Does each one of your tweets require a multi-step approval process within your company before posting on Twitter?
Are all of your Facebook status updates products of rigorous review processes by your communications, legal and policy departments?
Does the above result in social networks in which you’re only posting one or two times per week?
Then maybe social media isn’t for you (or your company.) Or, more to the point, maybe your organization needs a communications climate change.
If you think the above examples are overly-exagerrated, think again. Unfortunately, we’ve run across several organizations in recent weeks where those examples held true. And yet these organizations were left scratching their heads as to why their online communications programs weren’t bearing fruit.
In their minds, they needed to invest more money in bells and whistles. New apps. Fresh widgets.
Wrong.
It’s not about the widgets. It’s about the content.
We’re living in the age of real-time, folks. While that may sound scary, it’s reality. Are you ready to adapt?
It may only have been a few years ago that you had the luxury of spending an entire afternoon running your press releases through a groupthink approval process before hitting the send button on your fax machine.
But times have changed. We have to be able to react within seconds, not hours.
And different communications platforms require different discussions. People on Twitter and Facebook don’t simply want focus group-tested talking points. They want a discussion. They want a conversation.
So, what we normally tell organizations is this: either change your communications climate, or stop embarrassing yourself with a failed social media experiment.
Otherwise, you’re throwing good money after bad, and tarnishing your brand in the process.
Are you read for the climate change?