Once the season of goodwill is over, how will you foster goodwill towards your company? Mark Gibbs has Twelve Do’s that’ll do it.
In this season of goodwill to all men, it’s a good time to reflect on our relationships. Whether we’re talking about friends and family or acquaintances and business colleagues, how we manage our social relationships matters enormously. If you manage your relationships right you’ll have friends, be popular and happy, and make money. Manage them wrong and your image, your brand, your success and your business will suffer.
Where IT pros do their social networking
Now, we all, to greater or lesser effect, know how to manage our real-world relationships. Over our lives we have learned to recognize different character types, detect the signs of friendliness, attraction, aggression, criticism … the whole smorgasbord of behaviors involved in real-world, face-to-face engagement.
Here’s the problem: Many of you are failing at the virtual side of the coin: online, computer communications-mediated relationships. There’s a very good reason why this should be the case — it’s still all so new. Part of the problem is there are so many new forms of social media.
I recently gave talks to a couple of professional groups in Los Angeles on the topic of Twitter and social networking (you can see my presentations here), and it is clear that, despite the huge amount of publicity surrounding these topics, most people have only a rough idea about what they are and how to use them.
So, let’s look at what you need to do to make sure your company is up to speed on its virtual relationships. Here are your Twelve Do’s for after Christmas, 12 things you need to get going on the first day you get back from the Christmas break.
The First Do after Christmas: Teach your users to write well. Now, you might retort, “Mark, baby, my users send scores of e-mails every day, they already know how to write.” Indeed, (and don’t call me “baby”) it may well be the case that they know how to write, but most of them do not write “well.”
Most of your users put precious little effort into their writing and while they, and you, might assume what they do gets the job done, it is guaranteed that their slacking causes problems (and I doubt if their high-school English teachers would be impressed).
Ideally you should hold writing classes, but I realize that probably isn’t possible so, at the very least, start sending out writing “tips” (one of the best is “before you send, proof read it” – most gaffs and misunderstandings are caused by poor wording that would be caught if employees would only read before sending).
The Second Do after Christmas: Have detailed policies for all communication channels, not only e-mail and social media, but also Skype and the telephone. These policies must define what the user should and should not do and their responsibilities. I know this seems obvious but how many companies really have comprehensive policies? I’m betting yours doesn’t.
The Third Do after Christmas: Assign one person, or at most a small group of people, to be responsible for social media. If all of your users have Twitter accounts and feel they can speak on behalf of the company, you’ll wind up with an inconsistent and probably self-contradictory corporate voice that will most likely get you into trouble. Want to know how to do it? Consider Starbucks: One guy handles all of their Twitter interactions. It’s consistent, it’s timely and it maintains brand image.
The Fourth Do after Christmas: Make sure you pay attention to all communications channels. For some companies, Twitter may be the bees knees while others may find that Facebook or LinkedIn provides a better level of market engagement. But whatever works today may not work as well tomorrow, so keep your options, and channels, open.
The Fifth Do: Pay attention to the big picture. Develop a plan for actually monitoring the social sentiment trends concerning your company, your partners and your competition. This can warn you about everything from public relations issues to problems with products (whether yours or someone else’s) and give you the chance to be proactive rather than reactive.
The Sixth: Ensure that you collect hard data. You need metrics — real numbers — on what you’re doing and how well it is working (or isn’t). If you don’t measure, you can’t quantify. If you can’t quantify, you won’t know what the value is. QED.
The Seventh Do after Christmas: Make sure you educate senior management and the board so they know what you’re doing and back it. This won’t, at least in the beginning, be a costly project (and quite probably never will be), but they need to be able to see cost and return, otherwise you’ll be sticking your neck way out. Of course, not doing anything will also stick your neck way out. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb.
The Eighth Do after Christmas: Make sure you engage. Someone has to be responsible for replying to messages and comments. Every ignored message is a lost opportunity.
The Ninth Do after Christmas: Show your values in all exchanges. If all of your outgoing communications look like advertising then people will soon stop paying attention. If they are bare bones and show no style and don’t express corporate values you are missing another opportunity. Put footers on e-mail. Spend a little time and money on the design of your Facebook page and your Twitter account. Looks do matter.
The Tenth Do: Don’t overload the people you communicate with. I just read that the average American is exposed to some 34GB worth of content a day, which includes 100,000 words of information! Add to that input stuff that isn’t relevant or stuff he doesn’t care about, and the person will tune you out faster than you can say “antidisestablishmentarianism”.
The Eleventh Do after Christmas: Keep telling everyone inside the organization how it’s going, what you’re doing, what works and what needs fixing. Give out prizes for involvement, highlight individuals who contribute and are engaged.
And, last but not least, The Twelfth Do after Christmas: Make sure everyone who speaks for your organization plays nice. Consistent courtesy and kindness will do more for how people think of your organization than any advertising ever will.
It’s not hard to build good virtual relationships but it does take effort and skill. Follow these Do’s and it will be easy, and then not only will it be goodwill to all men, it will be goodwill towards your company and towards you.
