Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 3.

Installment 3 of my post-e2conf thoughts is about the Help! Marcomm does not get it. panel.

The panel was moderated by Maggie Fox, CEO of the SocialMedia Group and live tweeted here. One of my co-panelists, Robin Bordoli prepared an excellent write-up already. So I’ll simply add a little of my perspective about the panel and the topic.

I’ll admit we all found the title of the panel very challenging and we also had a difficult time coming up with a set of messages that we would convey – or argue about. First of all, what exactly is Marcomm? Who said they don’t get it? What kind of help can we provide? To whom are we providing this help?

Marcomm refers to marketing and communications. The diversity of activities covered by the term marcomm is great – as is the way companies organize their marcomm activities. There are marketing folks who generate leads, others who interact with the press (PR) and analysts (AR), still others who focus on the development and protection of a brand. Larger companies have an internal marcomm groups whose work could include executive speech writing, internal newsletter editing, or managing the content on the intranet portal. So which marcomm were we talking about?

What is the it that they don’t get? That socially mediated channels of communications are important? – I think they know that. In many cases they are the ones who initiate the conversation about understanding the socially mediated channels. Does pushing back on hype mean they don’t get it? Maybe they get it so much that they are testing the applicability of the hype to their environment? And for those who resist change, isn’t that to be expected?

We discussed these questions and found that Robin Bordoli, the CEO of Headmix leveraged how well BestBuy folks do “get it” to help them create one of the best Social Media stories out there.  Marius Ciortea spends his days at Oracle making sure that everyone there “get’s it” too – his work there impressed all of us.  Chris Almond and I had similar experiences working with internal marcomm folks in our previous companies (he at IBM and I at Fidelity Investments). We were each successful in our Enterprise 2.0 activities and figured out how to work toward shared goals with marcomm.

We all had battle wounds, but we did not share those details on the panel. Rather we focused on providing some advice that might help you.  Robin’s blog articulated the lessons well, so I’ll only add three additional points that I recall from the panel:

1. The trust relationship will make or break your success. Your CEO buys your loyalty with every paycheck, you are expected to be a brand ambassador.  Yet, your CMO prefers that professional communicators do the talking in public. So there is a natural tension here. Your CMO will not help you subvert his role. But the company cannot stop you from talking (usually), and probably does not want to. Your executives want a corporate voice, not noisy employees. Marcomm is learning that they cannot control their customers. Customers talk about you – so you need to figure out how to make that work for you. Employees should love their customers and empathize with them too – but remember your loyalty to your paycheck provider. As long as marcomm sees you as an ally, you’ll have a sanctioned voice too.
2. Build something together to make it stand for you. I found that the most important part of having Social Media guidelines in your company is the process of creating those guidelines – not the actual guidelines themselves. Why? Because the guidelines are simple – they usually boil down to “Don’t be foolish and don’t hurt the company.” But the process of setting up the guidelines is not simple at all. The very process of figuring out who needs to be invited to the table to discuss social media guidelines is itself a big deal. You’ll find that more people care about this than you might have thought. And they will share concerns that you might not have considered. So take the time to form and storm – since you’ll start to understand more about your company and its values.
3. Manage the transparency balance. Some people approach information with the “need to know” bias – this means you only share what you have to with people you must. It’s a bias that protects information at the expense of productivity. Web 2.0’s social value promotes public, open sharing. It’s amazing what people will share on-line these days. Enterprise 2.0 does not promote sharing everything; rather it’s about resetting the balance by leveraging behaviors and technologies that can enable sharing and protecting. Part of that balance is also developing a sense of consistency across the business. If you only have an externally facing social media campaign inviting transparency and openness, but your internal operations are all silo-ed, then you run the real risk of simply exposing your silos. What this means: fix the business before showing it off. Social media for marketing is important, but when you have well-developed internal social-workplace channels, then the internal and external efforts work together well.

The best part of the panel was that the advice that came from one of the participants. About 45 minutes into the talk, John Nielson raised his hand and started to list some very thoughtful advice. We all clapped.  He should have been on the panel!

So does marcomm get it?  I’m not gonna say yes or no.  It’s really a silly question.  But the conversation about engaging marcomm is not silly at all.  After all, how can you encourage collaboration and shut out an important part of your company?

Tagged as: collaboration, conference, Enterprise 2.0, marketing