…is not to talk about social tools.

Or social business. Or social theories, whitepapers, stats or case studies.

It is to get stuff done. The stuff that your business is made of; be that selling shoes or healthcare provision or delivering fish.

We don’t call our colleagues on the telephone to discuss how awesome it is to talk on the telephone and brainstorm all the creative things we could do with the hold music. We don’t use email to tell our customers that we’ve redesigned our email signature. So why do we spend so much time using social platforms to talk about social platforms?

We’re just so excited! © David Saunders

Sure, if – like us – your business relies on a sophisticated knowledge of this technology and the behaviour behind it, it makes sense to ponder these themes. However, in most companies the tools are best used when they disappear and become effortless conduits for better sharing, better innovation and better engagement.

For example.

Nurturing a company’s existing ‘social stars’ is an important first step in driving uptake of internal social tools, but in his recent blog post ‘Mr Popularity and Your Enterprise 2.0 Community‘, Steve Radick reminds us that “those very active champions who are so critical to the early growth of your community may also be the cause of its downfall.”

‘Mr Popularity’, the early adopter who is super comfortable with the technology , may also be skewing the agenda towards discussions about social itself, and inadvertently discouraging less confident and knowledgable staff from speaking out.

This indicates a wider issue. For most businesses, ‘social’ now brings with it such an aura of specialist knowledge and skills – usually accompanied by earnest company announcements, laborious workshops and promotion of predictably young digital natives to positions of guru-dom – that people forget it is an innate human instinct made up of familiar concepts such as openness, warmth, listening, quick reactions and word of mouth.

Every single person in a business, whether they’re a tech whiz-kid or still mistrustful of email – should understand that they have the ability to be social in what they do -whether they make tea or run the company – using whatever tools they find best fit their own personality and role.

Yes, some basic tool training is needed so that everyone has the full raft of options, and keeping on top of developments in social media can be inspiring. But the sooner the internal comms platform becomes a space to do deals, share ideas and tackle problems rather than being seen as an ‘innovation’ in itself; the sooner customer-facing social platforms are used to give better service and forge deeper relationships, rather than being considered social by simply existing – the sooner we’ll see results.

Results that everyone can take credit for and celebrate.

Tags: internal comms platforms, social business, social tools