When you get the same question three times in one week, it makes you think.

In a recent week we had three people, all from different industries, ask about using social media for collaboration. They all come from large regional or global companies and they are concerned that collaboration won’t happen without an effective electronic medium, since the collaborators are often far apart…though even when they are sitting in cubicles in the same large room, there’s a sense that some kind of social media tool is necessary.

Our first question to all of them was the same: do you already have a culture of collaboration that could produce better results with better tools, or are you trying to find a way to create a collaborative culture? Because those are very, very different things.

This, then, gets to a key question about the use of technology: do you first need a culture that can use this tool, or can the tool itself help create the culture? Which comes first?

We put the question out on Twitter, and not surprisingly, got answers both ways. One respondent, who leads the social media effort for his airline’s HR department in Asia , suggested it could work both ways, so theoretically the use of social media could help you expand a nascent culture of collaboration, OR having such a culture could make social media tools more effective for you. On the other hand, a leading technology advisor in the US wrote that “Culture trumps operations. Technology almost always has to come last.”

Our experience has typically been that, if you’re going to use a tool, there needs to at least be a reason for the tool. Rather than telling us what tool you need, tell us instead what you want to accomplish, and then let’s find the right method together. In the case of collaboration, if it’s the distance between collaborators that’s the problem, then social media may be what helps you. But if the problem is that your employees don’t trust each other, or were hired because they work well on their own rather than as part of a team, then setting up a new means of communicating isn’t going to help since they aren’t inclined to share in the first place.

So for those who are wondering if an internal Facebook-like platform will help their employees collaborate, the first thing you need to do is assess if they actually want, or are able, to collaborate now. If not, then a new tool is more likely to just be a new toy.