Is your business REALLY ready for social media?

To quote Sandy Carter, Vice President of Social Business Evangelism at IBM, “Culture eats strategy for lunch!”   

If your business is not ready to share information internally or hear some not-so-wonderful messages from your customers, then all your best laid social marketing plans may just come to naught.

You don’t have to look too far to find examples of brands that have removed customer comments from their Facebook pages or shutdown campaigns all together because they haven’t received the answers they wanted or expected.  

Marketers often bemoan the fact that they’re finding it difficult to get their colleagues and managers to “buy in” to social media and as we all know, it’s impossible to run an effective SM program if the marketing team are the only people driving things forward. Everyone needs to be involved in some way.

So before you embark on planning a knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark social media strategy, do yourself a favour and analyze your company’s culture.   What is the speed of your decision making process and who are the people allowed to make the decisions?  Social media isn’t going to wait around while your board of directors create that perfectly crafted answer – you’ll need to act fast and with decisiveness. 

Sandy shared a sample of IBM’s culture checklist on her blog yesterday :

Some particularly important areas to note are:

Learning – are employees and managers willing and enthusiastic to learn new skills or are they trying to avoid having to step into the unknown?  It can be especially difficult to get older generations of employees involved in SM because they don’t understand how it works and are loath to invest the time to do so.

Horizontal Communications – are you able to pick up the phone and ask that guy in the stock room whether they have a bath towel in all three colours or do you have to send a memo to his manager first?  Is Information shared freely through easily accessible channels or do you have to fill out a form to request an update on a customer complaint?

Boundaries – are employees and managers able to operate and make suggestions outside of their fields of expertise or are your R&D meetings for the R&D team alone?  Marketers and customer service staff are often able to offer extremely valuable ideas about other areas of operation, but are they willing to listen? Or is it a case of “you do your job and I’ll do mine”?

Taking the time to analyze and understand your company’s culture – and taking steps to change it if needs be – is the first step in ensuring an enduringly successful social media strategy.

You can follow Sandy Carters blog at www.socialbusinesssandy.com and get yourself a copy of her book, GET BOLD - Using Social Media to Create a New Type of Social Business, here.