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January has seen a spate of people tweeting things they shouldn’t – from Diane Abbott to Ed Miliband in the UK to countless people working for brands across the world. We’ve also seen a renewed debate in the UK about how the professions should use social media – notably about teachers befriending their pupils on Facebook. One way that many organisations deal with this is to create social media guidelines but even more important than any guidelines you might right is the internal culture change needed to real to make yours a true social business.

Surveys in the UK last year consistently showed that between 35% and 40% of UK firms have no social media guidelines in place. And even for those firms that did, many employees claim that they do not know what they are. Guidelines are useful, but really they are just the starting point, something every firm should have in place. Much more useful than any social media guidelines is the cultural change you need across your business to really take advantage of the opportunities social can bring.

This change is broadly in two main areas: bringing your staff closer to your customers, and building your staff as your biggest advocates. Both of these are important tasks and done properly can start to have a real impact on your organisation.

1) Bringing your staff closer to your customers

In any organisation some employees are customer-facing and some are not; and only a few of those that are customer-facing really understand what a range of your customers are thinking. This often leads to a real gap in understanding between what your customers think about you, your brand and products, and what yous staff think that they think. Maybe your staff think that customers are more critical than they are. Or that some things are more important to them than they are. Or even that customers like you a lot more than they really do. There are always gaps in understanding, and social provides a way to close this gap.

At the simplest level, all organisations could benefit from using real-time comments and discussions as part of internal comms. Show what people are saying about your brand on screen around your office or on computer desktops will begin to connect people to conversations. Analysing this and showing positive and negative trends and the topics of conversation will being to let people understand the weight of discussion and opinion online.

You can go much further than this. Rather than just showing real-time information to staff you can start to really connect them to customers. Develop an advocate programme not just for the external benefits that they will bring but also to bring information into the business. Have a formal mentoring relationship where customer-advocates mentor your key staff gives them a real role in the business and allows you to use your most connected customers and contacts to support your business. On a broader level encouraging each employee to build their own networks and connections onine (be that through Twitter or through specialist forums and groups) will help them to be more involved and engaged and will help them to solve problems – giving them an extended team of people from which to source ideas and support.

Connecting your staff (be it passively or actively) will help them be more informed and help to focus your efforts on what really matters – the customer.

2) Building your staff as your biggest advocates

Your staff should already be your biggest advocates and you should be encouraging them to use social media to help them project this advocacy and support for your brand.

Many organisations develop comlpex and valuable advocacy programmes for customers and influencers online, but fail to develop similar programmes for their biggest advocates – their staff. Your staff care about the brand, and your products and are often emotionally involved in what you do and why you do it. Sharing this externally is valuable; getting them to share it even more so. Encourage your staff to build networks that are appropriate to them – if they work in product development they could build contacts through forums and groups with people who could help them. If they work in sales they could use Twitter as a way to build their own brand and reach out to people to fill the top of their sales funnel. And everybody across your business could connect with people using your products, in your industry or customers looking for help and advice.

You staff will be doing this already (whether you know it or not) and encouraging and training them to really use social tools will help their efforts benefit you more. Rather than them leaving a review on a product of yours saying it is great, imagine how much more powerful it would be if they went in and said “I was part of the team that worked on developing this product. We’re really proud of it and hope you like it too”. Encourage and enable them and make sure your guidelines are more about setting boundaries and providing support for this.

For many brands reach of your messaging and engagement is important. Your staff provide the single best vehicle to do this. Empowering, practically encouraging, your teams to all engage in social media will be good for their development and also good for you.

When people ask me to explain what social business is all about, I’ve found that describing it as an alternative to email for internal communication and collaboration is an easy-to-grasp starting point.

What makes this explanation even more interesting is that last week Thierry Breton, CEO of IT services firm Atos announced his intention to have a “zero email” policy within the next 18 months. This statement has been seen by many as controversial, but some believe this will be viewed as normal rather than exceptional in the not too distant future.

Breton highlights that internal emails are becoming increasingly demanding of time. As users accumulate more and more data in their inboxes  (which may or may not be relevant to their job) searching for key information becomes more difficult and time consuming. Thus Thierry is suggesting that eradicating internal email will make his internal team more efficient.

Let’s be clear – email is not going away any time soon and Atos would still use it for external communication. However, transforming the internal communication model in this way this way is a definite move towards becoming a social business. In fact, Atos would not be the first multinational company moving towards a social business model and IT companies are ideally placed to pioneer this change as they have the in-house resource to implement these systems and the desire to be leaders in the field.

Here are just  a few areas where moving away from email for internal process can be beneficial:

For the workforce of the future

In an interview with the BBC, Breton highlighted how “most of the young people that we were hiring were not using email anymore after graduating from universities. They were instead mainly using instant messaging tools and social networks like Facebook – and for most of them, when they joined Atos it was first time they had ever worked with internal email tools like [Microsoft] Outlook.”

