Is The Enterprise Ready For Social Media?

I was at a Salesforce event last week where they demonstrated the integration of their platform with Facebook and Twitter. The more impressive of their two examples was Twitter.  With it a tweet could be captured with a customer profile to initiate a trouble ticket or sales lead. While this was interesting it still seems to be lacking something.

I’m not faulting Salesforce. They are simply integrating with complementary platforms that are becoming more prominent in their market. What I am suggesting, however, is that they are missing the social part. In fairness to them, many enterprises and their suppliers are also missing the social part.

What I mean by that is that they are focusing on the tools rather than the social interaction. Salesforce sells tools but I wonder if enterprises and their suppliers give much consideration to the environment into which they wish to install a tool or solutions. Is the environment or culture already social or at least predisposed to it? If not, there is a high risk of failure for the solution and the enterprise’s social objectives will likely not be achieved.

Even if the enterprise could be considered highly social, there is a great deal of trepidation regarding social media, which is why organizations have been slow to adopt.  Having a proper sense of what approach to take provides some comfort and Dave Fleet provides some helpful tips on social media policy for companies, which should serve to reduce their fears and elevate their comfort level.

On Radian6’s blog, How can you help the enterprise socialize?, Lauren Vargas discusses their internal efforts to create a safe haven for staff to test social media, ask questions, and better understand the demands put on organizations before they can gradually embrace it. As I mentioned earlier, the focus was on tools rather than social interaction and Lauren says it even better when she says “The tool is not the platform for sharing information, it is the people.”

This is where I think a lot of social media gurus, consultants and solution providers seem to be missing the point.  There seems to be very little time and effort devoted to situational analysis or organizational assessments, specifically the people and their readiness to adopt social media.  If there were, the success rate for social media initiatives would most certainly increase. That is, of course, if the analysis or assessment concluded the environment (i.e. people) was conducive to social media.  If it wasn’t conducive then the enterprise would avoid wasting time, incurring extra costs and, even worse, the prospect of a public shaming via social media if they went about it all the wrong way.

The hype surrounding social media would give the impression that things are moving rapidly but the enterprises, and the people within them, need to be slow in their approach because putting a strain on an organization should not be the intent with social media. Enterprises need to ensure that any social media initiatives align with their strategy but most importantly, their culture and their capability.