Is Your Organization on its Way to Becoming a Social Business?

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This week as part of Social Media Week in New York City, I had the opportunity to attend a panel hosted by the Social Media Club of NYC on social business and the role social media plays (and has the potential to play) in organizations.

The session focused primarily on how social media is being used inside some of the world’s largest corporations and the challenges associated with getting large companies to adopt social media, manage change and get executive buy-in. However, many of the challenges and best practices discussed can be relevant to organizations of any size.

Panelists included: Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM; Dan Woods, CTO and Editor at Evolved Media and a Columnist and Blogger at Forbes.com; and Matt Dickman, EVP, Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick. Their range of backgrounds – from a technologist to a communications professional – made for an interesting dynamic and lively conversation. While opinions differed in some ways, it was clear that regardless of each person’s respective discipline, there was consensus on many of the challenges and opportunities surrounding social business adoption. A few key insights that we walked away with:

• Regardless of company size, have a firm strategy: Certainly with a large corporation, setting a strategy and social media guidelines is fairly standard, but what about everyone else? An entrepreneur or a small business owner is certainly more nimble and can often jump into action while a large corporation is still dealing with internal red tape. While this can be an advantage, the panelists cautioned the audience about setting a clear strategy and goals regardless of company size. It might seem best to dive in head first and beat out the competition, but if you don’t have a long-term strategy in mind, there’s no way to sustain the approach.
• Gatekeepers are a good thing: We often think of ‘gatekeepers’ as those corporate guys who stall our great ideas and provide roadblocks to our approach. However, smart companies looking to transition to social business should consider actually applying more rigor and contextual access to social properties. For example, perhaps entry-level employees should be limited to monitoring of social apps and more senior-level individuals should be the ones participating in the discussion. It’s important to raise questions like this within your organization and find the set of gatekeepers and access controls that make the most sense.
• Incentives are key: While it would be nice to think that organizations like IBM become social businesses with a flip of the switch, deep down, we all know that changing employee behavior is critical to the evolution into a social business. As with anything, establishing goals, metrics and developing incentives will encourage and speed adoption. Our panelists raised various examples of incentive programs. Text 100’s client, IBM, was represented on the panel by Ethan McCarty who raised the subject of gamification – which uses game design techniques and mechanics like point systems to engage audiences (think Foursquare’s model of gathering points and unlocking deals).
• The challenges are real, but not impossible to overcome: Changing organizational behavior, addressing cyber security concerns, and gaining executive buy-in and support are a few of the primary challenges the panel focused on. These and other challenges can limit an organization’s ability to evolve into a social business. The panelists discussed the importance of driving discussion around these subjects and setting plans to drive progress in areas such as changing organizational behavior.

Many thanks to Howard Greenstein from the Social Media Club of NYC and his team for putting on this great event (and for the free round of drinks at Connolly’s!).

Interested in more on this subject and happen to be attending SXSW? Ethan will be speaking on a panel, “Social Media in the Underground World of B2B”, with Text 100’s Melissa Chanslor and representatives from Xerox, Cisco, and NVIDIA. Check out more Text 100 and client panels to watch for at SXSW 2012 here.