Getting Started with Social Media

I had a great meeting last week that exemplified some of the challenges for businesses trying to launch social media initiatives. I was invited to a brainstorming session with a cross-functional team at a fortune-500 company. They had a very experienced team representing marketing, customer support, technical services and management. They had an active customer community, and a broad history of marketing programs to engage them on traditional one-to-many terms. They had a new web site, they had the resources and management buy-in to try something innovative, and they had pressure from competitors who were already engaging the market with user-generated content. The company already had an executive blog, though it wasn’t performing as they had hoped, and the team was planning to develop a customer forum, but wanted some earlier successes in building community involvement online.

They also had some significant challenges. With a high-technology product line, they had serious concerns about how increased information access might impact security and product safety. A long history of such concerns had shaped a corporate culture that was relatively closed, including significant constraints on public communications. And that long history of constrained corporate culture had in turn shaped many of the features common to large organizations that impede innovation.

But, like I said, this was an experienced team. They were smart, informed and genuinely excited about all the various opportunities for social media initiatives. They had researched an array of options from blogs and podcasts to forums to wikis, and they had a lot of community-building experience to draw on, most notably user groups and major events. The biggest challenge turned out to be deciding what kind of initiative to start with—one that would represent a clear move into social media, while minimizing the more substantial risks that might dead-end any future adventures in innovation.

So without belaboring the story I’ll lay out my own thoughts and recommendations, and then solicit your input.

My first advice was to focus on an initiative with minimal investment in time and money. Success is more often than not an iterative process. You’re likely to fail. So do it quick, do it cheaply, and then correct your course. Don’t set out with a big initiative that ties up a lot of resources putting all the bells and whistles into a flashy launch, unless you’re ready for a flashy failure. Social media lends itself well to this kind of iterative and learning approach. Marketers often dwell on the ROI for Social Media, and metrics are important. But as Jeremiah Owyang often says, the “I” in ROI for Social Media is so small that it’s not relevant when you’re just getting your toe in the water. If you’re just getting started in social media and you’re stuck on ROI, you’re either focused on the wrong issues, or you’re making too large an initial investment.

My second piece of advice was to choose an initiative that would engage others in the organization in the project. This will help build bridges internally—or pipes into the organization as one of the participants later phrased it—and help reduce some of the risk around communications.

My final advice was to choose something fun. Something that would engage and excite people in the organization as much as their customer community.

The first specific idea was to launch a short series of videocasts—the kind you shoot with a home video camera—interviewing some key employees about what they’re doing today that might impact future products. The key to making this kind of transparency work, is to form a team that includes someone from corporate PR to help set guidelines around what can be discussed and what can’t. The advantage with this initiative is that it’s cheap, easy to start, interesting for everyone, and will filter up one or more engaging personalities in the organization that will help social media efforts.

The second idea was to launch a product-focused blog that would dovetail with customer support and leverage product developers that have deep product insights but aren’t attached to support. This initiative is less risky, because corporate PR and customer support can choose the internal participants and train them on guidelines that would minimize unwanted disclosures. This initiative would also “build pipes” into the organization, develop personalities good at engaging the community, and enhance customer service capabilities. 

The third idea was more of a grouping of ideas that would leverage existing events. Maybe a customer contest to highlight innovative uses of the product. Maybe a blogger’s hospitality room at a major event to help identify influencers in the community. Maybe a string of videocasts leveraging the huge investment in event marketing to bring the event to a larger community.

These are just a few targeted ideas in a constellation of possibilities, and I’m interested in more input. So what are your thoughts or ideas for low-cost, low-risk initiatives to help a large organization get started with social media? Do any of these ideas resonate with you? What would you do, or what are you doing, that’s relevant?

Comments

[Colin Henderson]

Observation ... step 1 prior to those items. They need corporate CEO agreement to work with the medium, personalise the blog, and accept there will be bad days, which will translate into enormous benefit by how they handle them.

[chris kenton]

Colin--

That's a good point, and theory can translate into reality in many different ways. Even when management agrees to the medium, exactly what is agreed to can vary dramatically. Some companies, notably Sun, have established company-wide blogging policies with clear and fairly open guidelines for employees. Other companies have embraced employee blogging, but established such strict guidelines that employees aren't motivated to engage.

In the case of the company in this post, there exists what I think is a fairly common situation: management is aware of the trend and interested in exploring the opportunity. But for the team actually executing social media programs, there's an acute awareness that it's not a blank check. They need to be smart about managing risks, and selecting initiatives that demonstrate a tangible difference in how the market can be engaged.

Thanks for commenting.

/chris