I expect that much of the criticism of Breton’s desired policy has arisen from a confusion as to what tools will be used – “Facebook/Twitter-like” may be misleading, causing people to imagine an informal or very short-form discussion. Social business tools will be purpose built for enterprise, but retain the familiar user experience of the major social networks. The adoption of these platforms will come naturally to younger recruits and is only going to become more prevalent over time.

Stop attaching, start collaborating

The ability to work on documents collaboratively is perhaps what excites me the most about social business. Tools such as Chatter or Confluence (see our list of collaboration tools for social business for other examples) offer secure environments for documents to be shared and worked on simultaneously. Freedom from the need to track, revise and merge changes into a single document is a great boost to efficiency.

It goes beyond the sharing of documents, though, as pooling skills and knowledge will be another benefit. In a large enterprise, the ability to quickly identify others who may have the skills or knowledge you need for a project will be invaluable. Individuals will be able to tag their areas of expertise, or even topics that they are interested in and so be able to contribute even if they are from different departments or countries.

Top down change

Successful transformation to a social business requires senior buy-in, and so I hope that Breton is successful in proving the value of alternatives to internal email. If this is the case then Atos will be a valuable example for others looking to demonstrate the benefits to management.

Today I went to IBM and SugarCRM‘s “Get Social” social business and social crm roadshow.

Some of the key takeaways from the event include:

Social Business

Roy Lee, Marketing Director at IBM gave the following tips about social business:

• Social business should tie together processes and departments. The IBM definition of social business is a business that is engaging, transparent and nimble.

• Social media v social business – Lee believes that social media is about communication mostly  for marketing and PR. Social business, however, embraces social media but brings the tools and techniques inside an organisation, aligning goals across the organisation as a whole.

• When it comes to social business, Lee believes organisations have to set an AGENDA:

A – Align organisational goals and culture

G – Gain social trust

E – Engage through experience

N – Network  your business processes

D – Design for reputation and risk management

A – Analyse your data

• The most successful way to adopt social business is from the top down, via the senior executives and the board. Then you need to establish a digital council, community managers, a centre of excellence for continued learning and development, content management, guidelines and standards, reputation and risk management and metrics and measurements.

• Lee believes that social gaming is critically important for engaging and IBM themselves have 2 social games internally – “IBM Innovate”, which is a business process management game which involves sharing final scores both internally and externally, and “City One”, a city planning simulation game.

Social CRM

The key take home from Tom Schuster, VP and General Manager of SugarCRM Europe, session on getting started with  Social CRM was as follows:

1. Don’t know where to start with Social CRM? Start with the customer.
2. Next, choose and open source CRM system that allows you to keep up-to-date with changes online.
3. Ensure the CRM has a flexible Cloud infrastructure to allow easy data migration and alignment.
4. Integrate collaborative processes into gathering data and merge all existing data with new data that is gathered to give a holistic picture.
5. Allow users to connect to the CRM using their own tools and platforms.

While the session was very interesting, it didn’t offer any ground-breaking advice or case studies about  social business or social crm. However, it was good to see that social business is finally becoming a key objective for business leaders and owners on a global scale.

82% of TV adverts generate negative ROI, according to the book The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Get Social Media Working in Your Business, written by a team of three from Accenture.

If this is actually the case, it begs the question: Why are we all so obsessed with social media ROI?

Given that the first TV ad was broadcast over 70 years ago, and social media has only really come to the forefront for business use in the last 5 or so years, it make little sense that brands and businesses are reluctant to invest in social media due to a lack of hard ROI statistics, but are happy to pour millions into TV advertising.

So why is this the case? I’m not really convinced that brands and businesses themselves understand why social media ROI is so fundamental to its adoption. Is it because the likes of Facebook and Twitter are still viewed to be ‘free’ thus there is a reluctance to invest? Or is it a case of waiting to see if someone comes up with the equivalent social media metric for what ‘reach’ is to PR?

To me, I think we’re obsessed with social media ROI because social media, unlike TV advertising, is so much more than just another channel.The smart brands and businesses want a social media strategy that includes measurements, KPIs and metrics that deliver value across the whole business, rather than just for PR, marketing or other one-off initiatives.

This type of adoption- social business- requires uptake from the top level down, cross market, cross department and cross discipline. And for businesses to invest in social media in this way,  it’s vital to understand the value it can generate before taking that leap.

Becoming a social business, and using social media in a way that is potentially transformational to an organisation, requires heavy investment in both financial, resourcing and strategic terms. So for business to willingly adopt this model it’s wholly understandable to see why we’re all obsessed with social media ROI.

As shown in the infographic below produced by agency Get Satisfaction, there are some astonishing figures about where executives believe social business will take us over the next few years:

• Over half of the 900 US based executives believe that if their company does not adopt social business then they will fall behind compared to their competition.
• Over 450 of the executives of leading US companies believe that social business is key to keeping up with competition. An even greater proportion of those executives interviewed believe that by adopting social business they will see a rise in their profit margins.
• Of the 900 executives interviewed, 71% of them have downloaded at least one web based app for their work on either a mobile or a computer.
• If the majority of executives believe that their companies will fall behind if they do not use social business then this gives those 16% a massive head start in terms of profit margins.