Place Your Community First in Twelve Steps

By Lauren Vargas
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 | 235528 Commentshttp://www.radian6.com/blog/2010/01/place-your-community-first-in-twelve-steps/Place+Your+Community+First+in+Twelve+Steps2010-01-05+16%3A06%3A06Lauren+Vargas
Tags: conversational listening, engage online, social media engagement, two way listening
Posted in: Community, Social Media

The start of any year can be overwhelming. Between personal and professional resolutions, you and your organization may be feeling the pressure of change. However, change for the sake of change is not healthy or productive. Evaluating why you want to resolve to do something different can mean the difference between a year of success to forgetting the resolution even existed come the beginning of February.

Breaking change management into steps can help us keep our resolve, press forward with the satisfaction of progress not perfection and establish an integrated social media strategy. To get you started on this path, we created a twelve step program to help tackle a potential organization goal of putting your community first and actively engaging in healthy online dialog. These steps require only that you and your organization be willing and honest with yourselves and your community.

Follow these steps at your own pace. Since there are twelve, you could resolve to conquer one step per month! No matter how you decide to initiate these steps, our team will be here giving you the support and resources needed to maintain your resolve.

Twelve Step Program for Community Engagement

The following steps are clear cut directions for your organization to practice continuously to foster healthy online relationships and place community first. For a more detailed approach to tackling these twelve steps, please view and download the eBook.

1. We admitted our organization was powerless over the social web – that our conversations had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than our organization could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our organization’s will and our social outposts over to the care of the community as we understood our community.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our organization and brand.
5. Admitted to the community, and to our entire organization the exact nature of our organization’s past behavior.
6. Were entirely ready to have the community remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked the community to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all communities our organization displeased, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would further irritate them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when our organization was wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through social media engagement to improve our conscious contact with the the community as we understood our community, asking only for knowledge of the community’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had an intellectual awakening as the result of these steps, our organization tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

*This version of the 12 steps is an adaptation from the original 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the program inspired by Communicators Anonymous to reposition the communications industry.

Are you up for the challenge? Already tackling these steps? Please share how you will or already are implementing these steps to promote healthy change in your organization.

Remember….this is YOUR year to make social media success a reality!