Jessica Lee was  our esteemed moderator for Unpanel Event #3 in which we discussed Adapting Corporate Cultures for the Social Enterprise –  Specifically an Action Plan. The questions were:

Are there generational differences / digital divide issues with employees / customers? and How to manage them? From this question the answers varied from, “start with education” to bridge the gap to “find a champion”. Still others thought there really wasn’t that much of a divide yet some thought that encouraging everyone to get their hands dirty with social media might be  better than any formal training that one could get. The bottom line: some type of hands on training and education might work best:

But here’s a question. that’s the obvious answer but what else is there?

The next question was, In the social enterprise, what are the skill sets needed, attributes, values to look for at each level? Do you need a janitor that can also relate to a customer in person / digitally? An interesting comment arose from this and that was: Do we hire/promote “connectors” for an org as ability to find, connect, combine knowledge of others inside/out? Great question! and then this comment which was very insightful-”Are you hiring a noun or a verb? If you view #socialmedia as a thing, you hire a noun. If personality, a verb (talkative)” and finally, It’s easier to teach someone how to use Twitter than it is to teach them to be outgoing and friendly. The bottom line here is that ideally people need to possess the skills going forward but even if they don’t, they can still ramp up.

And lastly, given that there were certainly some technological challenges that prohibited the discussion to flow the way it should, we think that Jessica did an awesome job in Unpanel #3