First, I start with Facebook. I scroll through to find anything interesting, especially posts from my three kids. Then I check out LinkedIn. Who’s invited me to connect? Who’s endorsed me? Who’s looked at my profile? I check out an article or a random post.

I don’t muck much with Twitter except to search on #stcorg and #stc13 . After looking at these two searches, I usually just close it. I might check out Instagram, but usually only because one of my children has posted there. Next, I check out the ST C Board of Directors site to read any new posts. And I check my iPhone to see if there is any pushed content I find interesting.

One morning, though, things were particularly active. I kept getting new posts all over the place. Bing here, ping there, bop over there. (Ok, not audibly; metaphorically, but you get the idea.) I could barely keep up. For some reason that I didn’t totally fathom, I wanted to check them all out. It quickly became took much, moving back and forth, forth and back, that it all became, well … chaotic!

When that thought hit me, it just brought everything to a halt. Is social media just chaos, and we’ve all been sucked in to the flurry? While my computer and smart phone kept pinging and popping, I began to wonder. What if social media is a manifestation of the chaos theory? Well, that just might explain a lot.

So off to the Internet to refresh my memory about chaos theory. First, I learned that chaos theory is a field of mathematics. Right away, I liked it. After all, I was a math major in university. A major concept of chaos theory is the butterfly effect. A small change in one place—the proverbial butterfly flapping—has a profound effect on some cataclysmic event somewhere else—a tsunami, for instance. And here’s the kicker. In math terms, such a succession of events is nonlinear. In other words, there is no direct connection between the two events.

Mathematics, of course, has a more technical explanation: something about dynamical systems being deterministic, but sensitive to initial conditions (I’ll spare you the details). Suffice it to say that even though one event might lead directly to another event, a tiny change in that initial event can cause all hell to break loose.

Okay, so back to social media. Does this make sense? Why was I getting all these posts in such a short period of time? Did some Monarch flap its wings somewhere? Maybe social media as chaos doesn’t refer to my particular situation at all, but to a larger condition of the greater social media, the one in which everyone plays.

One post can certainly cause various events. Tweet that ST C is holding its annual conference, and people register. That’s a direct and expected result. There have been times, though, when one small post results in completely overwhelming and unexpected results. I’ve seen it on Facebook and on Twitter. You probably have, too.

In the end, I guess, that’s the greatest attribute of social media: the power to engender cataclysmic social disruption and change. There’s not much that is loftier than that.

A final note: This is my last column as your social media columnist. It’s been a great ride writing this column. And Editor Liz Pohland has been patient (my favorite trait), thoughtful, and considerate. But for me, social media has become too big a distraction, and a convenient excuse to procrastinate. I act with purpose, and while some of my social media interactions are certainly purposeful, most of them are in search of purpose. Social media has become (I’m going to say something potentially blasphemous here) what television has long since become: titillating but ultimately forgettable. Or maybe I just got tired of waiting to see that completely overwhelming and unexpected result from one of my posts.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post originally appeared in my “Social Media Insights” column in the May 2013 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).]

A Communication Audit. This is a comprehensive, systematic evaluation and analysis of your company’s communication. A communication audit unveils what is truly happening as opposed to what is thought to be happening. It:

• Encompasses the activities conducted in a communication assessment and its resultant findings (although here it is more robust).
• Identifies the people who create the messages and information being communicated.
• Evaluates the clarity and value of the communication.
• Critically looks at the various methods of communication (such as Web sites, newsletters, emails, blogs, videos, and other publications, as well as interpersonal skills and managerial communication), pinpointing problem areas and identifying successes.

A communication audit must be thoughtfully planned and implemented, and the results carefully assessed to achieve the greatest impact.

The Scope of a Communication Audit. You can focus on a number of communication areas to evaluate and analyze. This focus can be the broad-based communication for the entire company or for an individual division or group. It can be a specific communication method (such as interpersonal communication or your internal Web site) or for a specific vehicle (such as your corporate publications).

Sometimes the scope of your company’s communication is simply too large. Breaking your communication efforts into smaller, more manageable chunks enables more targeted, accurate findings. Your scope simply depends on what you want to achieve in a particular timeframe.

The exact scope of an audit depends on your company: on your particular problems and needs.

When to Conduct a Communication Audit. Communication audits are always helpful, if only to keep up with the needs of a changing staff and a changing business climate.

If you have never conducted an audit, now might be a good time especially if your company has grown substantially. When a company experiences any substantial growth, communication channels tend to break down—what once worked becomes antiquated and stresses its ability to carry the ever-changing and ever-increasing amount of information.

