5Q: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, social media strategist

Mikolaj (Misiek) Jan Piskorski’s first reaction to social media back in 2004 was not unlike that of pretty much the rest of the world: It was interesting, but he didn’t see much use for it.

“I thought we had interacted with each other in the offline world for so many years, for centuries, in fact, and we seemed to do rather well. If you asked human beings if they felt the need to interact with each other in a different way, most of the time people would say no,” Piskorski said in a telephone interview from Lausanne, Switzerland where he recently took on the prestigious post as professor of innovation and strategy at the IMD Business School following a lengthy teaching stint at Harvard.

Ten years on and Piskorski has most certainly changed his mind on the subject. Now considered a thought leader on social platforms, he uses a collaboration of hard data and social science to help the rest of us understand the real value – and potential – of this complex new form of communication.

He argues in his new book, A Social Strategy: How We Profit From Social Media (Princeton University Press), that the secret to a successful social platform is that it allow us to interact in ways we can’t otherwise. Whether we’re looking for love, friendship or business parternships, the best platforms make it easy for us to build valuable connections.

“The offline world is pretty amazing but it is not perfect and there are always opportunities to improve on the offline reality and the online reality is compensating for these shortcomings in the offline world,” Piskoski said.

Clearly, we are intrigued.

By the time this book went to press in late 2013, Facebook had more than 1.25 billion users who made more than a trillion connections and uploaded more than 240 billion photos. Twitter had garnered 232 million users and eHarmony had more than 1 million paying customers.

Of course, we had plenty more questions for this social-media heavy-hitter. Here’s what he had to say:

What have you discovered about why we are so enamoured with these platforms?

Over the years we have developed these very intricate ways of how we should and shouldn’t interact with each other and, in some ways, these norms are good, and some ways these norms are very restrictive and not necessarily helpful to us. What I found that it is actually the norms part of the offline world that gives arise to the online world.

A great example of that is that you and I have just met electronically. We haven’t really interacted with each other and we are talking in a very professional manner. Yet, we might be very interested in each others personal lives. You may want to know what I was doing last weekend, and I might want to know where you went on holidays, but it would be very inappropriate of me to ask you. However, if we became Facebook friends you could come to my page and you could see I had an absolute blast last weekend. In fact I went to see Dolly Parton’s concert and you’ll see the pictures and videos and you would actually get to know me much better as a person. Facebook is letting us engage in these behaviours. I can go out and find out a lot about that person without that person actually knowing that I have gathered that information, but I am not violating the norm that it is not okay to do that.

How does the way we engage in social media specifically differ from traditional methods? Is it simply that we can peer on people’s lives without the fear of breaking social norms?

The example I gave you is an example of Facebook. One of the big uses of Facebook is around letting us peer into other people’s lives. But the more general point is that the online environments allow us to restructure interactions in a way that we wouldn’t be able to do in the offline world. Another great example is dating sites. One of the most successful dating sites out there is eHarmony. It is widely believed, because this is what the company makes us believe, that the success of the company lies in the success of its matchmaking algorithms. In reality one of the key reasons that eHarmony is so successful is that they have actually restructured the entire interaction process when it comes to dating. In the dating world, it is a familiar norm that women are not supposed to be aggressive when pursuing men and, in fact, they should sit back and wait for men to approach them. There is a long history of why that is the case but of course there is no really good reason why women shouldn’t approach men. Women are as qualified to approach men as men are to approach women. eHarmony has managed to restructure the courting process between men and women in a way that they have actually subverted the norm and encouraged women to message men and start interactions in ways they would never do in the offline world. It’s not only just gleaning of information, but it can apply to other parts of the interaction process, including the actual interaction.

You aren’t just a business expert, you also have an academic background in sociology. How do the social sciences apply to social strategy?

I graduated from a joint program between the sociology department and Harvard Business School. We were constantly taught to think about how our work informs the field of sociology and how our work also helps businesses become more effective, without, obviously, undermining human happiness. In that way, the focus of the book was a perfect reflection of my training. The book argues that you cannot think of online behaviours as being very different from offline behaviours. They are very tightly integrated. Humans are very astute users of social environments and if offline social environments are very difficult for them, they will naturally migrate to online environments. You see that, for example, when you look at the rates of any minority use of social interaction online. If you look at ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, etc. Right away, these are people who normally have a harder time finding a spouse or friends who are just like themselves. They will naturally gravitate to these environments. It’s good because these online environments get to serve as equalizers between people who naturally don’t have a problem interacting with a lot of people offline and those who do.

You’ve been quoted in other interviews about how your research was perceived early on – how some of your own colleagues thought it was “cute” but were otherwise dismissive. Your research is now considered ground-breaking. How did we initially miss the potential of social media?

