It is apparent from online and offline discussion that there are still great challenges to social media adoption. Regardless of cause – control, forcing one-way communication models into conversational media, lack of participation, time, or fear – companies and organizations find themselves stubbing their metaphorical toes quite a bit. Their cultures prevent them from succeeding (Image: Bangkok Art and Culture Centre 9 by honou).
There’s no greater example of this than the enormous challenges the Obama Administration is facing in getting the government into the web 2.0 era. No one questions whether the mighty O and company get social media. But a prohibitive federal culture is designed to enforce privacy and security regulation, and protect agencies from getting lambasted publicly.
Quite frankly, as Allison Fine puts it, organizational silos prevent people from empowering their edge. And many companies attempt social media with a trial balloon or a beach-head approach. While this can be successful and in my book, represents a great way to introduce the power of social media, this short-term approach does not build an organization that can truly engage.
If an organization needs to become social media friendly – from PR firms and nonprofits to enterprises and government agencies – then a serious gut check needs to occur. Will our culture allow us to embrace these new tools? And more importantly, can we change the way we interact to allow more of our community into our business?
In the end, management must make a conscious decision to bring more voices to the table. This does not mean crowdsourcing your finances and trade secrets. It does acknowledge that real conversations involve more stakeholders than just the people inside the walls of the department/division/organization/enterprise. And that those people expect a genuine relationship with the organization using these tools.
That means the old ways of communicating won’t work. Publishing a Twitter feed, a blog, a Facebook group, a “viral” video is not the answer. Instead change the way relational communications are approached throughout the organization. And to achieve that organizations will have to move a lot of folks’ cheese, so to speak, and spend some money.
If you are afraid of what will happen, here’s a few thoughts for you.
- Competitors will read your conversations. They will see what you are doing. And in most cases their efforts to emulate you will fail. Because they are not you, and while you are open, your core offering is your very special people and processes.
- Customers and partners will want to suggest that products/services/programs to be run differently. And you know what, a couple of their ideas will actually be improvements.
- The integrity of the company and internal relationships will not be drained. You will not lose power. Instead you will only strengthen relationships and add more human capital and equity to the equation (hat tip: Allison Fine).
There are so many case studies and books now about the power of social media, and the results it can achieve. No, now it’s really a question of whether the C-suite is willing to embrace the painful change to become a socialprise. The C-suite needs to take responsibility for moving the cultural bar towards openness.
But a decision means nothing without the ensuing action. From a CxO perspective, how does one move an organization into the social, collaborative web? More coming soon.
What are your thoughts on all of this?
As corporate innovator, social media champion and culture transformation veteran, I couldn’t agree more and having tried every trick in the book and still not seeing shift happening, I am wondering if the world is not divided into C level camps of those who get it, (Seen John Chambers video on MIT World?) and those who don’t. Those who don’t are by far in the majority, and I am beginning to think its a generation/ lifestyle gap and maybe the large-scale adoption in corporations will only happen once the digital natives are at C level! My theory is that the C-suite is too busy to learn and experiment because truly understanding the miracle and culture of mass collaboration through social media is revealed not through reading but through doing. And to build your network and learn the “tricks” of Twitter & Facebook and so takes a bit of time, trial and error. They open a FB or Twitter account, don’t invest the time to actively participate and build their network to experience the network effect and then dismiss the trend as “hype” without business value, satisfied they can tick the box of “yes, I have a FB account but I really cant see the benefit!” I can rattle off scores of executives for whom this behaviour holds true.
“And in most cases their efforts to emulate you will fail. Because they are not you, and while you are open, your core offering is your very special people and processes.” I’ve always said, even in my previous life in the corporate world: If you really think you’re as good as you say you are, publish your marketing plans in the competitor’s employee newsletter or on their web site. You’ll still be you, and that should be good enough…
Good food for thought, Geoff. I think that giving companies the tools to “do” social media is like giving them materials to build a boat though none have ever sailed the open sea. Difficult to get enthusiastic unless immersed in the experience. Wondering if we’ve given enough thought on ways to simulate various social media experiences in ways that IMAX takes us on Everest climb.
