I see a lot of effort with embryonic social media efforts associated with "selling" senior management that this is important, something should be done, etc.
I don't know if my perspectives and experiences in this will work for everyone, but I thought I'd spend a moment to share some thoughts on this.
Creating Justification
Somewhere in B-school, I'm sure there's a lot of effort spent on creating business cases for senior management to evaluate. Identify the opportunity, state the investment required, and focus on ROI.
Fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But is it enough to get something done?
Where I work (EMC) there are literally hundreds of positive-ROI projects for us to go look at. Maybe thousands. It's not enough to say "here's a project and it clears the hurdle rate". Something more is needed.
Even if you do all that work, how do you get people to pay attention at a senior-enough level?
I Guess I'm A Senior Manager, Sort Of
Although not the most senior, I occasionally fall into the category of "senior management" depending on what's getting talked about, etc.
And I have had more than my fair share of proposals come my way.
I used to sit patiently through the business case presentation, and finally a year or so ago I started levelling with people.
Look, no one looks at that pie-chart, spreadsheet, business-model stuff up front. They get hooked on an idea, and the data supports the idea, and not the other way around. How do you make your message so compelling that they WANT to see the data?
Boil it down to a couple of key, visceral points, and people will seek you out, and not the other way around.
My Key Visceral Point
Any company that masters social media -- and the powerful use of communities -- will enjoy an order-of-magnitude business model advantage over those that don't.
At the core, it's that simple.
I put it in the same frame as learning to use the internet. Or outsourcing/offshoring. Or giving laptops to your user. Or providing health-care benefits to your employees.
There are two basic motivators in human psychology -- pain and pleasure. Pleasure can motivate people, but pain is much more effective.
Showing examples of people in our industry who are getting good at this is very motivating. At EMC, we have an inbred paranoia with disruption from below, a-la-Clayton Christensen and the Innovator's DIlemna.
Showing smaller, more nimble competitors gaining this order-of-magnitude business model advantage is probably more scary than showing IBM doing the same.
Creating Confidence
In reality, there's really two components to selling senior management. One is creating the case. And the other is finding someone you trust to go fix the problem.
Senior management teams look at big, thorny problems each and every day. If you've ever been at the receiving end of a set of all-day management meetings, you get to see challenge after challenge after challenge.
I don't know about others, but I tend to look at situations that include ".... and we'll ask so-and-so to create a function that does X, and then get such-and-such to fund it ..." and so on. If someone brings a workable schema to the table, that particular problem might go into the "solvable" category rather than the "unsolvable" category.
Timing Is Everything
I've often found myself selling the same idea over a protracted period of time -- sometimes many quarters, or maybe over a year or so in some cases.
Too many people put their ideas in front of management, and get disappointed when the earth doesn't move immediately thereafter.
There's a certain rhythm and pace to these things. Not every problem can be addressed immediately.
I can't tell you how many times I've been pushing an idea, and then Something Happens, and then everyone is Very Motivated to start working on it in earnest. I've learned to be extremely patient in order to allow enough time for the thinking to circulate virally -- and -- wait for a triggering event.
Not everything in life can be run according to schedule, and the Social Media journey is one of those things, in my opinion.
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