Chaordic Marketing for Social Media Success

Step 7 on the social media marketing strategy process is called the “Enterprise Social Media Assessment” phase. What it really means is figuring out how social media will affect and benefit the various departments or functions of any one company. When we do this across a higher-ed or K-12 organization, it becomes even more complicated as they are typically sage organizations and thrive on autonomy and keenly interested in academic freedom and independence from central control of any sort. How do we manage social media across complex organizations?  Simple.  We apply chaordic concepts to marketing strategy.

What’s chaordic?  Good question. You don’t see the word much now, but when Dee Hock founded the VISA credit card network, he founded based on what he called a chaordic model.

The portmanteau chaordic refers to a system of governance that blends characteristics of chaos and order. The term was coined by Dee Hock the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association. The chaordic principles have also been used as guidelines for creating human organizations — business, nonprofit, government and hybrids—that would be neither centralized nor anarchical networks.

The chaordic system of managing enterprise-wide social media engagement is, in the spirit of choas and order, usually co-developed during the strategy process, but a simple model makes this approachable for nearly anyone.

1. A loose confederation of entities agree to certain basic principles and systems. For example, a large college might craft a series of guidelines and helpful hints or even a handbook that everyone draws insight from, but they don’t control all of the tools, content or protocols in each area.
2. Decisions are made as a governing body on the principles, but not on the inner-workings of each area’s social media presence. For example, a common policy may be crafted to handle crisis situations but corporate citizens have the ability to handle constituent engagement in their own way at any sub-crisis level.
3. The organization is held together by a common philosophy and approach. For example, an organization will get the department heads together to craft a set of common ideas on how they approach social media and then agree to adhere to those principles, rather than placing hierarchy or excessive governance in place.
4. Education trumps discipline. As with most good social media policies, like Intel’s, which states – “We expect all who participate in social media on behalf of Intel to be trained, to understand and to follow these guidelines.” – they lead with education and being helpful, rather then focusing on the punitive consequences if someone screws up.  When your team is educated, the opportunity to leverage chaordic social media marketing is amplified beyond what any command and control (antithetical to social media anyway…) system could accomplish.

In an interview with Fast Company, Dee Hock sums up, what I think is the best model for social media “governance” within an organization when he explains the VISA model.

…and that, says Hock, is exactly how it ought to be. “The better an organization is, the less obvious it is,” he says. “In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It’s the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent.”