What are the next steps for social interaction, and what happens after the conversation’s been going on awhile? Do we stop pouring forth linkage and retweets, what Seth Godin calls, random pokes, and go out and make something?
What how does the social factory make value?
When thinking about where we are in social business at the moment, what comes to mind is the image of the child still on walking reins, trying to be let loose in a playground. Children who are held onto for safety by their parents.
We’re still in the infancy of the social revolution, but the dawning sense is one of spectacular change on the horizon – a new renaissance of the self.
Depending on the quality of our leadership it’s a change that can be an emergence or an emergency, as some people call it. We are at a crossroads.
It’s a change that for many means they are unanchored, like life is for the 250 million people, and counting, who are unemployed across Europe with the means to feed their futures.
Social business is us. As Danah Boyd has written, social business is what we will make it.
Right now in the evolutionary chain of our connected development, we’re all plankton, on our way to creating spectacular new life forms.
This TED talk is a six-minute metaphor of what we are capable of and a film that recognizes traits we’re all capable of, including the species that eat their kin.
The biological nature of social organization in business is based on the idea that affinity is stronger than structure.
When affinity is stronger than structure, social molecules collide and they find each other using social media. Instead of the ‘eat or be eaten’ karma of the primordial soup, enlightened and connected society can support and nurture one another as a healing and generative mesh in action. We have the means to create useful action out of shared interests. We can define the types of interaction and cultural collaboration that add and generate value. Using social technology and social crm we can create a contribution economy out of a return on involvement.
So the question becomes, how can we create sustainable, collaborative culture and move towards enlightened evolution this time around?
Well, it might have something to do with tethering.
Consider the hashtag as a digital maypole around which people converse, share ideas, and commune generally. The hashtag is an example of tethering.
In a social organization, contractual ties are looser, sufficiently loose to allow the kind of personal expression that supplements corporate reputation and personal reputation. That’s especially appropriate perhaps, given that the fixed contract relationship is increasingly being seen as an unnecessary overhead and people who are out of work want ways to contribute and prove their worth. That’s another kind of tethering.
These days most of the best people would not like to be employed, but they may choose to be tethered to a good organization and be part of it that way.
People with social leadership skills, the linchpins, are able to consider now who they tether themselves to, which raises the talent bar, saves costs and builds a better culture. When good people associate themselves with an organisation, it enables them to up their game.
Social organisations can help develop this sense of tethering, and platforms like Kaggle show how it can be done.
And finally, it’s worth that in the digital age, we all want to connect and release what we’re capable of as generative value which can be the better for society, as a new kind of cultural interaction, one where people choose what they associate to, because the web enables that.
For all organisations going social, consider the nature of the contract that underpins it. Tethering can be a good source of generative value because it works two ways, symbiotically, as we stretch our legs into a new social chapter of interaction.
(Pic courtesy of NESTA)