This morning during Ragan Communication's Social Media for PR and Corporate Communications Conference at Disney World, Steve Crescenzo, CEO of Crescenzo Communications, spoke about "safe" social media and how to put Web 2.0 tools to use in the corporate atmosphere without scaring executives or damaging your brand.
Leadership is terrified.
Steve started with talking about how he's seen high-level executives peeing their pants in Armani suits when asked about social media involvement. He describes their inner-monologue as: Inmates taking over the asylum. But why are executives leery of social media? Steve says they're afraid for two reason: that bad things happening inside the company will make it to the outside world and that internal social media will hurt productivity and possibly the culture.
Despite their terror, us as communicators need to see social media as opportunities, conversations, collaboration, digital workplaces, great ideas, communities, productivity, and three-way communications and we need to keep pushing the issue among leadership.
These are his three tips for getting your corporate social media efforts off the ground:
1. Start with something easy and non-threatening.
Start small and take baby steps. Remember, slow and steady always wins the race! Choose topics that are non-threatening and less confrontational. These topics will have less of a chance for negative feedback and less of a chance for negative comments fueling angry discussions. Every positive baby step gets you one step closer to winning over leadership.
2. Publicize your wins!
When something great happens, brag about it. Be a social media spy in your organization and mine for content, pull it from the shadows and publicize it. Your leadership and employees don't always know something in newsworthy. Your role is to be an reporter for your organization.
3. Get the important people involved.
These unfortunately are going to be the ones that will be resistant but you need executive buy-in for a successful social campaign. You will need to convince them and show them your successful starts and explain their value to the organization. On top of leadership buy-in, you need subject matter experts (SMEs) to help curate content. Be talent scouts. Find SMEs and find out who would be good writers for blogs or good on video. These people become your talent. Train them!
BONUS: Work with your leaders. Offer training.
Leadership 2.0 is about being transparent and more influential and more personal. Offer them training how to use a personal voice to tell a business relevant story and start a conversation.
Final advice is: Do less and do it better.
As your social media efforts get started, you need to prioritize your time and your tasks. You may not have time for everything so decide what is most important and give it your all!
What does success look like?
A highly engaged community with back and forth, two-way and three-way communication between the organization and its employees and between employees about the organization.
NOTE: This was written live during the #RaganDisney conference. Please stop by later for a more robust edition.
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