Red Pill Leadership: Wake up and be a better leader

I was reading a Wall Street Journal online article titled, For Companies, a Tweet in Time Can Avert PR Mess. It is a great article about how organizations can avert or at least smooth over PR related issues using social media. In the article, I saw a quote I want to bring to your attention.

“Some companies are training staffers to broaden their social-media efforts. At Ford, Mr. Monty plans to soon begin teaching employees how to use sites like Twitter to represent the company and interact with consumers.

Coca-Cola Co. is preparing a similar effort, which initially will be limited to marketing, public affairs and legal staffers. Participants will be authorized to post to social media on Coke’s behalf without checking with the company’s PR staff, says Adam Brown, named Coke’s first head of social media in March.”
from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124925830240300343.html

In my last post, Social Media in the Organization: Embrace it. Don’t Block it!, I mention this specifically. Organization must embrace social media and show employees how to use it to do their jobs more effectively. Ford and Coke “get it”!

And take a look at this article. It appears that Employees using Facebook and Twitter at work are 9% more productive.

I was recently interviewed by Andy Rosen of the Daily Record for his article ‘Lockheed Martin is getting social – with a private network’. According to the article, Lockheed has created its own, internal social network and just recently re-opened access to Facebook. I wanted to delve a bit deeper into this topic and give my thoughts regarding social media usage within organizations.

Companies need to embrace social media…not fight it.

Some companies might feel the need to ban social media entirely. Watching YouTube, checking a friend’s status update on Facebook, or tweeting about a trending topic is a waste of valuable work time, right? Perhaps, but managers need to look beyond the “loafing” aspect of social media and begin to embrace its business potential.

Organizations need to be smart and view social media as a tool to gain a competitive advantage. Social media can provide a wealth of knowledge to employees tapped into the correct networks. Employers benefit from employees who read blogs or are on Twitter reading tweets relevant to their job. It helps them enhance their knowledge base. For example, a software developer might need to troubleshoot a problem. He or she can tweet the issue to his or her followers and obtain technical assistance. This saves time and money. A sales rep can read blogs from a sales guru like Jeffrey Gitomer and gain really great insight (try www.salescaffeine.com/)

Teach employees how to harness its power

If used correctly, social media can be a great tool for employee productivity. The question is, how can companies focus employee’s efforts to use social media tools for business effectiveness? Teach them! For example, an organization should hold seminars on how to leverage social media. Customize the training for various departments. Here are a few ideas:

• Teach the sales department how to tap into sales networks to increase sales (LinkedIn and Spoke come to mind). 
• Teach accountants how to leverage social media to help them become better accountants. The Maryland Association of CPAs is on twitter (@macpa). In my opinion, every accountant in Maryland should be following them on Twitter.
• Teach HR professionals how to leverage Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Show IT development staff which social media can help them resolve technical issues faster than random troubleshooting or calling the tech support line (which can be pricey these days).
• Post training videos on YouTube.
• Have the CEO (or boss) blog like Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers and CEO social media  ”rock star”

In his article, Social media gets the job done at work, Devin Dwyer interviews a few IBM managers. IBM is embracing social media. According to the article, half of U.S. companies ban “blogs and online communities”. In my opinion, this is incredibly short cited. One of the IBM managers states,

“Do companies ban people from going to the water cooler to talk? Of course they don’t. But they choose to ban tools of social media, because they’re scared of them or because they don’t understand them.”

Sure, there will be employees who goof off and spend two hours looking at photos on Flickr or playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. However, these same employees would likely be wasting time doing something else if they did not have access to Flickr or Facebook. Most employees want to do a good job and will use social media in productive ways if expectations are set and they are taught how to use them. If a sales person can gain five additional sales a quarter using a social network, that’s worth the time he or she might spend watching the latest viral YouTube video.

Should companies build their own internal social networks?

I think it is great that organizations are implementing internal social networks. I think they can help build community, leverage knowledge across the organization, and employees might be able to collaborate more effectively using internal social media tools. However, internal knowledge can only go so far and I think employers should use an internal / external strategy. Train employees how best to use the internal social network and how to best leverage the external social networks as well.