Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?

This post is featured on Social Media Today.

How has the activity of organizational change been changed, with the advent of social media?

Back when I was an internal OD/Org Change manager in the Soap Plant, we spread ideas about change the old-fashioned ways: meetings, photocopied paper mail, and face-to-face conversations.

With the rise of enterprise social networks, and all of those messaging, micro-blogging, meet-up-ing, and connecting tools, the world of an internal organizational change agent must also have changed– but how?

Has Social Media Movement Building moved inside organizations?

At last week’s Social Media Week events, there were several sessions about using social media to foment change ‘outside’– among citizens, voters, consumers, and audiences.

Social media — the latest, greatest tool set for social movement building –is being used outside organizations:

1. To aggregate individuals who share an interesting change,
2. To cohere these individuals into a community, and
3. To mobilize this community into off-line as well as online efforts to change a social situation.

No one at Social Media Week really talked about using these very media platforms and techniques inside organizations. This led me to wonder:

Inside our organizations, are individuals intentionally using social media to develop organizational change movements?

We already know that the adoption of social media within organizations, through the implementation of “enterprise social software”, can (and should) transform relationships among individuals and organizations. Once conventional organizations, these actively networked collectives have become “social organizations”.

As far as I’ve seen, most of the conversation about the dynamics of social media within social organizations have to do with dynamics around getting work done (project management, knowledge transfer, innovation) and personal career development (expanding your network, finding sponsors, developing a personal brand). These activities reflect the basic needs of organizations and the self-oriented concerns of individuals who want to succeed in organizations.

But what of organizational social change agents?

You know, those individual people in our organizations who have a vision about how things could be better? These individuals may or may not be in leadership positions; they may or may not have managerial authority or access to significant organizational resources. But what they do have -now- is access to internal, cross-organizational communication networks.

• Are individuals using these communications networks to aggregate the attention of individual members around a moment, an event, or particular program?

• Are they using social media to build these aggregates of individuals into a core community of employees/members who are moving towards a shared vision of a better organization?

• Are they using social media to move organization members to act differently at work, to push for change and initiate it themselves?

The kinds of organizational changes I’m thinking of are not things like re-instituting Friday coffee hour. I’m thinking about organizational change initiatives like developing a worklife flexibility policy, promoting LGBTQ inclusion initiatives, or influencing the organization to adopt a cradle-to-grave sustainability program.

I can imagine a few individuals using the internal social network:

• to identify possible allies,
• to recruit new members,
• to share information about successes, failures and opportunities for influence,
• to send messages–public messages–to key decision-makers,
• to gather financial, behavioral data on the change topic.

Enterprise social media tools could also be used to build off-line community–for example, creating ways for people to meet each other and work together in person. Social media can help a change initiative movement “scale” to include a critical mass of members within an organization. And, it can allow individuals at many different locations in an organization to group together and put pressure on the organization from many different angles.

All of this change agency can be facilitated by social media within the organization, without or before even turning to the organization’s external stakeholders to engage them in helping to influence the organization.

There are obvious power-related obstacles to using social media within an organization to mobilize organizational change.

The primary one is, of course, that the organization itself owns the networks. If powerful members of the organization wanted to prevent individual members or employee groups from using the organization’s networks to foment revolution, all they would need to do is change the rules about how the network can be accessed by members, or revoke the user privileges of certain members.

Another obstacle to using social media for organizational change is that the very visibility, transparency and trackability of internal social media tools makes it difficult for internal change agents to keep their enthusiasm and participation “under the radar”.

Still, why not use the master’s tools to transform the organization?

It seems so likely that this activity is possible, I’d like to know if anyone actually done it. Anybody have some stories?

Some ideas about where this might be underway? Please share…

See also:
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?
Only A Cosmetic Apology? MAC’s Juarez Controversy & Fauxial Awareness
Enterprise Social Networks : another productivity lever

Tagged as: Enterprise 2.0, mobilizing, movement entrepreneur, Organizational Change, organizational change agency, purpose, social entrepreneur, social media, Social Media Week NYC 11, social movement