The Actual Implementation of Social Media

Following up on my last post, it makes a lot of sense to add the same sanity check filters to the deployment and integration of social media into the mainstream corporate workspace. Similar to mobility, social media is an area that gets outsized attention from the mainstream and business press, as well as the analyst communities. One billion + users on Facebook is not a number to be trivialized, and even a small percentage of such a large number is a statistically significant cohort, which explains the vast cottage industry orbiting around Facebook.

But similar to the preceding rise of mobility (and the rise of the consumer internet before that), this is another technology trend that has caught corporate America with their pants down. What? Social Media? One Billion? Holy Smokes! Let’s do something! And everyone goes rushing off the cliff like good little lemmings, without asking the core question…Why, exactly? How does this tie into or augment what we’re already doing? How does this add value to our existing value proposition, and what is the best way to ensure tight operational alignment?

What happens more often than not is companies jump all over this, without a clear commercial or operational imperative, then nothing really happens since expectations were never properly set to begin with, and the whole initiative starts to slow down. And similar to mobility, this is a very consumer-centric framework; as anyone who has tried to market to consumers knows, they are fickle, flaky, easily stampeded, and have the attention span of a two year old. Do companies really want to jump into this dynamic given the relative immaturity of the technology and the proclivities of the end target?

I am not suggesting that companies should not pursue a social media (or mobility) strategy, quite the contrary. These are pervasive technologies, but they are not geared towards the need of the corporate model. Facebook started out as a way to create communities in colleges, and became so large it was impossible to ignore. But the fact that it’s there doesn’t mean you have to jump in without thinking about it long and hard. I’ve seen tons of companies who beat their chest saying “Yeah! We have a Facebook page! We’re totally social!” And you go to the page, and it’s static. A one-way conversation with no one apparently listening on the other end. No interactions, no engagement. It is not enough to post, you have to interact, that’s what makes it social. And guess what? Those interactions may not go in your favor. If you get it right, and truly integrate social media into your core business model and align around it, it can work wonderfully, but if you rush in without thinking, you run the risk of either being ignored, or worse, getting a public spanking.