Today marks the first day of a new campaign to spread social media and Enterprise 2.0 practices throughout my company. I had an inspiring meeting this morning with someone from our communications team. We discovered that we’re both very interested in social media and its promises for the future of doing business. I’m going to try to meet with him regularly so we can plan an internal campaign to bring social media to our organization. Below are some of my takeaways from the meeting.
Message control is a major focus for traditional communications organizations. An official message released from the top is useful as a vision for the rest of the company to aspire to. Equally important is this: the unsanctioned messages seeping out from the rest of the organization via Facebook, email, phone calls, conversations, blogs, and every other medium are THE TRUTH and are not to be disregarded. Michael Kanazawa’s People Don’t Hate Change, They Hate How You’re Trying to Change Them might be our blueprint for new communication and engagement strategies.
Participation is the best way to frame customer conversations about your company. Michael Dell drove this home in his recent interview with CNN Money:
“The first step was to add blogs and message boards in the hope that irate customers will talk to the company rather than gripe to the whole Internet. “If we don’t do that at Dell.com, it’s going to be on CNET or somewhere,” Michael Dell says. “I’d rather have that conversation in my living room than in somebody else’s.” (article)
Comcast and Dell are both doing a great job of participating in the ongoing conversations about their brands. Frank at “Comcast Cares” engages customers who complain via Twitter and resolves their problems. This defuses potential negative PR while improving the Comcast image. Dell has a whole team of folks like RichardatDELL who are taking the company’s message to the people in an interactive fashion with blogs and Twitter. By engaging the community on a continuous basis Dell can shape public perception of their brand much more effectively than they can through traditional press releases.
Analytics are key for measuring communications success. My new friend on the communications team is responsible for composing and distributing an endless stream of internal messages, largely via e-mail. Our current e-mail newsletter platform isn’t giving him a robust analytical view of the penetration of his messages. Did anyone click on that third section in the newsletter? Are people getting targeted information an acting on it? We hope so, but we can’t really tell. We need modeling capabilities like those provided by Google Analytics.
Until you’ve got top-level support, you should only solve one problem at a time. We know that our organization can’t jump headfirst into social media overnight. We’re going to look around for teams and teammates who have the need and the passion to make collaborative solutions work for our company. My ongoing wiki promotion efforts can be a testbed. His communications expertise will help us maintain perspective. Now we need to keep moving and reach out to a few more people.
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