Social: Bugger All New to See Here -

In the context of business, social content does not exist. Social describes the nature of the forums in which the content is generated; social does not describe the actual content. To be honest I don’t even like using the word “social” to describe the forums in which the content is generated. This “new social business” thing is really nothing more than an extension of the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) models.

Business has been taking place socially since time began. Get over it; we aren’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before. What we’re doing is using new tools to do it faster, capture more stuff, and do it better (we hope). We’re also creating a whacking great amount of new buzzwords and revenue opportunities for vendors, SI’s, analysts, and fly-by-nighters based on not much more than new and improved products without the new and the improved part is suspect in some cases.

Truly social content is that stuff we see on Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other channels (that are shared with business activities) about how much you drank, what you had for dinner, who’s doing bouncy-bouncy with whom, etc. It’s not that the content isn’t valuable to some (nice take on it here by Cheryl McKinnon), it’s just not business related content so from a business point of view we really don’t care (and do not confuse business value with historical or archival value).

Bduhon asked this yesterday: “The phrase "social content;" is there any there there or is it a BS concept-content is content is content?” Wanna take a shot at what my opinion is?

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Agree to a point, but there are other examples...

Submitted by Jesse Wilkins July 06, 2011 - 1:54 PM

Hi Chris,

As I noted on Twitter, I think there is a key difference, regardless of the term, between social and other content – in fact I think there are several grouped around:
- Co-creation – that is, the traditional collaborative model like a wiki, a blog post with comments, or even an aggregation of tags.
- Aggregation – as for example with an activity stream on Facebook, including the comments, likes, etc. in context. The Twitter stream falls into this to some extent as well.
- Fragmentation – the individual Tweets, Facebook likes, etc. that form the activity stream but are not themselves disintermediable in most cases without losing the context.
- Additional context around things like geolocation and, in some cases, “logilocation” – think physical checkins for the former, and logical checkins such as “Independence Day 2011″ where it’s tied to a phrase, a date, or some other non-physical attribute.
- Finishedness – that is, content might be content but it may not lend itself to traditional IM-type activities until it is “done” – so when is an activity stream or blog post with comments done and worthy of the control and formalization required for example of formally declared records?

Not sure where it fits, but I think there is also something “there” with regards to the trend towards gamification, badges, etc.

The other social content you mentioned I agree with – and is just as readily found in email, phone calls, texts, and the like.

Hoping to do a lot more thinking and writing about this over the summer but I’d welcome your thoughts….

jesse

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More discussion required ...

Submitted by Chris Walker July 06, 2011 - 3:33 PM

Hi Jesse

So let’s agree, for the moment, to disagree about the terminology. I think we can also agree that socially generated content is subject to the same legal and regulatory considerations as other content.

There is absolutely a difference between content generated by social technologies and content generated by more traditional tools. I just don’t think that the differences warrant labelling the content as social, provided it is actually business related content. From a systems point of view the differences are in the technical and non-functional requirements, not the business or functional requirements.

Regardless of how the content is generated it must, at some point, be tied to a business process. Once that’s done you can categorize the content and apply your governance policies to it. I think the differences in how you go about doing that are mechanical. I.e.: how to do it vs what to do.

Fragmentation and aggregation aren’t that difficult to deal with once you’ve determined at what point to start capturing a stream, which I think is the tougher issue to deal with.

Co-creation and finishedness can likely be dealt with by applying concepts of active/inactive content, case files, and compound documents to them.

I don’t really know enough about gamification or badges to have an informed opinion, so I’ll leave well enough alone for now. As for your comment about the true social content appearing in emails, texts, etc.; too true and can we fire the ones that mix business and social content in the same object?

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It's the intent, not the content, that's social?

Submitted by Julie Colgan July 06, 2011 - 4:07 PM

Your initial argument is that "social content" doesn't exist because "social [describes] the forums in which the content is generated", not the content itself. I agree, but add that your argument, by the end, takes another twist and infers that there is also an intent to be social involved (how much I drank, dinner plans, even Fred's pants ...) rather than to be business oriented in the content I am creating.

Also, playing off of Jesse's comment a bit: I think there is a general confusion of phrase in common industry language between "social" and "collaboration". Collaborative content is absolutely not necessarily (like that?) social, but it could be. Social content isn't necessarily collaborative either, but it could be. And as you and Jesse point out, business content can smack of social and collaborative content in the same container ...

I agree that calling content "social content" just because it is content generated in a particular forum or in a particular container is wrong. It requires an intent to be social.

You've also hit it dead on that we aren't doing business any differently than we have for eons, we just have new tools to do it. We have also, fortunately/unfortunately, become much more social in our business exchanges which complicates the management of business content and yet at the same time adds more "real" to our business relationships.

Is that good? Maybe, in a human sense. Does it complicate things? Absolutely, from a management sense.

This is now making my head hurt. You'll pay for that. ;)

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What is social?

Submitted by Jim Adcock July 19, 2011 - 12:53 PM

I agree that there is a lot of buzzwordniess and BS around the whole "social" thing, but I think there really is a baby in the bathwater, so be careful what you are letting go down the drain.

In the social realm, used to be that if your sales staff knew who was sleeping with whom and where the bodies were buried (and when the client's spouse's birthday was, how many kids they had, who in the client's family had just graduated with honors, etc) they would have an easier time selling to the client - they called it the gift of schmooze. And as long as you weren't "used-car-salesman" about it, it worked.

With the advent of "social", it is easier to acquire this information about smaller and smaller clients (the "long tail"), and manage the information in an automated fashion, making the efforts on long tail transactions worthwhile.

In my mind, "social information" is intelligence (in the spy definition) on your customers (existing and potential), your competition, your market, your products, and the "next big thing".

***IF*** you can capture the information.
***IF*** you can process the information effectively.
***IF*** you can take advantage of it in an automated fashion.
***IF*** you can surface the exceptions effectively for human intervention.

The new "social" also give you new channels to interact with customers outside of the traditional "social" methods - the sales call, the three martini lunch, the customer support phone queue.

And then there is the new mental paradigm of the social users - share it with the world, broadcast what you see, think, feel and do.

In a lot of ways, it really *is* just new methods of doing the same old stuff - but the new methods allow you to scale that down to the smallest customer.

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Buzz, Buzz, Buzz, I agree Chris.

Submitted by Randy Moeller July 20, 2011 - 7:51 AM

Where would we be without buzzwords? Who could sell us anything or keep our interest without new ones? Business always had some 'social' as talking about family before a meeting or asking about them in the first line of your email. The rest is business. Consumer understanding, business. Negotiating anything, business. Arguing some merit, it better be business or do it during lunch. The list goes on and on. Methods and buzzwords will change but it's all business content or you're out of business.

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