I just visited a client who had several groups in their company doing quite a bit around social media (they are trying to answer the 4th and 5th question). They were what I call “walking” and were on the verge of “running”. Often, when I meet companies for the first time, I try to find out which of the following questions that they are answering, as it determines their level of sophistication.
As one might expect, brands in tech, media, and some consumer goods are more advanced, and finance, insurance, and sometimes government are trying to answer the first questions.
Five questions companies ask about social media:
What is Social Media?
For many folks, corporations, the question to answer was “What is a BloB”. Blogging was the primary tool that we saw in the marketplace, for some, it wasn’t taken seriously, for the savvy, they quickly adopted. We saw scare tactics from the threatened mainstream media, such as “Attack of the Blogs” and light of amateurisms, angry customers and crazies were painted. For many, we wanted to know what are these tools, how to they work, and what’s the impact. Early on, this impacted corporate communications, PR, and mainstream media.Why does it matter?
As we’ve evolved, many were realizing the impact of exploding batteries, brand hijacking, and blog evangelism. Savvy companies were starting to adopt these tools, a few provided integrated communities that were scrapped together or built from existing platforms. For the majority, trying to understand why these tools matter to a business. In addition to corporate communications, PR, we started to see other marketing and business units being impacted by these tools, as well as adoption.What does it mean to my business?
We’re here now. This is the year of ROI, measurement, and experimentation. Many corporations have deployed resources, headcounts and budgets. Corporations are afraid to make mistakes, so plans are created, and measurement is critical to help manage and prove the worth of new programs. ROI was proven, new social media measurement attributes were defined, and many new tools were deployed, I did what I could to further this industry (see all posts). In addition to Corporate Communications and PR, business units are starting to experiment with these tools, often out of the PR budget. A new role started to appear more frequently, the digital marketing manager, the community manager, the social media strategist.How do I do it right?
Now that experimentation is done, and business units are starting to apply these tools, like advertising, PR, field marketing, and customer references, companies will want to do it right. Frameworks will be developed, consultants will offer packages, and a loosely developed process will be used. For companies that don’t have enough internal resources to listen, manage, and deploy, consultants will be a very sought after service. Nearly every brand will start to have an ongoing budget for social media, the new role to manage these tools will appear. IT departments will start to deploy enterprise 2.0 tools.How do I integrate across the Enterprise
Normalization is happening, A checkbox for ‘social media’ on every announcement, product launch, product development and support will be using these tools. Social media tools to listen, converse, collect knowledge, and build new products will integrate across the customer cycle. It’s not just external, intranets will start to deploy suites for collaboration, such as blog accounts issued to many internal and external employees. Product Teams, IT departments, HR, Finance, Executives, and of course Marketing will be using these tools.
This post, for the most part is a rehash of what I’ve posted nearly a year ago, but I think it holds merit to discuss again
Update: June 10th. I’ve scheduled 52 inquiry calls with clients since April 2008. Inquiry calls are 30 minute discussions with clients that want to pick our brains, and I tell them everything I know that will help them meet their business objective. While the range of questions wily varies, most are asking questions 3, 4, 5.
What question is your company, or your clients trying to answer, this is often a good post to send to your internal teams and try to trigger a discussion.
Great post. I can see my org being question #2. In a large corp, being able to define roles needs to happen. Worst thing would be to engage without end results in mind.
These are the ones that I am hearing…How can I use it for recruiting and What other companies are using this successfully?
turf, territory, power, status, self-protection, self-advancement, avoiding blame, culpability, accountability, maintaining position, privacy, secrecy, …
social media will totally ruin most companies, and is to be avoided at all costs
Interesting article. Speaking purely as a user, I think that corporate America has to accept that in the realm of social media, they have to give up some control about the message. I read some blogs and it’s like marketing types want to attract consumers but also control what happens on the site.
But although people might visit or wander in, they won’t stay unless they can have some influence (a voice). And I think a lot of corporate marketing types have a not-so-small contempt of the public and fear giving up the control that is required if a social networking site is going to thrive. You can’t have it both ways, that is, attract users/viewers and also control what is being said/done on your site. There are just too many other competing forums where people can go which don’t have restrictions beyond the “no flaming, obscene language or photos” maxim.
No one wants to belong to a policed social network and companies that don’t realize this will have their carefully budgeted plans go down in flames. They have to accept that by opening up a blog to comments or creating a discussion forum or asking for user-created content, there might very well be some veiled or direct criticism of the company and it’s positions. It would be best if they had a sense of humor about it and didn’t try to silence those who are saying something they don’t want to hear. It could be much more valuable to the company than bland compliments.
Regarding item number 5- “How do I do it right”- the things mentioned here sound just like what you’d do for any other business. It doesn’t appear that social media is managed any differently. If so, disappointing; since if it’s managed the same way it will become homogenized and therefor no different from anything else on the internet.
How do I measure what sites local neighborhoods are using and having conversations on.
good points