Bringing about significant change in a company isn’t easy. I know this from having recently left Hewlett-Packard, where I led an ambitious, new program starting in late 2009 to help drive the giant technology company’s social media activity across its Enterprise operations.
It was an interesting ride. I managed a team of editors and project managers, and was lucky enough to work with bloggers and social media managers across the organization and test-drive dozens of ideas. Given the challenges, I was surprised at how much progress we made.
But still, I came away with the same question that has nagged me for five years of working with companies like Cisco and Sprint on social media programs: Why is it so hard to drive change in these companies? Why do they struggle with social media?
Most big companies admit they’re still coming up short on using social media. Only 12% in one survey say they’re using it effectively; another 43% admit they’re using it ineffectively.
Another sign is that corporate blogs (particularly B2B) are still light years behind independent bloggers in quality of content, engagement, and every other measure. How much buzz do you see being generated by your favorite corporate blog?
So I began rethinking social media earlier this year. One idea eventually dawned on me. Maybe we’re trying to do too much at once (“boiling the ocean”). We still need to walk before we start running in most companies.
Changing the Corporate DNA
Real change—like “socializing” a company’s communications—takes enormous time and effort. As GigaOm’s Om Malik points out in a wonderful post, companies develop habits, processes, and work environments that eventually come to define the company. They are like deeply ingrained “instructions” or “corporate DNA.” Changing this is no easy feat.
Rather than delude yourself into thinking you’re going to change an entire company, be smart. Start with focused, achievable goals and programs. Think small.
You can practice “being small” in many ways:
1.) Identify one strong, motivated group or organization for a carefully planned pilot program (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) rather than launching across an entire company. Assemble a focused team. Plan, strategize, execute. Document metrics, proof points, and best practices. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
2.) Don’t force everyone to blog. Most corporate employees don’t have the time or inclination, so don’t waste your time on massive education programs. The key is to identify a few motivated enthusiasts—and support them with targeted personalized editorial resources, such as market intelligence, editorial tips and strategies, story angles, and related subject blogs. Then get out of the way.
3.) Cultivate senior management support, one at a time. Even fewer senior execs have time to blog, so you need to identify the one mostly likely to work with you and meet with their team, starting with their communications manager (if they have one). Support them with personalized research, story angles, messaging, and an outline or rough draft. Social media purists will scream about anything that smacks of ghosting, but it’s not that much different than any other executive communications support. (Do you really think Steve Jobs writes his own speeches?) The CEO owns the final post. They may still resist, so start with one guest blog post on a friendly industry or partner site. Think small.
4.) Find a friend in sales. Social media and sales are uneasy bed partners. Most salespeople are skeptical that it helps beyond the awareness stage of the sales cycle, and they aren’t even sure about that. Don’t worry about converting all of sales into believers. Find one hip sales team or person, and develop a social media pilot that will help you map out social media across the entire sales cycle, while providing the ammunition (proof points, metrics, best practices) you need to prove it works and broaden your program.
No Easy Ride
Small steps will eventually pave the way for bigger, more ambitious programs, but don’t expect an easy ride. Resources and employees are stretched, the workload is brutal, and social media is still unproven (particularly in the B2B space). Then there are the intangibles. So much of succeeding inside a corporation revolves around relationships, priorities, politics, and perceptions. Social media is no different.
I remember one of Cisco’s smaller partners challenging me during a training on the value of blogging: “If I’m not selling, I’m losing money. The rest is just noise.”
But it’s that “noise” (channeled correctly) that represents the future; it’s your customers, investors, competitors, employees.
I still believe we’ll get to the Digital Promise Land, where social media practices are accepted as the norm across the organization. But that will be in a few years. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to dream big and focus on what I do best, while keeping my attention on the “little picture.”
You should too.
Tags: B2B, Blogging, hewlett packard, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Great post!
I think this advice is applicable to changing the way companies operate across a lot of different areas in marketing, not just social media. I went through a similar process to get a large company to stop exhibiting at trade shows, with another to get them to thinking about digital advertising and with another to get them started with blogging.
