If you’re the sole champion of social business in your organization, it can be a daunting place to stand.
Where should you focus your time and energy? What should your priorities be? How do you keep your programs moving forward while building a business case for carrying those initiatives deeper into the company? What things can you focus on that are always necessary and can help you stay on track?
We’ve got a few ideas. Six, to be exact.
1. Vision/Goals
It might seem obvious, but having clear vision and goals for social business becomes your anchor. That’s the stuff you come back to when things get off track or seem like they’re not aligned.
The most important element here is not to build the goals for social business itself. First, work with leadership to outline and understand the business-level goals for revenue, market growth, research and development, culture and talent retention, partnerships. What is the C-level committed to in terms of the company overall? Once you understand that, build your social business goals so that each one can be tied to the larger goals of the organization.
Consider what social business practices will enable, make possible, or accelerate? Speak in terms of business outcomes, not social media program objectives. If you can speak to people about the things they will always want to achieve and how social supports those objectives, you’ll always have a strong foundation for support and forward momentum.
And all of that together helps you illustrate a very important picture: the one that describes what your organization will look like 6 months, 12 months, 3 years from now. The picture of your company as a social business.
2. Finding Champions
You can’t do this yourself forever.
While you’re the lone solider leading the charge, you’ve got to find the people in your organization that believe as you do or at least have a curiosity and an interest in learning how to build social programs within the company. They don’t have to be seasoned social professionals. They can come from anywhere in the organization, and they can be at pretty much any level of responsibility. The key factor is their desire to help establish roots for social business practices because they can help them do their jobs better, further their department goals, build a better business in which to work, or all of the above.
Finding internal advocates is the first step to establishing things like social business councils or building a Center of Gravity. The more invested people are in social’s potential in the organization, the more they’re willing to lend their time and expertise to the cause and eventually help build a case for more devoted staff. Plus, the volunteer/unofficial approach to finding social advocates across the organization time and again proves itself as a strong foundation for collaborative work that transcends hierarchies and silos. It just works.
3. Education
Education is perhaps the most critical piece is socializing knowledge about social, the context for your initiatives, and your intent with the programs you hope to build around the organization. Over time, methodical outreach and education is is how you build a case for additional budget and resources and create enthusiasm and curiosity around this “whole social business thing”. That’s what creates upward momentum among the people in your company, and grabs the attention of the decision-makers.
What about convincing the skeptics?
If you address them openly, honestly, and patiently (including admitting what you don’t know yet), they’re much more likely to support your approach, which is what you need at first. The goal isn’t necessarily to convince them immediately that you’re right. Your job is to instill enough confidence that you’ve thought things through and have a plan. Because leadership doesn’t really shy away from risk; most of them have become leaders because they understand the inherent value of taking risks.
What they shy away from is risk without a plan that addresses it realistically. That’s the difference between calculated risk and unmitigated, messy risk. Illustrate that your approach to social is well-reasoned, and you’ll buy yourself enough breathing room and support to execute on the plan and be accountable for it (more on that in a moment). That should be your goal. Not to convince the people that don’t yet buy what you’re selling, but to earn the chance to prove it to them.
