A few days ago, I wrote about the emerging enterprise battles between departments over who should control social media. I talked about the irony of how a few years ago, most enterprise social media programs and teams were parts of skunkworks projects just five short years ago. Now the very departments who disdained social media is now competing to own it.
A skunkworks project, is usually a small, low budget experimental endeavor. Big companies usually have several of them going on at once. They get to move fast because they are not subject to the labyrinthine processes that encumber most traditional enterprise programs. CEOs like skunkworks projects because they demonstrate vision at low cost and lower risk. Most skunkworks programs die.
Some, actually become a product, a service or a technology. The issue is that when this happens and permanence is added to what had been independent and ad hoc, it graduates from skunkworks and gets integrated into the mainstream corporation, where the formerly agile group suddenly have reports and quarterly goals to fulfill.
Social media in recent times has proven its worth. Measure is getting pretty accurate and companies are finally figuring out just what it is they want to measure in social media.
In fact for marketing, communications, human resources, customer support, product development, social media is proving to be a sustainable, scalable, low-cost impact tool set.
Suddenly everybody wants to run it.
My friend KD Paine likes to say, “we become what we measure.” This may be true, but social media, I think becomes who does the measuring.
In short, if an enterprise community, for example, becomes part of marketing, then it will be measured by marketing criteria. The social media program will become better and better at achieving marketing goals.
Simultaneously, the same community, will become worse and worse, at helping product development, recruiting and customer support, because those will be downplayed by a marketing-driven community.
Well, why not just divvy it up? Let marketing have a piece and product development have a piece and so forth. Problem with that is this is not convenient to the customers, and one irrefutable fact is that social communities that put customer needs in front of company needs are the most successful.
Personally, I think this is an over-worked issue. I;ll explain that in a moment. But currently, I am learning this is an enterprise social media issue upon which managers are getting overly worked up.
Social media, it seems to me, is not an app. Nor is it a channel, or an outreach program. It is a communications tool set. The tools are not what is vital to the emerging modern enterprise. The communications is.
I think social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter should be used ad hoc by whoever needs them to get her or his job done. The tools do not need to be measured quite as much as some people would have you think; the performance of the employee using them needs to be evaluated. Is the job getting done.
Where it gets muddy, is in the new enterprise communities Some of them, like IBM’s have more than 8 million users all over the world. They are producing content, sharing information and otherwise serving as an intangible global marketplace.
Companies start these communities. They invest significantly in the technology to host, communicate, store, design, establish and enforce community standards and rules. That’s many millions of dollars. The return is far, far greater.
But the return–and the value–isn’t just to the hosting company it is to the community of customers. Altimeter estimates that SAP’s network of communities is worth nearly $90 b, with only a slivver of that going to SAP itself. The real value to SAP is these communities are so valuable that customers will never want to leave.
So where do these communities fit in? Each company seems to be answering that question differently. How it works out over the next few years is to me one of the most interesting and strategically important questions that social media proponents face.
To tell you the truth, if I were running an enterprise community, I try to stay sequestered inside a stealthy skunkworks program for as long as possible.
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I believe the main question for enterprise should be; what are the roles and responsibilities for groups involved in social? PR, Marketing, Support and Product teams all have a need to access and use social to engage with their communities. What we need to do is reduce the miscommunication and mass engagement issues that come from multiple employees targeting the same audience.
Once you have roles and responsibilities created, then you can create a conversation router between these teams that allows them to seamlessly share topics.
There are other supporting workflows that attach to this idea, but the two above are baseline to an effective social media process for enterprise.
Char,
I think social media is going to be used by people with diverse roles and responsibilities. The main question to me is how to integrate the resources into the existing operations without giving control of social media to one group at the expense of another.
Great post Shel. As a public relations professional I believe you’re right on target deeming it as a tool and not an app, channel, or program. Using it as a tool for integrated marketing and communications (which includes PR, customer service, etc.) gives every part of the enterprise access and responsibility to provide actual deliverables that are specific to each area.
The parameters have to be left up to each company with the goals they have established for the use of social media. This really comes in play when you have SM sites that are now “doing it all” like Facebook.
This inclination of companies to silo and own social media makes it a challenge to introduce to them. I agree with the approach of either keeping it skunkworks or simply adding the tools across the org with clear guidelines for acceptable behavior. It’s just a tool set designed to encourage and assist communication and adaptable behavior, it’s not its own entity. I did an Awareness Inc webinar last week where I talked about this very thing in part of it, and was surprised how many of the participants were not thinking of the tools that way yet. Good post, Shel. :) Love getting people thinking.
You shine a light on a legitimate, active debate happening in the enterprise everywhere. I think the answer is: everyone that has a valid need to engage in social media should own their own engagements. Typically, that would be any enterprise function that communicates with external audiences, such as HR (recruitment), marketing (promotion), PR (announcements and awareness), customer support, sales, etc.
I also believe that those same groups have a shared responsibility to establish the guidelines they all will abide by when engaged in social media, and to come up with those guidelines together. They also need to follow the same procedures for developing any communications policy, which are probably already in place and which usually involve HR and legal early in the process.
Isn’t this the “next important question?” Innovation exists at the edge. So, how do we sustain innovation when the tendency of the organization is to draw proven innovation from the edge into the “middle” – where its total nature changes.
Thanks for adding to this dialogue.
I agree Social Media should probably needs to stay a skunkwork. What I see for social media is that it should be one of those “clouds” all above the organizational chart that Henry Mintzberg proposed. It should be a network of employees that anyone could use for a different purpose. It could work for HR, Sales, Product development, etc. Maybe some areas like accounting won’t use it, but maybe they will use something like identi.ca to share knowledge between the area.
So before letting everyone fight for ownership maybe we need to make the case for social media allowing many social networks built within and out the company with out much of the control of it assigned to a specific area. The control could be done with good guidelines and very few area specific parameters.
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