Are your bosses afraid of new media? Make them happy.

Lewis Green has me thinking about happiness -- and how you can use it to your advantage when your bosses are skeptical about new media. Lewis writes about measuring social media success, and says happiness is usually undervalued in our calculation. From the introduction to his new book, Lead With Your Heart, Sell Happiness and You and Your Business Will Flourish:

"This book is dedicated to painting a picture of what happiness looks like from a business perspective. Briefly, when I define happiness, I am talking about meeting and exceeding people’s wants, needs and desires by creating great experiences for employees, customers, and citizens that our businesses touch. I am talking about putting the “who”—people—first, not the “what—profits. And by doing so, we will create happiness, we will contribute to better living and we will create and deliver products and services that people want and need at prices that deliver value.

His post addresses businesses and their products and employees, but it applies, too, to the things you can do with new media tools. It reminds me of the emotional reaction I see in clients all the time -- when they see their new blog, or hear a newly produced podcast, or get a positive response to something they've posted somewhere. Unless you've experienced that, I'm not sure you can really understand the happiness that it brings.

So here's my suggestion. If you're convinced a blog or a podcast would be good for your organization, do it yourself. Carve out a half-hour a night, 3 or 4 nights a week at first, to feed it. Stop trying to convince your boss that it's worth your time to do it. Instead, let the project grow at its own pace, wait until you have something worth showing, then show it. Your supervisors will see the value in it, once the project is off the ground. Why? Because it will make them happy. It always does, in my experience. And that happiness is the easiest and best way to get their buy-in.

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