Where We Get Our News Keeps Changing (Scotusblog; Andrew Sullivan — and the changes keep coming)
Just a quick thought.
As we all awaited the SupremeCourt decision on the Affordable Care Act, many of us (yes, me included) got our news from the Scotusblog. The Scotusblog live blog was practically indispensable on that very important news story. And, yes, they got it right.
And, today when Anderson Cooper came out, he chose to do so on a blog — Andrew Sullivan’s blog.
We have arrived at the point where the right blog can be a legitimate news source. With the Scotusblog example, we learn the value of “narrow expertise.” And with Sullivan’s blog, if you have followed him at all, you know that he has a remarkable ability to take a major theme and find just the details we need as he runs with that theme. He has done this in a number of ways, with a number of stories.
Just one way the world keeps changing.
Gabler Asks Where Did the Ideas Go?
The August 13 edition of the New York Times included an informative article by Neal Gabler entitled “The Elusive Big Idea.” Gabler is the author of a book about Walt Disney and a senior fellow at the Annenberg Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California.
His thesis in the article is that we are drowning in information, with neither the time, nor the desire to process it.
Think about this for a moment. Just 15 years ago, you would not be doing what you are doing right now – reading a blog. There were no blogs. Your phone would not beep when a new development in the news occurred. Everyone has knowledge to share, and everyone has the capability to access it. But, in what ways are you processing, implementing, or transforming what you know?
As a result of all this access to knowledge, your big idea is easily lost. As Gabler says, “If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forbears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world – a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t be instantly monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are diseeminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passe.”
He goes on to say that in the past, “we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful…[now] we prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information.”
And much of that information is personal – where you are going, what you are doing, who are you meeting with, and so forth. The early days of Twitter popularized this method of sharing personal knowledge.
The problem is that we now have fewer thinkers, and fewer people who transform the way we think and live. We have no shortage of information. We know more than we ever have before. The question is what are we doing with it?
Gabler’s article suggests that we won’t be thinking about what we know. “What the future portends is more and more information – everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.”
So, he ends by saying, “think about that.”
I don’t believe many people will think about it. They will just turn to the next blog entry, the next page, the next news channel, and so forth, filling themselves with short-term knowledge.
What do you think? Let’s talk about this really soon!
Social Media Customer Leaders: Some Early Performance Data
H. James Wilson
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We found that tweeting is both common and encouraged among a select group of companies we call Social Media Customer Leaders, or SMC Leaders for short. We identified these companies in our new Babson Executive Education survey of over 900 global executives, managers, and individual contributors. (Special thanks to colleagues Elaine Eisenman and PJ Guinan for their ongoing input to this research.)
SMC Leaders are the companies where employees “strongly agree” with the survey statement: “our organization has embraced social media (like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook) to improve its responsiveness to customer needs.” At the other end of the spectrum are SMC Laggards, who strongly disagree with that same statement.
[There are some] noteworthy performance results when comparing SMC Leaders to Laggards:
Only 21 percent of SMC Leader companies have flat or declining sales over the past year compared to 31 percent of SMC Laggard companies.
While just five percent of SMC Leader companies had higher than 25 percent growth over the last year, that’s two-and-a-half times more than the 2 percent of SMC Laggards that could say they grew that much.
Two-thirds of respondents from SMC Leader companies strongly agree with the statement, “We are more effective meeting customer needs today compared to 18 months ago” when the recession began. That’s three-times the rate of SMC Laggard companies.
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Correlation isn’t causality, of course. Aggressive adoption of social media can be a signal that an organization is more dynamic and innovative in the first place. For instance, SMC Leaders are two-and-a-half times more likely to strongly agree with the statement, “My company puts more emphasis on innovation and growth today than before the recession” (43% vs. 17%).
As we suggest in the title, we are still in the early stages of looking through our survey data. Of interest next is the performance of the 38 percent of SMC Leaders (compared to 2 percent of Laggards) that also use social media internally for CEO-employee and employee-employee interaction, such as strategy communication and knowledge sharing.
Have you ever wondered whether your boss’s boss recognizes you from your company’s internal Facebook account?
H. James Wilson is a Senior Researcher and Senior Writer at Babson Executive Education (BEE) in Wellesley, MA. At BEE he is a contributor to an ongoing Social Media research study led by Dr. PJ Guinan. Wilson has written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, and HBR Online where “Innovation Teams Lack Data, Structure” appears.
