Logic+Emotion

Stop Looking for the Next Twitter

 
From my latest contribution to Harvard Business

If you are a pundit, or get paid to watch trends, then this message doesn't apply to you. It's your job to go out and find the next shiny object that could influence how we live and do business.

But if you're in the trenches of an organization, my advice is to stop acting like or listening to pundits. Stop looking for the next Twitter. Why? It's simple—because the odds are you already have plenty of projects and ideas with proven potential that you need to improve on without worrying about the next thing you'll start. Here are a few thought-starters based on observations I've made about all of "yesterday's Twitters" that need some care and feeding before you start looking for the next Twitter. Perhaps some may hit close to home for you.

Your Website(s): Websites haven't been bright and shiny for years now; they're more de rigeur. But is yours really as good as it could be? Do search engines find it effortlessly? Is it usable? Does it even serve a purpose (is it useful)? Can you rapidly re-design it without it causing major upheaval within the departments of your organization? After reading how American Airlines struggles with the all too common problem of "design by committee" (which exists within many large organizations), I have to conclude that getting your website to completely satisfy business, brand and user goals is still elusive for many companies.

Your Blog(s): Your company is blogging. Congratulations. Is anyone listening? Blogging was the bright and shiny object of 2006-2008 and many companies found out just how hard it is to do well. Good blogging provides value. It is interesting and generates a healthy amount of comments and conversation which in turn generates a good dose of Google juice. It's also terribly difficult to sustain. It requires cultural shifts within an organization, and has to be prioritized (read: made part of someone's job). Frankly, I rarely see outstanding examples of a good company blog. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing (if it makes sense strategically), but doing it well is another story.

Your Intranet(s): Wow. Where do I begin? Intranets were bright and shiny several years ago, now they're more often the butt of water cooler jokes. How old is your intranet? When was the last time it was updated? Do your employees use it or have they, like many, engaged in IT mutiny, instead, basically sidestepping your internal system for Web 2.0 cloud based systems that allow them to work and collaborate the way they want to? If employees don't use the systems you've put in place, why? Fixing this system will do a lot more good than expending energy on finding the next Twitter. After all, if your company isn't functioning well internally, it's probably exhibiting problems externally, too.

Your Facebook, Twitter, Community Initiatives etc.: I'm lumping these ecosystems together because what's really important about them is that they all require high levels of engagement and participation from company representatives (unless the company is fortunate enough to be a "badge brand"). But the reality for many organizations is that they just aren't ready to directly engage with customers on the customers' turf. Tweeting requires a certain confidence that it's okay for your conversations to be public and companies who are customer centric such as Jet Blue tend to do well here. There's a good deal of interaction that happens on the Whole Foods Facebook page in addition to the expected promotions. Communities are delicate ecosystems and companies that want to be relevant there have to have representatives who are comfortable, at ease, who can deftly work these ecosystems. This has proven to be easier said than done for many.

By no means is this a complete list. But in whatever previously shiny object you own, the common thread is that a lack of vision, strategy, and ability to execute well limits the potential of an organization to be truly valuable to all of their constituents (customers, employees and business partners). So my advice for the non trend-watcher? Forget finding the next Twitter and start buffing up those previously shiny objects, the ones where your constituents need you today.

It's Time to Clobber Social Media

Originally posted on the Collaboratory

Jeff Dachis and I recently returned from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York—a near week long flurry of activity that brings together technology, business and design amongst other things. We co-presented a somewhat uniquely titled session called “Social Business Design: It’s Clobberin’ Time”. So what does this mean? Simply put, it means that we are fast approaching a time where there will be a de-emphasis on the “media” portion of “social” and an emphasis on a business being socially calibrated. By this, we mean a business being more real time, adaptive, and in tune with all of its constituents (not just consumers/customers). If you want to make this really simple, you can use the word better. We believe that a socially calibrated business will be better.

