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December 08, 2009
Guest Blogger: The Business Culture of Social Media - Steve Parrott
I recently met with Steve Parrott and two other Seamless Enterprise bloggers and discussed the role of social media in Corporate America. Steve will be sharing his thoughts from a cultural and technical perspective. Here’s the first of his posts dealing with the cultural aspects of social media as it relates to business. In a future post he’ll share his thoughts about the technical issues for all of my IT followers.
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The Business Culture of Social Media
By Steve Parrott
The challenges to social media usage in the enterprise aren’t necessarily technical ones. It’s pretty straightforward what technology is needed and how companies need to integrate mobility into their network in order to be sure that their employees have the anytime-anywhere access to the social media tools. Instead, the challenges are really organizational and cultural.
People talk about the “intersection” of social media and business as if it’s still coming, as if it is something that hasn’t happened yet. That is simply not true. The degree of intersection may vary by company and industry, but it’s clear that this intersection is taking place right now. Business, it’s safe to say, has entered the Age of Social Media.
At its heart, social media is about messaging, location awareness, presence, and collaboration, and despite minor differences, those concepts are the same from a business standpoint. Social media as we typically think about it involves individuals communicating better with their friends, families, and acquaintances. On the business side, the rationalization is different. It’s about better communications among employees, team members, partners, and customers. And in particular, doing it anywhere and at any time.
So far, the most attention has been on the external uses of social media. Like airlines using Twitter to inform followers about special fares, service providers of various types using it for customer care and service, and entertainment companies leveraging bloggers and Tweeters to spread the word about their latest productions.
Moving beyond (or perhaps, more specifically, moving among) these budding uses of social media is where the challenge lies in the enterprise. A company has to take a close look at how it gets its people to embrace social media concepts and how it can evolve the process-oriented aspects of business to the more fluid and collaborative nature of the real-time internet. Not only is it an organizational shift, but a cultural one as well.
Companies taking advantage of customer-facing social media also have to ask themselves what they are going to do with the feedback and information they get, and how they will deal with the commentary generated in the Twittersphere. If they’re going to be successful, they have to have the right people in place who can react appropriately to any negatives and who are prepared to go all out in leveraging the positives. They have to be instantly responsive, as well as instantly effective, in their response. This means tearing down any bureaucracy that stands in the way of that responsiveness.
However social media is used, it definitely cuts horizontally across departments and divisions. While customer-focused social media will probably be driven by marketing, there are sales, product management, legal, and IT aspects to it as well. Because social media can be whatever the enterprise wants it to be, it will require each organization to define it, draw some parameters around it, and either meld it to their culture … or transform their culture to fit it.
Steve Parrott is guest blogging on behalf of Sprint’s Seamless Enterprise blog (seamlessenterprise.com), which focuses on unified communications, convergence and related enterprise issues.
You can follow Steve on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/Stevenparrott
Posted by jeff on December 8, 2009 04:51 PM | Permalink
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