Our final Georgetown U. Social Media for Social Good class post on the Groundswell deals specifically with Chapter 11, which discusses strategies on how to get social media improved inside the organization. Before I begin, a very special thanks to Charlene Li, who guest lectured last night via Skype (full photo set here).
Rather than comment on this excellent chapter, I’d like to offer our experiences working with organizations to get social media approved. At some point, all nonprofit, corporate and government social media efforts require approval. While most executives understand that social media has become a must have in the larger media environment, many organizations still view it as experimental marketing. In large part, that’s because most of them fail in their initial self-started efforts.
So, that being said here are some tips to getting your boss to say OK. This post is in the form of tactics or ways to nudge the process along. Several Twitters also weighed in and their answers are included. Thanks to Andrew Wright, nishland, Philip Zorn, Larry_Slo, Chris Allison, Robin Yasinow, Chris Gasparro, and Mark Chrisman.
First off, we recommend using a pilot project to get through the door. Reticence is often conquered by a win, and the best way to provide a win is via a pilot project. Tips to ensuring you choose the right pilot project:
- Begin with some form of listening or monitoring. You must be in tune with your social web community if you want this to work. Hopefully you are doing this before you begin, but just in case…
- Simple and relatively low cost is good. When there is fear involved, an easy, relatively affordable project is an easy thing to sign off on.
- Short timeframes help, too. You want to make this a quick test.
- Make sure you have a measurable goal. Look at your strategy, it will tell you exactly what to measure. You must be able to attain ROI. That is why attaining something worthwhile is essential, whether it’s micro-donations, market intelligence, feedback on a new product, click-throughs to a store, registrants for a value added webinar, or some other measurable result. You must be able to declare victory.
- You have to feel confident that you can attain said goals. Make sure it’s doable. It may be worth bouncing off someone else who has more experience.
- Common Objections
People who are skittish often demonstrate their reticence by throwing out objections. Here are some of the more common ones and methods to handle them.
1) If someone references past failures, show them successes, preferably your own. Often best practices have not been deployed, and your asking for dollars to achieve best practices.
2) If they believe you need to publish on Facebook or a blog, and that’s not what you’re recommending, focus on the stakeholder (e.g. donor, customer, advocate), not the tool. It’s all about where your community is. Find them before you meet with executives, and understand what they care about. Bring evidence with you. A blog or Facebook group is often not the answer.
3) Our community isn’t out there is a common objection, particularly for any stakeholder group over 30 years old. Show them real conversations over a significant period of time that the stakeholders are having – without the organization. My favorite way to do that is to type relevant key words or the corporate name on search.twitter.com. Another method is to use market research countering those misconceptions.
4) Control. They don’t want to engage in negative comments. There may be little you can do about this, but I always like to show folks 1) that people are already talking negatively about them and 2) tangible evidence through prior case studies that direct engagement actually reduces negativity and builds relationships.
5) Invented here syndrome. I remember serving as in-house communicator. We may have had some fantastic ideas, but sometimes because it came from the in-house department executives were skeptical. That’s when you trot in a friend or a bonafide consultant who has outside experience. Let them tell your executives the facts and set them straight (so to speak).
I know we’ve got a lot of experienced readers out there. What would you add to this post for our students?
Thanks for this excellent primer, Geoff. Once again, very impressive. It’s been my experience that everyone realizes by now that they need to blog and engage in social media. Thanks for the insightful ways to demonstrate ROI.
Hi Geoff
Great points. I was successful at getting Social Media approved by my Company President by presenting him with some of the very same information you have listed above as well as some statistics that I found at Jeremiah’s website http://web-strategist.com/blog/. He has some great statistics on users and social media medium usage stats.
Good article -
The proof is in the pudding. Good post, Geoff.
Geoff… you missed the biggest piece.
It’s all about people.
You assume the objections are all based on reason, when most are not. They are irrational, based on fear, ignorance, and pride (which you did touch on briefly.) Much is territorial.
