Grow your own Corporate Social Media Talent through Healthy Competition

As social media becomes increasingly mainstream, more and more companies are jumping in, figuring out how, when and why they might tap its power.

Are you?

It’s a conversation that focuses first on your business strategy, market realities and corporate transparency comfort.

Eventually, though, it becomes a human resources issue. Who’s going to do what?

You need talent, and not just people who will log onto the company’s Facebook account. You need corporate understanding and likely content contribution, and not just from people in marketing.

Look. Train. Inspire.

So what if no one at your company is allowed to use social media during work hours yet. Do you know who logs on when they get home? Not sure… ask.

Social media coaches and consultants can get the conversation started and move leadership up the learning curve. They can even set up necessary platforms, design strategies, create profiles. Ultimately, though, you will need internal social media expertise, passion and energy, otherwise those efforts won’t feel authentic to the people you’re trying to reach.

Even if your social media needs are outsourced, they still have to be understood internally as part of your overall marketing/sales strategy.

Consider starting with those home social media users.

Tap Human Nature: Inspire Healthy Competition

Looking to inspire social media expertise from within your staff? Consider taking a page out of Chemical Bank‘s** corporate finance training playbook, circa 1985/6:

Start with people most likely to succeed. Offer high-value training selectively and in waves. That will likely encourage the employees NOT trained first to learn quickly anyway. Just to prove they can.

Nevermind that Chemical’s then senior management team may not have planned it that way. Or did they?

First — a quick bank history lesson: **For those that don’t remember Chemical Bank, sift through the bank merger mania and you’ll find it’s now part of  JP Morgan Chase. I joined Chemical after college and worked in corporate lending and then corporate finance for nearly 11 years.

Creative Corporate Training in the face of a Sea Change:

In the mid-1980’s, Chemical and other New York banks were quickly retooling to compete with investment banks for corporate finance business. It was a banking industry sea change, not unlike the ways we’re having to rethink how we do business in a Web 2.0 world.

• New vocabulary.
• New concepts. New products. New Services.
• New technology. (Lessons in Lotus 1-2-3 — gasp!)
• Tougher revenue goals. Greater accountability.
• Stiff competition.

Sound familiar?

All while we were being told to move our marketing efforts up the client corporate ladder to the CFO and CEO level of America’s largest corporations. We were charged to improve ROI by building stronger client relationships. Offer  ”advice” to help them solve perceived problems. Explain new corporate finance products. Suggest potential mergers and acquisitions. Ask for high-priced business.

It was uncomfortable at first. Not everybody thrived.

Chemical did hire some Investment Bank talent, placing the bulk of those at the product group level.

Mostly, though, Chemical invested training money on existing employees, officers with front-line client coverage responsibility. And then waited to clear out non-performers until later.

Selective Training and Group Dynamics

The training was top-notch: Various week-long off-sites taught by Harvard and University of Chicago MBA professors, among others. Access was top-down, starting with Managing Directors and Vice Presidents and a newly promoted squad of mostly assistant vice presidents with a new functional title: Corporate Finance Liaison.

There was one CFL per corporate business group – about a dozen total. I was one of those CFLs. Most of us were homegrown graduates of Chemical’s corporate lending training program who’d managed corporate 500 customer relationships for 3-5 years.

Suddenly we were learning corporate finance theory alongside our senior officers, everyone hopeful these new skills meant bigger deals and better bonuses. Some of us tapped special assignments, like the month I spent in London on loan to our syndication group.

In addition to managing our original client and prospect base, CFL’s were supposed to spread all that early training knowledge around to their peers. Share resources. Offer advice. Help fellow group members close deals.

Peer Advising Idea was Brilliant in its Failure.

One problem. Non-CFL client managers weren’t so anxious for CFL advice. We were, after all, only a seminar or so ahead of them, training-wise. Some of us weren’t even as senior as the other client managers in our respective groups.

Many of those other officers began studying the corporate finance markets more closely, too. They worked directly with product groups to solve client problems. And they pitched many new ideas to their clients.

Bottom line: They quickly moved themselves up the corporate finance learning curve, even as they waited for their turn to attend the official off-site trainings.

Human Nature Steps In.

Call it competitive spirit. Perhaps it was survival instinct. Or maybe they did it because corporate finance seemed fun and exciting. Regardless, the non-CFL officers’ efforts proved what I think we all knew: CFLs weren’t that special, anyone could learn this stuff if they just tried hard enough – or had access to training.

The CFL role faded away within about a year, leaving Chemical with what it always had –  dedicated client managers who knew their clients well. Only now they knew how to market corporate finance advice and products, too.

So here’s the million dollar question—would Chemical have made so much progress so quickly if they’d never tested the CFL role?

Client Relationship Equity Preserved

One thing is certain, if Chemical had chosen to hire all that new corporate finance expertise, it would have taken the bank a lot of years to make up for lost client relationship equity. And it was leveraging those long term client relationships that ultimately booked the bank’s first corporate finance deals.

Imagine how much more quickly we would have accomplished those deals if we had had the easy access to webinar tutorials that exists today. Or how much lower the training budget would have been.

Hire if you have to, but train when you can.

The ultimate goal of social media for business is to reach a human who has a problem your business can solve, and then build the kind of trust that will encourage him or her to let you solve it. This is true B2B or B2C.

It pays to keep people who know what to do when that phone rings. So.. feel free to be a little creative in your training tactics. Here’s one idea:

When it comes to homegrown Social Media expertise, it might help to start by announcing that you are looking for employees who are already using social media personally. Even if they aren’t currently in the marketing department.

Any other ideas? Please share.