Failing to create a vision will send you into the ditch in a hurry.  You’ll never sell the concept, you won’t end up where you want to (but without vision, you don’t even know where that is anyway) and getting people to commit to the long-term strategy that’s required for social business success will be like pulling teeth…from an elephant.

In failed social media attempts (or any attempt to do something kick ass within an organization that falls outside the traditional bullshit) you’ll find a path littered with agendas, plans, memos, directives and other immature attempts at really taking the business into the social realm.  This isn’t something that just happens – you need vision, you need commitment and you need a team (see: coalition) of super-energized people who love what they do and don’t take “that’s the way we’ve always done it here” for an answer.

Let me put it to you this way. If you’re got a big ass think bind of data on social media at the ready to convince anyone who asks that your social media mission is a just one, well, you can just burn that binder and pull out a business card. If you can’t get your social media vision onto the back of a business card, when it’s not a vision, is it? (Hugh’s take on “quality is job one” comes to mind…)

Related posts:

1. Monday Marketing Moxie – Vision Without Execution
2. Change Management for Social Media Success
3. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)

Major change, the type required to embrace a more social business model and strategy, certainly needs support from the top, but it also needs support from each silo, department, line of business and functional area that will be affected by social media’s reach into the organization. Most situations that I’ve seen have involved anywhere from 8 to 40 people across an enterprise (depending on the size) and they all are in support of social media in one way or another.  It becomes a collaborative effort that everyone wants to see succeed.  Once you have skin in the game from the major players, it’s hard for them to back down from the charge.

If you’re looking to change the way you market, including the use of social media, here are a few thoughts on creating a guiding coalition:

1. The team needs to be comprised of leaders and front-line people from each functional department or line of business. If that means 4 people X 15 departments, then so be it.  If that means 5 people X 20 departments, then so be it.  There’s something to be said about small and lean teams, but if coalition is what you seek, now is not the time to skimp.
2. A guiding coalition can be comprised of many levels, but I’ve seen them include the CEO, senior management, front line sales people, members of the board of directors, customers, staff members from all levels of the organization and even strategic partners or vendors, when it’s appropriate.
3. Members need to be free to share, push and pull ideas and agree or disagree without feeling as though their boss is going to pull rank (which may happen anyway in the long run) to ensure that the ideas, concerns and perspectives required to help the project succeed are all on the table to fall to see.
4. A shared sense of urgency must permeate the group (see Failure #1 if you still need this) so that everyone gives this coalition the time, attention and energy necessary for it’s long-term success.
5. Carve out specific working times for the coalition. Some organizations will form internal or external retreats to learn about and strategize on social media while others will set a standing working group that meets regularly to push the organization forward.

Failing at the guiding coalition stage of change management usually leads to an overall neutered strategy which fails to penetrate the entirety of the organization and delivers far less than the original champions envisioned it would. 

Tomorrow we’ll cover the concept of “Lacking a Vision”…

Related posts:

1. Chaordic marketing for social media success
2. Change Management for Social Media Success
3. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)

Related posts:

1. Slide Deck:Using Social Media to Connect With Your Customers Online
2. links for 2009-08-08
3. The MarketingSavant Group Blog/Site Launching Soon

Creating a sense of urgency requires robust leadership. Notice, I did not say ‘management’. We’re not looking for people to shepherd the existing systems – we need bold leaders to create the social business system that will take the place of the existing business system.

So, how do we go about creating a sense of urgency?  There are many tools that a leader can employ, here are just a few:

1. Facilitate a frank discussion on the realities of the market. Perhaps 90% of your customers are already on Facebook. Maybe all of your competitors have a blog but you. Maybe your entire organization is going to become unsustainable unless you build a loyal community to drastically reduce new business development costs.  You get the picture.
2. Bring in someone else to kick your company in the pants. Lest you be branded a heretic or put out to pasture for bringing all this bad news upon the company (and…we all know the quote about a prophet in his own town). Outside consultants (full disclosure: I am one) can bring a ‘global’ perspective on social media and be a credible ally to help create the sense of urgency you’re seeking.  I can think of several engagements over the past few years where we played this exact role.
3. Ask your customers. Customer feedback, especially if you’re not gathering regularly or if you’ve never explored the social media question, will give you some great insights to share and can really move a company off it’s perch when they hear that their customers say that ‘they’re out of touch and not reaching them in their channels of choice’.  That hurts…and motivates!

