Imagine you inadvertently overhear a snippet of your wife’s conversation with a friend. She doesn't like your new mustache, but hasn't said anything about it because she doesn't want to hurt your feelings. But she’s eager for you to get tired of it and shave it off.
You’ve discovered a painful little truth. You’re “just trying it out” and think it looks pretty good. But you've gained a new insight into your wife’s tastes. You’ll probably shave it tomorrow morning.
Imagine, too, that you’re the founder and president of a thriving multi-national business. You’ve always assumed that your employees admired you and, for the most part, heeded your counsel about how things ought to be done to assure continued growth and success.
Recently, your communications team installed a new social media app on the company’s internal network that enables employees to meet and share ideas instantly, regardless of their location or time zone. It’s an immediate hit. Employees are buzzing in the online chat room.
The head of communications suggests you spend a little time getting familiar with it and asks you to contribute to the conversation. You’re busy and this new communications tool seems a bit frivolous. One evening at home, you have nothing else to do so you check it out.
Amid the back-and-forth chatter about challenges and opportunities, customers, products, and competitors, however, you discover a few comments about you and your leadership team. Employees are wisecracking about your management style, your directives and your ideas.
You get angry. The next morning, loaded for bear, you call in your communications VP to talk about it. He advises you to calm down and consider the comments as constructive criticism. He’s right. So you think of them in the same way you do your wife’s feelings about your mustache. You’ve learned something else you didn’t previously know.
It’s a learning experience. The best organizations, after all, are learning organizations. And what this new social media experiment is doing, you realize, is allowing people to share big ideas and to learn together through means that were previously non-existent.
People are having virtual conversations about topics that make the business better. Maybe their stray criticisms of your style are justified. Maybe you are a little stodgy in how you see things and how you operate. So your eyes are opened now.
Parallel Worlds
Speaking of having one’s eyes opened… Bob Pearson has written a marvelously insightful book called Pre-Commerce. Though I’m only halfway through it, it’s really opening my eyes about social media’s potential for business. 
The book is about the places where customers and businesses intersect, and how companies can use social media to get ahead of the curve on product development, customer service, and customer satisfaction – all toward improving their customer relationships. The first third of the book sets up the rationale and the opportunity. The rest fleshes out the how-to and follow-through.
In that first third, I found myself substituting the word “employees” in some of the places where Pearson uses “customers.” For instance, consider the following passage:
“The only way to start rebuilding trust and brand loyalty with the Pre-Commerce customer is to become an effective peer. An effective peer is one who provides the right information at the right place and at the right time. An effective peer doesn’t look for ways to avoid blame or responsibility. He or she corrects problems swiftly and to the satisfaction of the person wronged. And an effective peer constantly works to improve the relationship. That last step, the constant work on the relationship, is the most rigorous…”
While what Pearson has written is certainly true about the relationships a company should cultivate with its customers, those of you who are, like me, students of employee communications know that the words apply equally to the relationships an organization and its managers must have with their employees, and the nature of the communication that sustains those relationships.
I don’t mean to imply that Pre-Commerce is about employee communications, per se. In fact, it’s about transforming your business from a conventional 20th century marketing organization into one that leverages social media to listen to, learn from and engage your customers through every stage of the transaction – all toward improved revenues, profits and long-term success.
Engaging Customers
Aside from my word substitution, the other obvious intersection here between the external and internal worlds of business is why it’s critical for employees to engage customers. As Pearson notes, “I can toss out a few examples of innovation and a theory or two, but that doesn’t do anything to change your culture. You need to get all of your 500, 5,000 or 50,000 employees focused on listening to customers more effectively.” Which can be achieved through effective use of social media.
To come full circle, Pearson’s insights can also be applied to how we engage our employees inside the organization. Which is why the use of social media behind the firewall excites me. It can become a valuable part of a company’s internal communications dynamic.
While stimulating and increasing productive internal dialogue – irrespective of managers’ and employees’ physical location – these tools also give leaders the opportunity to eavesdrop on and participate in that internal discourse, a productive, relevant conversation that was heretofore very difficult.
Imagine the potential, especially in the context of what Pearson writes about being an effective peer. The best managers and leaders are those that operate in the manner of a peer, speaking to employees as equals. They understand that their chief role is to help employees acquire the necessary resources to do their jobs – and then get out of the way and let them do it.
What better way to uncover those needs, to cultivate trust and those critical internal relationships, than to engage in a robust dialogue? And when use of social media tools means that the dialogue can occur whenever and wherever you want, the possibilities for success and greatness are limitless.
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