Introducing Social to Your Business – Part 1 of Podcamp Philly Series

Our team headed north last weekend to Philadelphia to attend a social media podcamp. You might be asking, ‘what is a podcamp’? The Podcamp Philly 2010 web site gives this guidance:

PodCamp is a Barcamp-style community unconference for anyone interested in podcasting, blogging, video-casting and social media.

In other words, show up, meet people and learn!

I decided the join a session entitled “Mastering the Dynamics of Social Business” since many companies are still unsure if this whole social technology ‘movement’ is real and if it is, where to start?

Our speaker, Chuck Hall, holds a Master of Science in Organizational Dynamics which gives him a unique perspective into how organizations are structured and how they need to flex, stretch and embrace new ideas such as social technologies.

This video brought our attention into laser focus:

Chuck pointed listeners to this fact:
Typically the top 25% of results when you run a search on a brand is user generated material, not brand generated material.

So what’s different about today’s organization needs?

1. Understanding that the organization is a complicated and complex system
2. Integration of a inside and outside forces are becoming extremely important
3. What got you here won’t get you there

Chuck reminded the audience of Peter Drucker’s description of the purpose of a business:
To create a customer.

The five questions a business should be able to answer while implementing social technology:

• What is our mission?
• Who is our customer?
• What does the customer value?
• What are our results?
• What is our plan?

When introducing social technology to your organization, Chuck recommended using these guiding principles:

• respect the way things are
• responsibly engage
• recognize social is the way to go

So much more was discussed in this session. The good news is that Chuck Hall is writing a book on this topic so when that book is released, look for a review here.

I look forward to sharing the goodness gleaned from other sessions we attended.