Get your culture right & the tweets will look after themselves

Martin Thomas @crowdsurfing

“Digital communications is a destabilizing force in a bureaucratic environment. And I am sitting right in the middle of a bureaucratic environment.’”Senior corporate communications director

“We’re not set up for this shit”UK CEO

Social media dramatises cultural & operational weaknesses

Connected Consumer meets Disconnected

Corporation

New behaviours & heightened expectations

“Amplifying the volume of moaning”

Instant access, instant response, instant gratification “living life through shortcuts” MTV

“The trouble with McDonald’s is it’s too bloody slow”

Real time problem solving Real time expectations

Why many institutions struggle

o Not configured to work in real time, in terms of speed or resources

10 minutes60 minutes

* Critical response time for responding to negative comments

Organisations & people that struggle with this new world

Slow Hierarchical Bureaucratic Process oriented Distrustful

No surprise that public sector finds things difficult

Social media as a positive force for cultural & organisational change

Good social = Good businessGood business = Good social

Alternative perspective

Operational & cultural traits of successful organisations

TrustingOpenAgileInformal Collaborative

1. Trusting

o Bedrock of strong internal cultureo Allows shared responsibility & real time decision making

The best company rulebook ever written?

Trust the people

“How many of your 90,000 tweets have

been pre-approved by senior management?”

“None of them”

Trust the peoplein uniform

"It comes down to culture of an organisation & degree of trust you have in your frontline officers. You have to allow them to make mistakes and deal with them as a mistake, rather than coming down heavily on them.”

"The message has to be: 'We trust you with a baton and with the right to take away someone's liberty, I think we can trust you with a Twitter account.”Gordon Scobbie, police national lead on social media

2. Open

o Transparency & honesty non negotiable

o Capable of transforming reputations & address trust deficit faced by all institutions

o Thicker skins essential

From litigation to ‘civil dialogue’

“the one thing we’ve changed in recent years is we have been a lot more open about engaging in dialogue with people so long as they aim to be constructive” (Steve Easterbrook, UK CEO, McDonalds)

3. Agile

o Ability to improvise & operate in close to real time rather than institutional time

Crisis management at hyper-speed

Speed of response

o Photo hoax went viral on Twitter

o Quickly countered by social-media team with Twitter statement

o Stock price rose 5% the following day

Agile creativity

4. Informal

o Being willing to show a human face & a personality

Think human … not corporate

A human response to human error

Authenticity & timeliness more important than production values

5. Collaborative

o Tapping into spirit of collective self expression

o Leveraging people’s willingness to shape service & product offers 70% of companies regularly create value through use of web-

based communities (McKinsey)

The Power of Communities

Mutualisation: Collaborating with readers and communities to better understand, explore or reflect situations, topics, perspectives or experiences

The Power of Communities

10,000 people have paid to become part of an online community that debates & votes on key decisions involved in running a farm

The Power of Communities

• Over £200k saved• Over 250 photography ambassadors• 50 million views

Social customer service

• Community-powered customer service

“Each view of a YouTube customer support video equates to an £80 saving”Laura Price, social media manager

“Using customer communities to solve customer problems costs 10% of traditional call centres” HP claim saving of $50m in support costs

If you want to succeed as a social business

TrustingOpenAgileInformal Collaborative

Get your culture right … & the social media will look after itself

@crowdsurfing