Aligning Social Media Within Companies

Great post, I am currently muddling through these same questions at my day job as Marketing and B/D and as I do Marketing/PR/MR for some of my families various and sundry small businesses.
Twitter is a great tool, but I like many people seemed to get sucked into “broadcast” mode vs a conversation. I also like how it has a “block-party feel” feel vs FB’s ‘invited guest” feel.
None of this brave new world is cut and dry at my company and I think it will take a while to be. Right now it is more of a “Well let’s see what happens…” feel.

We have used Facebook to promote summer jobs, but it is along the same lines as you mentioned, Chris. We’re not sure if it’s working. But it did get us some good PR for being innovative!

I agree, I think it will be a while when corporate houses start using these tools. And it will be for the benefit of everyone, I have a similar post here.
http://coolwebdeveloper.com/2009/01/why-social-media-is-not-catching-up-within-the-corporate-setup/

OK here is my riff ;) I am always uncomfortable when starting with the tools. The tools are a means to an end… which is probably why Social Media hasn’t managed to embed itself anywhere into most companies. I am not sure those are the right questions.

Rather than “Where should Twitter go?” shouldn’t the question be how/why is Twitter part of the solution? The tools support the tactics… where is the strategy? What is the company vision, how do the tools support the company mission? How will Social Media support business objectives? Where is the business case? What problem will each of these tools solve? Can one tool solve better than another given the company?

Tell a CEO how Twitter will help their sales people be more productive or how blogging might enhance product development and we might be getting somewhere.
Much still seems focused on “get into Social Media and build community… because you have to/because it’s cool/because ABC is doing it!” This leads to the knee jerk reaction of ” great – let’s use it for PR! Let’s tell people all about who we are and be seen to be “doing social media” Who’s department is that? Oh right, marketing. No, PR. No… Communications.”

By the way Intuit, the top company for accounting software used to have a blog. Users used to give product feedback (and plenty of it) to Intuit. The blog is now defunct… but Intuit does now have a very useful community forum where experts answer questions from users and users help each other. I found it far more useful than the blog. And left to me, with the impact Twitter could have on Customer service (not that companies seem to care much about that) Twitter would be a CS tool. And if the CEO didn’t lead.. forget it.

I’m an advocate for companies using social media.
I just think that asking which department the a tool should go sounds much like the current conversations going in corporations today when they re-org…and which result in dsysfuntional silos disconnected from the top – and customers. If practitioners can help companies take a strategic view of all they could do and how they can solve pressing problems with Social Media (like keep customers happy), it would become clear which tool is suitable and where it should reside and how it should influence and engage the whole company.
OK, riff over! Nice thought provoking post and equally thought provoking comments.

All valid arguments- I think it’s important to get involved in social media, but it has to be genuine. Social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and video are all great ways to interact with your audience whether it’s for PR, HR, or both. Just always be genuine!

I think that feeds and feed aggregation is the big deal within companies. I led a conversation about feeds, readers, and sharing in Humana’s Innovation Center this afternoon and could see the light bulbs going off. I’m excited to see where it goes.

I also just wrote about how can help prevent forest fires.

“Is blogging marketing or PR? Technically, it’s neither. It’s a tool.”

Yes, and building on the above contributions I’d echo that the same applies not only to blogging, but to Twitter, Facebook… the whole ball o’social wax and string. Approach any of the channels in a disingenuous or broadcast-only fashion, it doesn’t matter which department owns it, the effort will (at best) come up short. The content is what drives success in any of’em.

Determine you have the right content (and intent), first, point it at the right channel, second.

I’ve read a number of marketing/PR driven “blogs” over the years that are none-too subtly focused on describing product feature bullet points – those end up being less successful than more transparent efforts where real people get to document their real passions, tribulations, and triumphs. In turn, the latter are rarely fully ghost-written directly by ‘marketing’ or ‘PR’, but are written more directly by the people in question.

The trick is that those people who have the best stories to tell (and that by extension would generate the most interesting conversations) also have other responsibilities in a company, often involved in shipping the actual product (for example). Can’t necessarily ‘guarantee’ ongoing participation in blogs or any other two-way channel by a software engineer if a product milestone is due in the software world – and that’s where I think marketing resources that are legitimately plugged into the conversation can continue to provide a through line.

Having “non marketing people” create content doesn’t put marketing people out of a job, it just changes what the job is: marketing is becoming about fostering, connecting, and enabling conversations that are happening, not just about scripting new ones.

Facebook: I say ‘oui,’ but not as something to generically check off of a marketer’s ‘to do’ list. Instead of building another glorified billboard “group” page, why not invest in a genuinely decent game or social app that actually contributes to the ecosystem? I can’t take credit for the idea – Parking Wars was probably the first to hit that nail on the head – but surprisingly few have followed (or built upon) that effort, at least from what I’ve seen.

Additionally, I’m seeing the company I work at actively use Facebook (and a similar group on LinkedIn) to pull together alumni, current employees, and job seekers, which I think is a great idea. If a business has a healthy/positive culture, this becomes a way to leverage that social capital in recruiting, even from people who may have moved on.

Twitter: I really like “one strategy per account” for ‘official’ twitter feeds; these are likely surrounded (and amplified) by larger conversations spilling out of personal accounts along the way.

“Marketing messages strewn all about the social web” is a (purposefully?) ugly thought indeed, but if smart marketers are actively participating in (and fostering) conversations their consumers are already having, everybody wins, right?

