Even if you’re doing everything right, setting up a social media governance structure is stressful for your organization. Here are the top 10 headaches that arise when a company goes through the governance process and 10 ways to alleviate them.
4. Culture change – Let’s assume the best: 95 of 100 people in the company are thrilled with the culture shift that social media unleashes. But those five people are connected to an awful lot of colleagues, sending out ripples of discomfort through the company’s real social network. The more powerful those people are, the bigger the ripples.
5. Workflow disruption – People who haven’t done social media work before are swiftly confronted by its 24/7 nature. Add in the work-life rebalancing and you’ve got people on edge.
4. Misunderstandings – Big organizations, lots of new tasks, unprecedented requirements to collaborate. It’s like a four-way intersection where the traffic light is broken. It’s too easy for things to go wrong.
6. Analytics-driven accountability – The explosion of metrics has made it possible to measure success and failure. This can be especially freaky to marketing people, who have relied on squishier metrics in the past. The pressure is on. Fingers will be pointed.
9. Faster turnaround – Blood pressure rises even when a simple task has to go faster. And social media ain’t simple.
8. Mistakes in execution – Mistakes happen even in routine jobs. Now you’re asking a bunch of new people executing a bunch of new tactics in a fast-evolving landscape to be perfect? Good luck.
10. New crises – Most companies, especially B2B ones, have not yet faced a social media crisis. Crises that you understand are tough. Now compound it with something that’s either totally unprecedented or “merely” unprecedented for a company. Pressure!
Top 10 Headache Alleviators
1. Say there will be stress – Any change brings stress, so you might as well not undercut your credibility by saying there won’t be any. Acknowledging the issues builds trust, creates permission for people to ask more questions, and lets people prepare mentally for what’s to come.
2. Call it an experiment– Even though many best practices have been figured out, it doesn’t mean they’ve been figured out at YOUR company. Framing it as an “experiment.” Experiments are never failures if their goal is to learn something. And since social media offers tons of metrics, you can always set up a pilot so that something will be learned. A client I’m working with now just learned that they’re so early to market, there’s no conversation about their product taking place online. The absence of their customers is super valuable info. It saved them thousands of dollars — not to mention embarrassment — by NOT proceeding with a social media program.
3. Legitimize the new attitude – People take things more seriously when they’re written down and blessed by management. State that this stuff is new and unknown. Assert that when problems are found, the priority will be fixing them, not assigning blame. Align it to your existing corporate values and everyone from the board of directors down will re-set their expectations and reduce anxiety levels.
4. Catalog existing problems - Regarding #3 above, it’s hard to tell what current stressors you may exacerbate if you don’t take a good look. If you haven’t done an employee survey in a while, do it. Add questions about the level of social media sophistication. And if you’ve done a survey, match up its findings with what you’re about to ask of the origination. You may find you need to put the horse in front of the cart before you ask it to walk down the road.
5. Get third-party perspective – Social media land can be a legitimately scary place. Perspective, a sense of scale and magnitude is impossible without third-party counsel, like an experienced agency, or without hiring someone in-house that brings that perspective with them.
6. Formalize a training program – The more you know, the fewer mistakes you’ll make. You’ll also have a stronger sense of what’s “normal” in this new land. Finally, you’ll know what mistakes to avoid by learning what other companies have done wrong.
7. Start with pilot programs – Pilots lower the cost of failure. They also create a nucleus of social media expertise in the company or division, creating a resource for others to turn to with questions.
8. Do the Horizontal Integration thing – When someone on your team has a question, but no EXPERIENCED one to ask, it creates stress. So do some “horizontal integration” by creating a working group of cross-department social media users who can ask each other what to do in X type of situation. Even if colleagues don’t have the answer, knowing they don’t reduces the “I’m the only one who doesn’t know what they’re doing” feeling.
9. Hire More People – How could a department staffed for a 20th century media world possibly cope with the online volume of the 21st? Hire more people or burn out the ones you have.
10. Assert that the Governance Process will Change – You’ll create new sources of friction if your social media governance policy is set in stone, but you learn something new. Say from the start that the governance policy will be reviewed at least annually. Even the US Constitution has an amendment process.
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