Business Insight Zone

I’ve been thinking a lot — too much — about the best way to frame this idea, so much so that it’s delayed me a couple of weeks in expressing it. So instead of worrying about “best,” let’s just bull ahead with “adequate for starters,” eh?

One of themes that comes at you thick-and-fast at SXSW Interactive is that the social media “can’t be controlled.” At some level, this is absolutely true, but to say it in those words hamstrings us unnecessarily. Why? Because it’s too easy for companies to hear “can’t be controlled” and run away as fast as they can from social media. As of this moment, they might be able to do so without obvious penalties; as time goes on, this option will be less and less viable.

Better, then, to think of it like this: social media inevitably erodes the old command-and-control models of advertising, corporate marketing, public relations, et cetera. This is so because the social media enable far too many people to express themselves exactly as they wish — with R-rated language and everything — and to (potentially) do so with just as big a megaphone as any corporation.

What’s required on the part of companies is to let go of the fantasy of command: You will not “command” the airwaves. You will not “command” the conversations around your offerings in the marketplace. Also, you will not “command” your employees, who can access all sorts of scary hiring-market information via LinkedIn and Jobster and Monster and Craigslist and the rest.

The antidote for this loss of command: just get over it. Historical and technological forces are against you, and those corporations and executives who insist on retaining command are destined to failure.

But you can exert a modicum of control. You can shape a conversation. You can rebut erroneous information about your company or your product. You can harness transparency so that it works for you. You can grow into the language of the social media so that you fall naturally into the mode of persuasion-and-recruitment rather than command-and-control.

For many executives, this is going to mean an uncomfortable transition. A whole set of uncomfortable transitions, even, since they’ll have to learn new technologies (blogging, commenting, tweeting, whatever) at the same time that they’re getting their heads into new modes of thinking (persuasion, conversation, give-and-take, active listening).

But it doesn’t mean that every old rule goes out the window. During the second half of the 20th century, U.S.-based firms used Druckerian management principles to create more prosperity for more people than at any other time in human history. Despite what some of the utopians at SXSW would have you think, those rules have not been thrown out the window. They do still apply. But they continue to be modified, especially by the savvy younger members of the workforce, in the U.S. and elsewhere, who have no interest in perpetuating — and no need to perpetuate — the repressive parts of the old management equation.

There is a new math in play, but it’s not all new. If you can let go of the fantasy of command and adapt your views on control to fit the way the social media actually work, you can then get a lot of good business done on old-fashioned principles — truly timeless principles like “giving customers what they want at a good price.” Like “taking care of customers.” Like “innovating to meet customers’ needs.”

The world is your oyster. The social media are nothing to be afraid of. Go get ‘em.

(General Patton and colleagues borrowed from the Library of Congress.)