Seth Godin is wrong (again)
In the post Seth’s Blog: The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations Seth Godin gives the answer that social media is a PROCESS and not an EVENT. Here I think he is completely wrong!
I don’t disagree with the fact that social media per se isn’t an event, but a process, but with the fact that this is the reasons organizations have such a hard time understanding and utilizing social media in a natural and constructive way.
In my view it has much more todo with that social media is constituted by the facts that the inner mechanics is fundamentally built directly together the raw social logic which make individuals tick. From the perspective of underlying driving forced organizations and individuals are very different entities all together.
Organizations are in fact machines that are not built up to follow the same driving forces that drive humans but instead stupidly and repeatedly do one specific thing really good from a certain perspective in order to provide a predictable value over time.
The real power with these huge machines is that they enable us to collaborate in a way which wasn’t possible with the communication technologies that existed before the birth and diffusion of Internet.
When we work for an organization we rather work *in* that organization in the sense that we are fundamentally a limited part of something bigger - an entity consisting of many individuals i e an entity of a different level of abstraction.
Social media is based on individuals and is fueled by energy from an personal/existential level and is thus creating relations between individuals and drives organizing on a different and thus competing level. What we see is an organizing force that contradicts the fundamental principles with which the traditional organization is built upon.
It might be so that social media must be treated as a “technology” that is not relevant to most traditional organizations - and what constitutes a new class of organizations is exactly that they are built upon the same logic that we see in social media today.
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