Adapting Social Media
In this article, we discuss why businesses in government agencies are slow to adapt to social media. In my last article, I discussed how social media is changing the way we think and talk about products and services. In this article, I ask why businesses and government agencies are slow to adapt to the social media age.
Systems and change
One fundamental truth about systems is that small systems are very flexible, and as systems grow and are more based on rules than on quick decisions, they become slower. Government agencies and big businesses are some of the slowest systems. One key sector about those big systems with a lot of rules is that they want to be in control. They have moved away from being a chaotic system, which is very flexible, and they have become a controlled system. They are in a stable state and they want to keep it that way.Thus, they need a lot of extra energy to push them to go over to a different state.
We could argue that why would anyone want to change? If few businesses are doing well and you’re making money, you don’t need to change. That’s only half true, because success now means that in the past, you have made decisions that have led you to where you are you know. In order to be successful in the future, it means that you have to make decisions now about which way you want your business to develop.
Social media is here to stay
It’s clear that there is no way around social media anymore. Social media is already here, Facebook is here, Twitter is here, and blogs are here. People don’t ask the permission of a company or of a brand in order to talk about them. People blogging, talking on Facebook or on Twitter don’t ask permission to talk about your service or your product. People giving you recommendations don’t ask you what to write. That’s one good thing about social media. People think about this as more true than Google because it’s actually how real people interact. Businesses and government agencies, and everyone who is in the internet needs to connect to that new reality that social media is here to stay.
Listen to your customers
If you don’t want to be a part of it, that’s fine, but your product and services will and you will be talked about. The question is not whether you will be present in social media or not, rather the question is will you have the possibility to listen to what other people say, and if you have the possibility to paint a picture of your own perspective. The questions that businesses should ask themselves is not “should we go into social media or not?” It should be “what do we have to lose by listening and talking to our customers?” Frankly, I don’t think any business that doesn’t want or need to talk to his customers will be around much longer. This is the best way to make your product really valuable for your customers. Listen to what they would like to have and make it.
Why businesses hesitate to join Social Media
Why are they hesitant to join in and let people be on Linked-in or have a Facebook fan page? I think one of the reasons is that things can go bad. They don’t want to be in the middle of the mess. That’s pretty much the argument I gave before. If things go bad you want to be in the middle of it and taking care of it. Not taking control, but being able to see what’s going on. You will have people work on this and they can make mistakes to. An example is Domino’s Pizza. Their employees did some nasty stuff to the pizza and Dominos reputation dropped in free fall within one night. But you’re human, and if your product is good you can always say I am very sorry. Having said that, there should be rules, and you should educate your employees about social media and not give them concrete roles to act upon.
If you have read some of my articles you know I’m a big fan of dynamic system theory. It states that the best possible system is close to chaos. It is in a stable state but that stable state can be change to chaos with just a little bit of energy. That means you can react fast to change and that’s one of the most important things in our world. Change should get quicker and quicker. You should teach your employees what social media is, and what the rules are in social media. There are laws, but the community lives by specific standards. Those standards should be respected if you want to be part of the community. You should know the unwritten rules that you have to deal with. Social media is about people. It’s not about businesses, brands, companies and services, but people.
It is very important that you allow the people behind the social media campaign to be visible as people. You should also select the right people to do your social media campaign. That would be people that are likable. People that have great communication skills, inter-cultural knowledge, quick to adapt, very friendly, and that can stay friendly in a heat of discussions. Those people don’t necessarily have to be text savvy, but they should know a thing or two on how to make the best of social media. You can teach them, or come up with a social media strategy so your people will take workshops on a specific part of that strategy.
The control part of business
I think business people are afraid that if they let people do the work for them, if they tell employee “go on linked-in, we want you to build a huge network of people around a specific topic”, that employee may leave the company because the network will be a personal network and not a company network. And what happens if the employee leaves the company? What will that mean for the personal network? Will that go away with him or not? If that person goes to a competitor, what about the linked-in and profile? Does it stay with the company or not?”
In that regard, we have a lot to learn, and which way this is going is still undecided in my opinion. This situation could pretty much go both ways. We haven’t found a good way to deal with it yet. Some suggest that this is resolved when everyone in social media has a business account, but I think this won’t work because social media is not about business. Essentially, social media is about going back to the way we talk around the fireplace. Around the fireplace, there are no businesses. There are only people.
Should we be afraid of social media?
Is it a good idea to be afraid of social media? In my experience, you always get what you focus on. If, as a business and team decision maker, you are afraid that social media will be dangerous for your business, it probably will. You will see all the aspects on which you can be attacked on or where information might leak out. However, if you focus on the good things, such as being able to communicate directly with your costumers, you don’t have any bias, like that of a salesperson, for example, who has an own opinion which might be bias. It’s a great plus to be able to communicate directly.
Leaking of information
As a business, sometimes, there is information you don’t want shared, such as information that is vital to your business and development that you don’t want your competition to know. However, in the digital age, it is very hard to keep secrets. The question becomes, will it be effective to keep secrets, or will it not be effective to keep secrets? If the amount of work required to keeping information sealed off is more than you have to gain by keeping that information off the hook from everyone else, well then you should just leave it!
I think that more and more companies are discovering that by freely sharing their information once or thrice, or probably even more times, there will be negative aspects related to your competitor knowing what you do. However, there are positive aspects behind this. By sharing information, you let potential drawing partners, investors, and the public know what you are doing. This is a very great value that will put you on the map.
What makes a system a good system
This is going back to dynamic systems. A good system is a system that is close to chaos and that has the most amount of information, or feedback, available to them. This allows the system to go to iterations and directly see what the effect of a change has in the system. This is the base of the dynamic system: small changes can have huge effects, but it is very hard to compute which changes will have which effects.
Businesses should look up on social media as being the perfect tool for getting feedback. They need to acknowledge that people make mistakes and that people drive social media. There will be mistakes, but you can use those mistakes to improve. I encourage everyone not to be afraid but to embrace social media and understand the effects that it has on your business. Start looking at it as a tool for getting feedback.
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