Establishing a corporate social media strategy

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Introduction:  Why social media?

Today the agreement is nearly universal that organizations avoid establishing a social media presence at their own peril.  “Social media”, as used within this article, is defined as those peer-to-peer, inherently collaborative and generally open media sources that are differentiated from the traditional “industrial media” such as print newspapers and television broadcasts, that have high capital costs and limited availability due to prohibitively high economies of scale.  Virtually all of the Fortune 1000 currently employ a myriad of social media, whether it be internally for knowledge collaboration (i.e. SharePoint, employee wikis) and externally (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn) to provide differentiated information to increasingly knowledge-hungry and specialized customer segments (most business scholars acknowledge that the era of “mass production” has now given way to an era of “mass customization/mass specialization”, and social media is a key enabler of this trend.)  While social media may have emerged in the early 2000’s as a teenager/young adult-driven socialization and entertainment venue, it has unquestionably now arrived as one of the premier conduits for corporate knowledge sharing, marketing, and customer outreach.  Indeed, an aggressive social media presence today is less of a strategic differentiator than a mere requisite for continued competitiveness, similar to the transformation of the role of an Internet presence between 1990 and 1999.

However, the pervasive nature of social media usage by large corporations today does not necessarily suggest that IT management has optimally designed the organization’s social media presence.  In fact, it has been my experience that many competent IT and marketing managers within some of the world’s largest corporations fall into the same social media pitfalls which reduce the efficacy of operational (and occasionally, capital) spend in these areas.  At the very best, falling into these pitfalls – all of them generally emanating from a lack of a holistic social media strategy - results in wasted effort and wasted dollars, with no benefits flowing to the organization.  At the worst, committing these “social media sins” can actually have a deleterious impact on brand equity and drive away customers. 

Designing a social media strategy

It is surprisingly frequent to observe corporations approach the implementation of social media with no cohesive, comprehensive strategy.  In speaking with one Partner-level executive at a midsized consulting firm, I encountered a precise example of this viewpoint.  “My teenage son,” the Partner proclaimed, “is an expert at using his Facebook account, so how difficult can this stuff be to use?”  Such a viewpoint – and it is a frequently expressed viewpoint – fails to acknowledge the rich diversity of social media (Facebook is but one element), and it also fails to acknowledge that communicating with personal friends via social media is a radically different endeavor than attempting to capture market share and drive sales. 

Unlike individuals, profit-oriented organizations utilize social media primarily as a marketing mechanism, with the end intent of driving an increase to the bottom line.  It is imperative that organizations conceptualize and implement a holistic social media strategy prior to launching their electronic presence; simply putting up a LinkedIn company page and a blog without any understanding of the purpose that those tools will serve is analogous to PepsiCo launching a new soft drink brand without any type of market research or demand planning.  While there are many possible variants of a social media strategy, my recommended approach is below and includes the following four areas:

1.  Purpose – While the ultimate purpose of your social media presence will be to drive sales (with few exceptions), what is the more proximate goal of the social media approach?  Does your company wish to expand overall name recognition or target increased market share for a few emerging brands?  Perhaps you are a consulting firm wishing to establish your role in thought leadership by publishing innovative content on a blog, or a software as a service (SaaS) firm that will utilize a prospective client portal to provide a demonstration of your software utility’s capabilities.  In yet another situation, perhaps you are a burgeoning small enterprise wishing to attract and recruit top-notch talent by utilizing the targeted recruitment functionalities on LinkedIn.  Regardless of the case, the overall purpose of your social media strategy must be established before any content is delivered.  Otherwise, your company may be delivering the wrong message to the right clients, or wasting money in giving a strong value proposition to clients with absolutely no interest in your services (i.e., I cringe when I see companies such as SAP advertising on Facebook; while there are undoubtedly SAP experts and SAP consultants on Facebook, those dollars would be far more effectively utilized on another social media milieu.)

2.  Media – Social media comprises a vast universe, ranging from sites such as Facebook and Linked, to blogs, to external and internal wikis, to video-sharing sites such as Youtube, demonstration portals/extranets, SharePoint, and more.  It is potentially dangerous naiveté to assume that the process of selecting which of these media to utilize is a simple matter.  For one example, there are significant demographic differences between sites such as Facebook (younger, diverse, more socially conscious, less affluent) and LinkedIn (older, more homogeneous, more educated, more affluent), and your company’s social media purpose may necessitate a mixture of various milieus in this regard.  Additionally, while some social media options will constitute mere operational spend (i.e., the fees required for a premium LinkedIn account, along with necessary labor FTE costs for the maintenance of the presence), other social media may actually involve capital spend (i.e., server costs if implementing a dedicated WordPress blog or a prospective client demonstration portal.)  The determination of which social media best correlates to your organization’s goals should be the end result of a cross-functional discussion between IT management, marketing, and product/service managers.