According to Kotter, you need upwards of 75% of the management team of a company on board with any change program in order to achieve success.  In the social media projects that we’ve seen, that’s pretty accurate.  Having all of the departments or lines of business on board, at least with the concept of social media, is key to long term success, especially if you endeavor to bring social media to their part of the organization (such as in customer service or HR or operations).

Related posts:

1. Chaordic marketing for social media success
2. Change Management for Social Media Success
3. Failure #3 – Lacking a Vision for Social Media

"We know that leadership is very much related to change. As the pace of change accelerates, there is naturally a greater need for effective leadership."
– John P. Kotter, Author, Leading Change

Marketers require all kinds of skills to be effective. We need to understand project management, art and graphic design, be able to run a brainstorming meeting and talk ROI at the end of the day to measure what we did last month. The one set of skills that we will need going forward is a master’s level understanding of change management.

What was once a discipline for people on large-scale corporate re-engineering teams, change management and the transformation process are skills that every marketer now needs to have in their hip pocket, ready to deploy at the next turn.

You can’t learn change management in a day, but there are some guidelines that can help you get through your next project. In Leading Change, John P. Kotter outlined eight stages in the change management process. By understanding the process that human beings go through in order to achieve successful change, you’ll increase the chances that your next endeavor will end on target.

Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

Think about your existing marketing projects that are brining change to the organization (especially social media…) and compare them to Kotter’s eight-stage process to see if you’re going through the right steps to succeed.

1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency
2. Creating the Guiding Coalition
3. Developing a Vision and Strategy
4. Communicating the Change Vision
5. Empowering Broad-Based Action
6. Generating Short-Term Wins
7. Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
8. Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture

WHERE ELSE TO LOOK?

This week we’re doing something a bit different. Starting Tuesday July 20th and for the next eight workdays, we’ll be covering the “Eights Steps to Social Media Failure” using the Eight-Stage Change Management Process as a backdrop for the discussion. Stay tuned at www.marketingsavant.com.

Related posts:

1. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)
2. Chaordic marketing for social media success
3. Failure #3 – Lacking a Vision for Social Media

Day 1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)

Day 2: Not creating a guiding coalition for social media

Day 3: Lacking a vision for social media

Related posts:

1. Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Process
2. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)
3. Failure #3 – Lacking a Vision for Social Media

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.”

Related posts:

1. Failure #2: Not creating a powerful guiding coalition for social media
2. Consistency & Frequency – Ingredients for Success in Social Media & Thought Leadership
3. Failure #1: Not establishing a sense of urgency around social media (marketing)

So what, you say? Well, you may already know that social media is outsourced far less than any other type of marketing activity. The reason is that any social media effort needs to be piloted by a true steward of the brand. The steward is someone who gets the convergence of the personal nature of social media and the cultural imperative for organizations who decide to truly engage with their stakeholders. That steward, and not the outside expert, needs to be steeped in the dog food that the organization is going to be shoveling out…

By dogfooding your social media and integrated marketing efforts, you not only become familiar with the tools and technology, but realize the desired effect of becoming a more approachable and conversational culture that drives business growth in the age of conversational marketing.

One caveat: You’re not the audience. Always keep your customer in mind. Dismissing something prematurely because it doesn’t work for you internally could just be a case of dogfooding myopia!

Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

Are you dogfooding your marketing? Even if social media or geo-marketing efforts or that cool app you want to develop are far off, you need to be acclimating your organization today to embrace the challenges of tomorrow.

Where else to look?

So much of our work involves research and reading from a variety of different resources and if there are additional resources that went into each week’s theme, we’ll share them with you here.

Related posts:

1. Random acts of social media marketing
2. NEW e-Book: 30 Marketing Ideas in 30 Days – for Entrepreneurs “Do It Yourself” Marketing Month
3. The Burden of Loyalty

Why complexity? Why now?

A study on the trucking industry some years ago by Daryl Wyckoff uncovered a “rather strange profitability pattern of trucking companies. Both small and large companies were very profitable, but the medium-sized companies were quite unprofitable.” 
The reason for the odd distribution of profitability: Complexity.

In this year’s Global CEO study from IBM, Capitalizing on Complexity, the top concern of 1,500 CEOs from around the globe is summed up as follows:

The world’s private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of “complexity” is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue — indeed, to accelerate — in the coming years.

That says volumes.  Complexity is their number one challenge.  Outstanding.

