On Wednesday, I attended the book launch of Jemima Gibbons’ new book on social media, Monkeys with Typewriters.
The book is named after the theoretical monkeys or apes who, given long enough, produce the complete works of Shakespeare, and therefore explain the golden rules of social media:
- It’s simple (because monkeys can do it)
- It’s fun (why else would monkeys bother)
- Its ubiquitous (everywhere you look, there’s another goddamn monkey with a typewriter).
The book is one of the best I’ve read on social media - partly because a lot of Jemima’s experiences resonate for me (I’m one of the people who have never quite managed to get to Tuttle, but I have been a Fellow of the RSA for most of the last 15 years) – but there are other reasons too.
The book is written as a narrative, describing a series of experiences which I think works well. And it also provides a lot of information, a lot of which is surprisingly current, and quite a bit of which is new for me – and I read a lot about this space. All the book’s arguments are also very well referenced and supported.
But I’m also impressed because I think the book outlines the the paradigms that come with working with social media very well.
I’m particularly pleased to find that Jemima agrees with my own perspective that we need to focus on people, and what the technology enables people to do, rather than starting from the technology itself.
So, much of the book focuses on the required changes in leadership within a social media enabled environment, ie one that is not about:
- command and control
- micro-managing
- over-structuring.
But instead, is based upon:
- co-creation
- passion
- learning
- openness
- listening
- generosity.
Jemima describes her dream environment as one which looks like the world-wide web (or at least, web 2.0 – Gary Hamel’s argument too):
“Wouldn’t it be great to have a system where people worked together constructively without the need for micro-management? Where people were passionate about what they did? Where there was a common understanding of objectives and protocols? Where people knew who to ask if they wanted advice or where to go if they needed feedback on something? Where there were numerous experts on hand to give advice for free? Where people co-operated and shared stuff without arguing, and got rewarded for doing so? Where people were valued and appreciated by their peers? An overwhelmingly create environment, where ideas and materials were frequently re-used, re-purposed and mashed together in order to form new, eminently desirable products and services – desirable because it was the consumers themselves who had shaped them?”
I still think we need to take Jemima’s argument regarding people vs technology further however. For me, we need to be much clearer about what we’re trying to create. Focusing on an environment which is enabled by social technology is still inherently about technology. We need to go beyond this and think about all the different ways the desired environment can be created.
Even better we can go beyond talking about environment and focus on the outcomes this environment provides us, whether this is customer or employee engagement, knowledge, productivity or connections and relationships – or social capital (which is, in my view, the key outcome from both social technologies and the environment that Jemima describes).
Once we’re clear about the outcomes, we can look at which environments and which technologies or other enablers can best create these. My belief is that this can lead to an even more compelling case for change than the arguments Jemima uses for her very human organisational environment.
But I do think this book is a big step forward (from Andrew McAfee’s ‘not not about the technology’ for instance).
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You may also be interested in these posts from the end of last year:
There were quite a few sessions at the conference about developing a culture of something, eg of:
Jackie Orme didn’t include this as a theme, but it was certainly one for me. And I think it builds upon the previous three: 
Live blog from the CIPD 2009 conference final panel keynote: 
My favourite session yesterday was Nick Shackleton-Jones (
I’m doing quite a few workshops on HR’s use of social media over the next few months.
In his 
The other section of 
You may also be interested in these posts from the end of last year:
I’ve got an article, 
Did you get through yesterday’s rather monster ‘HR in the Social Business’ carnival? Well, apologies, but I think this is going to be an even longer post… (it’s well worth reading though!)
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