Social Media, Emergence, and Telos

MIT's Sloan Management Review recently published an interview with Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald about their new book "The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees."

I was encouraged to see them emphasize the need for Purpose in the creation of effective social media-based communities.  There's a lot of money being thrown at corporate social media with a "build it and they will come" / "emergence magic" mindset.

Social media with no coherence, boundaries, and attractors is Chaos.  Internet-scale chaos works for socialization purposes where individuals form their own informal communities.  But, even the largest companies will probably find the intersection of "bottom-up" communities and the company's key exploratory activities relatively small.

Within a company, purposefully working to "manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within boundaries, within attractors" would seem to be an essential partial constraint on social media.

Seems like we prefer mindless solutions: an algorithm at one extreme or "emergence magic" at the other.  Managing complexity (and complicatedness) requires intention and mindfulness ... drones need not apply.