PR 101

I was in a meeting yesterday when I was asked how one changes a corporate culture so social media will be accepted. Frankly, my answer wasn’t the best because I didn’t discuss what it takes to get executives and employees to accept social media. It’s is something I know how to do. It’s not easy, it requires intelligent selling, but it can and has to be done.

I have previously written about selling social media to a company, but that’s only the first step. There is more to be done after completing the initial sale than there was before the sale.

We who do social media full-time forget what a culture change it is for most organizations. Not just for those people in the C-Suite, but for everyone down to, and including, the receptionist. Remember, up until to about six years ago, most employees didn’t have to worry about social media or marketing their company in any way.

“Too often, people from company “A” will recognize great success that company “B” is having by doing XYZ with social media,” Blogger Adam Christensen wrote. “So, logically, they decide to do the same at company A. But the results are dramatically different. Why? Because they didn’t account for the corporate culture variable which is inevitably different between the two companies.”

Christensen is currently the director of social and digital communications and marketing at Juniper Networks in San Francisco. Until April, he worked for IBM in communications and marketing where he led IBM’s social business strategy and execution globally. He worked on projects including IBM’s Watson and Smarter Planet.

So first, what is corporate culture and how’s it formed?

Well, corporate culture is essentially an internal brand. It doesn’t exist until the majority of people at the company buy into it. The company’s leadership and employees who have the same values and assumptions about their place of work create it. Although it can awhile for a company to form a culture, once formed it can be difficult to change.

Why? Because it provides a sense of belonging and safety to the people who work there. Remember, in every company there are the written and the unwritten rules. The unwritten rules are that which forms the culture. By following both sets, especially the unwritten one, an employee can generally minimize surprises and things out of the ordinary.

The problem is that same culture can keep a company from taking the calculated risks they need to stay viable. Consider the bookseller Borders or the video rental company Blockbuster. While I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened to each, I know from being a customer of each that their cultures were wedded to a way of doing business that was clearly no longer viable.

Those examples are not going to stop other companies from making the same mistakes. Staying in one place is usually the normal human state.

So along comes someone like myself telling the leaders and employees they need to adopt social media if they want to remain in business. Yes, they know about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the other social media sites. They might even say they want to do it. But it still means a huge culture change.

So what do you do? Well, first it takes an intensive education program. You need to show everyone how social media works and what it can do for the company. You need to show each employee how they fit into the plan.

You also need to get their input. You need to find out what they are comfortable with and what they are willing to start with. As I always say, you have to crawl before you can walk.

Once you and the leadership feels that employees are ready to dip into social media, start out internally. Set up internal blogs, an employee Wiki and other applications. Let as many employees as possible play, learn, grow, build relationships, and develop the needed collective awareness. Once the employees are comfortable with it, take it public. It will work then.

That social media is becoming one of the dominant forms of marketing is not debatable, I feel. However, just because that’s happening doesn’t mean companies are willing to by into it. What I am finding that is chief marketing officers and their neighbors in the C-Suite are in a “show-me” mode. They need to be convinced that social media does what we practitioners say it does.

Therein lies the conundrum for many of us. We can write compelling blogs, post interesting tweets, make fascinating videos, add to LinkedIn discussions, and draw people to our Facebook pages. But a lot of us couldn’t sell long underwear to Alaskan oil field workers in the middle of a January blizzard. We have forgotten to acquire that the one key skill that ensures that a business or agency will be successful – sales.

I used to be as bad as sales as anyone. I can do everything I just wrote about and then some. But when it came time to convince someone else that they needed to the same to make their business prosper, well just remember that shivering oil field worker.

Just because we know social media is going to dominate marketing doesn’t mean our prospective clients know or care. They need to shown and convinced why that is so. Too often we social media evangelists make the same mistakes other enthusiasts make: we assume that everyone shares our fervor. Well, that just isn’t true.

I have heard many stories of an internal marketing manager or an agency representative charging into the CMO’s office enthusing all over the place about social media. Done that way the usual result is the CMO tells the interloper to clear out and take the enthusiasm with them. Oh they might be polite about it and all, but they never call back.

You can’t go fishing with a shotgun and you cannot convince someone to buy something based on your attitude. Just like in fishing, you have to be patient. You have to have the right bait and you have to convince the prospect to rise to that bait. That is the only way to do it.

