Doubt over how social media improves productivity is a common question. Surely, dabbling around in social media doesn’t allow anyone to do any real work. As 2009 comes to an end, the year that will probably be remembered as the big bang of the social revolution, it’s a good time to think about a social sense of productivity.
Social productivity might mean a number of things from here on in. It might refer to the enormous potential to serve up the kind of aggregated information that connectivity can create, more information consumption pushed through bigger pipes.
That’s a kind of productivity, save for Michael Arrington’s prediction however, that ‘the rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly’. This is the kind of productivity that can mean the death knell for hand crafted content, an age of what is, in effect, even more passive consumption fuelled by neurospin and a continuous conveyor belt of content.
However much this may be a possible productivity scenario, it’s not an appealing one, and it’s still very much a product of the factory mindset, that thing that arguably the social media revolution allows us to, and needs to, change.
So another question is can being social improve productivity by creating a contribution instead of a consumption economy, and value that comes through solving problems instead of consuming resources? As we shift from a preoccupation with factory structures to more seamlessly networked organizations, will the ability to lead, to build, to influence and resonate, with contributions made within a network help alter the lens which we use to define what productivity is?
2010 may well be the year of a great ‘attention crash’ to use Marshall Manson’s phrase. Think of 1929 but without the money. It may be a year of sense-making and lead to an active screening out of content, which is already happening, the like of which we’ve never seen before, bringing with it big implications for marketers. What way for productivity then?
The rise of Twitter has heralded a simple truth essentially that, long as there is the # hashtag, one’s state of mind will triumph over marketing. Hashtags allow people to collect around what matters to them more than how they identify themselves through brands. Hashtags make shared and common experiences sticky. So what does that mean in terms of productivity, when endlessly hurling output at a market ceases to be of value in the way it used to be because it can’t connect with that.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs set out a trajectory for the evolution of the human species that places self-actualization at its peak. It is a framework for enlightenment, enabled by ‘morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts’. Free distribution gives greater access than ever before to self-actualization, it creates the opportunity to find and develop new forms of value.
And Theory U from The Presencing Institute suggests that to make something of the social potential that exists in 2010 means looking at productivity as a generative experience, and shifting from factory indices of productivity to a networked and social alternative.
Productivity is different in an age influenced by social media. Social communication is not about ‘driving the message’, it is permission-based. Neither is social productivity about pushing output. Social productivity rises exponentially when formative experiences and iterative, real-time learnings create a mutual and co-created value that comes from developing new insights and implementing the solutions that come from them collaboratively.
The premium that comes from social productivity is that generative listening and receptivity can create a real desire to contribute and to be present. Goodbye big marketing spend, this is what brands in 2010 can most benefit from. This is a new kind of productivity, a social productivity coming from iteration, reciprocity and interconnectedness. This is productivity that supercedes consumption and allows for self-actualization in all its stickiness as the most potent marketing proposition there is.
If your business is based on community (which one isn’t), maybe reframing it to be productive in a social sense is worth looking at. A social sense of productivity has enough potential to dominate the agenda of new marketing, as long as in 2010 we are productive enough to develop the skills to let it to happen.
Hat-tip to Mike Baldwin for co-creating the graph with me. Best wishes to you for a very productive and fulfilling new year.