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Social Media Governance Empowerment with Accountability by Chris Boudreaux |
According to Jobvite, one in six job seekers found their last job through a social network, and more than half of job seekers in the U.S. have used social media to look for work in the past year.
For people who used social media to find their last job:
For the most active users of social media, 28% found their last job through social networking, and 85% of those did so via Facebook.
Infographic below from Jobvite:
This is why you need a written agreement with each employee who manages any brand social media account: A federal judge ruled last week that news site PhoneDog (@PhoneDog) has a potential case against former employee Noah Kravitz (@NoahKravitz) for taking Twitter followers with him when he left the company. When Kravitz left the company, they asked for the account credentials, but, instead of surrendering the account, he changed the account name. PhoneDog says that Mr. Kravitz owes them $2.50 follower — per month — for each of his 17,000 followers, for a total of $340,000, and the judge required that the company present more evidence.
PhoneDog claims that the account and its followers were a company asset because Kravitz acquired the followers as part of his job responsibilities.
According to Eric Goldman, PhoneDog is suing on three fronts: “(1) misappropriation of trade secrets, (2) interference with economic advantage; and (3) conversion.” Eric also examines each of the claims in his blog.
PhoneDog claims that $2.50 is the “industry standard” for the value of a Twitter follower, but no such industry standard exists to my knowledge.
Kravitz argued that the value in a Twitter account really “comes from . . . efforts in posting tweets and [an] individual’s interest in following . . . not from the account itself.”
Regardless of the court decision, all brands should implement written agreements with employees who maintain brand accounts in social media, so this kind of situation never becomes an issue for the courts.
Its not just a problem on Twitter. Google+ requires their newly released brand pages to be created within a personal account. If you have someone creating a brand page on Google+, you better think about what happens if they ever leave the company. I’d start by only letting long-term employees create such accounts.
ShareMichael Maoz of Gartner recently wrote that CIOs can only shake their heads when marketing, sales and services leaders are able to obtain funding for social media projects without a business case, instead of being held accountable for the same level of quantitative rigor as other IT-enabled investments. While it is true that most social media investments still travel with no business case, anyone who wants to change that fact needs to undertand a bit of history:
One challenge is that most communications professionals and social media consultants don’t have much experience in organizational change. They’ve never led cross-functional change programs. They’ve never built a business case that had to stand up to the CFO’s rigor. So they just don’t know how to do those things.
And, in the corporate communications arena, they never had to measure business impact from their efforts. Clippings were all they ever counted.
But that is all changing as marketing, sales and customer service leaders begin to ask for real dollars for social media.
However, the one critical factor that is changing the slowest is that CIOs are simply not getting in the game. CIOs and their teams are simply not at the table when cross-functional social media efforts are launched. And, ultimately, the CIO has to change that. CIOs need to start reaching out to their VPs of Communications and Marketing, and start figuring out how enterprise IT will enable the business goals that social media supports.
The bottom line is that CIO can not sit back and wait for other functional leaders to bring them a business case or a well-defined social application architecture. CIOs need to get out of their foxholes, and go be the smartest person in the room about how the organization should use technology to solve challenges in marketing, communications, sales and service.
And if you want some help developing your technology strategy for social in your organization, I’d be happy to help. Send me a note any time.
ShareAll of us who drive change in organizations live and die by our ability to convince others to adopt our ideas. In the embedded video, Susan Duarte shares patterns that she discovered in her examination of compelling speeches by Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King.
Than you, Susan, for sharing.
ShareWhile nearly every organization has a social media policy today, most social media policies ignore the greatest business risk to their organization from social media: managers. The simple reality is that landmark law suits or sanction brought against employers in the past couple of years have resulted from the actions of a manager, not an employee. For example:
In each of the above cases, managers broke the law and exposed their employer to significant costs and damage to their brands, in addition to personal prosecution, in some cases.
Too many executives and employers hold false assumptions about their powers over their employees, and every employer should proactively educate their managers about their boundaries as managers. Social media training should be part of basic Manager training, just like sexual harassment, bribery or discrimination content.
While I am not aware of any juridictions requiring such training for managers, it is clearly in the interest of any employer to take the lead and educate their managers.
