MAD Perspectives Blog

I was recently in a meeting with a client when the marketing manager stated that all social media updates are reviewed by her or her team before being posted externally. After a bit of probing, I came to understand that her concern was about maintaining the company brand and the unintentional sharing of intellectual property. These are fair concerns, but they raised alarms for me. 

To be clear, my engagement with this client is not specific to social media.  They have hired an agency to help them with their efforts.  My concern is that with too much control, their social media communications will be flat and uninspired. Regardless of who helps them develop their social media plan, they will need to think about the company culture.  Her comments made me realize that this company does not have a culture of empowerment. They have been through many acquisitions and spin-offs, and the culture has been impacted by the continual shifting of leadership and ownership,

Like a symphony orchestra, each individual brings a unique tone to the overall production.
Social media is about being transparent and authentic. If the director, stifles the soloist, the performance seems lacking. The role of the director is to infuse his musicians with and understanding and passion for a particular piece of music. Companies should consider a similar model.  If companies are concerned about their employees sharing inappropriate content, they should inform and educate their employees on the company goals for using social media, provide guidelines for content and ramifications for employees if they show poor judgement.  A company's culture and organizational structure can provide two of the biggest hurdles to social media success.  Take the time to understand your company's culture and the impact on communication style and channel, is critical when initiating your social media efforts. 

Recommendations for addressing these challenges include strategic planning to align the use of social media with clear goals and metrics, employee education, organize a hub and spoke social media team and constantly listen, review and assess.  Everyone I have talked to about social media shares that their experience has been trial and error.  It's ok to make a mistake.  Own it and move forward.  Your goal should be to orchestrate the efforts of your organization in such a way as to let individual personalities emerge and shine.  The content they share will reflect positively on your organization

How are your social media efforts proceeding?  What are your biggest challenges?  I'm interested to learn from you!

What's your perspective? 

As marketers plan their social media strategy, they usually focus on content, resources and platforms.  I rarely hear anyone discuss organizational structure.  Yet, a company’s organizational model can reveal a lot about how they will use social networking platforms.  The structure of an organization impacts processes and behaviors that will reflect company and employee comfort with the openness and interactivity of social media. 

The primary organization structures are:

Structure	Characteristics	Adoption of Social Media
Functional	-          Employees perform a specific set of tasks (i.e., marketing, engineering, sales, etc.) -          Focus on operational efficiency and economies of scale -          Fosters technical expertise -          Creates silos -          Communication across silos is difficult -          Focus on process, hierarchy and control	-          Pursuit of social media  will require planning of  strategy, policy, clear metrics and employee training -          Social media most likely to be pursued by marketing department only -          Employees may not feel empowered to communicate socially   -          Social media primarily used to reinforce outbound marketing messaging
Divisional	-          Employees organized by product or geography -          Employees perform specific functions within the divisional structure -          High accountability for achieving goals -          Communication encouraged across function to achieve goals -          Little interaction between divisions -          Hierarchical within the division	-          Pursuit of social media  will require planning of  strategy, policy, clear metrics and employee training -          Social media effort led by marketing with intent to include other functions -          Strong interest in gaining external feedback
Matrix	-          Employees organized by function and product -          Structure reinforces and broadens employee expertise -          Reduces organizational silos -          Requires clear communication of goals, objectives and metrics -          Poor communication can create confusion and/or stress	-          Focus on communication will foster interest in use of social networks as extension of communication model -          Multi-tasking employees will easily adapt -          Requires clarity in how social media will support goals & objectives -          Collaborative environment will easily adapt to interactive nature of social media

 

The focus here is primarily around structure and does not take into account culture or communication style, which was discussed in a previous posting.  The level of bureaucracy in a company may impact willingness to communicate effectively internally, externally or on social networks. You may want to consider the impact of social media on existing organizational structures, business processes and communication methods.  While full scale reorganization is not the goal, education and training may help management and/or employees understand how the use of social media influences the existing business model.

While organizational theory segments company structures into the simple models referenced above, it is likely that your company reflects some mix of the models noted.  Your company’s approach to social media will reflect a combination of cultural and organizational influences.  It is important to recognize the challenges they may represent when building and implementing a B2B social media strategy.

What’s your perspective?

Last week I began a discussion about the impact of corporate culture on a company’s level of comfort with social media.  While I was thinking about this week’s continuation of this discussion, the CEO of my former employer, HP, resigned due to allegations of misconduct.   This news hit the social airwaves like tsunami last Friday. I enjoyed a 24 year career of Hewlett-Packard Company, which means I was lucky enough to have learned from the founders, Bill and Dave, what it means to be open, ethical, moral and to do business with integrity.   One of the key elements of HP’s Standards of Business Conduct is to “think about how your decision or behavior would look in a press article”.  This is a good foundation for us to consider when we think about how a company’s culture and organizational model impact the company’s use of social media.

