Dear Sir or Madam:

I understand your fears and worries. I really do. It’s risky out there where employees may say something they shouldn’t that brings the wrath of a regulatory agency upon your head, where links from Facebook pages lead to sites that exist solely to infect your network, where employees seem to be doing anything but the work you’re paying them to do.

And it’s tempting to deal with it by simply throwing up obstacles to prevent employees from accessing these sites at all, or at least employing tools that let you observe their every online move.

When you hear that these efforts are mostly like in vain because employees have multiple methods for engaging in social media that bypass your networks, you feel frustrated and helpless.

I get that.

The time has come, however, to think differently about the issue of employees tapping into their social networks while they’re on the job. That time has come because new research now supports what many of us have known for some time now: that your organization makes better decisions that are more likely to grow market share and best your competitors because you have stopped encumbering employee access to social media.

Better decisions through professional networking

Out there, amidst all the banality and risk about which you are so frequently warned, the decision-makers in your organization are participating in Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG), according to “The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks: Social Media’s Impact on Business Decision-Making” (PDF file). According to this study—sponsored by the Society for New Communication Research (SNCR) and written by SAP‘s Don Bulmer and Leader Networks’ Vanessa DiMauro—“the long-promised global virtual and collaborative work enviornment” has arrived.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that professionals would seek out one another, form into professional networks using channels to which they already belong, channels that make it easy for people who share interests to find and connect with one another. The vision of a global virtual and collaborative work enviornment once conjured images of proprietary software. The reality is that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the channels through which these collaborations take place.

It has always been a conceit that the organization houses the best minds that can possibly be brought to bear on a problem or issue. That’s why Procter & Gamble formally solicits product ideas via a site called “Connect + Develop,” in recognition of the fact that some of the best ideas are not going to come from the corps of cloistered researchers P&G employs. More than half of P&G’s product initiatives, according to the site, involve “significant collaboration with outside innovators.”

Mining the Social Media Peer Group

But the social networks to which the decision-makers in your organization already belong are fertile ground for seeking answers to vexing questions, for identifying subject matter experts who can help solve problems, for testing ideas and soliciting feedback, for bring customers, partners, suppliers and other critical stakeholders into discussions.

As the study’s authors put it:

No longer do companies need to guess what the decision-makers want, or engage twice-removed customer research projects to find out what the customer thinks. In trusted online environments where the audience is vetted and the rules of engagement are clear, as is the case with most professional networks and online communities for business, companies have an opportunity to make informed decisions for the future—collaboratively with the constituents that matter the most to them. The implementation of collaborative influence strategies designed to interact with customers and prospects will find better results in using social networks to effectively buyild brand experience, opportunities for innovation, and sales opportunities.

Look at it this way. Since 1977, I have belonged to a professional association, the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). The core value of IABC has always been the networking. I can’t begin to count the number of times a fellow IABC member—or group of members—has helped me make a better decision that I could have made alone.

I took advantage of this network either face-to-face (chapter meetings, annual conferences) or by opening up the member directory and calling people one at a time in the hopes that they could help.

Think about Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online social networks as a professional association’s global conference that never ends. All members are available all the time. I can send a brief query over Twitter or a longer one via the “Answers” feature of LinkedIn and have ideas, suggestions and advice coming back to me within minutes.

Going where the answers are

That’s what the decision-makers in your organization are doing online, according to the SNCR study. Among the primary reasons decision-makers access social media:

• Access to thought-leadership and information I couldn’t get anywhere else
• Increase the speed of collaboration
• Research business decisions

The study reveals that decision-makers’ reliance on online information is shifting with professional networks rapidly becoming a vital decision-support tool—in fact, these business applications have become primary drivers for professionals’ use of social media. They have come to trust the information they get from these networks. When asked the value they derive from social networks, business decision-makers listed the following:

• I am able to reach and connect with professionals
• Collaborating with others provides me with fresh insights, ideas, and actionable information
• My collaboration with peers is strengthened by online collaboration and made more efficient
• My connections online have shared information with me that inform the work I do in meaningful ways

And yet you remained paralyzed—succumbing to the fearmongers who hope to profit from the worries they have created by selling you systems and services designed to allay your concerns by blocking, filtering or implementing Orwellian monitoring of your employees’ activities.

The SNCR survey results should inspire you to reconsider your position. After all, competitors who embrace these networks rather than block them are producing better, faster decisions than you.

Would it help if I told you that nearly 25% of the participants in the study were CEOs?

The role of a leader

You became a leader because of your ability to lead an organization in the right direction, the profitable direction, not the safe one. The evidence is growing clearer all the time that social networks are where work gets done, work that is better than that which your company produced when the opportunities to interaction with stakeholders was far more limited

Pay close attention to the conclusion of the study’s authors: “Laggards who do not understand the value of social networking and its appeal to the emotional side of customer relationship management will lose competitiveness and, ultimately, market share. Perhaps more importantly, they will lose the ability to connect and learn from their customers.”

Avoiding this unhappy scenario means that you, as a leader, need to drive a behavioral change in your organization, one (according to the report) “dominated by valuable content and genuine contributions, transparent honesty, and a commitment to follow where the decision-maker wants to lead.”

Will you lead your organization? Or simply react to the fear-mongers and inhibit your company’s ability to compete?