Back to our school districts… I see it the same way here. I believe that one of the reasons that we’re seeing an influx of PR professionals and a surge in social media and new-age marketing technique interest is due, in large part, to the growing complexity of the environment that we operate in.

Complexity causes businesses to change in fundamental ways. Entrepreneurs who aren’t prepared won’t know what hit them, says Jonathan Byrnes.

Complexities? Like what?

Well, let’s look at just a few factors that I feel make things more complex:

1. Politics: Everything has become political.  With the advent of 24/7 cable networks devoted to politics and the heightened skepticism of the American public who sees everything as ‘having some agenda’ behind it, politics affects so many of our decisions.
2. Options: We now have dozens of venues, outlets, channels, tactics and techniques for everything. It’s newspapers + blogs + video + PR + parent groups + [whatever else comes up in the next 10 minutes]
3. Fragmentation: In 1965, 80 per cent of adults in the US could be
   reached with three 60 second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime time commercials to produce the same result. (via Jim Stengel, Chief Marketing Officer, Procter &Gamble. 2003)
4. Changing States: Water flowing from a smooth stream to a spattering all over the sink, the seemingly inexplicable change in traffic from and even flow to a near halt and back again and other similar phenomena are all state changes.  We’re seeing the same thing slowly happen with the communication in our districts. We almost don’t know it’s happening!

These are just a few of the reasons that underly complexity – there are certainly more.  I think that you get the point.

What can we do about it?

The whole point of this post is to tune your frequency to the increase in complexity and what it’s doing to school districts, as well as other types of organizations.  I think that you’ll agree that the factors that are moving us to a more complex world are some of the same factors that are making it ever more critical for our districts to take a leading, proactive approach to parent, student, staff and community communications and dialogue (which is why social media is so important).

From here, it’s all about how you handle the complexity.  Here are a few of ideas:

• Invest in strategic communication planning, especially in the wake of new and social media.  It’s critical to understand the breadth of all of the stakeholders who need to hear from the district and the depth of resources that you have to reach them.
• Review and revise your crisis communication plan. A recent book by MIT professor Yossi Sheffi called The Resilient Enterprise highlights how organizations of all types can “manage the unmanageable”.  Now is a good time to think about how you might do the same.
• Carefully focus on understanding your district’s vulnerabilities. A recent discussion we had with a medical college who does animal research gave us some insight into the importance of doing this type of scenario planning before they went to market with their social media presence. You can’t prevent every attack on your vulnerable areas, but it’s far better to understand possible scenarios than to be caught with your guard down.

As with anything that’s complex, there’s much more to discuss on this issue.  I look forward to feedback on the issue of complexity in school district communications.

Related posts:

1. Marketing Classics: Communications and Industrial Selling (Theodore Levitt, 1967)

Captivated by the hype and the ease of implementing social sites, many marketers initially ignored proven marketing principles. Instead of developing a strategy to guide them, they launched their social media initiatives by creating blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts without a plan or a purpose.

– MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

Are you committing random acts of social media marketing?

Lack of strategy results in random acts of social media marketing.

Many marketers in the initial and even in the mid-term stages of social media engagement pursue social media from a purely tactical perspective. I applaud them for taking an implementation approach, but without a sound strategy and social media architecture, they’re setting themselves up for muted success at best.

Social media has been called the ‘glue that holds social networks’ together. It’s true, in many ways, and well-built networks of customers require proper planning, care and feeding to maximize your potential in social media marketing. You can’t be looking around for a strategy when you get to what we call the “beyond now what” stage where you have people interested in your social media outlets and then leave then hanging because you don’t have a strategy.

Q&A | QUESTIONS & ACTIONS

1. You’re going into a long-term arrangement. Time, work and commitment are required. Get this into your headspace and you’re set for battle.

2. Content. You need to become a publisher. That’s how you build your voice, your brand and your social media presence.
3. Fish where the fish are. You NEED to UNDERSTAND your audience and where they hang out in social and digital media. Spend a day and start searching…and searching…
4. Run it like a business. It’s not about having friends or followers. You HAVE to figure out how YOU will make money from social media. Innovate – implement what works for you!

Where else to look?

So much of our work involves research and reading from a variety of different resources and if there are additional resources that went into each week’s theme, we’ll share them with you here.

Related posts:

1. Monday Marketing Moxie – The Social Media-ologies
2. Change Management for Social Media Success
3. Failure #3 – Lacking a Vision for Social Media