According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Facebook’s “closed social network” is steadily and noticeably encroaching on Google’s territory. As a result, “Google risks losing the competition for Web users’ time, details of their lives and, ultimately, advertising.” (Really, did you think it wouldn’t come down to money?)
Google has been and continues to be the leader in writing algorithms for internet searches. Trouble is, the algorithms don’t work so well in social networking, because they can’t determine how humans actually make decisions or interact socially. In other words, you really can’t plug human nature into a formula.
Creating algorithms for social interaction is, in one form or another, what many businesses are trying to do. They’re having just about as much success at it as Google. Money, time, and effort are consistently spent on strategic plans that are never fully executed, business development programs that may or may not be completed or acted on, and retention tactics that often miss the mark.
These efforts fail because often they don’t consider how the humans affected will react – or, more likely, not react. A small core of people creates something that looks terrific on paper, only to have it largely ignored by the rest of the people in the organization. We humans decide mostly with our emotions: pleasure, fear, acceptance, loyalty, happiness.
Google is learning that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reduce human behavior to reliable, predicable statistics. As business owners and leaders, we can learn from Google’s travails. We can create better programs for retention, business development and just about everything else when we remember to include those whose participation is crucial to the program’s success.
We can lead our organizations more effectively when we remember that our team members are not parts of a formula, but individuals whose decision making process is a complex blend of rational, emotional, and social elements.
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