All employers should actively educate their managers about the boundaries.
Email Chris Boudreaux
(415) 692-1250
@cboudreaux
Great news! I joined the team at Converseon where I will lead Social Media Management Consulting, headquartered in New York, with offices and clients around the world.
As my new teammate Craig Daitch says, Converseon is one of the best-kept secrets in the industry, but not for long.
Converseon is the only company I know with deep experts in every stage of digital and social media strategy and execution and the people are fantastic.
In the past two years, Converseon won the 2009 SAMMY Award for “Best Social Media Agency,” a WOMMIE for Best Word of Mouth Program, and the OMMA Award for Best Use of Virtual Worlds, among many others.
If you aren’t familiar with Converseon, I hope you take a moment to check out the Converseon web site, and see what some of our clients say about our work.
The press release announcing my move has more information.
Look for more announcements soon about Converseon, our work and our fantastic clients!
Share
A lot of people wonder, “Who should own social media?”. For example, in many organizations, PR seeks to own relationships with all journalists including bloggers, but Corporate Marketing wants to build blogger relationships, and so do Product Marketing, community managers, and the folks who manage alliances. Who’s right?
Lesson From the Past
To answer the question, “Who owns social media?”, I look back to the late 90s when Process Reegineering was getting the attention that social media gets today, and the world’s leading brands were hiring people like Michael Hammer to tell them how to make their “siloed” organizations more “process-centric”. Process reegineering shares a lot with social media, including:
Just like social media, processes cross organizational boundaries. Ownership is often unclear.
In the days of process reengineering, many organizations created Process Champions: senior executives with strong relationships across the organization, who could influence across organizational boundaries, without a need for formal authority. The Champions were rarely given direct control over all of the groups they needed to corral. Instead, they usually had to navigate the politics of the organization and convince people to get on board. In all cases, though, the Champions had the full support of the CEO. And that made all the difference.
For example, I was at Bank of America in the late 90s (then called NationsBank) when the CEO designated three Customer Champions: one for each of the bank’s three major customer segments. Each Customer Champion was a very senior executive with decades of experience at the bank, and deep relationships across the organization. Each was responsible for improving the processes that served their customer segments, but none held direct reporting ownership of the departments that they needed to work together. Even so, the compensation of each Customer Champion depended on specific financial targets for their customer segment.
Suggestions for Today
If you lead an organization with different departments battling over ownership of social media, you really need to put someone in charge of social media. You need a champion. You don’t need to make everyone report to the Champion, but someone needs to lead the decisions that cross organizational boundaries — for example: which capabilities should be centralized, and which should be decentralized. Someone needs to ensure that metrics are effective and consistent. And someone needs to make sure that the organization is keeping pace with the competition in this rapidly evolving space.
If you find yourself waging war with another department about ownership of social media in your company, you have four choices:
I hope you are able to choose one of the first three.
ShareLast week, I described a use case entitled “Retail Omniscience” wherein companies can use emerging text data mining technologies to gather, filter and summarize information from social media, then unify the information with internal knowledge tools to help retail and call center employees perform better when interacting with customers or prospects.
The value of that use case was based on Accenture research [1] which found that (1) most consumers conduct significant online research before buying a mobile device, and (2) they usually buy mobile devices in retail stores, rather than buying online. Since the publication of that Accenture research, Google and OTX published a study in March 2010 [2] which found that consumers predominately use the Internet for pre-purchase research, followed most commonly by conversations with sales or support employees, and friends or family (see chart from eMarketer below).
Now that Google, OTX, eMarketer and Accenture all agree, we can probably feel confident that anyone selling mobile devices should proactively provide their retail and customer support employees with the same level of knowledge that is available to their customers through online sources such as forums and other social media. To understand how that can work at scale for even very large companies, please see my earlier post on the subject.
If you are interested in discussing ideas for developing these capabilities in your organization, drop me a line any time.
Chris Boudreaux
I help the world's largest organizations develop and implement comprehensive social media strategies and capabilities across their business. My work has helped global organizations to improve their use of social media in marketing, sales and customer service.
While I am an executive at Converseon, the views I express on this site are my own, except where otherwise noted.
