Pitfalls of un-Enterprising Social Media usage

This is an article we should have written, but Business Week got theirs in first so we will cut and flatter it profusely, as below:

Over the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs, and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes, many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.

The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents. "It's a bit of a Wild West scenario," blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex. Without naming names, he compares some consultants to "snake oil salesmen."

Actually I'm glad they've written it as sometimes I feel we are the only guys questioning the Orthodoxy of Enterprise 2.0. Many have popped up in the last 2 years from (seemingly) nowhere but with a lot of PR push. My frustration is that many of these people have never worked in an enterprise, put in systems or done change management within an enterprise, and certainly very few have ever run anything. These would probably - in my old fashioned book anyway - be important criteria for selecting Enterprise 2.0 consultants or advisors, but hey ho..... (OK, OK being old salts in the game we would say that, but I really don't see how this is so radically different from other radical innovations that have come before like MRP, Just In Time/Lean Ops, etc). The other sure fire sign that an expert is not business or experience led is that too many solutions are based on dogma (whereas most companies are fairly unique to some extent), and are often trying to avoid proper business metrics and ROI with "new economics" calls - Dotcom 1.0 should make most CEOs very wary of that pitch.:

Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes. Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel: Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos. Yet these strictures don't always make business sense.

As the Business Week chart shown above notes, one has to be a bit more careful than that. Also, in our experience social networks in structured hierarchies that have to deliver to real deadlines work differently to consumer ones that don't. Most importantly, Social Media does not exist in a vacuum and to get real value it has to tie into other systems, as well as requiring restructuring to new ways of working to maximise its impact. To do this is non trivial and requires more than enthusiasm. (It does worry me slightly that a lot f the Social Media advice is coming from marketing companies rather than business ones, I think this risks driving too far down the Marcomms route without fundamentally attacking the end to end business processes.

The issue for those in the industry who actually do know what they are doing is there are so many noisy people who don't, which leads to the risk of an "Akerlof Law" effect - ie because the buyer can't tell good from bad they assume the worst and price accordingly, and even look at the wrong things (speaking circuit profile vs implementation track record for example). As the article notes:

The best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media's practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results. It may be the only way to convert the skeptics—and flush out the snake oil.