I noticed that social media wants to work it’s way into companies at pretty much every seam. It rises up from the bottom as employees start using social media tools to discuss their workplace and respond to incoming sentiment, its been creeping into management meetings because service providers are pitching social media projects, and now it’s coming down from the top leadership that has identified it as a potential means of satisfying business goals.

Resistance To Social Media

Of course, this is not happening without resistance and there are some real concerns to consider. For example, many leaders fear what will happen if employees start communicating directly with customers, sending mixed messages, and misrepresenting company policy. For the manager’s part, they have concerns about implementing a social media campaign without understanding how it fits with their overall strategy. Of course, certain industries have significant legal concerns to look out for and there is a sense that companies that wait can learn from the mistakes of the early entrants.

Tenaciousness of Social Media

On the other hand many companies are discovering that social media is a flexible and tenacious vine that can grow under remarkable constraints. For example, if you’re a bank and are worried about running afoul of the complex legal code associated with providing investment advice, you can start a blog about something that’s tangentially related but outside legal review such as ways to improve your credit score or how to save money with home upgrades. Or, if you’ve got employees who are Twittering in response to customer service, you can provide them with some resources that will help them provide the right answers, such as a moderated wiki or faq directory.

In fact, these kinds of resources have often already in place, having been created by the people using social media to save themselves time and effort (i.e. no point in re-writing the same answer twice). The problem is that social media starts popping up in different parts of organizations without coordination. For example, there may be multiple people who have started twitter feeds. Or, one department is running a newsletter and another is running a blog and they’re not working together. On the positive side, you’re engaging with your community. On the negative side, you’re probably not making the best impression.

If this is the case at your organization, check out my post on Managing The Social Media Mix where I talk about how to pull together and optimize the social media vines that are popping up in your business.

Manicuring Social Media

From a strategy perspective, one of the most significant challenges associated with social media is managing the balancing act between providing your team with tools to engage your community while also making sure that they fairly represent your business in a distributed fashion. When I think about the projects I’ve worked on that dealt with this challenge the idea of “freedom within constraints” keeps coming up. This articulation is really a design principle that guides the development of social media guidelines and protocols. Too much constraint and your internal team won’t want to use social media, not enough and it may get unruly.

Just like manicuring a plant, it’s not possible to set the constraints once. Rather, it’s a process of ongoing trimming and direction that seems to produce the best results. Because social media grows and evolves so rapidly, iteration and experimentation are key to a successful program. I’m particularly interested in how social media plays out internally at companies because I believe that many of the best social media ideas come from within. I believe the best results are achieved when  internal channels are combined with regular social media audits.

As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments.