Image Credit: Thanachart R.
When we talk about the practice of community management, we often speak only of the external relationship between an organization and its customers. I contend that organizations must weave together the practice of active online customer engagement with the management of in-house culture.
Culture Meets Customers
Considering that 60% of employees are considering jumping ship for new opportunities as soon as the recession ends, I’d say we have some work to do in company culture development.
What’s scary is that your company’s culture is important not just internally, but externally as well. As Bradford Shimp remarks:
The culture you have within your company will spill over to your customers. You can’t control that. In fact, if you are trying hard to keep a tight lid on what your employees say and do, you probably have an issue with your culture.
[...] the happiness of your employees, the satisfaction of your customers and ultimately the success of your company rests on the buy in [of employees to your corporate culture].
Culture development through CM
As employees become increasingly connected via social networks, they will inevitably be connected to your customers. And as time goes on, more organizations will realize that its lunacy to restrict access, not just for marketers, but for the entire organization.
This means, of course, that your corporate culture will be spilling into the social sphere where your community manager (CM) is merrily going about his or her business.
Although much of an organization’s culture is driven by senior leadership, CMs must work to foster an internal culture that reflects all those social media buzzwords (transparency, authenticity, blady, blady, blah).
More specifically, CMs must do more than educate internal stakeholders how to execute their part of an organization’s communication plan. They must show stakeholders the value of pausing their other business tasks to communicate directly with customers.
And most importantly, loyalty to a culture of direct social engagement with customers must be won not by a top-down process, but though bottom-up culture so that it’s “I get to engage…” not “I have to answer this stupid customer…”
More than customer service
This is only partly about educating stakeholders about how to do customer service via social tools. Besides listening and responding Jeremiah Owyang suggests a CM should
“…Shut up and sit back: One of the most important jobs of the CM is to connect the right internal people with customers and let them work it out, stay out of the way if you don’t understand the problems.”
While I believe Owyang is dead on, connecting customers with internal stakeholders is a best practice that many organizations with no social media presence are doing already.
I believe that where a CM’s skill is is particularly valuable is not only in connecting customers who have concerns with the right stakeholder (lest we fall into the fallacy of social media customer service), but in teaching stakeholders how to build relationships with customers that transcend specific complaints.
It means teaching teaching stakeholders how to listen for opportunities (example below).
Networks trump the process of your engagement plan
As Stowe Boyd outlined in “The Rise of Networks, The End of Process”
Increasingly, people’s work is being viewed as a shared aspect of social relations. Time is a shared space, where we cooperate toward shared ends.
So for a simple example that I’ve used before, if a mountain groomer sees a tweet or status update from a friend asking about snow conditions (an opportunity!), I believe it’s not just appropriate, but entirely essential for him or her to respond.
Education about the process and best practices of the social web helps the groomer understand when it’s appropriate to interact (and therefore stop doing his/her grooming task for a moment) so that the more fluid exchange of information can occur without serious inhibition.
The process is important, but the culture of networked connection that says it’s okay to take time to respond is more important.
The next step is how…
It’s one thing to argue that we need cultural development, it’s another to outline a strategy to do it. More on that later.
Until then, let me know what you think. How do you see the role of CM?
-Andrew
Image Credit: Thanachart R. (bugtom on stock exchange); original here
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Tags: Community Management, Corp, critical thinking, Customer Relationships, engagement, social media
