Much of the current discussion of social media as a business tool appears to be focused on its value as a tool for communicating with consumers. We provide a brief summary of this discussion below. We then turn to another business use of social media—especially Twitter—that may be quicker and easier to implement, can provide company-wide value, and may be a better place for companies to begin building their social media competencies.
Social Media and Consumers
The current focus on the use of social media in business is on the use of social media tools to INTERACT with consumers (especially existing and potential customers). Current issues coming to the fore include:
A. Mindset issues. Moving from a broadcast mindset in communications to an interaction mindset—from leading to listening to interaction.
B. Engagement issues. What are the rules and roles for consumer engagement that will most benefit my company?
C. Organizational issues. Social media cuts across a variety of business functions and departments (from marketing to public relations to customer service). How should social media be managed and coordinated? How do we optimize its use while minimizing turf and power struggles?
D. Organizational change. Successfully dealing with the three overlapping sets of issues listed above may require organizational change. Some advocates are even promoting social media as a tool for organizational change.
Using social media as a tool for interacting with/marketing to consumers is where much of the attention on social media is currently focused. If some of the early successes of social media marketing are any indication, its prospects for creating better and stronger businesses are indeed great. Realizing this potential, however, is going to take a lot of work, a lot of experimentation, and a lot of time for most industries, companies, and organizations. Social media services and tools themselves are probably just in the early stages of their development and evolution. When it comes to how social media will transform how businesses and consumers interact, we are probably in for a very long (ten years?) and interesting ride.
Meanwhile, there are other uses of social media in business that have not been getting the attention they deserve. Let’s now turn to one of these.
Social Media and Professional Development
The internet is an amazing resource. It is an amazing source of information, knowledge, and tools for probably nearly every business function, task, group, and profession. If you have a job, a task, or a problem to solve—or want to find ways to do something better—you can often find helpful information somewhere on the internet. The trick is finding 1. good help (i.e., useful information or instructions that directly address the critical parts of your task or problem) 2. efficiently. Having Google at our fingertips certainly beats the old days of trudging to the library to look through the card catalog (or even the early days of Yahoo search). But finding “the information we’re looking for” or need on the internet can still be frustrating—more misses than hits, more noise than signal.
Social media as search engine. Surprisingly, social media can provide some of the benefits that we have looked to search services like Google for. This is especially true of Twitter (once again, there’s something about Twitter…). First of all, Twitter is a streaming collection of what people are thinking, feeling, doing and paying attention to now. Secondly, and more importantly, if you use Twitter to follow some interesting, knowledgeable and provocative professionals in your area of expertise, you’ll get lots of high quality links to interesting new articles, discussions, insights, and media. Suddenly you’re a lot more “plugged in,” suddenly you’re discovering valuable new stuff outside your normal blog subscriptions, RSS feeds, and Google searches. You’ll discover great stuff you didn’t even know you needed. Superior crowd-sourced searching and filtering delivered in incredibly short and efficient messages. From Twitter! Who knew?!
If I was the CEO of a company that was moving into “the social media space” ( wouldn’t that be nearly every company right now—even the ones that have already jumped into consumer communication?), I would encourage all employees to begin using Twitter as a basic part of their job. I would urge them to use Twitter to find and follow professionals they look up to and then to follow their Twitter messages for tips and links to new and better ways to do their jobs, new and better tools to help themselves and the company. I believe this company-wide effort could be initiated with relatively little investment and minimal training—a meeting in each department to kick it off and get people going. I would then monitor Twitter usage and growth in the number of people being followed. I’d ask groups within departments to meet up and share tips, tools, useful apps, lists of worthwhile followers, and case studies of how it’s changed them and their jobs.
I think this would be a great place to start with social media. First teach the whole company how to use Twitter. Learn to follow and listen together. On this foundation I would then begin to build my social media and consumer outreach. I’d look for the best people in each department or group to serve as the company’s public face for that function. We’d have to work hard to figure out how to manage all of this as we evolved our use of social media as a channel for communicating with consumers. Listening to consumers via social media and learning how to be helpful won’t be that big of a challenge, however. Most of that will be pretty natural. Our biggest challenge is going to be learning how to do this in a way that is good for us, for the business, for the company…and resist getting caught up in the things that aren’t. Sorting out the things that will and won’t benefit our business is going to be our long-term challenge.
Summary. In focusing first on implementing social media as a consumer communication channel, many companies may be jumping the gun and overlooking what could be the biggest bang-for-the-buck and the best place to start: using social media as a professional development tool to help everyone in the company get smarter, better and more innovative in their job.
Footnote. Ford Motor Company may be evolving something of a hybrid of the model described above. Scott Monty, the head of social media at Ford, is canvassing and grooming people throughout Ford to play an active role in Ford’s efforts to address consumers via social media. I suspect that other companies who start with consumer-focused social media efforts are also going to find themselves spreading the social media opportunties and responsibilities throughout their organization. This may be one way to back into helping the company use social media as a tool for professional development.
