Is Your Corporate Culture Ready for Social Media?

A Rocket Fuel colleague and I were involved in our own strategic discussions on our business earlier today about, in particular, where we stand on social media marketing. My own view is informed by two major corporate communications’ assignments with large clients. Both were failing organisations; failing to the extent that their operations put public lives at risk. One recovered far more quickly than the other. It’s not possible, nor would it be ethical to relate their difficulties but they were significant. Both suffered major disaffection of the workforce. In one case, the communications function was almost redundant since its demoralised employees fed the media bad news stories every day. Every day we faced a rearguard action having been slammed by the media on the day before: newspapers, television and radio.

Here we managed to bring communications back into equilibrium by seizing the initiative and improving relationships with journalists and at the same time ramping up internal communications and employee engagement.

Ironically, the second organisation, which was in a far worse state, made more rapid improvements. It had a new, very competent CEO who understood the power of his people, the press and the public. He engaged with communications directly. He agreed to the appointment of an excellent PR whose sole job was to address employee communications and involvement. She did an amazing job. We and Fred (not his real name), the new CEO, opened up channels of communications including company forums with the senior team, a fortnightly newsletter, a CEO same day response service, “Ask Fred”, a reinvigorated intranet site, open access to information, valuing feedback and other engagement initiatives. Fred faced up to all the issues, both internally and externally and did whatever he had to do in order to address them. He was an inspiring leader who took time out to be visible to all his employees. Fred and our two-person communications’ team transformed the culture. We did it quickly too, in a matter of a few months.

In Fred’s operation, we also set up customer focus groups and worked directly with customers on how we should improve and what they saw as our key priorities. We acted on their views involving them every step of the way. It worked like magic. Interestingly, we never got the bad press that we probably deserved as everyone was working on the same side to build, improve and empower the business and its employees.

In the first organisation, we recommended customer focus groups too, although none were set up due to management difficulties. Also we had to close down intranet chat facilities that were being abused by those with a disruptive political agenda. Customer issues also went unheard and unheeded. Eventually, the entire senior management team was replaced. Change continued at a slow pace. These two organisations that faced identical threatening challenges responded in different ways with markedly different results. Fred’s business with its empowered and involved employees will no doubt go on to be one of the finest of its type in the UK. We’re completely convinced.

So let’s be clear about the difference here. It wasn’t only about Fred, the excellent leader, but his understanding that employees are central to everything. Employees are the brand, the corporate values and the customer experience. They stand for the business and what it means to its customers. Our buying experience from a business is qualitatively differentiated by its corporate culture and its people.

Coming back to social media - corporate culture, style and collaboration are likely to be fundamental in determining whether or not social media implementations succeed or fail. It would have been foolhardy in the extreme for us to have promoted a social media initiative in either of these clients' organisations, no matter how involving it might have been. Any attempt to implement social media in organisations with difficult or dysfunctional corporate cultures will invariably fail. The implementation of a social media programme involving customer dialogue is a not a means of driving corporate culture improvements.

The development of a healthy corporate culture requires management commitment, healthy internal communications and a notion of fair process that builds execution into strategy. These are all required to build trust, collaboration and buy-in to change.

In a later post, we’ll say more about fair process and what that means to a business and all of its employees. Fair process to us is the cornerstone of building execution into strategy.

Geoffrey Wilkins