the reflexions insider

We were recently hired by a large professional services firm to deploy a social platform that helped senior decision-makers share ideas about new revenue models amidst the changing economic environment. It’s something that more companies should be doing, and - I bet - would be doing if they understood what tools are out there to make it possible.

From a technical perspective, the solution wasn’t trivial but it wasn’t complex either, and we were able to pull from open source platforms to deliver a solution on an accelerated timeframe (in this case, we happened to use WordPress). Partly helped by the client’s streamlined process, customizing an off-the-shelf platform enabled us to deploy an attractive, polished, and functional solution over a long weekend that even a few years ago would have required weeks or months. By all accounts, it was an enormous success.

When a large company with a lot of stakeholders tries to deploy a conversational or social platform, the hurdles are usually organizational or political rather than technical. These types of tools are disruptive by design; their very deployment usually involves challenging assumptions about decision-making process and procedure that have literally been ingrained in an organizational memory for decades.

I think traditional hierarchical organizational structures are being increasingly challenged by social platforms; they’re simply not compatible with distributed, conversational media without awkward governance policies. This doesn’t mean that social media is incompatible with large companies; it just means that large companies need to embrace new approaches to how they make decisions and communicate internally. Often, those approaches involve giving up control, encouraging constructive dissent, and increasing transparency — not always an easy proposition.

If you’re in New York and are interested in how organizations can use social media to facilitate internal communication, I suggest you check out the Meetup group that our company has co-sponsored, Social Media For Business, with the agency Headshift. You can find more information and can RSVP for our meeting on June 18 here: http://newmedia.meetup.com/83/

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