John McCrory

Once upon a time I was a staunch opponent of social media policies. The last thing we need, I felt, is for the lawyers to get involved. But to truly scale up social media efforts in an organization, you need to get the practice out of the skunkworks. That takes the buy-in of a range of stakeholders, and it takes training and education of people throughout the organization.

The process of developing a social media policy can be a great way to begin that education. Now I don’t just promote social media policies, I help organizations to create them.

If you are ready to begin utilizing social networking media in your workplace, here, based on what I have learned so far, are 5 tips to guide you when you craft a social media policy:

1. Start your policy with a clear declaration of your organization’s overall approval of social media and social networking. Clear up any misconceptions and make sure supervisors know that employees are allowed to use social media within the guidelines set out in your policy. Particularly if you are reversing previous bans, or settling differences in policy across different parts of your organization, it is essential that your message be heard loud and clear. See how the Department of Defense led the issuance of its new policy recently with a clear statement of the value they saw in social media.
2. Balance the legal requirements with the opportunity to teach and model good social media practices. A social media policy has to address copyright, privacy, record retention and other legal issues, but it won’t work if it is just a big fat book of NO. Potential dangers of using social media are risks inherent to any communication. Show employees how to behave appropriately online and you will reduce the risks of disaster.
3. Cover broad, basic principles that apply to all social media engagement. Some of the most important good practices to follow, such as being transparent about your identity and not faking being someone you aren’t, are true across all social media networks. Help your employees learn to be good social citizens in general, and they’ll do a better job no matter which tool they are using.
4. Back up those basic principles with concrete guidelines and advice on using specific social media tools and services. Each social media network has distinct ideosyncracies, lingo, and culture. Guidelines for each particular social media network shorten the learning curve and translate your organization’s legal requirements for each social media tool. Mass.gov’s toolkits for blogging, Twitter (and soon, Youtube) are a great example.
5. Make your policy human-readable. You want your social media policy to have impact, to engender conversation, and to be something employees can learn from. A certain amount of legalese is probably unavoidable, but take care to explain the legalese in plain English. Provide concrete examples to show what is and isn’t allowed. Be transparent about why the rules are necessary and trust in your employees ability to understand. Look at Flickr’s fabulous Community Guidelines and see how they are written for real people.

I am sure there are other good tips; these are the ones I have found most useful. What are yours? I hope you’ll share in the comments.

At yesterday’s Gov 2.0 Camp New England Unconference, the final session of the day I participated in was, “Getting to Yes,” led by Brad Blake and Jess Weiss. The obvious premise of the session was that social media enthusiasts usually face significant barriers to employing social media in their workplace. There were several good takeaways from the session, particularly the pointers to Mass.gov’s social media toolkits (which I have found very useful and adaptable). However, the discussion surfaced more challenges than solutions and it seemed to me that many in the room were frustrated by various institutional obstacles to using social media in their work.

The session took its title from a classic book on negotiation, second only to my favorite, Start with No.

It’s a familiar situation to a lot of us: say you want to start a blog for your department or agency so that you can engage with constituents more easily, and in a more timely manner than you can through your official web site. Or perhaps you want to use Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or some other social network. Unless you are the chief executive, you need to get permission, and in most cases, that permission is given by committee, with input from the IT department, the communications department, the legal department… IT fears security breaches; Communications fears losing control of the message (often, communications fears communicating); Legal fears everything, but particularly the exposure of private information. Supervisors fear lost productivity, that you’ll be wasting time on the company dime. Getting to yes can be quite a gauntlet.

Though much has changed in the past five years as awareness of social media has grown, fears about security and wasted time remain high, as does the fear of technology. To non-enthusiasts, social media is just a big Pandora’s box they’d rather not open.

It all boils down to the fear that if we engage through social media, something big, bad, and more than embarrassing is going to happen; the fear that an employee will do something stupid that will hurt the organization and torpedo its credibility; leading to the conclusion that using social media well will require a lot of training first, and that there just isn’t time for that right now.

To be sure, there is no shortage of social media fiascos, or employees who have been fired thanks to posts on Facebook or Twitter. But — and here is my message to the supervisors and directors at the top — the truth is, the chances of a social media disaster grow greater every day you and your organization wait to learn how to use social media. If you look at the history of social media blunders you will see that nearly all of them were self-inflicted wounds that resulted from inexperience at social media.

