5 internal obstacles that block social media progress

What can get in the way of developing a social media platform in your organization?

The Social Media Minefield: Five factors blocking your success is a great post by Mark Schaefer describing five obstacles.

The takeaway is you need to figure out the obstacles in your organization to developing a social media platform. Then you can figure out a plan to remove them.

He sees five very common obstacles routinely encountered in organizations:

1) Budget and resources

2) ROI – KPI

3) IT – Tech support

4) Legal and regulatory

5) Culture and change management

Each obstacle is illustrated with three quotes you will likely hear. Here’s one I found particularly entertaining:

“I tried Twitter and I hated it. Nobody on the board uses it either so our company doesn’t need it.”

What does that mean?  The speaker doesn’t get “it”, so “it” has no value.

Obstacles in my firm

In my intentionally one-person CPA firm, I’ve cleared out the ROI, IT support and legal/regulatory mines. I know asking ROI questions is irrelevant, I’ve always been my own IT support, and I am quite able to handle the legal issues.

The resource minefield is a big issue – there’s never enough time to do everything even though social media is a very high priority for me.

I think the culture and change management mine is cleared as demonstrated by the traffic count at my blogs.

I’m barely using twitter. That’s not a change management issue.  Unlike the fictional comment above, in which the speaker sees no value to Twitter, I do see value to the platform.  I just don’t understand it well enough to figure out how to make good use of it. There’s a big difference between saying a tool is useless and not knowing how to use it.

Obstacles for other CPA firms

For most CPA firms, the IT and legal obstacles should be easy to clear. A larger challenge is understanding that ROI questions are as relevant to social media as they are to the question of upgrading your ancient telephone system.

The two huge obstacles for CPAs will likely be resources (ever meet a CPA that wasn’t swamped with billable work due yesterday?) and change management.

Check out the article for help on figuring out the minefields you may encounter.

Then develop a strategy to defuse those issues. How can you go around them?

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