Your social business plan needs to build in a tolerance for failure during attempts to innovate—in other words… agility.
Although IBM didn’t mint the idea of social business, they have certainly taken up the standard and become proponents of the approach as is pointed out by an article from this week’s Fast Company FC Expert Blog. The idea of business agility for enterprise social media efforts figures prominently in the article: “Since not every social business initiative will take hold, it is important to try lots of approaches and move on when one doesn’t work. IBM describes this as ‘agile development.’”
Agile development is a borrowing from the software development world. Perhaps too simply put, It is an approach that espouses the rapid development of working software feature-by-feature instead of via carefully developed project plans and estimates. One practice from agile development, the sprint, is all about short bursts of activity designed to develop just a few features of a new product.
In social media efforts, the analogy has profound implications. At a time when most companies are obsessing about the Return-On-Investment (ROI) of social media efforts and CEO’s are looking for detailed project plans that often delay social media launches for months or even years, the agile mindset is something that social media proponents both inside and external to companies would do well to adopt, using the idea of rapid, low-intensity experimentation to get a foothold and build trust slowly within an organization.
Social media business efforts do not tend to crystallize this quickly, especially in organizations where considerable anxiety emanates from the executive team. The C-suites at so many companies I speak with dwell beneath the Sword of Damocles—knowing that they need to do something about social media but fearing the consequences of actually engaging. An agility-based approach to social business can take some of the apprehension out of creating a full-blown social media plan and can set your business free—at last.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Using IBM as an example anywhere close to agile is funny. Big blue is to agile as an elephant is to a dancer.
Talk is easy, real agility is not.
Hi Dave–no argument here and point taken. I’m not holding IBM up as a paragon of agility here. I’m more interested in the idea of applying more agile approaches to social business.
The Risk/ROI issue is a huge one which is often overlooked when people talk about Agility. It is not just about moving fast and changing on a dime. In order to do those things you need to have excellent communication and visibility into the status of the business, projects and teams. Agility brings a much higher degree of visibility than traditional approaches. As such, it mitigates Risk by letting your see how your ROI is going much sooner than the wait-get it perfect-go approach. Especially when we know that no one ever gets it ‘perfect’ right out of the gate. You just need to start a direction and then use Agile Developments feedback loops to adjust intelligently – both tactically and strategically. Of course, this can be scary at first, but then just tighten your feedback loop to what makes you comfortable.
Todd, what is the usual turn-around on feedback on social media initiatives?
Social media seems to move faster than most things and as such would be a great candidate for those suffering from commitment anxiety in that it would rapidly provide insight into what was working and what wasn’t. Perhaps a company looking to transform towards greater Agility could make a social media project its Agility pilot as well?
@Alexis, to answer your question most social media pilot initiatives can be planned and implemented in 90 days. That’s just getting off the ground, though. The way I run engagements, they tend to go in 90 day sprints, giving us enough time to see how target audiences are responding and watch the analytics. Of course, if the social media messaging is built around a hot issue, we can see turnaround far more quickly. I see no reason why a company interested in improving its overall business agility wouldn’t identify social media efforts as a viable project application of agile principles and practices.