TechWag

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One of the things that the “shiny shiny jet set crowd” often forgets (and I am one of them) is the importance of internal politics when it comes to any social networking project. It is the process of internal politics to carve out spheres of influence within the organization and control them. The problem comes with the idea that social networking transcends and breaks those spheres of influence. Never the less you cannot forget the folks who still live and often die by their own spheres of political influence and in many cases, affluence.

Simply, some business organizations are not politically or organizationally prepared to deal with social networking. They want it, but they are not ready for it because the organization is still based on small groups of influence, domains, empires, silos, or call it what you will. Those spheres, domains, silos and the people who work within them want to keep the status quo in many respects. They have been successful doing what they have been doing, they have been doing it a particular way for a long time, why change now. What benefit will social networking, blogging, twitter, and FriendFeed provide to them in the longer run, or how with these system degrade or impair or improve the internal organizational processes that will use them. While it is ok to sell them on the idea using the “What’s in it for me” process, in the longer run, we are dealing with people.

When people get stressed they often fall back on the tried and true, those things that have worked in the past, rather than try to work out a new way of addressing issues. There is a lot of risk when it comes to social networking, mostly in that if your organization is already dysfunctional, or there are silos within the process of information sharing, social networking can highlight or amplify the issues surrounding those silos rather than breaking down barriers.

What you are doing at times with social networking is putting a semi-transparent overlay upon the existing organizational and political structure. Sometimes, and in my experience often times the overlay does not work as well as it could, or will not work at all because of the entrenched ideas that go along with an already dysfunctional or semi-functional corporate environment. People will be quick to pick up on the idea that an organization is dysfunctional very quickly even if social networking is not done right, as people talk about the organization, people will swiftly pickup on the idea that there are problems within the company.

Rather than showing off the great things that are happening within a company, the social networking aspects of the company can highlight the dysfunction of the organizational hierarchy, causing further confusion if not outright hostility towards social networking within the organization. In the end, the social networking experiment, campaign, or process will fail because of the entrenched interests of the people who were to be involved.

Internal politics, organizational hierarchy and behavior all have to be known and understood, along with the business that a company is in when someone is building out a social networking program for a company. Without understanding the company, the interests, the drivers and motivations for embarking on social networking it is hard to build out a custom program that will work. Without appealing and informing, demonstrating, and in some ways using guerilla marketing within the organization itself, adoption of a social networking program can be difficult if not impossible.

Remember that internal politics, organizational development, silos and empires have as much to do with adoption and success in social networking, as knowing the business that the company is in.