3.  Consumers – With an overall purpose and specific types of media established, organizations can proceed to decide which consumers to target.  The key here is to recognize that there is almost never a “one size fits all” approach to social media.  In other words, unless your organization is one of the incredibly few with a highly monolithic customer base, you will have to convey a variety of messages through a variety of social media approaches.  A company such as Coca-Cola, for example, might choose to utilize Facebook games to target legacy soda products to an 18-29 year-old demographic, while creating a themed health-conscious blog to tout the benefits of Dasani bottled water or Minute Maid fruit juice to an older, wealthier, more health-conscious demographic. 

4.  Continuous Monitoring/Improvement – The first three pillars of the social media strategy – Purpose, Media, and Consumers – are key to effectively establishing your company’s presence and producing the desired message.  However, a fatal mistake is committed by organizations who believe that a relevant social media strategy in 2010 will continue to maintain the same effectiveness in 2011 and beyond.  In the 21^st Century, not only do technologies continue to evolve at a breakneck pace; our era of mass specialization/mass customization has produced consumers who continue to demand products and solutions that are ever more pertinent to their preferences and lives.  Leading organizations must continuously monitor and evaluate their social media implementation to ensure that it remains an effective strategic element.  Key points here include ensuring that content is frequently updated (static months-old content may actually push customers away by presenting a staid, reactive image of your company), and ensuring that the correct tools are being utilized (for example, the demographics of social networks sometimes change – while MySpace was an early leader in social networking, today it is in decline and is primarily frequented by younger, lower-educated citizens in the Southern and Midwestern United States.)   As a general rule, social media elements should be evaluated at least once per quarter to ensure their continuing relevance.

Conclusion

Social media presents tremendous opportunities for companies today to deliver the highly-targeted messages that are critical to attracting and maintaining dedicated customer bases in the 21^st Century’s paradigm of mass customization/mass specialization.  However, haphazardly approaching the establishment of a social media presence can result in wasted spend or even deleteriously impact your company’s marketplace image.  A successful social media implementation based on a sound and holistic strategy – such as the one outlined in this article – can have a remarkably long-lasting positive impact on your company’s market position and competitive advantage.

Note:  The opinions expressed in this and all Bizteck articles are exclusively those of the author and do not express any implicit or explicit endorsement by any of his current or previous employers.

"Out of Sight, Out of Mind": The Case for Academic MIS Standardization

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“So Adam, what exactly do you do for a living?”

If you’re in my field – management information systems and specifically business-oriented IT consulting – that question almost certainly invokes a great deal of dread.  It’s not that you’re embarrassed of your work or that all business technologists have entered into a secretive covenant to remain mum on the nature of our jobs.  No, rather simply, you dread explaining the role of an IT auditor to a person who thinks that all “computer people” write code or fix malfunctioning hard drives; you have before, perhaps, found yourself twisted into semantic pretzels attempting to explain why companies are willing to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for largely intangible projects with names such as “Independent Verification and Validation” – which probably just sounds like a bunch of confusing, valueless $350/hour paper shuffling to the person on the other end of the conversation.

In other words, you are irritated because you frequently encounter a problem that accountants, bankers, and economists seldom do – explaining the very nature of your profession to a public that remains largely unaware of its role and significance.

There are several causes to this recurring problem.  In the grand scheme of things, information systems is a relatively new field; while the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) traces its roots back to 1887, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) was only founded in 1967.  Generations of adults alive today came of age in a world in which bank transactions, library cataloging,  accounts receivable aging, and customer credit ratings were all performed entirely without the assistance of information systems.  Furthermore, the nature of much of our work is highly specialized and generally out of public view.  However, given the increasingly pervasive role of IT in daily life – quick! try to think of a business or organization that doesn’t use IT in some manner – the profundity of these misconceptions is startling.

Is this is a serious problem, or just a mild annoyance for technologists forced to constantly explain their work?  Evidence from corporate America would suggest the former.  The view that IT is nothing more than a troublesome cost center to be minimized, not nurtured – perhaps best exemplified through Nicholas Carr’s now famous Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter – remains shockingly widespread in C-suites across the country.  Of the fifteen largest Fortune 1000 corporations, only eight (53%) have a CIO or VP of IT sitting on the Executive Committee with equal stature to a COO or CFO.  CIO magazine’s 2009 State of the CIO survey indicates that only 44% of CIOs working at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue report directly to the CEO.  According to a recent poll by ChangeWave, more than 20% of corporations surveyed planned on reducing IT investments over the next fiscal year – in spite of IT’s tried and proven track record of driving efficiencies and reducing operating costs.