HP’s culture and what became known as the “HP Way” focused on innovation, integrity and collaboration.   This culture was a natural match for social media.  The predecessor to today’s social networks was “MBWA" or management by walking around.  In HP, this meant an ability to learn from others in your office.  Employees would mix and mingle and share experiences.  Many careers grew through discovery and learning from peers.   HP’s founders would have been cautious about protecting HP’s Intellectual Property but they would have loved the ability to crowd source innovative concepts. However, over the past decade or so, the culture at HP changed.  This was a result of both external and internal forces.

External forces include the internet and the rampant availability of information.  They also include the increased demands from the financial services sector for all companies to provide and meet quarterly estimates.  This kind of instant gratification will change the way any company works.  Internal forces took the shape of CEOs and managers hired to lead change (defined in many diverse ways) but who each also had personal agendas.  In all cases the “HP Way” was deemed out dated and the collaboration of old gave way to siloed, hierarchical organizations with formerly empowered employees fearful of making even the smallest mistake.  Could Mark Hurd's HP, with a culture of cost containment, hierarchical decision making and limited employee empowerment, succeed in social media?

Interestingly, the answer is yes.  Consistent with its current command and control model, HP has a well defined, publically available, blogging policy.  They even have a digital media council, which includes representatives from all business units, that sets the policy for how HP will participate in social networks.  Any employee that will represent the company on a social network must take the requisite training.  So, HP empowers its employees with guidelines of expected behavior.  Is that really empowerment? I check on various HP blogs from time to time and follow several twitter feeds.  I find them interesting but cautious.  I think that HP could use social media as more than another PR channel.  I believe this is indicative of the internal culture.  That said, HP is number 22 on the NetPropex Social Index, which measures the social network activity of the largest U.S. corporations across a variety of social platforms.  Imagine what HP's score would be if the former culture of openness and collaboration was prevalent.

As a former HP employee and current HP shareholder, I hope HP’s next CEO balances innovation and operational excellence.  I hope they remember that their 300,000+ employees are the company’s biggest asset.  I hope they empower them to connect, communicate and collaborate, using social media, with their peers both inside and outside the company to create and innovate market changing solutions.

What’s your perspective?

One of the biggest challenges facing brands as social media platforms continue to evolve is that of brand consistency.  In the “old” world, marketers defined messaging and images they felt were most representative of their brand.   On the social internet, the community defines the message and may begin to define the images.  How do Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems fit into this?  They are the central repository for a company’s digital media assets.

As companies intentionally reach out to their communities for input, this input will come in many formats. Brands may invite consumers to create new tag lines.   It may come as pictures of users with the product.  It may come in the form of home video extolling product benefits.  Consumer brands are actively seeking user generated content, partly to attract attention to the brand, partly to gain low/no cost re-usable content and partly to test the waters. 

Platforms such as YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo are growing outlets for company created content but also for brand requested user generated content.  This user generated content may not comply with corporate defined brand image.  How do brands address this?  Or, by ‘crowd sourcing” content, do brands give up control of brand identity?  The goal for many marketing teams is to create content that can be repurposed across multiple distribution channels and create tighter bonds with their customers.  Regardless of their intent, how do companies manage and repurpose user generated assets? 

DAM systems can help companies manage these assets.   Any Digital Asset Management solution provides the ability to define the ontology and taxonomy of digital assets.  It is possible to create additional categories which identify the assets as user generated, associated with a specific campaign or of certain image quality.  DAM systems may also begin to incorporate social concepts such as the tag cloud, which shows the tags associated with specific assets.  They could also incorporate features such as reviews & comments, helping marketing departments identify the most popular or useful content.

A digital asset management system cannot control a company’s brand, but it can help that company manage the digital media assets related to the brand.  The system provides the company with a tool to review, assess, edit and manage assets with the intent to determine the asset’s alignment with brand image.  It then enables companies to extend their brand across multiple channels (i.e., mobile, internet, print, TV, etc.) through re-use and re-purpose of the selected asset(s).  Bottom line, digital asset management systems will have to integrate and manage professionally produced assets as well as those imported from social platforms.

What's your perspective?

For additional posts on Digital Asset Management check out We Speak Digital Media, where I am a guest blogger.

