The New Battle: Sociology vs Technology

Brian Solis has been preaching “it’s not technology it’s sociology” for awhile now and I am finally following my gut and joining the fold. Working for a corporation making strides to fully implement a social media strategy I finally had the slap in the face moment that the battle has changed from a battle with the company to a battle with participating individuals social habits.

After putting the final touches on our Facebook and Twitter profiles, all on top of currently running blog program, a little resistance began to surface. The participation requirements came into question along with how we are reporting and tracking tasks. And everything has come back to social behavior and sense of social responsibilities.

Some love blogging, others hate it and the rest see the value in doing it so they do it, but lack caring. So, how do you get everyone to buy into the same plan? Well, you don’t. You have to cater to individual talents and perspective on careers for a successful blog. There becomes a point of too much behavioral change for some to accept this shift. And this is also a starting point for where to start your measurements.

Are you goingto measure results or are you going to measure behavior? To add to that are you willing to trade results for training behavior? There you have it, once you start measuring behavior and taking in account behavioral change you have left technology and entered sociology.

Numbers Aren’t What They Used to Be

In reading a post by JoshBernoff on measuring the value of social applications he brings a great point up and one Iam currently struggling with, how do you measure social initiatives?

How can you measure something that nobody measures or truly understands? Well, you use the old fashion way of measurement, creating outcome objectives.

Numbers and statistics are great to help justify a business case, but that is not always an option and with limited meaningful numbers availiable for social projects they could be the achillies heel of the proposal. By making solid objectives and following the space you plan to enter befor hand their can be a lot of insight into a rogue venture into a new world.

I will continue the research around my project and will hopefully be able to provide some insight.

Corporate Social Buy In

With corporations beginning to utilize social tools in marketing and PR efforts, who is shouldering the responsibility of committing others? With the countless tools out there to make a company or subject matter expert popular, who informs them their time is now confiscated for social outreach? Now that we have social tools so easily accessible as they are we as PR/marketing folks naturally plan elaborate campaigns and wonderful plans for these tools. But, sometimes that’s as far as our participations goes. Where does the rest of the work come from?
Well, co-workers, the actual subject matter experts, and the corporate heads. Now, to coincide with other initiatives you are stuck with asking more out of representatives to fulfill not only the usual campaign A, but also the new and wonderful campaign B. This could raise some concerns with participants who are not familiar with the format or comfortable with the life cycle of a social campaign killing any plans.
This is where we come in and introduce the mediums available to a social campaign to build comfort and pitch the plan like any other plan to maximize everyone’s abilities. If you have any uncertainties in the process or unable to answer questions the plan dies again. Making us as professionals responsible for building our understanding to make sure the plans and goals we have set with social PR can be met with knowledge and understanding to pass along to the big hitters. An asset like social media outlets are neither something to pass up nor something to be taken lightly. There is value here and we are responsible to showing decision makers the value.