After all, when you believe that IT is only responsible for repairing broken motherboards and testing code – well, that and burning through copious amounts of cash with little ROI to show in return - why take it seriously?  Even worse than those who reject the value of IT are the corporate directors and executives – many of whom climbed the corporate ladder decades before the information revolution – who do not even claim to understand the nature and role of IT in the business.

It is incumbent on the MIS profession to aggressively tackle the problem of low name recognition  and under-appreciation over the next 10 years.  As the younger tech-savvy generations (those born after 1979) rise into maturity and corporate leadership, a significant portion of the problem will resolve itself.  However, significant change needs to occur at our nation’s universities and community colleges before we can expect to see a widespread change in public perception of IT.  I am a case in point.  When I matriculated at the University of Florida in 2005, I selected Computer Science as my major.  I fully expected to graduate and become a Programmer or Systems Analyst.  It was not until my Sophomore year that I even became aware of the field of MIS and switched over to UF’s MIS program in the College of Business Administration.  And I’m no tech-neophyte; I was already using my first computer in 1991 at the ripe old age of four.  How many of today’s talented, technically astute undergraduate students are bypassing a career in MIS/IT purely out of lack of knowledge about our field and what MIS careers entail?  While it is impossible to know this number with certainty, I have no doubt that it would drop the jaws of many i-School deans and administrators.

There is a very fundamental (and very easy) way in which universities can and must help our field overcome the “out of sight, out of mind” problem – standardization.  There is already minimal variance in the curriculum taught in MIS programs across the country.  Based on the wild variance in naming, however, you would never assume this to be so:

University	Name of MIS Program
University of Florida	Information Systems & Operations Management (until 2009 Decision and Information Sciences)
Georgia State University	Computer Information Systems
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Library and Information Sciences (with an “Information Systems” specialization)

Here you have three public universities with a total of four titles in circulation for what is essentially the same degree; and not one of them utilizes the most well-known title of “Management Information Systems.”  Is it any wonder that many of us cringe at the prospect of explaining our job roles to strangers when we can't even agree on the name of our academic degree?

Within ten years, a widespread standardization program coordinated among our nation’s universities would have a tremendous, indelible effect on the name recognition and appreciation of the MIS field.  Such a standardization program might encompass the following steps:

1.      Universal name standardization of all degrees in the field.  The most common-sense approach would be standardization around the name “Management Information Systems.”

2.      Standardization of the colleges/schools within universities that offer the degree.  Examples such as Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College – a public policy school offering a degree (Master of Information Systems Management, MISM) that assuredly has nothing to do with public policy – must become a thing of the past.  There seem to be two equally acceptable solutions:  assigning this academic realm to business schools (perhaps resulting in the rewarding of an MBA-IS or a MISM-type degree a la Carnegie Mellon); or alternately, assigning it to independent “i-Schools” such as the extremely successful University of California at Berkeley model.

3.      Effective and near-universal partnership of MIS programs nationwide, perhaps through an expansion of the existing i-School initiative or the formation of a new organization.  This organization would play a role similar to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), albeit on a more micro-level.

4.      The mobilization of a more aggressive professional presence at the nation’s universities by organizations such as the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) and ISACA.  It is imperative that these organizations target not only upperclassmen who have already chosen MIS as a career route, but also underclassmen who – like me in 2005 – are often clueless about the field.

Perhaps it would be an exhibition of extreme naiveté to assume that MIS will ever enjoy the widespread name recognition of fields such as Marketing, Accounting, and Economics.  However, it is not too hard to believe that an aggressive and coordinated effort – such as the one outlined here – will produce tremendously beneficial effects for the field going forward.

Note:  The opinions expressed in this and all Bizteck articles are exclusively those of the author and do not express any implicit or explicit endorsement by any of his current or previous employers.

Welcome!

Welcome to bizteck.blogspot.com!

My name is Adam Harpool, and you can find more information about me and my background via my profile on the left. As indicated, this will be a blog focusing on many issues at the intersection of business and technology - everything from cutting-edge trends, emerging technologies, pressing business issues, to education. I hope that you find it as informative as I find it enjoyable to update.

Happy reading, and as always feel free to leave or email any comments or suggestions!

-Adam Harpool