Keynote: ‘Integrating People-to-People’

Speaker: Olivier Blanchard
Social Media Expert Blogger, The BrandBuilder
Twitter: @thebrandbuilder

@growwithorganic on Integrating People-to-People

I have met Olivier on three occasions and on one of these I had the good fortune to harass him for his opinions for a good few hours. I have to say it was a pleasure and I am looking forward to his keynote on People to People.

As far as I am aware, Olivier coined the phrase ‘People to people’ and know he has one of the most developed and sophisticated approaches to social media that I have come across. Certainly Olivier is responsible for (or guilty of) informing much of the method and best practice (such that it exists) around social media integration with businesses.

Interestingly, Olivier doesn’t use the phrase ‘social media’ in his keynote title. He refers to P2P or people to people only. I think Olivier finds the phrase ‘social media’ unhelpful and sees a focus on ‘people to people’ as a better alternative.

I am already a convert. Here is why.

What Olivier does well is see where social media fits into the bigger picture. Olivier’s critique is that too many companies potentially fall into the trap of recruiting or hiring a social media whizz kid with thousands of followers or friends and a very popular blog, but who does not necessarily have the ability to affect change on a business and all its various complex activities.

It’s a bit like the social media tokenism John Bell will refer to. Social media is not an end in itself. However, whilst for John the buzz word is ‘strategy’, for Olivier its ‘integration’:

‘it’s one thing to evangelize Social Media, even if you do it extremely well, but another COMPLETELY to work within an organization as the Director or VP level actually INTEGRATING and OPERATIONALIZING Social Media (or anything, for that matter).‘

Olivier notes that Social Media can play a part in all areas of a business, but this means redefining how you look at your business, and focusing on people as the primary actors. Hence P2P or people to people.

So I think understanding P2P in it's wider context is something that all Likeminds and Social Media insiders should try to do. It helps us focus on how to use social media rather than becoming obsessed with quite how cool the latest web 2.0 platform is – something I think most of us are guilty of from time to time.

P2P: ‘SOCIAL’ BUT NOT ‘MEDIA’

It might be easier to understand where Olivier is coming from if we stopped calling ‘social media’, ‘media’ altogether. It’s a term that is too easily associated with marketing and isn’t very accurate anyway. In the title to the keynote, Olivier doesn’t even refer to social media so why should we?

Indeed, a more correct definition of the ‘media’ in this instance might be ‘the digital infrastructure we normally refer to as telecoms, the internet and IT’ - the infrastructure or hardware, databases and systems that deliver and store the packets of data that we pass around from one to another.

By losing the ‘media’ tag you can begin to redefine what we usually call ‘social media’ as just another set of IT based tools or interfaces for communication. You can then begin to appreciate that the only thing that makes them different from other web based communication tools is that they are ‘social’.

So to use social media effectively in our company or organisation, we need to stop thinking about it as media, and think about it as a set of tools that allow organizations to engage on a P2P, or person to person level.

Even King Canute uses Facebook

I would go so far to say that adopting a P2P approach to at least some extent is a necessity. This is because Social Media adoption rates have been dramatic.

• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners.
• It took terrestrial TV 15 years to reach 50 million listeners.
• The internet took four years to reach 50 million people.
• Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.

People are taking up social media and it isn’t going to go away. If people prefer this type of communication and are going to adopt it anyway, organisations and companies will be forced to change and use this form of communication as well.

The point is they might as well try and stop the tide coming it. It's happening – even King Canute uses Facebook:

Square Peg, round hole

The problem is that getting social media into most big companies is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Traditionally structured organisations are run from the top down and centrally controlled. They strive to control and own the message. Accepting that they no longer own the message and adapting to a world where they don’t control the conversation is going to be tough.

Integrating P2P: A Solution!

The solution Olivier is offering companies to help them deal with this is ‘Integrating people to people.’

This means thinking about how social media can work across your entire business and focusing on people as the key actors. I look forward to what Olivier has to say on the subject, because it is closely related to what we do at Organic Development. We offer our own P2P approach.

Anyone who has heard me talk about the ideas behind Organic Development and complex adaptive networks will know that I tend to model businesses, organisations, societies and communities as networks of interconnected nodes - (the people are the nodes) - passing information around between them.

The speed, organisation and number of connections between those nodes is what determines how adaptable, effective and competitive that organisaiton is.

So at Organic Development, we try to increase those connections to improve the effectiveness of a business. You can do this in any sector or area of a business, and what you effectively try to do is help people use technology to do business better.

This is partly about building technology, partly about training, and partly about understanding how people in an organisation do things now and then helping them do things better without fundamentally changing the patterns of their behavior.

So one way of taking a step towards integrating people to people is to use the Organic Development model. Its not the only way, but it works! We often work with advertising and marketing agencies to help bring this kind of thinking to their clients as well. You can find our more about this on our website.

What do you think about P2P. How do you think your organisation can integrate P2P or start taking an P2P approach? Let us know and your comments will be added to the LikeMinds hashtag.