Establishing Corporate Social Media

A New Medium

Think for just a moment if there were no TV or radio and someone called and asked if you would like to advertise on this new medium. Conceptually it has a nice ring to it. The ability to spread your message to many people and you can target what type of people will hear your message by delivering content to shows watched by certain types of viewers. Social Media is the next TV or radio. Again and again I hear people say that they don't understand Social Media. With this post we will break it down and develop a plan for your company to move into the Social Media medium.

Social Media explained

Think of social media as the next TV or radio. The only difference is no one is going to call and sell you ad space. You and your company will need to create the ad space. The ad space and message are delivered through communities. It is a blank slate for you to develop or move a community to and then deliver the message. The community hopefully accepts your message because it provides value to them. Who doesn't need a good widget at a fair price?

Plan Summary

Social Media should be treated as a big project within a company. It requires time and money to complete properly. The message that a company wants to send is already created, the message must now be transitioned to the Social Media community. As with TV, Print, and Radio is not the great splash of a "new campaign". There is the delivering small directed messages that the community accepts and then keeps delivering for you. It is the word of mouth selling that create a long term brand loyalty. For every campaign to create brand loyalty there needs to be a plan.

Plan Organization

The first step to the plan is to organize your communities by defining them. A basic definitions of communities for a corporation is:

• Consumers/Clients - Brand awareness, Brand loyalty, May be broken down by business unit
• Stockholders - Shareholder loyalty
• Internal - Recruitment, business continuance, retention

Within each defined class a community needs to be developed and a message needs to be delivered. It is possible that a community already exists for some of the defined areas.

The plan is now taking shape. Next create the phases of the plan for each of the defined groups and begin execution. At this point it is time to begin the effort of working stakeholders of the Senior Management team. The Senior management team will have concerns that need to be addressed and suggestions on what message they want delivered. This will influence your plan creation. A well formed plan will have the following phases:

1. Discovery/Creation - Begin to discover previously created communities and form new communities
2. Acceptance - Become accepted in the community by playing and active role in supporting other community members
3. Promotion - As the community sees the active role you can now provide your product or service as a benefit to the community
4. Measurement - Measure where your message is being seen and forwarded to. Seek to grow the community by bringing the extended community into your current one or join the extended community
5. Evolution - The commercial web is 10 year old social media is 3ish years old, grow with what's next

Managing the Stakeholders

With more marketers shifting to online, some departments within a corporation will say Social Media is the best thing to ever happen and there will be several departments that will resist the Social Media concept.
The first department to voice a concern will be the IT group. They are responsible for providing bandwidth for computing resource and making sure those resources stay up and running. The second will be from managers thinking this will be a time waster for employees. The response to these and the stakeholders is the Social Media Governance plan. The Governance plan should tie to the Employee policies. Employees are expected to have certain standards of conduct and the Social Media expectations are an extension of the same conduct outlined in the the Employee policies.

Social Media Project Execution

Now that you have effectively gained acceptance from the stake holders it is time to execute on your project plan. The project plan has continuous improvement built into it so an evaluation of current state and revisions will build your brand in the new media of Social Networking. What do you think?

Big Oil and Social Media

Will big Oil ever embrace Social Media? Sitting in the middle of the energy capital of the world the question presents itself; will big oil will ever need to enter the social media arena? Safe to say they would be missing a big chance to tap into their customer needs, embrace a younger work force and communicate the way they communicate, and form communities. The current data suggests:

Exxon - The Fortune #1 company. I have consulted for Exxon several times; the first time was in 1997. They were still on a mainframe profs mail system and only Vice Presidents could authorize a person's access to the Internet. From a corporate perspective they are a machine that prints money and they would prefer that no person has the power to interfere with that. There are three FaceBook groups for Exxon. Two of them are hate groups. They would not see the need.

Chevron - Chevron due to their California headquarters is a bit more customer/employee focused and could create a great following. There is what appears to be a company sponsored FaceBook page with 4,800 fans, and with a far reaching global following. Chevron has already begun their foray into the Social Media world with satisfactory success.

ConocoPhillips - Social Media would be a great way to create a following, and promote brand loyalty. They have an innovative bug splatter app on their 76 brand page that is cute, and a fun community builder. It took several minutes for me to find it. Why create the marketing initiative if you are not going to publicize it? There are 1,700 fans on their corporate FaceBook page, but the last update was in September of 2009. ConocoPhillips is number 3 oil company in America not far behind Chevron. Creating a following with Social Media could be used to advance the brand to the next level.

British Petroleum
BP America has 112 fans on FaceBook. There are few updates to the page. With the recent gathering pipeline spills in Alaska they are missing a great chance to manage the expectations of the public. The MS150 bike ride in Houston is BP sponsored with 13,000 riders. Many of those people could be converted to a community of online brand proponents with the right approach.

Summary
Social media has been used very effectively to promote the social agenda of climate change. We all know that the climate will change. Social Media can help big oil understand the fears of the younger Social Media community that has only heard one side of the message. By providing the facts to the younger community about climate change via Social Media, they may be willing to embrace it. The younger generation, who need to be courted by big oil to replace the baby boomer executives, live in the technology that is Social Media. The question is will Big Oil embrace the next communication method. What do you think?

Corporate Social Media

If you do a Google search on Corporate Social Media you are returned with articles that would guide corporations away from SM. The main point of most articles is Corporations cannot move into the online social media world and that it is waste of money. So as we move into the next decade is social media ready for Corporations? Are Corporations ready for Social Media?

What is a corporation?
I have worked for, around and with corporation throughout my career. These forays have been a good cross section of what is out there. Living in Houston we have a good amount of Corporations to choose from. We are famous in a not so good way for Enron where I worked for 5 years. I was there 2 years after the big collapse with people on the news exiting the building. I have also worked for or with Continental Airlines, Exxon, Chevron, Deloitte Touche. Each of these corporations are made up of people. There is one or several folks at the top making the call on direction and then everyone falls into line and tries to get there. Corporations exist as a separate entity, but like my corporation nothing happened for many years till I hired people. So people are really what make up a corporation.

Community
Twitter and Facebook are the current online communities with Google Wave maybe becoming something in the future. When trying to explain to older folks what these are, I suggested they are entertainment where everyone has a voice. Instead of coming home and watching Archie Bunker unfold his life before you on TV people tune into the internet to see what is happening. Dating, Jobs, Public and Personal calamity can all be found. Right now on Twitter the Haiti Earthquake is top with the NBC night talk show taking up the rest of the spots.


Everyone wants to be a part of a community and everyone wants to be heard, it's right above food, shelter, clothing. From behind your keyboard you are no longer an introvert. If you can type you are an extrovert, the faster you type and respond to current events the more extroverted you are. In Social Media the people that work for Corporations can now be heard, both good and bad. People need community.

Social Media
Developing a community requires the ability to let people be heard and feel like they are being listened to. For Corporate Social Media to succeed this must be the main goal. If people are not allowed to speak then they will find another community whey they are allowed to be heard.

Internal vs. External
Social Media can be used for both internal and external communities. Internal community development uses are communication, collaboration and making people feel part of the team. External is for marketplace brand awareness/promotion/placement.

If the writers of an article suggest that corporations spending money on social media is a waste of money it usually looks at the aspect and that of brand promotion.. Building communities within or about a corporation are other uses of Social Media that can reap benefits.
What do y'all think?