CHAPTER 10
Whom Do I Know? Building and Engaging Social Networks Using Social Media Technology
IN THE PREVIOUS TWO CHAPTERS, WE CLARIFIED THE IMPORTANCE of knowing oneself and one’s context as cornerstones of being an entrepreneurial leader. Beyond the ways that have already been discussed, this awareness is essential, as it supports one’s ability to build relationships and enlist social networks to garner support for new ideas and organizational initiatives. Entrepreneurial leaders—with a deep understanding of their capabilities, weaknesses, values, and drives—use this understanding to connect with others who complement and supplement their own skills and share their own passions. Even within traditional bureaucratic decision-making contexts, entrepreneurial leaders can learn to develop and tap social networks to build momentum for ideas and strategic initiatives that they are passionate about. Finally, understanding their own position within networks enables entrepreneurial leaders to discern and build connections in a way that is sensitive to the interests and the perspectives of those who are situated in the particular cultural context.
Building networks and engaging relationships is foundational to cognitive ambidexterity. By engaging others in co-creation, entrepreneurial leaders identify and follow new directions in the pursuit of economic and social opportunity. Engaging social networks was critical to Robert Chatwani’s work in building WorldofGood.com. His passion and communication of the idea to both friends and colleagues is what led him to Priya Haji, who helped him refine the idea; and together they created WorldofGood.com.
Engaging social networks has also been essential to the work Alan Mulally has accomplished in revitalizing and increasing profit-ability as CEO of Ford Motor Corporation. Mulally has used social networks to improve communication with employees, personalize the brand, and build more-engaging relationships with new customers. One such customer effort, the Fiesta Movement, focused on using social networks to market the US launch of the compact Ford Fiesta. During the six months that Mulally championed the Fiesta Movement campaign, Ford was able to expand its network of customers and brand advocates. The company reports a number of measurable marketing results, including 37 percent prelaunch brand awareness among millennials. Moreover, the social networking campaign resulted in 50,000 sales leads to first-time Ford customers and 35,000 test drives.
In today’s world, technology is a central tool for entrepreneurial leaders in building and engaging social connections. Social networking technology—comprising social media, Web 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0—has fundamentally shifted whom we can connect to, how we maintain our connections, and how we envision connections between our organizations and stakeholders. Internet tools such as blogs, wikis, rating systems, tagging and bookmarking systems, and social networking platforms allow entrepreneurial leaders to build connections with others who share a common interest. Through the richness of social media, entrepreneurial leaders can easily share their passion for an idea and build others’ passion for the idea as well.
Because users can easily and rapidly produce and consume content through social media technologies (such as YouTube videos, web links from Twitter followers, and the like), there has been an exponential increase in the use of social media. With Facebook alone, it is expected that by 2012 one out of every six people on the planet will be a member. These technologies create unparalleled access to social networks.
One of the challenges for the entrepreneurial leader is to determine how to engage social media in a way that provides access to individuals and innovation but doesn’t excessively waste energy and resources. Individuals and organizations need to develop a social technology strategy that includes a suite of technologies, processes, and ultimately management practices that enable them to greatly expand the potential size and reach of their personal networks and dramatically reduce the “costs” of collaboration (Dutta 2010; Li and Bernoff 2008; McAfee 2006; O’Reilly 2005).
In this chapter we explore how entrepreneurial leaders can use a social media strategy to build and leverage relationships to move new ideas forward.
Social Media and Cognitive Ambidexterity
Organizational use of social media is not a new phenomenon. Approximately 65 percent of today’s organizations have adopted at least one social technology, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums leading the way. Organizations are using these technologies to capture and share knowledge inside their organizations, to foster collaboration within a division or group, and to improve external corporate communications (Keitt 2010). Wiki software has proven to be a particularly valuable tool, as it enables a large community of knowledge workers to generate, share, and maintain content and to coordinate activities. By 2010 nearly 50 percent of organizations were using wikis (Koplowitz 2010).
Organizations are increasingly finding ways to incorporate social technologies into their business functions, often employing both prediction and creation logics. On the prediction logic side, employees use these tools to systematically analyze and locate subject-matter experts or workers with similar interests, helping themselves overcome physical or organizational boundaries. As a result, these technologies are integrated into structured talent and knowledge management practices and processes. For example, when these technologies are incorporated into the on-boarding process, new employees are able to build relationships and integrate into the organization more quickly.
At the same time, additional benefits stem from the link between social networks and creation logic. When entrepreneurial leaders need to engage a creation approach to decision-making in which they are acting their way into new situations, social networks and specifically social media become fundamental to these actions. Numerous marketing campaigns we have studied use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to experiment with new ideas and test potential solutions to customers’ needs wherever they live. Returning to the Clorox example, YouTube and Facebook were used extensively to determine potential interest and to identify the market for Green Works. Below we highlight three unique ways in which social media is particularly advantageous to a creation approach to decision-making.
