A good many of the current thought-leaders in the business/organizational use of social media hail from various business backgrounds – especially marketing and knowledge management.  While these folks have done a good job of furthering the cause for social media and of getting organizations to jump in and test the waters, a trend has been emerging lately, where these folks have begun debating and re-debating social media-related issues about transparency, return on investment, propriety of paying for content, etc. without coming to any sort of consensus on either a solution, nor even on the fundamental issues at hand.

In situations where this sort of things occurs, it is often the case that the group of experts seem to have run out of conceptual tools with which they can frame or reframe the problem when there seems to be no resolution.  When this occurs in any group, the group will tend to go round and round, using whatever tools they do have until they and/or the people paying attention to the discussion get tired and go home.  In such situations, what is needed is a new set of conceptual tools with which they can more effectively reframe the question in order to come to a better answer.

This is why we have formed SociaLens, and more specifically, this is why we have intentionally pulled together SociaLens from a diverse group of smart business and academic folks around us – even academic folks who are not explicitly focused on business.

You see, social media is not a new phenomenon.  Neither are its effects limited to businesses or organizations.  In fact, social media is just one of a series of media in a 300 (or more)-year shift in human communication practices which began with the invention of the telegraph in 1835, and will end with something else in the future.  And these communication practices fundamentally change the way we perceive and interact with our world.  So as experts continue to attempt to explain social media using logic based purely on modern business theory and practice, there is going to be a natural limit to their abilities, since modern business theory is fairly new.  Too, modern business theory may not be able to explain things such as the socio-cultural or psychological or systemic factors which play such a huge role in social media – even within an organizational context.

In order to understand social media within these larger, important contexts, SociaLens has brought together an extremely diverse team.  This diversity starts with its three co-founders who each possess a different mix of business and academic approaches and skills.  Our diversity continues with our 7 partner researchers and advisors whose approaches and skills range from business strategy and corporate performance management to relational-cultural theory and psychology – and many other in-between.

With this diversity of approaches and our strong teamwork (many of us work, teach, conduct research and even have fun together outside of SociaLens), we are looking forward to bringing breakthrough value to our clients and to the social media community.