How many times have you asked this, or heard it asked?

Yes, but who OWNS social media? Is it marketing? PR? Customer service?

My answer? Yes.

You see, we’ve gotten so very matrixed and hierarchical in our approach to accountability and leadership (in everything, not just social media). We’ve told ourselves that something can’t possibly function unless we have one tie to tug, one person or role to point a finger at, one department with which to leave all the heavy lifting or all the glory (while giving ourselves the excuse that, well, that’s in their department).

Tomorrow’s successful and groundbreaking social businesses simply won’t see things that way.

The answers to how social applies inside our companies should never be one dimensional. Because social media isn’t vertical. It isn’t horizontal. It’s a business model that – if deployed well – permeates the very structure and practice of a business. It doesn’t just trickle down a spreadsheet into someone’s budget or list of accomplishments. It’s not a checklist.

But when it comes to management, hierarchies are cleaner. Excluding people by roles or functions is less messy, mostly because it requires less discussion. Parking social media in a singular box means that we somehow can understand and relate to it more familiarly. We can skip the hard work of weaving it throughout our enterprise. For if we label it as PR, we can therefore take the short road to the purpose, ownership, and even the measurements that PR has always implied. Right?

What a terrible waste that is.

The sustainable social organization will embrace the art of team-based innovation and leadership, and the collective accountability that goes along with it. They’ll build social media like a co-op. Driven by a team united voluntarily, toward common goals, and equally invested in the outcomes.

Collaboration is not just a feel-good buzzword. It’s the idea that our business is built more efficiently through shared knowledge, and shared responsibility. That multiple disciplines work together in order to see – from varied angles of expertise – how an organization works and can excel. What it’s challenges are. How to allocate resources, solve problems, innovate. Together.

The customers that we say we are trying to connect with do not care what our job description is or what department we work for. They care that we want to bring them inside the walls and make them a vital part of our business. No one department or discipline alone can accomplish that.

If you’re going to tell me you need to know which budget this fits in or whose strategic plan this falls under, I’m going to tell you all of them. It is your responsibility as a leader in your company to stop staring in the mirror when looking for how to achieve something greater, and start looking down the hallway. Across the aisle. Across the world. Check your ego at the door and realize that transformational ideas rarely have a singular source.

Find a team that cares enough to evaluate how and where social can make an impact. Let enthusiasm, curiosity, and passion be the criteria for participation, not rank and file. Put your plan together as a group, and hold each other accountable for progress. Build a cross-functional budget based on your objectives. Collectively outline your goals and divide and conquer the strategies intertwined areas of responsibility based on roles and expertise. Answer to your successes and failures as a team.

We’ve always wanted to feel like we all had a stake in our business’ success. We’ve all wanted to believe that our job description wasn’t what mattered, but our potential for innovation, cooperation, creativity, and execution on things that mattered. That we were all invested in the process, and that we’d reap the benefits together by watching our business grow.

It’s here. For all of us to do, collectively. The walls between us – internally and externally – have never mattered less. Shouldn’t we, once and for all, grasp the opportunity to show how team-based innovation wins?

image by Jason Riedy

Social Media is a Co-Op

There are so many discussions swirling around social media measurement these days, and the discussions I’ve had recently at conferences have reinforced the fact that as a whole, measurement of communication is incomplete at best. We’re not satisfied with what’s available to us in terms of proving the value of what we’re doing.

CAN we measure elements of social media impact, reach, and yield? You bet. There are lots of metrics, new and old, that contribute to building cases for attribution of purchase influence, customer and transaction values, and the like.

But the challenge of doing a good job measuring our communication, customer outreach, and marketing initiatives has always been a sticky one, for one specific set of reasons.

Influence Isn’t Cause.

Communication and relationship development have always – and will always – reside in the gray area of actions that influence and impact purchase and buying behaviors, but are not always the direct and only cause for same. We want desperately to have said that our advertising or our press release or that game of golf was solely responsible for a customer’s decision to buy from us.

But more than likely, the combination of several experience touchpoints directly with the company combined with external influences (opinions of friends and family, for instance) and things like context and timing (my purchase of a new dishwasher is driven by need, but my impression of a company based on other experiences might steer me their way) are what make up the bigger and complete picture of a sale.

Even in the world of direct marketing, where you can track the path from touchpoint to purchase with codes or links or whatever, you cannot say with absolute certainty that that marketing effort was the singular cause for the purchase. It might have been the catalyst or the impetus for the purchase at that time, but it’s likely not the only thing that guided someone’s decision to buy, yet we measure it as such.

Measurement has always been imperfect. It’s not just social media measurement.

Frankly, we as communicators and marketers and PR people have relied on a flawed set of measurements for a long time, and we’ve always been lousy at demonstrating the impact of our work. There’s a reason why CMO tenure is ridiculously short. And I’m not so much alarmed at the figures that say we’re bad at measuring social media because, honestly, we’re bad at measuring lots of things. We’ve just told ourselves otherwise, content to settle into the metrics we do have, even if they’re not really telling us anything of substance.

