Rewards of social chat are worth the risks

FT.com

August 19, 2013 5:36 pm

By Sarah Wood

The benefits of companies engaging with social media outweigh the odd error, says Sarah Wood

Is it any wonder that so many companies still feel uncertain about taking on the risks and rewards of social media?

In July, Bank of America wanted to respond via social media to some angry activists’ tweets. But the responses were dry and cautious, and simply fuelled perceptions that the bank was too impersonal: “Your tweets seem computer generated. Like you haven’t got a heart and soul,” fumed one.

Last week, Domino’s Pizza was mocked when a member of staff mistook a compliment for a complaint on its Facebook page and apologised for providing a delicious pizza.

So, a brand says something that sounds inauthentic, or just silly, and it will be engulfed in online flames. And that’s before getting on to grammatical errors.

Nevertheless, there really are rewards to be had from building a “social business” – that is, one that helps and encourages employees to speak on behalf of the company in public on social media and to interact on internal social platforms. Researchers increasingly wield statistics showing that organisations adopting social business initiatives bring products to market faster and have more impact, or that employees on internal social networks are more likely to support their company in a crisis and to recommend its products and services.

What is behind such claims for “being social”? First, there are the marketing arguments: employees may amplify campaigns by talking about them; if there is a crisis, they can counter misinformation quickly.

But there are other benefits too. Creating and sharing, say, workplace photos on Tumblr or playlists on Spotify, can remind customers, staff and potential recruits what is special about a company’s culture. Adobe uses Instagram to humanise its business software brand through visual storytelling and to tap into employees’ love of photography by inviting them to share photos publicly on the site, using Adobe hashtags. Its “Day in the Life” Instagram initiative on February 19 elicited 86 photos and 5,853 comments within 24 hours from across eight offices.

In product development, public social media platforms provide a round-the-clock focus group. Frito-Lay created an “I’d Eat That” app, where customers could create crisp flavours and vote for ones they liked.

It can be tempting to see these initiatives as fads. But innovation relies on diversity of participants and fast feedback.

Getting started on embedding a social approach in a company could feel like a logistical quagmire, but a “social company” is one that taps into the energy and expertise of people across the organisation. Put out a call for employees to become involved in a “social squad” and the social superstars will self-select. Use them to crowdsource your social media guidelines, as IBM did, and they will feel engaged from the start. Invest in training, establish peer-to-peer “social clinics” and be clear about your approvals process.

Active engagement from senior managers is critical. Michael Dell and Zappos’s Tony Hsieh are chief executives whose tweets from the top send a message that their business is a social one and every employee has a part to play.

Arguably, however, the most important guidance senior executives can give is to make it known that a gaffe is not the end of the world. Everyone makes mistakes and, despite the furore around Bank of America and Domino’s, social media audiences are usually extremely forgiving to those who acknowledge their error and behave like decent human beings who slipped up. So if there is a social media mistake, join the conversation and own the #fail. That’s what Domino’s did this week. The company told reporters from Digiday, a digital media and marketing website, that “real human beings make real human mistakes sometimes, and this was one of those times . . . It happens. We were all, naturally, a little bit red-faced by this – but we’ve already moved on.”

In other words, there is no heinous crime, no social media car crash. Just a worker learning by doing.

In an age when consumers expect brands and businesses they buy from to behave like real people, to be authentic, to have “a heart and soul” – as Bank of America was accused of lacking – we will be seeing more companies turn to employees to provide the human touch. They will make mistakes. But let’s all be a little more forgiving when they do.

Twitter: @sarahfwood

The writer is co-founder of Unruly