Social media offers a variety of opportunities for brands to understand and participate in those conversations. 

While participating in social media is not without risk, not participating might prove to be the greater risk — especially to reputations.

[Thank you Harvard Business Review]
[by Clara Shih and Lisa Shalett  | 07.31.13]

There are conversations taking place about your company or brand 24 hours a day, seven days a week in social media. Are you a part of these conversations? Or are you hoping that if you don't hear them, they don't exist?

Social media offers a variety of opportunities for brands to understand and participate in those conversations. While participating in social media is not without risk, not participating might prove to be the greater risk — especially to reputations.

Here are three risks of not being in social media for big companies or major brands, small business owners, and service providers:

Having your reputation defined by others: People are talking about you, your company and your brand, and your stakeholders expect you to be paying attention in real time, especially when they have a customer service complaint or positive feedback to give. You decide whether to participate in this conversation or not, but at least you are aware of what is being said. This is the new frontier for reputation risk management. If you don't tell your story, others will tell it for you.

New research suggests using big data, particularly social media data, can lead to a biased representation of the data based on societal factors.

Striking new research out of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that inferences based on how people use social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook should be reconsidered. The reason? These platforms represent skewed samples from which it is difficult to draw accurate conclusions.

[ Thank you MIT Sloan Management Review]
[ By Renee Boucher Ferguson | 07.17.13 ]

In her draft paper, Big Data: Pitfalls, Methods and Concepts for an Emergent Field, UNC professor and Princeton CITP fellow Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) compares the methodological challenges of developing socially-based big data insights using Twitter to biological testing on Drosophila flies, better known as fruit flies. Drosophila flies are usually chosen because they’re relatively easy to use in lab settings, easy to breed, have rapid and “stereotypical” life cycles, and the adults are pretty small. The problem? They’re not necessarily representative of non-lab (read: real-life) scenarios. Tufekci posits that the dominance of Twitter as the “model organism” for social media in big data analyses similarly skews analysis:

When ideas are still being developed or decisions still being considered, criticism and constructive conflict are vital to testing the value of the ideas.

By contrast, when everyone in a group always agrees, it can indicate that the group doesn't have very many ideas, or that they value agreement more than quality suggestions.

[Thank you harvard Business Review]
[by David Burkus  |   07.22.13]

It's tough to find examples of successfully challenging the boss, even tougher to find stories of leaders who specifically ask to be challenged. The most common is a tale of Alfred P. Sloan at General Motors. During a meeting in which GM's top management team was considering a weighty decision, Sloan closed the meeting by asking." "Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?" Sloan then waited as each member of the assembled committee nodded in agreement. Sloan continued, "Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about."

What Sloan was looking for was something many of us seek to eliminate: dissent. There's a lot of discussion on how leaders ought to cast a vision, gain buy-in, or steer a group to consensus. There's a lot less discussion on how leaders ought to cultivate a culture that values the right kind of criticism. That criticism is what Sloan was looking for, and what research tells us we need in order to make the best decision.

When ideas are still being developed or decisions still being considered, criticism and constructive conflict are vital to testing the value of the ideas and helping increase that value. Conflict is an indicator that diverse viewpoints are being considered and that the competition for ideas is still ongoing. During this competition, ideas are strengthened through further research, consideration or through the blending of different ideas into one stronger concept. By contrast, when everyone in a group always agrees, it can indicate that the group doesn't have very many ideas, or that they value agreement more than quality suggestions.

My mom Pierrette Mora is a painter in Rennes, Brittany, France.
Pro site: http://www.pierrettemora.fr
Pro Board: http://pinterest.com/philippemora/sarturday-by-pierrette-mora/