“ACTING LIKE PEOPLE AND NOT LIKE A COMPANY”

Most companies spend a lot of time trying to understand their customers.  What do they think?  What do they want?  Why do they buy the products they buy?  What makes a customer LOYAL?  Who are the INFLUENCERS?

Companies that have benefitted most from social media spend a lot of time trying to answer the same types of questions INTERNALLY.

Communities in many companies are based on office geography – who you meet at the water cooler, in the kitchen, in the hallway.  Communities are often predefined silos within functions; marketing staff know marketing staff; IT folks talk to other IT folks. 

Best Buy is now a leading corporate tweeter and highly successful social media organization.  They shared with me that one of the drivers initially pushing them into social media was an effort to decrease employee turnover.  Realizing that SHIFTING THEIR CORPORATE CULTURE would also help to improve sales, Best Buy created and implemented a 3 step process to improve relationships, beginning inside.

l  Blue Shirt Nation – improving  employee-to-employee relationships

l  Bizarro – improving employee-vendor relationships

l  Twelpforce – improving employee-customer relationships

SocialMediaExplorer posted a great interview with the founders of Blue Shirt Nation:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49W2j2huIjg . 

My favorite comments on the video?  Employees use the platform to “get to know each other.  When people put up pictures of their cats, it’s a good sign.” 

And, of course, “acting like people and not like a company.”

Social Media DNA

In a recent benchmark study, I discovered that a major differentiator between the organizations that had the greatest success with social media and those that didn’t was how they behaved internally.  The two big pillars?  Culture and Governance.

Culture is a large umbrella for how people work together, how they behave, interact, and engage with the organization and with each other.

Governance is how the organization manages and makes decisions.

Culture is the more ambiguous and amorphous of the two.  Recognizing different cultures is easy; defining the differences is hard.  Changing a culture is even harder. 

Some of our benchmark participants were younger companies (relatively speaking); a social media culture is part of their DNA.  I remember reading many years ago that Nordstrom explained their famous customer service by saying that they “hire the smile;” they could teach skills.  Today, best practice companies in social media such as Zappos similarly hire for cultural fit.  They hire people who are open, sharing, socially adept.  The Zappos interview process includes a self-assessment on a weirdness scale (I won’t reveal what score they think fits best with the Zappos culture).  Everyone talks to customers, and there are guidelines and policies, but no scripts or hard and fast rules.  So how come customers get the same service and decisions regardless of the employee?  If a person doesn’t “fit,” they don’t stay long.

The new age social companies provide a good blueprint.  More mature companies that are among the best practice organizations for social media also hire to fit the culture they want.  They also work to change the established culture.  Some ideas on how to make the change next.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics - as quoted by Mark Twain

The statistics about the usage of social media are overwhelming.  A recent study showed that 70% of high-level corporate marketing executives planned new social media initiatives in 2010.  eMarketer forecasts a 55% increase in ad spending on social networking sites, from almost $2B in 2010 to over $3B in 2011.  SaleSpider found that 75% of small and medium business owners they surveyed planned to increase the percentage of marketing dollars allocated to social networking in 2011, and 83% intend that percentage to exceed 11% of marketing resources.  90% of internet users visit a social media site at least once a month according to comScore.  The statistics go on and on.

But there is a problem.  Organizations think they “have” to be in social media (see statistics above), even though it’s not really for them.  So they set up a new Social Media Department or hire a Social Media Guru.  Or they tuck social media away in PR or Communications or Marketing as another channel.  It’s like the moves from print to radio to television…bigger, broader, but with little change to the underlying operations or objectives.

To drive more than incremental success, social media first must change an organization internally.  Social media is not a channel.  It is a technology-based throw-back to the family business on the corner.  When it works, it changes how an organization is governed, how people work together, how employees approach their jobs.  Employees are both the first target market and the drivers of success; they learn to share more openly, listen more carefully, and engage more fully with the entire operation. 

Next:  how it’s done