Our presentation provided the rationale for why we feel this (we think many business functions have the potential be socialized, not just marketing). We explained our position on why we think the intentional act of design (or business re-design) is needed to achieve the end result of “moving the needle’ or realizing significant cost reduction or profit. We cited several early examples of success while noting the challenges they also pose. Providing customer service on Twitter is great, but how do you scale and integrate it? What’s the right metric to measure? Do your “social initiatives” live in a silo or are they integrated into multiple facets of the organization? These are not media questions—they are business questions. We injected a bit of personality by starting the presentation by saying “we didn’t come to save social media, we came to demolish it”.  An exaggeration to be sure, but we think there is something deeper and we’re just seeing the tip of the Iceberg.

We broke down what we think will be the building blocks of a more social business. Adaptations in people, process and technology. We talked about the benefits and value of “open cultures” (think Zappos) and the potential of connecting the ecosystem of an organization so that a new way of collaborating could co-exist with traditional hierarchy.  The audience seemed receptive. More importantly, they seemed hungry. Does social media really need “clobbering”? Not really—many businesses are reaping the benefits of communicating and engaging with their customers in new ways enabled via social technologies. We applaud this. And we think it’s only the beginning. Have a look at our presentation and let us know what you think. More importantly—ask yourself this: How ready for social business are you?

Social Business Design: Web 2.0 NYC

View more documents from Dachis Group.

Why Serendipity Is Underrated

A nice reminder from Chris Brogan. I recommend watching the entire talk—it's only 10 minutes. Here's what you need to know: as an observer and active participant of the social web for several years, I've seen the power of serendipity influence how business gets done. Business leads coming in through Twitter because the person inquiring somehow stumbled upon you via the web and after following you for a while, they decided it was time to talk business.

It's like life. Some of you reading this right now have done business because you sat next to a person on a plane and struck up a conversation or was receptive to the being a part of a conversation after someone initiated it.

We want to separate business from real life—but the reality of life (and business) is that it's messier than we like to admit. As Chris says, we need to figure out how we develop relationships that yield (I've experienced this in so many ways).

Serendipity is underrated because it's fuzzy, intangible, and difficult to source our even put our finger on. It takes time. But we want results NOW. Faster. Cheaper. Better. Of course, there's nothing wrong with this—if you're in business, you're in it to profit. But profit can be obtained in a number of ways:

 

Some businesses do understand the power of serendipity. When a Zappos employee sent my wife a hand written card elaborating on their discussion about family and her aunt—that employee understood that one micro-interaction has the potential to trigger vast ripple effects. Amazon obviously saw the value of doing business this way. Serendipity as Chris suggests is a tough sell to anyone who toils in the trenches of corporate cultures across the globe. That doesn't mean it's not a increasingly important business tactic. In reality, as my airplane reference suggests (based on a true story), it probably always has been.

Tweeting at the Speed of Scale

Originally posted on the Collaboratory
From a holistic perspective, we talk about the need for organizations to become more socially calibrated—able to adapt and respond to changes both externally and internally. The three areas where emergent outcomes can manifest are, participation with your customers, collaboration between your employees and optimization in the interactions/transactions between your business and its partners. Digging into customer participation, it’s clear that in a networked economy customers demand engagement, information, support and ultimately, value and ecosystems such as Twitter are beginning to deliver here.

In true agile fashion, we’ve been working on our service offerings simultaneously as we service clients. One of our offerings is built upon the belief that a socially calibrated organization will desire to engage in ecosystems such as Twitter with both efficiency and scale without sacrificing quality. It’s a tall order but one that we see as a natural evolution of organizations looking to engage customers effectively and perhaps generate a bit of positive word of mouth in the process.

To date, we’ve seen several companies find success using Twitter ranging from the spokesperson model (Ford’s Scott Monty) to the nimble customer service team (Comcast) to literally hundreds of employees engaging within the ecosystem (Best Buy’s Twelpforce). While there is no one size fits all solution, it’s clear that the Twitter ecosystem is ripe for interactions between constituents and as Best Buy shows, it is indeed possible to scale. But currently they are one of the few organizations doing this. For organizations looking to engage large numbers of their employees within Twitter, they will also need to factor in speed as this particular medium is as real-time as it gets (see dynamic signals). There can be many complexities that exist as a barrier between moving from a current ad hoc model to a more systematic scalable solution. When exploring this opportunity (if it makes sense for your organization), there are several key factors to consider (and I’m only scratching the surface for the sake of the blog format).

