20 Questions To Start a Social Media Discussion

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

Critics and Evangelists: A Communication Starter

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

Social Media Time Management: Getting Organized

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

Social Media For the Risk Averse

Not every company is at the same point of maturity with social media, and that’s okay. Every set of business innovations comes with the leading edge adopters, the mainstream adopters, and the late adopters.

When it comes to social business practices, some companies just seem like they’re made to tuck them right in and truck along, uniterrupted. Others have a harder time shifting the tide, and this whole social media thing has got them paralyzed and flustered and wondering what the hell they’re going to do.

Often, that’s because of things like:

• Regulatory, compliance, or strict legal policies
• Legacy communication practices that are fully entrenched in the business
• Lack of resources with the knowledge or skills to adopt and train on new practices
• Debate over who “owns” and is accountable for these strategies (this in another post soon)
• Good old fashioned fear of the unknown

There are ways, however, to start with baby steps toward adoption of social business ideas. It doesn’t always have to be about upending everything you’ve always done. Let’s toss out a few ideas, and have you add yours in the comments.

Social-ize Existing Content

Got a newsletter? Start a blog format and put the content there. Let people comment, and see what they say. Add voting or “like” functionality to parts of your existing website.  Put LOTS of ways for people to reach out to you in your print, online, and other media – email addresses, Twitter accounts, phone numbers – and make sure you make the invitation for feedback warm, open, and equipped with a real live human on the other end.

Still doing lots of print? Ask questions and leave some open ended dialogue opportunities in your marketing materials. Ask people to email you their take on an industry topic for publishing on your blog or newsletter. Look at your marketing pieces as catalysts for conversation, not just statements of features and benefits.

Build a new suggestion box. Add something like UserVoice to your mix and let your customers or employees give you feedback. Not yet ready to open that up publicly? Keep it internal for a while and learn what your staff thinks your priorities should be.

Minimize the Insecurities

Yes, it’s okay to have social media guidelines. If you’ve already got an employee handbook, the personal accountability bits in there will cover a lot. But have a look at some social media guidelines and policies from other companies to see what they’re doing and find a set that make you comfortable about covering your bases. You can always roll back stricter policies as you get your feet under you, but if having guiderails makes you feel better about getting started, by all means do it.

Worried about snarky comments on your new blog? Moderate the comments. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t let the negative ones through – you actually should – but with some advanced notice and a chance to see them before you make them public, you can do some direct outreach in the case of someone who’s upset, and spend some time discussing how you’ll handle future criticisms. If it’s just a troll, you’ll learn how to identify and ignore them. And you may just find that your fears about graffiti and negative stuff aren’t as real as you thought they were. Moderation is easy to turn off later when you’re more comfortable.

Communicate Internally. Lots.

If you’re not ready to bring the outside world into your domain quite so openly, start in familiar territory. Use your existing tools like email to start a dialogue among people with an interest in making social media work for your company. Start a discussion group or a team to start laying out a plan, even if it’s in tiny pieces. Talk a lot (and honestly) about why social media is of interest to you, and what you hope it will help you do. Decide who will take charge of which pieces, and decide on goals that you can collectively be accountable for.

Don’t shy away from bringing the tough critics to the table, either. Bring the lawyers and the bosses and the folks with the biggest beefs against social. Ask they why they feel that way, and keep picking apart the dialogue until you get at the root issues. Let the compliance and legal teams work through absolute worst case scenarios with you and figure out how you’d try and handle each.

Most important? Negotiate. Try the “okay, if that won’t work, what can we try” approach. People don’t really want to stand in your way, but they do want to mitigate the potential for blame and real risks (like financial or legal ramifications). Talk them through and try to find the intersection where you both feel comfortable taking a small step toward more open communication.

Be Finite.

Is social media a campaign? No. It’s an ongoing commitment, and a long term mindset. BUT. You can make a particular tactic or strategy finite, if nothing else to see how it works. Not every initiative needs to be endless.

Decide you’re going to do a blog campaign around an upcoming event you have, and invite your customers to contribute their experiences from past events to the blog (you can have them submit to you and you post it, to avoid any risks on that front). Post for two months leading up to the event and for two months after.  In for a little more effort? Try something like Rachel Reuben and her team did with Cafe New Paltz and set up a community for a group that has a natural closing point (hers was incoming freshmen to her university).

Don’t Buy the Hype.

Hype is called hype for a reason. And yes, there’s plenty of it in social media. There are NO silver bullets in business, least of all in the world of the internet. Social media has powerful potential, and I believe in it more than I have lots of things in many, many years.

I DO believe you have to do this social stuff, because it’s going to get done for you one way or the other, and I’d much rather see you plotting your own course than reacting to others shoving you in face first. But I think that lots of discussion, careful planning, and understanding the upsides and downsides is an important element for doing anything well in the long term.

So are these a helpful start? What have you successfully done to chip away at the fearful mindset inside your company, or what have you seen others do? Let’s learn from each other.

The Bridge Between “Evolve” or “Die”

Is it true that you have to evolve or die? Yes.

But no one said you had to do it alone.

There are resources and ideas and discussions, and value in baby steps. You don’t have to do it all tomorrow, or even today. Those that believe in what’s coming – nay, what’s here – want to help you understand what we find so compelling. We want to give you ROI and value and justification and the confidence that you, too, can succeed. We’re still learning too, but we want to bring you with us.

We want business to change because we know (a lot of) it’s broken. We know expectations have changed, and the business-to-customer landscape is being ever flattened. We love it. We embrace it, and we rejoice in it. We want to deliver all the proof. Because we love what we do, and we believe in the potential of each and every person – and company – to change the world if they really want to. We know that change is possible. Change that benefits everyone.

We are patient, and we understand that change is not instant. We know that resources and money and jobs are at stake. We understand that we are questioning the relevance of business practices and job descriptions and industries that have existed, unchallenged, for decades or longer. We are ready to do the hard work to justify that change. We know that evolution at this scale is scary. It shakes your confidence in what you do and who you are, as a professional and as a business, because if we’re telling you to change, we mean to tell you you’ve been doing it wrong.

So have all of us. Some of us are just ready to accept the need for difference, for evolution, and move on now.

Your choice is this. Accept that change is needed, and collaborate with the people around you who believe in that. Discuss. Debate. Collaborate. Act on something. Evolve. Find a path that works for you.

Or, pretend. Pretend that none of this is happening. Act as though the way you’ve always done it will be relevant for another two decades. Or three. Or until you retire. Tell yourself that none of this matters, that it’s a fad, that it’s hype, that it’s not really changing anything. Deny that what’s being talked about is old, old concepts clad in new, new technology. Keep doing what you’re doing and watch the distance between you and your customers – the “community” you all strive for – grow ever greater.

And make no mistake. Your attitude – your defensiveness against what may be unsettling but is real anyway – will give us permission to leave you behind. It frustrates us and leaves us no choice. Because our job is not to convince you. It is to empower you. But we can’t do that until you convince yourself that you’re ready, of your own volition.

Those of us that are learning, trying, educating want to surround ourselves with people who are working as hard as we are to affect change. We believe in this, not because it’s new or fancy or grants us a new title on our business card. It’s because we believe in a new way of doing business. Of communicating and collaborating and building businesses for and among people, not on top of them. Because whether or not we have precedent, we have millennia of human existence that tells us that putting people first is always for the good of the many. Even in business. Even if it’s cheesy. Even if we’ve forgotten.

We want you to come with us, and we’ll give you our ideas and our passion and our knowledge to help you get there if you want it. We are the bridge. But the choice?

That is entirely yours.

image courtesy of Shutterstock