I found myself explaining to a client the other day why incentives don’t work very well for encouraging people to get involved in social media. Indeed, incentives can have the very opposite effect so must be handled with extreme caution.

This excellent video from Dan Pink explains very succinctly why incentives do not work for anything other than simple mechanical tasks, and goes on to examine the importance of autonomy.

You should also read Johnnie Moore’s blog post Incentives, innovation, community which adds yet more flavour and context, including lots of quotes from and links to studies in the same area. And you might also like my post on incentives from earlier this year.

It’s unsurprising that these flaws ‘business operating systems’ affect the way that social media projects are rolled out, as companies try to remake social media in their own image. But it’s also interesting to (sometimes) see how the more autonomous processes of social media can rub off on business culture. Might social media even be a powerful enough force to change the default settings under which business operates? I hope so.

Stephen Baker writes an interesting piece over on Business Week sounding a note of caution about social media snake oil (and publishes some paragraphs that didn’t make the final cut on his own blog). The comments take Baker to task about the case studies he selects, but I think the point he makes still stands: It’s very easy to become a well-known name in social media regardless of your actual knowledge and experience, and quite a different thing to achieve results.

The problem of social media carpetbaggers is something I’ve mentioned before, but it’s a topic worth revisiting regularly because it’s not one that’s going away. People can be suspicious of consultants at the best of times and now that the job title “social media consultant” draws the same reaction as “estate agent” or “used car salesman”, it’s clear that the carpetbaggers are having a strong and negative impact on the perception of social media.

Therein lies the problem. Social tools can be incredibly powerful, but they have to be used well to stand even the slightest chance of success. If you have a crappy email client, you just have to learn to live with it. A crappy social media project is not only something that people can reject out of hand, it’s also likely that when it fails it is social media that is blamed, not the implementation.

Baker suggests that there is “danger of a backlash”. I’d say that the backlash is already happening – I see it already in the scorn some people heap on not just consultants but the tools themselves.

We saw exactly the same thing happen after the Dot Com Crash. Companies that had invested in expensive web projects, many of which were doomed from the outset due to being patently stupid ideas, failed to look at their own poor decisions and instead wrote off the web as a bad idea. “Internet” became a four letter word. (If you tried raising biz dev money in autumn 2002, you’ll know that!) The baby was thrown out with the bath water.

Seven years later, companies that had been quick to throw their digital talent under the bus have found themselves way behind competitors who reacted more sensibly to the end of the boom. Those who invested wisely in the web and ensured they had good digital people on board have flourished. The nay sayers are still running to catch up.

So here are two basic truths about social media:

* Social media is not a panacea. It cannot perform miracles. It cannot turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. It can go horribly wrong horribly easily.

* Social media is not a waste of time. It can be transformational. It can empower your staff and your customers. It takes time, effort and understanding to get it right.

Companies making bad decisions now about social media are going to have a lot of running to do in five years’ time when they suddenly realise how far behind they are.

Smashing Magazine has an article titled The Death of the Blog Post, wherein UX designer Paddy Donnelly examines a trend amongst web designers to play with their blog’s design and layout in what he calls a “blogazine” – a blog with a magazine-style layout. Donnelly’s main point seems to be that he, and other designers, find traditional blog designs boring, and feel that that each post deserves to have its own design to service its own needs, rather than have to fit in with a single blog-wide design.

I can understand why this is deeply attractive to designers. The creative freedom to tailor a page’s design perfectly to fit the text must be something designers often crave. And the examples he gives, particularly those from Dustin Curtis, look lovely. But the idea of designing each post afresh is only going to work for a very tiny minority of bloggers with the time and skills. For the vast majority of bloggers, this is just not an option.

But more than that, conflating blog and magazine is a really bad idea.

In unpicking why, we have an opportunity for some important lessons for enterprise. The first is that your blog design really, really matters. There is no excuse for you not to have a beautifully, professionally designed blog that is readable, accessible, and flexible enough to be read on different monitors or devices. If your blog is just slapped onto your corporate website with the same navigation, styling and layout as the rest of the site you should get it redesigned right now. No excuses.

The next lesson is relevant not just to enterprise, but also to web designers shifting from site design to blog design: Blog design patterns matter.

When you look at a well-designed blog you will see a number of features that I call “blog furniture”. There are many pieces of blog furniture to choose from, and not all blogs use all pieces, but most use a combination of:

• Calendar
• Search
• Categories
• Archives
• Recent posts
• Recent comments
• Meta information (e.g. the admin sign-in link, RSS feed link)
• RSS feeds from other sources, e.g. Delicious, Twitter, or news headlines
• Badges from third party sites, e.g. Flickr badges
• About the Author text, photo or link
• Blogroll or list of external links
• Tag lists or tag clouds

These are really important not just because they are useful, but because they provide the visual cues that tell visitors they are somewhere different from the rest of the site, somewhere more personal, more conversational, more informal. Take those cues away, and you risk confusing your readers, even if only momentarily.

If I pitch up on a page that looks just like the rest of the site – or, indeed, nothing like any other page on the site – then it’s going to take me a while to understand what it is and what it’s for. When we arrive on a new site, we give it less than a second to impress us. If the visuals conflict with the content, for example, we are expecting to see a blog but we are presented with something that looks like a magazine, we are less likely to hang around. The fact that it looks pretty isn’t going to make up for that moment of disconnection. (In this precise case, designers may be the exception, but that also means they are profoundly unable to judge whether or not a page causes a conflict of expectations.)

Thirdly, RSS matters. A cornerstone of the blogging world, RSS strips out all design and present, very simply, passages of text interspersed with any graphics. Donnelly’s post looks awful in RSS. Compare and contrast:

From the website

From the RSS feed

A blog post that reads in a disjointed way, with too many graphics, in your RSS reader is going to be a post you don’t bother to finish. Beautiful layouts that rely on the juxtaposition of text and image to make their point are likely to fail horribly in RSS.

I would say that if you’re creating a site with lots of bespoke pages, no blog furniture, which loses its coherence in an RSS reader, you’re not actually writing a blog at all: you’re using blogging software as the backend of a website. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that and I’m glad that such talented designers are flexing their online creative muscles. But let’s not confuse our spades and our shovels.

Over the last ten years blogs have evolved conventions because those conventions are useful. There is no reason why those conventions should hamper design, but you throw them out at your peril.