A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be able to write a guest post on Amber Naslund’s Altitude Branding blog that was all about how we think about social media at Humana. At the time that post was written, our social media “un-committee” was about 4 months old. Now that we’re approaching our collective first birthday, I wanted to revisit the Altitude post, and to share a bit more about how we think about social media in our Fortune-100 enterprise. This is the last of three posts on the subject.
As I described in my last post, we don’t have a centralized governance committee for social media – governance and social media just don’t mix. It’s one of the fundamental tensions between the ground-up nature of social media, and the top-down control orientation of businesses. Instead, we decided to allow the form of our social media work follow the function . . . so instead of a governance committee, we have an “un-committee.”
Continuing the “Town Square” metaphor, we call our merry band the “Social Media Chamber of Commerce.” We run it as a social media democracy. It’s an un-committee. We don’t have a charter and we don’t have rules. We don’t have a P&L and we don’t have a budget. We don’t have a leader and we don’t have any formal reporting structure. We even live-tweet our meetings (watch for hashtag #hcoc for Humana’s Chamber of Commerce).
We’re what a management guru might call a self-managed team. The Chamber of Commerce itself doesn’t actually do any work or have deliverables … but it does set up workgroups that people in the team can voluntarily join – and since they’re all leaders in their organizations, they can also commission others to help. The Chamber of Commerce meets every 3-4 weeks, and our agenda usually looks like this:
- Updates from last meeting
- One member presents an update of their social media work: what is it, how and why did they do it, what have they learned?
- We incorporate a “voice from outside” to provide expertise
- One or more work-groups present updates
How does it work? It’s amazing. It’s the only team I’ve been on that has nearly 100 percent attendance at every meeting – even, as it turns out, when they’re called at the last minute. And you don’t have to look hard to figure out why. It adds value to people’s jobs. It fuels their passion. And it’s one of the rare groups that actually lives up to the saying “you get out as much as you put in.”
What it means for Humana
We’ve recognized up-front that this new way of doing business will stretch and redefine the capabilities of every department in our company. As a group . . . so #hcoc will advise:
- HR on creating a culture of collaboration, and on hiring, training and rewarding people for collaborating and sharing
- Marketing on having a conversation and building a brand based on collaboration
- IT on issues of security, access development and toolsets
- Legal on IP, compliance, liability and indemnity
I have to admit at this point that this is a new team – we’ve only been meeting since January. We have really tough issues to tackle, and we all have “day jobs” that keep us busy. And frankly, the biggest threat to the Chamber of Commerce is biting off more than we can chew. But the value we can bring to our company is this: There are very few large companies that have really made social media a differentiator for their business. And I can’t really think of any in health or health care. Desipte the fact that it has no official charter or accountability, it is the Chamber of Commerce that was responsible for writing Humana’s social media policy, and getting it approved by our executive committee (which we did this fall).
We know that health, and the health system, have to change. Humana intends to continue leading that change through innovation and our focus on consumers. There’s a lot of work to do . . . but luckily we work in a company with 29,000 other people who can help. And that’s what the Chamber of Commerce will be tapping into.
How is your company integrating social media into its core functions? What are you doing differently that we might benefit from? We’d love to hear from you …
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