Cultural Paradigm Shift happening within Corporations

A large cultural paradigm shift is now happening internally at even the largest corporations at all corners of the world, and it seems to revolve around the context of social communication and mobility. 

And it looks like it is all happening from the outside - in.

Here are are 3 compelling corporate cultural change stories so far this year:

HP is transforming into a socially connected business with social employees and social products.  It all starts with embracing change.  They now use the term: "From the garage to the cloud".  And they are creating what they call the "HP Social Enterprise".  So what was their first step?  To weed out bureaucracy.  

But of course, there are always the worry warts who frett about the Cloud; the security concerns, perceived lack of controling one's destiny and other negatives.  But according to John Hinshaw, Executive Vice President of Global Technology and Business Processes, "The people who are embracing this social enterprise are going to be the winners of the future."

The message here is that this new approach is now strongly reinvogtating HP's corporate culture. 

Second, let's look at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.  You think that a bank can't be mobile and social? "Can't" isn't in their vocabulary.
 

"We're changing the way banking happens" says Chief Marketing Officer Andy Lark.  CBA wants to turn every form of communication into a "social" form of communication. Change the customer experience.  Streamline the process, make it personal.
 

One of the hot CRM platforms (Customer Relationship Management) that CBA and other large companys are using today to help them get there is Salesforce.com. 
 

Starting out with just Facebook, their model has now turned into one of the most effective marketing platforms in the market today.  Bring in "Radian6"-  a digital banking system for Gen Y.  Twentysomethings are frustrated by their banks, with less than a fifth of Gen-Y saying they have recommended their banking provider.  There are at least four ways now that Banks can connect with Gen-Y on Social Media.
 

Financial institutions have been slow to adopt social media because of regulatory and privacy issues, but that’s beginning to change as they realize that social media and mobile solutions are the way to reach Gen-Y, a generation that prefers to tweet or text, instead of visiting a branch or dialing a call center.

Lastly, let's take a peek at O2, the leading provider of mobile services for the UK, Ireland and Germany.  O2 is evolving it's services and capabilities to become more social "both in terms of how we communicate internally and how we communicate with our customers."
 

The question here is:  How well do you know your customers? - or is it really: "How well would you like to know your customers?"
 

Using Twitter, Facebook and Chatter, O2 dove in and now feels the gigantic buzz inside the halls of their offices.
 

They started their model centered around a term called "Joined Up".  Joined up Business, Joined up Communication, Joined up IT  an the last part: "Joined Up Customers".  Just one example is how Chatter helps their engineers engage in crowd-sourcing to solve big problems.

 

Written by Ron Carlson, Founder of pbd in Chicago        Contact Ron at ronc@pbdinc.com