers, a company to individuals. But between people, you want to also give them the reason to disagree on things. And really because that’s the source of the creative process. But you just want to make sure that the rules for solving that conflict are very, very clearly articulated.

And again, something like Wikipedia strikes me as an organization with extraordinary rules for how behavior should be regulated, even though it gives people a lot of freedom in disagreeing on how to generate the best content possible.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: Wikipedia is actually a great example, because they recognized early on that they had to introduce some rules, some editing rules in order to really deal with this conflict. Because they’re trying to ascertain fact, which is generally pretty difficult to do with wisdom of the crowds, because you get disagreement. So there’s also a misconception out there that, well, you put it out there and don’t give it any structure. Let whatever happens, happens. And that’s not really the case.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: No, it’s quite the contrary.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: You need to put some guardrails in place to get productive mass collaboration. So you need a purpose. You need a shared purpose. You need guardrails. And then you need guidance.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: And in fact, Wikipedia has just phenomenal set of rules and committees. And then just if you actually look at how much in the background work is done to make sure that these rules are obeyed is just extraordinary.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: But the key here is that these structures facilitate productive collaboration. You can put structures in place that will inhibit.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: Of course, of course.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: So you’ve got to guard against that, absolutely.

SARAH GREEN: Well, thank you both so much for chatting with us today.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: Thank you.

ANTHONY BRADLEY: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

MISIEK PISKORSKI: That was Mikilaj Piskorski from Harvard Business School and Anthony Bradley from Gartner Research. Misiek’s article is “Social Strategies That Work, ” and Anthony’s book is called The Social Organization. You can find both of those on hbr.org.