Communication audits are indispensable when a company is undergoing any significant change to your business, such as when you experience a layoff or change in staffing; merge with or acquire another company; implement a new technology; launch a new product, service or line of business; enter a new market; or any other disruption to your everyday business operations.

In these cases, the results of an audit can identify those key communication areas that are vital to your moving forward as smoothly as possible whenever your company experiences these inevitable transitions.

A Communication Plan. This plan takes the findings of an assessment or audit and defines a plan of action that enables you to communicate better. A communication plan has four main parts; it:

• Clarifies the quality of your communication by summarizing the comments garnered through conversations with employees.
• Evaluates the effectiveness of your communication vehicles and channels, as well as the messages and information being communicated.
• Recommends steps for improving communication and making it more effective, including specifics on methods, channels, and personnel.
• Outlines a timeline—both short-term and long-term—for implementing the recommendations.

A Communication Plan, thus, maps the roads you can travel to communicate better and attain the resultant benefits.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Since the most successful companies communicate well, understanding how your communication is working and how it might work better is critical to achieving this success. Flawed communication leads to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, mistakes, low morale, higher turnover, decreased sales, and lower market valuation; whereas effective communication leads to lower turnover, greater contributions, increased total shareholder value, and stronger market valuation of your company.

Communication is a complex process with many potential pitfalls that can be identified and corrected.

There are two methods to determine the quality of your communication; a:

• Communication Assessment (a short, pointed process)
• Communication Audit (a comprehensive, far-reaching process that encompasses the activities of a communication assessment)

Both strategically evaluate and analyze your company’s communication; both form the basis for a Communication Plan. A communication assessment is a fixed-cost alternative that quickly gives you a bead on your communication efforts, which helps you determine if you need to spend the time and money necessary to conduct a more comprehensive communication audit.

A Communication Assessment. This closed-end, short-term process focuses on the quality of your communication: how employees at all levels feel about your internal communication, its content, and the distribution vehicles.

A series of interviews, focus groups (including, perhaps, implementing a version of the world café), surveys, and questionnaires conducted with employees from across the company (various departments, management and staff, recognized leaders and informal leaders) elicits a cross section of thoughts, information, and ideas. Key questions elicit responses about what these people know about the company, what they do, what they see is important about their job, and how it affects the company’s mission and goals. It discovers what people know, what they don’t know, and what they are unclear or misinformed about.

The expertise of the people conducting the assessment enables a deeper grasp and evaluation of responses, ultimately painting a more robust and accurate picture. These interviewers must develop the appropriate questions to elicit worthwhile answers, and be available to conduct the assessment in a short timeframe.

To be of the greatest value, these responses must be honest. This is difficult to obtain if employees feel their responses might be used for other purposes or might not remain confidential. Objectivity and trust are paramount to obtaining honest answers since anonymity is critical.

From this information, a picture of where communication is clear and where it is cloudy and confusing emerges. The results of a communication assessment determine the need for a communication audit.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Employees feel disconnected in companies with poor communication. Why effective communication is needed in a workplace without it:

40%: Employees who feel disconnected at work.

67%: Workers who do not identify with or are motivated to help the company attain its business goals and objectives.

25%: Employees who show up just to collect a paycheck. (1)

49%: Employees who feel their company is open and honest in its communication.

55%: Employees who feel that senior leadership only talks at them, but doesn’t listen to them.

51%: Employees without a channel to communicate up the corporate organizational chart. (2)

Benefits to companies that communicate better. Company that communicate effectively enjoy these statistical benefits over firms with poor communication:

30: Percent increase in market valuation. (3)

57: Percent higher in total return to share-holders than companies that communicated least effectively.

4.5: Times more likely to benefit from employees meaningfully connected with the company.

20: Percent who are more likely to experience lower turnover rates. (4)

1: Number of Communication Plans that a company must implement to achieve effective communication.

Succeeding with better communication. From an employee’s perspective, effective communication encompasses these elements:

• Open and honest exchanges of information.
• Clear, easy-to-understand materials.
• Timely distributions.
• Trusted sources.
• Two-way feedback systems.
• Clear demonstrations of senior leadership’s interest in employees.
• Continual improvements in communication.
• Consistent messaging across sources. (5)

Source Notes.

