Why are we even arguing about this?

Pre­sented to the AGM of the Aus­tralian Grad­u­ate School of Entre­pre­neur­ship and for the prod­uct launch of Intranet​Man​ager​.NET.

It was just lucky that two groups asked me to present on essen­tially the same con­tent on con­sec­u­tive days.

Just 10 or so years ago, we were argu­ing whether email was nec­es­sary for our staff to do their work.

Not long before that we were argu­ing over the value of giv­ing them phones on their desks. And Heaven for­bid we give them long dis­tance access!

At the same time, I doubt any of us even con­sid­ered the cor­po­rate web site as a crit­i­cal busi­ness asset.

15 years ago, the pub­lic Inter­net and the web were in their infancy, and we weren’t cer­tain at all what we should be doing with them.

So why now, are we argu­ing about the value of social media for our busi­nesses? There’s a wealth of good research on the returns for busi­ness on fac­tors such as cus­tomer ser­vice, prod­uct devel­op­ment, inno­va­tion, find­abil­ity of infor­ma­tion and brand reputation.

For no good rea­son many busi­nesses seem highly reluc­tant to allow staff to par­tic­i­pate in social media activ­ity — either inter­nally or in pub­lic. I doubt there’s any­one in the room today that gives a sec­ond thought to the impor­tance of the cor­po­rate web site, staff email and per­sonal phones for all staff.

Why is this?

Today, we live in a world where almost every­thing about your busi­ness is pub­lic infor­ma­tion. Not only that, the world is now hyper­con­nected in a way that makes dis­cov­er­abil­ity and con­ver­sa­tion about you a triv­ial exercise.

A few sec­onds of effort at Google and I can dis­cover who your man­age­ment team are. Shortly after that, a slightly more diverse search on Google, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Face­book and per­haps MySpace will give me a pretty inti­mate win­dow into the business.

It’s quite pos­si­ble that I’ll have a win­dow into per­sonal lives of many of your employ­ees and prob­a­bly your man­age­ment team and board of direc­tors. I’ll know where they’ve worked and when. What peo­ple thought of them. I might even know what they wore to the last New Years’ Eve fancy dress party and whether I think they have a sense of humor.

With not much more addi­tional effort, I’ll know what your cus­tomers think of your prod­ucts and of your busi­ness. What’s good, and what’s bad. And why.

I’ll be able to con­sume a vast range of opin­ions — a con­ver­sa­tion — around your offerings.

Are you par­tic­i­pat­ing in that con­ver­sa­tion? If you’re not, there’s noth­ing you can do about it. It will go on regardless.

In the end, you have two choices, and I’m not being extreme here — join the con­ver­sa­tion and thrive, or die.

And to join the con­ver­sa­tion you need to cede some con­trol. Not all of it. Just some.

It’s actu­ally highly likely that your staff are already tak­ing part in this con­ver­sa­tion on your behalf. Wouldn’t it be bet­ter if they had your backing?

The emer­gence in the past five years of blogs and wikis, of social net­works such as Face­book and LinkedIn, and of empow­er­ing pub­lish­ing plat­forms such as Twit­ter, YouTube and sim­i­lar tools have fun­da­men­tally changed the way you and your busi­ness need to inter­act with your cus­tomer base.

They have also shifted the power base — away from the PR flacks, the mar­keters and the her­itage media into the hands of the peo­ple for­merly known as the audi­ence. Today, the audi­ence is no more. They are your col­lab­o­ra­tors and your users. Whether you like it or not.

The Obama cam­paign used these tools — the tools of social media — to ground­break­ing and groundswelling effect. Have no doubt that a sig­nif­i­cant and mea­sur­able part of the suc­cess of the Obama cam­paign was due to the grass­roots empow­er­ment of the vol­un­teer com­mu­nity through the use of social media. Let’s look at some of the numbers:

The use of social media for both Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates was sig­nif­i­cant, yet the Obama cam­paign, appeal­ing directly to a part of the con­stituency that voted strongly for it, lever­aged social media as an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful medium to reach out, appeal to vot­ers and gar­ner both con­tri­bu­tion and vol­un­teer support.

And now that he has been elected, President-​​Elect Obama isn’t drop­ping the ball on social media. He has already released the first of what is to be weekly updates via YouTube.

