Social Scaling

The subject of this post has been visited before, thanks to an earlier note by Tac Anderson on the ‘3 types of social media strategy‘, and David Cushman’s excellent presentation the same topic.

What made me revisit this are Tac Anderson’s post last week titled ‘Dam your social media strategy‘, which used an excellent analogy to present a 2 step approach to changing business strategy , and my own experiences in the last few months. In my first post that referred to the 3 types of social media strategy, I’d wondered whether it was possible to move from strategy 2 (optimising social media  for business) to strategy 3 (optimising business for social media), but my experiences later made me feel that it was perhaps (generalising) an inevitable approach, and this view has only been strengthened since then.

However, the biggest roadblock I sense is in convincing an organisation and its internal stakeholders to look at the tools from beyond a ‘push communication’ marketing perspective especially after we start out on optimising social media. It is all the more difficult because this perspective is something they can identify with – just another channel, and one that’s ‘free’.  A twisted view that ‘Conversations are markets’. Just another place to sell your wares. 😐

The challenge is to shift the focus from ‘media’ to ‘social, and from a purely brand centric view to one that encompasses the organisation’s internal stakeholders and consumers, and has a more holistic view of ROI. I wonder then, if it is actually better to start with something like ‘customer care’ or ‘operations’ and include ‘brand’ only at a much later stage in optimisation. Debatable. 🙂

until next time, ambushing marketing on the brand team.

4 Comments

  1. Manu, Thanks for the post. I agree 100% the battle to change into a truly social company is an internal switch and from my experience this has to be driven from the top down and even that’s not a guarantee for success.

    I heard a great saying the other day: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” (look for another blog post on this topic) Basically any effort to change your strategy will fail if it goes against the company’s strategy.

  2. thanks Tac for dropping by 🙂
    I’m nodding at that statement but also wondering if there’s a paradox – that it seems like changing the culture itself needs to be a strategy 🙂
    PS: love the StarWars visualisation in many of your posts :))

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