Invite colleagues
As more and more organizations adopt the use of social media there is an obvious difference in perspective as to whether social media is a strategy, a tactic or just another new thing getting it's 15 minutes of fame.
Our perspective drives our actions, attitudes and relevance of importance to our lives, our business and entire markets. Strategic relevance is a higher priority than tactical relevance. Finding things as tools has less relevance and thus does not get thought of as strategically important. Unless things are of strategic importance they will not get top management attention and support, it will be delegated down.
In a Business Week article titled, “The Overlooked Side of Social Media” the executives interviewed said “Most companies are embracing social media—but too many are wasting their efforts through sloppy management”
The article discussed the views of the Corporate Executive Board where they found more than 70% of companies were already using social media; many were planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.
But, Unfortunately, few have thought very hard about managing these initiatives. In a classic case or “ready, fire, aim,” companies are committing resources to social media efforts with very little process behind them. The result? A hodgepodge of unrelated initiatives, wheels re-invented and resources wasted.
The Corporate Executive Board has found that the best companies recognize that social media are just another set of promising tools and as such are to be understood, mastered, and used efficiently as they journey into the space. That journey has three stages:
• Discovery: At this stage, the organization is just finding out about the potential uses (and risks) of social media for its purposes and making initial forays. The goal: understanding (”could this work for us?”).
• Experimentation: As an organization does more with social media, the importance of learning efficiently becomes urgent. These bodies should develop and steward a learning agenda for the firm’s efforts, using each initiative to deliberately increase the institutional knowledge of social media use.
• Adoption: While few companies currently find themselves in this stage, those that do loosen their managerial posture, moving away from oversight toward support.
To distill the Business Week story; Social media isn’t a fad about to fade away; it’s a good idea for organizations to learn how to use social media to it's advantage. The best companies will learn faster and get more out of social media by aggressively managing their efforts.
What say you?
Written on Saturday, 07 November 2009 11:39 by Matt McDougall
