click on image to enlarge

by Kenneth Rudich
 
The stampede to enlist social media as a marketing tool doesn’t mean that questions about the effective use of it have suddenly ceased to linger.  If anything, they are on the rise, making its touted potential still a bit higher than its proven worth.

Despite that, many organizations have rightly felt a need to take action anyway, and the stories about how it has improved awareness or enhanced the brand are starting to get widespread notice.  These initial outings have shown a glimpse of real promise for its future, and they’ve sparked additional thought about what might yet be done to make it work even better.

next

Up to now, the main focus of most social media initiatives has been on the external marketing and the benefits it can reap.  But what about the benefits that might be derived from an internal marketing perspective, and can they be used to further fortify the external marketing?

It’s important to recognize that social media marketing is partially planned and partially organic.  No one can know for certain what will actually happen after the launch of an initiative.  In the same vein that some people will skip reading the instructions on how to do something and go straight to tinkering with it, learning as they go along, the external audience gets to decide on how they want to interact with the brand, to what degree, and in what context.  As such, a brand bears the onus for trying to fit into their social landscape, not the other way around.
 
One strategy for managing this dynamic is to encourage participation from among diverse functions and disciplines within the organization.  Since each is geared to ask and answer different questions, the perspectives will differ, and each will have its own unique outlook to offer.  Plus, it’s a good bet the external audience is more interested in talking with the likes of product development, customer care, public affairs, or technical support than they are with someone like marketing.  

Combining these views in a way that is meaningful to the external audience will have a  favorable effect on the interaction.  As Professor Francois Tadda aptly points out, “No discipline knows more than all disciplines.”

the challenge from within

To be sure, it would be imprudent of me to suggest this is easy to accomplish.  The internal marketing will almost surely demand as much time, thought, attention, and finesse as the external marketing.  Guidelines will need to be developed, systems and processes must be put in place, and it will require training to bring all the key internal players up to speed. 

It’s beyond the scope of this post to delve too deeply into these matters just now, however, so I’ll wait until another for that.  Instead, I’d like to take a moment to mention a few of the potential benefits that can come with being able to pull this off.

harnessing a fuller range of benefits

This particular approach does not stop at strictly using social media as a tool for bolstering awareness and brand.  Nor does it merely increase the quality and level of conversation between a company and the market for its offering (though it certainly could).  Rather, one of the larger potential benefits lies with its capacity to strengthen the organization’s own internal operations.

Here’s a short list to consider:

• it creates a platform for fostering interdisciplinary collaboration;
• it helps to reduce siloing;
• it promotes greater internal understanding of each other’s perspectives;
• it promotes greater internal understanding of the customers’ perspectives;
• it raises internal awareness of the organization’s commonly held goals and reinforces them;
• it adds potency to the mechanisms for listening, monitoring, and responding to customers;
• it helps the organization to put forth a united face for the public eye to see.

interdisciplinary

by Kenneth Rudich

What does interdisciplinary studies actually mean, why have these programs become so pervasive in academia, and what is their connection to the real world?
 
Academic programs constructed around the concept of interdisciplinary studies have recently gained considerable traction in higher education.  Nor does the trend end there.  Similarly new and equally afoot are terms like multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies, with each striving to carve out a niche in its own right.  All three appear poised to have a substantial impact on what we study, how we learn, and how we work.
 
This does not mean to suggest the age-old practice of engaging in disciplinary
studies will go away anytime soon, however.  To be sure, it almost certainly
never will.  Instead, it will remain intact and continue to function much as it
always has, right alongside these newer approaches.  The underlying expectation
is that each form of academic inquiry will make its own unique contribution
to our overall understanding of, and knowledge about, the contemporary world
in which we live.   

what’s the difference between disciplinary and interdisciplinary?

A discipline focuses on burrowing deeper and deeper into a specific area of
study, ever trying to extract more information about it, usually while paying
little attention to its relationship with anything else.  Like snowflakes, no two
disciplines are exactly alike in design.  Each represents a small fragment
of the bigger reality that surrounds it.  The goal is to develop a large degree
of expertise about a very very small area of specialization.
 
Harvard Professor Howard Gardner couches it this way: “…disciplines are separate
for a reason; traditionally, at least, one did not need the same skills to study
physics that he or she needed to study biology, for example, because the two
disciplines were geared to ask and answer different questions, and used
different methods.”
 
As one enters the realm of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and
transdisciplinary studies, almost the exact opposite occurs.  In this case, the
goal is to actively seek out and explore interrelationships among the
disciplines as a way of better understanding the world-at-large .  This trend,
reports Robert M. Diamond, President of The National Academy for Academic
Leadership, responds to the desirability for “integrating knowledge:
synthesizing and reintegrating knowledge, revealing new patterns of meaning and
new relationships between the parts and the whole.”  Emeritus professor James
Brian Quinn characterizes it as “previously unassociated matrices of thought.”
 
Though there are some distinctions that differentiate interdisciplinary,
multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary from one another, all three share the
same objective of forging meaningful links across the disciplines, to discover
insights that otherwise might not — or probably would not –  get noticed.  They
collectively represent a significant shift from the detached thinking of
disciplinary studies to the connectedness of interdisciplinary studies.    

the why of interdisciplinary studies

 As the world marches forward into the 21st century, it faces the reality of
having to wrestle with challenges that have gone from being difficult to
downright complex and intellectually demanding.  Variously described as
multi-dimensional, non-linear, unscripted, or non-routine, these challenges
will impose themselves upon us, and they themselves will be imposing.   

Take, for instance, the present-day embodiment of the sustainability movement.
Arizona State University President Michael Crow defines sustainability as “the
intersection of environmental, economic and societal stewardship.”  The
aspiration is to create a scenario in which these three become jointly
compatible, as opposed to one doing well at the expense of another.    

Achieving true sustainability, on a global scale, will require a comprehensive
effort to reverse an already wayward progression on many fronts.  No one
area of expertise alone can possibly encompass it all.  One idea, for example,
is to stop depleting the earth of natural resources by trading the insidious effects
of extractive technologies for the kinder, gentler touch of renewable technologies.
You may recognize it as “going green.”  Sustainability expert John
Crittenden describes this challenge in even broader terms.  He advocates
the “development of technologies that are ecologically sound, economically
viable, socially just and humane.” 

The mosaic-like complexity of dilemmas such as this illustrate exactly why
interdisciplinary studies have become so prevalent in recent years: because
they provide a method for integrating diverse perspectives that otherwise tend
to stand in isolation from each other.    

Many universities have developed interdisciplinary programs expressly
for this purpose — to give experts from different disciplines a central place for
collaborating on commonly held goals.  The hope is to cover all the angles and
intricacies associated with a given challenge, and thereby take into account the
full sweep of implications that come with any given action or response.  Professor
Helga Nowotny notes, “If joint problem solving is the aim, then the means must
provide for an integration of perspectives in the identification, formulation and
resolution of what has become a shared problem.”  As Professor Francois Tadda
points out, “No discipline knows more than all disciplines.”     

how well has it been working so far? 

In part 2, I’ll share how these concepts have been embraced in both the academic
world and the real world.  You might be surprised by the influence they have already
had on indviduals and organizations alike.