In the increasingly peer-centric landscape sparked by recent excitement (and anxiety!) around social media, we find ourselves with a new operating challenge: Marketing and Communications functions find themselves at odds with (or just driving different objectives from) many of their peer functions around the corporation.
We’ve all spent too much time talking about why social media matters, and even how to exploit its power, so let me skip over that well-worn path.
Inside the enterprise, I see a culture change afoot. As companies try to maximize their ability to capture customer voice and shape product, to drive brand and product awareness, to leverage advocacy, they are further extending themselves out beyond the “safe” boundaries of their corporate walls. We know that social media is by nature unstructured, unreliable, and, at its most powerful, deeply unpredictable.In other words, it’s exactly the type of activity that leaves peer executives like the CIO, the General Counsel, the CHRO, and the CFO scratching their heads and questioning every decision, feeling more and more exposed with each blog posting. When was the last time we heard this:
- CIOs looking to “firewall” people out rather than creating a channel for the outside to come in
- CHROs and General Counsels putting excessive restrictions around what can be said and by whom, wrapping employees and consumers with policies and waivers that dampen the power of information
- CFOs seeking the false precision of specific financial return on CapEx and operating investments for social media
Some CEOs think about these functions as their arms of control, goaled in some part to manage and mitigate risk. The more generous among us consider these partner functions enablers to business outcomes. No matter what, they can neither control nor enable much without appreciating the opportunities (and limitations) of social networking channels.
The command and control environment is no longer a viable operating model for the modern enterprise. Social media is the great democratizer of the brand, but our enterprise operating structures haven’t evolved to understand how to function in this “open-source” environment. At the forefront of this change, leading Marketing and Communications organizations are using this occasion to teach their colleagues how their worldviews need to adapt.
Rather than doing media days for the press, some of our members are turning inside to put together media days for their internal partners to showcase social media opportunities and challenges. They are not only sharing the most basic tutorials on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., but also engaging in two-way dialogues about their peers’ needs and opportunities to extract value from these new media.
Marketing needs to do more than marketing; it must be a steward of the open-source cultural revolution. Have you taken for granted that the rest of the organization is as progressive as you are?
on 15 December 09
Respond
CIOs would say that Haniel’s comment that “CIOs looking to ‘firewall’ people out rather than creating a channel for the outside to come in” is a bit of a generalization.
We see that, although more than 70% of organizations plan to increase their investments in social media in 2010, the full potential of social media has not been realized, as efforts are often uncoordinated and piecemeal across a company. However, the rate of change in this space means that developing a formal, well-defined strategy for social media may be premature. What is most needed now is a plan for social media experimentation that has direction and a plan for success.
As social media cuts across functional boundaries, CIOs should help to provide the environment to allow social media to be successful. We see five principles for effectively
experimenting with social media and for quickly capturing business value from the experiments that work:
1. Adopt a Test-and-Learn Approach. Rather than jump into the most popular social media platforms, adopt a hypothesis-led approach toward social media experimentation to maximize learning for business alignment and impact.
2. Orient Toward Meaningful Business Objectives. Tie social media experiments to activities such as deepening relationships, acquiring new customers, or recruiting employees that will derive significant business value.
3. Organize According to Intent and Maturity. As organizations progress through social media maturity, their managerial needs and opportunities change. Match your management model to
your maturity level, moving from loose to tight central control and then back again, to ramp up on social media quickly.
4. Provide Baseline Policies and Education. Put in place baseline policies to protect the organization against social media usage risks while fostering innovation. Educate employees about effective use so that they can understand, relate to, and articulate company policies and practices.
5. Redirect Capital to Growing Sources of Enterprise Content. Social media already accounts for a fair share of content creation within organizations and this share will grow rapidly. To capture value from this content without being overwhelmed, consider shifting investment and mind share away from systems and processes that manage structured data toward lightweight
capabilities to capture, filter, and disseminate unstructured information.
To read more social media related materials that are geared towards actions a CIO can take to drive value, go to: https://cio.executiveboard.com/Members/ResearchAndTools/Abstract.aspx?cid=100158574&fs=1&q=social+media&program=&ds=1