Accumulating Social Currency through SM-F-CoP Engagement
The next area of interest outside of one’s organization that a digital leader can capitalize on is to accumulate social currency by participating in SM-F-CoPs. This is an emerging area that today’s digital leaders don’t have any predecessors to follow and there are no best practices to learn from. The notion of learning by doing (Dewey, 1938) best describes the way we are approaching this area of interest. It is an area that challenges and stretches digital leaders’ forward-thinking skills and mindset.
Though sharing the three elements of the commonly known CoP – domain, community, and practice (Smith, 2003, 2009), SM-F-CoP seems to be much more difficult to predict and manage. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that SM-F-CoP is elusive both spatially and temporally. SM-F-CoP can take shape, turn into actions, and dissolve at a fairly unpredictable speed ranging from hours to years. The impact can be either positive or negative and, many times, dramatic. Widely known examples of the impact of SM-F-CoPs include how they have helped to elevate social movements for social justice to an unprecedented level of actions (e.g. #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, etc.). To lead successful digital transformation, a digital leader doesn’t necessarily have to initiate a social movement. But understanding the potential impact (positive and negative) and developing appropriate strategies to cultivate the positive and minimize the negative is needed.
The video below uses actual social media data to showcase how SM-F-CoPs went viral that, to a large extent, fueled the Egyptian Revolution back in 2011. This single case study alone can not help digital leaders understand how most SM-F-CoPs work and develop strategies accordingly. But it provides a rough idea about why digital leaders should have strong presence on social media. First, being present on social media would allow digital leaders accumulate social currency by tapping into those SM-F-CoPs that are otherwise inaccessible through offline CoPs. By contributing to or even facilitating some of those SM-F-CoPs will give digital leaders the opportunity to help shape the conversations around digital transformation at a much broader context and to reach more audiences, which will either directly or indirectly set the stage for future digital transformations.
