When it comes to social media, it’s easy enough to choose your medium. It’s the ongoing monitoring, analysis and measurement that starts to get tricky…

That’s why IABC Victoria is thrilled to have Simon Talbot, Director of Corporate Affairs at Kraft and Jeff Richardson, C.E.O. of The Online Circle at our next Be There event, giving us the lowdown on social media management, analysis and measurement.

Jeff will outline how the process of Social Media measurement and analysis feeds into management decisions, while Simon will follow with how The Online Circle's work is currently supporting Kraft. They’ll touch on effectively managing online presence, identifying and addressing risk, building on opportunity and being FMCG leaders in this communications space.

The Online Circle is a Social Media Agency specialising in monitoring, analysis, strategy, and campaign management. Jeff brings over 20 years experience in senior marketing and management and leads a team of talented individuals who continually achieve optimum results for clients such as Kraft, Schweppes, and Choice Home Loans.

Look forward to seeing you on 24 March.

Charles Handy, mentioned earlier, sums it up in response to a common employee lament, “If they don’t trust me, why should I bother to put their needs before mine?’ If it is even partly true that a lack of trust makes employees untrustworthy, it does not bode well for the future of virtuality in organizations. If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organization, we will have to rediscover how to run organizations based more on trust than on control. Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough.”

So what does it take to build trust in virtual organizations? Fortunately, the answers are not different from what we have been proposing in our model. Leaders need to take responsibility for trust building and align strategies with the overall goals and purpose of the organization. We do believe trust building in virtual environments requires a melding of roles and expectations with appropriate technology to support excellent results.
The following recommendations are research based and have been tested with clients in a variety of virtual environments.

1. Develop norms and expectations for virtual work. Relate expectations to the vision and purpose of the organization.
2. Set meeting and communication standards.
3. Ensure appropriate skills for using technology (includes employees and other stakeholders).
4. Research and design user-friendly work environments (equipment, supplies, technology, and ergonomic work features, etc.).
5. Use multiple methods of communicating including voice and face-to-face meetings.
6. Ensure employees and other stakeholders know how their work/interaction relates to the overall excellence of the organization.
7. Provide information on individual and organizational results.
8. Ask for feedback and suggestions for improvements.
9. Deal directly and swiftly with trust breaches.
10. Support continual learning and development.
11. Make personal contacts with virtual workers.
12. Reward and recognize contributions.

From Building the High-Trust Organization by Pamela Shockley-Zalabak, Sherwyn Morreale and Michael Hackman.

Today I was fortunate enough to attend the morning session of the knowledge management roundtable (KMRT), a regular event facilitated by the vivacious Michelle Lambert. I’m always armed with my natural level of comms skepticism when attending such events, but it was very quickly obvious how the affinity we have with social media tools like wikis are a natural link to our cousins in knowledge management.

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