After a stint in college in the early 1980’s, I set my sails and went to live in southern Chile. Letters (actual hand-written characters on paper) from home took up to two weeks to reach me. Information came through at a trickle, and communication to my family was slow. I found that “letter writing day” (as it became known) was calculated and well thought out. Every word I penned to paper had meaning.
At that time, news from home was practically non-existent. The first space shuttle launch happened, but I didn’t find out about it until nearly ten days later. I was living on the far end of the earth and on the far edge of information availability.
Dateline 2010: Chile experienced a horrific earthquake. The resulting Tsunamis inundated the areas around Concepcion (where I had lived). As I watched the news, I immediately began calling on my cell phone, texting my friends, and leaving messages on Facebook in order to check on them. Within a few hours, I found out that my dear friend Pedro had lost his home and his father. Pedro was living in a shelter, and he used a mobile phone to respond to my text and my Facebook post. Soon my Facebook friends, who had seen the exchange between us, were offering support and dollars to help them and others.
Within a day or two, Pedro was rebuilding his house. Yet, thirty years ago, it took me 14 days to find out about the first space shuttle launch.
In those thirty years, the speed of information has increased exponentially. We are at the point now where if you don’t tweet, text, blog or Facebook (yes you can conjugate Facebook as an action verb), it is difficult to keep current. The immediacy of communication allows information to become almost instantaneously available. We want people to know what we think — and we want it now!
Fast Forward to Social Media
As companies begin to embrace social media, many are using a “ready, fire, aim” approach. Companies check social media off their list by creating a Facebook presence, or a Twitter hashtag, but are they doing their due diligence in educating their employees, or better yet, establishing a policy for usage of these social media outlets?
As you get ready to open your company to the world of social media, here are some basic things to consider:
- Seek out best practices and ideas from current social media practitioners. Consider Seth Brogan’s The Ethics imperative in Social Media
- Establish a usage policy for acceptable use and behavior on social media and communicate this policy to all employees.
- Monitor what people are saying about your company on social media and decide how or if you will respond. This is feedback at the speed of light, so be sure to determine what you intend to do with the data you collect.
- If you don’t do #3, it won’t take long before employees and customers realize that you are not serious about your social media presence, and they will treat it with ambivalence.
- Incorporate the data received from your social media outlets into an overall VOC initiative. Allegiance offers SocialVoice to help you get started in this area.
So what have we learned in thirty years? Information is now instantaneous, but the quality of information can be questionable. If we can incorporate the sentiment and thoughtfulness of letter writing into the instant communication of today, we can leverage social media to build real relationships. After all, elements of social media has helped alleviate the suffering of earthquake victims. We should use the same care and commitment in our tweets, yammers, posts and blogs. People are listening.
