Social Networking or Notworking: The Value of Social Media in Business Panel Discussion: Professor Cliff Bowman, Dr Tazeeb Rajwani and Toby Thompson June 2009 TT
Hello, I am Toby Thompson, I am here today with Cliff Bowman and Tazeeb Rajwani of Cranfield School of Management. Cliff Bowman is Professor of Strategic Management and Tazeeb Rajwani is Research Fellow in Strategic Management. We are talking about social networking, and before we go on this is a debate on the KI, a debate which we are very happy for you to engage in. So you will see beneath this video there is a comments panel – please leave your comments if you feel passionately about what we are talking about. I will mention that again later on. Gentlemen, we are here talking about social networking. I think we have something of a Gen Y and a Gen X – not mentioning names there. Tazeeb, is this networking, is it media, is it computers? What is this that we are talking about? TR Basically, social media is here without a doubt and we are seeing some serious changes. I think social media is still in an embryonic phase. People are trying to understand what are the foundations, what does it really mean for business – but to summarise and give you taste of what it is, social media is about dialogue. Not monologue, but dialogue. It’s about engaging people in ways using various tools, and the toolkit within the social media toolkit includes things like podcasts, videos, social networking. All these elements where you are having engagement and dialogue. TT Principally technology, with a technology component? TR Exactly, the technology is there to facilitate these conversations that happen on line, instead of having it off line. So social networking, for example, would include the likes of FaceBook, Bebo, My Space. The new social networks out there include things like Dogster, Brave New Talent.com where you connect lovers of animals to each other; you have got over a million users on Dogster for example. You have got social networking sites like FaceBook that have over 100 million people worldwide using it. Just today, around 100,000 people are going to go online and use FaceBook to connect people. TT In one day? TR In one day. Professor Cliff Bowman and Dr Tazeeb Rajwani
TT But haven’t we been talking for millions of years as a species. Cliff, dialogue is something that we are doing right now. Do we need technology to do that? CB To enable it, I suppose. I am fascinated to hear all that because I’m not probably even Generation X, I think – Generation B is probably more appropriate. So, I am ignorant – almost totally ignorant – of these things that Taz is talking about. And that in a way is not just being a dinosaur, it’s just something that I don’t feel a need to do this. One of the problems I feel we have is I understand Taz’s point about dialogue, interaction, and I think that sounds like a good thing. But, having sent e‐mails and they have been misinterpreted because it is very difficult to put tone across and affect and emotion in an e‐mail, and I have sent off a fairly swift and kind of jokey seeming response and that has been misinterpreted and it has upset somebody. So I think that I understand the point of trying to interact to get dialogue, but it is still a limited kind of interaction. And if you look at it from an evolutionary psychology point of view – your million years thing, Toby – that we have evolved very, very sophisticated ways of judging mood and tone and feeling by looking at people’s faces, and if you haven’t got the opportunity to do that or if there is a delay, a time lag, and you don’t know these things are being interpreted because you can’t register the immediate response from the individual. I think that other thing that bothers me about it is the permanence of these seemingly fleeting often interactions. That you toss a thing out as a Twitter, let’s say, but it isn’t just like a verbal thing. It’s there in a form that can then be moved around. TT It’s there forever. CB It’s there forever and if there is a log it can be passed on to other people at a speed which is frightening – which you don’t control as well, which is another problem. TT So in terms of business – we are here in a business school – we are talking about the relevance of that to business. There is no relevance to that? It’s not a reality that business people are facing right now with Gen Y coming up through the work organisation? CB I think it is very much a reality. The question is whether we understand the impacts of the developments on the normal running of business. One of the concerns I have, which again is the kind of Generation B reaction, is this expectation for immediate response. So if somebody sends you something there is an expectation that, somebody will say well, I sent you that Saturday night – why haven’t you read it? Because you sent it on Page 2