One of the first beneficial uses of social media is as a means to help entrepreneurial leaders work through both uncertain and unknowable situations. Researchers have found that those who adopt social media are more effective at dealing with high environmental uncertainty and in adapting to customers’ changing demands (Wilson and Eisenman 2010). In unknowable situations, social media enables entrepreneurial leaders to act first and experiment to move toward a solution. For instance, social media enabled EMC, a global technology firm, to identify pockets of “free work”—self-forming groups of employees working on emergent opportunities not forecasted during planning or strategy sessions. According to an EMC manager we interviewed, unpredicted issues that these groups were working on included “global cultural awareness, green and sustainability, markets around data warehousing, and virtualization.”
Second, entrepreneurial leaders can draw upon social media to enlist others in co-creation. This model is different from shared decision-making because with co-creation others are fully involved in shaping and directing the outcome. In this process of co-creation, the outcome is likely to be very different from the entrepreneurial leader’s original ideas. The challenge for an entrepreneurial leader is how to activate co-creation. Social media can be a useful tool for leaders to connect with their networks and engage others in co-creation. For example, in the marketing area, entrepreneurial leaders are using web-based customer communities to gain real-time feedback on potential product ideas. By launching contests and promotions on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, entrepreneurial leaders are enabling customers to help them co-create new opportunities to meet customer needs that the organization might not have known existed.
Third, entrepreneurial leaders can use social media to enlist stakeholders to help them achieve business goals with minimal investment. For example, in 2007 as Facebook was expanding the number of languages it supported, it could have paid a dozen professionals hefty fees to translate the site. Instead Facebook used social media and, specifically, crowdsourcing as a less expensive alternative with more value-creation opportunity. Crowdsourcing is the process of taking work that would traditionally be given to a designated agent and instead outsourcing it to a large, unidentified group. Facebook users could join the “community of translators” and begin translating Facebook into new languages.
The power of this approach can be seen in the site translation into French, which occurred over a 24-hour period and was supported by 4,000 users (Sawers 2009). Through its Facebook Translations application, Facebook has used crowdsourcing to have its members translate the site into 100 different languages. Beyond saving money, this approach has enabled entrepreneurial leaders at Facebook to move the organization into diverse markets and to do so in a way that is customized to the needs of the local context, as it is created by local agents (Holahan 2008). Most importantly, by developing translations through the use of social media, Facebook has been able to tap into the enthusiasm and the passion of its social network so that these users attract new users to the site.
Educating Entrepreneurial
Leaders about Social Media
When we introduce entrepreneurial leaders to social media and engaging social networks to support prediction and creation logics, we focus both on modeling how to use these technologies to connect with others and how to build passion through networks. As in organizations, social media applications in a management course can foster dynamic collaboration among learners, and this experience can be used to connect back to the real world (Wankel 2009).
In this section we describe two learning projects we have developed that enable participants to work with social media, such as user-generated video, wikis, tagging and bookmarking systems, and social networking sites, to create new opportunities. As we present these learning projects, we also provide research data to show the effect these experiences have had on students’ understanding and use of social media.
Reinventing Case Discussions through Wikis
Case-based discussion is fundamental to every MBA program and to every management development program. The notion of bringing together leaders to collectively make sense of a real-world experience is a hallmark of management education. Beyond introducing managers to new models of decision-making, case-based teaching also enables managers to build connections and to see alternative points of view of the same material.
One of the easiest ways to introduce entrepreneurial leaders to the power of social media is through the use of wikis to deliver case-based materials. We have adapted a traditional case involving the diffusion of tagging and bookmarking technology in the MITRE Corporation (Parise et al. 2009) to deliver it using a wiki-based platform. With a standard teaching case, the case authors would have simply interviewed stakeholders in the MITRE Corporation and written a paper-based case. Students would read the case and then participate in a face-to-face discussion to explore solutions to the problems presented. Using the wiki software, we have fundamentally shifted how we teach this case.
First, the wiki platform enables us to provide supplemental information from MITRE employees and from IT industry experts. For example, an expert in the knowledge management field created content that describes the knowledge management software, infrastructure, and marketplace. This content is placed in a supplements menu option on the home page of the case. The two main protagonists of the case created a Class Prep section, which includes discussion questions and action items from their perspective. Beyond this additional case content, the faculty used the wiki technology to create hyperlinks between the case and related digital materials. We can update these links every year as relevant new articles appear.
