MIT Sloan Management Review

Despite the considerable amount of attention paid to social media by business, the press, and academia, managers still don’t have a clear understanding of what social media actually is. Managers need to understand the nature of social media so that they can understand its strengths and weaknesses for their own business. If they don’t — in a market environment increasingly influenced by social media — they may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Now that the crisis and chaos of the Boston Marathon bombings and the hunt for the suspects have passed, managers can consider the critical role that social media played in identifying and apprehending the bombers. Key management lessons can be gleaned from these awful events: (1) recognize what is possible for your organization and (2) effective collaboration is a learned skill that, with time and leadership, can improve productivity for a significant number of employees.

CIOs support social business and want to increase their knowledge about social media in the enterprise, but they face barriers to expanding their role. One of the big challenges is the increase in the IT capabilities and resources of the CMO as more digital tools are used in marketing functions. The roles of the CIO and CMO may be blurring, so the future of the CIO as a leader in social business is uncertain.

New CEOs need to quickly establish themselves and communicate their vision. Traditionally, CEOs communicate through e-mail, memos and Q&As. They walk halls, attend meetings and issue press releases. In many cases, social media is a more effective and efficient way to communicate with a wide range of stakeholders. Social media has already become a state-of-the-art leadership tool that surpasses many traditional approaches to listening and communicating with stakeholders.

Five years ago Cisco created its digital social educational platform, Learning@Cisco, which today has over 2 million global participants. People in IT sector go to the site to get Cisco certifications, to find industry jobs, for tips on finding work and to share information. This network has helped Cisco grow its industry, create loyalty to the company, recruit and become a key source for strategic marketing information.

According to researchers at Penn State, crowdsourcing works best when the right type of crowd is matched up with particular types of crowdsourcing projects.

Ron Utterbeck, the CIO for GE Corporate and the Advanced Manufacturing Software Technology Center in Michigan was vital in getting GE to implement its social network. The Facebook-like network built in-house is called GE Colab and links up the firm’s 115,000 employees from around the globe.

The network has been breaking down corporate silos, helping problems get solved quicker, aiding employees better find internal experts, and making it easier to share files and documents in a meaningful context.

Although most companies think “social media” when they hear the word social, author, consultant and business executive Nilofer Merchant says firms need to expand their understanding, and think about the transformative ways social tools change how an enterprise operates.

Among the fundamental ways social technologies alter companies include removing bottlenecks in decision making, freeing work from jobs; leveraging customers as co-creators; and getting customers to engage around a shared value.

The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the authors of the most outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from fall 2010 to summer 2011.

With social media fundamentally changing the ways in which businesses sell to customers — be they consumers or partners — a pivot point is at hand.

“I see IBM as a social business,” says Jeff Schick, IBM’s vice president of social software for IBM. “We’ve broken down the barriers of reaching out to the people within the organization” — not to mention partners and clients as well. And the company is making it easier for its client companies to do the same thing.

Allowing yourself to be interrupted all the time reduces your effectiveness as much as an all-nighter, says Boston University’s Marshall Van Alstyne. The solution is to batch your time on task and step away from the social media.

It has become accepted wisdom that weak ties — your acquaintances, distant colleagues — can provide more novel information than close ties. But new research by Marshall Van Alstyne, associate professor at Boston University and a visiting professor at MIT, suggests that in some cases strong ties are better.

Featured this month in the Social Business Innovation Hub:

McAfee Q&A: What Sells CEOs on Social Networking
In 2006, MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" as a shorthand for what collaboration and sharing tools such as blogging and wikis (and, today, Twitter) would mean for enterprises.

At Xilinx, collaborative tools to help peer-to-peer interaction resulted in an increase in engineer productivity by about 25%. It’s an example of “social organization” where mass collaboration is used to tackle strategic issues and opportunities.

A New Yorker story says that Facebook is trying to come up with an approach to organizing the Internet that’s entirely different from what Google has done, guiding you through the preferences of your friends.

The worldwide Langley Knights Competition starts July 2 at 9:00 EDT. Use social media and Google Maps to track down 5 knights in shining armor — both real and virtual. $16,500 in prizes and anyone can play.

The CTO of Tata Consultancy Services describes how he learns from his organization’s collective intelligence.

Social networking inside Tata Consultancy Services helps people access the full breadth of the organization’s collective intelligence in lightening speed, says K. Ananth Krishnan, TCS’s chief technology officer.

Most managers have at least a thousand dormant relationships. While they can’t all be useful, research suggests that the dormant ties that come to mind easily all tend to be worthwhile.