Actions speak louder than words.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and an action is worth a million words.
You have already decided how important Social Media is to your business and you did it with your actions.
There are three things you probably already did that determined how important Social Media is to your business.
First, you put someone in charge of your Social Media efforts.
Mike Boysen, an extraordinary thought leader and fellow member of the SCRM Accidental Community, asked the question that has been bouncing around my head for sometime "Does it matter who is listening to social media?"(Great blog post - definitely worth a read).
Everyone says that becoming a Social Business starts with listening - but I say it starts when you do something with that you heard. And, if you really thought that Social Media (or Social Business or Social CRM or Sally -- or whatever you call it in your organization) could bring value to your organization, you would have placed a smart, well connected, middle management or above person to listen to Social Media. Someone who could act on what they heard.
Companies like Intuit, Drugstore.com, and Comcast did it well.
Putting an intern, young or inexperienced business person in charge of your Social Media efforts means you don't really think you can get any value from it -- else, you'd put someone in a position where something can be done with the Social data collected. Please, spare me the flaming about how young people can also know and understand business -there is no substitute for experience and long-term exposure. Period.
Second, you calculate the ROI for your Social Media investment.
The fact that you even attempted to calculate an ROI on a piece of infrastructure means you place little value in what you can get from that infrastructure investment. Social Media is a long-term, part-of-the-core-business investment you must make. Expecting a return on that investment is naïve - like expecting your purchase of a better telephone system to return your money.
Social Functions (things you do on top of Social Media channels) are similar to what you do on other channels and you can determine their ROI - sort-of.
Most organizations calculate the pseudo-ROI given to them by their favorite vendor or consultant and use that to justify their decision (also known as covering your --- options, yeah, that's the word). They think they can justify an infrastructure investment like you justify a software purchase - not so.
Setup Social Media and associated tools, then you can calculate the value it brings to both organization and customer before implementing a specific social function. Use the infrastructure you built to prove value to both parties (hint: value and ROI are different things!)
Third, you create Social Media Usage Guidelines.
When you created those guidelines (if you did not, skip to the end - you already killed the potential value by not creating them anyways), you had to make a very hard decision: craft them to accommodate the existing culture in the organization, or use them as a change agent and empower your employees to act in the social world as social entities. That decision translates into the value you assign to Social Media for your business. You really think that Social Media can bring value to your business? Then empower your employees to act as their own, give them freedom to reason what is worth sharing and what not, and ensure you have the support systems and solutions for them to do so. For a good example of this, see Zappos in addition to the companies mentioned above.
The alternative, limit their involvement, monitor and punish them for going beyond the strict guidelines, or make them conform to a style that is not theirs. If that is the way you go about Social Media, shouldn't even bother crafting guidelines - simply block access to social networks or dismiss employees for using them. Either way, your organization does not see value in Social Media sufficiently to trust them with it.
Now, let's say you made any (or all three) of these mistakes. Is all lost? Can you redeem your organization into becoming a social business?
Glad you asked.
You are going to have to wait about a month for that answer... that is my next post exclusively here at TheSocialCustomer.com (hint: it is very easy to revert the death spiral, trust me).
What says you? Did you make any of these mistakes? Did you avoid them? Got any guidelines or advice to give us on how to do things better?
Comment section below... (Unless your company has blocked your access to social networks or you cannot put comments online or... nah, just kidding).
image credit - http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2008/10/valley-vcs-attempt-to-scare-startups-into-profitability.ars