Sometimes ideal isn’t ideal…

Organisations are struggling to embrace the idea of social media. They are, in fairness, getting to the realisation that they need to, but in many cases it is a culture shock. The reason for this is because it goes against 30, 40, 50 years of conditioning. Half a century of doing what we know and are comfortable with and being truly social is a major change.

In the corporate world we are used to the “brand” being preeminent in the hierarchy of value, and you could argue that in consumer brands that’s still the case - Coke, Apple, Nike, BMW…the brand is more important than the people who make/sell it.

However, in the B2B world things are different. There are, for example, 5,000 companies that make CRM systems. The overwhelming majority of them have connectors to other software to “make everything simple” but one thing they all have in common is that they all claim to be the one that you need. The one that delivers competitive advantage. The best.

The same is true of, marketing automation, cybersecurity, hardware, cloud storage, connectivity, consulting, recruitment…everyone says they’re the best.

Because of this “I’m the best” being rather like an “I’m Spartacus” moment the true differentiator can only be the people. We’re all familiar with the expression “People buy People” and today that is more true than ever.

The problem though is that this is at odds with the command and control view of the world that corporates sometimes employ.

Obviously, social media is a great place to promote the “people buy people” philosophy…and it works. I often cite the example that I regularly get more engagement on my posts (with my 12,000 followers) than IBM does with it’s 12 million followers. But to capitalise on this incredible contract in levels of engagement organisations need to relax their vice-like grip on what they want people to say (a simple 'share' of the corporate content won’t cut it), and empower/educate people how to be professional but personal in this space.

This anomaly (my posts being 1000x more engaging than IBMs) isn’t because my posts are better but simply that I have a relationship with my audience in a way that a corporate (large or small) never could.

The thing that needs to be addressed is that doing this right, in a way that gets results and works is NOT the easy way. Often organisations look for the shortcut even if it doesn’t work.

The only way B2B social media works effectively and sustainably is if the people in the organisation are empowered to write content, engage their audiences and have conversations with them.

The the reason I flagged the example in the photograph is that this week in "That Album" Eric and I are talking about Sting’s first album The Dream of the Blue Turtles…which led me to doing some research on Sting. Sting is, amongst other instruments, a keen player of the lute (well, in fact the Arch Lute - which is the one with the very long neck) and this is a great example of an unwieldy instrument that must present huge challenges with taking around to venues. Yes, you can shorten the neck of it (like focusing on corporate posts on your social media) but it simply doesn’t work properly if you do!

So the choice is, do it in a way that works...of do it in a way that's easy...