Can Social Media be used effectively in a non-collaborative environment?

By Rafael Martín

Social Media can be defined as the combination of technology and Social Interactions to create or co-create value for the different stakeholders involved. In other words, it allows people to have conversations and collaborate around topics of their interest to create value for them. In this context, value can be general information, news, expertise, discounts, or just the pleasure to stay in touch with a group of friends.

One important characteristic of Social Media is collaboration, the spirit of exchanging information to produce value together. But what happens when the environment is non-collaborative? Can Social Media help in this case?

The question I would like to answer today is: Can Social Media be used effectively in a non-collaborative environment?

A simple scenario...

Let's imagine the following scenario: we love the Apple iPad2 and want to create a blog to share information about the characteristics of this device, share analysis of the most relevant applications, etc. In this case, it is relatively easy to find other people that will come, join the blog and contribute with their opinions to the discussions in the blog. The internet is full of this kind of examples: http://gigaom.com/apple/ or http://appadvice.com/appnn.

But this is easy, right? The reason is that this is clearly a collaborative environment, where all parties involved in the exchange of information benefit by enhancing their experience.

A trickier scenario: non-collaborative

Now let's think about a different scenario: we are looking for a job. This scenario is competitive by nature: a number of job seekers are competing for an open position. In this case, not sharing information might a competitive advantage against competing jobseekers. Therefore, exchanging ideas and information does not benefit all stakeholders that are competing for the same position.

Even in these competitive (or non-collaborative) environments, I believe that Social Media can help to create value, although it is not as obvious as in the previous example. Let's describe one possible approach.

When a person is looking for a job, she is normally concerned about three particular dimensions: industry, geography and role. She will probably spend many hours reading (and discarding) positions that are not exactly what she is looking for because they don't match her right three dimensions, but only two or one. Instead of just discarding those positions she is not interested in, she could forward them to other people looking for exactly those three dimensions and, in exchange, she could receive job offers that don't match exactly the criteria of those other people. In addition to jobs offers, feedback could be included, so the value created is even bigger. With this simple approach, we have converted a highly competitive environment into a Social Media platform to help each other to find a job.

A similar approach can be applied to other competitive environments such as looking for an apartment, a car or or a good deal for holidays.

What can we learn from this?

1) One of the Social Media key success factors is collaboration. People in the community have to exchange information in order to create value for other members of the community and themselves. If there is no such collaboration, then Social Media doesn't create much more value than traditional media.

2) Social Media can be applied beyond the obvious collaborative environments, where the community enjoys sharing information by nature.

3) What is important in competitive environments is to find points where the different stakeholders are not directly competing and can benefit each other from exchanging information.

And now my question for you...

Can you think of any other competitive environment where you could apply Social Media successfully?