You know, the whole duality of Man thing.... #socbiz

(from Full Metal Jacket)

Colonel:Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man!
Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir!
Colonel: The what?
Private Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir!
Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?
Private Joker: Our side, sir!
Colonel: Don’t you love your country?
Private Joker: Yes, sir!
Colonel: Then how ‘bout getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?

 

 

There is a great discussion that started over on Facebook, migrated to G+ and now I want to blog about it...kind of the Oregon Trail of content. It stars a lot of my favorite folks (Greg Lowe @Greg2dot0, Luis Suarez @elsua, Richard Rashty @richardrashty) and it was this last comment of Richard's that prompted this little post. 

To avoide a 1:1 scale recap - let me just say that we had come around to point about who owns "social" efforts and who should and so on - this is where the duality thing comes in (I know you were wondering). I find myself saying a lot of things like "social is different" but it is and here are some of the ways it has a dual nature. 

Social is not reliant on any one tool, but often tools (like Socialtext for instance ;-)) can lend scale and speed and additional capabilities to efforts to make more of the organization visible and transparent. So we need at least two owners - we are going to need an owner who writes the check and an owner (can be the same as the first) who makes sure that all the tech details (LDAP integration, SSO, etc) are mapped out.

THEN we're going to need someone (hopefully not the first owner) to "Own" the effort within the company to change behaviors to use th new system. Ideally senior leadership will jump in and start using it but if it's not them at first, it will need to be someone and that someone will have to be passionate about it. I don't want IT to take this wrong way but I agree with Richard that IT should not own the cultural side of social. It's too important and it has too much to do with changing behaviors to be lodged in any department, I believe, below the CEO level. 

When implementing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) one time, I was asked by senior leadership what I needed to make this effort successful. I knew what the question meant - how much money do you need to buy this? I responded the best way I could, I said "all I need is for you to change the way you work." Now who will own THAT?

 

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