Social Media for the Shy
One of the things that’s been bugging me the whole time that I’ve been playing around in this “Enterprise 2.0″ space — or whatever name you give to the place where the utility of social media meets the productivity of the workplace — is that many people are innately shy.
The statistics regarding extraversion and introversion are a bit rough. The New World Encyclopedia’s article on Extroversion cites a study that says introverts make up 25% of the U.S. population. Americans may be uniquely loud, but we can assume the figures for the rest of the world are about the same.
But whether you’re introverted or extroverted, we also know (again from studies of Americans) that fear of public speaking ranks above the fear of death. It’s most people’s #1 fear.
So a sizable portion of the people you meet at work today aren’t fabulous, gregarious extroverts who express their opinions willfully. In everyday life, most of us are microphone shy. Why do we think it will be any different when it comes to social media?
I suspect that a lot of these Enterprise 2.0 deployments have most of their content created by a small, vocal minority of users. I bet the consumers outweigh the producers — probably along the lines of the 80/20 rule. Is this a problem? Perhaps this just the way that organizations function — 80 percent of us are mostly moochers, most of the time…
If we look at the public social networks, like twitter, most of the people with loads of followers fit this extroverted model — they tweet a lot, about silly things. But sometimes they are insightful and amusing.
But what if your organization isn’t filled with insightful and amusing people? If we give people access to social media tools within the enterprise, are we just setting up a platform for the company show-offs to strut around on? What about the people who are insightful and shy? Or those that have interesting things to say but are afraid to ‘rock the boat’ by getting involved. Or those who are moochers, who never contribute anything, thereby remaining anonymous?
People have varying levels of sociability, just as they vary in lots of other ways. This doesn’t matter on Facebook, or Meebo or Plaxo, because as we’ve discussed time and again, they have no real point.
But your workplace does. It has a series of goals that need to be achieved, and it has hired people into positions specifically to meet them. Any effective software solution that we provide needs to be able to be harnessed by everyone — not just the company extroverts.
How do we get around this? Is it more training? Cultural change? More carrots? Bigger sticks?
Social Media gets us to the dance, but many of us are all standing on the sidelines, looking at our feet. How can our systems help get wallflowers onto the dance floor?
Related Posts
- A Social Object
- Social Networking Belongs in Business
- Twitter as Social Computer
- What is Social Software?
- Open the doors and see all the people
There has to be something fun. To get the others going.
In order to get users into one system, and get their profiles updated, we held a contest. We had users nominate their favorite 5 and then we put it up for votes. Those that were gung-ho got the other in to vote and to offer feedback. We ended-up with 95% of the profiles fully setup with pictures and interesting information.
That was the carrot. Our stick was PTO approval. Everyone takes vacation, so everyone has to at least periodically enter the app. We force-fed the process into the platform so that people had to go there, and hopefully absorb other things while they were there.
-Pie