I am still surprised when many of my friends bring up the fact that they cannot use social media (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIN, etc) in their offices. Most of them work for corporate America and their bosses still view Facebook as playtime.
Jason Falls has a great post today on How To Be The Social Media Champion At Your Office. What do you say when you are being made fun of for using Social Media? What do you say when you are constantly being beat down with this “new-fangled-fad”?
And what do you say when superiors and peers tell you social media marketing is a waste of time? Jason has six steps to help you along your journey. I am also going to add in a couple of my own.
1. Illustrate the Benefits
2. Make Yourself Available
3. Target the Right Co-Workers
4. Get To The Professional Through the Personal
5. Operate Within The Rules
6. Solve Business Problems With Social Media Tools
I would encourage you to go read Jason’s blog and learn from his expertise. I wanted to add a couple that will help my peers along the way of social media domination in the corporate environment.
1. Show Historical Data of Productivity Enhancement. I know that title sounds like something from the inner vaults of Forrester but I have found this method to work numerous times. I have used the success of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation to champion the use of social media in the corporate environment. This adds to Jason’s first point and if you can show the success of peers…. it will be easier.
2. Work Behind the Scenes and Work Often. I am not saying go behind your supervisors back and start using social media for productivity and marketing enhancement. Ask to use social media for the companies benefit on your OWN TIME. Map and track everything you are doing to show management the value of all things social media. This will also show the leaders that you are serious about social media and SERIOUS about the companies success.
If you ask… you better hustle. Hustle hard and work your butt off.
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Blame it on Websense. This software has made it so easy for companies/executives to simply block out anything deemed not to be “business critical.”
And this goes much further than social media sites. Employees can’t even check out their childrens’ school websites because they’ve been “Websensed.”
Ridiculous…
Re: “Hustle hard and work your butt off.”
Amen to that! It’s not easy to get others to see the benefit (at least not right away). But the more organized you are, the easier it’ll be to present.
@Chuck It shows how out of touch corporate america can get.
@Ricardo amen Ricardo, amen.
Hi, very interesting ideas but in some corporate environments the people to evangelize to are not in the same city and have made decisions with a technology board of partners or execs lead by the CIO.
At my day job, MySpace is blocked and so are a large number of sites that are social networking sites, but that are perceived as dating sites.
The security team, avid tech users themselves, has to police against dating sites, porn, and instant messaging because of corporate decisions.
Global enterprises generally do not allow the people who would need to be evangelized accessible.
Typically, they operate under different rules with non-standard configurations.
Hence, I think everyone should have a BlackBerry or iPhone or smartphone with social networking applications on them to access the sites their corporate policies block.