Harnessing the Power of Social Media - OR - Avoiding the Barrier of Scale

In an Interesting discussion with some fellow social media communicators the topic of LinkedIn and what it could be doing to better serve its user came up. It highlighted what to me is the single greatest strength of social media but, it’s also the point where nearly every existing social media engagement from organizations breaks down.  It highlights the barrier of scale. 

While we happened to be discussing LinkedIn specifically the barrier of scale is a systemic social media challenge faced by both organizations and those of us tasked to create and implement social information operations and communications.

In my experience and observations I believe we users forget, just as LI and other big network hubs want us to forget, that LinkedIn is NOT a social network or a business networking site.

In fact LinkedIn is not particularly interested in serving the needs of its “members” at all.  LinkedIn is, as Google and Facebook are, an advertising network plain and simple. 

LI’s customers are not us, the users, beyond LI’s need to maintain a critical mass of user numbers to provide data and traffic we’re incidental individually though necessary as a whole but not beyond our willingness to surrender terabytes of personal and business information to LI’s true customers – advertisers.

It’s ironic that LI while at least partially positioning itself as a technology driven business networking hub uses technology to keep its users far, far away from help, support or any sort of interaction with the entity LinkedIn.

This does give us a small glimpse into one of social media’s most challenging barriers; the barrier of scale.  Social media is an ideal vehicle to truly engage stakeholders in real and meaningful conversations verses push or one-way communications, the problem is scale. 

In order for large entities (Be they LinkedIn, the US Government or anything in between) to make a case for wide-spread adoption of any technology social or other that technology must be scalable to encompass the intended organizational targets. 

In other words there needs to be a way to deliver the technology or use it to deliver information and services to a wide range of users with relatively little need for real-time human intervention or management. 

Think auto-attendants and self-service kiosks verses the person who used to answer a business’ phone or help you check in for a flight. To truly leverage the real and true advantages of social media we need to get at the value it provides which is one-one engagements with stakeholders; and this, of course, is impossible when you automate.

How many conversations can any one person carry on simultaneously?  That’s the real answer to how aggressive you can be with  a social media program and ultimately how much you can scale it and still extract the value it provides– not how many followers, friends or what your Klout score happens to be.

The real question then becomes how we can tap this power of social media without bankrupting organizations with swelled payrolls of social media operators.  Technology certainly helps with dashboards and various aggregators but the real answer is pushing both the social monitoring and engagement down to the individual level within an organization. 

The only way to overcome the barrier of scale in a socialized environment is to mobilize each and every employee as a social ambassador for the organization and create a process-driven system so they can both monitor and engage within the social environment.