Time 21:36

The tables have turned in five years. Back then social media zealots were telling company execs, “you don’t get it”. They loved to bring out charts of percentage growth and the ever referenced “if Facebook was a country…” It took among other things, two election cycles, (the US and Iran), numerous gadget launches, a pop star’s death, a golf icon’s fall from grace, the year-long roll out of the first “social” car (you can comment which car you think I’m referring to here), and a World Cup for executives to retort, “We get it now.”

And now it’s their turn to say to the social media business community, “you don’t get it.” The it for them is how companies work for anyone to move from side project freak show to bonafide, no snickering business function. The holy grail for social media practitioners is Engagement, the holy grail for corporate executives is Process. The mutual nirvana are the key performance indicators (KPI) that give each side a reference point for their work.

Engagement means dialogue, participation, exchange of ideas

Process means your work is part of a decision oriented workflow system with predetermined actions to be taken based on certain events

KPI means “a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.” This definition is from Avinash Kaushik from an excellent post on different types of measurement.

In this Marketing Edge podcast with Brain Solis, we discuss how to support the social media champion in an organization by understanding how to fit social into the company’s goals. Even the smallest pilot project needs to be structured in a way that will assimilate into the larger picture if it is to succeed.

I love when Solis says every champion hits a ceiling. You can’t just walk into a meeting of senior executives, say the world is going this way, and they will come along. His latest book Engage Solis peels the onion back a few layers than most social media books by examining how to work social media into the corporate process. The journey to achieve getting social media included in corporate processes is what Solis calls the last mile. He has written about the last mile in social media on his blog BrianSolis.com

I look at the culture of the business to determine whether the last mile will be a walk in the park or the last mile of a long journey across a desert. I highlight social culture vs social tactics in a podcast called, Is Your Company Social At Its Core ? It’s the story of a small, but growing premium ice cream brand, Izzys Ice Cream, and how their culture is spawning sophisticated uses of social technology.

Fun for Listeners

We are going to do a few neat things with this podcast and post.

First we have a drawing to win Solis’ book Engage. Email MarketingEdge AT providentpartners.net and put Engage in the subject line. This is not just a copy of the book, but it is the copy I have read and included comments in the margins, kind of like a combination book and blog. The physical replication of social media, only slower with fewer people, but unique nonetheless.

Second, we invite you to join Brian Solis in Minneapolis, July 27 at 6PM at Solera in Minneapolis. It’s an event An Evening with Brian Solis, sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of PRSA, register for the event today, it will be enlightening and inspiring. Hat tip to Jen Kane for leading this event.

I enjoyed George Colony and Forrester’s exceptional work in research and analysis for more than a decade. Like Colony, I have lived through the 90s enterprise tech ascent and the ‘01 free fall. Recently Colony listed 5 reasons this tech recession will be different.

Colony contends that technology will be down but not out in part because technology is more prevalent in our daily lives than in the past. Let me highlight his fourth reason by citing it directly here because it involves social media, Colony writes,

“4) Customers live on tech. The consumer landscape is very different than it was in 2001. Forrester’s consumer surveys show that each succeeding generation takes more tech into their day-to-day life. The delta between the Y generation (18-27) and the X generation (28-41) is extraordinary — Y spends twice the amount of time on cell phones and half the amount of time reading newspapers. For more on this, check out our report, The Gen Y Design Guide. In a recession, the use of Facebook, Linked In, eCommerce, blogs will increase, not decrease, as people look for jobs, companies stay closer to their customers, and easier-to-ROI Internet advertising accelerates. Companies will have to stay focused on their web sites, social strategies, and eCommerce this time around — or risk losing their next generation of customers.”

Colony accurately believes social media is a general platform upon which millions of people live and work. I however, believe business and sociey can maximize the benefits from these technology platform by expanding social media’s greatest contributions (freedom of expression, connecting ideas, allowing for deeper thought) to reach other corporate culture silos. What is missing from this observation, perhaps assumed by Colony, (I’m not one to doubt GC) are corporate culture shifts that are required to maximize the benefits experienced by society from this rich, broad space called social media. Here are three areas that need a different paradigm for companies to benefit from social media.

