Posted a little less than a year ago (the video was uploaded May 05, 2008), this entertaining video has gotten over 5,000,000 plays and looks like a great viral video.  It’s got quite a bit of appeal as we watch vaguely athletic 20-somethings jump (and land) in pairs of jeans in interesting ways.  We assume we’ve been brought along on the ride by a friend who has picked up a video camera to film the shenanigans, and posted them on youtube for fun, and maybe a bit of fame.

It’s exactly the sort of thing that a typical college student would forward along to a friend, never assuming it was an ad.  There’s no real dialog in it, no mention of the jeans at all, just subtle glances at the label that could pass as amateur camera work.

As an ad, it saw considerable success in the number of views. As an exercise in transparency, it was far less successful. For a few days, people forwarded the video, posted it on blogs, sent the link, and the buzz was pretty high. People were curious who these guys were and how they did it. Shortly thereafter, though, someone somewhere leaked that it was an ad campaign for Levi’s 501s. Bloggers, in particular, did not take kindly to being duped and the reaction was not a pleasant one.

Internet culture, for all its skepticism and negativity, wants to believe that things like this are ‘real’ and aren’t just a calculated attempt to gain sales. That said, there are a healthy number of skeptics who quickly learn when someone has been deceitful or deceiving. Companies that see the most positive reactions are those that are up front about their role in marketing and advertising, not those that hide it.

Decisions made in boardrooms can have very real and significant effects in all of our lives. The current economic crisis has shown us that, like it or not, we are all in this together.

However, while the societal effects of organizations’ actions can be negative, the corollary is that they can also be positive. Just as an organization can break the public’s trust by making decisions that affect their entire community negatively, they can also act in ways that make positive contributions. Organizations that are transparent and engaged with their customers and other stakeholders can demonstrate that they take their responsibilities to their larger communities seriously. Transparency in this sense can be a very positive thing, for both organizations and communities.

This focus on economic and social interconnectedness and push for organizational and governmental transparency presents an opportunity. It allows for both organizations and the general public to think about how business could be done differently, in ways that serve communities and society as a whole. Greater transparency and engagement could not only allow for pessimistic policing, but also facilitate productive interactions that could lead to benefits for all involved, not least of which could be mutual goodwill. And as these issues are now at the forefront of our collective consciousness, the timing has never been better.

Photo by: *SΛM

Our solution?  Actively seeking to become a “learning organization.”  Learning organizations are, as Peter Senge puts it, organizations in which “..people continually expand their capacity to create results they truly desire; where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured; where collective aspirations are set free and where people are continually learning to learn together; it is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.” (Senge, 1990, p. 14).

While i like Senge’s definition, it is a bit general.  So let’s get a little more specific.  Donald Schön and Chris Argyris describe people within “learning organizations” as operating according to what they call the Model II Theory of action, which tries to satisfy the following values (Schön, 1983, p. 231-232):

• Give and get valid information
• Seek out and provide others with directly observable data and correct reports, so that valid attributions can be made
• Create the conditions for free and informed choices
• Try to create, for oneself and for others, awareness of the values at stake in decision, awareness of the limits of one’s capacities, and awareness of the zones of experience free of defense mechanism b eyond one’s control
• Increase the likelihood of internal commitment to decisions made
• Try to create conditions, for oneself and for others, in which the individual is committed to an action because it is intrinsically satisfying – not, as in the case of Model I, bacause it is accompanied by external rewards or punishment

Schön defines the following strategies for satisfying these values:

• Make designing and managing the environment a bilateral task, so that the several parties to the situation can work toward freedom of choice and internal commitment
• Make protection of self or others a joint operation, so that one does not withold negative information from the other without testing the attribution that underlies the decision to withhold.
• Speak in directly observable categories, providing the data from which one’s inferences are drawn and therefy opening them to disconfirmation
• Surface private dilemmas, so as to encourage the public testing of the assumptions on which such dilemmas depend

We are currently in the process of defining the ownership structure for the core SociaLens team.  As we do so, i am taking some fairly radical, sometimes uncomfortable, and sometimes counter-intuitive steps (based on a Model I theory of action) to ensure that i operate according to these values with my clients and my team.  It is clear to me from my organizational experience as well as my study of business, cultural and media history that the time has come where such models are not only possible, but also superior (in most situations) to other more Model I-type theories.  (for a handy chart comparing the two models, check out Chris Argyris’s Wikipedia Page).  We will also be considering, as a team, to what extent SociaLens will deal with its clients in according to a Model II theory of action.

I will continue to reflect on this process here in hopes that it will be informative to other researchers and entrepreneurs.  Please leave your comments, questions or ideas below!

Senge, P.M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday, New York, NY., .

