When Your Company Culture Isn’t Ready for Social Media*

01/08/10 07:28 AM Filed in: #social media

If you have already implemented social media to connect to your customers, how are your organization’s executives responding to the wealth of information ? Are they open and responsive to it, no matter how bad the feedback, or do they demand the feedback be filtered in order to create a sanitized, more palatable version? More importantly are they responding in Internet time rather than on your company time schedule of "when we get to it".

Social media has great power to democratize information, enable direct access to anyone in the company, and to provide real-time, meaningful feedback on products and services. Are those the kind of features that would increase your speed-to-market, improve innovation, and engage your employees? Or do you worry more about the threat to management structure, security of information, and hierarchical protocol?

What if you’ve taken a culture check-up, and your organization is not yet ready to be open and transparent to employees, customers and partners? Do you have to wait years to shift the culture to one that is ready?

Maybe there are pockets within the culture that could pilot a small project, focused on a specific business need. For example, a new product team could use a private, secure social networking tool to communicate with each other and store important documents, training guides, past correspondence and feedback from customers. Or you could implement a broad scale, highly focused tool, such as an expert employee directory with additional social networking capabilities progressively turned on as the organization acclimates. Another way to tiptoe into the waters is to create and launch an Innovation Jam — a one-day idea generation day created to engage the entire workforce on ways to improve and enhance current products and services or propose new ones.

*by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd
Harvard Business Review

Tags: Implementation