Corporate Culture important for an effective social media strategy?

image credit: Gilbert International

I just happened to come across this blogger’s site, Adam Christensen, also an IBM employee, who features a quite useful Slideshare presentation of a particular IBM case study regarding social media and corporate culture.

And what better than to learn from those who know, right?

IBM has successfully implemented a social media strategy not only B2B and B2C but most importantly, B2E. The Big Blue shows us employees are as important as customers when it comes to the implementation of social networking into a company’s communication strategy.

The IBM presentation titled ‘The Impact of Corporate Culture on Social Media’ proves a very important point that gets often overlooked by companies and that is, empowering employees to partipate in social media. Your employees are the brand. They are your primary brand loyals.

I can only agree with Adam when he says, that if corporate culture and social media are pitted against each other, social media will always fail. Always. Companies and employees must embrace new technologies before implementing them to the external world. The process should function most efficiently from the inside then works its way out.

Once your employees have embraced and understood social media, communication internally will flow more easily, employees will freely express themselves, their opinions, concerns to the point where there’s complete transparency, which in turn can only benefit your company.

As Adam puts it, any company’s use of social media needs to start primarily with these two things: a core business model and corporate culture for a more collaborative environment.

To close, I want to leave you with some more useful insights: The 10 Commandments of  Zappos, which reveal the company’s core values which help them stay on track during good and bad times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 5:05 pm and is filed under New Media Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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