Page 207 - Social Media Marketing

collaborative activities that inform your business and strongly tie your customers to 185
it, and taking the time to measure and establish a quantitative basis against which to
assess the business value of your social media and social business program. ■ ╇ W hat N ot to D o ( and W hat to D o I nstead)

The next section covers two of the universal challenges that face businesses
wanting to take advantage of social technologies: These are the difficulty of facing up
to the changes required in some form for most business, and the tendency to assign
all of this “social stuff” to marketing, as if it were something marketing alone could
control.

Ignore Change at Your Peril

Wouldn’t it be great if the world stopped changing, or it changed so slowly you could
ignore it? Actually, no, it wouldn’t, because in that case you wouldn’t get your next
promotion because that would change things. One way or another, change is some-
thing to get used to and ultimately to embrace. “What’s next” is change, and that
change is coming to a marketplace near you.

Gearing up for change, then, is part of getting an organization ready for social
business. This includes instilling a culture of learning (so that new collaborative tools
such as wikis, Yammer, or Socialtext are embraced rather than pushed off, along with
a culture of openness (so that employees are comfortable suggesting what may seem
like wacky ideas to others in the organization).

Watch out for resistance to change that is hidden—businesses can position
themselves, for example, as “forward thinking and innovative,” yet be very rigid inside
when it comes to how they go about running themselves. If the internal vision held
by an organization for “innovative and forward thinking” collides with that of its
customers in the marketplace, the kinds of internal changes required to adapt may be
tough to implement. In particular, in organizations with a strong leadership figure—a
founder or a CEO whose personality is an active part of the brand—the inclination of
that business leadership to actually embrace change is a factor. I’ve been fortunate to
consistently work with businesses headed by leaders open to and supportive of change:
Your mileage may vary.

The Status Quo Is a Dead End

While “doing what has always worked” may see a firm a few more miles—or many
more miles—down the road, market evolution is a fact of life. To adapt—and to be sure,
there are countless management handbooks and articles on this topic—some degree
of flexibility is required. In start-ups, it’s the ability to move from what “we knew our
customers wanted’ to “what they were actually willing to pay for.” Surprisingly, a lot
of start-ups fail by missing this signal. In established firms, it’s more likely exhibited
as an aversion to risk or the failure to hire (or even the tendency to actively screen out)
“change agents.”