Nelson Piedra Flickr Photo
Charlene Li of Forrester Research, lead a session called "Social Strategy for Revolutionaries.She picked this topic because the SXSW crowd are at the vanguard of the social media revolution. She started off with a few stories that defined what she meant by the term groundswell. "A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions and corporations."
She shared the POST strategy, the "ladder of participation" and explained the technographics chart. She also told some stories that illustrated different objectives or outcomes of how businesses were using social media tools. She talked about how important "revolutionaries" were to the adoption of social media tools behind the firewall. The term "revolutionary" is what I've been calling the "network weaver" for external strategies and what Nancy White has called the "technology steward" for the internal revolutionary.
There was a lot of resonated from what I've seen with nonprofits - particularly the story of stealth adoption of a wiki at Intel. (It is similar to the story of water wiki at the UN).
Key Takeaway points
- Find the people most passionate about developing relationships
- Educate your executives - Facebook on Friday - the benefits of how the technologies work and reach business objectives
- Put someone in charge - responsibility - up and down the line
- Define a box - policies and processes - what we will and will don't do - what is the worst thing that could happen.
- Make it safe(er) to fail -- risk adverse - you will fail, blow ups, mistakes - how you can increase the risk adverse
- Start small, but think big (reiterated over and over)
- Make social strategy the responsibility of every single employee - it's everywhere
- Patient - cultural change does take time
- If you don't feel quesy, you're not moving fast enough
- Letting go of control, mindset and habits for collaboration
sounds right up my alley! good luck in your upcoming panel with Rachel, Ed, et al...
Posted by: Beth Dunn | March 09, 2008 at 01:58 PM
good luck in your upcoming panel with Rachel and nice design
Posted by: simon | March 10, 2008 at 01:54 AM
wow! Charlene Li sure gets around, I just heard her last week at the Invent Your Future Conference at MicroSoft w/Gina from ning and Ann Crady from Baby Center talking about leveraging social networking sites! Since I'm a newbie in that domain, I'm going to http://netsquared.meetup.com/1/calendar/7323125/
tmrw. night in hopes of learning more on same! Can't wait to hear about your panel...
Posted by: Shaping Youth | March 10, 2008 at 11:31 AM
Thanks for the recap, Beth. Sounds like a great session.
Posted by: Drew Bernard | March 10, 2008 at 02:45 PM