Tag: SMUG

Thesis 2: Social Media Tools Overcome Inertia

Note: This post is part of a series providing fuller discussion for my 35 Social Media Theses. I welcome your feedback and comments to challenge and improve them.

In Thesis 1, I discussed how social media really aren’t completely new, since air was the original social medium. This leads us, however, to what is new:

Thesis 2: Electronic tools merely facilitate broader and more efficient transmission by overcoming inertia and friction.

What these electronic tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter do is not different in kind from what has happened with word of mouth since the dawn of civilization.

They just make it a whole lot easier.

People have always talked with friends and family about their experiences, including those with merchants and service providers. From which blacksmith did the best job with horseshoes a century ago to which dentist is best able to prevent pain, a huge portion of our “purchase” decisions have been and remain significantly affected by word-of-mouth.

As I mentioned in Thesis 1, word of mouth from patients and their families has been the top source of information for people who prefer Mayo Clinic, and it’s been that way for more than a century.

Now that word just spreads a lot faster.

So when someone writes on our Mayo Clinic Facebook wall, it’s available for the world to see…

Shannon Swing

…but more importantly, it may show up in her friends’ news feeds.

Social tools just mean that people are sharing with a lot more people, with a lot less effort.

Offline word of mouth is still more prevalent and more powerful than online, even with the new tools. Hearing a friend talk in person about an experience makes a deeper impression. And if a person, let’s call him Bob, is telling his friend Carl about his mysterious illness and his frustration that it hasn’t been diagnosed, if Carl tells him right then, at the point of need, about his good experience and recommends that Bob try Mayo, that’s obviously going to have deeper impact than a wall posting on Facebook.

But social media can have a broader impact. In the example above, Shannon’s wall posting was potentially visible to 300 million Facebook users, and the sharing she did with her Facebook friends was effortless. The act of writing was the act of sharing.

Likewise, when Rhonda King told the story of bringing her son Trevor to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion on the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel:

…It was seen by many more people than she could have spoken with personally. As of this writing, in fact, it’s been viewed more than 4,400 times. And while nothing is as powerful as face-to-face dialogue, I would argue that the impression Brenda made via video is both broad and deep, for those who have taken time to listen to what she had to say.

So while social media really are as old as human speech, as Thesis 1 says, there is something new and exciting about the ease with which messages can spread with social tools.

I say “merely” in Thesis 2 to emphasize the continuity of social tools with offline word-of-mouth. But don’t think that “merely” minimizes their impact. As we will discuss in the next two theses, social media tools are revolutionary in what they are doing to the anomalous mass media era of the 20th century.

SMUG Textbooks

Despite the decidedly social media nature of SMUG (“social media” is part of our name, after all), I’m still a big believer in books. They enable authors to make an extended argument and deal with a topic in more depth than the blog format allows.

I’ve written several book reviews here on SMUG, but it’s time for me to catch up, based on several more I’ve read or listened to via Audible.com. And I thought it would be helpful to develop a more comprehensive list of books that receive the SMUG Seal of Approval. As soon as I’ve finished adding related reviews and links to this post, I will be using it as the basis for a remodeled SMUG Bookstore.

Of course, everything about SMUG is voluntary, and tuition is free, so I can’t really say these are “required reading” for SMUGgles. As I get the reviews done, I will add links to the list of SMUG textbooks below. And if you have recommendations of books I’ve missed that you think would be helpful, please add them in the comments.

Personal Productivity

Social Media Theory and Philosophy

Business and Innovation

  • The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen
  • The Innovator’s Solution, by Clayton Christensen
  • Our Iceberg is Melting, by John Kotter
  • Death by Meeting, by Patrick Lencioni
  • Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
  • Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson. You can download this for free if you have an Audible.com account.
  • Seeing What’s Next, by Clayton Christensen
  • Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers
  • The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki
  • Selling the Dream, by Guy Kawasaki

The Gladwell Grouping

Malcolm Gladwell’s books defy easy categorization, but he has a wonderful writing style and has a thought-provoking approach to all sorts of topics. If he wrote it, you should read it.

The Seth Section

Like Gladwell, Seth Godin deserves a section of his own. These are all somewhat related to marketing, particularly as it is understood as designing delivery of your products or services in a way that enhances customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth.

  • Tribes, by Seth Godin
  • Purple Cow, by Seth Godin
  • Free Prize Inside, by Seth Godin
  • Meatball Sundae, by Seth Godin
  • The Dip, by Seth Godin
  • Small is the New Big, by Seth Godin

SMUG Textbook: The Innovator’s Dilemma

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, by Clayton Christensen.