The link to sales is critical. Nothing can kill a new marketing initiative faster than having the sales team say they think it’s a bad idea. Having even one sales rep that sees the value can make a huge difference.
April
I agree, the link to Sales is one key to a power base that always — not just in social media adoption — elevates the power of Marketing. In addition, a link to product development (R&D) is often another power base. There is often an expert who is ready to “go social” who has stature and credibility. A number of large companies have launched new products successfully using social media communications. Check out the presentation LaSandra Brill of Cisco did for MarketingProfs just a few months ago.
In fact, “socializing” a company may require more than just Marketing’s leadership. Often,social media adoption requires a culture of openness, requiring a fundamental paradigm shift from the much more common culture of control and suspicion. For many large companies, this is, as Mark says, going to take years to change.
Most importantly, Mark’s general thesis about starting small is right on target. Find key advocates and small projects, and start turning heads in powerful places. That’s the way to change in more fundatmental ways.
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Both of the above responses are valid, but with all due respect, they don’t go far enough.
I come from a long background in marketing (mostly startups, turnarounds and hopeless cases) and like all marketing people, I was conditioned to think that change is all about communicating well. Wrong.
Any time you try to make a change in a company — whether in business processes, technology, or organizational structure — you’re getting into the business of change management. I am presently collaborating on a book on change management with an experienced, world-class practitioner and I can share just a few tips here.
You talk about “driving” change. You cannot drive or force change. And the larger the organization, the more difficult it is to cause change to happen.
1. Changing a company’s DNA is too ambitious, takes too long, and is probably not even possible. Do not start from that point of view. That sort of change is organic and only happens over time as people and attitudes change.
2. To effect change, you start by meeting with the leaders who have authorized or will authorize the project. You need to make sure you understand and agree with those leaders on the vision and the business case for making the change, as well as the outcomes they expect.
3. You need your leaders’ active sponsorship at every step of the way. Sponsorship is different from “senior manaement support.” Sponsorship means they personally show up at meetings and say “this is important, we need you to do it.” (They don’t have to attend the entire meeting, but they do need to make an appearance.) They can also reinforce personal visits with video and email.
4. You need to enroll every stakeholder in the change — those who will be affected by the project, and those who have influence over it. You can only enroll them by (a) clearly communicating the benefits of the change (the business case) and, most critically, (b) answering the question “what’s in it for me” for each individual stakeholder. (Just like sales!) Until you have everyone’s consensus, do not try to proceed. Your stakeholders will tell you how best to communicate with them, the best options for implementing your project, and what they will consider a win.
5. Once you have taken the three steps above, you have to plan out in detail not only the process change itself, but the sponsorship, communications, training, and measurement activities that will be necessary to support and implement the change.
6. Pilot projects are good before rolling out across a business unit or the entire enterprise. They enable you to learn from your mistakes and make adjustments.
Implementing change is a lot of work, very detail-driven, very time-consuming. It’s easy to take the position “I’m not a change manager, I’m a marketing person.” But if you want your project(s) to succeed, this is a very high-level view of the steps necessary — whether you personally take them, or bring in a change management consultant to help you.
I was fortunate in my last few marketing engagements, with the encouragement of the CEOs I worked for, to have some influence in other areas of process and technology — not only sales and customer service, most critically, but also HR, recruiting, training (internal and external), product development, and the like. I walked around, talked to people, synthesized the information, fed it back up the chain, also applied it in marketing. Without knowing it, I was taking baby steps into change management. But only scratching the surface. What I’ve learned in the process of writing this book is an eye-opener.
And I seem to be writing a book here, so I need to stop. Good luck!
Mark, you make excellent points here. I think one reason corporate blogging (or any corporate social media initiatives) struggle to get off the ground is because people who were hired to do something else are often shoe-horned into these projects or roles. I’ve trained several corporate (and government) teams that included people who never really wanted to learn about it, they weren’t passionate about it, they felt forced into it and they subsequently treated blogging, tweeting, etc. as something to cross off the list. They were constantly dragging their feet, saying “I don’t get it.” No surprise, those initiatives fell down rather quickly.
