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Your educated guess is as good as mine
By Justin Goldsborough | June 30th, 2008
Justin case you were wondering…One of the things that continues to amaze me about social media is how much guessing is involved. When it comes to technology, social media is middle-aged. MySpace and Facebook have been a round a few years, companies have been blogging since the early 2000’s and discussion forums and online chatting tools have been available for more than a decade - just pull up the guide on your TV, go to Lifetime and you’ll find a movie from around 1996 about kids getting into chat rooms with “not so nice” people.
Ok, backing away from the remote and back to my point - while social media seems like it’s been around a while, I’m always reminded that something becomes old in tech years far sooner before it becomes old enough to provide adequate historical perspective. I get this reminder every time a colleague comes by my desk at work and asks, “What do you think we should do here?” And after thinking to myself that I’d like to climb into the Delorean and shoot forward about 25 years, I always end up coming back to the research I’ve read. And why not…it’s detailed, thoughtful, and gets the brain going — there’s just not that much of it.
Think about it. We’re talking about a medium that’s really only cracked the surface in corporate cultures in the 2000’s. And emphasis on the word cracked. The majority of companies still employ one-way communication strategies that can be controlled by top-level execs and a PR team that has rehearsed the key messages. Combine that fact with the idea that every corporate culture provides a unique situation and those companies that do employ social media tactics can end up in some uncharted territory. There’s no rule book or style guide to refer to. Instead you most often test best demonstrated practices in the line of fire (great movie if you haven’t seen it, btw).
So are we making the right decisions with SprintSpace? Only time will tell. One of the toughest decisions to get a read one for me has been how to involve executives in the social networking that’s beginning to take place among employees. I’ve heard from social media thought leaders like Shel Holtz and the Ragan Communications folks that it’s a good idea to get execs to blog because it promotes an open culture and makes employees feel like they have a stake in the company. Yet my friend Cam Gross, who runs Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation site, told me to keep execs out of my employee social networking site to avoid that “corporate” feel.
So who’s right? My educated guess is both, depending on the situation. How’s that for a cop-out? I am a blue after all. But in all seriousness, what works for us at Sprint will likely be somewhat different than what works at the next company, and the company after that.
Every time I used to hear Shel Holtz speak, when someone would ask him a question about implementing social media, he’d always say, “I need to know more about the situation at your company.” That response drove me crazy the first time I heard it. According to everyone I respected in the communications arena, this guy was “the SME” on social media, but he couldn’t even answer a simple question about if a company should blog or not. However, after doing some research I can see why Shel wanted to do even more research.
There’s no answer key when it comes to how your executive may be perceived on a blog. We’re guessing about how people are going to react, and as far as I know that science has never been perfected (see man’s inability to consistently do the right thing around his wife). All we can do is make an educated guess and bounce that guess off of a sounding board to see how others react.
So that’s what we’re doing. We meet with Shel Holtz tomorrow to see if he can help us fine tune our guesses. And we may meet with other social media SME’s down the road to get as close to that 99.9 percent accuracy rate as we can before implementing our decisions. But in the end, we’ll never quite get to 100 percent and the conclusions we draw will be best described as educated guesses. That’s a little bit scary, but it’s also exciting because our educated guesses will likely make it easier for other communicators to guess down the road. In other words, we’re making history.
“The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of Sprint.”
July 28th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Nice post, Justin. To clarify a couple of things - I am on a team that manages BlueShirt Nation. Most of my time is spent on the introduction and launch of “Bazaar,” a new branch of BSN that gives employees an avenue to interact with Best Buy vendors. Steve and Gary are the co-founders and the final word at BSN.
Also, I don’t recommend trying to keep execs out of your enterprise site. Those execs are your sponsorship and, ultimately, the engine for turning SprintSpace insights into real action. My caution to you was about turning SprintSpace into a place where company leadership tries to push down polls and initiatives. The groundswell has a better chance of happening if employees feel comfortable and empowered to be candid AND when they feel leadership is listening and responding.
Cheers,
Cam Gross
http://www.twitter.com/camgross
http://www.greaterthanmedia.com