People
One of the most significant obstacles to overcome is to determine if your organizational culture can grow into something which supports large numbers of your employees effectively engaging on Twitter. People fuel the ecosystem, not automated technologies. Issues such as competency, incentives, scheduling, job descriptions, policies and guidelines all need to be addressed. This is likely to be different for every organization and as distinct as your culture.

Process
If an organization finds that their people are ready, able and willing to participate in an appropriate fashion—there is still the issue of process. Having a handful of employees providing support, help or engaging your customers may be one thing, but when you’ve got a small army of them it’s another. A process needs to be designed which allows for employees to engage without stepping on each others toes. Tasks may need to be allocated. An organization may need to architect a series of flows which can handle a multitude of scenarios. With scale comes the need for a flexible structure.

Technology
Tweetdeck and your personal account may be enough to sustain the “spokesperson” model of engagement via Twitter, but moving into having a legion of employees actively participating in an orchestrated fashion can require the use of a TAM (Twitter Account Management) system such as Hootsuite or CoTweet (disclosure, CoTweet is one of our partners). A “TAM” with robust features would likely be needed to manage workflow and integrate data. It’s worth noting that for a fee, CoTweet will support storing data of the interactions you have with your customers on Twitter (in addition to other services). But regardless of what you choose, in order to scale by design it’s likely that you’ll need more than what the native platform offers.

At the end of the day, business will have to move at the speed of real time and to do that at scale, you’ll need to plan, design and cultivate the right people, process and technology—all which ideally function under a business framework that is social by design. If you are looking for guidance in this area, we’d be happy to work with you.

Overcoming The Obstacles To Social Business

Originally published on Harvard Business

While social media often commands favorable media attention, the less often told story is that successful initiatives are rare to come by and that there are still a number of organizational roadblocks that managers need to overcome in order to make progress.

Still, we are seeing signs of progress in the form of new efficiencies, more direct ways to connect with customers, and ways to make products and services better. From my experience working and talking with people in large, complex organizations, here are a small sample of obstacles to look for with suggestions on how you might overcome them:

1. Culture shock

Externally, social media is a vastly significant iteration of the Web which has empowered the public in ways we never imagined. It's also highly disruptive. The same potential for disruption exists internally for organizations. Instead of everyday consumers becoming empowered, everyday employees now have this potential as well. And this could cause a culture shock to the system of an organization structured upon decades of tradition, hierarchy, middle management and incentives. An inconvenient truth remains that change is often perceived as a threat.

How to overcome it

Find the change agents within your organization who are passionate about making your company better and harness their passion for the benefit of your business. Comcast's Frank Eliason was a customer service manager who began engaging (and, more importantly, helping) customers via his personal Twitter account. When the rest of the company was made aware of the initiative (and the ensuing positive attention), they decided to reward the effort as opposed to doing a u-turn. A great way to overcome culture shock within a large organization is for leadership to recognize and embrace the mavericks driven to change things for the better. The next challenge then becomes scale.

2. The legal treadmill

The changes sparked by technology are giving the lawyers a headache. Legal teams must be on full alert to changes in the social media landscape, such as the FTC's recent decision to force bloggers to disclose when they've been given payment or products. The legal department of any organization exists to protect it. But sometimes doing business at the speed of real time makes it feel like you are on a treadmill when you need to be sprinting to the finish line.

How to overcome it

Legal needs to be engaged early on and by the right people. There also needs to be support from the top if it means doing something that pushes the boundaries. Michael Dell fully supported Dell's pioneering social media efforts from the top down which no doubt influenced decisions made in the legal department. That said, not everything has to involve the CEO. When I recently approached The Art of Shaving (a P&G brand) to sponsor our Movember team, I advised them that the first thing they should do is talk to their legal department. The brand manager did just that and legal produced clear guidelines about how the social sponsorship would work. In order to get off the legal treadmill, you need a combination of leadership and collaboration.

