The Magic of Social Networking

This is my speech from a presentation I shared at work, modeled after a TED talk. I omitted the slides because they contain information that's confidential to my employer, but they're basically screen shots of our systems combined with pictures of my kids, my friends, and spaceships.

This is my daughter, Evie. She’s four and a half. When Evie is really impressed with something, she declares that it’s magic. She’s also the reason I’m standing here today, talking to you about why social networking is magic.

When we learned of Evie’s impending arrival, my husband and I were living in Reno, Nevada, and all of our family was here in the Midwest. I wanted to give updates and share ultrasound photos and talk about nursery colors and naming philosophies and do all the things that excited pregnant women do, but it was exhausting to call everyone, repeating the same story each time. So, I posted a blog on MySpace – It was 2006, after all - to share the latest news with family and friends. It was great, especially after the baby arrived, when I was too tired to see straight but could post enough photos and cute stories to keep Evie’s admirers feeling connected. I had been using the Internet for some time, but this was when the real power of social networking hit home for me.

The need to communicate with other people is an essential part of being human. It’s also critical to our success as a company, and it’s part of my job to think of ways we can do it more effectively. A couple years ago, the bank invested in social networking tools that employees can use to connect with one another: Blogs, wikis, profiles similar to the ones people use on Facebook. I was fortunate enough to be one of the pilot users of these tools. The idea was that social networking tools could make employees more efficient and productive. I think they can move space and time.

Space and Time are the two largest constraints on our ability to communicate effectively with other people. And let’s be honest, they’re pretty big.

Space – Our relationships have always been, for the most part, limited to people in our physical proximity. In school, you talked to your classmates. At work, your cubicle neighbors and office mates tend to be the coworkers you know best. Relationships aren’t just about proximity, of course - We build relationships by connecting to people with shared interests and compatible personalities – but we most of the time, we’re drawing from that pool of people who are in our space.

Now, you can work around the space constraint. Did anyone here ever have a pen pal? It’s a neat idea – by building a relationship with someone whose life experience is distant from your own, you’ll learn things, gain a broader understanding of the world and have some fun in the process. How many of you lost touch with your pen pals after a couple of letters? There, we’re bumping into the other constraint – Time. It’s a hassle to write letters, address and mail them, and then wait for a response. Plus, what if your pen pal is a dud? I actually met my 6^th grade pen pal during a family vacation to Germany. It was awkward and she stole my Swatch.

The time constraint is especially noticeable when you’re trying to work with groups. Groups of people are great at solving problems and brainstorming ideas. Group discussions can provide a diverse set of perspectives, the ability to see something from multiple angles at once. The problem with group discussions often comes back to time: It is really, really hard to get a group together. Think about the planning that went into this conference. Could you do this every week? Every month, even? Not without tremendous cost and effort.

So what’s a large organization like the bank to do? We sort ourselves into silos. We don’t create silos because we’re grumpy, or don’t like the other groups, we do it out of practical necessity, so we can actually make decisions and get things done. But we all know, deep down, that we need to collaborate more. We know that there are lost opportunities for idea sharing and project synergy.

So we send e-mail and we have meetings.

Meetings are great, but very expensive in terms of time. A one-hour meeting with 10 people isn’t a one-hour meeting; from the bank’s perspective, it’s a 10-hour meeting.

E-mail seems easy, but it quickly adds up to a time burden as well. Does anyone here get too much e-mail? Do you ever spend work time deleting e-mails that you didn’t really need to receive in the first place? Stop and think about that one for a minute. If you’ve ever done that, then you’re receiving too much e-mail.

The trouble with e-mail and meetings is that neither one is an effective or especially efficient way to catalyze a large group to action. The larger the group, the less effective they are. E-mail is not a group collaboration tool. Don’t let the Reply-All button convince you otherwise – please, don’t.

E-mail and meetings are what we call “push” communications. Someone, at the other end of your network connection, decides what you need to know and pushes that information in your direction. If you feel overwhelmed because you receive too many e-mails or meeting invites, don’t blame the sender – They’re just trying to be inclusive and transparent, because leaving people out of the loop is often worse than over-communicating.

In our daily lives, where information overload is a real problem, we’re seeing a shift from push to pull communication.

Gone are the days when everyone got their world news from a paper on their doorstep or the same anchor on TV. You can choose to get your news from CNN, or Fox News, or Huffington Post, or TMZ or US Weekly. You can click the headlines of the stories you want and skip the rest, saving yourself time – unlike when you had to listen to the news anchor read every story before he got to the one you cared about.

Facebook lets you engage in pull communications with your friends. It’s brilliant. You choose your friends, and then you choose how closely to watch them. You can click on someone’s page to see everything they’ve been up to lately, or you can just watch your news feed for the top stories. You can hide the people who irritate you or you can hide applications if you’re tired of reading about the potatoes your second cousin grew in Farmville.

This is US Book, our internal social network. You can’t hide or block people. But you can choose whom to follow and add to your network. You can filter your news feed a few different ways, including by key word or topic. You can follow the communities and blogs that you want to follow.

