What Twitter Can Teach You About Your Dysfunctional Business

Companies need to be social to be successful. This is a key insight in Maddie Grant’s book Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, which argues that the principles underlying social media’s growth can be applied to the way we lead and manage organizations.

What’s the Big Idea?

Maddie Grant is a social media consultant at SocialFish, and has observed that companies that have trouble integrating social media tend to have deeper organizational issues. For instance, let’s say your company doesn’t collaborate. That’s a problem with the company culture. Let’s say you don’t actually trust your staff to represent the company. You may only trust your media spokesperson.

The essential challenge, according to Grant, is to “shift from a company that’s used to having one or two people who are enabled to speak for the company” to all of a sudden having everyone speak for the company. This is not a social media problem. This is a change that needs to happen in the company culture.

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What’s the Significance?

While there is risk in change, Grant argues that doing nothing to adapt to the digital world we live in is suicide for a company. That is because consumers are looking for companies to be open and accessible, transparent and to share information with us. Above all, consumers expect a human touch. Grant says:

We’re very critical of the party line and of marketing speak, you know, we want the real truth, we want authenticity and we want to know who individual people are who work for a company and, you know, what their even personal things are that they like. There’s something about being human that is okay to share personal information and that’s how you connect with people inside and outside a company.

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