If you've ever tried to use social media within a large corporation, it won't surprise you to hear that the biggest barrier tends to be top management. Legal doesn't want to expose the company to risk... Marketing doesn't want to risk negative feedback about the company... the business groups are afraid the competition will learn more about your company.
All those risks are real, of course. The challenge is to persuade management that the benefits exceed the risk. At the Marketing Profs B2B Forum 2008 in Boston, Lee Erickson of Erickson Barnett gave a great primer on how to gain management buy-in one step at a time.
I won't go through all her steps, her slides are available online. But here are a few money quotes from the talk:
- "Word of mouth has moved to the Web." In an age of greater and greater specialization, conversations move online because the small percentage of people interested are dispersed geographically.
- IT Toolbox surveyed decision-makers on what online resources they find the most valuable in making purchasing decisions. The clear winner was topic-based discussion groups or communities, which out-polled search, content aggregators like del.ici.ous, and general networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook.
- The key to overcoming management resistance is to start using social marketing tools (blogs, wikis, forums, networking tools) internally first, where the risk is lower.
In the Q&A I told her that at Social Media Today, we've found that within the communications functions, advertising and brand-management tend to be the most resistant to social media, but PR departments are more likely to get what we're talking about. Advertisers are used to measuring results from multi-million-dollar campaigns, while PR departments are more used to valuing general communication that doesn't necessarily move the sales needle. Lee had a different take, saying that PR departments also resist because they don't want to lose control of what the company says about itself.