Are Cultural Barriers to Social Media Bigger Than We Think?

The culture of sharing is difficult for many Baby Boomers. Our business environment in the 70s, 80s and 90s was focused on winning, and that included kicking ass on the competition and gloating about it. Conversations with the opposition never went beyond small talk and were best avoided.

Today, thanks to Twitter, I see competitors becoming good friends. That’s not wrong, it’s just different. I’ve spoken to several Baby Boomer CEOs who find the whole “personal brand” thing troubling, worrying that it could interfere with company loyalty.

The sharing culture will remain a tough sell in the C-suites until SMers show bottom-line value—or until my contemporaries retire. But I don’t need to preach that here, do I?

Sidenote: Attended a session at PRSA conference last week in San Diego in which 3 executive recruiters talked of how they fill C-suite-level PR and Marcom posts. Their CEO clients, they said, tend to shy from candidates with high online profiles. One even said that being a blogger might be seen as a negative at the C level.

Chuck,
Thanks for the mention—and I’m still waiting for concrete answer, btw. But you touched on the essence of my question in terms of getting multiple departments to buy into the idea of SM. I guess I’m wondering if it would work to include PR, legal and IT, while leaving out HR and marketing?? (This is purely an example.)

But I think you’re right on with the main point in your post. I think a lot of companies are just playing the waiting game with SM at this point. They may be listening or marginally participating, but won’t immerse themselves until they deem it absolutely necessary—aka have an argument the C-suite can’t ignore.

Looking at culture shift aspect - and to answer your first question - I think it’s not about the number of hours each department puts into social media or the social side of the business, but more so the understanding and buy-in they have on the space and how it can positively effect the business.

Understanding the collaborative nature of the space, how the business can function with similar strategies implemented internally, and staying abreast of what they’re doing externally - in case there does come a time where different departments need to step in or help out with certain initiatives - are all important factors in alleviating any sort of barrier that does exist in the company’s culture.

Are all businesses built with the proper leadership and employees to go through this sort of culture shift? Not at all. But it’s something businesses are focusing on more and more as we get into 2010 and something the latter organizations will have to think about when they look at where they’re going in the future.

Sonny really touches an important point.

Organizations have to become collaborative internally before they can become collaborative externally. Some companies are better suited to adapt quickly while others will plod along until they lose their sense of complacency in the status quo. You need leadership and a strong internal communication plan if you want employees to engage in social media. And, you certainly need HR at the table because I recently learned that HR is growing increasingly wary of companies monitoring employee communication over the increased risk to litigation.

Overall, however, social media seems to me to be a mainstream function of communication, but where companies seem to run into self-imposed barriers is not so much as to whether or not we should do it, but how do we do it.

Social media has created its own challenge in that while there are many voices on the subject, there are not enough people searching for conceptual models and clearly no identifiable vetting mechanism beyond popularly. Best practices are great, but they also may or may not be transplanted to another organization because so much of it is situational to each organization. In more cases than not, it is the companies who do it differently that tend succeed over those that simply follow in the footsteps of others (beyond gleaning a few insights and adapting them to fit).

I also think that sometimes we forget that social media was not the first attempt to share knowledge between organizations for mutual benefit. Many authors, professional organizations, and instructors did their best to open doors prior to social media ... and often succeed. That really hasn’t changed as much as people seem to think. What has changed is the immediacy in which those ideas can be challenged, promoted, etc.

There are benefits to both methods, and I’m hopeful those methods will eventually find a common ground rather than working against each other. And when they do, I am certain that we will see an abundance of success stories with very unique approaches that confirm what we already know. There are hundreds of ways to employ social media as part of a communication plan, limited only by our imagination and willingness to implement.

All my best,
Rich

First- Great post, Chuck.
Second- Great insight, Chris.
Third- Totally agree, Sonny.

The irony in this (from my point of view)-

Gen-Y is perceived by the older generations as being selfish and having an “all about me” attitude. If someone in the C-suite has that disposition, how are they supposed to trust that the social media plan being proposed is good for the company, and not just for the individual?

Other ironic part? The one’s that are perceived to be selfish and “all about me”, gen-Y, are the ones that are collaborating (for the most part).

Just realized that it sounds like I’m assuming that a member of gen-Y will be pitching the plan. That’s not what I was getting at.

More accurately, social media is associated with gen-y (and therefore, it’s stereotypes) fairly heavily. So even if a senior staffer were to be pitching this, there still could be skepticism through association.

Chuck - I’ll add my two cents to @rich’s comment about internal culture. It informs external comms in general, not just regarding collaboration. One good test to see a potential client’s (or if inside the org, boss’s) openness to social media is asking about the current internal culture—silo’ed or cross-functional? Jealous of other managers/departments? What are the employee engagement metrics, are people involved?  If those aspects of internal culture are negative, the likelihood that they’ll be receptive to a social media strategy deeper than direct sales/customer marketing is low. That’s my instinct, however, not a fact I can cite. This would be an interesting course of study.

The trust element is fascinating—orgs are always demanding employee loyalty, and paradoxically for the baby boomer managers, embracing collaborative strategies would likely increase that loyalty.