1. “U.S. Job Satisfaction Keeps Falling, The Conference Board Reports Today”, The Conference Board. 28 February 2005.
2. “Study Offers Insights on Effective Communication from the Perspective of Employees”, Towers Perrin. January 2005.
3. “Connecting Organizational Communication to Financial Performance—2003/2004 Communication ROI Study”, Watson Wyatt & Company. 3 November 2003.
4. “Effective Communication: A Leading Indicator of Financial Performance—2005/2006 Communication ROI Study”, Watson Wyatt & Company. December 2005.
5. “Study Offers Insights on Effective Communication”, Towers Perrin.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Consider these questions to better determine how well you are communicating.

• Are your employees at all levels talking to each other?
• Do your strategic groups know what each other is doing?

• Is there a breakdown in communication—the information only goes so far, but from that point on, everyone makes it up as they go?
• Is there animosity over the perception that other groups simply don’t contribute enough to the company’s success?
• Does your staff know exactly how to proceed, or are there conflicting ideas?
• Are expectations clear?
• Are departments duplicating efforts while other tasks are left undone?
• Was your communication once flawless, but now that you are growing and changing quickly, these communication channels just don’t work anymore or are filled with static?

Communication fails as a company grows and changes. As a company grows—whether through sales or acquisition—communication becomes more of a challenge. What once seemed so intuitive, now seems like such a struggle. The breakdown of communication channels is common. This is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a pervasive issue with growth and change.

There are size thresholds where communication becomes problematic: approach that size and issues arise. For smaller companies this happens when you just don’t know everyone in the organization any more, or staff come and go and you’ve never met them. For larger companies, the increasing size just doesn’t fit into your infrastructure causing things to slip between the cracks. For extremely large companies, employees don’t know all the countries around the world with company offices, much less what they do at those offices. There is just a sense that everything is just too distant.

Miscommunication results when channels breakdown. To compound the problem of weakening communication channels, employees at all levels unwittingly communicate schizophrenically—especially managers and company leaders. A specific message about policy discussed on Monday changes by mid-week. Appeals to raise the bar of integrity are counteracted when actions fail to support this imperative. Or decisions passed down through the chain of command take diverging routes as managers and leaders at each level obfuscate the meaning, diluting its impact.

Messages about the state of the company change, sending staff in varying directions to the point where they end up in many different destinations. Off-hand remarks are misinterpreted and undermine trust.

Miscommunication can occur at all levels of a company. This kind of communication, of course, leads to confusion and misunderstanding, takes up valuable time while everyone tries to decipher the real message, and leads to shrinking morale.

Absent any overarching statement of vision and values and image, absent any clear channel of communication, absent any method for engaging in a shared multidimensional dialog, managers and leaders up and down the organizational chart are free to interpret any message and its meaning.

Effective communication is clearly stated and singular in nature. A Communication Plan must clearly state the company’s brand and mission in words that can be understood and internalized by everyone. It must inform every employee about where the company is going and how it is doing.

A company’s stories must be truthful and honest; they can’t be mere claims using strong powerful words. The emotional value behind the words and the means of how the words are delivered must not only ring true, they must be true! When that happens, a focused strategy emerges, energizing everyone to arduously pursue a common goal of success.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Successful performance means bringing together the best resources for serving future needs with a company’s capabilities, investing in the these resources, then constantly measuring and managing the results. To best bring these resources together, you must communicate effectively. And for that, you need a plan.

A Communication Plan relates the a company’s brand, image, mission, values, and goals to all employees, informing them of what the company does and for whom; the benefits it offers and the problems it solves. It describes communication channels that facilitate the exchange of information and ideas among your board, executives, management, and staff. It is a strategic discussion about the very core of a company: how it operates, what it stands for, what it delivers. This discussion must be robust enough so that everyone related to the company speaks with one voice, one mind, one purpose: a focused, clear, articulate message.

Creating and implementing a Communication Plan. One way to create and implement a Communication Plan on your behalf is by applying four communication principals: Enlighten, Convince, Motivate, and Align. These four-steps provide the framework for creating and implementing company-wide communication where everyone actively participates.

When creating a Communication Plan, address the particular challenges to communicating effectively in your company. To better evaluate poor or nonexistent internal communication, look for ways to change how you talk about problems, to truly assess and analyze these problems in a new light, and to generate new and innovative solutions.

Examine the relationship between organizational structure and specific communicative practices, how communication practices by various levels of hierarchy establish, maintain, or change the message and, ultimately, the culture. Anticipate communication deficiencies, and use these discoveries as a means for facilitating organizational development and innovation.

