Social Culture:The New Culture

Let's face it-in order to have a social media strategy developed for your organization, you need to have a social culture. The American Red Cross is a great example showing how an organization can become a social culture. Wendy Harman, a social media integrator, was hired at the American Red Cross to increase organizational transparency. From their goals, they increased internal adoption of social media and created a shift in the organization's relationships with their publics. Starting right there-they earn a gold star! There social media tactics allowed both positive and negative comments because you actually do need both! Negative comments provided them an opportunity to respond back to their audience and improve on what they were doing. Also, by developing a social media policy, they were allowing their social media to expand way past their expectations. It advised employees on how they could and couldn't use social media, meaning now they could actually use social media. Here is how you can write your own social media guide for your organization, provided by Inc.com.

Organizations with social cultures follow these strategies:

• Use social media to have two-way conversations
• Embrace mistakes and take risks
• Reward learning and reflection
• "Try it and fix it as you go" approach
• Have open discussions to avoid organization inertia
• Understand that individuality and informality do not indicate a lack of caring or quality
• Trust staff to make decisions and respond

By having a variety of open social media channels allowing you to spend a lot of time talking to people outside the organization, creates real conversations. You get to know what people truly think and believe, whether it be positive or negative. Like we said before, they are both good responses! Of course, fears of a social culture expand way beyond the point of negative comments. Organizations have always had the mindset that they need to control everything that happens inside and outside their territory for fear of making a public mistake. Organizations need to teach their leaders and staff that by living without these fears and learning to talk about these issues will produce a much more effective outcome in their social media world. Here is an example of how Kodak uses the power of social media to increase their PR efforts:

Kodak uses social media in all four areas of engagement, measures, content creation and distribution. Learn from them!

When considering a social strategy, organizations must consider the following questions:

• What are the appropriate boundaries between public and private information?
• How do we balance our interest in being open with the technical needs to safeguard against cyber attacks?
• How much do we have to be "on" with social media?
• Who should operate the channels?