This is the second part of a this post on what scares companies away from ‘joining in the conversation‘ and how they can learn to get over it.
FEAR: Losing individual status.
When your company strategy starts to be dictated by your market rather than by certain individuals within the organisation, those people can feel threatened by the loss of power that they perceive from the shift.
Given that these people are probably quite senior and influential, this means that they’re in a great position to undermine and derail your efforts to become truly customer-centric.
HANDLING IT: Appeal to their logic and ego.
If you’re leading the company through this change, you need to take these steps:
- Reassure ‘threatened’ employees that they still have a valuable role to play, even if their purpose has changed. Make it clear how they can still add value, even if they’re not calling the shots on product features.
- Role model the kind of new behaviour you need to see in others, whether it’s talking to customers, paying attention to data about customer behaviour and so on.
- Give people as many reasons to get on board as possible. Describe examples of success, incentivise where appropriate, draw a line on what kind of behaviour is unacceptable if necessary.
I I by 67Bosely
FEAR: Being unable to measure return on investment.
Many companies worry that time spent talking could be wasted, or at best that they won’t be able to see the value they get from it.
A lot of the activities associated with Sales 2.0 don’t appear to have direct, tangible outcomes and that’s a difficult concept to sell to the CFO.
HANDLING IT: Get a new set of metrics.
As the field of social media develops, you can rest assured that the market for metric tools grows alongside it. Spending effort measuring activity is in my opinion somewhat silly – for instance, if you’re charting the number of Tweets your intern is sending out per day, you have deeper issues than I can help you with.
However, there are plenty of measures for engagement and influence out there which can put a return on your time.
Lauren Fisher has an excellent list of free social media measurement tools that you can use to make sure your efforts are helping the business.
Some other resources you might find useful include:
- A beginner’s guide to using social media.
- A shorter list of tools with guidance on how to use them.
- Discussion of a new model for social media measurement.
So keep your eyes open and jump in. Listen and talk. Let me know how you get on.