Social Media Governance.  What was your immediate reaction?  Yay, Awesome!?  Or, argh! - something else I have to be doing?  Governance is the "method or system of government or management". The good news is that your business has decided to use social media for some purpose.  Presumably you have some measurable goals in place and your use of social media is aligned with your overall communication plan.  How are you going to know if your use of social media is successful?  This is where governance comes into play.        

Governance is the business process to support your vision with relevant targets, skills, metrics and guidelines. Governance provides a framework to prove social media value.  Governance can be summarized as the 4 Ps.  Planning, Policy, Preparation & Protocol.

1.  Planning -   This is the hard part.  This is figuring out HOW you want to leverage social media.  Ideally, your company will have identified areas where social media can help your business achieve existing goals.  The impacted business groups will be aligned in how they will use social media to communicate and interact with customers, vendors or employees.  Planning is agreeing who takes the lead in your social media initiative and understanding the roles of impacted business groups.  Planning is setting a timeline for how you will move forward with your social media strategy.

2.  Policy - This is the critical part.  This is setting the company guidelines for what can or cannot be said via social media.  Policy is working across different business units, including legal and HR, to understand concerns about social communication and defining the parameters within which employees can be 'social'.  This is taking into account your corporate culture and expanding upon existing employee code of conduct guidelines - or not.

3.  Preparation - This is the nitty gritty part.  This is determining what kinds of social media platforms your company will use and determining if your company has sufficient resources to manage a social media initiative.  This is establishing your presence on the relevant social platforms (i.e., blogs, wikis, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Slideshare, etc.).  This is educating your employees on your policy and how your company will leverage social media and the various platforms.  Perhaps this is enabled via interactive training, an online handbook or a webinar.  This is making sure your employees know where to go if they have questions. Preparation is confirming how you will measure success and selecting the tools needed to capture necessary metrics.

4. Protocol - This is ongoing, every day part.  Protocol incorporates bits of planning, policy and preparation to ensure that guidelines are followed and that employees are engaging for the purpose intended.  Protocol will look at the ongoing measures of success and used the data collected to determine if plans need to be adjusted.  Protocol is how your social media team will communicate and address progress, hurdles or problems.

If you can keep these 4 Ps in mind as you initiate and implement your social media initiative(s) you will have the foundation for a successful venture.  Many forays into social media have mixed results, but often this is do to lack of planning and management of the effort.  While an ad hoc approach is great for gaining familiarity with the communication style and platforms, it does not enable you to set goals and prove that you have achieved them.

Your company uses some form of governance for its exsiting marketing, sales, product development or R&D projects, shouldn't social media be held to the same standards?  

What's your perspective? 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Facebook privacy issue and questioned whether it was about privacy or control and discussed the corporate focus on operational issues when commencing their foray into social media.  Thus, addressing the legal, security, network and business goals around their foray.  However, the question of control in a digital media world goes beyound that initial discussion.
 
Company business models have been based on control - control of all aspects of their operations, financials, product and messaging.  Why?  Companies want to build meaningful products, build market leadership and sustain competitive differentiation with the overall goal to create profit and margin.  Companies protect their intellectual property, technology and business processes as they often provide that competitive differentiation.  Companies have controlled the flow of information about their products and their product roadmaps.  However, there is a major shift that has been underway for some time, but that is exaggerated by social networking.  Customers want information whenever and however they can get it.

Look at Apple's veil of secrecy around every new product launch...and the hoopla around Gizmodo's "lucky" and early access to iPhone 4.  Steve Jobs seeks to control the introduction and messaging around every new product.  However, the internet buzz around the product(s) creates demand for insight and discussion, and we can imagine, product.

Companies control access to their products and solutions to create interest and demand.  In the 'old" media world, broadcasters created programming and determined the schedule for when each program would be broadcast.  This created demand for the program and allowed advertisers to target ads to the programs audience based on their demographic.  We have seen this model challenge on multiple fronts as advertisers sought incremental outlets (i.e., the internet) and consumers sought alternate channels to access content (i.e., the internet) or new devices allowed consumers to watch content when they wanted (not when the broadcasters wanted them to).

The tide has turned and B2C companies are responding.  Broadcasters make their content available via multiple distribution channels.  Airlines offer discounted tickets to followers on Twitter.  Local businesses offer coupons to consumers in their neighborhood (i.e., Groupon, Foursquare).  Consumers are using social media to "get what they want,  when they want".  If you have a question, you tweet or facebook about it - and, you get an answer.

