Tech blogger and fellow Alexandria resident Dennis McDonald is on to something in a blog from Friday. Management increasingly will have to plan for how to manage the social networks and online communities of two companies in the process of merging:
Let’s say that two companies that share commmon markets are planning a merger of their management, manufacturing, product lines, distribution, and support operations. Company A employs FaceBook as an external system for interacting with customers, and Company B employs MySpace. Each has invested in development of custom applications that help integrate network based transactions with “back office” customer support systems.
In the old days of custom applications that were developed, owned and operated by the companies, it was not uncommon to migrate users from one system to another based on relatively objective analyses based on issues of cost, scalability, reliability, and alignment with overall technical architecture strategies.
Those days are gone. The users of MySpace and Facebook may have many other relationships and groups in those systems besides those associated with Companies A and B, and this fact may add to the complexity of developing an effective unified post merger strategy.
I’ve seen mergers both as employee and as outside PR counsel. Unfortunately cultural and PR issues often get far less attention than they should, so I have no doubt companies will struggle with the added complexity of 2.0 community integration. Here’s the full post:
Incorporating Social Networking Systems with Mergers & Acquisition Planning
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptTech blogger and fellow Alexandria resident Dennis McDonald is on to something in a blog from Friday. Management increasingly will have to plan for how to manage the social networks and online communities of two companies in the process … […]
At a recent ACG National Capital event to discuss M&A best practices, Brad Antle of SI International said roughly 90 percent of acquisitions fail to achieve their objectives because of poor planning when it comes to integration. I suspect Brad didn’t even take into consideration a requirement to merge social network interaction policies.
I wrote a brief post about the ACG session on my blog at:
http://strategicguy.blogspot.com/2008/02/build-versus-buy.html
Marc, thanks for the comment. I’ll make sure Dennis sees it — a Q&A with Brad on the question might be very interesting.
Thanks for the mention, Chris.
If it’s really true that a majority of corporate mergers never meet their expectations, it’s may be due not only to the shortchanging of cultural, PR, and IT issues during the planning process, but also to the fact that the process of merging is so evolutionary and involves a lot of surprises and changed expectations along the way.
Dennis