Robert Hooke
I blame Robert Hooke‘s 1667 invention of a string telephone for Twitter and other social media.
A scientist who made pivotal discoveries in the latter half of the 1600s, Hooke also invented a string telephone in 1667 that used wire to send mechanical vibrations over long distances. Hooke was well known, as were his experiments and discoveries. That string phone experiment might well have been the catalyst that stimulated the imaginations of the various scientists and inventors who created the world’s first electrically powered telephones in the 1860s and 1870s.
Until then, you had to write a letter or travel if you wanted to communicate with another person who wasn’t right in front of you. Telephones and later innovations have continued to chip away at personal, in-person, high-value communications.
From string phone to the telephone, innovation and invention marched inexorably forward with the fax machine, e-mail, and today’s wild landscape of social media like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn…and Twitter. Twitter is essentially Hooke’s 1667 string phone recast in a modern electronic context. So I blame Hooke for bring us social media like Twitter.
Evolution of communication = communilution
I’m not sure I grok Twitter. What’s the social value of sharing the tiniest snippets of my life with others, like: leaving for work; it’s cold outside; or feeling happy?
I crave a well-written letter, because a letter is proof someone cared enough to invest their time and energy in crafting a communication intended just for me.
It was only a handful of generations ago that most communication across distances was primarily by written letter, with the occasional telegraph or telegram for information that just couldn’t wait.
Then came widespread use of the telephone. The rich history of individual lives captured in letters began to fade as telephones became commonplace. I’m sure our parent’s parents decried the erosion of letter writing and good penmanship as picking up the phone supplanted pen-and-paper. I’ll bet some of those folks resisted that new-fangled invention called the telephone, preferring to continue writing letters. Comfort rules.
During the telephone era, written information still had to be mailed. Solution: fax machines. With a fax, those pages that had to be created, selected, folded, inserted, and mailed could instead be inserted into a fax machine and instantly sent over telephone lines to someone who also had a fax machine. Speed rules.
(I resisted fax machines, because I knew it would time-shift business communications from days to minutes…and it did.)
With the computer age came e-mail, fax by/between computers, and voice-over-internet. Computer-based technologies also triggered a shift in the intended audience for communications: where letters and phone calls were generally one-to-one communications, computer-based communications allowed one sender to easily reach more than one recipient. This was a fundamental change, and it empowered individuals to reach much larger audiences. Power rules.
(I resisted e-mail, because I knew it would time-shift business communications from minutes to moments…and it did.)
Today we have SMS-enabled phones, and it seems like wherever you go, you see people walking and thumb-typing because their 140 characters of information can’t wait until they get to their computer or a telephone. It is incredibly easy to use text messaging. Social media services leverage text messaging; I can send a text to my Facebook page to let the planet know I’m stuck in traffic or I’m going to a basketball game. Ease of use rules.
Generational patterns
I see a pattern that is really all about what each generation grew up using as their most popular way to communicate.
My parent’s parents wrote letters, and saw the widespread expansion of telephones into almost every home…but they still liked to write letters. Letter writing was part of their known universe, part of their comfort zone.
My parents wrote letters, but were much more comfortable using the telephone than were their parents. The immediacy and convenience of phoning someone was their comfort zone.
I grew up as we transitioned from telephones to e-mails as a major means of communicating. I’m very comfortable with e-mail. My parents are far less comfortable.
My children are growing up in an age where being always connected by cell phone, text messaging, and various social media services is their norm. E-mail is kind of old school for them — they’ll use it, but they are quite at home with social media.
It hits home at work
In my work with information technology, I see differences in how people prefer to communicate, and those differences generally mirror the generational patterns above. E-mail is so embedded in today’s business world that managing e-mail has become a significant portion of the work day for many workers. Retaining key e-mail, archiving it, and searching it across the enterprise to find pertinent information are huge challenges.
E-mail in business was largely handled by company-owned systems until just a few years ago, when web-based mail services became widespread. Today we see quite a bit of business handled through third-party accounts with Yahoo! and Google and others. That creates another layer of challenge for corporate America when it comes time to find content.