Are Social Media Worth Your Time?
Morten Hansen
Are Social Media Worth Your Time?
Morten Hansen
In the latest issue of BusinessWeek, Stephen Baker’s article “Beware Social Media Snake Oil” makes a provocative argument. He claims that all the hype around social networks, wikis, and blogs for business neglects the potential risks and time wasted. While I think he is overstating the argument, he is bringing up a vital question all managers and employees need to ask: What’s the business value of using social media? In my view, there has to be a crystal clear business impact for using these tools.
Consider collaboration inside companies (which differs from using these tools for marketing and PR). The promise of social media, or “enterprise 2.0″ as it is often called, is that employees can become much better at finding information and working together if they use blogs, wikis, social networking, document sharing, Facebook pages, and the like. But are these new activities valuable for a company? Well, that depends. The first obvious issue is that you can spend an awful lot of time on this, and that’s time not spent doing other things, such as finishing your job for the day. So it’s only valuable if the result (e.g., finding good information) justifies the effort (all the hours put into social media). That’s focusing on outputs, not inputs.
Some people miss this point: They think of adoption success in a company as the number of wikis, blogs, tweets, and Facebook pages that people have created and used. In other words, they measure success as the activity level. But that’s the same as saying, “in our company, we have lots of meetings so we must be doing something right.” As enterprise 2.0 expert Oliver Marks told me, “random Twitter and online dialog can be an even more disastrous use of time than endless unfocused meetings.” More is not necessarily better.
There is a bigger problem, however. Social media tools are only useful for some problems. Managers need to ask, do social media tools solve my key challenges? Consider again collaboration inside companies. Why are people in your company not collaborating better? There are potentially many different reasons for this. As I show in my book Collaboration, some barriers to collaboration are motivational — people are unwilling to share information and look for help, perhaps because they see colleagues as rivals or only care about their own performance. Social media tools are just not going to be good at fixing these motivational problems. You need other solutions for this, such as changing the incentive system so that people are rewarded for helping others.
If you blindly focus on investing in social network tools, wikis, and blogs in your company, without solving these motivational problems first, you have just committed a great managerial sin. You have applied the wrong solution to your problems. You have prescribed cough medicine for a broken leg.
We need to be precise and honest about where these new social media tools have great impact, and where they don’t. Then they will be seen as great tools, and we won’t hear the snake oil label anymore.
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Morten T. Hansen is the author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results (Harvard Business Press, 2009). He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at INSEAD.
To check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.
Bob Morris: DJ/BJ Par Excellence
Bob Morris, DJ/BJ par excellence
Robert (Bob) Morris, our blogging team member, is the true business book expert of our group. He has written over 1900 reviews on Amazon.com, and many others that show up in other places, including on our blog.
Every week, as I read Bob’s entries, I discover new authors and new books and new insights. He is a one-man knowledge aggregator.
I now have a new label to put on Bob. Let’s call him the DJ par excellence. But, let’s change that slightly, and make that “BJ – Book Jockey” instead of “DJ — Disc Jockey”). This label is prompted by this post from Andrew Sullivan’s blog:
DJ Culture
Salon interviews Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil. There isn’t much new here, but this is worth commenting on:
There’s always been too much to read. Nobody read all the books at the Great Library of Alexandria. Nobody was capable of doing that then. Nobody is reading all that’s online today. What we need and what we always seem to get is a way to make this glut of information navigable. We need search engines, we need indexing, we need reviews. We have all this apparatus to find the data we’re looking for.
The Dish can’t read the whole internet, but the web allows social networks to filter the best content upwards. We try to catch as much smart stuff in the net as we can. In this fast-evolving medium, a blogger still writes and edits, but he or she also acts as a kind of disk-jockey for the collective mind – sampling the best, re-mixing the funny, keeping the crowd dancing in the public square.
I think Bob fits this bill with books. (And increasingly, he is finding blogs and articles for us also). This truly describes his work: “He makes this glut of information navigable.” And, he acts as “kind of a book/disc jockey for the collective mind, especially regarding the good and valuable business books out there.”
So, Bob, thanks again for your work. I will now think of you as the DJ/BJ par excellence.
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