Let me just get one illusion out of everyone’s heads right now: There is going to be a crisis. Disaster is coming. You can’t avoid it. It’s like an earthquake — it is going to happen, you just can’t know when. So, are you going to be prepared? Are you going to start shoring up your plans now to respond and deploy social media effectively?

For those who’ve been wary of opening the social media Pandora’s box: consider that box is going to open one day no matter what you do, and the havoc unleashed will be greater the longer you keep the box closed. Here are a few things you can do to get started today:

• Assess your employees’ readiness: find out what their existing skill and experience level with social media is. You may discover some surprises, and you’ll learn what kind of social media training you really need.
• Deploy blogs, wikis or other social media tools internally, where it is comparatively safe, and train employees in using them; even if these don’t “take off” it will start moving your people along the learning curve.
• Develop a social media policy. Balance legal requirements with the opportunity you have to educate your employees how to do social media well.
• Create a social media engagement strategy. To get the most out of social media, like any initiative, takes planning. You’ll want a strategy that provides basic models for how social media engagement can be carried out in different situations.
• Set a near term deadline for deploying social media externally to make it real. Two to three months maximum.

With the right mindset and preparation, you can better handle the blunders and the fiascos which are sure to happen (they happen to everyone!) and deal with the earthquakes that are certain to upend your world one of these days.

The interesting discussion over at Chris Brogan’s about engagement on Twitter left me unsure where I stood regarding autofollowing. Then something happened that turned me firmly against it.

I don’t autofollow people back who follow me, but to each his own, I felt. The only thing I find disconcerting is when I get a direct message from someone I follow, but discover when I try to direct message them back that they don’t follow me and I can’t DM them. It’s a flaw in Twitter I think that I can’t look at my list of followers and see whether I follow them back or not.

Then, by coincidence, around noon today I happened to follow my 1,000 person on Twitter. Now, the people I follow are a carefully-curated group of real people and organizations whose tweets I actually want to see and who I would want to have a conversation with. I have built this group up gradually since joining Twitter in May 2008.

A funny thing happened next. Within minutes of following the 1,000 person — BOOM, I suddenly got all these new followers — 50 in a few hours — who are all like this guy: “Terrence Watson” a.k.a. @media2AtlantaGA. He has has just 7 tweets yet has managed to get 1,100 followers out of 1700 he is following. He has a web site that has the tagline Cutting edge Internet marketing and social media campaign development company in Atlanta, GA. Utilizing proprietary systems and software applications to acheive top ranking on Google in just a few days. Take a look at his cutting edge site (Screen shot below — I won’t link, but it’s on his Twitter profile) and you’ll see an empty Wordpress site with “Hello World!” and “This is sidebar 1″… you get the picture?

I know what’s going on: these poor folks have signed up for some scammy service like boostyourtwitterfollowers.com to help them sell make money fast schemes, multi-level marketing diet supplement programs, and phony SEO baloney. If you are new to the world of social media and internet marketing, please don’t fall for these scams. Following 1,000 is apparently some threshold that these services now recognize me as an easy mark to get their customers more followers. Perhaps folks who follow 1,000 or more people are more likely to autofollow back, and it’s easier to “hide” in a big list and not get pruned off.

I’ve been getting a trickle of phony Twitter followers for a long time, of course, and I simply add them to the Twitter list I made just for them called “Spammer or Scammer.” If they don’t disappear after a while, I will just report them for spam, which expunges them from my follower list. They remain on the Spammer or Scammer black list, tho.

Now, here’s why I’m against auto-following back: If there was no auto-follow back option, there’d be a lot less of this scammy behavior, and Twitter would be an even nicer place.

I still feel it’s your choice what to do since everyone’s situation is different. But if you decide to auto follow back everyone who follows you, be aware you are feeding the Scam-n-Spam beast. If you have a huge following and it is too much to manage, you can always use a validation service like TrueTwit.

In working with clients I’m often introducing them to the importance of engaging their customers or constituents through social media and other channels. We discuss examples of engagement, but when it comes to planning how they are going to engage, I find it helpful to focus our initial creative brainstorming with a clear definition.