3. Riskphobia

Making strides toward thriving as a more socially calibrated business means taking a risk or three. And in this economy, no one wants to do that. Unless your organization has a serious entrepreneurial streak running through it, it's likely that the people who work in it are generally risk averse and rewarded for playing by the rules. However, riskphobia is a serious problem for large companies who are finding their businesses disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. Tower Records probably wishes they took some more calculated risks before the industry came crashing down around them.

How to overcome it

Risk can often be managed by piloting small initiatives to see what happens — while learning, gathering data, and iterating on them while they inform bigger and better initiatives. When our company launched our website, we included a real-time stream of our activities and content on our homepage. The stream even includes information about who we email (you don't see names, but you do see the domains). Some view this as risky business, but we felt that the gesture would help us help others manage the risks of transparency and we can manage what gets shared. It's a small gesture, but meaningful as we hope to help others manages their own risks.

These are just three of many obstacles. So, I'm curious — what obstacles have you encountered? How have you dealt with them?

How Google Helped Save A Life

When my eight-year-old (Max) complained that he wasn't feeling well, we kept him home. On the next afternoon, when he complained about stomach pains, I told him to lie down. Later that day, when the stomach pains persisted and I had left the house—Belinda turned to Google for help. Mother's intuition told her to search for information—specifically where the appendix is located. And after doing so she went up to Max's room and pressed down on the right side of his abdomen. When he winced in pain, she decided to call the doctor. The doctor said go to the emergency room. The ER said, get a cat scan and the cat scan said it was irritated. Then the surgeon said it was early, but in a day or two it was likely to burst.

So the surgeon gave Max an appendectomy and I gave him a Popsicle.

Thank you to the Internet, Google, Mother's Intuition and all of the doctors, nurses, co-workers, friends and family (including you) for all the kind words. He's doing well. So is the penguin.

A Conversation Worth Sponsoring (Thank You To The Art of Shaving)

When Aaron Strout approached me about participating in Movember (through the Movember foundation which facilitates donations for Mens health issues such as testicular cancer), I was a bit apprehensive. I mean, I do a lot of talks/work with clients and it's hard to be taken seriously with a 'stash that came out of nowhere. I also thought about how much work it would take to hit up my network and raise funds for a great cause. It's never easy to ask people for money.

Then the "marketer" in me started thinking. Wouldn't there be a brand out there who would want to get involved with this? What does a traditional sponsorship get you? A few banner ads? Those don't work—everyone in the industry wants to figure out how to get in the social streams in a meaningful way.

I typically don't do what's known as "sponsored conversations"—but this is a conversation worth sponsoring. So I dialed up my friends at P&G. And they dialed up their friends at relevant brands. And The Art of Shaving, stepped up and said:

Yeah, we will donate $5000.00 to Team Austin (who by the way is going to decimate team Boston). Well, in the spirit of full disclosure—they said this exactly:

1) The Art of Shaving will donate $5,000 to Team SocMed Austin’s fundraising efforts for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Livestrong, & Movember Foundations. 

2)  The Art of Shaving will provide you and 9 of your teammates a gift pack of our products for you to use as you shave throughout the month.  The pack will also include a DVD & a brochure with information on our brand and products. 

3)  In any subsequent communications, you & Team SocMed Austin will be sure to acknowledge the Art of Shaving donation of money & products transparently to your readers & followers.

And just like that—the folks at The Art of Shaving are now part of this conversation as they should be. I mean, it's all about growing and trimming facial hair for a good cause. So thank you to the folks at The Art of Shaving for your support of Team Austin. Will I reference the products they send me? Of course I will. They helped me and I want to help them back. It's a "sponsored conversation" but I'll also be honest about the products, though at first glance they do look fairly high quality. And instead of a few dollars going toward a media purchase, it goes somewhere better. If you feel moved to help as well, you can donate to Team Austin here. Thanks for even considering.

