A lot of the current focus on social business revolves around social CRM and customer initiatives. I guess that's not surprising since it is both a customer driven imperative as more customers adopt the social web, and also an area of quick and obvious business benefit (when done correctly anyway). I have this nagging feeling though, that approaching the transition to a social business from the outside in may not be the best approach. After all, the social customer that we hear so much about is also becoming the social employee, and I wonder if you can really successfully change your relationship with your customer when your own organization is "unsocial"? How can you, as an organization develop a meaningful and ongoing conversation with customers when your own organization is so silo'ed that marketing doesn't talk to customer service or product development doesn't talk to sales, etc.?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that you can't or shouldn't start to engage customers in new and different ways, in fact I believe it's a must do action. Social customers are creating a wave of change that will be increasingly difficult to resist. What I am suggesting is that you also need to start to deal with the overall cultural transformation that is happening and address internal issues as well. Here are some ideas:
- Build a social company policy (see this post for ideas) and train your employees on what you expect.
- Liberate the content. Get data into the hands of the people who need it to get their jobs done. Old content management (read content protection or lock up) isn't the answer. To turn content or data into useable information it has to be easily accessible. We need people centric content tools, not file centric.
- Look at incentives: do you reward individual or group efforts? Are employees incented to work together and share? Do you establish common objectives and goals?
- Where are decisions made, only at the top or throughout your organizations?
- Who owns social in your company? If your answer is marketing (or any 1 existing department for that matter), which is the most common answer by the way, I think you have significantly greater challenges succeeding with your social initiatives. I believe you need a new approach to bringing social into your company, and that the initiative needs to be led by an empowered leader on par with your CIO.
- Social tools are already being used in your company. Yes I know you may think you block them on your network, but trust me, you have not stopped your employees from using available social tools for business. Take inventory of what's being used and why. More than likely you will find that employees are working around systems that simply are not getting the job done. You can't address this by shutting things down or punishing employees for doing what they believe they must to get their jobs done. Instead use this momentum to correct issues and bring the work-a-rounds out into the light and figure out real solutions to these problems.
Technology won't change your business culture. There are a lot of tools though, that can assist in the transformation. From an internal perspective we need to focus on people as the platform and enable them to interact with each other, with content, with data and with systems in a paradigm that resembles current consumer Web 2.0 tools. There interfaces have proven efficient and effective. One of the places to start then, might be with a social collaboration tool like Salesforce.com's Chatter, Novell Pulse or SocialCast. Breaking down the walls around people, content and data are critical to the broader concept of removing silo'ed organizations and engaging with external constituents more effectively (customers, suppliers and partners). Oh, and the tools better support mobile...
