As the growth of 'Social' becomes exponential, everywhere, including organizations, we are seeing a trend, a trend which is becoming a dangerous monster, which will kill the very existence of it.
This monster gets life when we take steps to make 'Cloned Social'. When efforts are put to inorganically grow the communities, or make them active, or when incentives are put to push the use of social media or when rewards substitute the intrinsic motivation.
In my last blog, The Fairy tale is ending, we read about how this phenomenon of incentivizing use of social media with in organization will actually kill it. By not letting people adopt 'social' if they find value in it - and making it a mandate and taking the charm out of it. Imagine all employees of a huge organization start posting status updates, not because they want to share it but they are forced to paste!
The problem is just not numbers or sheer waste of resource, it goes much deeper, inside our psych, and messes up our behavior system. It's called over-justification effect. There are many studies that acknowledge and support this phenomenon.
Let's understand that, whatever we do, there is an intrinsic or extrinsic factor working on it. And when we talk about being social, it always more to do with intrinsic need/driver. This is a classic case where rewards will actually do more damage than good.
Rewarding a behavior driven by intrinsic motivation replaces the motivation and makes it depend on the rewards for motivation. It is like pumping plastic blood in your heart and eventually the heart stops responding to real blood. Now the real action will look for rewards and in the absence of it, the behavior will stop.
Similarly, if organizations start rewarding employees for writing blogs, why will people write once the rewards are taken off? Same goes with sharing files or micro-blogging. Just like pulling a plant every day to ensure it grows faster. The plant will die. I bet my salary.
The essence of social is in its value - be it a community or an individual or an organization.