In David Armano’s post for the Harvard Business blog, Debunking Social Media Myths, he writes:

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. (emphasis added)

This post brought to mind something I thought about this past weekend: that social media is serving as a leverage point for guiding businesses away from the industrial/post-industrial practices that guided them in the twentieth-century. The new way forward is in the comment I made to David’s post:

David, I think what you’re noting here is one significant aspect of the upheaval social media tools have put into play. Thinking back to when the internet first caught fire around 10 years ago as a business tool, most of the activity was centered around doing what organizations had been doing for decades – just faster and more efficient with less overhead. The early internet held incredible promise to enterprises wanting to continue to operate with their industrial/post-industrial practices of engineering the human out of the service and delivery equation.

Now, enter social media which puts the human back in the center of the equation and these same organizations now are confronted with a problem: try to continue with legacy operational thinking or enter a strange (though somewhat familiar) environment that means changing some core processes.

There’s going to be a sort of cognitive dissonance that propagates the myth that “social media is fast, cheap and easy.” It’s because it tramples on the promises of an industrial/post-industrial age that’s passed. We’re entering a whole new territory where business growth isn’t the hare, it’s the tortoise who knows that relationships (which, at times, can be slow to evolve and challenging to maintain) between people are always at the core of every single transaction.

Habitat, a UK-based home furnishings company, received a lesson this week on how NOT to market its brand. Turns out whoever is minding their Twitter account decided to take advantage of all the buzz surrounding Iran and use related hashtags such as #MOUSAVI to peddle their wares.

Shameless? Yep. Brainless? Yep, again. And it’s not just isolated to piggybacking on #Iran – apparently, Habitat has been riding other trending tags such as #apple and #phone. I’m still a bit mystified by who actually thought this was a good idea. The company has deleted the offending tweets and issued an apology, but the damage is done.

A quote from the BBC News article:

“The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that has been caused.”

The BBC writer is quick to pick up on what is easily inferred from this statement: that a third-party agency is responsible for Habitat’s online marketing strategy and – perhaps more interesting – their Twitter writing. Letting someone outside your organization write your tweets and post to social media shows is a quick way to get into some seriously hot water. If your organization is thinking of using Twitter and other social media tools to engage with customers, for heaven’s sake, don’t let someone else do it for you. This is a DIY initiative.

Sometimes, a name change can be refreshing for a company. But mostly, they turn out to just amp up whatever was sucking that instigated the need for such a change.

Example 1: Boston Market. Remember when it used to be called Boston Chicken? I do and it was damn fine chicken. I ate there quite a bit. But something happened and the geniuses running the enterprise had an epiphany: Boston Chicken is just too confining for our aspirations. So they changed the name to Boston Market and the roof caved in. There are Boston Markets still around (there’s one not too far away from my house), but I really have no strong reason to eat there. I could care less what they call the chain, but they have a lot of work to do to erase the last few crappy experiences I had around the time they decided to change their identity.

This leads to Example 2: The Hut. Which “Hut” would this be? This appears to be the idiotic marketing decision du jour from the folks at Yum! Brands. You might recognize them more for their debacles with KFC and Taco Bell. Now, they’re taking their shtick to Pizza Hut by rebranding it as simply The Hut (some locations have already seen the changes).

Here’s what’s troubling about this rebrand. It’s yet another example of shoddy, shallow marketing in an age when this nonsense might only go so far. I think Ruth Mortimer at MarketingWeek sums it up nicely in her post, Pizza Hut’s rebranding is stale:

If Pizza Hut really wants to be a family restaurant for 2009, it needs to stop worrying about its name and start concentrating on marketing the things that matter. Like really pushing its natural ingredients so parents can feel great taking their kids somewhere they can trust at relatively low prices.

“Marketing the things that matter” means actually engaging your customers and speaking with them like you believe they’re smart, intelligent people. Changing your business name is kind of like flailing around, hoping you can still be relevant in the market place. Don’t bedazzle us with bullshit. Give your customers what they want. You want to make me stop ordering from Papa John’s? Don’t change your name, logo, and packaging…give me a quality product that has natural ingredients for my girls and I’ll be a raving fan.

I’m back home in Austin and I took time on the flight to look back at my notes from yesterday’s Online Community Unconference 2009. So what did I learn?

Learning #1
Okay…this isn’t so much a new learning as it is a poignant reinforcement of something that I know. Acquaintances made online become closer friends when meeting offline (like with my friend Bill Jacobson). If you have a community that only meets in the online space, seriously consider how you can encourage offline meetups.

