New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

I've only dipped my toe in the Social Media waters (New Venture Lab and a related LinkedIn group) and I have actually been fairly resistant to expanding any of my own personal efforts on social media (I do not Tweet on Twitter, I do not have a Facebook page, I do not have a MySpace page, etc.).  I've been resistant due to time constraints and because of privacy concerns -- and I guess there is an age thing too.  I just don't spend any time reading anyone's blog or posting messages to anyone's page on Facebook.  It sort of mystifies me that the twenty-somethings spend more time on Facebook and MySpace than their email.  Or that they spend more time online than in-person fellowship.  At any rate, the article below showed up in my inbox today and does a good job of outlining the concerns over the time investment necessary to do social media well as a company...

I recently spoke at and attended the Conversational Marketing Summit in NYC. On day two, I heard something from Brian Wallace of Blackberry that echoed thoughts I've been preaching for a while. He said "I was selling in the idea that social media is free, until the community manager headcount came in."

This underscores a fundamental truth to social media that many organizations underestimate--being social means having real live people who actively participate in your initiatives. It's difficult to automate and a challenge to scale, but it can also help move your business forward in ways that produce leveraged outcomes such as new/better products or services.

The economics of using social media in business require the participation of people to fuel it. It is not simply enabled by technology that maintains itself. One of the biggest lessons to be taken away from a social platform such as Twitter is that the ecosystem it's a part of if, is itself built on people who keep it humming along with not only content, but a seemingly endless stream of third party applications. This phenomenon is not entirely new--it's been referred to as end-user innovation (innovation by consumers and end users, rather than suppliers).

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.

It's worth noting that seeding, feeding, and weeding all take place after any social initiative has been launched. But not taking into account the manpower that's involved in these as you develop your social business design strategy can lead to a lack of adoption or participation--essential elements to any social initiative. Ignoring these realities will continue to propagate the myth that social media is fast, cheap and easy. As organizations look to grow or scale their current initiatives, it's proving to be anything but.

Source: Harvard Business Publishing