Adopting Social Tools: The Young vs. The Gurus

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Image copyright Flickr user Sebastiaan ter Burg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg)

I witnessed many debates and read many articles about which between the juniors (the young) and the seniors (the gurus) in a company are most likely to be the number one  adopters and beneficiaries of social tools. I believe the balance is not necessarily inclined towards one of them, so in the following I’m going to list some of the pros and cons for each group.

The Young. Well, the social industry began with them and you’d think they’re like a duck to water when it comes to adopting social tools. And you wouldn’t be wrong. They are active, enagageable and manage to easy engage others by the content they choose to share. But there are two obstacles they come across when they are put in the position of expressing the above mentioned skills in the business sector. One is that they don’t use it necessarily because it’s effective, but more for their personal social awareness – this blurs the practical feature of using Enterprise 2.0 , operating as an inhibitor for most of them. Moreover, the base material for successful social sharing is knowledge content, so experience is a needed asset. Concluding: the young can be the social enterprise allies as they have the aptitude for it, but they’re lacking the background.

The Gurus. They rule over the know-how land and everybody is looking for ways to enter their circles. They are usually top influencers and people ask for their advices every time they show availability. Which is usually almost never. And there’s a number of reasons for that: time, hierarchy, no dedicated setting. Assuming they are willing to share their knowledge, how can they do that for everybody to benefit? They can at most pick a small team of juniors to directly coordinate or train, but that’s just part of being social and that doesn’t meet the needs of the organization as a whole. Furthermore, this selection process can create a negative competition behavior, operating precisely against the principles that social tools stand for.

Of course we also have to mention that it has been shown more than once that the knowledge transfer is not one-way only, as the seniors were efficiently assisted by junior colleagues. Innovation comes from the most unusual places.

So which are the best adoption agents for social business? Well, as soon as each side will understand and experience their benefits, everybody will accept that social asks for the presence of both type of profiles. Given this argument, the best strategy is a combined use activity with both parties as actors.

Happy Knowledge Sharing!

 

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