(I don’t want to go into the loss of key employees and their off-site information. Let it suffice to say it is a significant problem. It represents a great business opportunity for someone!)
Those of us in the 40-to-60 age group have adopted e-mail as a primary means of communicating with clients. The group now entering the workplace and preparing to enter management positions are the folks who are actively posting personal and business content on their various social media pages. If we have trouble figuring out how to handle mail handled by third-party providers, how will we ever be able to harvest meaningful content from the multitude of social media sites? Think about having to go through a discovery process as part of a lawsuit, and you’ll probably see why I’m stumped by this.
Blogging is free speech, or is it lobbying?
Today I read an article exploring the idea that blogging may, in some cases, be considered lobbying. Ask yourself who in your organization is most likely to be blogging. That’s right: the younger folks coming into the workplace. Many will blog under their own name (as I do), while others will blog under pseudonyms. It is going to be a huge challenge to manage the potential exposure created by employees posting to Twitter, MySpace, personal blogs, and all the other always-on, always-connected mechanisms our younger workers are so comfortable with.
If you blog, are you part of a new wave of journalists, and thus eligible for protections traditional media like radio, television, and newspaper enjoys? Is blogging just free speech made available to a wider audience? Is it about expressing personal thoughts (like I’m doing here) or a way to try to influence others?
I suspect it is all of the above, so determining risk becomes contextual, and that will make it extremely difficult for businesses. The easy way out for businesses is to simply prohibit blogging and social media. But to do so would be a horrible mistake.
Today’s social media users are also customers, and will be tomorrow’s managers
Let me say right here I don’t have a solution to the challenges outlined above. What I do know is that our coworkers who are immersed in their always-on, always-connected lives are also customers and clients of other businesses and organizations. They are the seeds from which the next wave of corporate management will be harvested. Like it or not, social media is with us.
To try to suppress all blogging and all social media use is not only short-sighted, but ultimately makes little business sense. Customers will go elsewhere.
This new crop of workers is interested in getting things done very quickly, with as few button clicks as possible, and having some level of personal connection to the company they are dealing with. It doesn’t matter that the personal connection is rather shallow. What does matter is there is some kind of connection with another human being.
Connect what people do with why they choose to do it
It’s relatively easy to describe to folks what a company does. For example, in my conservation work, it’s easy to say we helped replace “x” number of culverts to help save salmon. Where we fail is in creating linkage with the human beings who choose to invest their time, money, and energy in implementing conservation practices like fencing streams, providing alternate livestock watering facilities, revegetating/restoring riparian habitat, making culverts more friendly to spawning fish, and many other on-the-ground practices.
Why do they choose to implement these conservation practices? How do they feel about it? What caused them to take a lifelong habit and voluntarily change that behavior? How do their neighbors feel about it? These are more meaningful questions than simply asking how many culverts got fixed. It’s social science applied to technical fixes to natural resource issues. And it is vital that we understand these connections and communicate them to the rising tide of folks for whom knowing what others are doing and why they are doing it represent a vital, driving force in their world view.
Resistance is futile: we must adapt
If Twitter and the like are a means to get this done, then corporate America has to embrace these new ways to communicate, or risk losing contact with an entire generation of customers and rising stars. I get that. And I’ll continue to explore these new media.
I encourage you to think about how social media can be used to benefit your organization’s health and goals. These things are new to corporate management, but that age group is approaching retirement. The time is now to carefully consider how to use these tools. Ignoring them is a mistake.
Thank you Robert Hooke for your string telephone. While it may be your fault we now have social media, I think connecting in a more meaningful way with customers, clients, and coworkers has high value. I don’t know what the next big wave of innovation will bring, but I’m sure it will be something most of us won’t immediatley understand. Keeping an open mind and a focus on who we serve will be key.
(A conversation with my friend Doug triggered this line of thought. Doug, thank you!)
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