Building change management into social media initiatives

Many of our clients initially consider two things around social media strategies: the technology and the measurement metrics. But as we continue to move towards a more structured approach to social, there is another aspect of strategy that we should think more about: change management. There’s an interesting passage in Sandy Carter’s new book, Get Bold, that refers to a comment made by Adam Christensen at Juniper. “Culture is the most overlooked, underestimated factor determining whether social media succeeds or fails in a company.”

This can be taken one step further to say that change management (which encompasses more than just culture) will be required to ensure the success of social media initiatives within organizations.

A Booz and Company paper on the 10 Guiding Principles of Change Management states, “Success at large-scale transformation demands more than the best strategic and tactical plans, the traditional focus of senior executives and their advisers. It requires an intimate understanding of the human side as well — the company’s culture, values, people, and behaviors that must be changes to deliver the desired results . Plans themselves do not capture value. Value is realized only through the sustained collective actions of thousands or tens of thousands of employees who are responsible for designing, executing and living the change.”

Understanding the human aspects of a job that are impacted by change is important for most strategic initiatives, but the very nature of social media necessitates that change management be addressed in a complete and thorough manner for initiatives to be successful. Often we assume that by having social media tools at their fingertips, people will simply use them. But these technologies will change the way that employees will communicate and make decisions, and organizations need to ensure that they clarify the ways that these technologies can help with each specific job or role.

Buying a social technology, like social media monitoring, is usually grounded in a high level strategy and vendor analysis. But when we hear that purchased tools are not being used, it’s a pretty good sign that there is no change management plan for the new technology. What will this new tool do to change your employees’ jobs? If we can start thinking and planning around this more often, the rate of success with social media initiatives is bound to go up.

Originally Published Nov 2011