Clayton Christensen is amazing. I got to hear him speak in person at our Mayo Clinic Transform symposium in September, but I was a fan long before that. In The Innovator’s Dilemma he lays the groundwork for a way of understanding disruptive innovation and why successful incumbent businesses and market leaders are so bad at adopting disruptive technologies.

It’s not because they’re stupid, lazy or unwilling to take risks. Christensen argues that they’re simply making decisions in keeping with sound management practices, and focusing on their most profitable lines of business.

Here’s my simplified version of the product progression Christensen describes. I will illustrate it using video cameras as the example.

  1. Incumbents develop products that are “too good” for most customers. In the case of tape-based video cameras, companies like Sony continually add new features to distinguish their products from those of competitors and to keep from having to cut prices to compete. So they improve quality with Carl Zeiss® lenses, or add night vision infrared capabilities, or 60x optical zoom, or other features that are important to the most demanding customers.
  2. Disruptive technologies arise that are much lower in quality but also much cheaper. In the video camera examples, the disruptive innovation was a camera that uses a Flash memory card instead of a tape. This “not good enough” product didn’t meet the needs of Sony’s most demanding customers, but it did make video recording available to many people who previously couldn’t afford it. Instead of chasing the low end, incumbents like Sony reasonably chose to focus on their most profitable market segment.
  3. Low-end competitors improve their product to move “up market.” Pure Digital, maker of the Flip video camera, continued to improve quality and convenience, meeting the needs of an increasing portion of the market at a much lower price. By the time the incumbents like Sony respond, they’ve lost their market leadership position. The Flip is now the most popular video camera in the U.S., and it is even available in HD for $200 or less.

This is a simplified overview, so you should read the book for a fuller explanation. But It’s amazing when you see how this same model has played itself out in countless other industries.

The Innovator’s Dilemma sets the stage for Christensen’s other books, including The Innovator’s Solution, Seeing What’s Next and The Innovator’s Prescription. I recommend all of them as SMUG Textbooks, and hope to review them here in the future.

SMUG Textbook: Trust Agents

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

I got to have dinner with Chris Brogan at a conference in May in San Francisco, and from our conversation (and his blog) I was pretty sure this book would be good, but this is one of those books that had me nodding in agreement almost from the start.

I particularly liked the chapter called “Make Your Own Game,” which is about seeing your life and career as a game, and progressing from playing to “hacking” to programming, and is similar to what I call “The MacGyver Mindset.” It’s about understanding the rules of social media so you can help develop the rules for your own game, tinkering with tools and seeing how they can let you do your work in a new way, and maybe even create a whole new business.

Here’s how Brogan and Smith define what a trust agent is:

Trust agents have established themselves as being non-sales-oriented, non-high-pressure marketers. Instead, they are digital natives using the Web to be genuine and to humanize their business. They’re interested in people (prospective customers, employees, colleagues, and more), and they have realized that these tools that enable more unique, robust communication also allow more business opportunities for everyone.

Who, exactly, are trust agents? They are the power users of the new tools of the Web, educated more by way of their own experiences and experiments than from the core of their professional experiences. They speak online technology fluently. They learn by trying, so they are bold in their efforts to try new applications and devices…. Trust agents use today’s Web tools to spread their influence faster, wider and deeper than a typical company’s PR or marketing department might be capable of achieving, and with more genuine interest in people, too.

I added some emphasis on elements in the above that embody the SMUG philosophy, but would just take issue with the “digital native” descriptor. I don’t think you need to have grown up with digital tools to become a trust agent. It’s perfectly fine to be a naturalized digital citizen. But that’s a minor quibble with an otherwise excellent book that has the SMUG textbook seal of approval.

SMUG Textbook: Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky.

I read this book more than a year ago, and it has significantly affected my thinking. Shirky’s main point is that complex projects formerly required the overhead of an organization, which meant that there had to be some way of funding that overhead, either through business profits or government taxation. The advent of digital tools has made complex projects possible without the organizational overhead. Some of these, such as Linux or Wikipedia or Craigslist, have seriously challenged or even “beaten” the products of formerly profitable organizations. But these tools have also made it possible to undertake projects that previously weren’t worth doing. In a section he calls “The Tectonic Shift,” Shirky explains:

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven’t had all the groups we’ve wanted, we’ve simply had all the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation; the difficulties that kep self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing.

You will find traces of Here Comes Everybody in many of the 35 Social Media Theses. I highly recommend it to all SMUGgles.