by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
When I started my previous business, “Adam Gray Social Media”, like many small businesses I engaged with mainly other small businesses. And whilst it was great to get hands-on and make a difference for these guys it was also quite frustrating. Frustrating because they didn’t embrace change as readily as I had hoped for.
Typically they would cite a series of reasons as to why they couldn’t deploy social media for the moment, “we haven’t got someone in-house who understands social media”, or “we’re too busy doing other things”, or “our directors don’t really understand social media”, or “we plan to do it next quarter”, but never now. There was always a perfectly valid reason for not doing what I (and often they) know they should do.
The frustration was that they were squandering an incredible opportunity presented to them by social. Customers have changed their behaviour. They once did research about purchasing through websites and brochures and sales people. Now they do it through social media and websites and the role of the sales professional is now closer to that of an “order taker” in many instances. But, despite the fact that customers had embarked on this transition, largely, businesses had not. So there lay the opportunity for my clients. Embrace social wholeheartedly and they could “own’ the social space for lawyers, accountants or whatever it was that they did. But this often proved to be outside of their grasp.
So, when I started at Oracle I was thrilled that I was going to be working with very large organisations that wouldn’t have these issues. They would have the money to hire the very best staff, they would have in-house social media experts, they would be at the very cutting edge of social transformation and I would be working with them to be doing some really clever social media science.
But (as in paragraph 2):
Typically they would cite a series of reasons as to why they couldn’t deploy social media for the moment, “we haven’t got someone in-house who understands social media”, or “we’re too busy doing other things”, or “our directors don’t really understand social media”, or “we plan to do it next quarter”, but never now. There was always a perfectly valid reason for not doing what I (and often they) know they should do.
To begin with this perplexed me. I couldn’t understand why large organisations that could recruit incredible talent were on many occasions no more advanced than their smaller, poorer counterparts and sometimes far behind them.
In time, the problem became apparent: large organisations are stifled by organisational inertia and people don’t feel “ownership” of either problems or solutions and therefore are resistant to change. This was partly the reason Tim and I set up Digital Leadership Associates, to help break down these roadblocks.
So, how do we do this?
We have developed a programme to gain agreement in organisations and give people that feeling that they have ownership of both the problem and the solution, and more importantly that they are a crucial part of the success.
It is important that all stakeholders see i) social is a vital element of future success, ii) everyone must be involved, and iii) clear objectives around what good looks like, what constitutes success and how long will it take to create a positive ROI.
They need to see, and believe, that social media is not a subset of digital which is itself a subset of marketing, but that social is the glue that connects and binds an organisation with itself and its customers. Social is conversations between staff, social is organisation announcements, social is customer complaints, social is sales, social is marketing, social is brand, social is competitor profiling, social is research, social is NPD, and social is shareholder communications. Social is everything.
Against this backdrop, where for every possible business function there is a social element (supply-chain management – yes), giving responsibility for “social media” to the teenage daughter of the Chairman or the Head of Digital Marketing doesn’t seem like such a smart move.
Without this organisational-wide stakeholder buy-in, anything that happens as far as social media is concerned will only ever be an isolated blip of success, rather than the all-encompassing powerhouse that it really is.
Sceptical? Not convinced? Don’t believe a word of it? You are mistaken, wrong, about to make some very serious career mistakes.
If you need us to come and convince you, just ask. It will, I promise, be the most important decision your company has ever made.
We are a Social Media Agency. We do three things: Social Media Strategy,Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.
