What could laundry soap possibly have to do with Social Media and change? Everything. It started back in the early 1920’s when advertising started to become a little more sophisticated. Then in the 1950’s, manufacturers woke up to the fact that women actually had more buying power than men. As TV adoption grew, manufacturers, like those making Laundry Soap, began to tailor their marketing at the buying audience. Business had begun to recognize consumer preference.

The more significant issue here is what this meant to the nature of business. Up until this point, issues like package design, market segmentation, demographics and psychographics meant little. A product was produced, sold by salesmen to distributors and off we went. Then along came Peter Drucker (management guru) and opened up the can of worms around marketing. It was highly controversial and many businesses resisted the deep impact corporate change this was causing. Large companies are all about processes and Best Practices - scalability to protect margins and shareholder value.

Social Media, beginning with Web 1.0 has been upsetting the apple cart. With the Social Web, this is even more so. Adopting and integrating Social Media into the enterprise will result in some profound change in the way the organization functions; and we don’t yet understand what all those changes are, or their economic impact on the enterprise.

Today we see that 100% of the Fortune 1000 have websites, as do 97% of businesses in the U.S., Canada and Europe. This process of implementing websites (Web 1.0) took about 8 years, and was a constant sea of change as technology kept progressing and consumers became more sophisticated. Add to the mix the easy transfer of money across the Web and changes in researched and established consumer behaviour and one can understand the challenges senior management faced in adopting the Web. The concept has been hard enough with Web 1.0 and essentially “static” websites.

Now consumers are engaging Social Media and suddenly they are saying to the Enterprise; “We want to talk with you. Not at you, but with you. We want you to talk with us, not at us.” Now consumers are saying they want eco-friendly laundry soap, long-lasting scented soap and so on. When the enterprise doesn’t respond, they shout, sometimes loudly and sometimes it has cost the CEO their job.

All of this represents a huge sea of changes in processes, Best Practices and communications procedures from previously well established channels of consumer communication. An additional challenge is that these commentaries by consumers are totally transparent to everyone - journalists, shareholders, board members, employees and competitors.

Some companies are embracing Social Media, some are dipping their toes (a great way to start) and some are completely shying away. Certain businesses will not really need to engage Social Media in the public sense, while others won’t and will suffer greatly a their competitors do. The “Tipping Point” has been reached however, there are enough people using Social Media services and enough traditional media picking up on Social Media stories that it is relevant. The challenge will be for companies to understand the impending changes and work to understand how to integrate a new set of best practices, policies and procedures into the organization.

(Excerpt from the eBook, “The Conversant Corporation“)