Listening: A Strategy and Change Blog | Hosfeld & Associates

There are signs that the social media bubble is preparing to burst. As with the dot com bubble, this does not signal that social media is going away – far from it. Yet a tempering of expectations seems to be looming, and this allows us to re-examine one of the foundations of competitive success: knowing and serving the customer.

Evidence of a social media “market correction”: General Motors recently announced that it was withdrawing its $10 million dollar paid advertising from Facebook.  According to the New York Times, GM continues to spend $30 million maintaining its “free” Facebook page (Hey GM, I know someone who’d do it for $1 million with a $10 million expense budget. Call me.) This budget is focused on creating user testimonial stories and clever graphics they hope will “go viral” – but probably also includes a margin for “we don’t know what we are doing so we’re going to try a lot of stuff and see what sticks.”

Recently, the clutter and chaos of social media has been depicted in graphic form: Graphic for social media  Here’s the equivalent graphic for mobile computing And the differences between different social media platforms have also been depicted through humor. I like this one, but you can enter “social media explained” into the image search of Google and find many more, with applications to specific industries.

In response to this cacophony, the venerable McKinsey & Co. consulting organization has created educational materials to orient C-Suite and senior managers.  McKinsey Social Media Videos  This collection of videos provides an initial orientation, a baseline description of how consumers engage with social media and some advice about the balance of traditional advertising relative to social media.

As writer David Court points out in another article, one of the biggest challenges facing organizations in communications and marketing is that they don’t know what influences their customers. GM has discovered that paid advertising on Facebook does not; as a result GM is turning its attention to  “earned media” – the reviews, the mentions, the articles that are user- or journalist-generated and considered more authentic and reliable by consumers. I expect to see other companies follow suit.

Effective use of social media requires a strategy based on a relational knowledge of the customer.  While some of this should be derived through formal research, it’s also a function of a heart-felt connection with those the company is trying to serve.  If you’re looking for a place to start with social media, start there.

Mergers of teams, business units and whole companies often trigger questions about organizational identity.  Yet, such situations are not the only times organizations and companies question who they are, what they stand for and how they want to live that out.  New leadership, significant regulatory changes, an examination of values of sustainability or the triple bottom line, declining market share or profitability can all trigger executives to step back and ask big questions of identity and purpose. The need to strengthen brand strategy or branding campaigns can also highlight fractures in shared identity and strategy.

In a recently completed project with a non-profit organization, we asked the question: “Who are we together?” and the client reached its answer in a uniquely soulful way: by listening to each other.  I’ve led quite a few processes that help organizations find clarity of direction and a strategy for how to achieve their objectives. This situation was unique.  There was not enough social cohesion in this organization to allow leaders to chart a new course in the normal way.  There was conflict, lack of clear roles, and a history of false starts in finding a new direction.

This organization needed to build trust – trust in leadership as well as trust in their decision-making processes. In the process of finding a new identity and future direction, many organizations conduct inventories of assets or skills. This is not a bad thing to do; we did it in this case, too.  But, we went beyond merely cataloging shared values and assets. We got people talking about them. And about what mattered to them as individuals.

We designed a series of conversations to begin to build trust within small groups of individuals.  These groups reported out their conversations to the wider organization. One of the common comments from the small groups was how good it was to talk among themselves in a thoughtful and supportive way. We gradually increased the number of people in each conversation. As the groups got larger, we changed the structure of the conversation to make sure that all voices were heard equally and that groups learned how to synthesize the essence of their own talking and listening. By the time the process was complete, leaders were able to synthesize the reflections of all who participated.

We didn’t start the conversation with “What should we do together?” Instead we started with the question “Who are you?” We asked people to share their own personal perspectives in response to some distinctive questions. This personal piece was an important building block. Then we moved into the question “Who are we together?” After these two questions had been satisfied, we asked “What do we want to do together? What is our shared work?”

In his book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, author and consultant Peter Block says that the “small group is the unit of transformation.” In this instance, listening together in small groups has led to a powerful outcome that will guide one organization for some time to come.