Participatory Media Part 4: Successful Participatory Media Adoption
Here are four recommendations for overcoming resistance to participatory media adoption caused by the social-context shift and effort expenditure detailed in the previous two sections of this series. These essentials will help an organization develop the previously mythical long-term value of Web 2.0 technologies.
1. Participatory media must not be optional but embedded into an organization’s workflow. It is the workflow of a new kind of more deeply networked company infrastructure. According to McKinsey’s September 2009 survey results on How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0:
[C]ompanies reporting business benefits … report high levels of Web 2.0 integration into employee workflows. They most often deploy three or more Web tools, and usage is high throughout these organizations…. Many companies experiment with Web 2.0 technologies, but creating an environment with a critical mass of committed users is more difficult.… [S]uccessful adoption requires that the use of these tools be integrated into the flow of users’ work.
If participatory media is obligatory, then even though the social context shift and extra effort may cause some temporary discomfort at first, employees will move up the learning curve and down the other side, having mastered their new communications skills along with their colleagues.
2. Business leaders must set informal agendas for participation—an organization-specific goal or theme—in which the overall objective is generating meaningful contributions. Encouraging meaningful contributions organized around a loose theme or goal engenders self-initiated innovation, open knowledge sharing, and higher employee satisfaction. Authors of meaningful posts will naturally be credited within the community and given professionally beneficial status. McKinsey reports, that “encouraging continuing use requires approaches other than the traditional financial or performance incentives deployed as motivations tools. In the Web community, status is often built on a reputation for making meaningful contributions” (ibid).
Ling, Beenan and Ludford, et al (2008), too, indicate that participants contribute to social media sites more often when they are reminded of their own uniqueness, shown the personal benefit of participation and shown the benefit that their participation will have on others. This means people tend to contribute most, and get the most out of it themselves, when they contribute out of both self-interest and generosity.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120837967/
Further, setting a loose, informal agenda introduces a set of constraints for participants to interact within and be guided by. This may decrease cognitive load for employees who are trying to feel out appropriate types of contributions and communications styles unaided.
3. Business leaders must lead the participation. It is important for the company’s direction and the success of the participatory media effort that senior staff remains in charge of the overarching theme of a participatory media “conversation,” and that they lead the effort by example. McKinsey reports that, “role modeling—active Web use by executives—has been important for encouraging adoption internally” (McKinsey. op.cit.).
4. Finally, the responsibilities of participatory community management must be assigned and compensation must be arranged. Either these responsibilities must be formally assigned to an individual already on staff, or business leaders must hire a Communications Manager to meet their new needs. Assigning these responsibilities unambiguously and making sure management efforts are compensated for is indispensable for the successful adoption and discovery of Web 2.0′s long-term value.
Participatory Media Part 3: Time & Effort
Contributing to a participatory media community takes a great deal of time and effort—especially at first. As the temporary excitement for the new wanes, an individual may be struggling to master the new technology as well as a new social context. Before tangible, positive value is seen, participatory media may be prematurely judged as discomfiting, time-consuming work for which no payoff is apparent. Members may naturally stop contributing.
The following video from Howard Rheingold both introduces the new participatory paradigm and describes the difficulty that even his students at Stanford had in integrating social communication tools into their learning practices. Young and bright as they were, Rheingold reports that they were “overwhelmed”:
http://socialmediaclassroom.com/index.php/using-the-smc
To mitigate this resistance, the role of “Community Manager” has emerged. A successful, active participatory media hub for a business—such as a public blog, a public microblog and an internal wiki—needs community management. The Community Manager maintains, champions, and encourages the use of the hub. The Community Manager also moderates, troubleshoots, listens for new ideas and implements new ideas on how to improve the hub. Community management takes time, effort, a clear vision of what the hub is designed to do, a vision of what it has the potential for in the future, and the passion to keep it alive. The Community Manager also needs a paycheck. Realizing this, business leaders resist.
At HarvardBusiness.org (June, 2009), David Armano writes, “I heard something from Brian Wallace of Blackberry that echoed thoughts I’ve been preaching for a while. He said, ‘I was selling in the idea that social media is free, until the community manager headcount came in.’” He goes on:
This underscores a fundamental truth to social media that many organizations underestimate—being social means having real live people who actively participate in your initiatives. It’s difficult to automate.
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/debunking_social_media_myths.html
Any serious attempt at gaining long-term value from participatory media must remove the temptation to believe that participatory media is free. It’s neither free to build, free to participate in, nor is it free to maintain. Once built, the media needs to be populated with meaningful, targeted content and it needs to be managed.
The next section, the last in this four part series, offers some practical, actionable recommendations for how to overcome the obstacles of both the effort expenditure required for participatory media adoption and how to mitigate the discomfort of the necessary social context shift.
Participatory Media Part 2: Social Context Shift
Social Context Shift
Although participatory media is being adopted by Generation Y and by members of older generations who are more tuned-in to the pulse of times, many individuals and organizations remain resistant to the social context shift that it requires.