As course participants use the wiki technology to engage in case preparation and discussion, they also learn how to successfully leverage social media to make decisions. For example, as a part of the case discussion, each participant bookmarks, tags, and comments on an article (or a video or audio clip) related to the case. Participants then comment on their own and others’ bookmarks based on what they found interesting in the case. A tag cloud appears to the right of the case and is updated in real time so that participants can see popular themes emerging. Participants learn to use social media tools to more effectively communicate and generate enthusiasm for their ideas.
In the action-planning section of the case, participants learn how to engage others in a co-creation process through the use of social media. As in traditional case discussion, students are assigned to small groups to generate action plans. Instead of working face to face, these groups use a wiki to generate an action plan electronically. When the final action plans are posted to the class wiki, two MITRE decision-makers read each plan and respond to the group. These comments can include strengths and critiques of each plan as well as follow-on questions. Course participants can respond to the decision-makers’ inquiries and ask additional questions regarding the case or the company. At this point the course instructors become part of the discussion thread.
In teaching this case recently, the instructors modified the teaching model to enable course participants to present their action plans to the two case decision-makers in a live setting using Elluminate Live!, a web conferencing program used in higher education. From disparate locations, course participants, instructors, and case decision-makers were able to give PowerPoint presentations and receive feedback and questions from the decision-makers in real time. The MITRE decision-makers followed with a description of current social media and knowledge management practices at MITRE, and instructors ended the session with a debriefing of lessons learned.
From the post-course survey data we gathered, it was clear that students learned more than just action planning regarding MITRE’s use of social media. Through the wiki technology, they learned how to more effectively use social media to initiate a co-creation process. First, students learned how to use technology and social media to effectively gather information as they began to formulate an idea. By having to use the Internet, articles, videos, and blogs to prepare for the case, participants developed strategies for how best to leverage the vast resources and information that can be used to inform their ideas. Rather than become hamstrung by the high levels of uncertainty resulting from all these data, however, students learned to reduce uncertainty by testing and learning from specific media formats to gather information. For example, they discussed the value of hyperlinks and multimedia content as essential to helping them make sense of and internalize the material available.
Through the use of the wiki platform, students also learned how to connect with and involve others in a creation approach. They learned how to effectively communicate their ideas, respond to others, and generate momentum for new ideas. They also learned how to use social media to find out what other course participants knew and were interested in and how to tap in to their colleagues’ knowledge to move an idea forward. For example, one course participant commented,
I always had an interest in cloud computing, but everything I read on the topic seemed foreign or overly complex. There was a cloud computing tag on the wiki. From that I watched a video posted by Bill, who was in another section. The video was great, as it explained what a cloud was in terms I could understand. I barely knew who Bill was, and I didn’t realize he had done an independent study project on cloud computing. Since the case, we’ve met several times, and he was more than happy to share his project report with me.
As this quote illustrates, many times entrepreneurial leaders don’t know who knows what in their network. This student learned how to use social media to supplement his knowledge and engage the knowledge of others to move forward with a new idea.
The other key learning about networks and social media came from watching the faculty use the social media. Faculty modeled for students the opportunities that a blended learning format (including online and in-class formats) provides for diverse types of learning and knowledge sharing. While there is a tendency to believe that asynchronous technology is most useful for conveying technical content such as financial and accounting metrics, the experience with this case shows how beneficial social media can be for knowledge sharing that relies on engaging others in a social constructionist approach.
With a social constructionist approach, social media can be used to have participants learn from each other and to challenge and expand each other’s ideas. The asynchronous format supported rich, diverse conversations in which participants could more easily access and share other related knowledge. For example, in a traditional face-to-face case discussion (or even a meeting), the program leader is often constrained in terms of how many ideas can be discussed and how many others can participate. With the wiki case discussion, participants felt they had more opportunity to offer their perspectives and, more importantly, to learn from their classmates.
Many students indicated that in a face-to-face classroom they were sometimes intimidated by the more vocal students, but in an online discussion they felt more comfortable replying to and engaging all of their classmates. As one participant commented, “There were so many interesting threads to participate in, and more participants were engaged.” Both the faculty and the students learned to use the technology to co-create an experience that parallels future situations that students will face as entrepreneurial leaders.
The one challenge to the use of a wiki-based case discussion is that there is a learning curve for most students before they can use the technology to its full capabilities. When using a wiki platform, professors need to build time into the course to teach participants how to use the technology. Yet here too there were hidden advantages of this learning-by-doing experience. Some students talked about the benefits of learning firsthand how to use the wiki platform for joint content creation and online discussions. By learning how to create content in the context of this program, participants were more confident with engaging social media in the real world to explore and build support for their ideas.
