Change is inevitable in life as it is in business.
History is littered with the carcasses of those who failed to adopt to change, both in business and life. Can you believe what happened to the Iron Curtain 70 years of communism…gone in a blink of an eye, Arab Spring (dictators gone after 40 years of tyrannical rule), and in business, Apple has crushed Nokia, Microsoft, Dell and numerous other market leaders, just as Borders Books collapsed because they couldn’t figure out a way to compete with Barnes & Noble, let alone Amazon. Change will happen. Email, Internet, and now Social Media. All game changing plays. Who could have guessed that FaceBook would have grown to be a $50B company? Remember MySpace, how about Friendster? The bottom line is that your business and personal life are going to change. Are you ready? Do you have the tools to survive and prosper? Social Media is changing the way people interact with each other and the way business interact with their customers, employees and partners.

There’s been a lot of buzz since Marc Benioff announced at Dreamforce in San Francisco last month about the new direction of Salesforce.com embracing of what they call ‘The Social Enterprise’. Some call it Enterprise 2.0 (or Web 2.0, etc). Regardless of what you call it, I have been advocating this kind of holistic approach in leveraging Social Media tools to create a new way of sales, marketing, and customer service and even a whole new way of thinking about all the aspects of your business – supply chain, partners, communications, customers, HR, finance, etc. It’s all in play with Cloud based Social Media applications that allow collaboration and communication and insights to vast amounts of data that was impossible previously.

First, to clarify, for those who don’t understand the true impact of the expanse of ‘The Social Enterprise’ it can affect truly most any aspect of your business now.  Of course there is the obvious places to leverage Social Media tools around marketing messaging (Twitter and Facebook) and social feedback using any number of social media listening tools out there like Radian6, InTTensity, or BuzzMetrics.  The next logical step is to bring in the sales activities to include social media prospecting through tools like LinkedIn, Viadeo, Xing and client interaction. You can also use a number of social tools in the internal collaboration (Chatter, Jive) crowd-sourcing and HR functions (Concur and Workday) and Social Recruiting tools (xyzCo & Workopolis) which some call the Job Cloud. There’s also Social Supply Chain Sourcing (Kenandy) and Partner Portals for collaboration.  Effectively, the entire value chain can be enveloped into using Social Media to improve communication and collaboration. In fact, I just had a great conversation with an old friend of mine who manages the supply chain forecast group for a giant toy retailer. He was telling me that they could have much more accurate forecast for fast moving categories like Harry Potter toys by being able to integrate Social Media feedback about when people start trending up and down in their social conversations about the Harry Potter merchandise and how that would impact demand, mark-down strategies and supply chain/logistics responses. So the Social Enterprise is much more than just having a product page on Facebook or even tracking customer complaints via Twitter.

So, how does a small to medium enterprise, let alone a large enterprise manage to incorporate all these rapid changes in the way we are doing our job. These powerful tools bring opportunities and disruption to the business processes and day to day activities. How does one leverage these tools without wasting time. How does a manager manage the use of the new social media tools without being too restrictive or unnecessarily restricting employees right to communicate.

The introduction of social media into organizations needs to fit into their general strategy and you need to have executive buy-in. In many companies there are now plenty of people who belong to the digital natives generation. Should there be a Chief Social Officer who is in charge for promoting the use of social media in all aspects of work and customer engagement? How do you effectively create a culture of change to bring in the new tools that Social Media offers without being too disruptive?

Why Most Social Media Change Campaigns Fail

According to Todd Pitt*, here are common ways initiatives, projects and campaigns fail -
• Failure to have a change management team or plan
• Failure to integrate change management and project management
• Staffing the wrong people on the change management team (coalition)
• Selecting the wrong enterprise social software solution
• Failing to recognize when a custom software solution must be built
• Lack of organization wide training and education on social media
• Failure to create enterprise level social media guidelines and policies
• Lack of resources, staffing and funding for the change initiative
• Lack of change sponsorship in general
• Lack of propensity to see the change through to fruition
• Failure to develop a long term strategy
• Political obstacles, barriers and debacles
• Change manager is seated too low in the organization, is on the wrong
team or in the wrong silo
• Failure to staff permanent positions in support of enterprise SM services
• Staffing only interns or volunteers to run social media change campaigns

Managing Change to the Social Enterprise

Media Change Managers Gain and Maintain Top Cover
You will fail in your enterprise social media campaign if you do not have adequate top cover (executive sponsorship). The Social Enterprise represents a massive culture change, a dramatic shift towards openness, sharing, acting as peers and openness facilitated by a social software. Unfortunately, not every executive or manager learns how to share information, communicate well, work collaboratively, be open and transparent (sometimes it may not be in their personal interest). But with all of the recent press, media buzz, marketing hype about social media it is not really hard to gain top cover in the beginning. It is much harder to maintain, then it is to gain it initially.

If you want to effectively lead a social media changes in a business, you are going to have to do it by leading from the front, socially. You have to know both yourself, the history and the culture of organization.

Communicate Effectively With Change Champions and Leaders
Most companies still operate primarily on email. You will have to learn when to write a blog post, when to send out a quick microblog (i.e. twitter or yammer), when to email everyone, just the leadership, a limited team, or tailor communications to specific individuals. Most of all you have to know when to pick up the phone and what communication modes will get the most efficient response to make change happen. Different teams, departments and key players will have different communication preferences. Know when it is time to pickup the phone, have a meeting or make the walk to their office to get what you need done in the right time frame. Figure out quickly what communication medium is going to most effectively mitigate your risk or solve the problem rapidly.

Manage Expectations From The Beginning
The expectations of organizations and their leaders is high when it comes to social media. Many of them will honestly believe that they are ready to dive straight in to the Social Enterprise, when they don’t even know what it is! Project managers and core stakeholders will view the rollout of your enterprise social software as if it is like the deployment of every other information technology product or process change they have experienced in the past. Show them other case studies that will distinguish it and prove how it is different

Train Early, Educate Informally
A sure way to have your Social Enterprise change campaign go directly south and fail is to under train or not bother to invest in educating your organization about social media. If employees do not have a strong understanding of social media tools, how can they figure out how to integrate them into products, services, processes or adopt them in daily work? If people cannot grasp the concept of a culture of openness, they will not be able to create or participate in one. Be sure very early on that you develop strong ties to the training or e-learning team, because they represent one of the greatest forces for organizational change awareness of education. Get that social media 101 course development started and
running in parallel with the campaign creation as soon as possible. Place an emphasis on informal social experiential
learning while the courses are developed in order to bridge the gap

* Todd Pitt, Zero Strategist, Social Media Change Management Trends & Tips, 03/01/2010.
Prosci Global Conference, April 25, 2010, Las Vegas, Nevada.