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Saturday night. TT I know Taz I get your Twitter updates on my phone, and the thing goes bing bong every – well I wouldn’t say every few minutes, but its every few hours certainly, with a comment. How is that relevant to business? How is that relevant to organisations, improving productivity and entering new markets? TR Good question. Now let me put things into context. President Obama came into power, how did he come into power? He used social media. He was using it so effectively compared to McCain – I will give you some examples. On Twitter he had over 168,000 people following him. On FaceBook he had over 3 million people connected to him, compared to McCain who had 318,000 people. Now take some people – take academics out there where they are putting their own ideas on education or it could be on various themes of management practices; I think it is so powerful where you are able to disseminate your views, your thinking out there. Where people are able to actually either adopt your views, or they are able to have conversations with you about your views. I get people replying back to some of my questions, I might throw something out there, I received somebody from The Telegraph that contacted me because is asked the question ‘Will social media change the way marketing will be done?’ Just a simple question, and there are people following me, and I just find it fascinating that there is this technology – which we call Twitter – that had last year (in February 08) around 400,000 using it effectively, and then year later you have 7 million people using it. That is an increase of over 1,300%. TT That does seem like an ineluctable, inescapable reality of the world – is this a productivity tool? People are working better as a result of this? CB I think that Taz has given us a great example of the immediacy. So Taz comes up with an idea, blasts it out there, people pick it up – now you could say this is the marketplace and if it is a good idea then it will fly. I don’t think that is actually necessarily true. I think there are a lot of bad ideas – and I’m not saying yours was Taz – but there are a lot of bad ideas that you can get out there, very quickly because there is no quality assurance associated with this. It’s just a marketplace. TT So there are bad ideas, and there is a kind of inattention to what you are doing generally. CB Well that, I think, is another problem. And the risk immediacy, I think, can lead to a certain kind of management issue or problem which is the expectation of immediate response and reaction leads to a fragmentation Page 3
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of management work, which I don’t think is necessarily helpful. I recently moved jobs and I was asked do I want my phone messages, e‐
mail – two or three other devices, Blackberry etc, that I was supposed to have. Well I don’t want any of these things because it seems like they are a huge burden on me. I have to clear all this stuff before I can actually start what I would consider to be work. TT And you are expected to be contactable at any time using any of those devices. CB Well I think the other problem with that is this 24/7. There is no down time, there is no rest. People take their Blackberries on holiday – I know it’s not exactly what you are talking about Taz – but it almost moves us into an era where you used to get total occupations where people, let’s say, worked in a coalmine and they only socialised with people in the coalmine and the whole community was orientated around the coalmine. They called it total occupation. Trawlermen would be a similar one. Now that is fine, except when you lose your job because then your social life and your work life are so ineluctably connected that if you lose your job, in a way you are losing your social life as well. TT Your identity has gone. CB Your identity has gone, and I think that that must cause an awful lot of problems for people. I also think that there is an issue here about its not just the permanency of these communications, it’s the frequency of them. Let’s say, I am not in one of these networks, but I would imagine people might feel under pressure to continually communicate. If you are in a business context and you have a network which includes people that work in rival businesses that you have met at conference or something like that, there might be a felt need to continually provide interesting information, which might lead to a point where you are passing on information to impress other people in the network. Some confidential information which you have suddenly got hold of that you think might actually increase your standing in this network. Now that is a problem for businesses. TT So you feel under pressure to exploit your network? CB Well, I think that is a different one. I think this is where you are doing it voluntarily, but I think you are right Toby, there is another pressure which is the pressure that you might be getting from your boss to exploit social relationships that you have – which I find absolutely appalling. Page 4
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TT Extracting more value from you? CB Well for me that is bordering on prostituting your social network. TT Wow, that’s quite a statement. For those watching, do please, if you have an opinion about this one, leave your comments in the box. Taz, that is quite an inditement of this social networking? TR I appreciate where Cliff is coming from. I worked at KPMG and I saw a lot of this happening, but I think the benefits outweigh the costs here. Now, think about this. Let’s go back to basics. If you look at the principles of management, it is about each person – so say you are a strategic leader, you have got to manage a team, empower your employees, make sure that they add value. It’s something that I am researching at the moment, we call this amplification. You are amplifying