5 Ways Social Media Can Enhance Your Change Initiative

Time sink? Shiny new tool? Change accelerator?

Social media can be all three. Those who dismiss it just as a shiny new tool that sucks time do so at their peril. Why? First, of all, organizations are becoming more communal, thanks to social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Chatter are changing how we communicate and interact with each other, inside and outside of the workplace.

Many employees, especially the digital natives, expect to communicate electronically with their co-workers. Just watch them text, post, or send instant messages. And if their employer doesn’t provide a sanctioned tool, they’ll use their smart phones, either company-issued or personal.

These electronic expectations have an impact on those of us implementing change initiatives inside organizations. We need to view social media as our friend, not foe, when considering what communication channels to use.

Here are five ways social media can help you with your change initiative.

1. Improved clarity. Being clear about what you’re doing and where you’re going is the essence of any business strategy, especially change. You’ve got to be able to articulate it to yourself before you can start to explain it to others. If you can define what you’re doing in 140 characters—the length of a basic Twitter message— you’re on your way to achieving clarity—assuming others understand what you’re saying. (Just as with any communication, it helps to test to make sure your message is being received.)

2. More transparency. When you’re clear, you’re able to have a more open and honest relationship—that is be more transparent— with employees and other constituents because they know what’s going on. And when you’re communicating directly either face-to-face or through tools such as Twitter, Instant Messaging, or texting, you’re interacting directly without filters. You’ll be able to build street cred with employee audiences that often trust their peers for information over authority figures.

3. Greater inclusiveness. With social media, it’s easy to involve more people in more time zones compared to other communication methods. You can build a platform of participation and invite more people into the conversation, which has multiple advantages. More people can ask questions as well as weigh in with their opinions. You’ll also hear a richer diversity of voices, which can influence you. After all effective communication is a reciprocal action.

4. Increased speed. The immediacy of social media gives the message—and the change initiative— a sense of urgency. It’s happening NOW (or within the past few hours). The message and the initiative don’t feel dated like a newsletter, report, or other static communication. If you combine the timeliness with a clear message and a strong call to action, you improve your chances of breaking through the information clutter, getting people’s attention, and motivating them to act. This is key for any change initiative that requires a change in behavior.

5. Real-time data. Built into the technology of most social media tools is a strong search engine. So you’ve got the ability to collect rich data about what people are saying—in real time. By analyzing that, you can fine-tune your change approach, including refining your messages, adapting your interventions, and testing new tactics.

When you embrace social media as an effective change agent, you can reap the benefits of greater clarity, stronger unity, and improved agility. In turn, these three people factors help accelerate strategy execution in your organization, according to the authors of Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution

Plus, you’re engaging with employees, which helps them keep focused on all of your key priorities, not just your current change initiative. Just make sure you’re staying focused too. After all, neuroscientist Brian Knutson is wondering whether the survival of the fittest now means the survival of the most focused. With the Internet and all of its interesting interruptions, we have so many temptations for our time.

So what’s your favorite time sink app? Oops. I should be asking: What’s your experience with social media and organizational change? Also, please join me in Orlando May 1 -4 at the global ACMP (Association of Change Management Professionals) conference. The keynoters are John Kotter, Admiral Thad Allen, and Daryl Conner. I’m speaking on “Tweet This: Leveraging social media for organizational change.”

About Liz

Liz Guthridge of Connect Consulting Group works with leaders to influence employees to get on board with change. She helps leaders gain clarity around change so they can share their vision, explain their goals, and clearly articulate their “ask” of their team members, peers, and other employees who often don’t work for them.

Liz has years of experience turning change initiatives from exercises in frustration to success stories, including counseling leaders on how to build their credibility. Liz also is an early adopter of social media, successfully using it in her own business as well as advising her clients and their workforces on how to maximize its effectiveness. As a change consultant to salesforce.com, she’s been using Chatter since the company launched it in early 2010.

