You don’t know what you don’t know
Before organizations can begin to think about having or being a social brand or a social business, they have to back up and temper their opinions or notions of what they think they know. Invariably what I see when I walk into the largest of the large or the smallest of small companies, are companies struggling with 2 schools of thought: (1) That they must corral the social employee and (2) How do they control the social customer. Usually they don’t know where to focus their efforts first.
This struggle is perpetuated by fear. Why? Companies fear what they can’t control. They fear an employee that waxes on about their company in a negative manner off hours on Twitter or Facebook, or they fear the customer that complains about their company or number (2a) they fear the competition doing more with social media than they are.
Let’s take social out of the equation and think about fear for a second and how it motivates companies. Better yet, let’s think about how fear motivates us. If we’re an athlete, we train or work out to get stronger and faster in fear that we might lose. If we work for someone, we work longer hours for fear of losing our jobs. In school we study harder in fear of getting bad grades. In the food service industry we deliver faster, fresher, food in fear of not getting customers or… the customer complaining.
Stronger. Faster. Longer. Harder. Superlatives motivate us.
In life, our fears motivate us into striving above and beyond what is expected. In business, specifically social media, our fear of it is motivated by the unexpected. What’s the difference? One spurs action and the other may spur inaction. But why can’t organizations just move forward with social media? Why can’t businesses just get it going? Is it really fear? No, it’s not fear per se, it’s more about the unexpected or the unknown.
We know what the general expected outcomes are going to be if you or I work harder, or study longer or train harder. We win, we’re successful. The problem with social media is that it’s still in the stage where the majority of business leaders still don’t know what A+B+C equals. It keeps changing, it keeps getting refined and redefined. They still can’t associate a bottom line, quantitative value to it. Qualitative yes, quantitative no. Essentially, companies are still struggling with what the value of a like is and are still trying to determine what the impact of the rogue social employee might be to an organizations bottom line.
Internally, companies can incrementally become a social business, which in and of itself may be the easiest jumping off point. Baby steps that can be controlled, if you will. They should be commended for becoming or attempting to become a social brand or business, replete with that level of uncertainty. It’s OK, uncertainty exists when rolling out anything new, right?
What do companies that choose to wait and see do?
So what should these noobie freaked out, paranoid, wannabe social companies do? It’s easy. Start with creating a basic set of easy to understand and comply with social media policies. Set the bar on what the expectations will be internally for your social employees both on the clock and off the clock. Create an internal accountability plan. From that, companies can start to build a base and a foundation to create baby step, measurable social initiatives.
Keep in mind that each “social” company will be different from the next. Until these companies have use cases that uniquely apply to each of them, every instance of anything internally social, will be a precedent of some sort. In other words, you will learn from your mistakes and you will build from that.
We’re a lot further along than we were say, 5 years ago, but the fact of the matter is that because of the amoebic like nature of the social web, we can’t with certainty, predict what the outcomes will be of even the best, most thought out, best funded, social initiatives. There is just not enough data yet. So is the fear well founded? Absolutely. Should it spur us into a state of inaction? Absolutely not.
