Your Company Culture Determines The Use of Social Media

Companies may have an amazing marketing team for their social media campaign but we have to realised they also have to have the right company culture to pull it offYou may have a business or marketing plan that includes social media, but if your company culture is introverted and slow moving you'll probably be wasting you time and money.For a social media push to be successful, there must be a company-wide culture that supports the use of these transparent, two-way communications tools. Everyone from the juniors to the CEO need to be committed to openness, innovation, and the company's overarching vision.Globally, Old Spice, BBC, and CNN are companies who have a culture all about moving forward. Locally, we have Vodafone, Telecom, Air New Zealand, Media Works and Stuff who also have forward thinking mentality. In a recent article the Guardian reported on CNN's use of social media - they scour the web for breaking news (the whole web). They, along with BBC, CNN and Stuff, use technology like RSS feeds and communities Twitter to keep up with world and local events. This is already engrained in their culture. For them embracing the new is already a part of daily life - social media are merely only part of it.Major server maker IBM is another great example of a company who has embraced this change. They've completely re-created their company culture to align themselves with social media, the starting point for them was creating an internal culture of participation within the company first. It may seem extreme but they realised the importance of keeping up with the world and their audience.One would assume these businesses can attribute some of their social media success to a really healthy internal culture. The values of forward thinking and innovation are shared throughout the whole organization.So if you think about it, a company culture where the guys' upstairs is singing a different tune to the guys in the sales department, how can they represent your business consistently to millions of people online ?Getting your whole company to buy into your plans to utilise these social media tools should be a priority before taking the next step.