A lot of organizations are trying to evolve past their organic, disparate social media activities and elevate social media into truly enterprise-class capabilities that support meaningful business goals. Within those efforts, organizations very often encounter cultural challenges, such as divides between Marketing and Sales, or acquired business units that make it difficult to execute a cohesive social media strategy.
In those cases, organizations should thoughtfully influence the elements of culture that can help them achieve their goals.
In any organization, there are four elements of culture that leaders can manage — some directly, and some indirectly.
Of those four elements, the easiest to manipulate are often called “artifacts”, which are the easily observable elements of culture that provide cues to employees. Common examples of artifacts can include the structure of the employee parking lot or the relative sizes of executive offices.
In corporate social media, artifacts can include the placement of links to employee blogs on the corporate web site and the degree to which Twitter accounts, blogs and YouTube videos from different business units appear together in a single, corporate social media presence.
There are three additional elements required for successful culture management, and I’ll discuss each of them in three following articles. The fourth article will provide a single framework that integrates the four.
I’ll be happy to email anyone wishing to get a sneak peak at the framework. Just send me a note by email to: chris [at] socialmediagovernance [dot] com.
At Converseon, we are helping clients to manage the cultural challenges that they encounter in their social media efforts, and, while most functional, business or product leaders typically express strong interest in making social media successful in their company, the established cultural norms sometimes get on the way. It’s just a fact of life that requires thoughtful strategies and tactics for success.
DISCLAIMER
I am the SVP of Management Consulting at Converseon, where I help clients manage, improve and optimize their ability to achieve business goals through social media. Share
