Social Media Going Corporate

Posted by Tim, Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 12:34 pm, under Blogs, Facebook, General Social Media, Social Marketing, Twitter, Twitter Business Examples.

Well, it seems like the Mainstream Media are catching on to what we who work the social media have known for awhile. Businesses are getting on board with the realities of a Social Web.

The November 7, 2009 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle has an article “Social sites invade corporate culture” discussing how corporate attitudes about social media are shifting.

Written by Benny Evangelista, the article talks about Comcast’s big shift in attitude brought on by one employee’s using his own Twitter account to respond to customers tweeting about service issues. The employee, Frank Eliason, now heads a staff of 11 who monitor social networks, offering help to customers.

The article quotes Comcast’s CEO Brian Roberts who says that their Twitter strategy has helped change their corporate culture “from inside the organization, not just top down.”

The article talks about several other companies that have began to use social media to create buzz around their brand:

• Petco Animal Supplies Inc., in San Diego, who wrote about pets being dyed different colors which resulted in a spirited exchange and helped give the company begin building a passionate community around this and other issues; (although, interestingly, on my visit to the Petco website I couldn’t locate anything on their cluttered home page about their social media endeavors!);
• Saba Software Inc., in Redwood City, which is developing programs utilizing social media such as status updates and expert networks to create a community around their brand. Their senior director of product strategy, Ben Willis, says “social networking will become the next e-mail. It will become the platform that people will use to communicate.”

Slowly but surely businesses are coming around to the fact that participating in the conversations around their brand is mandatory and that a failure to do so will increasingly cause them to look out of touch. I can remember in the late 1990s having to convince businesses that they should have a website, that it was more than “Oh well, I guess we should at least establish a presence on the Web.” These days, we’re telling people the same thing about participating in social media, that increasingly it will become part of the way businesses operate and not just a novel new channel for marketing.

The “social Web” is rising fast, and it appears that this awareness is seeping into the corporate consciousness. The Chronicle’s article mentions Robert Half Technology’s survey of corporate technology executives revealed that 54% of companies prohibit employees from using social media while on the job. (Again, interestly, the Robert Half website indicates zero social media presence and their Twitter account shows zero tweets!).

I would imagine that 54% will be rapidly shifting in the coming months and years as corporations learn how to harness the power of social media to build brand awareness, customer satisfaction, and engaged communities.

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