What are we talking about when we say “engagement,” “engaging a community” and planning an “engagement campaign”?

Below is what I’ve come up with so far. What do you think? Is this right? Wrong? What am I missing or forgetting about? At the very least, I hope it is helpful to share what I mean when I use these terms.

Engagement
Prompting, listening, mirroring and acting in answer to what is heard

Example: You walk into a clothing store and here’s what happens:

1. Salesperson approaches, asks what you are looking for today (prompts).
2. You tell him you are looking for a red sweater (salesperson listens).
3. Salesperson repeats “A red sweater. Were you thinking of a cardigan or a pullover?” (mirrors, prompts)
4. You say “Pullover” (salesperson listens)
5. Sales person shows you to a display of pullover sweaters, saying “We have some nice red pullovers here,” picks out a red one for you to consider. (mirrors and acts to answer your specific desire)

Community Engagement
Engagement in a group setting in which roles of prompter, listener and mirrorer, and answering actor rotate among the members of the group. A facilitator prompts individuals in the group to take on one or another of these roles to advance the conversation and keep the roles moving. The facilitator also moves the overall discussion through the stages of engagement with appropriate prompts that signal to participants a new frame for the discussion.

Engagement Campaign
For each engagement campaign, we want to consider:

• When does the campaign begin and end?
• Who are the campaign’s participants?
• Which engagement channels will be used?
• What engagement collateral needs to be created?
• What is the “story arc” for the engagement and what are the change points that divide it into stages?
• Which objectives and goals of the company, organization or project does this campaign advance?

The field of journalism is an early warning system, and the creative destruction now wracking the news and media industries is telling us how the Internet, or the connectedness of the open network, is going to fundamentally restructure power and authority in nearly every aspect of human life over the next hundred years. If you want to know what the future holds for your industry, be it marketing, publishing, art, politics—pay close attention to how journalism is changing.

The best primer I’ve seen on how the internet is changing journalism was delivered a couple weeks ago by Jay Rosen of NYU. His ideas and observations are just part of what makes the talk valuable. Note his attitudes, too. He doesn’t fear the Internet. He’s not angry or bitter about the changes underway. His perspective is not colored by the sense of loss that many journalists legitimately feel, but that is ultimately not very helpful.

Set aside a couple lunchtimes to watch. The sound is a little iffy towards the beginning, and you’ll need to crank the volume to 11, but after a couple minutes you won’t even notice. The content is that good. Below are some of the salient takeaways that intrigued me most, including his 10 maxims.

And here are my notes, quotes, and paraphrases:

Jay Rosen’s 10 Maxims (source)

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)
2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)
3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)
4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)
5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)
6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)
7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)
8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)
9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)
10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)
11. Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

5 Elements of Ethics

• Know what you’re talking about
• Here’s where I’m coming from
• This is the best I could do, right now
• What do you know that I don’t?

It’s not a question of what are your organization’s ethics, it’s “How does your organization produce trust?”

Transparency and open systems

“Open systems released into societies that are not open can be a disaster. When transparency meets fixed ideas, fixed narratives, you don’t get the benefits of transparency, you just get more material for these fixed ideas to work with. In many ways, open systems are more chaotic. They can be more violent, more dangerous. We shouldn’t look at them just as benificent gifts.” See “Against Transparency” by Lawrence Lessig in the New Republic.

The future of investigative journalism

What’s the future for expensive, deeply-researched investigative journalism? I don’t recall if Rosen made this point exactly, but think about how many investigations have died prematurely in traditional media. For every one that hits the front page, 10 go nowhere. Through crowdsourcing, for example, investigations that have reached dead ends can continue, involving a wider range of knowledgeable sources than a team of journalists can reach.

Really? How do you know? I’ve heard this line many times and it’s one of the most common reasons people in small business give for why social media isn’t a good fit for them.

What about advertising? Direct mail? How many of your customers are you reaching through those channels? A lot of the small business owners I’ve met aren’t sure they are getting any value out of ads and mailings. “Truth is,” they say, “I get most of my customers through word of mouth.”

Guess what? If word of mouth is your top marketing channel, you had better rethink your attitude about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest. Social media makes word of mouth visible. Because of that, I happen to think that social media are more relevant marketing tools for small and medium sized businesses than they are for big national brands.

