Training and Process Management
I’m was pleased to see that the new Baldrige Performance Excellence criteria includes Social Media for Customer Focus. I’m expecting 2011 to be a breakout year for Social Media across all industries including commercial (B2B). This news is just part of the rumbling as the big wave begins.
What types of questions are you hearing from B2B regarding Social Media?
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award has been a great American institution for many years. Each year Baldrige applicants apply the excellence criteria, undergo examination and some are selected for the award. In my experience, just the process of internally assessing each area of the criteria can make a significant difference in an organization’s performance. Over 50% of today’s applicants are in the Healthcare industry.
The new 2011 – 2012 criteria includes Social Media as part of it’s customer focus excellence. More and more organizations are realizing that when applied properly, Social Media tools can significantly help companies achieve their success goals across all departments. Social Media is much more than marketing and PR.
Changes to Criteria:
http://www.baldrige.com/baldrige/baldrige_process/new-2011-2012-baldrige-criteria-available/
Complete Social Media Integration occurs when companies leverage these tools in all aspects of their business.
If you’re in the Baton Rouge area, I’m speaking on the new Baldrige Criteria and Social Media on January 13th, at the Baton Rouge Bluebonnet Public Library, 6-8 PM for the American Society for Quality. You’re invited.
Why Take the Baldrige Journey?
Excellence is a Journey, Not a Destination
Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to effectively and efficiently meet their missions and achieve their visions. Thousands of organizations use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to guide their enterprises, improve performance, and get sustainable results. This proven improvement and innovation framework offers your organization an integrated approach to key management areas:
- Leadership
- Strategic planning
- Customer focus
- Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management
- Workforce focus
- Process management
- Results
Read more at www.nist.gov
In the 90’s much of my consulting and training work involved integrating new technologies into existing operations and transitioning from legacy to new technologies. One size did not fit all. Each project involved similar best practices but unique applications by business unit.
Social Media has started to develop some best practices however integrating it into your operation requires forethought and proper planning.
Each profession (or business unit) has specific, often subtle differences in application or integration of Social Media for maximum benefit. HR, Compliance, Legal, Communications, Operations, Sales, Marketing, et al. will use Social Media differently to achieve the best results for their organization.
Next week I’m teaching a one day course on Social Media for Sales Professionals. I’ll begin with the basics and then my colleague Carl Herrick will introduce the Sandler Sales Process. When I developed this course I included a discussion on the sales process because of the magnifying effects of Social Media. If you have a poor (or no) sales process, adding Social Media will expose and magnify your weaknesses.
After discussing the sales process we’ll spend the bulk of the course on integrating Social Media into your sales process, generating leads and referrals, and personal branding.
What subtleties have you noticed for your profession in your use of Social Media?
Getting more interaction from your Social Media audience is tricky. I’m not a big fan of “tricks” used to force interaction. I often say, I would rather have 50 genuinely interested advocates than 10,000 empty names.
In areas where Social Media is still young you may have to teach your audience how to interact. It’s ok to occasionally ask your audience to perform an action, “please comment below”, “click like”, “subscribe” etc. Don’t assume your audience knows that these actions are desired and helpful.
The best way to teach your audience what to do is by example. Spend some “Social Capital” and your audience will see you and learn. Comment on blogs and participate in communities, click like, retweet, stumble a page, etc. The more you do it, the more interaction you will eventually get.
How knowledgeable are the people in your area or audience? Social Media participation is growing fast in Baton Rouge, LA but the participants are still learning.
Accenting the Unique, Rich Personality of South Louisiana in the Social Media Sphere
A three-city tour of seminars and events featuring local SM professionals and headlining weblebrity and Social Media Superstar Amber Osborne, a.k.a.
The purpose of these events is to raise awareness of the use of Social Media for businesses of all kinds, dispel myths and show how Social Media can be fun and effective for business, and to benefit community based non-profit organizations.
In each city, a Social Media conference with a panel of speakers. The headline speaker is weblebrity/social media superstar from Tampa, FL, Amber Osborne a.k.a. “Miss Destructo” (www.missdestructo.com). The week before this tour, Amber will be in Austin, TX as a panelist at SXSW, the largest media/music conference in North America (www.sxsw.com). [Read more…]
If you want to be the social media hero at your office, start by listening for those first few weeks. “Listening”? What the heck do I mean by “listening”? I mean just look up people in your area, in your industry, in your company and competitor companies and see what they’re saying. Do some searches about your product or service, the communities where you have offices or stores, the vendors that visit your locations. Find some blogs that interest you and some that are good business resources for you. Listen to the tone people use when talking to each other; get a feel for the culture of social networking.
And then… jump in. Talk to people. Answer some questions. Join in on a chat. Ask some questions about how to do what you’re trying to do. If you’re new to Twitter, ask Twitter users for some tips. Join a LinkedIn group and introduce yourself to other members. Get into the flow.
Don’t walk up to people (virtually speaking) and hawk your wares; door-to-door sales went out with double-knit suits. But just talk to people. Spend some time – that could mean weeks or months – building relationships and building a community. Networking. You didn’t know everyone at your first Chamber meeting either, but you put out your hand and said, “Hi, I’m ___. How are you?” Do that.
If you are given an assignment at work, say to create a presentation or to write a report, it is completely within the realm of that project and expected that you would spend time researching the topic and collecting stats, etc before just throwing something together and tossing it out there. You and your boss would have egg on your faces in the conference room if you just slapped some half-complete sentences on a PowerPoint slide and stood in front of the room pretending that you know everything. It’s SOP to do some homework first.
Well, the same holds true for the project called social media. But sadly, many companies are not doing due diligence because they have a pre-conceived notion about what Facebook means – or doesn’t mean – to their advertising or marketing campaign. They pick the youngest person in the office (because social media is for kids, right?) or the one who happens to have time (from the boss’s perspective anyway), and tells them to make it pay off within a few weeks. The boss doesn’t believe it will, and their plan is to prove it worthless and go back to business as usual. But they set it up to fail this way.
If that guy (or gal) quickly creates a page or two on the only social sites he’s heard of, starts announcing the company’s marketing blurbs and advertising slogans, and clicks a bunch of “we can get you 10 thousand followers by lunch” links, he’s going to do that boss a favor. He might as well buy 50 grand in radio spots and have them air silence, because in the long run the results won’t be all that different.