In a Communication Plan, draw the map that enables you to create a company dialog. Be sure to implement simple, clear communication through the most effective channels so that all employees can easily access, understand, and distribute the necessary information. Devise a clear overriding message that embodies your image and values.

A well-implemented Communication Plan has many benefits. Effective internal communication, implemented through a thoughtful plan, allows employees to feel comfortable with the company and contribute to its vibrant culture. And it’s this vibrant culture that leads to the many benefits experienced through effective communication.

• Your company is able to distinguish itself enough to attract and retain the best and brightest employees.
• Your company has a strong sense of culture, one that employees help create and want to participate in.
• Employees feel comfortable enough to not only recognize and accept change and growth, but to participate and lead it.
• Employees can readily see how their contribution impacts the company and its performance.
• Employees at all levels engage in a dialogue to become intimately involved in the company and its daily interaction with its customers.
• Employees can readily see they are working for something larger than themselves, some greater cause, and thus can see the effect of their efforts on the bigger picture.
• Clear communication engenders a strategic discussion about your company and its industry, leading to continuous improvement and innovation that anticipates and addresses market needs.

To attain these benefits, your communication must be authentic, aligning words with actions; it must be real, having a human touch; and it must use a language, a voice, that everyone can speak.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

A Communication Plan defines a process for communication among all employees at all levels. It is a strategic method of getting everyone involved in the company, its growth and evolution, and ultimately its continued success.

A Communication Plan is based on strategic goals, aligned and focused, and results in increased revenue and profitability, more robust innovation, and marked organizational stability. It unites everyone—directors, executives, managers, and employees—in your company toward this strategic goal with a shared purpose.

Specifically, a Communication Plan identifies:

• The types of communication that most benefit your organization.
• The people involved in sending, receiving, and contributing to this communication.
• The best channels—written, audio, video, electronic, verbal, interactive, and others—for creating and transmitting this communication, and an action plan for implementing these channels. These channels allow for clear communication up and down the corporate organization chart (from directors and executives, to managers and employees, and back) and among all divisions, groups, and colleagues.
• A time table for how often information is communicated. Regular communication is one of the many keys to success.

What constitutes effective communication. Effective internal communication gets—and keeps—everyone on the same page with your values, image, brand, mission, and goals. Focusing on these aspects ensures all employees know:

• What the company does, and comprehends the entire scope of its products, services, solutions, and benefits.
• Where the company is headed, and how its products and services, coupled with innovation, keep the company moving in a positive direction.
• How the company is doing financially, as well as projected revenues and profits.
• How their work helps the company succeed.

A singular, purposeful message. A well-crafted Communication Plan, expertly implemented, allows you to quickly adapt to change and growth; it strengthens your position in the marketplace. As a company, you benefit from a clear sense of purpose, a laser-focused message, and a strategy to distribute your message, both internally and externally. When your external target market receives your message, they respond in a positive manner, helping fuel your growth and contribute to your bottom line.

This focus works for a number of reasons and has many benefits. Everyone in your company gets and contributes to the same message using the same voice. Clients and prospects receive the same message in their interactions with employees.

Within your company, one hand knows what the other is doing. Employees not only understand, and appreciate what other departments, divisions, and groups are doing, they also know what the people in these organizational structures contribute to the company. Employees see the big picture and better under stand their place in it. They better comprehend where the company is going, and the benefits it brings to your customers as well as to them.

This is a powerful motivation and an unstoppable force both within your company and in the marketplace. Customers know what you stand for, creating a clear image of who you are and what to expect from you: greatness. This focus allows your company to not only stand out from the din of too much information, but also to rise above it. This focus replaces uncertainty with clarity: a clarity which you define and communicate. For if you do not define your message—your brand, image values—outside forces will and it will not be the one you want out, nor would it be accurate or consistent.

Effective communication enables you to speak with one carefully crafted message backed by real action and commitment. Only this type of true message strikes deeply, withstands constant testing, and endures.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Effective communication performs a core corporate role, vital to your company’s financial capacity as well as to your overall success.

This success encompasses many measurable factors:

• Increased market valuation.
• Increased shareholder value.
• Greater connection and commitment from employees.
• A more robust and inclusive corporate culture.
• Proactive involvement that drives corporate change and growth.

In essence, effective communication drives business results that lead to success.

Increased market valuation. Effective communication is one of the leading indicators for financial performance. Research shows that, over the first years of this century, companies with the most effective communication attained a 30 percent increase in market valuation. This is almost 20 percent higher than companies that do not communicate effectively.

