Social Media For Suits

Yesterday, our little sister company MediaSnackers delivered one of their internal events to the staff and partner agencies of South Dublin County Council—check out the blog post which features feedback vid and photos.

One of the bespoke break out sessions I lead was for director-level personnel and senior management teams, focussed on how social media can impact positively on their current operations and strategies (internally and externally).

For this collection of individuals and the organisation as a whole, social media is a new consideration / activity / opportunity / threat etc.

Whether you’re trying to understand the opportunities of geo-location functionalities in mobile apps or simply trying to manage your time effectively to explore this stuff, social media means, for most, doing something different. Learning something different.

And there’s the rub, doing something different means change. Depending on your point of view this is either a hindrance or an opportunity.

All these new technologies and funky online platforms has to create benefit and value to your current operations. This is how we present it. This is how change should always be positioned.

It’s why we’re in the change business not social media business.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Alvin Toffler

Take a look at the image above. I’ve recreated it after seeing a similar picture in a copy of the Metro newspaper. It illustrated that people care about what is close to them. People like to do business with those who they can walk up to and shake hands with, people we can learn something about and share experiences. For that to happen, we either need to be close to those people, or communicate with them frequently using phone calls or emails, or do something else. That ‘something else’, is now becoming available to us in the form of geolocation software.

My phone is asking me to submit my location information for practically every application I use. And because of this I’ve started to spend some time exploring the use of geolocation services such as Foursquare, GoWalla, and Scvngr. After a few weeks playing with them, I can see the benefits of including it in your business strategy immediately.
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Social media is just a tool (actually it’s a set of tools).

For many of our clients these online platforms and strategies create, unsurprisingly, new benefits, expectations, challenges, understandings.

They enable us all to broaden the range of possibilities related to our current operations and focusses.

The takeaway here is that, if you use the same tools, day in day out, you’ll invariably create the same outcomes. Put another way, if you want something different to happen (like tap into a new sector/market, increase productivity across departments etc) then you have to do something different.

So what’s your favourite social media tool?

Image credit

We need you.

Need your feedback on what you would like to see more of on this blog.

We will continue to focus on senior level uses and impact of social media for organisation and companies, we're just keen to give you the opportunity to guide the content.

To participate all you have to do is vote below—thanks in advance for your time:

Poll ends 15th May 2010.

You know this fantastic U2 track, right? The one which goes:

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give, and you give
And you give yourself away

With or without you…

Well that’s social media.

To make it work you have to give stuff away.

What seems counter-intuitive is now a positive move to share with your community the development of a new product line (to build up momentum before the launch); engage your audience in the process of crafting what you serve (and by doing so create a built-in check-and-review focus group); develop relationships with existing clients by detailing industry insights in thought-provoking and engaging ways (another words, not just white papers but dynamic media such as digital stories, video, virtual timelines etc).

Plus, it's happening now.

With or without you.

It's up to you to get involved.

Over a series of posts, I’ll be looking at some of the most common responses we face regarding concerns, questions and fears from CEOs and Senior Executives about using social media. Covering topics such as ‘Time’, ‘Controlling Conversation’, ‘Security’, ‘Branding’ and ‘The Corporate Image’.

Lets kick off with the big one, time. Clients are always happy to hear that social media is free, but never keen to hear that it will need a lot of time investment. There’s no getting away from the fact that social media is as much about ‘social’ as it is the ‘media’.

2009 figures from EMarketer research informs us that 25% of individuals saw time as their biggest barrier.

So what can you do?

Internal Use

Firstly we recommend using everyone in the company to get social on your behalf. Build it in to their day, set some targets and you’ll soon start to see your brand grow through your web statistics. Every department can help. Introduce it to IT, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Research, and Reception. All involved should be able to search and receive searches based on the specifics of their job descriptions and share the load of creating and monitoring the online conversation.
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Have you ever questioned the benefit and/or value of blogging your businesses/organisations activities?

Check out two marketing and business changemakers, Seth Godin and Tom Peters explain why it's such a powerful medium…

Many organisations and companies spend a lot of money on people to manage their IT needs. Whether you outsource or have an in-house department, ask yourself : are they really doing their job?

IT exist to do two things :

• protect—they do this rather well
• enable—they do this rather badly

Imagine if your IT department facilitated internal workshops on a regular basis, with a focus on enabling you and your team to explore the latest online offerings and tools. In turn you acquire new skills to connect directly with your customer / clients / audiences, collaborate better, and save money.

When we deliver our training through our little sister company MediaSnackers, we're constantly running into the constraints of IT policies or uninformed IT officers who see social media as a threat to the controls they administer, when really they should embrace the opportunity to become change agents and leaders in your organisation / company.

So, at the next quarterly IT review or monthly meeting, take another glance at the image above and ask yourself what type of IT department you want to pay for…

Image credit to Gapingvoid

(WORLD) The MediaSnackers podcast focusses on individuals, organisations or companies who are simply impressing us and which are crying out for more discussion.

Jeffrey Hayzlett is Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Kodak, discussing how they utilise social media in their operations.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

0.00—0.32 intro
0.33—1.03 how does social media fit in with the marketing plans of Kodak
1.04—2.09 shift of approach from traditional to digital
2.10—3.03 benefits of narrowcast vs broadcast
3.04—4.29 social media killed B2B
4.30—6.45 internal use of social media
6.46—8.26 examples of results relating to social media use
8.27—9.03 outsourcing social media
9.04—10.03 future
10.04—10.16 outro

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