How will B2B companies respond?  While they will (and should) protect their core assets of IP and technology, they are figuring out how to leverage social media.  They are uncomfortable with ceding control to their customers, yet they are beginning to see how customers can give them an instantaneous opinion on products, support and company.  B2B companies can gain great insight on product features, customer satisfaction and company image.  Whether their customers are actually gaining control is still an unanswered question, but customer influence is growing. 

How is your company addressing social media impact on control and influence?  Are you listening?  Do you particpate in social platforms, communities, discussions about your industry or niche market?  Do you actively engage your customers to prioritize your product roadmap?  Do your customers have an online community to discuss support challenges?  Do you enable your customers to help each other?  Ceding a little control can gain great benefit.

What's your perspective?

In light of the active discussion about Facebook and privacy over the past few weeks, let’s talk about these topics as related to businesses using social platforms.  Unlike consumers, businesses don’t worry about the sharing of personal information like address, birth date or likes.  The primary concerns, for every business when they enter into the social arena, are brand reputation, confidential information, investor relations and security.   The benefits of being social, authentic and transparent can outweigh the fears, but it requires some advance thought.

The bottom line to this rampant conversation about privacy is control.  As individuals and as businesses we want to control the flow information.  We want to control how we access information.  On the one hand we want to control the message.  We want to control who has access to that information.  From a business perspective, we want to limit the information a competitor can discover, while providing enough meaningful content to educate and attract new customers while retaining existing customers.

As individuals on Facebook, we actively seek social interaction with out “friends”.  We actually even accepted the Facebook Terms & Conditions when we signed up.  These T&Cs told us that information shared on Facebook is public, not private, unless we set our privacy settings accordingly.  Can we be social and private simultaneously?  Again, it’s about control.  We want to be social within a framework that we define.  We define who we want to be friends with, whether we allow access by Facebook applications or if we want out Facebook content searchable by search engines.  We control what is truly public.  We become concerned when the framework for establishing that control is changed.

For businesses, the Facebook controversy reinforces concerns even if your business is not using Facebook.  It reignites concerns about what being social may mean for your business.  The issues for a corporation are far more complex but no less concerning.   Let’s address a few of these issues in the context of privacy or control:

1. Brand Reputation:   Social media provides companies with another channel for using pull marketing strategies to gain brand visibility.   The company does not want to be private about its brand, but it does want to retain control.  Social media by its very nature is social, which mean companies have to give up a little control.  However, in giving up some control they will learn more about what their customers really think.  It is important for companies to engage in active listening or monitoring of online conversations.  This will help companies regain some control. They will be able to refine their messaging based on the open, candid feedback of the social internet.   It will come down to common sense in determining how to address negative sentiment.

2. Confidential Information:  Companies are always seeking a competitive edge to win business.  There have been many reports on the underhanded methods that companies will use to win market share.  While companies generally trust their employees, they are concerned about the information employees may share, unintentionally, on social platforms.  This includes information about product roadmaps, R&D developments, financial performance, go-to-market strategies and customer engagements.  Companies must invest in educating employees as to the company policy on social network participation and how or when corporate content can be shared.  This topic is all about privacy and controlling what content should or should not be kept private.

3. Investor Relations:  Given the broad, open nature of social media, many CFOs are concerned about the impact on their investor community (public or private).  The SEC continues to evolve its policy around social networks, but statements thus far recognize blogs as an approved medium for facilitating information between customers and stakeholders.  Blogs are not any different than any other statements when it comes to the anti-fraud provisions of federal securities law.  In short, avoid any ability to create speculation about the company or 3^rd party valuation.  This is an area where control, in the form of a defined social media policy and ongoing monitoring, is important for compliance purposes.

4. Corporate Network Security:  IT Departments already face ongoing challenges regarding spam and malware.   The can control access to social networks from the corporate network, but that may be contrary to agreed upon goals.  They fear that employee access and participation on social networks from their office computers will expose the corporate network to increased attacks.  Again, a policy to define how the company will engage in social media, will help the IT group to understand who, what, where and how employees will engage and to continuously assess their network security solutions.  The goal is to maintain the privacy of the network and prohibit unwanted attacks.

While companies will give up some control as it comes to the social conversation about their brand, they must and will establish policies to guide their employees toward appropriate social networking on behalf of the company.  Just as Facebook has explicit, if somewhat shifting, privacy policy, companies must be cognizant of these policies and disclaimers as they leverage Facebook and other social platforms.  It’s a delicate balance being social.  The privacy debate will persist.   Policies will continue to evolve.  We will struggle to retain control.  But, individual and companies will be less private and more social.

What’s your perspective?