Social Media: Social Media has created a new wave of business that many do not understand. This is in large part because no one truly understands it. It is constantly changing and evolving the way business leaders must look at their business and the relationships around their endeavors as a company. Social Media allows for a great deal of transparency within the company which if not monitored, can quickly become negative publicity. New hires and current employees can find out what they want and if what they find is negative, you won't pick up talent. CEOs can no longer guarantee the image they pay for will truly be the way the public percieves their products or services. But is this a negative, a positive or maybe a little of both. Here's what our leaders are doing to change their perspectives and step out of the uncertainty to embrace change.
Whether You Like It Or Not – here’s the deal, I’ve been advising C level execs and Ven Cap leaders alike in the past year on the positives and negatives of Social Media. The problem is, when it comes to the negatives, it’s almost not worth talking about them. Your staff, your competition, your customer base, your supporting partners as well as many of your executives are already on Social Media whether you like it or not. Embrace it as a cheap, fast and effective tool that will help you get what you want. Note: I can expand greatly on how companies are doing just that. How its affecting areas such as the speed of new products to market, costs of research and innovation, and brand awareness to name a few.
Stay Focused – there is a mess of new applications, creative tools and forms of communicating out there via Social Media that CEOs, Politicians, and everyone else gets confused and flustered by. Here’s a simplified solution to the idea of Social Media; Don’t worry about the technology at all. With the rapidity of the technological advancements in the Social space as well as the progression of comfort that the community has with it, you'll never be able to keep up. It can cause a company to sit foggy and uncertain as to the direction things will go, especially if they’re focused on it from a technology standpoint. What I’d like to stress is that it really cannot be about the technology but must be about the relationship or objective you have given the target market you seek to influence. First figure out what the point is and what you're trying to do. Only then can anyone (including the "experts") inform you on how to communicate and with what tools to use. Note: I’m happy to speak with anyone about the technology and which applications, software and services to use in which situations based upon the Objective you develop around your chosen Target Market. Until you have those pieces though, don’t bother talking about technology.
Use Known Formulas - Understanding and establishing a target market and what your objective is for that market can help overcome the mystery of what technologies to use and create strategy around those. POST.. people, objective, strategy and technology (cited from social media book “Groundswell”).. there’s a reason that technology comes last. I would contest that the message hasn't changed, just the way you deliver that message. Leaders waste too much time on the method of delivery over the actual message they wish to convey due to the fact that there are so many ways to deliver it. All the hype around these channels cause leaders to think they need to keep up. This is strictly for CEOs and C Level execs as well as some politicians here; focus on your market and message and leave the techy stuff to your staff.. notably your PR, Sales, Development and Marketing Teams.
The following are some recent subjects I’ve spoken on that interest other CEOs:
- Strategic steps to navigating the world of Social Media and information transfer
- Companies should be looking at Social Media as a positive tool. How to re-leverage the power they are losing to the current Online Socially Networked world
- How to use Social Networking tools to embrace, empower and enhance your internal employee resources as well as your new found external socially networked community resources
- How some companies are successfully handling the change and why
- How companies are using social networking to innovate faster, adapt more rapidly, strengthen client relationships, empower customers and their employees (gamification, user feedback, influenced/incentivized rating systems, realized product improvement based feedback or policy change, etc), improve satisfaction ratings, build their book of business, decrease market spend, placation of dissatisfaction of customers and employees, etc.
I'd love to jump deeper into the above points if anyone is interested. There are some really fun conversations to be had about this ever changing Socially Connected Market.
These are just a few points that I wanted to share with you from conversations in the board room and with C Level executives around the nation. There are many other details we can get into if anyone has any questions. Feel free to connect with me on @barretn via twitter or email me if you have any comments, additions or feedback that you'd like me to add in. I appreciate your interest and time in reading Executive Decisions.
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