Put Your Social on the Wall!

A primary problem clients and prospects I speak to have is moving Social from the tactical periphery to the strategic centre.  This might be a person looking to push a Social agenda within their department or team, or an entire department (usually marketing or PR) looking to increase engagement in Social across the wider business.  There is one very simple answer that goes a long way to solving this problem: put it on the wall! Often the key barriers to the adoption of Social strategies within a business are visibility and ignorance:

• Visibility: when people are very busy Social Media is unlikelly to be front-of-mind as they dash from one "fire drill" to another;
• Ignorance: if there are people who haven't adopted Social Media tools in their own life, they might not even know what it looks like, let alone understand how it works

On a grand scale, it's an approach taken by the high-profile "Social Media Command Centres" such as those employed by the rock star brands of Social Media like Dell or the Red Cross (There are more examples in this Salesforce eBook).  But these are the Ferrari version of the approach.  There is a far more affordable Ford version which can be simply an edition of Hootsuite on a wall-mounted LCD screen powered by a legacy desktop stashed in a cupboard.  The outcomes are multiple:

• Right away you have a step-change in the visibility of Social Media in the organisation and how it relates to the target market
• Immediately, the business of monitoring is spread among many, meaning a comment or complaint directed at the company is far less likely to be ignored, and far more likely to be pounced upon quickly
• Strategically filtered Twitter traffic is much less dynamic than the furious Twitter feed most people are used to. This means people will begin to understand that Social Media is far more manageable than the skeptics would have you believe
• Breaking news pertinent to the organisation's sector or marketplace will equally be seen far more quickly by someone, making the organisation more responsive and better informed
• Spontaneous inspiration of action is likely as people pass by the screen and see something relevant to them they want to respond to or share

Pretty soon, the idea of dedicated screens might proliferate as more and more potential Social Media Champions understand that by dedicating a screen to Social Media, it becomes more informative, available and relevant to day to day activity.

For a guide as to how to structure such a "Command Centre", this Hootsuite post on what a dashboard could look like is very useful. But again, if you are having problems driving adoption of Social Media in your organisation, consider just wall-mounting it and then sitting back to see what magic happens!

Picture Credits: epicventure.nl