From control to conversation: Corporations and social media

Earlier this week I attended Bowen Craggs & Co’s third Web Effectiveness Conference in Paris. 2 intense days focusing on current achievements, challenges, headaches and predictions of the hard working individuals managing some of the largest and most complex Web estates in the world. Two of the dominant topics were:

• The changing role of the corporate website
• The impact of social media in the enterprise and how the attitude is maturing

Stephane Aknin, head of group e-communications at AXA, opened with a quote by Simon Mainwaring, which seemed to sum up a lot of what was discussed over the 2 days:

The online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.

The changing role of the corporate website and the impact of social media on the web more widely are in many ways linked. It is naturally not a simplistic case of social media taking over the roles and functions of the website; rather, corporations are gradually realizing that the way they have to act, comply and behave online is changing fundamentally because of social media. –At least the web professionals inside the organisations are! Jerome Colombe, head of Web governance at Alcatel-Lucent concluded that The 2.0 (r)evolution has “cracked the Web architecture lines we knew”. The godfather of Web analytics, Jim Sterne, who talked about how to actually measure the impact of social media, bluntly claimed that the impression of your company no longer derives from the corporate website.

After years of social media hype with rushed-through policy making and childish excitement in equal measures, it was great to listen to a discussion that finally appears to be maturing. Sensible questions were being asked and people were openly sharing their hard-learnt lessons. Some of the key points I scribbled down throughout the many presentations that brought up social media related issues were:

• Listen listen listen! It takes time to follow the many conversations that go on, but it is vitally important to dedicate that time.
• Respond to criticism if appropriate – and don’t mull it over for days: do it quickly.
• Have social media guidelines, even if you don’t intend to actively participate on social media platforms; your employees need them.
• Do not attempt to remove critical; even defamatory comments and do not try to shut down “negativity groups / spaces” – you will immediately be branded a “controller” and it will always backfire, as more than one organisation told us. When you find yourself in a social media storm, “facts simply don’t matter”.
• Befriend someone influential in your legal department and get them to take a real interest in social media; one organisation told how they have made one of their senior lawyers responsible for social media; all initiatives and considered scenarios are run past this lawyer. Every organisation should have a social media lawyer who can take a pro- rather than a re-active approach.
• Don’t befriend customers, clients or stakeholders anywhere in the social media space; Maintain a professional distance whenever you represent your organisation.
• Social media monitoring: think of it more as an alert mechanism than an achievement indicator!

I have deliberately not credited all the speakers for their good advice as many of them were talking out of very recent painful and still highly sensitive experiences, but thank you to all contributors nevertheless – and thanks to Bowen Craggs for facilitating and moderating all this valuable no-nonsense knowledge sharing!

For more on the impact of social media on the enterprise and the deafening hype around it, check out Peter Kim‘s talk on the subject given at the recent J. Boye conference in Philadelphia.

What is happening in your organisation? Control or conversation?