Still thinking about the ladder from Groundswell.
A huge obstacle to many companies right now is that their customers are higher on the ladder than they are. I can count on one hand the number of non-tech marketing managers I’ve met that fall above the “joiners” rung on the ladder, and most are spectators or inactives. How should a business school market itself to prospective students and interact with its current ones? How can a consumer durables manufacturer penetrate a ripe college market in its own hometown? Generally, how does a manager who sits low on the social technographic ladder figure out how to engage a socially tech-savvy demographic?
Much of the difficulty stems from the fact that many managers don’t yet believe that this flavor of engagement is even necessary. This is changing and will continue to change, especially as success stories across a variety of industries become more widespread and more public. So in a sense there are two separate issues: First, how do you convince someone that they need to move up the ladder, and second, how do you help them actually do it.
As far as convincing is concerned, it must first be noted that not everyone can be convinced. But a key step in the right direction is to figure out a person’s motivations and incentives and go from there. Does Joe Unbeliever really think there’s no utility to blogging? Or does he just not care because it doesn’t affect him?
If it’s a utility issue, there are ways to handle it.
The vast majority of organizations outside Silicon Valley are staggeringly inept at projecting what they see and hear about social media onto their own strategies and tactics. As a result, many managers and other employees within the organizations just don’t see the point of doing it. The antidote to this type of thinking is to present the utility and the doability of a social media strategy in real, quantifiable terms. Sales. Reach. Return on Marketing Investment. New customers acquired.
What if you are dealing with a person who not only doesn’t see the point, he also isn’t even evaluated based on those metrics? Just remember that people can be motivated in a variety of ways, not all of which are obvious. Consider such desires as acceptance, curiosity, honor, independence, power, social contact, status, safety.
Assuming for a moment that we are at the point where we have a person or group that is ready and willing to start moving up, what happens next? Some of it can happen more naturally because it is easy to do. Posting a quick comment on a picture or video is a fairly easy way to enter the conversation. Other levels of engagement can be more taxing. How do you get somebody to blog? Anyone that has tried to coach a prospective blogger into becoming an actual blogger knows that people don’t always just jump up and do it. In fact they hardly ever do, even when they actually kind of want to.
How do you coach yourself or someone else from standstill to creativity?
That’s an entry for next time.