This holds true for both publicly-traded as well as privately-held companies.

Increased shareholder value. Effective internal communication benefits your shareholders. Over the early 2000s, research demonstrates that companies with effective communication strategies experienced a 26 percent total return on investment to shareholders. This total return is 57% higher than companies with less effective communication. (By comparison, companies with the poorest communication experienced a 15 percent decrease in market valuation.)

Greater connection and commitment from employees. Employees work for more than just money. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves, to have meaning in what they do, to know their work contributes to a larger cause.

Companies that communicate better benefit from employees who feel more connected, more committed, and better understand how their actions contribute to a company’s success, which dramatically reduces turnover.

An effective communication strategy reinforces employees’ realization that they are critical assets to the company. Ultimately, employees are more inspired.

A more robust and inclusive corporate culture. Clear internal communication channels that create a dialog among all employees using a single company voice and that use technology in this exchange make everyone feel more in touch with the company. This is especially true for new hires. New employees feel connected to the company’s culture and immediately begin applying their efforts to the overall success of the company.

As companies grow, their culture can become scattered through the forced decentralization that must happen to keep up with a more complex business structure. Effective internal communication helps even the largest companies feel like a smaller, more comfortable, more secure place to work and fosters a sense of participation and contribution.

Proactive involvement that drives corporate change and growth. Effective internal communication has a positive effect on changes in the marketplace and in your industry. Employees adjust quicker and have a greater impact on changing business conditions, allowing your company to keep pace with this change, to grow, and to lead.

Most employees are adverse to change; they get too comfortable with the way things are, the status quo. Yet organizations with effective communication experience strong support for change and growth from management and staff when communication is at its most fluid.

Effective communication sparks a change in behavior, and more closely connects all employees to your customers. Ultimately, effective communication powers your company and proactively drives business performance to a higher measure of success.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

While cloud computing is a metaphor for the Internet, its breadth and range are much more significant and ground-breaking. Cloud computing is a complex infrastructure of software, hardware, processing, and storage that is available as a service. Cloud computing offers immediate access to large numbers of the world’s most sophisticated supercomputers and their corresponding processing power, interconnected at various locations around the world, proffering speed in the tens of trillions computations per second.

All of this is available through a simple Internet connection using a standard browser. Services range from the sublime—financial analysis, medical information and diagnoses, and document creation and collaboration—to the whimsical—computer gaming. Cloud computing is comprised essentially of applications running remotely (in the clouds, so to speak) that typically reside on personal computers and local servers.

A little background. The term ‘cloud’ first referred mainly to large ATM networks. Cloud computing began in earnest less than eight years ago with the advent of Amazon’s web-based services. Within the last two years, Yahoo and Google announced plans to provide cloud computing services to some of this country’s largest universities: Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington, Stanford, and MIT. IBM, followed immediately by Microsoft, quickly announced plans to offer cloud computing technologies. More recent entries include Sun, Intel, Oracle, SAS, and Adobe. All of these companies invested mightily in cloud computing and infrastructure to provide vendor-based cloud services to the masses.

Cloud services. Much has been made of the potential multitude of services that cloud computing can and could offer. In essence, though, these services break out into three main areas: storage, processing, and software as a service (or SaaS).

• Storage. The storage capacity available through the cloud is simply enormous, seemingly endless, and growing every day. Instead of owning and maintaining your own computer storage, vendors offer you the choice of storing your information in the cloud, on their servers, accessible whenever you want.
• Processing. Supercomputers, with the world’s fastest processors, form the basis of virtually all cloud computing sites. First, these supercomputers must handle the huge storage requirements. More importantly, however, they offer the kind of processing power that few companies can afford yet many critically need.
• Software as a Service (SaaS). For users, SaaS offers the greatest appeal. SaaS delivers benefits that are simply not available from applications running locally on your own computer. With cloud computing, you potentially have access to applications that you could never own. And a burgeoning number of SaaS applications enable you to create and collaborate on projects with people scattered around the globe simply by basing your information (think documents and proprietary data) in the cloud where everyone can access it.

A fundamental change in the nature of software. SaaS alters the basic premise of software. Think of the complex applications that you use every day: Word, FrameMaker, InDesign, Photoshop, RoboHelp, PowerPoint, and Flare. Each offers an incredible array of features, with its requisite learning curve. And how many of these features do you actually use, or in some cases, even know about?

SaaS applications will not be delivered as one huge chunk of code, but rather as a set of individual services. This method of building applications allows you to use the features you need, as you need them, without your having to understand all the available features first.

