Social media workshop technique #1 works well as an ice breaker.
This second technique in our occasional series is much more about getting down to brass tacks.
If you’ve read our Universal Social Media Strategy you’ll know that, in the commercial arena, any strategy worthy of the name should match social means to commercial ends. Social media are not ends in their own right.
This exercise is all about identifying commercial ends that might be achieved by social means.
It’s called “What have social media ever done for us?”

It is an homage to the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, in which the leader of resistance group the People’s Front of Judea (played by John Cleese) asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
It is clearly meant to be a rhetorical question but, much to his chagrin, his audience proceeds to rap off a long list of valuable contributions to society made by the allegedly oppressive Romans – roads, aqueducts, education, public order, irrigation, sanitation, wine etc.
This exercise is about projecting forward and collectively, collaboratively defining what success might look like.
With the image above on a projector screen as a prompt, you hand out A4 sheets with empty speech bubbles on them. Then ask the assembled stakeholders to project forward a year or two and imagine themselves faced by a sceptical CEO asking the question “What have social media ever done for us?”
The task is to generate a list of social media successes that would make the People’s Front Of Judea proud.

This exercise has been used a couple of times in anger and has generated some rich, varied, ambitious and sometimes surprising visions for the commercial value of social media activity.
By and large though the responses cluster around Revenue Generation, Cost Reduction, Efficiency Gains, Employee Engagement and Brand Positioning / Reappraisal.
A highly useful by-product of this exercise is that it serves to cement the idea that social = commercial in the minds of influential stakeholders. The project owner (your client) doesn’t need to sell the idea to his or her stakeholders. They sell it to themselves through this exercise.
As with Technique #1, feel free to borrow this and let us know via a comment whether it works for you.