-David

How To Create Advocates For Your Business

So what is customer advocacy anyway? Well for starters, they don't have to be your customers—they can be any part of your entire constituency. Employees, business partners, friends—you name it. But here's the point. You need them more than ever. Right now, if you are planning social initiatives, your biggest challenge is going to be manpower. Someone has to do the listening, the outreach, the customer service, the participation, the engagement with others in the ecosystem. Some parts can be automated (such as an algorithm in a listening tool technology), but many other parts require actual people. So at some point you'll have to scale, and you're going to need a passionate, engaged group of people to advocate on your behalf. So how do you do it? Here are a few high level pointers.

1. Improve your product, service or offering
Start there. You have to have something of value to offer. If your product, service or offering needs improvement, actively get out into your ecosystem and engage them in the process. Part of this is crowdsourcing, part of it is co-creation but the end result is that your constituents will become active participants in the process. You don't have to do everything they say, but you might be surprised at the insights and data you'll get in return. 

2. Serve
Acts of service are a great way to create advocates. It takes time, but over time the people you are serving will talk about your acts to others, get their attention and they will benefit from this. Over more time loyalty will develop and over more time they will eventually become your advocate acting as your eyes and ears and providing value back. Think of ways your organization can provide a service.

3. Make it about the catagory
One of the biggest mistakes that companies make when trying to convert consumers to advocates is to make it about their products or marketing to them in some way. Advocacy often times happens around a topic that people care about. Aligning yourself with the appropriate topic is a great way to tap into that momentum. But it has to be relevant and real—so be picky about what catagory you choose to align with and participate around.

4. Make it really easy
Your employees will dread using a collaboration system that's unusable, and out of frustration they will not become advocates of that system (and less likely to advocate for your company). Likewise a customer is less likely to advocate on your behalf if you make customer support, registration, or interacting with your organization difficult. Make all your touchpoints as simple as possible. And this is probably one of the most difficult things you'll ever have to do.

I'm doing a good deal of thinking about what it takes to make a customer, an employee, or anyone within a relevant ecosystem an advocate. And we are incorporating these principles into our client deliverables. I'm convinced this will be a necessary step in scaling and taking advantage of the foundation social technologies is laying out for us. Having advocates which help us listen, aid in customer support and make our products and services better can have huge benefits in business, because the simple fact is you're just not going to be able to do it alone. 

Six Social Media Trends For 2010

Originally posted on The Harvard Business Review blog

In 2009 we saw exponential growth of social media. According to Nielson Online, Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Meanwhile, Facebook continued to outpace MySpace. So what could social media look like in 2010? In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that's my guess. What are the near-term trends we could see as soon as next year? In no particular order:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

2. Corporations look to scale
There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy's Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates. This is a sign of things to come over the next year as more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology.

3. Social business becomes serious play
Relatively new networks such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile. However, it also has a game-like quality to it which brings out the competitor in the user. Participants are incentivized and rewarded through higher participation levels. And push technology is there to remind you that your friends are one step away from stealing your coveted "mayorship." As businesses look to incentivize activity within their internal or external networks, they may include carrots that encourage a bit of friendly competition.

4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
If the company you work for doesn't already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what's considered competition, it's likely that you'll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.

5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it's likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into "social media breaks" as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn't looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice.

6. Sharing no longer means e-mail
The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it's likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.

These are a few emerging trends that come to my mind — I'm interested to hear what you think as well, so please weigh in with your own thoughts. Where do you see social media going next?

Social Business Design in 5 Minutes

There's been a bit of discussion not so recently about the meaning of Social Business Design. As I thought about this, and the language we use—I recalled the 1/2 day talk I gave in Melbourne recently. The audience seemed to fully grasp the concept and Simon was kind enough to record a few portions of it. In this clip, I discuss the 4 key archetypes that we believe a social business will embody. What do you think?