Seventy-five percent of Fortune 1000 companies have a social media strategy. Fifty percent will fail. This is according to Lois Kelly of social media researchers Beeline Labs. Failure often because the strategy doesn’t match the medium and tries to be “top down” and linear rather than multi-vocal.
In a presentation she gave to the Conference Board last year, Kelly described many of these Fortune 1000 social media strategies as focused on connecting with customers. But some are oriented toward engaging employees and changing the workplaces.
Here are some reasons employee-focused social media strategies in today’s workplaces might succeed or fail (inspired by her article “10 Ways to Make Social Media Matter to Skeptical CEOs“).
1. Innovation and productivity today often comes from listening to both employees and customers. Social media is about conversations. Attempting to use social media to control a message from the top, rather than listening to those who work with the corporation’s products and services every day is not what it is for. Moreover, if employees don’t believe that their opinion is valued, they won’t participate so it will fail.
2. Employees or customers want to hear a CEO’s point of view (or that of a senior manager) – not just data about the latest product, new acquisition, etc. They want to know what he or she thinks about economic challenges; new developments in the industry; or even the local sports team. And, they want to be able to enter into a dialog on these issues.
3. Success of a social media strategy should be measured by involvement, engagement – the numbers actively participating in a dialog (not just how many clicks a message receives). In fact, involving employees in a good internal social media community sounds like a great retention strategy.
4. Corporate social media strategies often involve a leap of faith – or courage, as Kelly calls it – when the c-suite gives up full control of the message. As she ends the essay:
One last point that resonated at that skeptical CEO meeting, I played the new Paul McCartney
song, ”Fine Line,” whose lyrics are “there’s a fine line between recklessness and courage.” Not
… letting go of some control is reckless because it puts a barrier up between you and your customers [or employees], I reminded the execs. Change that makes a big difference, however, requires just a small bit of courage.
So, does anyone have any good stories about social media strategies that have succeeded or failed?
February 16th, 2009 at 8:28 am
About five years or so ago, Tony Blair launched “The Big Conversation”. It was designed to be a portal for citizens to post suggestions, get involved in debate and air grievances about policy and a vision for Britain.
It died a very sudden death. Nothing happened. No-one used it. It may even still be up there in the interweb.
February 16th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Interesting, Robert. Why do you think it died?
February 17th, 2009 at 6:48 am
Because Tony Blair’s government had a reputation for ignoring the views even of its own Members of Parliament, let alone constituents, so the whole thing became a symbol of his hypocrisy and obsession with spin over substance.
Because of TB’s reputation for “media management” anyone who genuinely posted any concern would have been instantly under suspicion as just being a hired stooge.
I imagine it was also the target of a lot of trolls who used it as a vehicle for expressing their resentment.
Although I’m only guessing about what happened as I have no acual evidence of what happened, I suppose I’ve come up with a few suggestions as to how social media in the workplace needs to be managed – the reputation for listening and acting on workforce suggestions needs to be in place before any kind of mega launch of a “we’re listening to you!” facility even starts, as that reputation can kill the social-media strategy stone dead.
Which is kind of auto-causative…
February 20th, 2009 at 6:14 am
I’m sorry, but that is not the reasons why they fail. Don’t get me wrong, those are valid and true. But MOST fail because of these reasons(50% is way low BTW):
1) Social media is an outlet for a real substantive site. Many companies try to build the social media without that backbone.
2) Delivery methods/social networks are varied and change often. Again, this is another reason for a strong central site or brand to rotate the social media strategies. If your online strategy is to twitter or myspace rather than building your own content and that site dies or dwindles in influence, what do you have left? Social media is part two. It should always be after your own inner-site development.
3)The term “social media expert/strategist” is so over-used now that many companies hire poor people to execute. Companies don’t know what to do and are getting sales/PR people who know how to talk the game but don’t perform the real content development to integrate with their strategy. Sadly, there just aren’t standards for who can really execute social media strategies.
Too many companies just throw up social media without having anything good to back it up with. It’s ridiculous.