Business Insight Zone

Hugh MacLeod, “The Porous Membrane”

Social media tears down barriers. More than tearing them down, it tunnels under them, jumps over them, or passes through them like a ghost.

If you want a particular barrier to come down, this is a welcome development.

• Maybe you’re a college student looking for someone to hang out with or date, and Facebook or MySpace helps you find that person.
• Maybe you’re a marketing pro or a sales rep and you’re hoping that a corporate blog or a Twitter stream or a LinkedIn profile or a Facebook group or Hoover’s Connect or whatever will help connect you with your users / customers / vendors / peers / etc. You get closer to these folks and thereby get a better sense of their needs and how to serve them.
• Maybe you’re a cog in a huge corporate machine who wants to connect with like-minded people across the company who just want to get things done.
• Maybe you’re an activist trying to drum up attention for your cause.
• . . .

But what if you’ve benefited from the barriers in place?

• You’ve been a gatekeeper — for information, for access — and you’ve profited from that role. The role could be within one company or broker between companies.
• You’re a purchasing officer for a company and you like being hard to reach, because you’re afraid you’ll spend your whole day fending off salespeople otherwise.
• You’re the best-looking student in your college department, or the most popular person in your dorm, and you’d just as soon not be easy to reach by every person who wants to get close to you.
• You’re a popular writer and you have to guard your time against interruptions if you want to keep producing books.
• . . .

If you’ve benefited from barriers, you’re much less likely to embrace social media, whether we’re talking about personal or corporate applications.

If the barriers in place help you to thrill your fans by writing more great books, heck, go all the way and be a total Luddite. Live in a yurt.

Don’t gum up the works

If the barriers in place help you to drag your feet, slow down progress, disappoint customers, delay action, ignore reality, divide and conquer your workforce . . . well, you deserve to lose. You deserve to be displaced. You deserve to witness the spectacle of those barriers being breached.

Thing is, the breach probably won’s be obvious or dramatic, because social media is wraithlike. It slips by you while you’re looking the other way. It gets inside the shell before you even realize it’s in the neighborhood.

But it’s also beneficial. It forces honesty where obfuscation thrived. And it will never hurt you if you’re (a) honest, and (b) even mildly willing to learn how it works.

The benevolent promise of social media

Social media ups the ante on us to be more open, more engaged, more real, and more human. If any of that’s a problem for you — or your company — then you’ll probably have trouble with social media. (A prediction: sooner or later, you’ll probably have problems with other things like growth and reputation.)

But if you embrace openness, engagement, authenticity, and humanity, social media could be a boon for you. Next thing you know, you’re closer to customers, you’re making new connections, you’re tearing down bad old barriers to your success and fulfillment, while preserving the boundaries that do you good.

Don’t take my word for it, or Hugh Macleod’s, or Chris Brogan’s, or Tara Hunt’s, or anybody’s. Your mileage may (will) vary.

Try it for yourself — it’s cheap to get started, and it’s easy to fix your mistakes.

Happy exploring!

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Related posts:

• Social media: the right tool for the job.
• SXSW recap: “Self-replicating Awesomeness.”
• YMMV.
• How Ape Lad harnessed the social media.

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Category: Social media