This week I had the great pleasure of being a very active part of the TalentCulture community. On Tuesday, I was the guest on the BlogTalkRadio show hosted by Kevin Grossman and Meghan Biro, and on Wednesday I was the moderator of the weekly #TChat twitter chat. In both cases, the topic was humanizing your brand. To get things going I posted Monday my (slightly snarky) thoughts about brand humanization here on this blog.
During the Radio show, one caller posed a question about all the “humanize your brand” blog posts that seemed to be “dumbing things down” by oversimplifying the issue. While I didn’t use those words, that’s fairly consistent with the message in my post on Monday. I agreed those posts were leaving something out, but I also made the point that everyone has to start somewhere. I remember when I thought blogging was stupid, and I had to slowly get into it. So if those posts get some people to actually start using social media, then cool, I argued.
And while I stand by that basic argument, I want to add something that I didn’t get a chance to say on Tuesday during the show. Getting people to start taking baby steps is fine, but I think the clock is ticking on the value of that approach. Since social media came on the scene, we’ve been in a period of rampant experimentation. Everything is new, so we try lots of things, we dabble, and we expect the tools to come and go and reinvent themselves. This has been great fun, if you ask me, and the learning has been incredible. To some extent that will always be there, but I think we’re entering a new phase. We’re entering a phase where organizations need to have their social media more carefully thought out and executed. Where social media is more clearly strategic. Where (as I argued on Monday) social media is more connected and compatible to your culture and processes.
This is one of the conclusions we drew from our recent survey on social leadership:
The fact that we’re still stumbling around is a problem. Survey responses are indicating a lack of patience with this undisciplined approach. Smart organizations not only have answers to ROI questions, but they are figuring out how to both integrate social into existing process and, more importantly, innovate their current management practices to better tap into the power of social media.
Add to this some data from the MIT/Deloitte survey of business leaders around the world, and I think the “window of opportunity” I mention in the title of this post becomes a little more clear. In their survey, 28% of CEOs have identified social software as important to their business (interestingly, only 14% of CIOs said the same). But projecting out three years, both CEOs and CIOs came in at 70%. They see it coming.
So while you might be able to get away with “dabbling” with humanizing your brand today, and starting by trying out some social media tools, without necessarily paying too much attention to culture or strategy issues, that soon will not be true. Soon the competitive landscape will be demanding a more sophisticated approach. Soon you won’t have the luxury of dabbling. So if anything, I’d ramp up your experiments now. Get deeper quicker. Actually look for those culture incompatibilities, so you can get them worked out now–ahead of your competition.