Using pull marketing tactics is how it is done correctly. As a refresher, pull marketing is a method in which you give a potential customer convincing reasons to buy something. You don’t force anything. You let them take their time and make a decision. That goes for both external and internal clients.

Second, you have to make sure you are targeting the right prospects. I have seen too many agencies use the “any company is a good client approach.” I know it is tough in a recession not to go after just about any business. But ultimately you will fail doing that. It is much better to pick out a market niche and target it. Set up criteria for which companies within that niche would be your ideal client and go after that group.

If you are inside a company, you have to make sure you trying to convince the people who actually the decisions. Generally, that would be people in the C-Suite. But be careful to pay attention to internal politics. Don’t bypass someone who has the power to stop you from achieving your goal. Rather get them to buy into your idea.

I once had an editor who would almost automatically turn any idea a reporter had. I don’t know whether he was insecure, busy, or just arrogant. What reporters learned to do was have a general discussion with this editor about the area in which they wanted to do a story. They would then let the editor has the “light bulb” moment and assign them the story.

The same tactic can work with the people you are trying to convince. Not that anyone’s superiors are insecure, busy or arrogant.

The bottom line is before you write that blog post or post that video, you have to convince people that it will work. Only then can you get the camera out and start shooting.

I was sitting at the BizTimes Milwaukee BizTech Conference-Expo last Wednesday listening to Kirk Strong of Smart Interactive Media explain how a sales program his company designed for Chrysler fell flat. On paper it was a great social media program designed to generate sales leads for local dealerships. In reality, despite hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars spent planning and implementing it failed. Chrysler killed the program after only a year.

Why did it fail? Because despite the sometimes dozens of leads generated for those local dealerships, the salespeople didn’t buy into it. What they wanted was instant gratification, Strong explained. They didn’t want to cultivate those potential sales, none of which were guaranteed to buy a vehicle. What they wanted was someone to walk into the dealership who wanted to buy a car immediately, he said.

Many of those listening to the presentation faulted the salespeople. How could they not want to accept a bunch of leads handed to them on that proverbial platter? Boy, those men and women were lazy, many said.

Well, I disagree – they weren’t lazy. I think it was just that no one sat down and walked them through how social media works. Not just how this sales program worked, which I believe was demonstrated, but how social media in its entirety works.

Look I know social media is taking over marketing. Still, it is only about five or six years old. To a lot of people it is new and somewhat scary. It is such a shift in the way things have been done that it still hard for many of the rank and file to grasp.

A lot of that has to do with the Great Recession. Companies from coast-to-coast cut employees. No one wanted to stand out for fear they would be the next one out the door. So they hunkered down in their cubicles, did what they were told, and did nothing to attract attention. The Japanese have a saying that goes “the nail that stands out is hammered down.” No one wanted to be that nail.

This was not an atmosphere that lent itself to creativity and risk taking.

Chrysler’s management loved and endorsed this program, Strong said. Unlike many CEOs and CMOs, Chrysler’s management actually got it. I think being the smallest U.S. auto manufacturer gave management the impetus to try something new.

Well, as Shakespeare said, “there’s the rub.” Given what’s been going on for the past three years in corporate America, do you think most people actually trust management? It appears to be no one bothered to get buy in from the people who would be the beneficiaries from the program.

Getting buy in does not mean just mean explaining this new marketing program. It means starting at zero and showing employees the benefits of social media. It cannot be assumed that they know what’s going on just because you tell them it is going to work.

Let me give you an analogy from own family’s history. My grandmother grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. For most of the time when she was a girl, her father used a team of horses to power the farm. The horses were used for everything from pulling the plow to taking the family into town.

As the farm grew more prosperous and larger, the horses could no longer handle plowing the growing acreage. So the men on the farm debated what to do. This was a tough decision. We take these things for granted nowadays, but in 1920 a growing, sparking, loud tractor was a scary concept. Apparently only after the three men had decided unanimously – with buy-in from the women – that a tractor was needed was a purchase made. The key here was everyone agreed about the need and understand the benefits.

This is what companies need to do. Even if the CEO and CMO agree on the need to a new way of marketing, it is doesn’t mean the employees will understand the need. The days of top down management are gone. That Chrysler program demonstrated that to me. Employees have to be shown and convinced that something new will work. Otherwise the entire effort is a waste of time, money and effort.