Summary : Knowing who should drive and own social media in the organization is a recurring question. Experience shows that when the project falls to a “central department”, this latter often struggles to spread adoption outside of its own range, what causes the system to be underused or the emergence of internal competing projects. In the end, it’s a costly and counter-productive situation. New approaches a needed that rely on new methodologies and attitudes : those who own the platform need to learn to share it with others, involve them from the early stage, listen to their needs and let them use it the way they want to meet their own needs.

This post is a synthesis of many discussions that followed what I wrote on the use of social platforms both for external communication and intranet purposes.

Such projects are often owned by a department that drives them. That’s the reason why many organizations start by wondering which department should own social media.

When one owns something, he uses it for his own purposes. There are many reasons to that. Most of all because one does not know anything about others’ needs, because some uses are counter-cultural to the DNA of a given department or because internal power games and politics makes it logical to keep one’s projects for oneself.

Consequence : a communication department that drives an internal social network struggle at making the most out of its collaborative potential. Sometimes because they don’t want but, most of times because it’s out of their competence field for obvious reasons. Replace communication with HR, IT, Innovation or business unit, the result is the same. It’s no use to blame the people in question because the situation is often caused by the lack of means and the irrelevance of some uses regarding to their mission and not by unwillingness. In fact, most of time you can hear them say “We’d like to but don’t know to”.

Whatever the owner, a social networks serves for communication, collaboration, innovation, expert location, talent management, supports some processes. If each of these needs rely on a different tool and project, there are lots of chances everything fails.

That’s the same for external facing projects. Marketing, communication, innovation, customer care etc…should be able to use the system, whatever the official owner is.

That’s why we can see more and more competing projects that, in the end, cause unproductivity and waste resources, those needed to drive them, to implement them and, last but not least, employee’s attention.

As one of my readers said, these are only channels, channels that can convey many kinds of signals, of flows. I usually use the pipe metaphor. One can own the pipe but it does not mean that it can be used to convey lots of things, for several purposes, from and to third part people.

Organization will have to embrace the culture of multiplexing. [Read more...]