I’m right there with you Geoff. I’m in a situation where I *do* get it, and am having a hard time convincing the right people that this is the way to go, even though it’s only internally to begin with. This is what we need to do, because it has such an immense potential to a business like the one I’m employed in.
But there is that cultural challenge. There is the “only people at level X can suggest changes like that” type of thing. And there is “no, we’re way too busy to even consider stuff like this”.
And it’s frustrating as hell.
Can anyone suggest good books on transforming an enterprise from the traditional command-structure, to an engaged organization ?
Geoff, interesting post. Change is very difficult for any company. And the larger and more successful the company has been the harder it is.
This is actually a good thing: any successful company is essentially a money-making machine. These companies have values and processes that have proven themselves year after year, and reward a wide variety of stakeholders.
Building a mechanism like that isn’t easy, and once you get it to work it’s a kind of miracle. Radical change and bold experimentation risks crashing the whole thing into the ground. (AIG, anybody?)
It’s a big leap to say “their cultures prevent them from succeeding”. It may stop them from succeeding in social media, but that’s a radically different thing than not succeeding in business altogether :-)
A sobering thought: 100% of the companies now experimenting with social media could easily survive without it. However, 100% of the companies who sell social media could not survive without those experiments.
I think social media has some promise, and I’m as big a change advocate as you’ll ever meet. But, positive change requires patience, perspective and understanding. The more of those things social media vendors offer, the more change they will be able to see.
The social media world prizes listening. My advice to those who are frustrated with the slow pace of change is to stop dismissing slow-moving companies as people who “don’t get it”, and start listening to what matters to those companies.
I’ll leave you with a favorite quote from Peter Drucker: “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.”
Greate article. You’ve set the context of using social media with employees AND customers. The change context from my perspective if the challenge is confined to using social media solely within the organization. What say you on these terms? does this challenge face similar hurdles or easier to overcome/ have different paramenters.
Geoff, I agree with what you say about the potential benefits of integrating social media. Yet when it comes to the “slow pace of change” I tend to agree with Tom Cunniff. Having worked for a large multinational for many years I now enjoy working for an SME where change is faster and more responsive to changing market conditions.
Geoff,
Conversation has never been a group strength. We know that. Gotta talk to people one at time sometimes to find out what they really think. We put in the work and the results can seem to take forever, but they happen.
Everything bureaucratic is incremental. :)
Tom: While I like your slant on Drucker, I have to disagree with this statement:
A sobering thought: 100% of the companies now experimenting with social media could easily survive without it. However, 100% of the companies who sell social media could not survive without those experiments.
Tell that to Dell and Zappos.
Great blog post, I tried to reply last night with something witty and I lost it. You will, however probably see soon a trackback here to a piece I am writing about the different cultures we belong to. And I am also commenting to subscribe to this discussion.
Geoff, if you’re saying that Dell and Zappos have had some success with social media, I agree.
If you’re saying that without social media these companies would be in Chapter 11, it’s not credible.
Neither Apple or 1-800-Flowers currently participates in social media, and both companies are thriving.
Tom: You need to do your homework on Dell. Arguably, they would be in Chapter 11. And Zappos would be half of its size. In addition, Apple definitely monitors and inspires social media word-of-mouth campaigns. They just don’t publish blogs or contribute a voice, but they know where their customers are and react accordingly (hello, iPhone price decrease and Green My Apple outrages). Sorry, dude, join the 21st century.
Geoff, we’ll have to agree to disagree. Being a subject matter expert (and I acknowledge you are) gives you deeper insight into this than generalists can have. The danger of such a narrow focus is that a specialist can quickly lose his or her broader vision.
