This week, the theme I’d like to explore with you is the social cognition aspect of social intelligence and how both businesses and mentors can use effectively. I suppose the first thing to establish is what exactly Social Cognition is as it’s not a term that many of come across in our day to day endeavours. According to Daniel Goleman, social cognition is “awareness about how the social world actually works“.
In other words, it’s the same as knowing what the expected etiquette or code of conduct is in any given situation. A great example of how to get it spectacularly wrong online and in business, would be the uproar that Habitat UK created in June 2009 when it used the hashtag function of Twitter to try to create awareness about it’s product range.
Unfortunately, the hashtags they used were completely unrelated to anything they were involved in, preferring instead to use what were the current trending topics, such as the Apple iPhone, Microsoft Management Summit, the series True Blood and most infamously of all, the Iranian Election. What this demonstrated was that they didn’t have social cognition, because they didn’t understand the etiquette expected of people (and companies) in this particular social network.
They also managed to compound the problem because their response to the overwhelming reaction was to remove the offending Tweets and replace them a few hours later with some generic product related ones instead. Had they applied (or understood) social cognition, there were a number of different things they might have done, for instance:
- They could have replied individually to the people that messaged them to apologise and explain that they had made a mistake
- They could have issued a blog post or news story that was fed to their Twitter account explaining their mistake in public
- They might have asked for some suggestions about what information their followers might like to see
If they had only applied a little awareness and understanding, they could have turned a bad mistake into a great triumph! Instead, they did nothing and as a result didn’t manage the bad publicity at all well, in fact it made the national press.
In every aspect of business and mentoring there will be acceptable actions and behaviours. For instance, I wouldn’t expect to turn up to some networking events wearing jeans, but in others I know it’s expected of me. I wouldn’t broadcast my social activities in Linkedin, but that’s exactly what you are expected to do on Facebook. In some cases it’s fine to send an email, but in others a phone call or letter is necessary. Social cognition is really the heart of the matter when it comes to social intelligence.