I’ve had many discussions with organizations nervous about this issue.  They are justifiably fraid of “astroturfing” * – the practice of participating, as a commercial entity, in a non-commercial space like a social network, and violating the social norms there.  There have been many very public examples of astroturfing, and even more theories thrown around of how to prevent it.  Unfortunately, many of the theories and methods are either too complicated to use practically, or so simplistic that they don’t fully address the problem.

If you agree with the premise from my previous post that social media spaces have social dynamics that are similar to those of small towns like Mayberry, then we might also extend this analogy to the issue of astroturfing.

When engaging, as a commercial entity, in social networks, pretend you’re a Mayberry business owner attending a cocktail party and you’ll do just fine.

Here’s why.  In highly-connected, highly-social places like small towns, there is no big separation between one’s work and personal life.  If you are a doctor or a store owner, everyone in town knows you’re a doctor or a store owner, whether you’re in the office or at a party.  So there will be times when your personal life will be discussed with a patient or a customer at your place of business, and there will be times when your work will be discussed with a patient or a customer at a social event – like a cocktail party.  The trick is to know your context and the people to whom you are talking, so that you know what is appropriate where.

If, for example, you are a Mayberry store owner who is attending a cocktail party at a friend’s house, the worst thing you can do is to start regailing everyone around the punchbowl with your canned marketing message and news of your latest discounts. Perhaps nothing would get you ushered to the door faster.  It is a social occasion.  If, on the other hand, the topic happens to come up in the course of a genuine conversation, no one would deem it inappropriate to talk a little bit about what your store is doing.  You might even get the party attendees into a conversation about what they think of your store.  But that commercial cart can’t come before the social horse.  You’ve got to show that you care – and i would say that you have to really care about the party before you care about your business.  Most people are pretty adept in social contexts at detecting false cues.

So if we treat our organizational efforts to engage customers in social spaces like a Mayberry cocktail party, here are a few principles to live by in social media:

1. Feel free to jump into social spaces, but only with full-disclosure of your day job. It’s fine to go to a party as a store owner, but in social contexts, people want to know both sides of you so that it doesn’t seem strange when you mention your store.
2. Make sure you really care about the social community. It’s pretty hard to fake this, so don’t try.  Find a way for your organization to really care about the communities it reaches out to, or better yet..
3. Reach out to communities your organization already cares about. If you’re new to Mayberry and you are an avid swing dancer, don’t start by attending a party where everyone is waltzing just because you think they are your “target demographic.”  Start with your natural community.  Before embarking on a social media campaign, find out if your employees are already involved in some communities, and consider ways you might contribute to those communities without pushing your message.
4. Get invited back. There is no magic quotient to this.  If you are polite, engaged, and add something to the party, people will invite you back.  Repeat invitations to a community are gold in social media marketing.

* Astroturfing refers to the act of trying a start a fake grass-roots movement.

Photo by: Takomabibelot

“What if one of my employees posts the wrong thing?”

“What if a customer starts a rumor that i can’t control?”

“Should we be completely transparent with the public?”

“Should i keep a separate business and private identity?”

“Do i want my employees to know my personal business?”

My answer is simple, straightforward, imminently practical, and almost completely universal.

When using social media as part of an organization, pretend you’re doing business in Mayberry (a really small town), and you’ll do just fine.

If you lived in a small, highly-connected town like Mayberry, you would probably follow three very simple rules when doing business:

1. Be polite to and honest with everyone – especially when everyone is highly-connected. One good interaction could turn into months of good word-of-mouth in the local town rumor mill.  One bad interaction could go the complete opposite way. The Mayberrys of the world are highly-connected, as is the social media world.
2. Remember that there is no difference between your public and private identity, whether you like it or not. The same person who enters your store is also likely a neighbor.  Instead of lamenting this, use it to your advantage. Personal trust does translate into business trust in places like Mayberry.  The same is true online.
3. Remember that what you say could be around for a while. In Mayberry what you say could follow you around for a generation.  On the Internet it could follow you until the server where your message is stored finally goes kaput.
4. Make sure people within your organization are well-trained to understand rules 1-3.

These same rules apply when using social media.  While at first glance this statement might seem a bit surprising, after a second glance it should make sense, since both are highly social, highly-connected contexts, and therefore possess similar dynamics. Many make the understandable mistake of assuming that all of these new technologies bring with them new social or organizational dynamics, when in actuality many of them are enabling a return to much older ones.*

(In case you didn’t recognize it, the title of this article refers to Mayberry – the fictitious small town setting for the 1960′s Andy Griffith Show.)

*For more on the ways in which electronic technologies might be enabling a return to older means of social interactions, check out The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) or Understanding Media (1964) by Marshall McLuhan. For a half-decent quicker exploration, have a gander at the Wikipedia entry on “The Global Village.”

Photo by: Natalie Maynor