Forget the tech, you need social intelligence
Much of the hype around Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and the social web is focused on the technological elements of these emerging spaces. While the technological knowledge required to participate socially online feels like a big deal, once you get over that hurdle you’ll find yourself in much bigger topic space—one that we are just beginning to explore. From my personal experience of coaching dozens of bloggers ranging from the tech savvy to Luddites and young to old, the technological skill comprises maybe 5-10% of what one needs to know in order to be successful socializing online. The truly important skill one must possess is social intelligence.
We are nearing the end of the time when technology was a gate keeper. You no longer need to be a developer to create a web page. You don’t even need one to start using a powerful content management system. You don’t even have to pay for it! As social web tech continues to commodify, your social media technology knowledge will shift from a resume builder to a unspoken requirement, much the way typing is expected today. One could argue that with the arrival of Gen Y into the workforce, that day is upon us.
What is social intelligence?
From Wikipedia:
Social intelligence according to the original definition of Edward Thorndike, is “the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls, to act wisely in human relations”.
Daniel Goleman authored the book Social Intelligence, which incorporates a large, but palatable dose of Social Neuroscience to demonstrate how our brains are wired to connect. Here’s a brief clip of Goleman giving a high-level explanation of his book:
Recently, Jenny Andrews did a talk on The Evolution of Our Social Brains that referenced primate research (not the torture kind) that suggests our highest level of evolution to date is our social intelligence, with empathy at the peak. Here’s her 5 minute talk from Ignite Portland:
What does it have to do with the social web?
EVERYTHING! While it is important to know how to create links, embed media, and leave trackbacks; most of your success is determined by what you use those skills to accomplish. Blogs, wikis, forums, Twitter, social networks, and the like are all made up of people. And, you mostly interact with them in front of everyone else. That means that your social skills become acutely more important as you socialize on the world stage—especially as you move from an anonymous lurker to a high profile blogger. The A-Listers of today’s social web are the ones that have had an intuitive fluency with socializing, but as the rest of the world comes online intuition may not be enough. And, whether or not you plan to are a contender for the top, most of us will have to do some work if we want to remain relevant in tomorrow’s social workforce.
How do I get started?
Ok, all of this theory is great, but how does one take this info and start to apply it? Don’t worry, ol’ Justin isn’t going to leave you high and dry. I’ve pulled together a few resources that should jumpstart your exploration:
- Social Intelligence - If you only follow up with one of these resources, make it this book by Daniel Goleman.
- Radical Transparency - This is a concept that has already infiltrated the tech bubble, which makes it easy to relate to.
- Fernando Flores - Get to know this early thinker and his work Ontological Design. Fast Company did a story on him in 1998 that is still a pretty good introduction to Fernando.Landmark Education offers a programmatic distillation of his work.
- Non-violent communication - Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D., developed this methodical means of interpersonal communication from decades of mediation going back to the Civil Rights movement. This is great knowledge for dealing with competitive business people.
I should probably end this post by saying that I am by no means an expert on any of this. I’m in the beginning stages of my development in this area and will be sharing my experiences through out the course of this blog. I hope to connect with others that are ready to push into this next frontier of the social web to see where this leg of the journey leads.
Comments
everything comes down to money and sex.
pull the plug on the web - and this truth will remain.
i beg to differ mr. diggles, if it all came down to sex and money we wouldn’t have open source, wikipedia or any other innovations that come from the new web. justin, thank you for this article. it is a great challenge to translate social skills on a local and person to person level to a global, virtual one. i look forward to reading about your challenges in this area in the future.
i beg to differ ms. reed:
- contributing to open source is probably the best way for engineers to build portfolio, to make more money (and if it’s not the best way, then the best way is having built something that makes a ton of money)
- wikipedia exists because jimmy wales a) is smart and b) was trying to get rich (and/or laid) by doing something valuable (in terms of social or financial capital)
sex = ultimate social capital
profit = ultimate financial capital
i salute you, mr. diggles!
hi, there’s a conversation you might find really interesting between Daniel Goleman and Clay Shirky about the applications of Social Intelligence to Web Society. It’s available at http://www.morethansound.net
Thanks for the link, David! I’m looking for that conversation now.
[…] about how that might affect his future employment only after the fact). My man Justin Kistner points out that we need to keep all of our old real-world knowledge in mind when socializing online, and […]
I’m all for Social Intelligence and benefiting the end users with it. IMO, Social Intelligence can have two flavors on the Social Web.
The first, the basic behavior of groups of people and benefiting from that behavior, which is typically perceived by users via things like ratings, # of times something is accessed, etc. But this leaves the user to apply a lot of eye balling to get the most value across multiple samples, say across social networks, blogs, forums, etc: how is the BMW 7 series rated among many of these. Man, that’s a lot of work. I don’t know about you, but that is hard, I don’t have time for that. But it is what it is, yeah, we can aggregate etc, but it still takes a lot of eye balling. Can this be automated? Yup, but it’s freaking hard.
The second, is applying this social intelligence to benefit end users of business applications. No, not managers, who cares about them
I’m talking about the grunt loosing sleep trying to make deadlines or achieve their sales quota. Take a look at what we are doing at Oracle’s Social CRM Applications (http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/2008/07/social_intelligence.html). The basic premise is that we CAN apply business intelligence (BI) to analyze past behaviors and provide that to end users so they can do something with it. So what? I say. Well, how about applying similar BI tech for predictive analytics to help guide users in what ever decision they are going to take, say follow a sales lead, or purchase a product? That’s pretty cool ’cause the rep doesn’t have to hunt down stuff, it’s served up to them, a huge time savings and s/he benefits from the crowd (http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/2008/07/why_sales_reps_are_social.html). But, why stop there, that’s just business intelligence!!!! Isn’t it? Well, how about capturing the here and now, that’s something that BI can’t capture because it generally requires a lot of data to spot patterns and trends. How about if the predictive engine took into account anecdotal knowledge of the users of the social web to add value to the users? An example is taking into account current events, such as the California fires to sell more insurance, or Katrina a few years ago to sell more flood insurance that the predictive engines would completely miss? Now, you’re talking…the sum of business analytics + predictive analytics + anecdotal social knowledge = social intelligence…in computer speak, not psychological speak such as Daniel Colman points out in his book…I’m not psychologist, but I can use computers to do the dirty work for me w/o all that studying so I can benefit from Social Network behavior without getting tired of reading endless amount of info on the Social Web 
Interesting usage of social intelligence—business intelligence applied to the social web. I agree that one’s ability to not only consume the vast amount of data generated on the social web, but to also process that data into useful, actionable information determines how effective one can be at socializing. I think we’ll see a lot more innovation in the intelligence space applied to the social arena. I’ve been referring to that as an attention management problem, which is the second tier of development in a social media participants growth cycle.
It still requires that one has the interpersonal skills in order to leverage that data, especially if the participant has business objectives their seeking to accomplish. I can see a whole segment of professionals scraping their knees as they blurt out analytical data in socially awkward ways.
Similarly, all the social skills in the world don’t matter if you don’t know where to plug yourself into the conversation!! I’m going to check out some of the links you posted here.
Thanks for sharing this insightful perspective, Francisco!
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