The Social Media Club recently asked “social media evangelists” to share their experiences of life in the trenches, helping people to understand the promise and peril of social media, which is highly connected to social networking and Web 2.0. I thought their survey was very well done, so here I am reprinting my answers, and I’m asking you to weigh in with your observations and experiences, too.
How do you define Social Media?
Web 2.0 is about P2P, social networking is the explicit activity of connecting with people for social reasons (I see business as social, too). Social media is less focused on explicit connecting and denotes creating metadata around other content; sharing opinion about vids, audio, blogposts. Connecting happens but is less explicitly the focus than with social networking.
How did you become a Social Media Champion/evangelist? What was your first experience with social media and what inspired you to help others ‘get it’?
My career has been dedicated to innovation and helping companies get stronger by adopting disruption. I am a Connector who wrote the first iteration of the “Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn” in 2006 as a way to help my (offline) executive network understand and migrate to LinkedIn. I did a social networking strategy engagement with a bulge bracket bank in 2007 and trained my disruption acumen on Web 2.0. I am an adoption leader among enterprise peers.
As a Connector, I love to add value by making global high-value connections. Per the definition, I am a connector between numerous ecosystems, so (digital) social networking was/is inspiring for me. I’ve worked with dozens of executives this year in the Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn seminar series. It inspires me to help other people understand the digital world and how it can help them to adopt, even though it may seem disquieting at first.
How did you convince others in your company to start engaging the market/customers through Social Media?
Leading by example, being patient and motivating and supporting early adopters. Most executives do not understand adoption. By segmenting the group into (I use Moore’s adaptation of Technology Adoption Lifecycle) Visionaries, Early Majority, Main St…, you can look for the right things and set expectations appropriately. This is especially critical when applying to mature industries or businesses which are inherently late adopters and who will expect “proven” results before they consider adopting.
What objections or obstacles did you have to overcome and how did you get beyond them?
First, “this stuff’s for kids.” What that often means is either “I don’t understand it, and they do, so it must be for them” or “I can’t believe some of the stuff that people share ‘out there.'” Both reactions often fall along generational lines: Traditionalists and Boomers often don’t get the reward of loose ties and don’t know how to use features to conduct themselves to achieve the right effect. Gen Y often doesn’t get the “executive social” ramifications of online behavior. Gen X is currently the spanner.
Get beyond this by leading by example and explaining how things work in terms of the group you’re addressing; generations/people sometimes feel alienated from each other and assume no connection. The Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn addresses gaps in executives’ understanding and capabilities.
Second, there is lack of perceived business value. Executives need to understand how Web 2.0 lowers the transaction costs of finding and engaging people; there aren’t many reliable studies yet. I get around this by reminding people that few companies took the Internet seriously in 1996 either; there were no models, it was “for the green hairs,” and we didn’t have to take it seriously. Srsly ,^)
What was your biggest success? Please share the case study if you have it, or else tell us what you did, what the outcome was and why it was such a big success.
The precursors of the Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn were two blog posts: “Review of LinkedIn,” which showed executives in detail how to understand and use LinkedIn’s robust privacy controls and helped explain ROIT in executive terms. The second was “The Unofficial Guide to LinkedIn for Executives and Professionals.” People from all over the world loved these. Vincent Wright was an early supporter. I came to realize that, although these posts were helpful for many, others needed more, so I developed a service offering around it. I listened to the crowd.
What advice do you have for other people who are just now trying to champion Social Media in their organizations? What are the keys to success? What would you differently if you had a chance to do it over?
Full disclosure: I’ve been in marketing and management consulting my whole career. So to skin this cat, I advise focusing on stakeholders as a start point. Whom do you care about? (customer segments, stockholders..) What are they doing in these online venues? What are the trends? (you need to focus on what will happen in the near future, not right now, which is becoming the past fast). Most clients have no idea who’s doing what where and why. That’s the fire.
Set expectations correctly: the adoption of disruptive technology/behavior follows a pattern, but it’s like a fire with wet wood. Those twigs smoke for a long time, and they need nurturing in the beginning, sometimes for a sustained period. Prepare for that.
Big one: companies are used to focusing on themselves first, often with customers a distant second. A still more distant third is “the public.” Web 2.0 flips this completely, because “the public” (includes stakeholders btw) comes to companies. We’ve digitized word of mouth. Teaching companies how to build relationships with anyone with an audience that includes their stakeholders is critical for success. For example, spend as much time on others’ blogs as on your own. That’s hard because the payoff is uncertain. But it works most of the time.
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