Just wanted to point you guys to my podcast I recently recorded with Matthew Grant for Marketing Profs. I think you will enjoy it. Here’s a little excerpt from Matt’s accompanying blog post:
Becoming Human
Social media, Maddie told me, is “powered by human attributes: the desire to be social, to connect with other people; the desire to solve problems; the desire to create and to share what we’re doing.” By enabling the fulfillment of these very human impulses, the social media have brought about a “paradigm shift in how we communicate as a society.”
As a result, people now expect organizations to communicate with them in a more human way: spontaneous, flexible, thoughtful, responsive. Organizations can develop these attributes, according to Maddie, by becoming more open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous.
Thought Into Action
Maddie readily acknowledged that there are many more human attributes than those four, but said she and Notter thought these were “ones that we can specifically translate to a work environment.” Their thesis is that if you cultivate these attributes, “you can really flourish in a much more social digital world.”
This is an important point. Talking about “humanizing the organization” would be little more than management consultant fluff without some indication of how to actually accomplish it in the real world. For this reason, the principles laid out in Humanize are designed to be applied, experimented with, tested.
And we’re not just talking about the marketing department! As Maddie makes clear, this book is not a “social media” book; it is a leadership book. The object of it is not to help you run better campaigns on Facebook or Twitter; the intent is to drive organizational change.
In the podcast, Matt pushes back on a lot of our ideas – including our assertion that best practices are evil. Listen to it – I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation. I know I did and I’m grateful to Matt and MarketingProfs for inviting me to discuss the ideas in Humanize.
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