Learning #2
We’re creating and recreating social norms with every new community and new technology. The way we interact acceptably in one online community may be entirely inappropriate in another. For an example think about your interactions on LinkedIn versus Facebook. While it’s not universal, I wager that your interactions in Facebook are different than LinkedIn (okay, at least mine are). And the types of people you friend on Facebook are likely different, as well (again, not universal…your experience may differ). And all of this impacts how we form behaviors, attitudes, and actions in our communities, in addition to how create expectations of other members. For companies and organizations wanting to build communities, having a grasp of these norms is incredibly important. Thanks to @gammydodger for kicking off this strand of thought.)

Learning #3
Grappling with our various online personas is filled with anxiety. With so much of our lives existing online, there really isn’t a magic formula for determining what persona to use in a given moment. Do you create and use separate personas? Or do you find a way to balance a unified persona? What we do know is that there are pitfalls with either case. And what makes it even more difficult is that as new semantic search technologies arise, we may not have a choice about what parts of our online lives are open to viewing. What is certain is that if each of us doesn’t have a strategy for how we interact online through comments, photos, bloggings, twitterings, etc. we put ourselves in a tough spot. (Thanks to @davepeck and @chip_roberson for spurring this session.)

Learning #4
It is vitally important to separate the person from the action. This is closely related to Learning #2. If someone violates a norm, the desire to label them as a “troll” or similar does nothing but create a conflict. Why? Because there’s a part of us that equates trolls with evildoing (or at least someone doing bad) and then we take the next step of binding action to person. Instead, we need to make an effort to separate the individual from their action. Reach out to the offending individual, listen to their perspective, and seek to understand. It could be they didn’t know the community rules or tacit social norms. But if they continue to offend take steps to maintain the health of the community. (This learning came from Scott Moore’s info packed session on Social Psychology and Communities.)

This really doesn’t begin to cover everything, but I’ll put it up as a good start. I know that as I continue to reflect on yesterday’s unconference, more will percolate to the surface here.

Oh, and if you or your organization is serious about online community, you need to pencil in next year’s unconference. For me, it was worth every single penny I invested.

Today, my good friend and fellow deep thinker Tim Walker pointed me toward an article from Time.com called Using Twitter and Facebook to Find a Job. This prompted a short, private back-and-forth on Twitter about the benefits of social media for work seekers and the overarching connections to Richard Bolles. It’s Richard Bolles who has come to be most commonly connected to the high-value idea of developing “weak ties” in our professional networking.

What are these weak links and why are they so darn valuable? I know one of the first groups we tend to reach out to when we need new work are close friends and family. It makes a certain amount of sense: if these folks won’t come to our aid, then who can we really rely on in our time of need? It turns out our strongest links may not be the most effective, however. Here’s the counter-intuitive approach from Bolles:

It makes sense that the people you are closest to will have more in common with you; they will tend to have the same interests as you, and they will tend to know the same people as you; there is a lot of overlap between your circle of 250 and their circle of 250. And because of that overlap, they will be more likely to know what you know. And in the same way, they will be less likely to know what you don’t know; in this case, of possible job-openings. It is when you start getting farther away from your core, and start finding people with less overlap between your 250 and theirs, that you will find the people and information that you, and those closest to you, are less likely to know. Though it seems paradoxical, it is the people that you know the least well, who are most likely to be helpful in your job hunt. This is called “The Strength of Weak Ties.” (emphasis added)

Bolles’s work is a wonderfully useful extension of the work proposed by Mark Granovetter around the same time in the early 1970s (and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they built off even earlier work). If you’re inclined to read up on some truly outstanding academic work, take a look at this later article from  Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited. You’ll find many of the same principles. Here’s a wee snippet:

It follows, then, that individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where advancement can depend, as I have documented elsewhere (1974), on knowing about appropriate job openings at just the right time.

So what can we quickly draw from these juicy bits of knowledge? Don’t be afraid to reach out to individuals not in your tight inner circle. Even the most tangential connection may be the one that helps you settle into your next work gig. If the thought of contacting people you haven’t spoken to in years is daunting, start smaller. Reach out to people you know, industries you’re familiar with, groups you belong to and then take it one step outward.

• Use LinkedIn to find new colleagues and groups who are connected to your own contacts.
• Join in on Twitter and seek out interesting people. Start up a dialogue there and expand your network.
• Go offline and volunteer with a nonprofit. Give five hours a week and you’ll be amazed at the diversity of people you’ll meet in your work. Plus it has the bonus of making a contribution to a worthy cause.

If you’ve had success at developing your own weak links to find work, what did you do? Love to hear your stories.