Member-to-Member

Organizational Identity in the Age of Social Media

I’m very late in picking up a conversational thread with Ben Martin that I dropped in Feb(!) about how organizations can and should participate in the social web. I need to set the record straight if nothing else that Ben and I are in strong agreement on the problem – if not the solution.  

In short, Ben and I agree that, as he says so eloquently, organizations are becoming "conversationally impotent in today's marketplace" to the extent that they don't let their employees and customers champion them in personal and individual ways from within the social web (and in the real world as well). Where Ben and I may not be in agreement is that I do not think the solution is to send these employees and customers forth unprepared, unmonitored and unchecked to shape the public image of the organization according to their own personality because there are very real downsides to the organization in doing this, and because some of the potential upside may be missed as well.

This fundamental dilemma - how to enable an organization's broader audience to carry forth its identity while still maintaining some level of control over the dialog and "company line" is the essential challenge for strategic marketers in the days, months and years ahead; and how we handle it will render us either essential or irrelevant to our organizations' success in the marketplace. Personally, I plan to be on the side of "essential."

Branding in the Era of Social Media

Pundits and hacks alike have been pondering the impact of social media on the mysterious yet powerful discipline of Branding. I am no different and am cooking on a truly brilliant theory of my own (really, I am - stay tuned) about this multifaceted subject. But before I get to brilliance, I wanted to point to a dialog going on among ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership members on its marketing list serve because - thanks to Ben Martin and his insightful blog response to the discussion - it illustrates a specific and yet important example of what modern 'brand police' are having to deal with.

Automating Serendipity via LinkedIn: Quantifying Social Media Efficiency

A few weeks back I sent out a question to my LinkedIn network asking if people found value in Facebook and/or LinkedIn and inviting them to join my Facebook network. The answers were really interesting and I made some new Facebook friends (see below), but I found a little gem in them that proved LinkedIn can be more efficient than serendipity (the occurrence of accidental fortune, not the open source blog system). One of my contacts helped her husband find his job through a LinkedIn contact, thereby demonstrating the potential for huge networking efficiencies that this service and other social media have to offer. Who would have thought we could ever have automated serendipity to achieve tangible business value?

Here’s the anecdote: My friend’s husband had sent in a resume for a job and waited two weeks. Nothing. So she got on LinkedIn and found someone in her network who knew the CTO of the company. She asked her friend for an introduction to the CTO. Her contact was happy to make the introduction to the CTO, who checked to find out the HR department had no record of the resume. Her husband submitted his resume through the CTO, got an interview and was hired.

This happy sequence of events could just as easily taken place through a serendipitous meeting at a business lunch or happy hour, except that it didn’t. And that’s what’s intriguing.

The serendipity of the happy hour was essentially “automated” via the wife’s LinkedIn search, making LinkedIn serendipity’s not-so-little helper. And, according to my analysis, if her husband’s new job was truly meant to be – the fates bound and determined to help him get it through LinkedIn or through a happenstance social encounter - the LinkedIn approach could still be as much as one day and 13 minutes more efficient. See my analysis below. :-)