On the topic of Social Media and its impact on business, one of the overriding themes is control. Control, or lack thereof, on employee communications about your business (see Washington Post). Control of your brand message. Control of social media usage within the workplace. And so on.
From my perspective, the risks/benefits of social media are derived from the notion of “Social Capital” or as Tara Hunt (@missrogue) would call it, the Whuffie factor. In virtually all areas corporations have such overwhelmingly lopsided access to the various communication mediums that controlling their brand message hasn’t really been that difficult. And stopping employees from speaking on the record to the press, etc. is a simple matter of a document being signed at the time of employ. Social media changes all of that. A massive multi-billion dollar enterprise may find itself with far fewer “followers” on twitter than the lowly mailroom clerk down the hall for example. Who has the greater social clout in that example?
Adam Savage (from the TV show MythBusters) had a mishap with AT&T that could have happened to anyone, but because of his social media clout a simple tweet criticizing AT&T’s mistake had AT&T back on their heels to resolve it as soon as possible before more PR damage could be done. A couple of years ago this certainly wouldn’t have been on AT&T’s radar screen.
Adam “@donttrythis” Savage tweets:
AT&T is attempting to charge me 11k for a few hours of web surfing in Canada … they’ve turned off my phone until I pay. … They’re claiming I uploaded/downloaded 9 million kilobytes (9 gigs) while in Canada. Frakking impossible.
…
There’s movement! Apparently I’ll be getting a call soon … Just got off the phone with AT&T and they’ve taken care of everything to my great satisfaction. … AT&T guy on the phone with me:” apparently you’ve got enough Twitter followers to get our attention.” me: “50,000″. Him: “wow” … [but] it shouldn’t just work for me. The data carriers MUST stop thinking in kilobytes and start thinking in customers.
Now imagine a frustrated employee who happens to be a “player” in the social media scene, or be connected to one. How would you know the source? Anonymity is certainly easy enough on the web. All of a sudden there’s this very real sense of paranoia on the part of the corporations, and rightfully so. Having a popular tweeter in Nebraska be on a level playing field with your 70 Billion dollar corporation must be an unnerving thing indeed.
Yet at the same time we are preaching to corporations to be open, be transparent, put a real face on your operations, etc. One can understand the difficulty in finding an acceptable balance between control and freedom. Obviously one of the ways corporations are combating this to some degree is establishing their own surreptitious twitterers who both reinforce their own brand objectives while going after the competitions. This, of course, in addition to their “official” twitterers.
The main challenge that I see many corporations failing at, is one of defining interest groups within their own product makeup. They are jumping into social media as an “entity”, but who really wants to listen to what a large corporation has to say every day? You want to identify with a person, not an entity. If you’re a Corvette fan, do you really want to follow Chevrolet as an entity or would you rather hear from the lead designer of that car? If you want to own the message you have to find ways to make your message more appealing and authentic than the noise around you. For example “Wow, can you believe our computer systems made such a huge mistake with *Adam Savage* of all people? How embarrassing. I wouldn’t want to be a programmer at tomorrows meeting. I guess the good thing about it being such a public personality is that it’ll insure it takes a high priority to be fixed in the system”. Mistake acknowledged, but depersonalized as a computer glitch, self deprecating, evokes sympathy for a real person (programmer) to move attention to a new “victim”, turns the negative of responding differently to someone with clout and makes a positive out of it, and provides nothing “hidden” for someone else to attack.
The second challenge, once you’ve defined a social “interest group” is who to entrust to deliver these messages? The potential negative impact to your company could be massive if done incorrectly. How do you define the tone of voice to be used and so on? These “spin” messages are once in a blue moon (hopefully) but you still need to establish a following by communicating every day. In general those communications are going to be personal opinions on things that have very little to do with your company, but hopefully there would be ones that reinforce in some way an underlying brand ideal…e.g. “Congrats to company X on that customer service award, we’ve asked them to come in and talk to us next week to share ideas”. These are very complex communications, but are you going to pay someone of that quality to sit at a computer all day and tweet? Or are you instead going to move back into control mode and put in place some bureaucracy to review and approve all tweets before they go out? Let’s hope you don’t choose the latter.
I certainly don’t have the “final answer” on this, anyone who says they aren’t flying by the seat of their pants a little bit is lying. So what are your thoughts on how to find the right balance of social media control and freedom in a corporation?
Matt Ridings – @techguerilla