It’s a mistake to think you can force people to be social, if that’s not their propensity. It’s probably an even bigger mistake to think people will want to blog if they aren’t already writers. Obviously smaller companies have no choice because they have minimal resources. People have to wear a lot of hats. Bigger companies, however, are just being stupid or trying to get work done on the cheap if they don’t recognize the value of hiring people specifically for these roles. I’m not saying that any company should silo its social media efforts — social business practices will eventually need to be baked into everything. But the folks who lead the charge inside the organization must be just that: leaders. Maybe even cheerleaders. That’s what it’ll take for most businesses to see real success in this milieu.
Carri Bugbee
http://www.carribugbee.com
These are all great comments; thanks. Clearly it’s a big issue.
One thing I’m trying to do (in a short amount of space) is add a reality check around a lot of the existing thinking about social media in the corporate space. Too much of what I read involves simplistic solutions, when in fact these are very complex environments where often intangible factors (I mention above) can make or break a project. I barely scratch the surface here but my point is simply to take baby steps first, such as focused pilot programs and projects.
Michael- agree with these points, with a little tweaking for my situation. We have to distinguish between different classes of companies. HP has over 300,000 employees. Enterprise Services (formerly EDS, now part of HP) alone has over 100k employees. It would never be feasible for me to get “every stakeholder” to the table to agree and to have “everyone’s” consensus. But I could get the key stakeholders to buy in and with the right ongoing support system and educational efforts, reach out across the org, engage bloggers and others with vested interests and move the ball forward on a project-this process might take months. This is far different than when I’m dealing with a small to medium size company, where I could be dealing with smaller orgs and perhaps at the SR VP or even CEO level. All your other comments–like clarifying “what’s in it for me” – are right on target (and often neglected).
Carri- this is one of the biggest issues, getting reluctant or resistant corporate bloggers to jump in. Some companies think they can throw money at the this and turn on a switch, and magically people will start blogging. Most corporate types simply don’t have the time or knack for it, as you say. I’ve managed programs that provide full support to these people- like full editorial resources-and even then, it’s a stretch. I’m suggesting we rethink what we’re doing in this area, trying for force the issue.
I definitely agree with you.And plus, i think it’s not just for social media only, it’s in all new areas.Big companies have a difficulty to get along with new things ( new marketing methods,digital platforms etc..).I think they might be thinking as these are too risky.They want to check it with other ones who tried it maybe
..And i hope that it’s not going to last for a few years, please..
It is definitely all areas of change that large companies have a problem with.
What we are dealing with is an interesting form of laziness or complacency.
Everyone wants to use what has previously worked in the past because they are used to it and change is scary.
The difficulty with convincing current employees to blog is the typical complaint, “That is not in my job description.” (dead on, Carrie) Yet another form of laziness because changing what you do daily requires not only creative thought but a change in schedule. These employees resist blogging and social media the same way most people have difficulty getting themselves to implement an exercise regimen or eat healthier foods.
This resistance to change is a combination of fear and indolence, both difficult things to overcome.
If viewed from this angle we recognize that forcing change (as Michael was so kind to point out) will only cause more resistance and often more than a little anger.
I completely agree that a great degree of strategizing is called for in these cases including both starting small as well as at least rudimentary knowledge of change management.
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[...] a clinging to the status quo-often hold them back. This is one reason corporations struggle with change and social media. Politics can make or break you in a [...]
Rebecca- good points, but in defense of the managers and would-be bloggers I worked with in big companies, they really do have a big work burden- and blogging isn’t part of it. They’re not graded on it when performance review time comes around, and many are fearing for their jobs these days. There are a few exceptions of ones who ignore it and break through with their blogs, but they are the minority. Nothing will change until companies, starting with management, truly “get it” with the importance of social media- so what we’re dealing with is a broader, deeper level of “corporate inertia” or perhaps laziness. Your last statement about change management and starting small is right on.
[...] MarketingProfs.com: Lessons From a Corporate Insider: Dream Big, but Think SmallMost big companies admit they’re still coming up short on using social media. Only 12% in one survey say they’re using it effectively; another 43% admit they’re using it ineffectively. Mark Ivey suggests focusing on the “little” picture. [...]
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