@crackedactor

Chris – love the comments-as-post, so thanks for inviting us in. I guess your point is that this stuff is just one big tool set…. And I agree. Clients are making a mistake when the first question is ‘how can we do a Facebook thingy?’. The proper question out to be, what’s the ‘marketing objective?’ (or whatever), and then look to ways to apply all this new-fangled stuff. Frankly, we often find that not doing Social Media is a better solution than doing it. That’s not to say that we don’t believe in Social, it’s just that we believe in practical and getting the best ROI….

I completely agree with Nicky saying that we should look at specific use cases rather than at the technology. It’s not difficult to understand what Twitter, WordPress, delicious, YouTube and the likes are. But is much more difficult to understand how these tools can be used in a business context.

People exploring the field of social software should ask themselves:
1) What are we trying to achieve?
2) Who is our target audience?

Based on that you can then start thinking about solutions. Should you really be on Facebook if your target audience is unlikely to be hanging out there? Should you create your own social network or maybe use a third party, like NING?

We recently did a project with an organization called ‘The Frontline Club’. Members are high-profile journalists from around the world reporting from war-torn countries like Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and others. They have about 1,500 members and a physical club location in London. Most of them did not know each other, because there was no easy way to meet other than in London. They had set up a delicious, twitter, blog, flickr, youtube, ustream, NING account and others. All of these channels have their merit if used correctly. But in this case, the social media efforts were disconnected and not appropriately executed. What the Frontline Club was really looking for was an intimate social network for their journalists, where they can share important information, stay up to date with what other members were doing, what they were reading and where and when they where traveling. At the end of the day we set up a members-only network based on Movable Type to share the latest club information, gossip, have competitions, share tips&tricks. To stay in touch with each other we set up a Twitter account that broadcasts members’ tweets into the network. Also, to share travel itineraries we set up a Dopplr group. Now it’s very easy to see who is where and when and if for example members coincide somewhere in Kandahar they can potentially meet. Since the group also wanted to share what members were reading, we set up an account on Magnolia, because Twitter does not cater for private groups. All these decisions were made based on a thorough analysis of what was really needed and how that could be achieved using existing, cheap tools and services rather than building from scratch.

Chris, maybe your next blog posts starts out with a set of use cases, e.g. CSR activities for a large energy provider. You define a couple of more parameters, state the objectives, problems currently faced etc. Then, people can chip in with ideas how this could potentially be addressed using social tools. This would make more sense to me.

Much of this dialog was centric to using social media as a tool for PR and Marketing. While there are obvious uses and applied methods to using social media for marketing and PR there is a much bigger purpose to the use of social technology (I am beginning to dislike the term social media) in terms of helping companies optimize performance.

I think the title of this post should be “Aligning your company using social technology” which opens a whole new set of variables and related issues to consider. Issues such as the difference between internal and external communications. Optimization of relations with suppliers, employees, markets and ultimately customers. Improving related processes such as: research, development, HR, sales and marketing, yes PR, accounting, service etc etc.

As we are witnessing across corporate America many organizations are failing (circuit city as an example) due to the economic shifts but also due to poor management processes, relations and systems of measurement to indicate changes in market behavior. No marketing, PR or social media campaign can save a company whose management system is defunct to begin with. Management systems are run by people, accelerated by communications and perform based on the flow and accuracy of information. Social technology provides the means and the methods to capture the flow more effectively than ever before. But a company has to have the right culture, the right relations and the right tools to optimize performance even in bad times.

Chris, your post and the subsequent comments spawned a host of thoughts for me to write about relative to “Aligning your company using social technology” Thanks.

Will advise when I have said post ready and appreicate anyones feedback on the subject matter.

All lovely, but why restrict yourself to social media? If you replace your first question, ‘Is blogging marketing or PR?’ with the ‘Is the web marketing or PR?’, you are hitting on a much bigger issue: who should run the whole online thing within a company. I know it’s not fashionable to talk about websites any more, but their importance (absolute if not relative) must be boosted by social media. Why separate ‘social media’ from ‘traditional’ online activities? It seems a bit artificial to me.

Specifically relating to Twitter, this week I’ve witnessed a backlash against a colleague using his personal Twitter account for non-work related posts during work hours. This only became an issue after the person involved was offered a new job, accusations of “personal brand-building” abound.

Do you think that in a medium as immediate and free-form as Twitter, corporate, “on message” only accounts will struggle to grow a useful network of followers?

I argue that a company is only as good as the people working there, if a member of staff appears to be particularly outstanding then isn’t it better to try and keep them than to try and keep them hidden under the corporate face of the company?

Hey Chris!

To me, the truth is that all the tools mentioned above are useful if used in the right way. I honestly believe that a company that acknowledge the Social Media power and importance will lead the market in its niche.
The tricky thing is not which tool relates to which sector (Marketing, PR, etc), but how it relates to the person behind it! When a Company chooses to be everywhere I can only hope that behind each strategy that is a motivated and passionate person. I hope they don’t come to a Marketing guy’s desk and tell him to write the Company blog posts. I hope they don’t ask the PR person to start a Podcast and “you better make it work”. I hope that there is a group of people behind all this that, in a meeting room give all these ideas cause they’re comfortable to get involved with it and then, the only result, will be success.

May =]

To educate.

To persuade.

To provide just enough information so an individual can make an informed decision regardless of role.

I only started reading your blog under 2 weeks ago, Chris, and I gotta say it is very thought provoking. Can't say I have come across many blogs that I find that is such valuable reading.