One of the ways that CCOs and compliance practitioners can better use 360-degrees of communication is through Twitter. In “How Twitter Users Can Generate Better Ideas”, authors Salvatore Parise, Eoin Whelan and Steve Todd found “employees with a diverse Twitter network – one that exposes them to people and ideas they don’t already know – tend to generate better ideas.” Their research led them to three interesting findings: (1) Employees who used Twitter had better ideas than those who did not do so; (2) There was a link between the amount of diversity in employees’ twitter networks and the quality of their ideas; and (3) Twitter users who combined idea scouting and idea connecting were the most innovative.
I do not think the first point is too controversial or even insightful as it simply confirms that persons who tend have greater curiosity tend to be more innovative. The logic is fairly-straightforward, good ideas emerge when new information received is shared with what a person already knows. In today’s digitally connected world, the amount of information in almost any area is significant. Yet by using Twitter, “the potential for accessing a divergent set of ideas is greater.”
The key concept for the compliance profession are the roles of Idea Scout and Idea Connector. An idea scout is “an employee who looks outside the organization to bring in new ideas. An idea connector, is someone who can assimilate the external ideas and find opportunities within the organization to implement these new concepts.” It is the ability to identify, assimilate and exploit new compliance ideas, which makes this concept so powerful. However to improve your compliance innovation, “you need to maintain a diverse network while also developing your assimilation and exploitation skills.”
For the compliance practitioner, Twitter is a gateway to solution and a way to obtain different perspectives and to challenge the status quo in one’s thinking. The key is not your number of followers on Twitter but rather the diversity within your Twitter network, as “Diversity of employee’s Twitter network is conductive to innovation.” An Idea Scout will “identify external ideas from experts and resources on Twitter.” The compliance practitioner can take advantage of experts within the anti-corruption compliance field, but there is an equally rich source of innovation from those outside this arena.
Even with modern social media tools, the first key to good leadership is to listen. Listening can be enhanced, through the “breadcrumb” approach of finding innovation leaders and thought-provokers. This entails listening to colleagues and industry leaders who are Twitter “including what they are tweeting about, who they are following and replying to on the platform, who is being retweeted often”.
Equally important to this Idea Scout is the Idea Connector, who is putting the disparate strands from tweets together. For the compliance function, this will be someone who identifies compliance best practices or other information from Twitter ideas, can then put them together and direct the information to the relevant company stakeholders. Finally, such a person can “Curate Twitter ideas and matches them with company resources needed to implement them.”
There are a variety of ways an Idea Connector can use Twitter. One is to try to sift through your Twitter feed and look for trends and relationships between topics. You bring value when you stamp your own analysis and interpretation on it. Another method is to focus on analytics and one user “filtered specific subsets of the topic for different stakeholders” at his company. Another method was to create “social dashboards or company blogs based on the insight” received thought Twitter. Interesting, one of the key requirements for successfully mining Twitter was in finding ways to share its content “since many employees, especially baby-boomers don’t use the platform themselves.” Conversely by mining information from Twitter and presenting it, this can allow these ‘technologically challenged’ older employees to ascertain how they can target millennial’s.
But as much as these concepts can move a CCO or compliance practitioner to innovation in a compliance program, it can also foster additional communication through the following of your own employees. It is well known that Twitter can facilitate greater communication to and between the compliance function and its customer base, aka the company employees. The use of Twitter to enable this same type of innovation because it “is different than email and other forms of information sources in that it enables continuous engagement”.
Twitter was created to allow people to connect with one and other and communicate about their activities. However the marketing potential was immediately seen and used by many companies. Now a deeper understanding of its use and benefits has developed. For the compliance practitioner one thing you want to consider is to align your Twitter and great social media strategy with your compliance strategy; match your Twitter strategy to your compliance strategy.
Twitter can be powerful tool for the compliance practitioner. It is one of the only tools that can work both inbound for you to obtain information and insight and in an outbound manner as well; where you are able to communicate with your compliance customer base, your employees. You should work to incorporate one or more of the techniques to help you burn compliance into the DNA fabric of your organization.
Three Key Takeaways
This month’s podcast series is sponsored by Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet’s compliance solutions provide comprehensive due diligence reporting and analysis to reduce your risk of working with fraudulent companies by accessing a company’s beneficial ownership, reputation risk and more. For more information, go to dnb.com/compliance.