If you integrate online and social media into your advertising and direct mail with something as simple as promo codes, you can even make the formerly invisible effects of your traditional marketing visible. But don’t take my word for it. Measure it.

Consider the case study of a retailer cited by Olivier Blanchard in his talk on measuring word of mouth the other day at the Word of Mouth Supergenius in Chicago: Though 90% of their marketing spend was on newspaper ads, E-mail, Facebook, and the retailer’s blog all brought in significantly more customers than print.

• 4% came from print ad codes
• 69% came from email
• 17% came from facebook
• 10% came from the blog

Not to trash print ads, but too often they are the default for many small businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions. In my experience, most small businesses never measure the ROI of different marketing tactics and channels, and proceed with advertising largely on faith. (Businesses based on direct-mail sales being a prominent exception.)

Alas, according to a recent survey, small business owners still have a long way to go in online and social media marketing. But the real problem is not knowing what works, and the solution is to measure and find out. I’ll choose evidence-based marketing over faith-based marketing any day. So before you say “My customers don’t use social media” again, ask whether that’s just your impression, or if you have real data to back that up.

Want more? If you still aren’t convinced, say, because “my customers don’t use Twitter,” Laura Fitton provides 5 great reasons why businesses should be on Twitter even if they think their customers aren’t.

In what may only be a sly little bit of linkbait, Joseph Jaffe calls for a ban on Twitter at conferences. It’s an issue that’s been bobbing around since the Great Keynote Meltdown at High Ed Web 2009 in October and danah boyd’s hard time at the Web 2.0 Expo last month. Jaffe complains that Twittering at conferences rips off the content that you paid for with your registration to share with your community of followers, akin to illegal file sharing. He also charges that the twittering has speakers under attack by abusive mobs of badge-wearing meeting attendees.

Jaffe’s trying to be provocative, and it’s cute, in a way. But he’s just plain wrong.

First, check out his video, then read a few reasons why he’s wrong:

Why Joseph Jaffe is wrong about Twitter at conferences

Twitter augments the live presentation with annotations. Backchannel participants often post links to sites, applications, studies, articles, or other things mentioned by the speaker. If a speaker mentions someone who’s not at the session, someone on the backchannel will let them know. All this creates a rich, connected record of the talk, through fairly easy, crowdsourced effort. It happens in realtime but is a handy reference later.

The Twitter stream can set up and improve the Q & A. Participants can submit questions via Twitter, and some basic ones can be answered by other participants on the backchannel.

The twitter backchannel is great marketing for the conference and for the associations sponsoring the conference. How many of the folks following along from home on Twitter will come to the conference next year? Jaffe’s baloney about stealing the content is a canard. Sharing the conference experience makes you a salesperson for the conference. And in the there’s no such thing as bad publicity department: I’ll bet Joseph Jaffe a bottle of Ardmore 30 year old Highland Single Malt that the High Ed Web conference in 2010 will have at least 10% more attendees than 2009 despite the down economy. And I’d chalk up its higher profile to the viral kerfuffle created by the back channel’s response to a terrible front channel.

The backchannel can be great publicity for the speaker, if s/he does well.

The twitter stream is another way the presenter can learn which parts of the talk resonated, and which fell flat. A lot of talks are given over and over again to different audiences. The best speakers refine them over time. Sometimes you can tell what works from the audience’s response in smiles, boos, laughs, or applause, but sometimes you have no idea what they are thinking. As a speaker, you can look back after a talk at the twitter stream and see which of your lines got quoted, which got questioned. It’s a more moment-to-moment record that post-talk survey cards provide (though they are useful, too.)

The Twitter backchannel is usually constructive and respectful, like most of the discussion at conferences. People are there to have fun and learn. The few examples of the backchannel “turning on” the speaker are the exception to the rule. Attendees who paid good money are not a mob, and they don’t act like one. Speakers always have to prove themselves, but they aren’t under attack.

When a speaker is truly outstanding, the backchannel quiets down. I’ve seen the twitterers close their laptops and go off the grid for a great, inspiring presentation. The audience knows when they need to just sit quietly and take in the experience of a great talk, and so do most of the twitterers on the backchannel.