I think that some of the early users of these social platforms were people who were not taken as seriously in our society. Teenagers, by definition, love the online world because teenagers don’t have as much choice in the offline world as to who they are friends with. If they are lucky they make great friends (at school), but if they are unlucky they don’t. For them the online world is really powerful. But when older people look at teenagers using these sites, they thought ‘Oh, it’s just a teenager thing. Nothing serious.’ Now, nobody doubts that this is very important and applies to everyone. But I think initially it wasn’t clear.

Where you an early adaptor of social media as a user, not just as a researcher?

I’ve always tried to go on as many platforms and maintain accounts on as many platforms as I could, even though very often I couldn’t relate to what these platforms were doing. But I really have to understand why these are here and what they are doing.

Can you give me an example of some of those platforms you didn’t really understand?

It’s not that I didn’t understand it, but it’s one that I wouldn’t use myself. Tumblr is probably the best example of that. It’s just not something I would use myself but I spend a lot of time on Tumblr trying to understand why it is that so many people are interested in Tumblr. What is it about these people that makes them so attracted to it.

And what did you find out?

One of the distinctions that the book makes is between platforms that have “meet” capabilities (those that allow you to meet new people), platforms that have friend capabilities (those that allow you to deepen existing relationships) and platforms that have both. What is really important to remember is that some of us have much deeper needs to meet people, some of us have much deeper needs to deepen our existing friendships, and I think Tumblr was a great platform to meet people you didn’t know. I just didn’t have that much of a need. It goes back to the idea that the kinds of platforms that we use will be dictated by the kinds of offline situations and social needs that we have.

Your book sets out a fundamental problem within companies right now: that managers or decision-makers too often confuse social strategy with digital strategy. Why does it matter?

I think that companies should just start paying attention to the fact that we are not on social platforms to listen to companies and interact with companies, and that you cannot be friends with a company. This is not the right environment for companies to be broadcasting their messages. I am not going to fault companies for falling into this problem because for companies have been so used to broadcasting their commercial messages to people that I think it is very hard for them to change the approach. But one of the reasons that I wrote the book was to underscore the fact that social media is a very, very different type of media. In fact, I make it very clear at the beginning of the book that I would rather not use the expression social media because I really think that people would be better off to think of them as social platforms to underscore the fact that reason we are there is to interact with each other as humans to humans. This is not media in the traditional sense like television or radio.

One of the points that stood out for me was that social media is like unexplored space. Even among companies that have been successful in making social strategy work for them, like Nike and American Express, still have yet to tap its full potential. Why is that?

I think part of the reason why that is the case is because there are still these competing forces inside companies -- the people who are thinking the old-fashioned way and people who are thinking the new way. I see this in all companies. I think the way to think about American Express and Nike is that they happen to have enough people who are thinking the social-strategy way in order to be able to propel social strategy, but there are still people in both companies who still want to be in the broadcasting realm. It really depends on who is getting their voices heard.

An example you give in the book is that of American Express and its ability to successfully tap the vision and knowledge of younger workers when it comes to social-strategy development. Do you find that more companies are awakening to this potential?

Yes, I think there is a widely understood call out there that in order to be successful with social strategy you have to involve young people. But I think this sometimes gets misunderstood because sometimes what people do is that they just say, “Let’s just hire some interns and have them Tweet.” That’s not right. Then you are very much emphasising the engagement part of the social strategy, but you are not thinking about how you are going to connect them to business goals. What is amazing about both Nike and American Express is that they have young people who are aware of how to do the technology component and the social component, but then you have the “old” people who are very clear that at the end of the day this has to be connected to business goals. It’s when the “old” people stick with the “young” people -- that is where the magic happens.

It is really a brave new world. Have we said goodbye to traditional marketing methods?

If you look at statistics of how media is being consumed you will see that, up until last year, it was the case that we spent more time on television than we spend on the Internet. Last year was the first time those numbers flipped. We spent more time on the internet versus television. Most of that growth is attributed to mobile and mobile devices and a lot of the time on mobile is spent either texting with people or on Facebook or Twitter or apps. It’s very non-traditional media that has nothing to do with what most companies are accustomed to.

No reversing that trend?

I think we are moving further and further into it. I think that media people are realizing it more and more and trying to come up with some with ingenious ways to combat it, but it is hard. It is very hard to compete with friends. One’s friends are always going to be so much more interesting than anything else that you can think of.

You went to press late in 2013? What has changed in the months since given the pace of change in social media?

I am actually in the process of writing a second book on the Chinese social media. I think that this is one of the biggest things changing right now. The competition has become global. That’s why you see companies like Facebook buying Whats Up and just incredible growth on the Chinese side. My predication is that in two to three years we will actually see more and more Chinese social platforms coming both state-side and in Europe, which is great for customers.

I guess no one is calling your research “cute” anymore. This is pretty engaging stuff.

Yeah, this is pretty hard core now.