Part II: Building a Structure for Success
Big companies have a reputation for loving structure, committees, task forces, and reports. There’s a reason for that. If you want to run a successful enterprise of more than one person, you need to know who is doing what when, and why they’re doing it.
Social media, as a whole, began with individuals. If you think back to the dawning of the twenty-first century and imagine the early proto-bloggers, you’re probably not picturing a corporate communicator but rather somebody in a darkened room, in a pizza-stained T-shirt bathed in the glow of a monitor, wondering if anybody is reading what he’s posting. (At least one of your authors resembles that remark.)
Many of the people advocating for social media inside companies today were originally attracted to it for personal rather than professional reasons and only later recognized its value for business. The challenge for the enterprise is to emulate that spirit of adventure, community, and openness while at the same time keeping an eye on core business objectives and the bottom line.
The best way to do that is to build a structure inside your organization where social media can live, policies and guidelines for how employees can and should use it, and tools to measure its impact.