Take, for instance, Google Maps, essentially a map of the world. Individual services attached to Google Maps include locating real estate for sale, rent, or lease; hotels and other accommodations; restaurants and other eateries; and points of interest such as museums and historical sites. Add to this the services of driving directions, urban planning, land management, and scoping out street level views of many cities, and you’ve got a robust set of applications that are accessible, informative, and interesting.

Social media channels. Cloud computing drives the many social media sites that you access virtually every day. When you realize that you have been using cloud computing every day to send messages, store photographs, upload videos, and a myriad of other tasks, the promise of cloud computing brightens considerably. When you upload a video to YouTube, that video is stored in the clouds; when you store your photographs on Flickr or post them to your Facebook page, those photos are stored in the clouds; when you collaborate on a project through LinkedIn, all of your information is stored in the clouds. And being in the clouds means that anyone with an Internet connection and appropriate privilege can access this information—which is exactly what you want.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]

Social media has drastically changed how we communicate. Not too long ago, we communicated through the mail, on a land-line telephone, and in person. Today, we send text messages; leave voice messages; use instant messenger; send emails; talk through headphones, cell phones, and online video phones; and, of course, interact through the Internet where a plethora of social media tools has redefined communication.

Such a redefinition has had an enormous effect. The entire paradigm of social media has altered the basic rules of communication, especially between business and their audiences. The one-way communication methods of the recent past—business-to-customer and business-to-business—have been replaced by a more robust multidimensional communication model. That model is collectively called social media (also referred to as Web 2.0).

The rules of social media. To communicate effectively in the social media world means understanding the new rules of the road.

People want:

To have a say.

• Meaningful dialogue.
• To be engaged and involved in the process.
• Personal interactions with others.
• To be listened to.
• To help shape what they find useful.
• To connect with others engaged in similar activities.
• Plain talk.
• Communication to be genuine and relevant.
• To conduct business with ethical companies who work transparently.
• To be in partnership.

Understanding social media. While the tools and kinds of social media are many and their implementations seemingly boundless, they all share a common set of characteristics that meet the rules of social media (stated above). Herewith, then, are the five C’s of social media:

Conversation. No longer is the communication one-way, broadcast or somehow sent to a passive audience. Social media is at least a two-way conversation, and often a multidimensional conversation. Social media engages everyone involved.

Contribution. Social media encourages contributions and reactions from anyone who is interested. ‘Encourage’ is the key here; social media solicits an interaction, positive and negative, by making it easy to contribute.

Collaboration. Social media promotes an exchange of information between you and your audience, and among audience members, by inviting participation. Creating a quick and simple collaborative platform requires that information be organized and easily distributed.

Connection. Accessing information on the Internet only takes a click. Social media thrives on connections, within its own Web vehicles and through links to other sites, resources, people, and automatic feeds. People can even create their own personalized site of connections.

Community. The fundamental characteristic of social media is the creation of community: a fellowship and relationship with others who share common attitudes, interests, and goals (such as friendship, professionalism, politics, and photography). Communities form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities build goodwill from members to the hosting organization and among members. While these communities are only virtual, with members seldom meeting each other in person, they are no less robust than the physical communities in which we live, and in many ways more robust from the simple fact that barriers are removed.

Generational perception of social media. Three generations occupy today’s workplace. The three generations can essentially be broken out into those over the age of 50, the so-called Baby Boomers; those in their 30s and 40s, known as Generation X; and those in their 20s and younger, known as Generation Y. Baby Boomers have the most difficulty comprehending the phenomena of social media, so the perception of social media between the outliers—Baby Boomers and Gen Y—bears consideration.

Baby Boomers essentially grew up in two-parent households (almost 90 percent of families). For the vast majority, dad worked a job, mom worked at home. This family unit, with its incumbent network of extended relatives and neighbors, was the foundation of their lives. Boomers grew up with black and white televisions, party-line telephones, newspapers, mail, double-feature movies, and mom-and-pop corner stores.

Only about 45 percent of Gen Y grew up in two-parent households. For the vast majority, dad and mom both worked a job, essentially disintegrating the basic family unit of relatives and neighbors. Gen Y grew up with color computers constantly connected to the Internet, cell phones, digital media, email and text messaging, movies at home, and big box chains. Gen Y is inherently more comfortable using the tools of social media to communicate with their network of peers and friends because they have lived it their entire lives.

—Rich Maggiani

[Note: This post is one of our position papers originally published in 2012.]