Posts Tagged ‘IABC’
Social Media from the Inside Out
On January 18th I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Philadelphia Chapter of The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) to discuss social media from an inside out perspective.
In preparing my slides, I recalled a time when I was trying to implement social media and the process I used to do so. It was about 2006 and to my surprise, I received full management and legal support for a blog—a challenge for most even today. Looking back, I was lucky that our CMO had foresight and that our management and legal teams trusted me enough to do something that most Fortune 500 companies were not doing at the time (I handled our PR, too, which probably had something to do with it).
I was worried about a change of mindset as the word of a blog spread, so I dove in as quickly as I could. I had the blog set up (with the CMO’s help), wrote a bunch of posts (legal and marketing approved, of course), and tapped into our industry thought leaders (who were all for it) for on-going content. With all of that work, you would my efforts would have been a success, right? Nope. The content was ready, but the blog sat empty. While I understood the cultural limitations of a large company and I knew the goals of our management team, I did not account for some internal resistance or the final gatekeepers who put the brakes on my hopes for being social with our customers. A big lesson learned.




