This Social Media Thing

Ultimately, the biggest change brought about by social media is going to lie in the area of relationships. Social media is not just a new set of channels you can use to reach your stakeholders, it is something your stakeholders will use to reach you and there is going to be a massive shift in the direction of communication from outgoing to incoming. The implications of this are outlined when looking at the Hammer of Transparency and, as mentioned here, the most important thing to recognise is the shift from institutional forms of communication and interaction, to processes.

What this means is that rather than try and anticipate all the places where people might try to interrogate your organisation and cover these off (an institutional way of doing things) it is far better to create places where you have a controlled process of interaction and discussion. One of the best examples of an organisation doing this is Dell. Having experienced the fire of being digitally outed, via the blogger Jeff Jarvis and his “Dell Hell” experiences, Dell took on board all the valid issues his experience raised and then went on to find ways of engaging their customers, actively seeking their input via the creation of IdeaStorm which allows people to suggest and then rate and comment on improvements to Dell’s business. (Here are Jarvis’s original Dell Hell posts – and here is a good summary of the whole story, including Dell’s turn-around).

You can also meet the need for greater transparency by creating a much broader range of discoverable content, allowing people to see into your organisation and seeing what you do as distinct from relying on saying what you do. A good early example here is Microsoft and its Channel 9 initiative which basically pushes a video camera into many of the corners of the organisation, allowing people to talk about and share what they are doing and thinking. This has the dual effect of drawing in and empowering the niche groups, for whom this information is of great relevance and also changing the perception of the corporate face of Microsoft, away from being remote, arrogant and controlling towards being accessible and flexible. It is a classic example of generating trust based on exposure to visible process.

If you want advice on creating engagement spaces, then please fell free to talk to me.