Social Media Simulations
With all the popular press on the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media, we have found that some entrepreneurial leaders are reluctant to use these technologies. Entrepreneurial leaders who are not a part of the millennial generation often have well-established ways of networking and leveraging social connections and well-practiced scripts that often ignore the power of social media. These leaders don’t fully understand the diverse and complex ways that social media can be used to gain access to new ideas, to engage others who share their passion for an idea, and for complementing their knowledge and skills with those of others. For example, one entrepreneurial leader we worked with stated: “I thought that social media was a ‘checkmark’ with very little relevance to the overall organization’s existence. The course opened my eyes to how my organization could leverage social media platforms for functions such as marketing, branding, and customer service and engagement.”
To develop entrepreneurial leaders who can leverage social media, we had to find a novel way to teach new scripts for working with and through social media. We created the Boston Advertising Simulation, an experiential exercise that teaches budding entrepreneurial leaders to use social media to generate new ideas and work toward innovations with their established and new social connections.
In this simulation course participants work for a fictional advertising agency in which they must create an external social media campaign for one of Boston Advertising’s clients. To introduce students to the power of video in social media, we use video as the primary means of communicating with students around the simulation. Each week the students are given a new video from Miranda Priestly, the CEO of Boston Advertising, with a new assignment for the campaign. Through these videos, course participants are introduced to the value of video to engage colleagues who are geographically dispersed.
As this is a real challenge for many entrepreneurial leaders, students immediately get to wrestle with how to best activate others’ passions in a disparate work environment. Furthermore, because each video introduces new demands, new situations, and new requests, students also learn the challenge of working in unknowable and fast-changing environmental conditions. All of these unknowable environmental components are critical to building entrepreneurial leaders’ understanding of how best to utilize social media.
In the simulation, participants must work with a number of social applications, including Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook, as they conduct research and build their advertising campaigns. Through this activity, students learn how social media can be used to reinvent traditional analytical approaches to market research. They also learn to engage a creation approach as they interact with customers and encourage them to share data and ideas that they might not have otherwise known. As such, participants learn to engage social media to develop a cognitively ambidextrous approach to action.
Students also learn that social media can be a unique tool for generating fun, passion, and excitement about an idea. Because social media is technology-based, many course participants initially assume that it is a weak form of communication that doesn’t build bonds or convey passion. They quickly discover that the fun and the excitement of social media can be easily harnessed to create emotional connections among people and build momentum for a new idea, sometimes in more powerful ways than with face-to-face communication. Students develop strategies to share their passion and enthusiasm through the use of Twitter and other social media tools. In so doing they develop new scripts for engaging social media in a co-creation process.
Twitter is a unique tool that course participants can use to stay connected and to share content. As one executive stated:
Each section had its own [Twitter] hashtag.* I know our section had the highest adoption rate of the three sections and someone posed a challenge to the other two sections to catch up to us! It was fun to stay engaged with classmates, and I found some very useful links from others that I used for my project.
Through this simulation participants realize the ease with which they can tap into a network and generate new levels of engagement within it.
With the simulation entrepreneurial leaders also learn that social media is particularly powerful for receiving quick, immediate, and often brutally honest feedback that they can use to move forward on a new idea faster and with greater success. We introduce students to this component of social media by inviting social media experts to comment on the participants’ social media campaigns, which they deliver using multimedia (voice, video, and presentations with notes) via Adobe Connect. Using video, these experts provide feedback on the presentations, and students are invited to use web rating systems to vote and comment on their favorite social media campaign. Beyond simply providing data on which campaign has the most votes, course participants often receive new insights from the data in the web rating systems that enable them to examine their campaigns in new ways. As such they become skilled in using social media to examine an idea from different perspectives and to use others’ insights to modify their own thinking.
One of the challenges of launching entrepreneurial leaders’ use of social media is to help them recognize the biases that others, particularly those of different generations, have for and against social media. If entrepreneurial leaders are to use this technology, they must know how to respond to these differing perspectives. When students from different generations and backgrounds work together on a social media project, they are able to gain insights into others’ perspectives. As one younger course participant explained,
In my job I have to convince decision-makers and dollar owners that they need a social software framework. Discussing and implementing change management, leadership, and cultural ideas with respect to social technologies really helped me think about how I could be successful in getting others to adopt social media in my job.
Some educators are often concerned about the potential problems with online teaching, but we believe that these examples illustrate that online cases and simulations can effectively engage students in learning experiences that mimic the co-creation method they will need to generate social and economic opportunity.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurial leaders who engage cognitive ambidexterity must know how to connect and use their social networks. These networks give leaders access to knowledge and resources that both supplement and complement their skills and are instrumental to creating a new opportunity. These networks can also foster productive relationships with others who hold similar passions and share a new world perspective. In today’s technology-enabled environment, social media is the fundamental means by which entrepreneurial leaders can connect and activate their networks. It is therefore vital that we teach future entrepreneurial leaders the skills to leverage networks in co-creation and to use social media to do this. When entrepreneurial leaders tap the power of social media, they expand their ability to co-create social and economic opportunity.
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