Image from tatahmgroup.wordpress.com.
So I was sitting here thinking about what to write or whether to write at all. I mean, who sits at home and writes blog posts on a Friday night? Answer — a 31-year-old guy whose wife is out of town at a bachelorette party enjoying much warmer weather and much better drinks. Plus, this way I figured I might stay up past 10:30 p.m. I know. Take a walk on the wild side.
Anyway, as I was perusing the Interwebs, I came across this customer experience post by my buddy Nate Riggs and it got me thinking about a question we always used to ask at Sprint: “Does a company’s culture dictate whether its employees can successfully embrace social media? Or can social media be the catalyst to change a company’s culture?”
We tried the latter approach when I was at Sprint — social media as a change agent. What we got was a grassroots effort that had a lot of success but eventually hit a glass ceiling that was harder to break through than we first anticipated. Doesn’t mean it can’t be broken through. But social media is a technology, a channel. It can’t be a change agent. People have to be the change agent. Usually, people in high places within the corporate hierarchy. Then employees can use social media to expedite that change.
Let me give you an example. A company might have a team of employees who notice that customers are sharing their issues and complaints on Twitter. And these employees might decide it’s important to respond to some of these customers to try and fix their issues or answer their questions. And they might even have some success with that approach. But in the end, the company won’t change the way it does business and require its customer service resources to focus on helping customers via Twitter or other social channels until leadership mandates that employee do their jobs differently.
And that’s because leadership controls company culture. In fact, it’s one of the few things corporate executives control anymore these days. Almost all companies still operate with a top-down mentality, which actually puts today’s company leaders in an incredibly powerful position. Because they get to decide what stories are told about their brand.
If a corporate leader decides to stay the course or “do the same things we’ve always done,” that leads to one type of employee and one set of stories that employees tell about the brand via their interactions with customers. But if a corporate leader decides it’s time to “change the way we do business,” or if s/he builds the business around a more open, customer-centric mentality, that leads to a different type of employee and customer experience, and thus a different type of story.
See, everybody tries to make social media so complex these days. What’s the proper etiquette? How much time should we spend using it? How do we measure it? How much budget should we spend on it? Way too complex if you ask me. What if company leaders just focused on three things — 1) Their customers, 2) Their story, 3) Their employees. That’s it…just those three things. Do you think a mentality focused on those three things might lead to more effective use of social media? I do. And it would have very little to do with how well the employees understood the technology or how well they could measure the value.
If your culture is to focus on the three things above, then you’re going to be all right. Isn’t that what Tony Hsieh and Zappos has taught us? Next time you’re in a room of fellow communicators, ask them if relationships are important to their business. Then after everyone raises their hands, ask what social media is about. Relationships, right? Building them and fixing them.
The companies that get held up all the time when we talk about awesome social media case studies — Zappos, Southwest, Ford, Dominos, Kinaxis, Mayo Clinic — didn’t use the technology to change their cultures. They built cultures based on their customers, their story and their employees. Social media was just a natural fit for these brands that never lost sight that success was all about relationships.
We have to measure tactics and strategies involving social media as stringently as we do because most executives have forgotten about the importance of relationships to their business success. Or more likely, they don’t see social media as a conduit to those relationships. Don’t get me wrong…I think we have to measure. We have to keep showing why social works.
But do those same executives ever sit down and measure their offline trips to industry conferences and networking events to talk about the company’s vision? How about the impromptu frontline visits they make to see how their employees interact with the consumer?
The answer is no. There’s a huge double standard when it comes to word of mouth and social media; to online versus offline relationships. And that double standard usually stems from one place — the culture corporate executives have created or are hesitant to change.
February 25, 2011
Integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Public relations, Social media