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

Three, two, one…Ignition…Blast off!

Welcome to the Rocket Fuel Blog.

2nd June 2010 sees the official launch of Rocket Fuel Marketing, a technology marketing business specialising in product and service launches. It’s not all new but a collaboration of marketing specialists who have been in the business for twelve years or more. We bring together a full range of strategic and tactical capability in marketing that works from before the point of product conception, through development, planning and live launches to full market adoption. We embrace traditional and new marketing methods in a way that’s different and challenging. We bring enjoyment, stimulus, creativity and interest to your work. Our belief is that if we’re not stretched by what we’re doing and it’s not taxing our grey matter, then we’re probably not doing it right!

Why now?

Good question!

It’s a truism that the marketing function will frequently be cut back during an economic downturn. We’ll not debate the rights and wrongs here. It’s a fact.

Marketing creates customers, innovates and drives sales. For most organisations of any size, it’s impossible to do without it; therefore marketing resource is bought in. Consequently, a technology business may be forced to manage multiple agencies with different approaches, methods and skills…not to mention egos. Launching a new product is stressful enough. We’ve seen this multiple agency mash-up more than once of late; situations that are not only difficult to manage but where expertise is mismatched to the task in hand and strategic intent is overlooked in key aspects of the marketing and launch process. What was meant to achieve cost-savings becomes an inefficient money sink. Rocket Fuel delivers and takes responsibility for any and all marketing activities associated with a launch. Efficiencies are gained by being able to select the services you need, as much resource as you need, whenever you need it without cost penalty or wasteful inefficiency.

Another answer to the “why now?” question is to do with changes taking place in the marketing industry itself. There’s a whole new wave of marketers proselytising digital and social media and content (“content is king”) as the be all and end all of marketing. We recognise that it’s vital too but it’s not the whole story.

There are the new soothsayers of marketing doom proclaiming that marketing is dead and that it’s only purpose is lead-generation. True, the ultimate purpose of marketing is to drive sales, but again it’s not the whole story. Imagine selling the wrong product at the wrong price to the wrong customer via an inappropriate channel-to-market. You can generate as many sales-leads as you like but without a well-executed marketing strategy, you won’t make sales. Interestingly, some of these new wave experts claim that strategy is outdated…that it’s dark and medieval, that it takes place outside marketing and that it’s engineers exclusively who (should) manage product development. So is this new world one where the sales-lead generator doesn’t so much as consider the customer or their values, beliefs, attitudes, behaviours or needs? There are no brand values either, since the only point of a brand is…what? You guessed it – lead generation.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are the traditional marketing specialists selling hope and promise wrapped up in methodological and scientific rigour. This group may be characterised by their claim of superior knowledge, mystification of the subject or a remedial approach. They appear to work on the assumption that they have a conduit to superior market wisdom or offer the “cure” to a company’s marketing malaise.

At Rocket Fuel, we’re not career consultants or new wave advocates drawn from website design, advertising or PR. Our client service directors have worked the streets opening, negotiating and closing multi-million pound technology deals. We respect sales people and we’ve done their job too. Forging a close alliance with a sales team is, for us, a fundamental part of building a successful marketing campaign. Their views are frequently the closest to the customer and demand our respect. We’re not all theory, but we know our discipline backwards. We take pride in being practical and pragmatic, of generating ideas that connect with our clients and their customers as well as initiatives that drive sales revenue and profit growth. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

The Rocket Fuel Marketing Team