Loosen Up on Employee Use of Social Media at Work

via news.cnet.com

I have worked with several corporations whose fear of losing control of all communications, let alone security, has prompted them to shut down access of all social media from within the company. I can understand that. If I don’t understand something, my first inclination is to stop ‘it’ until I can make some sort of sense out of it. The question is whether or not leadership teams are just stopping it or trying to make sense of it.

While Gartner came out this fall and flat out told IT authorities that “banning access to social media is futile”, the real value is understanding how foundational social networking is to our success at work, and how social media is a critical extension of that.

“While a job may be regarded as an economic transaction, the human brain thinks of the workplace as a social system,” said Carol Rozwell (shown), a VP at Gartner. That’s because organizations ARE SOCIAL SYSTEMS. Not only will employees find a way around social media barriers at work, the reactions to such barriers could lead to an opposite and equal reaction.

The fact is that we want our people communicating. We want them active within both personal and work circles, and frankly, we hope there is sufficient overlap in both of those circles to give our people balanced living while at the same time continuing to build a positive brand for the organization (building positive perception, contributing to corporate and product success, increasing talent pipelines, etc.).

Instead of banning social media in the workplace, find someone on the leadership team with social media vision and make them the champion. If you don’t have one of those, then install one, because society is not going to do a social media u-turn and abandon it. Teach employee groups how to use it, when and where to use it, and how to integrate it into work processes. Give them encouragement and parameters to help them grow your brand, champion a winning culture and harness social media to grow the enterprise. Be transparent about your fears and passionate with your vision.

We could easily see in the next few years that there are dramatic financial and people results between organizations that leverage social media among employees and those that do not. Or we may not. Either way, social media is not going away, and performance will be far better for those leadership teams that figure out how to harness its power and enable their organization.

Marketers, Stop Taking and Start Giving

Of course that’s an inflammatory headline; it’s supposed to get your attention.  Now the next thing I do is write a line or two of pain-centered content, then I begin to pull you in with my pitch.  That’s what good marketers do, right?

We send messages.  We pretend to communicate and fire away at our market with little regard to whether or not the message is received, decoded properly or feedback gathered.  In fact, in most marketing organizations I know of, the flow of thinking is: create the campaign, fire away, and start creating the next campaign (all without the concept of action-learning).  Not anymore.

The game has changed, but we’re still playing with our old tactics and strategies, yet wondering why are not able to capture more loyal customers or survive in a struggling economy. The bottom line is that our customers come second in line to ourselves and the gap between the two gets bigger with every level of management that stands between.  The future of marketing is changing faster than marketing management is able to.

Markets are not just ‘markets’ – they are people.  People don’t want to be talked at, they want you to listen.  People crave reliable relationships, interactions that validate them as individuals of worth and value resources that enable and empower them to at least feel like they can do more, even if they don’t.  Take the example of great customer service – at its most fundamental level, focused, personal customer service raises the perception of dignity in an individual and gives them the feeling that they are ‘worth it’. For most of us, whose back is to the wall on a daily basis, a simple experience of self-worth is priceless.  Marketers forget that.  We think it’s about us.  It’s not – it’s about THEM.

With the availability and flow of information today, marketers have to realize that they can rarely control online reputation through a carefully filtered stance of message-leaking.  If an organization does not speak enough, the market will speak for them, often to the chagrin of brand managers and boards of directors.  What’s worse is that even if a company is trying to speak volumes in cyberspace, today’s social spheres quickly attribute even the smallest departure from what they feel is honesty, transparency and moral motive and then do the branding and advertising for you, in a negative light.

Marketing, branding, positioning, etc. is not what we think or say, it’s the net result of everything we do.  Don’t be afraid to invite the customer in and give them a free pass to your world, because if you don’t, they’ll happily be standing there as you sort through your own rubble.

Creating a Social Media Strategy: Putting the Cart Before the Horse.

Don't rush into social media just because everyone else is. Take the time to plan it out and be deliberate.

