Authenticity, Authorship, and Authority in Social Media

Last week I attended the MESH conference for the second consecutive year and once again the issue arose around evaluating the use of social media technology by a commercial enterprise. To varying degrees it came up in three consecutive sessions, the most electric of which was a mosh pit with a panel of representatives from three corporations: Chris Reid from Yamaha Motor Canada, Natalie Johnson from General Motors and Jenny Bullough from Harlequin Enterprises. The session was skilfully moderated by Michael O'Connor Clarke.

These corporate representatives described the ways in which they had used social media to engage with customers and therefore redefine, influence and transform the perception of their respective companies and brands.

Not an easy task to be on that stage - it's a tricky thing to even describe let alone discuss in an energized room full of hundreds of highly intelligent people who are paying very strict attention to the slightest implications of whatever word or phrase a panelist might choose to use. There were some sparks.

It appeared that many of us in the mosh pit wanted to understand exactly where these panellists were coming from and perhaps had some doubt about the ability of large corporations to ever use social media in a genuine, authentic manner.

The question underlying all this is who speaks for the company? In the traditional world it's the executive level that controls everything uttered officially about the corporate entity. But in the emerging social media world a variety of people within and outside of the company can greatly influence the meaning of the brand by engaging as real people in dialogs through blogs and other social media tools.

So how far are the old school bosses willing to go into this new social media world? I had an opportunity to put this question to the panellists, asking them to speak of it in terms of three words that had popped into my head: Authenticity, Authorship, and Authority.

I knew that these words had something to do with it but I couldn't yet work out the relationship. I had hoped that their answers might have provided more clues. But my impression of their responses (confirmed by my neighbours) was that they didn't really answer the question. I won't fault them for this because these matters are hard to pin down without a meaningful metric. We need such a metric.

If there were such a scale then, based on the buzz around my section of the audience, I would say that Harlequin easily scored the highest mark. Jenny Bullough said some pretty amazing things about how her company from different levels had been engaged directly and meaningfully with their customer base for over 10 years. She summarized it for me in a subsequent conversation:

In other words Harlequin`s customer engagement through social media seemed to be the real thing, based on a substantial corporate policy and long history of interaction with customers and writers that has contributed much to their repertoire of published works.

On the contrary Chris Reid from Yamaha Motor got a low score in my books when he spoke about how he controls everything that is written in a social media context on behalf of the company. That did not seem to achieve the level of authenticity that I think many of us were hoping to hear. Did I hear it wrong?

During the session Natalie Johnson from GM seemed to be in the same camp as Chris and she took some heat from the floor (see first video above). But I caught up with her after the session and after listening to more details about GM`s practices and goals for social media I came away thinking that they did have a grasp of how to use social media in a genuine and meaningful manner. Based on that I would rate GM as pretty high in terms of its objectives and practice even though they don't have the years of experience with it that Harlequin has.

(Keep in mind that I haven't directly experienced any of the social media initiatives carried out by these companies. I'm just using my impressions of what I heard during the MESH sessions* to explore notions of metrics for use of social media in the enterprise. This is far from an 'objective' analysis of any of their practices. Just brainstorming.)

After emerging from the last of the three sessions on this topic, I breezed by a book promo display in the meetup area. I did an about-face. The word 'authenticity' had caught my attention so I checked out the book more closely.

It was called "Personality not included : Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity - And How Great Brands Get it Back". It was written by Rohit Bhargava who had been on the panel in the final session of the day. Out of all the many things that were said in that session I remembered him saying "Don't give up control. Share it." Those words had stuck in my mind.

So I bought the book** and as I did so, Rohit happened to come by. We discussed the authenticity, authorship and authority thing some more:

After this discussion with Rohit I thought more about the fuzzy definition of 'Authority' and wondered if that might be the cause of confusion when trying to resolve how social media applies in the enterprise context. In my chats with people at MESH the word seemed to be taken to mean 'subject authority' - i.e. the direct and meaningful knowledge on a given subject. But I imagine there is another meaning at play as the enterprise attempts to embrace (or just utilize) social media -i.e. the central power that has control over the enterprise and that might feel threatened by any attempts to disrupt the status quo.

With this in mind I formed an image of an 'authenticity metric device' in the form of a balanced interaction with the social media goal of optimum engagement placed appropriately in the middle. At one end is the old style, top-down control approach and at the other extreme is some form of PR nightmare.

I like this image because it visually identifies a point where an exciting balance might be reached between the two extremes. It allows a way for an organization to state their intended use of social media in a simple, graphical way. They could pick a point on the spectrum and identify it as a target or comfort zone.

It would be very interesting to do a survey of enterprises to see where they are in fact trying to place themselves on this scale. And it would be even more interesting to weigh that against a poll of where their customers actually perceive them on the scale. Of course you'd have to replace the numbers with descriptions that make sense to the participants and that could be cast in a variety of ways.

Call it a sort of social media barometer.

Footnotes

*Other speakers and attendees at MESH also had things to say about this topic. E.g. see Zoe Siskos' posts at Social Media Group.
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** If you're interested in how social media can be used in marketing today, I highly recommend Rohit's book for an enjoyable read with many valuable insights.
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