To gain acceptance, you need to recognize the people who will be potential roadblocks, and identify the source of the friction. Are they afraid? Are they territorial? Is it control-freak run amok? Another hidden motive?
Some executives will be impervious to all logic and case studies — and you must be nimble enough to work around them safely.
I’ll be talking about this more next month in Vegas.
@Ike Ah, fear, yes indeed. In any decision situation, fear is the great barrier.
I think a test run is a great idea. I would also bring up the conversations that are currently being brought up. Make the point that the conversation is going on and without being a part of it you make the company nontransparent and negatively affected. Plus, you increase brand awareness and likability, who wouldn’t want that!
Great article Geoff! One thing I would add is to make sure the boss understands that using social media online is not a channel to push a message to the public. Using online social media is an opportunity to start a conversation with people and in turn helps to establish relationships with many people. Trust is the most important thing social media can help you gain, if you do it right.
What I have found is the biggest hurdle is often the IT group who is concerned about network security. If you’re going to pursue an SM strategy you have to have access to the tools. Any suggestions for how to get the IT group sold in the idea?
Great advice! I am just starting a social media campaign for my company and I think a test run is just the ticket. It’s not enough to just get a social media plan approved; you need to show success to continue. Thanks!
Geoff
outstanding advice for interacting and pitching social initiatives to upper management.
great article. very useful topic these days.
How can the Govt embrace social media when they block it in their offices? What happens when your workforce is spending all day chatting with their friends? as the tools to track productivity get more complex this gets easier to check.
RE: Invented here syndrome. Great point.
the yellow links make the article hard for me to read
Great post. I think one point you make is worth a little additional discussion. When developing, implementing and using your pilot project it’s important to keep the actual cost low, but I wonder how much that hurts one’s Social Media quest in the end. In the current economic climate the keepers of the purse strings are looking for low cost/high impact, but not every SM venture can or should be low cost.
Thoughts?
Thanks for sharing this guide. Some good stuff!
However, with all due respect and assuming I am understanding you correctly, I disagree with “Our community isn’t out there is a common objection, particularly for any stakeholder group over 30 years old.” Dismissing the “I don’t get it” objections of stakeholders means *we* aren’t doing our jobs well enough as marketers…not that someone is “too old to get it.” And I do think your suggestions are right on the money for helping to demonstrate that.
Geoff: a key push-back is ROI piece, particularly where social media involvement requires a substantial amount of someone’s time – call it 50% of a managerial headcount. That’s a $100,000 investment, fully loaded. So before you produce result #1, you’re that much in the hole. In tight economic times, where your average marcom group manager is likely the first type to go, putting half a headcount on an activity with squishy revenue potential is a problem.
Second is the approval process of outbound communication. The CEO wants to know if legal is signing off on all this ’stuff’, which typically ain’t how Twitter works. This is a really uncomfortable situation for some.
Unless you can tie that activity to some metric, be it greater awareness, lower customer churn, higher SEO ranking, or something similar, you’ve got a particularly uphill battle.
“If they believe you need to publish on Facebook or a blog, and that’s not what you’re recommending, focus on the stakeholder. It’s all about where your community is.” What are some general examples of other platforms/options. Where else are you suggesting to build a community. Are you talking about building a community on an existing forum or board outside of the companies resources?
Kevin:
I am talking about understanding where your stakeholders congregate on the Internet. I guarantee you it’s in more than blogs and Facebook. I cannot tell you where that is, as I don’t know your market, but this is basic social web research. Perhaps starting off with some simple Google searches for communities and forums using tag words is the best approach.
Thanks,
Geoff
It’s all about the metrics and money (oh and the community too LOL – your boss really doesn’t care about this if they aren’t familiar with this form of communication/PR). The thing is you have to be a rule breaker. Ask for forgiveness later. But make sure you can deliver results. Tepid steps into social media result in nothing. You need to do your research, be consistent, and track results.
Thank you for sharing this information . i will remember this.
But do you think thereis a better way to do this ?