Social Media - Can you do an Inception on yourself?

As large organizations struggle to come to grips with whether to use Social Media and then how to use it – the world watches its power in the Arab world and America’s political system gets ready to deploy it in full force in the 2012 election.

This is how important Social Media is to the regime in Egypt. They shut it down knowing its power. We don’t know how events will unfold, but there is no doubt that the autocrats that run most of the Middle East are in grave peril and that both the spark and then the fire that has been unleashed has been carried by Social Media. The real power has been given to the people.

Now think of your organization. Just as the power in a nation has now been given to the people, the real power of your Brand has also been given to the people. If you are not listening to the people who use Social Media and then interacting with them, you are in the same kind of peril. If you think that you can fool the people about the quality of your offering, you are in peril.

The new era is here for organizations and for all of us. You can’t hide anymore. Your life and work is now public. If your life or work don’t fit, then you will be exposed.

Think that this is just a Middle East issue? Well our politicians don’t.

The 2012 election will be the Social Media Election. Why? Because, the politicians know that they will not get a second chance – they know that they will have to be in the stream. Proof? Who is the most popular man in Washington right now? Twitter’s Rep on the Hill.

This is only a start. The election coverage will be dominated by the web.

The New Hampshire primary is over a year away, and the first major candidate has yet to formally declare. Just don’t tell that to outlets like Politico, Talking Points Memo and RealClearPolitics, which are already planning to smother the 2012 campaign trail in a way they could never have imagined four years ago when they had far smaller staffs of bloggers and shoestring budgets.

With an eye toward earning greater respectability, this crop of political Web sites is hoping for more than just page views and traffic-driving links from the Drudge Report. They want to establish themselves as the Blogs on the Bus.

“We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor and co-founder. “Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan.”

Politico will host, with NBC News and Telemundo, the first debate of the campaign season on May 2, getting a head start on a season of face-offs that is already remarkably busy. (Politico edged ahead of Fox News, which scheduled a debate for May 5.)

This is how the new news organizations will do it but now even a citizen can do as good a job – have a look here at how one person, Andy Carvin, covered the Tuscon events while looking after his 2 children that Saturday

You will see that one well connected person can use their network and a few tools to offer up an insight to rival any offered by even the New York Times.

So in this context, where does your organization stand. I am sure that you are doing something now. But what is the relative importance that you have put on becoming expert at this? When I say expert I don’t mean by having a Twitter or Facebook strategy to simply push out your message. I mean this:

• Have you been able to accept what all of this means to your culture – that you can no longer control the message or your brand or that you can hide problems?
• That your number 1 job is to “Listen in Real Time” to what people are saying and oing abut things that matter to you. Research is transformed by this into a need for “Intelligence”. Think now like a General at war. You can and must know minute by minute what is going on.
• Your second job is to interact in a human way with both your allies out there and with those that have problems with you. No more Corporate Speak – No more “Your call is important to us”. You have to be authentic at the SM interface – in fact you have to lose that language and approach in every part of your external interaction
• The hardest job of all is that you have to make the new relationship with those outside your organization the same as the one that you have inside. And here is where the challenge lies.

Getting good at using Social Media is not about using the tools. They are easy to use as tools. They are cheap to install. They are the cheapest tools you have ever deployed.

But to use them well demands a revolution in organizational culture and this is not hard – it is very very very very hard to pull off.

It is as hard as any real life change such as eating in an entirely different way that is based on a new lifestyle. Or not marrying a clone of your first failed partner.

Using Social Media is all about giving up your old identity of control. The old you has to die, before you can do this well.

So there can be no cookie cutter – 5 best steps – template – Best Practice approach. There can’t be for giving up alcohol either.

But there is an approach to making great life changes that does have a high success rate. It is based in these steps:

• You – the CEO – have to “know” in your gut that it is a life or death decision. That your organization will never amount to anything now unless you can make this life change. If you don’t feel this – you are not serious.
• You have to know that you cannot demand this of your self or of anyone else. You cannot part the Red Sea with your command. if you still think you can “Drive Change” – you are not serious.
• You have to make the change in relationship and how you use power yourself. How you are will be the virus. If you don’t understand that this is all about you how you are  - you are not serious
• It helps to have a someone close to you who has done this – in AA it is a sponsor – in late 16th Century Europe it may have been your Jesuit confessor – someone close who will not judge you – who has shared all you doubts – who will never reveal to anyone what they have learned from you – someone you can call at any time. A true friend who cares about YOU. If you don’t understand that this is the model of the relationships that you will have to make your own with others – you are not serious.
• It helps to start small – for all will learn by creating new habits. Our work creates new habits and new habits create a new “Normal”  and our new Normal is the new culture. If you want to start big, you don’t understand yet.
• Small experiments also create other evangelists in your organization and so give you the network power top spread the change – again – not because you have commanded it but because – you planted the seed in your own persona – you have been your own “Inception”. If you don’t understand how much you need willing partners – you have missed it all!

There is now work that is more difficult than this. But what choice do you have?

via fastforwardblog.com