1. From a “Top-Down” Agenda to “Informal Group Conversations”
For example, a 2006 Economist survey on the impact of participatory media reports:
The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre, “don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations.” That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.
http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=6794156
What Weinberger describes is the democratizing force of participatory media, which tends to break up hierarchical structures by creating “informal group conversation” rather than the established “top down” approach of the few dictating a formal agenda to the many. Inside of an informal group conversation, rules and command structures become indistinct and uncertain. Those at the higher tiers of an established hierarchy may find this leveling effect threatening or simply perceive it as impractical and resist.
2. Discomfiting “Cognitive Collisions” as Public & Private Selves Meet
Perhaps more significantly, professionals pushing participatory media have largely been blind to the difference between computer-mediated social interactions and non-computer-mediated social interactions. They have been focusing on getting the technologies into the hands of the holdouts, as if access were the only blockade. Danah Boyd, a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft New England and Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, writes on this topic (August, 2009):
All too often, our conversations [as new media professionals] center on the need to get technology into the hands of learners, as though the gaps that we’re seeing can be explained away by issues of access. [Yet,] how people embrace technology has less to do with the technology itself than with the social setting in which they are embedded.
Boyd specializes in teens and technology. However, her description of the disruptive context shift that occurs in teens when social media is introduced in a school setting can easily be applied to adults in a work setting. Boyd says the unsettling shift occurs in students who use new media in their social (private) lives when their teachers ask them to integrate these technologies into classroom (public) use:
Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you’re polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful (ibid).
While this kind of social rupture may be demonstrated more dramatically in teens, its existence in adults cannot be ignored. Who one Friends in a social or private setting may be very different from who one Friends at work or in the public sphere. Further, managing one’s professional image through formal or public ways of behaving is very different from managing one’s professional image through informal or private ways of behaving. The “cognitive collisions” that occur when public and private identities intersect may bring resistance to participatory media adoption.
In the next section, the third in this four part series, I’ll address resistance to participatory media in relation to an unavoidable time and effort expenditure.
Participatory Media Part 1: Resistance May Actually Be Futile
If you don’t know how to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into your business model, you aren’t prepared to compete, learn or innovate in the 21st century.
Dramatic, but true.
The impact that participatory media has had on society, culture, learning, politics and the marketplace makes the clarity of this fact astounding. Howard Rheingold makes this point saliently in the following video (July, 2009):
http://vlog.rheingold.com/index.php/site/video/21st-century-literacies/
A great deal of research has been focused on children and teens regarding computer-mediated interactions—either for capitalizing on technology-saturated youth or protecting them from media manipulations. This data can also help the rest of us 30+ folks understand the radical shifts we’re undergoing in our communications processes and guide us toward a smoother ride.
For example, the media and skills gap between underprivileged children and privileged children parallels a clear dynamic that’s occurring in the business world today. The story is familiar: children from affluent backgrounds seem to be developing new media skills on their own or with the help of siblings and parents using their home PCs. However, kids from less fortunate homes are falling behind in school as their affluent counterparts outpace them with knowledge gained from the Web and content produced with a computer.
In Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (2006), Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, along with Clinton, Purushotma, Robison and Weigel, write:
More often than not, those youth who have developed the most comfort with the online world are the ones who dominate classroom use of computers, pushing aside less technically skilled classmates.
[Sorry folks: the link to this paper has vanished.]
Like affluent families investing in home PCs hoping to give their children a leg up, big business and new businesses run by recent, techno-savvy grads are investing in and finding lucrative advantages through the use of Web 2.0 technologies. Like less privileged children in the classroom, less wired businesses are losing ground to the advantages of their big business and new business counterparts with their experimental leeway and early-adopting budgets.
The less wired have held out from participating in new media technologies with the safe and cost-effective approach of letting others risk capital on experimental communications. However, now the results are in. Companies that have invested in participatory media are finding substantial value from their new communications practices. For those who have either remained on the sidelines or haven’t yet learned to mine the value of Web 2.0., an upgrade to 21st century communications standards—i.e. integrating participatory technologies—has become necessary.
According to McKinsey’s September 2009 survey results on How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0, companies are seeing long-term value in the following areas:
- Internal knowledge sharing
- Deepening relations with partners and outside talent/expertise
- Reducing communications, travel and operation costs
- Improving innovation, meaningful employee contribution, and employee satisfaction
- Deepening relations with potential customers
Some business leaders claim they have engaged participatory media but still haven’t seen a significant gain from their efforts. What these folks may have missed is that the long-term value of Web 2.0 technology arises from a foundational shift, rather than a surface-level shift. In order to obtain the very real benefits available from participatory media, business leaders must understand that they’re not just building a site with a blog to which they submit content now and again. Substantial long-term value comes from an upgrade to their internal and external communications processes. It’s a new way of doing business: networked business (See McKinsey on the “networked company,” ibid).
Many have blamed a lack of technological knowledge or access for resistance to participatory media. But little attention has been given to the fact that this communications upgrade requires 1) a difficult social context shift and 2) the unavoidable expense of time and effort. It’s these psychological and operational obstacles that have stopped many businesses from beginning, kept them from maintaining, and blocked them from succeeding with their participatory media projects. The next two sections of this four part series will shed light on some of the dynamics behind these obstacles. The fourth and final section will present recommendations for overcoming them.