by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
At Digital Leadership Associates we do three things: i) we provide strategic social media guidance (helping organisations articulate a social vision and create a strategy to deliver it), ii) we deliver departmental social media transformation (such as social selling or marketing change), iii) we manage social accounts. I would like to talk briefly about the first…and the most fundamental of those and how you can begin to make that change in your organisations.
We are exceptionally good at helping organisations use social media to create visibility of their brand, raise credibility and generate sales, these days this is simply not possible through traditional channels. But this transformation doesn’t happen by chance, you need to have a plan.
Why you need social media
With over 50% of the world’s population now using social media it is vital for your business to engage your prospects on social channels, failure to do so is the beginning of the end for your company. “Why?” you may be asking…well there are two main reasons for this:
First, the social proof and peer validation of your products or services provided through social channels lend a degree of credibility to your organisation which simply isn’t attainable through the non-social channels. A well written page on your website is, at the end of the day, just “words” that you have written. Even a testimonial is dubious because once again, you’ve probably written it yourself and to check/validate it is often more trouble than it’s wroth for your prospect. To my knowledge NOBODY successfully markets their business by saying “we’re rubbish” so simply saying ‘we’re good” carries no weight and just becomes “noise.”
Second, when did you last watch a TV ad? or read a newspaper ad? Or even open an email from someone you didn’t know? We are so inundated with approaches from people trying to sell us “stuff” that we actively try to ignore unsolicited approaches in a way that we haven’t before. Even when you micro-niche your marketing efforts and create an offering which is really compelling to me, the prospect, the chances are I will never know that because I will be actively trying to ignore your approach. As Seth Godin said “I have better things to do with my time than solve your marketing problems”…
Engaging with customers on social channels is extremely effective and, in the future will be pretty much the only way that you will be able to break through the noise and get noticed. But it is going to be hard work. Hard work for the business and for the individuals within the business.
You know what you need to do
The irony is that you probably already know what you need to do…you just aren’t doing it. Let me give you a real life example:
A few weeks ago Tim and I were sitting with the senior marketing team at a global “IT” vendor and we said as an off the cuff idea “if you want to get traction and start to shout-out your competitors so only you are visible you need to do the following thing…”
Get a sample of people from within your organisation (say 1,000) to write one blog piece per month (just 500 words or so, with the “agreed” keywords) and post those pieces all over the internet for example, on your website, on medium, on flipboard, etc etc – and for each article the writer then writes 5 tweets and all of the 1,000 staff send those tweets out over the following month or so.
By the end of the year you would have 52,000 articles about your products and you would have sent 52 million tweets about your products and with your hashtags on them.
This would make all of your competitors extremely difficult to find…you would look like the only player in this space.
The client said “we know this already…you’re not telling us anything new!” To which we said “but you’re not doing ANY of it!”
We see this so often, plans are not drawn up in a way which people buy in to, or they simply aren’t articulated so that EVERYONE understand what needs to happen and feels ownership of their part of it.
Why you need a special kind of plan
My point is, that social media is not difficult to understand, we do some really clever “social media science” stuff too…but to begin with, it’s really easy. Anyone who can maintain a friendship with another human being can understand social media…but at work, they just don’t do it.
First, we pull these simple strategies in to a single plan, but whilst understanding and collecting together these simple strategies is easy, managing the behavioural change within an organisation to implement them is extremely difficult.
That’s why our #1 proposition, our Strategic Offer, is to create that masterplan for change.
It looks like this:
- help organisations visualise what social can do for them
- articulate that vision and identify how important is it
- align all the key stakeholders behind this vision
- understand what the unique barriers are to successfully implementing this vision in your organisation
- identify the building blocks needed to maximise the chances of success
- create a “success trajectory” so the whole organisation can see progress
- highlight the key milestones
and, most importantly of all
- granularise the large objectives in to small manageable tasks that people can understand and feel accountable for
After this initial phase we deliver a manual for change, kind of like a “this is your life” book containing a snapshot of where you are, the vision of where you want to be and a map of how to get there. This document is the blueprint for social success in YOUR company and you can take this manual and give it to your management consultancy to implement the change, you can try and implement the change yourself (a tricky but ultimately rewarding solution)…or, of course…we can implement that change for you.
The key to success is always in the execution, and having a plan which drives change at an organisation-wide level rather than, as Tim would say, “random acts of social” is the first step on achieving this.
I would be lying if I didn’t say this was going to be a long and arduous journey, but there really is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow and failing to embrace this change if simply laying-down to die.
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.
