Social Media - a Waste of Time

Whenever a new technology emerges, it usually encounters some resistance. I doubt if any one of us could honestly say that they are immune to this. There was a brief time in history when a car was only allowed on the road if a guy walked in front of it carrying a red flag. Back in the 1980s PCs and Apple Macs were initially thought of as toys by so-called “serious professionals” in business.

A memory from the 1990s still makes me chuckle. My boss at the time in a major manufacturing company I worked for said to me “I will not allow email in this company”. To be fair to him, he had a good reason that made sense at the time. The culture of the company was based on personal communication: if you wanted to say something to somebody you walked over to their desk and spoke to them.

As it happened, many people in the company had – unbeknownst to my boss – already become early adopters of email as part of their work. When an email server crashed (the good old days of on-premises servers) and a lot of important communication was lost due to untested backups, there was consternation in the executive suite and the suggestion that “email should be banned” was seriously discussed.

Even experts get it wrong a lot of the time and predicting trends is notoriously hard. So confident business leaders back their own perceptions, and their perception is reality. The perception of many people for particular technologies often influences strategy beyond reason.

Technology changes quickly, often at a bewildering pace, and enables new ways of doing business. It’s not that long ago that business people would never have considered using text messaging for serious communications.

I’m still hearing some business leaders say things like “social media is a waste of time” or similar sentiments about new tools and techniques. This sounds to me like an echo of my old bosses’ views.

In the short term, of course, it takes time to learn something new and that might be hard if the only way to operate you’ve ever known is email - or paper (nearly 20% of businesses still describe their processes as paper-based).

Of course, any disruptive new technologies have their drawbacks and challenges. In my experience, however, a high proportion of business leaders focus on the problems, and this prevents them from exploring the benefits that can be obtained. The rest are the early adopters who gain a first-mover advantage.

Learning something new is never a waste of time. Once you know how to use something, you can decide if it’s useful, but deciding that it’s no use to you based on your (probably incorrect) perceptions risks putting you on the wrong side of history.

As another old mentor of mine was fond of saying, “knowledge is no load to carry”.

Ray Delany is the Founder of CIO Studio and has been doing this for a while. Why not ask for a no-obligation discussion about what digital can do for your business?

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