Where is your internal Social Strategy?

The need for social strategy.

A friend of mine, joined an organization recently, emailed me one day and asked me to mentor him on use of social tools within the organization and also help him create more robust SocialGlamor for him in the wider world. While chatting with him, I asked, why does he need to use these tools and his response stumped me! He wanted to use these tools to catch up with people, around him, who are using them everyday. He did not know WHY he needed to become social. He also mentioned that he does not have time for it but his leadership wants him to become social. This is more dangerous that the Cloned Social concept!

Where are we heading?

The use of social tools, like twitter, facebook, Connections, blogging etc should make us more productive, is what i understood all along, but recently the pull-push marketing has made the use these tools just a fashion statement. “Because everyone is using it, you should”, is a fallacy and will make more fatigued employees and will defeat the purpose.

Organizations need to be careful while pushing employees to use social media in the wake of becoming social business. The stress of work and then this additional task of ‘using’ social tools will hamper the productivity and natural uptake of these tools.

The focus should be on efficiency – the ability to accomplish a job with minimum effort, in least amount of time, using less resources and yet being effective.

The first question every organization should ask itself is, “Do we have a Social Strategy?” This is the starting point in creating, if there isn’t. Most of the companies are yet to reach the phase where their social strategy, if exists, compliments the Talent Strategy. These two can not be exclusive. Never!

Let’s look at it in details and what you can do to stat working on your Social Strategy:

1. Start at the end:  What is the organization trying to achieve? Be as specific as possible. The more detailed your approach will be, the easier it will become to achieve it. This is will also help you track if you are heading in the right direction. Everything else you do afterwards, will be around this vision. This vision will become the centrifugal force.
2. Align it with talent strategy: Ensure the details supplement the talent strategy and make people more productive. For example, your communities should be aligned with learning goals; the gamification should focus on skill building; social sharing could be adopted for talent attraction etc.
3. Device the plan: How will you achieve these goals? The plan should be detailed and immersive for the employee base, so that it does not become an extra task. Focus on ‘why’ rather than ‘how’.
4. Be social: Use Evangelists in the organization to become your Social Advocates. These social advocates will help you refine the strategy, develop it, deploy it and support all enablement work like working sessions, reverse mentoring (for senior leaders), penetration etc.
5. Track it: It is a cardinal sin to do work and leave it to God. The tracking should be done before you start with your goal. How can you decide your goal without knowing where you are? Measure the key areas of talent strategy and track the change all along.

Be sure of what you want to do and how you would do it. It is easier to get caught in shiny glitter of social. The social strategy will allow you achieve tangible goals and make more aware employees, unlike my friend.

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