Businesses facing the changing landscape of media consumption must reckon with the increasingly two-way nature of today’s world. Two-way (a.k.a. social media, conversational media, etc.) creates massive challenges for corporations that are indoctrinated in the one-way control culture.  This inevitably causes culture shock, fear and sometimes clashes. 

Culture clash: This ad promoting local beaches did not fare so well in Turkey. Clearly, the advertiser didn’t understand its community.

Experimentation or first time “social” media initiatives by command and control cultures usually fail. Results range from falling flat to causing outright brand suicide, at least online.  Consider some of the ways one-way business cultures try to approach social media:

• Astroturfing: Lying with fake social media efforts rarely makes it in the social media world (see Astroturfing on the Dark Side of the Moon).  In the case of Walmart, the company still hasn’t recovered.
• Turning a Deaf Ear: This follows the mindset that bloggers aren’t credible “If we ignore the blogs and social networks, they’ll go away.” Dell Hell and Fed Ex are great examples of how this can really hurt a company.
• Same Old Approach:  The is the most common form of corporate misstep, and also the least talked about (low drama factor).  Same old approach involves trying to provide controlled communications — press releases, produced videos, brochure copy, etc., etc. — through social media realms.  The end result is often deaf ears with an unengaged community.

There’s so much to be gained from actively participating in social media.  Consider how dynamic IBM’s culture has become with its many, many blogs (more than 30k , including internal blogs), and microblogging, lifestream and incredible Second Life initiatives. Their culture is rapidly evolving to become two-way. Social media as a communications form certainly isn’t hurting the bottom line for Big Blue: $69.9 billion through the first 3Q 2007 compared to $65.2 billion in 2006.

Yet most companies’ cultures prevent them from truly embracing a conversational form with their markets and themselves.  For me, whenever I engage a company in discussions about social media tools, rarely do we discuss cost or tactics.  Instead, the discussion revolves around culture. Unless they can change their cultural approach to communications, and innovate to meet the medium, their tactics will fail.

Changes on the Inside

Corporate culture must change to meet the form if companies intend to be successful.  Invariably, the discussion becomes how to best engage a community (which is chapter three of Now Is Gone).  Here are some very recent examples from prospective and current client discussions:

Listen and understand. As in know what your customers care about. Hint: It’s probably not what the company cares about. Once a company understands this, they should write/create for them. Don’t waste the community’s time with corporate drivel and press releases.  Simple, right? Wrong, most companies fight this.  It’s the heart of command and control.

Be real. Messages can be introduced through social media, but you better be sure that the messages are meant to serve the community.  You cannot control people in real life, nor can you in business life. Be prepared, and even welcome feedback.

Inject some personality into the content.  That means reinventing most corporate communications departments’ polishing processes.  By the time they are done polishing, a document may be safe, on message, perfect from grammatical standpoint, and about as interesting as a dissertation on modern calculus (sorry Ike).

Hard selling should be left to car salesmen. No you cannot use social media to blatantly push your products all the time. Even Guy Kawasaki found this out on Twitter. Look, it’s OK to push now and then (consider today’s other post on Now Is Gone availability online), but be transparent, tongue in cheek, and let it go. 

Community means being a  part of, and to do that, organizations need to serve, not sell. So if you’re selling all the time, or even a healthy minority of the time, do not expect a strong community.

For more on how to engage a community, read the Seven Principles of Community Building.