What are first key steps my company should take in order to become social?

Grant Leboff:  Let me ask you this, because you say that not all businesses are going to be social and they are never going to be social and I agree with you, but then I come perhaps to a different conclusion or maybe the same conclusion as you. You say, well maybe they can use traditional marketing, whatever else. My actual conclusion is because of the cultural changes that social media is bringing with it, transparency, the fact that more and more word of mouth is going online. So instead of telling a few friends, I tweet it and then, quite honestly it’s out my system so I don’t worry about it anymore. Then actually, I’m not sure, I don’t know – I’ve haven’t got a crystal ball – that if a business can’t become social, whether it can survive? It’s not that social media is the only marketing channel in the world, that’s not what I’m saying. But it’s the transparency, the authenticity, the conversation, the personalisation, even on a mass scale that’s required, that’s expected of business on social today, I think people are going to come to expect it from more businesses and, therefore, if businesses don’t do it to a point, some might be more social than others. Can they survive?

David Taylor: I think it’s a very, very valid point and I would agree with you wholeheartedly. Businesses have always had to adapt. It was always had to change and if you really can’t change then you become a dinosaur and may well be that you don’t exist. And we’ve seen some huge brands just disappear off the high street. Names we’ve known for years, for decades, decades. They just disappeared. They haven’t adapted. And you do have to adapt. It’s Darwinian theory, adapt or die, and that is very true of social. And I think yes, it is the businesses who do want to be social. And for me actually, what’s quite interesting is that smaller, more mobile businesses find it easier, naturally, to be social. If you’re a big corporation, it’s very difficult. That would be an interesting one. If you had to be a truly social and a multinational organisation, it could take some doing, because it’s all about the culture. I did a training course for an organisation in Geneva recently and they had their own internal social network, which was linked to their intranet. And the seminar, the course I was running with them was about engagement, getting employees engaged in the own internal social network and they’re all spread out all over the world. And it’s how do you get those, even the internal stake holders to engage with each other? What came out of that, I had a blinding flash of the obvious, which was; good social media starts internally. If I’m going to be working with an organisation, I need to look at the culture and it comes back to your point at the start, which is about social businesses and whether they have that social culture and what you might have to do is inculcate that social culture with them. So they’ll say, David, we want to be social. That’s fine, work with them for awhile… You’re not actually social, you nowhere near ready to be social! Actually we got to really sort out your customer service. You don’t actually…. you have really bad customer service. You’ve got no internal comms, so none of the departments are talking to each other. You’re not really aware of what’s going on in your marketplace. So you need to then work with them to get to the stage where they are ready then, to start doing social. And for me, certainly in the consultancy business I work in now, I almost think of it more like management consultancy than social media because actually, it’s managing change within organisations. And where are those organisations going? Do you really think your target audience are going to still consume the media in the way you think they’re going to consume it? I horrify people and I say 25 people, 25 less probably not on Facebook anymore. How you going to communicate with them? I haven’t even got my head around Facebook and your already saying, well they’ve, gone past Facebook, you need to be talking about Vine and Tumbler and Keek and all these sort of things. And then like my god! What do you do? How do you do all these things? And it’s that mobility, it’s that ability to change and change Your business and change where you’re going. And that is a very, very key thing in the ones who don’t, will cease to exist.