Everyone
everywhere is selling “social media” products and services. I often
wonder which part of social media are they selling.
In an earlier post titled “Do You Sell Social Media Snake Oil” we said “Using
social media effectively demands mind-sets and capabilities that are
unfamiliar and sometimes even counter intuitive to many business
managers. Business managers should allow themselves and the
entire organization time to unlearn and rethink everything before they
“jump into” social media. Most are following those who haven’t
unlearned and rethought how, where, when,who, why and what they
communicate which ultimately produces results, good bad and
indifferent.”
Which Part Do You Sell?
In another post titled 4 Component Functions of Social Media we suggested the functions are:
- Administration
- Listening & Learning
- Thinking and Planning
- Engagement & Measurement
Each function produces value to the preceding function and value is
passed back and forth between each function in the form of feedback
data for improvement. Thus, unless you measure the qualitative issues
that create the qualitative impact you cannot change or produce the end
results effectively.
Knowledge is required to maximize the effectiveness of each function
systemically. In other words not syncing all functions together with
the right talent and knowledge sub-optimizes performance of the whole.
Sub-optimization is wasteful and can hurt an entire effort while
producing short-term results that could be misleading.
Selling or Managing Parts?
Everything has parts and without all the parts you really can’t
produce an end product or service that a market wants to consistently
consume. Too many companies are using different parts of “social media” but not using them holistically. Instead the market is filled with snake oil salesmen calling themselves social media gurus but few can offer a “systemic approach” to all four functions listed below.
There are daily if not hourly stories, developments and new releases
all related to this thing called social media. Unless you can first
understand your system you cannot properly put any new information,
new technology or innovation into proper context. Without a system you
cannot decide the value of any new information or knowledge because it
doesn’t fit into a functional process rather it may or may not fit into
your system.
What Does Your System Look Like?
Whether an person or an organization you are managing a system
aimed at results. Results come from a series of interrelated processes
working together to enable you or your organizations to create or reach
the desired results. Each process should be seamlessly aligned with
other related processes so each works in sync with the other
interactively. Otherwise you end up producing waste, rework, failures
and increased cost. Worse yet if you use social media without having a
system you could alienate your market, internally and externally over
the long haul.
The illustration below depicts the “systemic functions”
(parts/processes) of social media. This is an overview and not complete
but relevant to thinking correctly. We believe that unless you “connect” the parts and do so effectively and efficiently you will not produce desired results over the long haul. What part of social media sells? All of them connected together.
Inter-connected Value Creation
So we ask, which process creates the greatest impact on social media ROI?
Notice the end result in the graphic above reflects that results comes
from all the inter-related decisions on how well each process/function
is connected. Seth Godin says social media is a process. I’d say it is a system of inter-connected processes.
In order to make good decisions each process and all the
people involved in the process needs the relevant knowledge. People
given the right knowledge, the opportunity to continuously learn and processes to apply knowledge enables good decisions that produce results!
See video of this post here