Guest Blogger Amanda Thompson: Practice Social Media Internally to Succeed in Social Media Externally
Everybody's thinking about social media these days, and what their company should be doing about it. For some, it seems like a huge and risky unknown. For others, it's more like a natural extension of what they're already doing. How do you move from that risky, unknown place towards a more natural extension of existing activities? That's what we'll explore in this post.
Those people and companies who seem to "get" social media have likely been playing around in the space -- whether that's in a personal or professional capacity. These people are typically writers (now bloggers and tweeters), amateur photographers (now sharing photos via Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Snapfish, or others), committed networkers (now connecting on LinkedIn and Facebook), or the naturally curious (always dabbling in the latest big thing, like Foursquare or Gowalla or the cool technology du jour). Most companies have some people within their organization who fall into one of these categories, or perhaps others. So leverage these employees' interest areas for the good of your company.
If it makes sense for your organization to publish a blog to share expertise and opinions on your industry, one approach is to create an internal blog that will lead to a public-facing company blog. By taking this approach, employees can gain some firsthand experience, but without the initial pressure of blogging to the public. You'll see who the natural writers are, and the team can jointly determine what the "voice" and tone of the company's future public blog will be. Give employees some suggested topics and blogging guidelines. Encourage everyone to try blogging to drive adoption and success. Predetermine how long the trial period will last (suggestion is six months), and set a goal date for taking the blog public. Document lessons learned during the trial period to ensure success with the public.
Perhaps a blog doesn't make sense for your company. That's OK. The idea here is to figure out the natural ways for your company to trial social media internally, so that the experience and learnings can be applied externally with the public after employees gain knowledge and a comfort level of the given media. Another idea is to create an internal community to share and connect with other employees. This approach may make a lot of sense for a company with multiple offices in various cities or countries, in order to get to know the other employees and find out about shared interests, common goals, or aligned projects. A community may help employees see the value in social media properties like LinkedIn that encourage professional connections.
It's important to encourage the behavior in employees that a company wants to project to the external world. If you believe your organization should be doing more to leverage social media, then set up the tools for employees to learn and succeed. Doing this internally as a first step takes out some of the fear factor out of forging into unknown waters. Sometimes that fear ends up being the ultimate barrier and that nothing is ever done. So don't wait. Start thinking of ways to get employees up to speed in the social media arena, and after gaining experience internally, go ahead and dip those toes in the public water!
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About the Author: Amanda Thompson is a consultant with Slalom Consulting who's currently working with Coca-Cola's Global Interactive Marketing Group
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