Twelve years, two billion people and countless case studies on the business benefits of social media later, professionals get that it’s important. This is a step in the right direction but a far cry from having a social-first mindset. So what does it take to make a deeper shift? Professionals must:
- Understand the value of social (and act on it).
- Develop new technical and emotional skills.
In order to properly invest in social business professionals must be convinced of its value for their industry. They also have to recognise that skills required to thrive in a technology-driven age are different from those that have got them to where they are but that they are learnable. Let’s look at both.
1. Understanding the value of social
In some ways, this is the easy part because the data is there. The reluctance to jump into social when it first emerged was understandable, on the face of it, social seemed to be about conversations between kids and the emergence of funny but essentially meaningless Internet memes. (So we thought.) Most social technologies were free but required an investment in human resources and the business benefits were untested. Twelve years on, things have changed. Social media platforms have continued to grow and become more sophisticated and influential. We know the conversations people have in social media matter and translate into actions in real life. However many senior professionals failed to rewrite the narrative along the way and that meant businesses missed opportunities and got left behind. Here though, the news is getting better. In 2013 an MIT, Sloan Management Review and Deloitte social business study of 2545 respondents from 25 industries and 99 countries found recognition of the importance of social business had risen steeply across every industry. Importantly companies started investing in initiatives like quality content marketing because they realised it was important and were prepared to refine the business approach as they learn more. Being able to make a strategic investment with incomplete information and refine it in real time will be important for leveraging new technologies because with the speed of innovation, opportunity may predate data. Decision-makers will however need new technical skills that allow them to make informed judgments as well as the emotional wherewithal to act quickly enough and take risks.
2. Developing new technical and emotional skills
The need for business to adapt to change is as old as business itself what’s new is the speed of that change. We are living in a time when more information is created in a day than a village of people once acquired over a lifetime. We respond somewhere on the continuum of: a) Feeling overwhelmed and freezing, doing nothing, which comes at a high cost; or b) Chasing our tails by trying to keep up, which is impossible and keeps us distracted rather than focused on developing the right strategy. We have to find a way to handle this tension because ‘technology makes more technology possible’ (Toffler) and predictions are we will experience 20,000 years worth of change in the next 100 years (Kurzweil). How can we stay open to disruptive possibilities while maintaining a strong filter that ensures energy is well spent and has a business imperative?
Technical literacy Because of technology the world is increasingly interconnected and mobile, professionals can therefore assume that technology is integral to business solutions and should be asking about it. This does not mean they need to know how to program computers but rather to understand the strategic impacts of new technologies on the way we do business, something that is easy to learn. They might ask questions like:
- If more customers want to transact on mobile (which they do) can our IT and web infrastructure adapt?
- If we migrate customer service to Twitter how do we report on it?
- How do we identify and share a potential sales lead on LinkedIn with the sales team?
Tech has to become a part of the mindset even if we are not technical experts ourselves. Developing the emotional skills to deal with constant change and ambiguity is also important. Essentially that’s the ability to deal with discomfort. Professionals need to recognize that sweeping changes can put them at a strategic disadvantage if they can’t anticipate or adapt fast enough. Business intelligence is important for decision-making but we need a mindset that can cope with information that changes in real time. It’s possible to put processes in place that help manage high ambiguity. A business can:
- Encourage staff to stay abreast of trends and current thinking.
- Find innovative ways to gather business intelligence including in real time.
- Cultivate an adaptive culture that recognizes innovative and creative thinking rather than just successful projects.
One of the best places to see this in action is in social media networks. Which means engaging in them and freeing your staff to do the same (yes with the right social media governance processes in place) is a great way to develop the very skills you will need.
