Weighing Social Media’s Risks
Concerns around Enterprise 2.0 fall into two broad categories: fears that people won’t use the newly available ESSPs [emergent social software platforms], and fears that they will. The latter, which stem from the lack of upfront control common to ESSPs, tend to crop up first. When first exposed to these technologies, business decision makers voice concerns about what happens when direct control is surrendered and many people can freely contribute to information platforms. The scenario of broad participation in these platforms behind the firewall gives rise to a consistent set of worrying questions:
Won’t people be tempted to use forums to talk about current events, review movies, ask for advice about camcorder purchases and have other non-work-related conversations?
What if blogs are used to denigrate the company itself, air dirty laundry or talk about how misguided its leadership and strategy are?
Don’t these technologies make it easier to leak secrets, deliberately or inadvertently, to the outside world?
If we give up tight control over our intranet’s content, how can we possibly avoid running afoul of all potentially relevant regulations and laws on information sharing in all the places we do business?
The first and largest category of risk is inappropriate behavior and content, either deliberate or inadvertent. Four factors, however, combine to make this scenario unlikely.
First is the fact that while anonymity is the default on the Internet, on the intranet, attribution is the norm. When attribution is the norm, people are much more likely to be cautious and circumspect and much less likely to “flame” their colleagues. And if workers do misbehave on an ESSP, they can be easily identified, counseled, educated and disciplined, if necessary.
The second factor limiting inappropriate behavior is self-policing. Participants in an ESSP usually come to feel a sense of community and are therefore quick to react when they feel that a member is violating community norms. The communities formed on top of ESSPs often have informal leaders who exert a great deal of influence and can shape the behavior of other members.
In addition to informal leaders, the formal leaders of an organization are a third counterbalance to inappropriate behavior and content. Managers can intervene when one of their direct reports is being counterproductive in an ESSP, and often the simple awareness that “the boss” is observing behavior and watching contributions leads to changed behavior.
The fourth, and most fundamental, factor limiting inappropriate behavior and content is simply that most people know how to behave appropriately in ESSPs and are inclined to do so. There are exceptions, of course, and in a few instances people have been fired because of ill-advised posts to their external blogs; but my experience indicates that most people know how to act professionally in job-related environments, including digital ones.
If a company believes that these four factors do not provide enough protection against inappropriate content, it can set up a review or moderation process in which contributions must be vetted before they appear on a content platform. Finally, inappropriate content on company-owned ESSPs, either internal-only or externally visible, can always be removed if necessary.
Whatever the advantages of Enterprise 2.0, though, it is true that ESSPs typically do increase the amount of discoverable information within an organization. In other words, they add to the inventory of material that can be requested and reviewed as part of a legal action, just as e-mails and memos can.
Many organizations understandably want to limit the amount of discoverable information they produce, but they also want to gain access to the advantages and capabilities of Enterprise 2.0. Because I have yet to hear of a case in which ESSPs and their content gravely hurt a company during a legal proceeding, I continue to believe that the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 outweigh the potential disadvantages associated with generating more discoverable content.
It’s easy to be impressed by the large, dynamic and vibrant Web 2.0 communities on the Internet and to overlook the fact that they’re actually quite tiny when expressed as a percentage of all Internet users. A key challenge, then, for all Enterprise 2.0 advocates is increasing the percentage of intranet users who contribute to their organizations’ ESSPs.
To do this, it’s critical to understand why the “ambient percentage” of contributors to organizational ESSPs isn’t higher. Are the technologies themselves too primitive, or are they difficult to learn and use? Do some managers in an organization actually act to block Enterprise 2.0, because they don’t want information to flow more freely? Or are the real roadblocks internal, rooted somewhere in the heads of individuals? Accurate answers to these questions are essential prerequisites to designing and executing successful efforts to deploy ESSPs.
Within enterprises, where the incumbent collaboration technology of e-mail is well established, ESSPs are what Harvard Business School marketing professor John Gourville calls “long hauls”–products that represent significant technological leaps forward and are therefore potentially quite valuable, but require major behavioral changes from their target audience.
Long hauls have the potential to become popular and widespread, but their success comes slowly. Champions of longhaul products must be patient and prepared to evangelize, demonstrate, coach, train, and explain for what seems to them a very long time. As Gourville writes, “The simplest strategy for dealing with consumer resistance is to brace for slow adoption . . . to be successful companies must anticipate a long, drawn out adoption process and manage it accordingly.”
Adapted from Andrew McAfee ( a principal research scientist at MIT)