1) Hierarchical View - (Advertising & Marketing) The corporate view that the social space is more or less like a mass market with “A” listers, and media properties and through aggregation services to net the small fish, it can become something with which they familiar. This is an old and tired perspective. Allow social media to breadth within and around your brand so the company and its people can absorb the influential ideas surrounding it.

2) Short-Sighted View – (Finance) The 30 day and quarterly “make the numbers” rat wheel that was prevalent in the 90s, and led to all kinds of PR an accounting schemes to make the numbers work, (Enron seems so long ago doesn’t it) are an imposed deadline. ’

Tell me really, are innovators really driven by a deadline? Do cancer researchers really need another goal that involves a stock price for their reward or do they get up every morning to beat a disease that claimed their parent or child, or stimulates their intellect to the point of obsession? Patience is a human virtue that seems to have little relevance in an economic world. That perspective needs to change.

3) Human Capital View – (Human Resources and just general office politics) Let me preface this one by saying, it could be a naïve pipedream. The last 20-30 years has seen and escalation of divisive communications. It’s not limited to politics or election year cycles, these topics and times just call more attention to it. The divide and conquer mentality is a function of economics, in vogue trends, work environments, two generations of 24-hour news cycles, the entertainmentization (new word) of news, and plenty more. What it has created are cultures that hinder innovation and foster a “gotcha” environment under the guise of accountability.

In numerous companies bureaucracy is stifling innovation. In some cases their customers and employees circumnavigate the obstacles using social media, gain some wins to run up the flag, and pray those that see it will have enough backbone to be their champion. A skunk works mode of innovation to be sure, and not one that has been accepted by the corporate culture allowing it to multiply.

Transparency Continued

Admission of a mistake openly serves the greater good, e.g. Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital’s wrong side survey as blogged by their CEO Paul Levy. His leadership should be recognized as it was by US News and World healthcare editor and writer Avery Comarow he wrote, “Levy has been agitating for more transparency for some time… Others should emulate this. I doubt that many will.”

This transparency should also be held as an example across all of corporate America. Hhmm we can we begin, oh yes I did quick search in the social media monitoring tool Radian6 using a rather limited word combination of transparency + bailout, it was mentioned more than 20,000 times in the last 30 days. Yes more transparency may have prevented the Wall Street Meltdown, nice catch to all those concerned.

So if we are to be transparent we need to be what, less vengeful, less harsh, less quick in assuming that transparency = accountability that leads to punish by detractors waiting in the wings. That kind of environment defeats the purpose of transparency which is improvement and discussion. I’m not decoupling responsibility from accountability, I’m reinforcing that transparency is a function of improving, of shared learning, that makes something greater than the individual better.

Sometimes our divisiveness wants to conclude the case before hearing all the facts, understanding the intent, learning from the mistake. Sometimes human nature instinctually pounces on prey that is bleeding instead of supporting its healing.

Maybe I am a bit naïve about the transformation social media can help bring about in corporate America and society. Perhaps George Colony is wrong when he asserts that people will spend more time connecting online with Facebook, LinkedIn and the like, that the youth generation intensify their friend relationships by being constantly connected with their phones. And perhaps Forrester was wrong in 2007 when they said that Facebook marketing means communicating not advertising, as does all social spaces I contend. Perhaps T Boone Pickens is just a rich old man with nothing to do. (He is leading a huge social network of passionate followers of new energy)

If we are wrong, then all this social stuff is just another channel. Direct Mail, 1-1 marketing, email marketing, it’s just another one of those Meatball Sundaes to use Seth Godin’s term. Then have at it spammers of the world, congratulations because nothing will change, innovation will stay about at the same pace as always, unless of course the rest of the world catches up to us and then it won’t stay the same here now will it? It’s what my generation of wiseguys would call SSDD.

I, however, think differently. And you?