The gray area in measurement is in the combination of:

• Correlation: Sales go up while our marketing reach does, so the two must be related
• Attribution: Our press release was part of the overall promotion strategy, so must have had some impact on the whole
• Influence: Awareness of our company is reinforced by a recommendation or endorsement from a Trust Agent

All of these things matter. They all impact the likelihood of sales. But none of them is alone the cause, and that’s why folks flip out over ROI equations. Just how much of that revenue can you attribute directly to social media, or traditional marketing, or public relations, or the skills of your sales guy? Unless you’re only employing a single strategy, it’s more likely that your ROI equation is related to the whole.

How to improve it?

What we need to keep exploring in social media is conversation pathing. Online gives us the best shot at refining measurement that we’ve had, really. The notion that we can trace all of the digital breadcrumbs – conversation points, recommendations and commentary, discussions including a brand within a larger conversation, content marketing, reviews, capturing of offline experiences – and create a weaving, meandering path through the social space in order to move the needle from separate influence points to an overall sense of how the profile of the aggregate conversation drove the customer to the finish line.

It’s a headful, alright. And I love that I’m working with a company that’s pushing boundaries on this to try and connect the dots so much better. But we have got to get out of the mindset that all of the old metrics still apply, that new metrics don’t have a place because they don’t have precedent.

Our communication is evolving. Our business foundations are changing. Our measurement practices and the work we put into quantifying the value of what we do needs to change, too. It’s going to take work and elbow grease and lots of methodical, meticulous trial and tracking and refinement.

But if justification and proof is what we want, we’d better be willing to do the work it takes to get there.

So, I want to hear from you. Is correlation and impact enough? Can we ever really prove and demonstrate cause, or do we need to? And above all, where is the balance between granular measurement that distorts focus, and measurement that highlights the business insights we so desperately need?

The comments belong to you.

Where Measurement Falls Short

A huge, huge barrier to adoption of social media is the Us vs. Them mentality. The notion that “they” are preventing us from implementing the social media strategy we want. Or that “they” are a bunch of time-wasters who don’t understand business value and want to upset the apple cart with  unproven strategies.

Provided that you have the wherewithal to bring the feuding parties to the table for a constructive discussion (and if you don’t, sorry, you’ve got no room to complain that “they” don’t “get it”), let’s talk through a few things you might want to discuss across the table.

Evangelists to Critics

Speak their language: Understand that the critics around social media are hearing the hype, but they’re likely seeing a focus on the tools instead of a discussion around how they further business goals. They may not use the tools themselves, which means they don’t have first hand experience. Or if they do, they see them as a personal communication tool, and not readily applicable, measurable, or executable in a business framework.

Your job: Education, information, and an objective mindset. And doing your homework around how your social media ideas fit into the bigger picture, including having a realistic assessment of risks and potential challenges. You’ve got to temper your enthusiasm based on what you see, and look at the social media landscape with a critical and editorial eye.

Points of Discussion:

1. What perceptions do you have about the usefulness of social media within a business? What have you heard that reinforces those notions, for better or worse?
2. What information would help you feel more comfortable about considering social media strategies as a part of our mix?
3. What are you most concerned about regarding the risks or implications of social media? What’s the worst case scenario you can imagine, should we undertake such a thing?
4. Why are these concerns top of mind? Is there anything else we do as a company that has similar risks?
5. Have you undertaken new or unfamiliar strategies in your role previously? How did you establish a foundation for that and mitigate risk?
6. Are you concerned that this will somehow negatively impact your role? That of your team? Your available resources? Why or why not?

Critics to Evangelists

Speak their language: Know that many proponents of social media do see potential for this kind of communication and mindset, outside of just Facebook, Twitter, or blogs. Enthusiasm for new strategies is often because it speaks to a perceived unmet need or a weakness in existing approaches. It’s perfectly reasonable to require business justification, but your advocates for social media might be seeing opportunity in places you hadn’t considered.

Your job: Articulating your criticisms and concerns from an objective and levelheaded viewpoint. Educating the group on business goals, and where you see gaps between social media strategies and the ability to meet those goals. Keeping an open mind to looking at existing business challenges through the lens of different solutions that may feel less familiar.

Points of Discussion

1. Which areas of the business will this impact, and how would we need to adjust our current culture, process, or operations to accommodate it?
2. How do you see roles and responsibilities changing to incorporate these new strategies and tactics, and what kind of resource allocation will your strategy require (people, time, money, infrastructure).
3. What are the potential financial risks? Reputation risks?
4. What training and education will we need to provide, both internally and externally?
5. What are your goals and objectives for our use and adoption of social media? How will you gauge progress toward them, and how are you defining both success and failure?

On both ends of the table, I’m a big fan of the 5 Whys approach to getting to the root cause of issues. It’s a tactic employed by the folks at Toyota as part of their evolution in manufacturing. It’s not perfect, but if you haven’t tried it before, it can be an interesting way to break through repetitive thinking. (On a related note, if you haven’t read The Elegant Solution, it’s a fascinating look into the world of Toyota’s processes, innovation, and mindset, and a compelling business book.)

Getting the discussion started among dissenting viewpoints is really key to uncovering root issues that stand in the way of long term social media adoption. And you may find that the issues at hand aren’t about blogs or Facebook or policies at all, but a shift in culture that’s happening as a result.

What would you add? Have you had these discussions, and what roadblocks do you come up against? What makes you lose patience with these kinds of discussions? Let’s have an honest discussion ourselves, here, shall we?

image by rmlowe

Critics and Evangelists: A Communication Starter