your value as an individual. Then you have got this other side which is this idea of aggregation. You have got groups of people, a community in that company that have to add values together. Now let’s think about the social networking aspect. You have got the potential of using communities outside your own internal network to improve innovation processes – this is the open innovation idea where you are able to, with social networking for example I know examples of Ernst and Young, T‐Mobile that are using it very effectively to engage and recruit talent. They are using it very effectively to find what exactly these people are about and try to bring them into the company. TT Aren’t they tying it on that in a generational sense? Isn’t this a generational argument? Those companies you mentioned there probably want the new generation coming through their doors; they are coming through the doors any time soon, if not now. Isn’t it generational? Cliff, isn’t it that Taz and you represent the two ends of the spectrum possibly? CB I think it must be. For people of Taz’s generation, a lot of this they have just grown up with. So for them it’s just the normal stuff. I think there might be a retiring generation of managers around my age who have never grown up with this – they have to make quite an effort to understand what is going on. TT Why are you not reinforcing the stereotype of you as a professor, maybe off planet? It does seem that I am not onto Twitter, FaceBook, MyFace whatever you call it – that is for the next generation. Are you reinforcing that stereotype to be provocative? CB Well that is a fact, I can’t pretend to be au fait with these things because I am not into it. My sons are, they communicate through FaceBook it Page 5
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seems quite naturally. TT So it’s the generational thing. So for business, it looks good, it looks rosy because a new generation is coming up for the business. The custodians of business, the hierarchy should let it happen? TR Exactly, Toby. By the end of the 2010 Gen Y will have outnumbered Gen X out there and the Baby Boomers. We are looking at a shift taking place where companies need to react now. They need to acknowledge that the shifts are taking place. The world is getting flatter, you have got 100 million videos on YouTube – it’s just insane. There were more videos uploaded just yesterday, compared to the whole of the month three months ago. It’s just insane. The shifts are taking place. Yes, companies have these pools of Generation X, Y, Baby Boomers and so forth, and yes, there is resistance to these new technologies. But companies need to embrace them because there are opportunities out there to really reinvent some fundamentals and companies need to embrace this in my opinion. TT So businesses watch out; go with the flow possibly? CB I think Taz is saying opportunities. I suppose I am seeing too many of the downsides and maybe there must be opportunities for the ones who can spot them and exploit them. TT And let’s face it classrooms have been around for thousands of years; auditoria and people lecturing in classrooms have been around. It’s resisted, it’s maintained for a long, long time. Maybe it works? CB Well, now we are moving into a slightly different area here, and that is the extent to which how do people learn and get useful information. We have already made the point that this is non QA’d – what is being blasted out there, there is content pollution there because there is so much stuff it is very difficult to figure out what is quality and what isn’t. But we talked about sustainable advantage and competitive advantage and how rapidly that can be dissipated and we know that there are business schools that are putting all their content, as much as they can, on these freely available sites. I am reminded actually of Eddie Izzard as somebody who has got a pretty shrewd appreciation of how this thing works. Eddie Izzard, I don’t know whether he still bothers to do this, but he would design a two hour show, take it round the world and make shed loads of money from doing it and then he would produce the video. But that means that every year he has got to invent two hours worth of material. It seems to me that if this stuff is being continually farmed out, and given away for free, we are creating the situation where there has to be a continual invention of knowledge on a weekly basis. Page 6
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TT So academic labour, intellectual labour becomes harder? CB Well yes, I would say it would become impossible. We already have – this is a slight side issue here – the impact of publish or perish where the point is to get a number of papers out, rather than maybe spend a lot more time and get one good paper out which actually does make a contribution. I think you get a similar kind of pressure if as soon as we produce new knowledge, it is freely available. Then we have to do it again, and again, and again. I can see that from a business school point of view, I can see that from many companies that are knowledge based – they would face the same problem. TT And ironically, here we are debating it and putting it on the web too. Gentlemen, I have got to stop you there – this could go on for a lot longer. For those of you who are intrigued, do please leave your comments online and thank you for your time. Page 7