All of that said, twittering at conferences needs to evolve, and backchannel participants will need to learn how to tweet appropriately.

Leave the backchannel in the back. The challenge danah boyd faced at ew2 was caused in large part by having the backchannel broadcast to the entire audience on giant TV screens behind her which she couldn’t see but everyone watching her could. I first saw this technique at the first Personal Democracy Forum in 2003 (?) and it was distracting and annoying. Participation in the backchannel should be voluntary. Don’t make me watch it when I’d rather just focus on the speakers. Plus, the speakers shouldn’t have to share the stage with the backchannel. I’d be happy to see this practice (which mainly happens at tech shows) banned at conferences. I agree with Jaffe that speakers shouldn’t have to monitor the backchannel while they talk. Instead, have an aide monitor it for the speaker and create places in the presentation for the aide to forward any important information or questions from the backchannel.

Bad behavior on the backchannel will be dealt with by the backchannel. Most people on Twitter are presenting themselves as who they really are, and not hiding behind anonymous handles. Their reputation will be affected by their tweets and they will be accountable for what they say. The backchannel will learn to police itself to stamp out really bad behavior. Over time, I expect twittering at conferences will be a self-healing system.

What do you think? Does Twitter enhance conferences? Or does Twitter destroy the experience of a professional meeting? Maybe he’s just stirring the pot a bit, but is Joseph Jaffe right or am I? Or are we both right?

Update 12/21/2009: Chris Pirillo phrases the issue as a question: Should Twitter Be Banned at Conferences?

Based on the example by @jaybaer, who wordled @juntajoe’s great roundup of predictions for social media content marketing, I gathered the text of a dozen other posts from many sources about what’s coming in the next year more generally for social media, then used Wordle to make the resulting word cloud. For this exercise I removed common words, including social, media, internet, and web.

Twitter beats Facebook. Like beats make. People beats content. People beats technology. Networks beat companies and organizations. Marketing beats enterprise.

My opinion? I think 2010 will be about mobile, location, and communities. And there will be some spectacular major brand name social media bungles. Authenticity will be important, too, but I’m saving that for 2011.

You’ve heard social networking is the next big thing for businesses. It’s the future of communications, PR and marketing. If you don’t want to fall behind, experts say, you better get on Twitter, set up a Facebook fan page, create a YouTube channel. You gotta start pumping out updates, funny videos, and podcasts to get your message out to your customers. Content is king, baby.

I have three words for you: Shut up and listen.

This brave new world of social networking, social media, web 2.0 and all this great internet stuff is transforming everything about how businesses, nonprofits, schools, and governments communicate with the public, but stop — go back to that word transforming. This change in communication is not just a new technology for doing what you’ve always done. It is not just the new tube through which to send your message. So put your megaphone down…

What? You can’t put your megaphone down because it’s missing? You lost your megaphone?! Oh, wait—I see it. Look out there. See it? See all those people? No, not the public but your customers, your members, your students and their parents, your employees, your constituents and citizens—all of them have the megaphone now. It’s not as big and loud as it used to be, but — ssh! Listen! They’re talking to each other. What are they talking about?

They’re talking about their favorite movies. Some song lyric they misheard. They’re talking about Afghanistan, President Obama, their cousin who was at Falluja. They’re talking about their favorite whiskey. They’re talking about their children and the funny things they said today. They’re talking about their grandmother who just died and their best friend who just lost to cancer at the young age of 37. They’re talking about how they beat cancer. They’re talking about Lady Gaga’s latest video and Susan Boyle’s new CD. They’re talking about Tiger Woods and and the future of journalism. They’re talking about what they had for lunch and how delicious it was and if you’re lucky it was at your restaurant. Woo Hoo! Social Media FTW!

Yes, sometimes they are talking about you. Are you ears burning? You better hope it’s good, because they could also be talking about how your service was terrible, how they got food poisoning from your blue plate special… and they’re talking about it with their friends (who trust them) and through the megaphone they’re also talking about it with a lot of your other customers.

So what are you going to do about it? Put out a press release? Here’s what to do: Go direct to them. But be careful.

It is tempting to jump right in and mix it up with them, but look at all the other stuff they are talking about. Do you really want to be in their face when they’re still mourning their best friend? When you go direct, you’d better be respectful. The world is watching.