Over the past couple of years, I have been an enthusiastic follower of social media communications in organizations.  As the wave of individuals have turned to popular applications and technologies to connect individuals and groups, businesses are finding the need to create new roles of tweeters, bloggers, posters and feeders, usually in an attempt to merely follow the competition.  But which of the competition really knows what they are doing? 

Social Media as a “Me-too” Strategy

I’m a lover of strategy, and as I search for social media strategies others are using, I see it following the likes of social media adoption: an all too often knee-jerk reaction to a developing eco-sphere of burgeoning online social activity, rather than a well-developed appendix to a communications strategy.  Don’t get me wrong – I think it’s great to develop a social media strategy, but there is a danger here in the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ it is formed: Any strategy for the sake of strategy, often becomes disparate from organizational purpose and sub-optimizes the whole.  Social media, and any strategy for that matter, simply needs to align with the larger purpose and vision of the organization / individual.  And, social media, having its own strategy, may be putting the cart before the horse.

A Purpose-driven Approach to Social Media Strategy

Most organizations need to back-up and first begin with the following:

 1.) The Relationships you’re building with Stakeholders. What are those relationships now and what do they need to become? Since really all social activities (and all organizations are social structures) begin and end with relationships, its critical to take stock in and inventory relationship gaps within and without the organization.  Most companies that I have been in (a fair amount) don’t even formally acknowledge who their key stakeholders are in the first place.  Take the leadership team through the process of working out and articulating these relationships, identifying their current state and their desired state.  Now you have something to work with.

2.) What is the Best Way to Build those relationships?  This question gives everyone a guideline and handrail to hold to and keep us directed as we work through the rest of the social media strategy process. Is it through insincerity?  Is it by being guarded and defensive?  Is it through telling too much or too little? Once you’ve identified the key relationships, simply have a discussion as a team about the best way to strengthen them.  Use experience from your own life about how your relationship was strengthened with organizations you patronize. Not every relationship needs to be at the same level, but discussing what principles impact the development of those relationships will put everyone on the same philosophical page about relationship building. 

3.) What Information, Exchanges, Experiences and Conversations need to take place in order for those relationships to foster? This is where you begin to design the messages or content from a high level.  Don’t wait for the moment to come later to have this discussion – get it out there on paper right now.  Let everyone look at it.  This will begin to tell you about your side of the relationship and how you can step up to the plate as individuals and as an organization.

  4.) How are we going to communicate with them to Best Facilitate it all? As you can tell, we haven’t even talked about social media at this point. This last question leaves us with the need to get clear on our communications strategy and planning ; social media, now that’s merely a channel for socializing your messages, a means for enabling your communications plan to be to actually communicate, from sending messages to receiving feedback.

Once you have a communications strategy, articulated and aligned, then you have the groundwork for clearly seeing the opportunities that social media can play in communication with your various stakeholder groups.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, what about the cool stuff – the facebook, twitter, digg, YouTube?” 

Again, don’t get caught up in the channels (or ‘means’) that the relationships (or ‘ends’) utilize.  Plan those channels just as you would any other. There is no quicker way to kill your brand than to whip out a social media strategy, open all channels of online social networking, and then find you’ve created a monster. Communications in web-based, open social circles can be like a prairie fire: a small spark can quickly rage uncontrolled, traveling faster than you can mobilize resources to contain it.  You put a message out there with one intent, and it can be quickly picked up and perceived as another, blown across a vast area, too fast for you to control it.  That said, don’t be afraid – be bold, be willing to be transparent and foster visionary leadership.

10-20-30 Rule

Guy Kawasaki, famous for his book “Art of the Start”, talks about his 10-20-30 rule for pitching to VCs.  What I like about it is that its a simple rule for pitching… anything.  

Ultimately, anyone you are presenting to is going to be investing some sort of capital in you or your idea, even if its simply emotional or mental.  I can’t tell you how many organizations that I have been in where the culture was one of death by powerpoint.  The funny thing is that they all know its stupid and senseless, but nobody has the courage to break the cycle (ahhh, the importance of leaders stepping out and setting their people free).

Watch this and see what you can take away from this in principle to change and better your next slide show.