The magic of social networking is that it transcends space and time. Because it’s pull communication, the threshold at which you impose on other people’s time is much, much higher. If all you want to do is keep people in the loop about what you’re working on, a blog is an elegant way to do that. Instead of clogging everyone’s Inbox with your project updates, you can post them on your blog for people to read when they’re ready.

I’ve seen leaders use US Book blogs to summarize pricing calls for their teams. Now that’s an example of taking the time spent in a meeting – an hour out of the leader’s day – and turning that hour into more value for the organization. Imagine if every leader and project leader in the bank shared high level updates on their blog. Instead of wondering about the status of a project or chasing people down to send them e-mail, you could search for that person – or search by project name – and get the information that you wanted, when you wanted it. Pull communication. You could discover similar projects where different business lines were trying to solve the same problem. You could peek into other groups and find inspiration and best practices.

If you love the idea of everyone else having a blog, but aren’t sure you’d want to write one yourself, remember that people don’t read business blogs expecting poetry. The most useful ones are short, clear and to the point. If you can write an e-mail, or present an update in a meeting, then you can write a blog. Blogging isn’t a whole new thing – It’s a new tool that lets us do something we’re already doing, but in a more effective way.

“Crowdsourcing” is one of my favorite social media buzzwords. Crowdsourcing is when you ask a question of a lot of people all at once – is both easy and powerful. Through Facebook, I’ve asked my friends for help with cooking beets, choosing workout music, and entertaining a toddler on a rainy day. I got lots of great advice, often from people at the periphery of my social circle who had fresh perspectives and were eager to share. Can you imagine how annoying it would be if I e-mailed those questions to 300 people simultaneously? And if the people who had ideas for me clicked Reply-All?

I’ve seen some great examples of Crowdsourcing on US Book. One of my colleagues in Marketing was at her wit’s end, wrestling with an Excel formula. She posted a status update asking for help, and within minutes she had the answer. The number of employees logging into US Book daily is still in the 100s – but imagine if even half of our 63,000 employees were in the same conversation.

Managing a focused conversation with that many people can get a little unwieldy. That’s where communities and discussion forums come in.

Back to little Evie for a minute. When she arrived on the scene, I knew nothing about babies. I had read lots of books and articles – but information without context is just noise. I needed people. My family was half a continent away, and my friends – none of whom had children – were at happy hour drinking mojitos.

On the website Babycenter.com, I found a message board specifically for mothers with due dates in March 2007. People were asking health questions and talking about names and swapping tips. We were women from all over the world who wanted to talk about the exact same thing.

Discussion forums or communities are great for a few reasons. First, they accelerate the sharing of knowledge. You have a lot of people interested in the same topic, they’re all learning and doing research, and they can share ideas and resources with one another. Imagine how powerful this could be if you’re the only person at your office in your role – say, you’re a trainer – and you could connect with other U.S. Bank trainers to find out how they’re handling the same kinds of challenges you face every day. And every time you ask or answer a question on a public forum, that learning is visible to anyone who reads it – unlike if you asked your question by e-mail or phone call.

Secondly, in a community setting, people can build rapport that can grow into relationships. There’s a social karma factor – The more kind and helpful you are to others, the more people want to help you. Just like in real life. And real networking can develop when you find someone who has a shared interest or a compatible personality. Collaboration comes naturally when you feel like you know someone – and when you like someone. I’m a big believer in the value of non-work related conversations in US Book. If you know that a colleague shares your enthusiasm for basset hounds or Battlestar Galactica, you’re naturally going to be more inclined to collaborate.

And thirdly, communities allow for richer and deeper participation from larger groups of people. If you hold a meeting with 70 people, how many of those people will really be part of the conversation? There will be the one or two who have a lot to say – you know who I’m talking about, there’s at least one in every meeting. There will be a lot of nods and “Me toos,” and maybe a couple of counterpoints here and there, but the majority of the people in your meeting will stay silent. Some of this is personality style: Extraverts tend to think out loud, while introverts prefer to have some time to mull things over and digest before sharing their thoughts.

My team, Corporate Marketing, has an US Book community. At a recent department meeting, we had two agencies present us with proposals for marketing materials. Our leader wanted all of our opinions – not just the opinions of most extraverted people in the room. After the meeting, she instructed everyone in the department to post in the discussion forum with the three most compelling things they’d seen in the meeting, their preference between the agencies, and any other observations. It took a couple of days for everyone to respond, but she got more thoughtful and useful feedback than would have been possible in a meeting.

Social networking is magic. It’s a spaceship and a time machine in one.

But the real magic is something else. It’s the most basic thing of all, it’s the connection of human beings who want to help one another, who want to learn and to teach, who want to listen and who want to be heard.

The moms I met on that pregnancy board 5 years ago continued talking. Parenting is similar to work in this regard: Once you finally know all the answers, they change all the questions. So my friends and I created our own online community and we continued to share our experiences and learn from each other. We’re still in daily conversation, with 76 members and over 250,000 posts (as of this morning) about everything from disciplining preschoolers to the latest episode of Survivor. It was my experience as a moderator of this community that inspired me and helped shape the professional point of view that I’ve shared with you today.

I’ll leave you with some pictures from my family vacation, the third one I’ve taken with friends from my parenting group. I have no doubt that social networking works, that online connections are real, and that the effort you give to an online community can repay you in something that looks and feels just like magic.