Dell’s market cap today is $20.13B. Pick the largest contribution of social media to their success that you can imagine, and then quadruple it. If you’re ready to say, “sure, social media definitely contributed at least $5B in profit”, I’d need factual evidence to take it seriously.
Part of the cultural challenge of integration is demonstrating to business people where your piece fits in the overall picture. When people blow the importance of social media out of proportion, it’s *much* harder for it to fit where it belongs.
Lastly, “dude, join the 21st Century” is unworthy of you. Professionals argue their cases based on facts, and — even here in the 21st Century — numbers matter.
Tom: Yes, we will continue disagreeing, both on your outdated industrial age point of view and the boxes you insist on putting things and people in. I have extensive communications experience beyond social media, more than 15 years and have produced numerous quantifiable successes in social media. I suggest you follow up with Richard Binhammer or Lionel Menchaca at Dell for the numbers you want.
Geoff, I don’t doubt your successes. If I did, I wouldn’t have been reading here in the first place. If it’s an “outdated industrial age point of view” to want to understand social media’s real contribution to a company’s success, I offer no defense. I am guilty as charged.
Interesting discussion and would agree these things take time but the value is there to be found. And, yes, organizations/bureaucracies take time to change and adjust to new things. I know that from working in governments changing political leadership, a Masters degree in poitical change and bureaucracy and even some of the work I do today.
But, for the sake of this conversation, lets flip the argument (and taking from a guest blog post I did at Lee Odden’s blog (http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/12/dell-social-media-interview-with-richard-binhammer/). If you are not persuaded by the trend data, case studies, the directions and changes occurring because of social media, lets pose the issues and question a little differently (and perhaps a little rhetorically). I call it the customer question: Since when did any business not want to improve and use every opportunity it can to connect with its customers? “How much” do we need to justify using today’s efficient, effective and readily available global IT infrastructure (the web which we are mostly connected to and computer you already have) to spend 30 minutes or couple hours a day connecting with real customers?
No one has yet to explain to me why they should not use social media and the power of the Internet as a way to connect, directly, with their customers. We could leave this point hang and let it stand on its own. I think it speaks volumes.
However, since Dell is mentioned here, let me provide some facts. Again, taken from a guest blog post I wrote for Lewis Green over at Biz Solutions (http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/2008/12/by-dell-richard-binhammer.html) as he had made such a great point about ROI, and my belief that social media measurement is not just dollars and cents, but also relationships, business process changes and more.
At Dell, a few of the ways we have measured and benefited from social media included:
- Listen and Learn: Conversations to understand what people are saying about Dell, tracked by topics and sentiment to understand what the conversations are about. We have seen a solid decline in negative commentary since we started listening, learning, acting, engaging and following through.
- Building/Nurturing Relationships: We find fans all over the web and it is great to get to know our fans, not to mention the individual customer connections allow us address individual needs. Build or nurture customer/stakeholder relationships such as those at Direct2Dell, Dellshares, digitalnomads or regeneration.org. Or turn online connections into opportunities for us to connect with more customers offline.
- Clarify or Correct Information: through listening we also have an opportunity to engage and clarify or correct information….first hand
- Business process improvements: Changes to business processes and products learned about through listening and social media conversations. Acting to change, improve or get better at what we do and how our business delivers, matters. In this regard we have successfully identified concerns earlier than we would have previously (up to three weeks), thanks to blog and social media commentary. We also measure the fact that we act on them.
- Revenue Generation: We also track revenue generation from The Dell outlet, small business and home offers available on Twitter. We have previously noted that Dell Outlet’s Twitter offers have resulted in more than $1,000,000.00 in revenue.
- Product Development: The Ideastorm community has another unique objective: partnering with customers to contribute to, and integrated into, Dell’s product development. With 10,000 ideas and over 300 implemented, the Ideastorm community has its own impact and measurable successes. It is an active community, integrated into and part of Dell’s product development.
Hope that adds some additional food for thought in the debate here.