- Image by SnaPsi Сталкер via Flickr
I managed to carve out an hour yesterday for a “strategy and governance” webinar and I’m actually glad I did.
(I have to admit, I signed up for it awhile ago because I thought it might be useful, if not that fun, and I was almost willing to skip it yesterday because I wasn’t really sure if I was up to “How and Why to Apply Strategy and Governance to Social Computing Initiatives.” )
Stacy Wilson of Eloquor Consulting (@stacylwilson) and Greg Reinacker of Newsgator (@gregr) walked us through the topic and provided lots of useful case studies, checklists, and best practices, as well as – surprise, surprise – demos of Newsgator products. (Actually, the demos were reasonably informative and not too pushy, even though the actual part of fitting them into the presentation was a bit awkward and could have been blended in a little more smoothly.)
STRATEGY and GOVERNANCE
* Strategy and governance are just such serious words, I feel like they need to be in all caps and preferably be accompanied by their own incidental music.
Having some sort of plan before launching into a “social computing initiative” is probably much better than having no plan, regardless of whether you’re a sole practitioner or a large, multi-national corporation.
If it’s just you, having a strategy (or a “plan”, if strategy seems to pretentious) can help you make the most impact with the resources that you have – for example, maybe you’re going to really focus on building and maintaining your Facebook fan page; this means that you will have to let all those other shiny and fun, yet distracting tools wait. For a larger business, having a strategy can prevent (or at least lessen the chance of having) the situations where everyone starts bringing their own tools to the table and you end up with two folks in Department A using Twitter to interact with customers, the folks in Department B are blogging about products, and the interns are posting (unedited) pictures from the company holiday party on Facebook. This makes IT unhappy because you have technology running amok, your Marketing/PR folks unhappy because all of these communications may not reflect the party line, and your executives unhappy because they seem to be (are?) out of control. In fact, the only happy people in this situation are those who saw the photos on Facebook.
So, now that you know you need a strategy, how do you create it? Stacy recommends using your business goals as a “lens to make strategic decisions” and offered these questions as a sample of what you may want to ask:
- Will it drive innovation?
- Will it help us deliver better service?
- Will it encourage collaboration?
- Will it help us recognize acquisition ROI faster?
- Will it enable self-service and initiative among the employee population?
- Will it drive desired culture change?
Obviously, some of these are more applicable to larger companies – I don’t think my local florist is looking for technologies to help her “recognized aquisition ROI faster” – but, many are applicable to companies of any size. More collaboration and better service are always appreciated!
Now that you have a strategy that aligns with your business goals, how do you implement that successfully across your organization? A recommended first step – read Charlene Li’s (@charleneli) classic book, Groundswell, to help you understanding the different interests and motivations of the people in your organization. For more on this, check out these slides. Once you understand the interests and expectations of these users, you can more effectively tailor your initiative and hopefully, position it to succeed.
Keep in mind that many of these “new technologies” can be a real cultural shock to workers who didn’t grow up with them or aren’t currently using them on a regular basis. I especially liked these short definitions (and potential impacts) Stacy provided:
- Blogging = sharing, or giving away what I know.
- Wiki = allowing others to change your work.
- Microblogging = discerning what offer others will value.
- Social Networking = integrating work stuff with personal stuff.
Education, coaching, and plenty of patience will help employees who aren’t as comfortable with these concepts (or the technologies themselves) find ways to participate in a meaningful way.
For those of you wondering, yes, we did cover some governance issues too (not just strategy), but that was mostly checklists around what info to include on policies & procedures, code of conduct, etc. If you want more of that, I’d recommend contacting Stacy.
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