Many of my blogs make the point that employing a “provide and pray” approach to social media is a recipe for failure. Despite the ease-of-use and intuitive nature of social media, without a clear definition of purpose the use of social media will gradually decline.
Following a recent talk, an attendee tracked me down to tell me how correct my assertion was. He described the experience his company had with social software for the workplace. He worked for a medium sized professional services company. By their nature, consulting companies do lots of knowledge work. Their stock in trade is creating knowledge then applying it to solve customer problems. The better they can recycle to knowledge, the better margin they can make on its reuse. This is one of the reasons consulting firms were some of the earliest advocates of knowledge management programs. It is no surprise to see them as some of the first devotees of social media.
Enterprises that fail to achieve the desired benefits from social media simply spread the tools liberally across the organization without first defining the purpose the tools are supposed to support. There is generally some excitement about the social media tools, especially since they are viewed as the next new thing. Some people will try the tools with great enthusiasm, others will be more tempered in their approach. But regardless of the user profile, after six to nine months usage drops off.
So back to my story about the attendee who validated my “provide and pray won’t work” statement. (Hey, I’m always ready to talk with someone who thinks I’m right!) I shared our research findings with him and asked if he was on the six or nine month usage drop-off curve. Apparently the people in his company were fast studies. He said they were on the two-month usage drop-off curve. By the end of the two month pilot exploration of social media, pretty much everyone had gone back to using the old tools. The problem they experienced was the lack of a purpose.
The reason I am telling this story is that once the social media experiment does not produce the desired benefits, it prejudices individuals and managers against trying it again after there are clear purposes identified. That means the next attempt will face even more skepticism and have higher thresholds to achieve.
So friends don’t let friends drive social media programs without a purpose.
