Let’s make something clear: you can be the person that starts asking the questions and initiating the conversations that move social media forward. You. Sitting right there. Yes, you.

I don’t care if you’re the marketing assistant, the PR coordinator, the customer service manager, the HR director, or the mailroom clerk. What it takes is the intent to be part of the progress, the bravery to start an open conversation, the maturity and patience to not make it personal, and the investment in the outcomes to take it a step further.

These are not just conversations for the communications department. Be courageous. Pick up the phone, or fire up the email, and ask for 15 minutes of time from the people that can help move social media forward in your organization (or at least reduce some of the friction around it). That means the marketing folks, the customer service folks, finance, HR, PR, product management, QA, sales. Yes, that includes the people you’ve never talked to before, and the ones that aren’t in your “box”.

Ask them one or two questions that can help you form a business case for social media. Your goal is to align social’s capabilities with the problems your organization needs or wants to solve for their own business. Note that the questions below aren’t all specific to social media; they’re attempting to uncover some of the underlying culture, brand, and operational issues that social media could help address. Remember, we’re talking culture change as well as operational change. You need to be the one to translate.

1. What do we do and why, in your words (not a vision statement)? On what could we, as a business, spend more time, energy, and focus?
2. Are you passionate about your role? If so, why? If not, what would help you be?
3. What goals do you have for your role this year? How do you hope to impact the success of your department? The company?
4. How would you describe the culture of our organization?
5. How do you use the internet in your work life? In your personal life? Where are the overlaps?
6. How do you believe your team uses the internet for their work? Have you heard ideas or feedback for ways they’d like to use it more or differently to do their jobs better?
7. Where do you turn when seeking resources or information about your role? Our company? Our industry?
8. What does our ideal customer look like, aside from demo/psychographics? What do they seek from us?
9. If you could ask our customers whatever you wanted, what questions are on your mind? What would you like to know about them and their relationship to our company?
10. How is your function in the business most impacted by customer satisfaction and loyalty?
11. Do you think our brand presentation aligns with our reputation in the industry? Why or why not?
12. How strong do you think our internal communication is? What would make it better? What information do you wish you had more of?
13. What kind of marketing or promotion do you think we do really well? What’s gotten you excited about the way we put our company out there, and why?
14. How well do you think we communicate with customers overall and solicit their feedback? What strengths and gaps do you see? Does it impact you, and if so, is it for better or worse?
15. What sorts of measures do you use in your current role to evaluate the success or impact of your work/department?
16. How flexible and adaptable do you feel our internal processes are? Are there some that are outdated? Cutting edge?
17. What’s your perception about social media based on what you know/have heard/have read?
18. Do you believe social media has a place in our work and business? Why or why not?
19. What are the worst case scenarios you can imagine from social media? What scares you, and what are the risks you’re most concerned with?
20. What excites you about social media, if anything?

These questions reflect some of the deeper discussions I get into with companies around laying the groundwork for social media, but they are by no means exhaustive.

What questions have you found useful in your social media discussions with clients, colleagues, management? How are you crossing hallways and walls and talking to people outside your department about this, or encouraging others to do so? What are your “yeah, but…” comments for me about why this is so hard to do?

image by mikecogh

A huge, huge barrier to adoption of social media is the Us vs. Them mentality. The notion that “they” are preventing us from implementing the social media strategy we want. Or that “they” are a bunch of time-wasters who don’t understand business value and want to upset the apple cart with  unproven strategies.

Provided that you have the wherewithal to bring the feuding parties to the table for a constructive discussion (and if you don’t, sorry, you’ve got no room to complain that “they” don’t “get it”), let’s talk through a few things you might want to discuss across the table.

Evangelists to Critics

Speak their language: Understand that the critics around social media are hearing the hype, but they’re likely seeing a focus on the tools instead of a discussion around how they further business goals. They may not use the tools themselves, which means they don’t have first hand experience. Or if they do, they see them as a personal communication tool, and not readily applicable, measurable, or executable in a business framework.

Your job: Education, information, and an objective mindset. And doing your homework around how your social media ideas fit into the bigger picture, including having a realistic assessment of risks and potential challenges. You’ve got to temper your enthusiasm based on what you see, and look at the social media landscape with a critical and editorial eye.

Points of Discussion:

1. What perceptions do you have about the usefulness of social media within a business? What have you heard that reinforces those notions, for better or worse?
2. What information would help you feel more comfortable about considering social media strategies as a part of our mix?
3. What are you most concerned about regarding the risks or implications of social media? What’s the worst case scenario you can imagine, should we undertake such a thing?
4. Why are these concerns top of mind? Is there anything else we do as a company that has similar risks?
5. Have you undertaken new or unfamiliar strategies in your role previously? How did you establish a foundation for that and mitigate risk?
6. Are you concerned that this will somehow negatively impact your role? That of your team? Your available resources? Why or why not?