You can email Liz at liz.guthridge@connectconsultinggroup.com, text her at 510.918.5322, or follow her at www.twitter.com/lizguthridge. She also blogs at www.connectconsultinggroup.com/category/blog

Letter from: BAodn Director of Technology

BAodn’s mission is about supporting a community of organization development practitioners. As Director of Technology & Infrastructure for BAodn, I am focusing on how we can best use technology to forward that mission in two ways. One is making sure our board members and volunteers have access to tools & resources they need to communicate and get work done on behalf of the organization. Second is improving services we provide to members and to the OD community via technologies like our website, our membership directory, e-mail newsletters, the BAodn blog, and social media.

When Paul Konasewich, last year’s president, posted the description for the board position of technology director it said, “In many ways, running BAodn is like running a small company”. This is so true! As an all-volunteer organization, operating primarily in the virtual world, we face particular challenges with coordinating schedules, sharing knowledge, and getting the right information to the right people without inundating folks with e-mails. These are not just technical decisions about what tools to use, but cultural and style decisions that depend on who we are and how we like to get and transmit information. Add to that the fact that we want to maximize efficiency on a small budget. Luckily there is a wealth of choices for online collaboration out there, many of them free such as Google docs and groups.

We are not alone in grappling with these issues. I shared some e-mails recently with Liz Smith, programs coordinator of the Chesapeake Bay Organizational Development Network (CBODN). She was soliciting information from other OD networks about what business systems and collaboration software we all use (She will be sharing her results with us!). Again, one side of the equation is researching what the technologies can do. The second side is what works for us, considering who we are and what we need. What I hope to accomplish is to use technology wisely where it can help, but not change old tech for new just for the sake of modernizing. For some things a regular e-mail to a decision-making group is still the best way to coordinate!

Choices we make about our outward-facing technologies are not straight-forward either. It’s easy enough to say, for example, we should have a Twitter account, or that we should add certain bells and whistles to the website. Sounds great! But what does that mean for implementation? Our current board president Chanterria McGilbra suggested a framework which we used for discussing the launch of the BAodn blog. She asked Alyea Sandovar (blog editor) to present an outline of what needs to happen to get it going, and what we need to do to keep it going. In other words, we want relevance, but we also want sustainability. My approach therefore is to look at efforts around technology in a comprehensive way. I presented five components of my strategy at our board retreat in July and I’ll share them here:

Support the BAodn mission and overall strategic initiatives. This is key, because we want to be developing resources that are relevant to our members and/or to sustaining the life of organization.

Leverage existing tools and resources. No need to reinvent the wheel if we can improve or tweak something we already know and make that better. This is also about being realistic about what our limits are, in budget and in volunteer time.

Balance technology choices with our organizational culture and preferences. This relates to what I said above about internal collaboration, to the degree that outward-facing tools are maintained by the same board and volunteers. Some people thrive around technology, while others may be uninterested or frustrated. We don’t want to introduce technologies that only a specialist can or would want to manage.

Use data. This comes from my training in both web development and OD. Rather than guessing at user needs, let’s look at statistics for some direction. Are there pages on the website that no one goes to? We can see that (with Google analytics) and make adjustments accordingly. Does membership go up when we send out newsletters to our public mailing list? We can use information like that to make decisions about our communication technologies.

Adopt best practices for technology and social media. Again, we are not alone in developing services for a membership-driven, professional association. What can we learn from other groups about creating and supporting online communities? Furthermore, what can we learn from for-profit companies and web experts about things like web usability and social media development?

This is an exciting time to be involved with BAodn as we put our attention on what our members need and on how we can best support OD practitioners. If you would like to help with our technology or social media initiatives please feel free to contact me at technology@baodn.org or e-mail volunteer coordinator Katherine Kott at volunteering@baodn.org. We are currently looking for a webmaster and you can read about it on the BAodn website.

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Pam Davis is a futurist interested in helping organizations align goals, strategy, people, and technology for maximum success. Her diverse background spans education, community organizing, office administration, website programming & analytics, knowledge management, and social media technology. Pam is completing an MA in Organizational Psychology at Alliant International University’s Marshall Goldsmith School of Management.