And now, we have the Greens, Mal­colm Turn­bull him­self, and just last week, the Prime Minister’s office using these tools to con­duct an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion with their con­stituency. Can­vass­ing opin­ion. Dis­cov­er­ing pre­vi­ously unknown issues. Con­nect­ing and hav­ing a mean­ing­ful, rich and human conversation.

In Aus­tralia though, we’re lag­ging behind the rest of the world in busi­ness adop­tion of these tools. And even fur­ther behind in gov­ern­ment use of them.

In the UK for exam­ple, Down­ing Street uses social media tools to allow the PM’s office to speak directly to the con­stituency. And pub­lic sec­tor work­ers, at an indi­vid­ual level, are expected to engage on sub­ject mat­ter within their are of expertise.

The same approach is being used by a num­ber of suc­cess­ful businesses.

In Aus­tralia, Tel­stra has taken sig­nif­i­cant steps in the right direc­tion this year after pay­ing atten­tion to the con­nected, social media using com­mu­nity. For­merly very old-​​school push-​​message focused, Tel­stra has fun­da­men­tally changed. Their cus­tomer ser­vice chan­nel via social media such as Twit­ter and their Now We Are Talk­ing blogs is arguably a more respon­sive, eas­ier, more direct and most notably, more human way to get prob­lems fixed than the robot call cen­ter that must be nav­i­gated in order to talk to some­one on the phone.

Beyond our shores, brands such as SAP, IBM, Dell (Dell Com­mu­nity, Twit­ter), Com­cast (video inter­view, Twit­ter) and the worlds largest online shoe retailer, Zap­pos (blogs, Twit­ter), rely on the rep­u­ta­tion and inno­va­tion chan­nels they have estab­lished via social media chan­nels to get things done quickly, can­vas opin­ion on prod­uct devel­op­ment, learn about issues and solve prob­lems eas­ily and in a way that builds rep­u­ta­tion rather than cus­tomer dissatisfaction.

It’s crit­i­cal that you empower your staff to be com­mu­ni­ca­tors and evan­ge­lists for your busi­ness. Under­stand and expect them to take part online in con­ver­sa­tions about you and let them do so as a part of their jobs. Right now, stop pass­ing every­thing through Legal and the Mar­ket­ing Depart­ment and allow the con­ver­sa­tion to be real, respon­sive and human. Your cus­tomers and staff will respect you for it.

Don’t worry about mak­ing mis­takes. Mis­takes are human. In today’s social media empow­ered world, mis­takes are expected. So make them fast, cheap and early, and then be real about admit­ting them and fix­ing them.

All of this applies equally to efforts inside the wall as it does to exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The use of social media tools within your walls pro­vides your busi­ness with a wealth of oppor­tu­ni­ties you sim­ply did not have access to five years ago.

A recent study by McK­in­sey found that deploy­ing the tools of social media within busi­nesses can be used suc­cess­fully to address issues such as attrac­tion, engag­ment and reten­tion, locat­ing exper­tise, build­ing teams, enhanc­ing flow, under­stand­ing work­load, flat­ten­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion and organ­i­sa­tion struc­tures, trans­form­ing lead­er­ship and man­age­ment prac­tice and increas­ing abil­ity to inno­vate and change accord­ing to mar­ket demands.

Sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of busi­nesses are trans­form­ing their abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate across the organ­i­sa­tion, mar­shal staff, drive inno­va­tion and dis­cover pre­vi­ously unknown exper­tise within their organ­i­sa­tion by using social media tools within their walls.

In Aus­tralia, com­pa­nies such as Janssen-​​Cilag, Cochlear and West­pac have made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment in social media tools to empower their staff to be more effi­cient and productive.

In today’s finan­cial cli­mate, where cus­tomer spend­ing is trend­ing sharply down and the need to be increas­ingly inno­v­a­tive and com­pet­i­tive is ris­ing, can your busi­ness afford not to look closely at these tools? To iden­tify issues that might be solved by them and build and imple­ment a strat­egy that intro­duces these tools to make your job eas­ier to do?

A word of warning.

These tools can’t be a bolt-​​on and nor can they be imple­mented with­out some strong strate­gic analysis.

You need to con­sider them as an inte­gral part of your strate­gic plan and of the work­ing life of you and your staff. You must evolve from bureau­cracy to infoc­racy. This move is fun­da­men­tal to build­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­nity your busi­ness needs to ensure ongo­ing suc­cess in the 21^st Cen­tury. Social tools are not going away and your com­peti­tors are adopt­ing them now.

Imag­ine your busi­ness if this was the way you worked.