TRANSCRIPT FILE
HOW TO BE A SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGE AGENT
JUNE 11, 2018
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>> Hello, I’m Paul Michelman from Harvard business digital and I’m joined today by Josh Bernoff. Josh is the co-author with Charlee Lee of Groundswell, winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Josh, thanks for joining me today.
>> It’s great to be here.
>> Josh, the primary focus of our discussion today is going to be a recent post you created for your Harvardbusiness.org blog called The Groundswell Effect on how to be a social media provocateur. Josh, for those in the audience who aren’t as familiar with this field yet, what are some example of social technologies?
>> Well, we are talking about any technology where people connect with each other online. So this can include blogs with their responses, wiki social networks like Facebook, even new applications that have come up like Twitter, ratings and reviews, any situation where people are connecting and drawing strength from each other through these online communications.
>> Why should I care about social technologies and my business?
>> There’s a huge trend that’s happening right now. It’s a phenomenon of people connecting with each other and drawing strength from each other online. And in general, companies have found the threatening because when people take power onto themselves, that’s power that’s taken away from institutions like corporations. The reason we created the book and the reason we want to talk to business people about it is because we wanted to put together some frameworks all in one place to allow companies to not only understand this phenomenon but to actually succeed in this world of the groundswell, to find ways to gain advantage from this phenomenon and accomplish business goals.
>> So, is any company immune to this phenomenon, or does this affect everybody?
>> This really does affect everybody. Now, if you happen to be a company with a relatively young following, if you are MTV or Nike for example, then your customers are engaged in this right now in a very significant way and you cannot ignore it. If you happen to be selling, say, retirement planning services, yeah, sure, the people who are involved in buying that kind of product haven’t gotten there quite as quickly. But this phenomenon is spreading and even among older consumers it’s been happening quite a bit. We’ve also seen, looking around the world, that in Asia it’s accelerating. In Europe they are catching up to what we’re doing here in North America. So it really is a global phenomenon. Wherever you sell, this is happening to your customers.
>> Okay so let’s move to the how. In a recent post you laid out a series of steps that individuals within organizations can take, can start the social revolution within their companies. So let’s pretend I’m the revolutionary. I want to get this thing going. I buy into the need for this, but my company really just, they know there’s this stuff happening out there, but really we have no idea what to make of it. So the first thing you suggest is start small.
>> Yeah, the challenge if you are trying to accomplish the building of a social application for your customers is that company policies, company procedures are all set up for things working the normal way and connecting with people who are in control of their own experience tends to be pretty threatening to companies. Now, the wrong way to go about getting started is to try and transform everything overnight. That really scares people and the result is that you won’t get anywhere. Instead you want to pick a single brand, a single objective, really concentrate on something that you feel you can accomplish and then get started on it as quickly as possible. It’s by generating success in a small way that you can then expand those efforts to other parts of the company.
>> The next suggestion you make is to get an executive sponsor.
>> Yeah, as I said this tends to be threatening and we’ve definitely seen a situation where people get to a certain point and then somebody in a position of power says oh no no no we can’t do that. Again and again what we see is that if there’s a powerful person within the company who likes your idea and is backing you up, you’ll succeed. At Dell Lionel Machaca was in charge of their blog. He put some things up there in the beginning that were a little bit uncomfortable for the company but Michael Dell, the CEO, was behind him and since everybody knew that Michael was backing this, it sort of made it a little easier. You need somebody in high place that’s going to say yeah, leave this guy alone, he’s got my blessing. We really need to get this thing going.
>> So in addition to the executive sponsors you also mentioned the need to line up other stakeholders ahead of time. What are some examples of that?
>> Well, the objective is that you don’t want to try and sort of sneak this up, because there are parts of the company that are going to object. You are probably going to get somebody from legal saying, no no, we can’t do that. If you’re in a regulated industry like financial services or pharmaceuticals, then the regulating regulatory affairs people will say no we can’t do that. You may get somebody in accounting who’s going to block you and the right strategy is to actually go to them ahead of time and say yo, corporate counsel let’s get somebody from your office involved in this project and we’ll make sure we respect your rules and then you end up maybe making some adjustments in the beginning that allow you to come to some sort of a resolution and not end up having that face down and possibly shutdown happen early in your project.
>> Okay, so we need to be organized. We need to be thoughtful about who we line up with and we also need to move quickly as you said.
>> That’s right. It’s interesting. I talked about Dell. When this blog idea came up Michael Dell said to Lionel and the team, all right I think this is a good idea. I’d like to see this blog working two weeks from now. And they didn’t make it. They missed the deadline by a week. But these projects really, you want to get engaged in the planning very quickly. You want to keep your momentum and you want to get things up and running as soon as you can stand it. Now you want to make modifications, you have to listen and observe what sort of things the customers are doing, but it’s much better to start and react than it is to put in place some plan that took 12 months, then you launch it and find out that all that planning didn’t capture some contingency that you find out once it is up and running.
>> Okay. So Josh I found the next piece of advice a little bit confusing. You say you need to seek precedence, but we are talking about something totally new here.
>> Well that’s true, but it’s very helpful to people to say hey, look at what these guys did. Our book has got actually 65 examples in it and 25 full case studies. So for example if you are at Starbucks where they just started a community that is designed to generate new ideas for the company, they can point to successes at Dell and at Salesforce.com that are based on exactly the same software and say hey, look, they did this this is how it worked here so we can do it. Whether you are starting a blog, starting a customer community, creating a wiki, participating in social networks, there are other people who have accomplished this. So you really want to be able to say to your boss and to the people in management, look this is what it looks like. This is what it did for Victoria’s Secret or this is what it did for Nike. This is what it’s going to be like for us. So that they sort of have an idea what’s coming as opposed to it launches and everyone looks at it and says, oh my gosh I’ve never seen anything like that.
>> So the next point comes right out of the court of social media and that is make friends.
>> Yes, this is a very lonely kind of activity. And it’s because what you are trying to accomplish, which is to make connections with your customers to take advantage of that dialogue, that doesn’t tend to be anything that other people in your company have concentrated on in a regular way. That means that your friends are going to be people who are trying to do the same thing at other companies. Think of it as a support group. So you want to go to places like the social media clubs, which have started up in cities all around the United States and overseas as well, and other kind of local tech groups. Find people who are in the same situation and then you can call somebody up and say hey, Joan, did you ever encounter this kind of a situation. I’m looking at three vendors. You think these guys are any good? Find somebody who understands what it’s like to do what you’re doing.
>> Great. Next one up. And this is critical I think in any change initiative is, measure your success.
>> That’s really crucial. When the boss comes around, or the head of marketing comes around and says, all right I see you spent $150,000 on this thing, what have you accomplished? You need to say, well we actually increased our conversion rate by 3%. Or this thing spins off 65 leads and those leads have a 25% chance of turning into $100,000 sale. Or our objective was to increase buzz online and we’ve been monitoring that. Actually we can prove to you that people are saying more positive things about our company. When that happens, that budget cutter is going to go to the next guy and say hey, why are we spending all this money on advertising or don’t we have too much headcount here in customer support, as opposed to saying oh, well, you know, interesting experimental little project. It’s time to shut it down because we can’t afford it.
>> Josh Bernoff, thank you very much.
>> Thanks. It’s been great to be here.
>> For more of Josh’s ideas you can visit the Groundswell Effect blog at Harvardbusiness.org.
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