Critics to Evangelists

Speak their language: Know that many proponents of social media do see potential for this kind of communication and mindset, outside of just Facebook, Twitter, or blogs. Enthusiasm for new strategies is often because it speaks to a perceived unmet need or a weakness in existing approaches. It’s perfectly reasonable to require business justification, but your advocates for social media might be seeing opportunity in places you hadn’t considered.

Your job: Articulating your criticisms and concerns from an objective and levelheaded viewpoint. Educating the group on business goals, and where you see gaps between social media strategies and the ability to meet those goals. Keeping an open mind to looking at existing business challenges through the lens of different solutions that may feel less familiar.

Points of Discussion

1. Which areas of the business will this impact, and how would we need to adjust our current culture, process, or operations to accommodate it?
2. How do you see roles and responsibilities changing to incorporate these new strategies and tactics, and what kind of resource allocation will your strategy require (people, time, money, infrastructure).
3. What are the potential financial risks? Reputation risks?
4. What training and education will we need to provide, both internally and externally?
5. What are your goals and objectives for our use and adoption of social media? How will you gauge progress toward them, and how are you defining both success and failure?

On both ends of the table, I’m a big fan of the 5 Whys approach to getting to the root cause of issues. It’s a tactic employed by the folks at Toyota as part of their evolution in manufacturing. It’s not perfect, but if you haven’t tried it before, it can be an interesting way to break through repetitive thinking. (On a related note, if you haven’t read The Elegant Solution, it’s a fascinating look into the world of Toyota’s processes, innovation, and mindset, and a compelling business book.)

Getting the discussion started among dissenting viewpoints is really key to uncovering root issues that stand in the way of long term social media adoption. And you may find that the issues at hand aren’t about blogs or Facebook or policies at all, but a shift in culture that’s happening as a result.

What would you add? Have you had these discussions, and what roadblocks do you come up against? What makes you lose patience with these kinds of discussions? Let’s have an honest discussion ourselves, here, shall we?

image by rmlowe

This post is the first in a multi-part series on Social Media Time Management, intended to supplement the content of the presentation I gave at BlogWorld Expo 2009. Click here to see the collection of posts in the series.

Information overload is real, but it’s something that’s in your control. Managing your time in social media is first and foremost about deciding where to spend your time and why, and that requires a little bit of organization to start with.

What Are You In This For?

If your goal is to be engaged in social media for pleasure or just for personal connections, your approach is rather simple. You’ll choose the tools and sites where you find folks with common interests, and you’ll tuck the time in outside your other responsibilities.

But if you’re in this for business, at least in part, you’re going to need to think through some clearer goals than that.

Here are five sets of questions to ask yourself:

1) Realistically, how many hours do I have to spend in social media each day? Do I have resources/people other than me? What can I expect of them? (Note: if you’re serious about doing social, you need to find an hour a day to start with, at least.)

2) Which 2 or 3 tools and social networks make sense based on my listening efforts? What is my goal for participation on those sites? What is the culture of those communities and how will my participation line up with that?

3) Have we evaluated our current online and offline communication efforts to determine what’s working and what we might supplement or replace with social media? Am I going to need to add this on to my existing responsibilities in order to prove its value before making tradeoffs?

4) Has our leadership bought into this idea already, or am I establishing a presence so I can build a stronger case? Is time I spend on social media going to be viewed as an investment or a time sink? How do I make the case for the former?

5) What does success look like? How about failure? How can I measure both, even simplistically? (Hint: Objectives you can’t measure against are going to be really hard to celebrate or adjust, since you won’t know how you did either way).

These are just a start, and you’ll think of more. But managing your social media presence and time means having a crystal clear idea of what you want out of it. The goals and objectives will help dictate the path and resources you need.

Personal Vs. Professional

You’ll hear lots of takes on this one, but here’s my short answer about whether you should be participating as yourself or as your brand:

The web is a vast, intertwined thing. If you’re participating in social media, you cannot keep your personal stuff from touching your professional stuff, even if you think you’re separating them by imaginary lines. The dots can always be connected, and you’ll do well to keep that in mind for the long term.

For the most part, as connections and colleagues, we don’t draw distinctions between you, the “personal” account and you, the “professional” one. You are you, with many facets. We think of you as a whole person, with many parts.

That said, you *can* create a separate blog, Twitter account, and Facebook page to foster conversation with a business purpose. I’d advise against participating solely as a logo; if you have a central corporate page/account, please let the voices and participants be intensely human and contribute as such. Whenever possible, provide names and faces to go along with the people on your team. Give your community people to associate with your company, and a sense of who they are. Allow them to converse outside rigid messages and corporate topics and be personable and approachable. That is, after all, the point of all of this.

And remember. If you’re using your personal account in hybrid (like I do, and the approach I prefer), whatever you post has a long shelf life. If you don’t want internet content about you personally to reflect on you professionally, keep it off the internet. There are no shortcuts to personal accountability. And good judgment doesn’t come with an owner’s manual.

Next….

We’ll cover time allocation for varying social media tasks like listening, responding, content creation, and measurement. Stay tuned tomorrow.

Other questions you’d like to cover about social media time management? Let me know in the comments.

image by allyaubry