Why Social is the Strategic Solution to corporate challenges today.

I had a very interesting conversation with Tim the other day. We were discussing what the challenges are to organisations embracing strategic social media.

I think that the rationale for making social media a strategic imperative in your organisation is pretty straightforward. Five of the major challenges in business today are addressed by creating an environment where people are empowered and encouraged to be social in their daily duties.

Those challenges (according to most of the organisations we talk to) are; Pipeline & revenue, Visibility, Credibility, Attracting good people and Making people feel part of something.

These are in many cases the reason that businesses are struggling to be successful in the modern world. We know that we need to do these things but many of the tools in our toolbox simply don’t seem to be fit for purpose any more.

So why will solving these challenges make a difference?

Pipeline & revenue - every company we talk to wants more revenue. Even those that claim to be ahead of their growth targets when asked the question “would you like to have more conversations with prospective buyers” they say “yes”. Being social creates an environment which encourages conversations not just your targets (those with authority within your desired accounts) but with those who have influence over the purchase decision. Even organisations that have had some sales success over the last couple of years have recognised that they no longer have a reliable mechanism for generating new conversations and opportunities to fill their pipeline. In the B2b space (and amongst the more considered B2C purchases too) sales generally only come from having conversations. So the purpose of social activities should be to set up as many appropriate conversations as possible.

Visibility - with everyone being swamped by sales and marketing messages (there are 306 billion emails sent per day according to Statista and we are all exposed to thousands of adverts and product placements) and simply creating more noise exacerbates the problem rather than overcomes it. Still though, despite the fact that ad fraud and email scams are well reported we are often told that “impressions” are good. On LinkedIn for example you might get 1000 impressions on a post you’ve written but only 2 “likes.” This should show you that there's probably a big difference between the legal definition of an “impression” and your perception of an impression! Of course, not getting much engagement on a post doesn't necessarily mean it's not a good post or that people don't like you but it does mean that the top of funnel "visibility building activity" is at best rather "hit or miss" and consequently is might not be the best thing to actually spend your marketing cash on. However, with social "impressions" are a byproduct of your strategy not the purpose of it and, best of all, the people what are seeing your posts probably already know who you are.

Credibility - in a world where everyone can (largely) say the same things it’s very hard to make your words land in any meaningful way. It doesn’t matter how good your product is if I’m not responding to cold outreach I’m not going to notice it. Social provides the opportunity to place your message in front of people that know who you are…and that is the basis for people consuming that content. Gary Vee once said “content is king but context is god” and I think this is a great way of describing the difficulty in getting your content consumed (and believed) in the modern world, without any context (YOU) why would I read your communication. A recent conversation with a friend who has created an industry podcast regularly gets more that 5000 viewers (which is significantly more traction and consumption than their company (of 250+ people) manages to achieve through their marketing efforts. The point is that THEY (the friend) are the differentiator rather than what they say. I can write the best blog in the world, but you’ll only know it’s the best blog when you’ve read it and you’ll only read if you know who I am. The problem isn’t that people need more content, the problem is that they need a reason to read the content…and you are the reason!

Attracting good people - we all know how difficult it is to attract good people…great people…the right people to our businesses. Sometimes the most diligent and hopeful recruitment process leaves us with an unfilled vacancy because a great candidate has gone somewhere else at the last moment. This is a challenge for most organisations and often the only way it can be addressed is by paying more than competitors. But it doesn’t have to be so. Google, Apple, Innocent, Tesla don’t pay the highest salaries in their sectors but they still get the best candidates. Why? Because people WANT to work there. A job at Google is more than just a job (or so you believe) because they have done a great job of externalising their culture so people know that you’ll get a hammock and jelly beans… Your company (even it it isn’t as funky as Google) can achieve the same thing by having the people in the company sharing how great their company life is with the people that trust the most - friends, family and network.

Making people feel part of something - the bigger the organisation the more we feel like we’re in a silo within it. This has long been the case but the advent of working from home, whilst having many advantages, has impacted on people’s sense of belonging within an organisation and may, in part, be the reason for a huge uplift in the number of resignations that many organisations are experiencing. Whatever the reality of this, most people would acknowledge that feeling part of a team and part of something bigger than just “me” is an incredibly powerful motivator. The nature os social is that it genuinely helps people to connect to and stay connected to other people within the organisation.

So, if adopting social media can solve these five pivotal issues organisations are facing why isn’t every organisation doing this (I hear you ask)? Well, that is one of the conundrums that we encounter every day at DLA Ignite.

Part of the challenge is that as a buyer there is something very appealing about the “here’s a piece of tech that sorts out your problem” story. You buy a piece of SaaS and it just “makes it all happen” employee advocacy, marketing automation, IVR systems etc. Whilst all of these things are great in theory, in practice the fact you are dealing with really people rather than stock control movements or reporting means that people are likely to be less satisfied if they receive an automated rather than a human interaction.

We are the USP. Not our processes, not our products, not our “exceptional customer care” but us. So we believe that every organisation should be leading with that.

The other part of the challenge is that everyone needs to take personal responsibility for being social. This is no longer a case of “oh, that’s Jason in marketing’s job” this is very much a case of the more people that own this the more successful it will be. I often us IBM as an example, that have about 1m followers on Twitter…but they have 350,000 employees. So if each employee had just 10 followers not only would they have 3 1/2x as many in there audience it would, more importantly, be an audience that was much more likely to listen to and believe what was being said.