Become a Social Organization: Online Community Meetup Recap

In June, the San Francisco online community meetup group welcomed Maria Ogneva, director of community at Yammer.

Ogneva’s talk examined what the difference is between an organization that merely uses social media to one that is a social organization. Ogneva also provided advice on how organizations can make the shift to becoming social organizations.

At first glance, it's easy to see why many organizations make the mistake of thinking that using social media makes them social. The distinction between using social media and being social is between that of using communications tools and having a communicative culture.

To be social, an organization has to embrace listening as a value across all levels. Social organizations use the communications tools available to them to listen to all of their stakeholders – constituents, customers, and employees. To a social organization, social media tools extend their reach and capability to serve constituents as opposed to being another broadcast medium. 

Organizations often mistake support from their constituents as support for their brand as opposed to what it really is – support for what they do. When organizations follow this line of thinking, they are liable to adopt bad habits that can make them lose support.

One bad habit is isolating social media from the rest of an organization's operations. The result of this isolation is, unsurprisingly, bad constituent experiences that can lead to larger crises.

One study found that organizations that are not social internally spend 38 percent of their time searching for and/or duplicating information requested by constituents.

Making the shift towards becoming a social organization means knowing where your organization stands in how it values openness.

Understanding where your organization stands will allow you to take the appropriate steps to change and to move at a reasonable pace. It will be essential to identify potential advocates and helpers as you scale up the breadth of what you are doing if you are a one-person operation.

When laying out the case for becoming social, help those in leadership positions understand what the value of true engagement means for your organization’s mission. Move your organization away from the idea that success is about the number of likes, fans, or followers.

Becoming social involves weaving this value into all aspects of what your organization does. If openness is not built into your organization’s foundation, it will take some time to make this change, but it is not impossible.

For a more in-depth look at the steps required to become social, take a look at Ogneva’s slide presentation. And if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can learn more about online communities by joining us at our next event on Wednesday, August 22 at 7 p.m.