The Serious Business of Social Media

In The Harvard Business Review’s January blog, author Tammy Erickson wrote an interesting article titled The Moment Social Media Became Serious Business. In the article, Erickson describes a revelation among senior executives that led to a change in how social media was used in corporations. Erickson describes a number of discussions she had with Senior Executives one summer about the use of Web 2.0 and its subsequent business application. While the executives weren’t necessarily convinced at first, by summers’ end their recognition of the way web 2.0 technologies would change the landscape of business was evident. Not only were there dozens of different new ways to communicate and network, but also the options for collaboration, information and data sharing and increased productivity were infinitely clear. Erickson goes on to describe other technologies that upon their release were seen as seemingly unnecessary, or frivolous, but that actually changed the landscape of the way we communicated and worked; so much so, that we can almost not imagine our lives, or our businesses without them. Erickson points out that,

“Each time our communication capability expands, several predictable things occur: an increase in the scope and richness of our interactions affects the way we organize, shifts the balance of power, and influences how we get things done.”

I think that this is a great observation, and one that really stands as a great model of the past decade. Who would have thought for example, that email would have caught on? Nowadays, most of us either have multiple addresses, checking one or all of them multiple times a day. The language alone, in terms of the way we are able to communicate with our colleagues, friends, and family members is almost unprecedented. The ease with which we have learned to communicate what it is we are trying to express to others through written language has increased significantly – not to mention, how efficient we have become at deducing the shorthand world of
“e-language.” Another example that springs to mind is the way that we receive and look up data – gone (or seemingly so) are the days of going to the Library and laboriously looking through books, or even reading the entire newspaper. It seems that more and more of our communicative lives are digitally based and made for easy access. I often wonder if by the time I have a family of my own if my children will ever know what a “newspaper” is, or understand the visceral experience of reading the Sunday comics and getting newsprint all-over your hands. – Katey Selix