I recently chaired a social media conference where the marketing head of a major insurance company admitted that up until very recently it used to take them 10 days to issue a Tweet. That’s 10 days for each 140 characters of text to make its painful journey through compliance, legal and corporate communications. This is an extreme case of how the corporate world is struggling to embrace the new demands posed by social media but is not atypical.
Compared to the hyper-speed of social media communication, most institutions are tortuously slow, weighed down by layers of bureaucracy, management cultures that don’t trust people to make decisions, pedantic legal advisers and self-serving control freaks in their public relations departments. Expecting these businesses to be able to respond in real time to a tweet or a comment on Facebook is, at the moment, completely unrealistic. Equally, you still have companies taking five days to approve a corporate press statement, so to allow their employees to take part in a real time, unscripted and unedited conversation with customers online is going to require a huge cultural shift in the way that they work.
So rather than focus on the “three Ts” of social media – technology, tactics and trivia – organisations should first look at their culture and organisational structure: they need to loosen up. Get this right and the Tweets will look after themselves.