Luke Armour raised an issue in a listener’s comment to last Thursday’s FIR in response to my suggestion that critics cut Motrin manufacturer MacNeil Laboratories some slack. I was reacting to numerous social media commentators who were chagrined that a second notice from McNeil Marketing VP Kathy Widmer remained on the Motrin.com website for a couple weeks without follow-up. My premise: MacNeil has just been introduced to social media. Give them some time to learn what they need to know and develop a company approach to entering this incredibly perilous space.

Luke retorted: It’s 2008 already; just how much slack does a modern company need at this point?

It’s a good question, one that deserves a thoughtful answer.

Only 12.8% of the Fortune 500 have a presence in the blogosphere. Growth rather than size determines which companies populate the Inc. 500, which has a bigger presence, with 77% using some form of social media. Of course, that still leaves 23%—115 businesses big enough to be on Inc. Magazine’s radar—with no engagement in social media at all. A lot of social media commentators are likely to dismiss these recalcitrant organizations as clueless laggards, but there’s more to it than that. A hard-and-fast rule of business is that organizations adapt and change far slower than the individuals who work for and with them. Further, not all organizations adapt at the same rate.

And let’s face it: Even those commentators who decry MacNeil’s (and other companies before MacNeil) for their measured pace probably have family members who don’t understand social media or know what Twitter is.

But that answer is something of a cop-out. A more complete answer requires some context.

A little personal history

I was introduced to the technologies that would evolve into social media while working at Mattel in 1986 or 87. I had a modem for transmitting coded text to the company typesetter; most employees in this Fortune 500 company didn’t have a computer, which required a special requisition. (Mine was an original IBM PC, the kind with two 5-1/4-inch floppy drives, one for the application disk, the other for the data disk.) Someone visiting my office saw my PC and asked if I was on a BBS. I pleaded ignorance, and he (or she, I can’t remember who it was) showed one to me.

It was an epiphanous moment. Here, for the first time, I saw geographically-dispersed strangers bound together by common insterests sharing news, ideas, and information. Everything, I realized, was about to change.

I don’t remember the name of the first BBS I inhabited, although I do remember that it was run out of his Sherman Oaks, California apartment by a guy named Shane Anderson (or maybe it was Andersen), with whom I connected a couple times. From there, I progressed to two proprietary services: CompuServe, home of the PR & Marketing Forum (PRSIG—I was 76346,627), and The WELL, the San Francisco-based collection of online communities. Both of these allowed the creation of groups (for example, I joined IABC Hyperspace on PRSIG). You could leave messages for individuals or groups, share files, and start threaded conversations. On CompuServe, you could even do instant messaging.

All of this was pre-1990, and I resist the temptation to suggest that any of these resources qualified as social media. One of the requirements for a tool to be labeled social media is ease of use. You accessed both CompuServe and The WELL in those days through VT-100 terminal emulation; that is, you got social from the command prompt. That alone was a huge barrier for a lot of people. But there were some 45,000 communicators and marketers in the PRSIG, freely sharing knowledge and ideas.

In 1990, I began my first term as a member of IABC‘s international executive board and immediately began advocating the adoption of online technology. All staff and board members should have email addresses, I argued, and IABC should have its own BBS. In 1990, of course, few companies had embraced email. The reaction I got could be summarized, “There goes Shel with his online crap again.”

That was also the year I learned that The WELL—which functioned on a platform called PicoSpan—gave me access to this thing I had just learned about from Jeff Hallett (onetime CEO of the Naisbitt Group) called the Internet. I had also just started working for Allergan and, through The WELL, used Usenet newsgroups (another tool that doesn’t qualify as social media because of its complexity barrier to entry) to monitor animal rights activists. I would tell anyone who would listen that these resources were revolutionary and that every communicator should avail themselves of them. I couldn’t underst,and why my advice was so routinely dismissed.

In 1994, my current podcasting co-host, Neville Hobson, and I “live-blogged” the IABC international conference. There were no blogs yet, of course, but the members of PRSIG’s IABC Hyperspace section attending the conference in Boston covered sessions and uploaded their notes so others could read them. We also did one session in which a laptop was used to take questions via instant message from people listening to a live stream. I waited for greater uptake of these tools, but was disappointed that the association never tried such an approach again.

In my final year on the IABC executive board, 1996, the association was consumed by member dissent over a dues increase proposal. An active group of members in IABC Hyperspace presented cogent arguments against a dues increase, which I showed to the executive committee. One member of the committee shrugged off the discussion, insisting that “This is only 10 or 15 people writing here. We have 13,000 members. Why should we pay any attention to this?” I did my best to explain the whole idea of online influence, to little avail.

(Fortunately, by this time, I had been joined on the board by others who recognized the rising importance of online communication, and in particular the ability for anyone to engage. We were still a minority. In fact, we were referred to as the “IABC Technology Mafia.”)

Every time I felt I had grasped some great truth about the importance of online communication, I was greeted with frustration over the business world’s inability to come to the same conclusions. I often felt—with great hubris, I admit—like Cassandra, given the gift of prophecy but cursed so nobody would believe her. After 20 years, though, I have learned patience. I don’t have any special gift. I just tend to adopt online communication technologies a little early.

Can we please get back to the point?

The introduction of online technology and the rising importance of online influencers has been a two-plus-decades process. Over the last five-to-seven years, the process has gained a lot of momentum and a lot of people have discovered the power of the medium, including many of today’s promiment pundits and commentators. Some of these evangelists for social media were in grade school in the PRSIG days.

Once you understand the importance of the medium, there is an inclination I well understand to drag everyone else along. In fact, it’s hard to fathom why people haven’t seen the light at the same time you did. (I well remember sitting in a bar in 1995 or so with Michael Rudnick, lamenting the division of audiences I was talking to about online communication: Most were hungry to learn, but on one end of the spectrum were a few who were fully immersed and a few who asked, “I’m confused. Is CompuServe the Internet?” Michael, sensing my frustration, responded, “You need to relax. Take a few deep breaths. Close your eyes and count to 10. Then look that person straight in the eye and ask them, “Does it look like the f***ing intranet?”)

Different people move along the path to adoption at different rates—if they didn’t, there’d be no need to chart such a path, which Geoffrey Moore did so deftly nearly 20 years ago.

MacNeil has just—just—crossed the social media chasm. The company’s opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter in the form of the #motrinmoms dust-up, and now the company is, if Kathy Widmer’s promise to introduce social media to its communication mix is sincere, spending some time to figure it out. Even if getting it right were as simple as reading a book or two and developing a quick-and-dirty strategy, that’s going to take a typical organization with its layers of bureaucracy and risk-averse culture a fair amount of time. And doing it right certainly means more than reading a book or two. Even actions resulting from a basic communications audit focused on traditional channels can take months to implement.

So it is that I counsel patience. Cut some slack to organizations that have seen the light and try to be constructive in your criticism once they make their first steps; I well remember the savagery of the beating Dell took when it first launched its blog, now held up as a shining example of business engagement in social media.

Rushing to judgment is nothing to be proud of and hubris is an unattractive trait.