Is Your Organization Culture Designed To Be Social?

As 2010 begins, every­where we turn, we see those who pro­claim that under­stand the social media are talk­ing about mea­sure­ment and ROI from social mar­ket­ing. It seems that every­one is try­ing to jus­tify the time, effort and expense of using social media by cre­at­ing mea­sures that are cen­tric to finan­cial results.

For­rester Research recently released a list Mon­day of social com­put­ing pre­dic­tion for 2010, the report sug­gests that:

“an increas­ing num­ber of mar­keters will adopt lis­ten­ing plat­forms to mon­i­tor social media, Twit­ter will become more prof­itable or get acquired, Face­book will take a hands-on approach to pro­tect­ing mem­bers, and incom­pat­i­ble mobile devices in siloed appli­ca­tion will shat­ter the social experience.”

From busi­ness per­spec­tive, deter­min­ing a return on cost and aim­ing to pro­duce results is ratio­nal, every busi­ness wants that. How­ever, before an orga­ni­za­tion demand­ing such things, there are some real issues need to be pro­duced and get mea­sured first, such as how your organization’s cul­ture be designed, is it designed to ‘be social’ or not? Is your mar­ket­ing play­ful? Is your busi­ness using customer-friendly model etc?

As you might know, being social and using social media are two totally dif­fer­ent things. Social media is noth­ing more than a new and pow­er­ful “com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nel”. You can use it as a tool to mar­ket; to raise aware­ness of your prod­ucts or ser­vices to the world, to engage peo­ple with your orga­ni­za­tion and hope to move them to a trans­ac­tion, and to sell more stuff because peo­ple are look­ing to buy stuff.

Speak­ing of orga­ni­za­tion cul­ture be designed to ‘be social’, recently I read an inter­est­ing arti­cle that pub­lished on the Busi­ness Week, titled Zap­pos Retails Its Cul­ture, Christo­pher Palmeri writes,

“Cus­tomer ser­vice reps are given plenty of free­dom. They may chat for hours with cus­tomers, write thank-you notes, and send flow­ers and even direct shop­pers to rival Web sites if an item is out of stock. In a tough year for retail, sales are up by dou­ble digits”.

The focuses that Anthony C. “Tony”, the CEO of Zap­pos con­cen­trated is to cre­at­ing an orga­ni­za­tion cul­ture that was “social” inter­nally and whose aim was to serve the cus­tomer beyond expec­ta­tions, as a result, their brand and sub­se­quent sales were enhanced.

More than 95% of Zap­pos’ trans­ac­tions take place over the Web, so each actual phone call is a spe­cial oppor­tu­nity. “They may only call once in their life, but that is our chance to wow them,” Hsieh says.

Accord­ing to the articles,

Zap­pos rep Michelle Rob­les recently showed a reporter how the approach works. She offers coupons and free ship­ping to one unhappy cus­tomer while grab­bing a returned pair of shear­ling boots for another. Roble knows her top pri­or­ity is to estab­lish an emo­tional connection.

David Brauti­gan, who runs a fam­ily heat­ing and air-conditioning repair busi­ness, indi­cates what he has learned from Zap­pos say­ing “The nicer we are to peo­ple,” he says, “bet­ter things are hap­pen­ing.” Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zap­pos, appears pleased to spread that mes­sage: “Shar­ing is how we build our brand.“

Did you see what Zap­pos did?

Through the Input (inter­nal cul­ture etc) + Process (new think­ing, new method, intend, serve the mar­ket of inter­est, com­mu­ni­ca­tion etc) + Out­put (sales etc) = Results (enhance brand­ing and rev­enue gain etc).

They are “con­nect­ing” the com­mu­ni­ca­tions and engag­ing in the mar­ket­place of its con­ver­sa­tions for dif­fer­ence pur­poses. As results, they achieved of mea­sured the ben­e­fit of engage­ment and scream­ing for an ROI on the invest­ment of time and expense.

Being con­sumed with mar­ket­ing ele­ments of social tech­nol­ogy is silo think­ing, unless your orga­ni­za­tion (any) learns to “con­nect” com­mu­ni­ca­tions and under­stand the issues that impact the sen­ti­ment of com­mu­ni­ca­tions, oth­er­wise all “intents” to cre­ate a result will be misguided.

So think about the inten­tions of the mar­ket­place you want to reach and serve, they are usu­ally dif­fer­ent as yours (sup­plier). What I mean is that, in a period of time, you may catch buy­ers by using social media but their intent is not to become friends with your orga­ni­za­tion if your orga­ni­za­tion is not truly social.

In the other words, for an orga­ni­za­tion, being social is the root cause of sales (rev­enue) for both online and off line. If your com­pany ignores this, it means you’re likely to mea­sure the wrong things just to jus­tify use of social media.

Using “social media” to cre­ate results is rea­son­able but using it wrong may cre­ated the wrong result. Wrong results and mea­sur­ing the wrong thing will cre­ate long term rejec­tion with no rescue.

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