What is “social?”

And, why is it NOT about goofing off?

The word social, applied in a business setting, is still in 2016 an often misunderstood concept that company leaders want to avoid. I deal in internal communication and collaboration. For me then, social has a very specific context geared toward making internal platforms for communicating and collaborating more…well, social. What I’ve seen, both in the past and even recently, is a continued reluctance and aversion toward embracing the word social in the context of doing work. It’s as if the concept of working with other people is some secret code for goofing off. This negative connotation is both unwarranted and misplaced.

So let’s walk through a few examples of what social means in what are generally accepted areas of typical human and business behavior for 2016. But before we do, let’s just simply define social.

Merriam-Webster defines social as relating to or involving activities in which people spend time talking to each other or doing enjoyable things with each other.

Well, we’ll be having none of that around here, I say!

Joking aside, enjoying what you do when in the company of other people is really not a bad thing. If we can enjoy the time we spend at work, if we can enjoy the people that we work with, and if we can enjoy the things we do together — then we (employees) will do better work, we’ll be more productive, and we will likely be more loyal to both coworkers and company. In HR speak, we will be engaged.

You can’t social alone just as much as you can’t communicate by yourself or collaborate with yourself.

By the definition above, social applied to communication and collaboration implies that you are indeed communicating with other humans and said communication is in fact enjoyable. It’s almost as if the word social doesn’t even need to be appended to either communication or collaboration. Of course, we want both of these to be as enjoyable (or at least tolerable) as we possibly can. Each of these words — social, communication, collaboration — cannot logically function without the existence of multiple players being involved. You can’t social alone just as much as you can’t communicate by yourself or collaborate with yourself. Ephraim Freed laid this out very clearly many years ago.

Let’s take it a bit further than just knocking down the meaning of the word and look at how what we all know as “social applications” are used every day both personally and as corporations.

In our personal lives…

In our personal lives, millions of people use social applications every day. Over a billion and a half people actively use Facebook each month. So what are these people doing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and the many other apps in this space? They are simply interacting with other people digitally. Sometimes it’s their family and friends, sometimes it’s celebrities and brands, and sometimes it’s someone just like them on the other side of town or the world that happens to have a similar interest.

We use social apps to connect with people. To learn about what they are up to. To hear or see how their day is going. To keep in contact when they change jobs or move to a new city. To meet up. To send a message. To get a reply. Social apps help us stay in touch with the people that are close to us or that we want to be close with, whether they are physically close or not.

We use social features to make decisions. Ratings and reviews are crowd sourced, social manifestations of asking people what they think about a product or service. I rarely will try a new restaurant these days without reading reviews and looking at pictures of the food first. Whether I am buying from Amazon or not (I am if there is a Prime option), I will go there to see what hundreds and even thousands of other people think about the product before making my decision to purchase. Ever put a question out to your friends on Facebook? You get helpful opinions back. You hear from people you know that have knowledge about something that you don’t.

We learn from social interactions. I don’t go to a single place to get my news anymore. I let it come to me from many sources. Most of us don’t go to libraries and conduct extensive research on topics we want to know more about or with questions we need answered. We google it. The information we consume to gain understanding and knowledge doesn’t come from obscure, unheard of corners of the web. It comes from vetted, validated, and crowd-confirmed sources. We “like” (or love, favorite, star…) content that we find useful and as the ratings add up, the visibility increases.

As businesses interacting with consumers…

One of the things we do via social apps these days is reach out to businesses. When they reach back…that’s social. This is just another point for consumers to contact corporations. In the beginning, you spoke to the owner, later you wrote letters, later consumers could call, then email, instant message or chat, and now tweets. It’s a progression of businesses leveraging the communication methods that the populace uses. One of the hallmarks of this progression is that the expectations around speed of delivery and response has increased with each type of new communication. This vein of social for business then is about efficiency. No goofing off here.

Businesses also use social networks as a communication channel to deliver messages to customers, potential customers, and fans (yep, businesses have fans). Social media in this regard is primarily driven with the goal to facilitate or increase sales. Again, we find social used today with solid business justification and objectives.

With the many examples that abound of how we use social in our personal lives to get things done and the many examples of corporations using social for marketing and customer service, why does a stigma still exist that social somehow translates to slacking off? The situation seems to parallel the past trials of introducing other consumer first technologies to the work place: the internet, email, instant messaging, to name a few. When are businesses going to learn? What does it take? How would any Fortune 500 company exist without allowing their employees to use the internet, email, or instant messaging?

How is harnessing the value of “social” any different?

It’s not.

Socially enabled technologies are nothing to fear. In fact, they should be encouraged. Allowing employees the ability to connect with their coworkers; be influenced by positive experiences throughout the organization; to augment their professional growth through informal, organic learning; to help their internal customers easier and more efficiently; and to easily communicate the services they provide to internal clients — these are all positive, business-based outcomes that any modern company should strive to improve upon.

Discussion & Discovery

In all of the examples of using social above, both in our personal lives and as we interact as corporations or with corporations, social is at it’s core about discussion and discovery.

We engage with others in conversations. This is social. We use our networks and communities to learn from the experiences of others. This is social.

I’ll dive into more aspects of discussion and discovery in a follow on piece.