As you prepare your marketing plans for 2010, are you considering whether your company should use Social Media to connect not only with your customers, but also with your employees, vendors, partners, etc.? Before you decide to encourage your key employees to blog or to launch that facebook fan page, consider first who will be handling the communication and how well they've handled other forms of communication in the past.
If there is bad feedback given, will your company rise to the challenge and - in a very public forum - correct issues and challenges or will Social Media immediately be blamed for unnecessary bad press?
The power of Social Media is the ability to read and write, meaning a two-way conversation. Thus a key question to ask is: "Do we really want to have a two-way conversation with our customers, employees and vendors?"
If you have already implemented a Social Media strategy to connect to your customers, how are your organization's executives responding to the wealth of information they already have? Are they open and responsive to it, no matter how bad the feedback, or do they demand the feedback be filtered in order to create a sanitized, more palatable version?
Social Media has great power to democratize information, enable direct access to anyone in the company and to provide real-time, meaningful feedback on products and services. Are those the kind of features that would increase your efficiencies, improve innovation and engage your customers and employees? Or do you worry more about the threat to management structure, security of information and protocol?
Be honest with yourself here. There's no right or wrong answer but definitely an indicator as to whether your company culture is ready for Social Media.
So, what do you do if you've evaluated the company culture and feel you're just not ready to be completely transparent on a global scale? Do you have to wait years for a cultural shift? Not necessarily.
Start small. Social Media is meant to be authentic and transparent. You have the ability to put a personality to your brand identity. Perhaps you start a fan site that doesn't necessarily allow for reviews but opens the doors of communication for your customers.When I was with MCI (prior to the many mergers & acquisitions), we piloted a small team who handled all customer service-related email correspondence. Personally. One at a time. With individualized attention given to each email. Now, admittedly, this was in the days when emailing customer service was still a new concept and the volume was manageable but the point is that it forged relationships - very personal relationships - between the brand and the customer. No, not everyone walked away happy but they did have a forum in which they could vent, question, challenge, etc. and they received very specific answers.
What does this have to do with Social Media? Well, its a first step to opening the door and allowing an open conversation. Maybe there are pockets within the culture that could pilot a small project, focused on a specific business need. For example, a new product team could use a private, secure social networking tool to communicate with each other and store important documents, training guides, past correspondence and feedback from customers. Or you could implement a broad scale, highly focused tool, such as an expert employee directory with additional social networking capabilities progressively turned on as the organization acclimates.
Another way to tiptoe into the waters is to create and launch Innovation Day — a day within your organization where the entire workforce in engaged and asked to advise on ways to improve and enhance current products and services or propose new ones. Your internal experts telling you how to do it better. Then take it outside and solicit the same advice from your partners, vendors and yes, even your customers. Follow that up with changes, results and communication to the people involved and you've just made a paradigm shift.
Good luck and Happy New Year!!
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