How Social is Your Culture?

PC World — I've ranted before against the perils of delegated social strategies. You know: Management decides it's time to get into social media, and appoints some whippersnapper to the task. The potential perils with this approach are many and severe, but even under good circumstances, this approach comes with a steep lost-opportunity cost. And that -- even if we ignore all the ways a lone-gunman social strategy can backfire on a good company -- is a very compelling reason to spend less energy thinking about your business's social strategy and more energy thinking about your company's social culture.

In a delightfully insightful opinion post on Fast Company last week, Bulldog Drummond CEO Shawn Parr advanced the observation that "culture eats strategy for lunch." The point, in brief, is that no matter how much strategic thinking you do, the culture of your company will either bolster your success or unravel your elegantly wrought plans. And while Parr didn't talk about social specifically, it occurred to me that this is a great opportunity for some dialog about the overwhelming impact of company culture on the effectiveness of social campaigns.

Good leaders know how to delegate, so there's no great shock in the observation that most business leaders offload social media projects to underlings, henchmen, and Twitter-savvy interns. But as in so many areas of 21st-century business, the anachronistic nature of the social web has changed the rules and turned the delegation instinct into a liability.

Here's why:

The kinds of interactions that build really valuable relationships -- as opposed to canned or forced marketing messages -- between brands and their followers require a real connection to the people behind the brand. At the very least, that means that the people whose fingertips are typing out tweets and responding to users in forums and other online communities need to have the power and autonomy to respond as directly and effectively as possible to your customers on the web. In a more ideal scenario, it means the CEO should be one of those people, monitoring the socialverse and representing the brand through direct engagement.

Does that mean the top brass should redirect all its energies to surfing Twitter and Facebook feeds? Of course not. But there's no question that when business leadership is in the loop on social activity as a matter of daily business, companies are more effective at responding to crises and opportunities in the social sphere. Conversely, in my observation, if your top executives aren't directly involved in your social efforts, your company's prospects for social success are limited.

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