So, apologize for the bad service (what does that cost you, really?). Then, do something about it. Back up the apology with action. Remember that if they care enough to complain about you, they care about you. So be grateful for the feedback. Who needs to hire mystery shoppers when you have real customers with megaphones 24/7/365?

That’s better. You can now go do your home work—read and follow Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Mitch Joel, Kristina Halvorson, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Dan Zarella and that’s just for starters.

But before you go, and this is very important, keep in mind that:

Social Media is not an add-on

If you are exploring the world of social media and web 2.0 and thinking you just need to add some of these new channels to your bag of tricks, stop now and go back to what you were doing. Social media won’t help you.

Don’t get me wrong, the only way to understand how social media work is to learn by doing. As Jay Rosen says, “You gotta grok it before you can rock it.” So, you can start tweeting, create Facebook page and a LinkedIn group and start watching your follower, fan, and member counts rack up. It might make you feel better about yourself, and you will start catching on to how it all works. Just, don’t expect any of it to matter much.

Social media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 are far more than new communications channels. A collection of internet-based software tools and platforms that enable people to share and collaboratively manipulate information with each other, these technologies are part of the Internet’s ongoing disruption of the information ecosystem, a transformation now more than 20 years old.

I point this out not to sound like some kind of internet triumphalist, but to put social media in a proper context. Social media is not only transforming the transmission of information from point A to point B, it is transforming how we work with information.

The changes to the news business, marketing, buying and selling are just the tip of the iceberg. For organizations who are trying to figure out how or whether to use social media, this means the relevance of social media extends beyond the marketing department. Social media will be transforming every function within your organization, from facilities and maintenance to accounting, customer service, HR, and on and on. No one in the organization will be unaffected.

Playing with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the like can be a lot of fun, and it can be a timesink. That’s okay — for a little while (see paragraph 2). We marketing and PR types have tended to be the early adopters of social media, but we have to look at social media as more than just marketing tools we can add to our existing programs.

The implications are significant for folks “inside the firewall” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Brito) who make the stategy, budget, and staffing decisions.

Are you willing to shred your budget? Kill sacred cows and start from scratch? Print thinner brochures and magazines. Send out direct mail fewer times a year. Stop advertising. You’ll have to find the money somewhere. A lot of social media are free in that they don’t cost money to use. But they do cost time and attention to do well. If you want to really make a dent in this new world, you’ll need to blow up your budget and start over.

This is not about new media destroying old media. Nor is it about social media replacing so-called traditional media. What’s emerging is an information ecosystem which is a hybrid of old and new. But, you can’t work effectively in that new ecosystem if you are organized to produce for the old one.

As new marketing strategies and plans are drawn up, the structure of the marketing department is going to have to change to execute those plans. You will need to upend your marketing communications staff. If you are going to succeed in the new world, you will need to reinvent your production process. The production requirements have changed. You will need to manage a different kind of media, on a different schedule, and that is going to require a completely new set of skills than your marcom department currently possesses.

It’s going to be painful. I know capable, wonderful people who have built up twenty or more years of experience and are still years from retirement whose strongest skills are just not relevant to the new needs marketing directors are going to have. Some are adapting, but many are not.

The InDesign expert who puts together your printed materials in-house may not be as valuable to the new campaign as the multimedia producer who can make podcasts and videos and zip them onto the internet. The new positions you’ll need to create on your staff will involve skillsets that current staff can’t easily be retrained for.

My point is that if you are, like most people in business, just dipping your toe in social media, or like some early adopters, have been working with it for two or four years or longer—at some point in the near future, you’re going to have to commit to some radical changes in staffing and budget. I think most of these changes will be a huge net positive, though not without some hurt. Are you up for it? Excited by it? Prepared to fight for it?

A lot of us talk up organizational change as a kind of tonic for business, but inertia is a powerful force in the workplace. A lot of the wariness of social media is in fact a result of the frustration of how hard it has been to foster cultural acceptance and embrace of earlier generations of promising technologies in the workplace. We’re very good at changing technology. We’re not very good at changing culture.

I hope this round of change will be different from the last. It will take a lot of commitment to fundamentally reorganize ourselves to actually get the most out of social media. You know who’ll show you how to do it? Your customers!