Logic+Emotion

Rock Stars, Tribes, & Community Management

Yesterday I entertained an engaging conversation with a young professional working her way up through the industry. She made some interesting observations about the company I work for. She observed that we had a very active "tribe" in multiple social systems. She also noted that she associates one of our community managers (Suzanne) with our practice site (edelmandigital.com). These two things made me very happy. I see them as a sign of maturity. Organizations who wish to move into new areas often look to hire "rock stars" to help make make rain, attract talent and garner attention. Rock stars do in fact produce results, but they don't scale well and you can't clone them.

This is where tribes come in. Tribes form as a business grows and begins to prosper. The benefit is that there is strength in numbers. Attack a member of a tribe and you attack the entire tribe, activating members to come to the defense of the single individual under duress. But tribal culture has it's limitations and this is where community management comes in. Community managers can act as connecters of tribes. Within a complex organization, they are the ones who can connect tribes across geographies and disconnected business functions. Externally, community managers frequently cross pollinate areas where "rival" tribes mix things up.

What's interesting about each of these archetypes is that they all play an integral role in any business environment. The next time you go to a networking function, you can see these constructs in action. The rock stars tend to draw small crowds around them--they are like magnets. The tribes cluster together in groups emitting a bond that you can almost feel physically. The community managers who are comfortable in multiple communities go from one cluster to the next, creating new connections each time they engage.

A social business model is one which understands and embraces the roles and traits of these individuals and their associated behaviors. More importantly, it looks to scale and replicate the successes which the combination of these roles can bring. Who fits the rock star, tribe and community manager descriptions in your organization? Are you tapping their behaviors for the benefit of your business?

Learning To Fly: The Four Stages of Social Business

Time to talk about social business planning again. My mother always told me, you have to "walk before you run" and as it turns out, the same is true for organizations looking to move from social media as a set of un-connected, chaotic collection of skunk work initiatives to a coordinated and purposeful initiative that works through the entire organization. Of course, this will take time—years most likely. But it's inevitable in my estimation. As I've said before—the end game is integration. The above chart is generic—it can be applied to some organizations (especially large ones with a global footprint). If your company wants to learn to fly and integrate a social "layer" into everything you do here are a few thoughts as you plot your own roadmap:

Crawling: People, Process, Procedure
In the initial stage of the evolving your business into one that not only leverages "social media" in one function (such as marketing), an organization must come to the point where it realizes it "has a problem". Then the first stage can begin on the right footing. "Crawling" involves putting in the right infrastructure which includes some organizational re-design. This is when the center of excellence should be formed and where education, standardization and active listening is put in place.

Walking: Managing Your Properties
With some basic infrastructure in place, an organization must now "take stock" of all the social properties which either exist or need to and devise the appropriate strategy to get these properties moving in the right direction. In this stage assets like content are especially important as it's lower risk than really diving in deeply and over-engaging. However, this is also the stage where an organization really defines its engagement strategy across multiple business functions, from employee to customer care to outward marketing and more.

Running: Ecosystem Engagement At Scale
At this stage, an organization has put in the internal and external designs in place and are running multiple social initiatives at a global scale with an established degree of efficiency. Most importantly an organization has evolved into one that can engage with multiple stakeholders to the level that works for its business (regulated industries will have unique challenges here). At the running stage, multiple ecosystems are also connected—for example the process and tools for managing scores of social networks have been formalized.

Flying: Social Innovation & Organizational Integration
Organizations at this stage have not only integrated "social" ito most everything they do—they are using the intelligence to improve their business, create new products and services and can digest data in ways that predict potential future outcomes. Organizations which "fly" have embedded a social mindset into much of what they do and have re-tooled entire business functions. For example, an organization which has completely overhauled its customer service function to work as effectively as it does in channels such as a call center (at scale) are at the flying stage in some degree.

From my experience talking and working with large global brands—very few are even close to flying but most seem to have a desire to get there at some point, understanding that the process will be a long and winding road. I've found this model resonates both at the CMO, CEO and senior management levels. Where do you fall on the spectrum?

My New Job Sounds Great. But What Is It?

Originally posted on Edelman Digital

Yesterday as news circulated that I’d be taking a new role at Edelman (EVP, Global Innovation & Integration). I spotted a tweet that I was secretly hoping I’d get. Zach wasn’t sure what my title meant—but congratulated me anyway. He brings up a valid point. Words like innovation are vague and in the past have been overused. And the word “integration” can be a number of things. But we chose these words purposefully and here’s my take on what they mean:

Innovation
Simply put, it’s what keeps your business on the front line. Google had a great run for a while as the only kid on the digital block, then Facebook came along and innovated by connecting people to other people not just information. Google innovated by indexing the Web, and Facebook is emerging as a challenger fueled by an innovative way of looking at human connections. Craigslist is an innovation and has played a role in disrupting the cash cow of newspaper classifieds. But someday, this space will be disrupted again by another innovator. In short, innovation comes in waves of all sizes, but it’s something that every business needs to focus on—because it can ultimately create new opportunities which are essential for growth.

Integration
Many organizations set up innovation incubators or labs and treat them as experiments. In my experience where I’ve seen this done, it leads to some interesting experiments—but a lack of adoption. This is where integration comes in. Innovations can often happen in nimble environments, but it doesn’t and shouldn’t be treated as a lab. Instead, innovations should occur in batches with the purpose of scaling and integrating more broadly. It’s the second half of the equation and can be accomplished with multiple teams focused on pushing things through to fruition.

I’m viewing my new role as a mandate from Edelman’s most senior leaders—”permission to innovate.” In this role, I’ll be focused on finding the right partners in crime from external platform developers to client partners to internal innovation co-conspirators. As Alan alluded to in his note—we are seeing tremendous shifts in the areas of mobile, social, search, content, platforms and analytics. Each of these areas will present opportunities for a business and brand to adapt over time. In my estimation, the transformation will be in baby steps. Small, nimble, incremental steps which help a brand uncover new opportunities in marketing, communications and how they conduct business in a connected age. That’s my new job which I’m really excited about, and don’t be surprised if I reach out to you at some point.

Is a Social Currency System The Next Big Thing?

Twitter lets us tell the world what we are doing. Foursquare allows us to broadcast where we are doing it. Empire Avenue let's us determine how much we are worth. That's essentially the premise of this quirky and somewhat addictive social system modeled after the stock market and loaded with game mechanics that reward you for a variety of participatory behaviors both on the network and across others.

Like Twitter and Foursquare, the network makes very little sense to the first time participant. It's more Foursquare like in the sense that it functions as a game—however it increases your "worth" based on the investments you make in others as well as your activity on the social networks that you connect to it. First impressions? I'm not seeing a practical use but it's a lot more fun in many regards than Facebook.

One application I could see potentially. For brands looking to gauge their social currency via the level of activity across networks and put a score to it (similar to something like a Net Promoter score), there are some interesting pieces of the platform which could potentially work this way. It's too early to tell exactly. I'm on it as are many of my friends—like the beginning of any social network. And just like all networks it will either gain some level of adoption or fade off into the sunset. Are you trying it out? If so, buy me while I'm still affordable. :-)

The ROI of Your Mother

From Chris Brogan's blog

"Gary was talking about a person in the board room who was hounding him, “What’s the ROI of social media? What’s the ROI? What’s the ROI?” Gary’s answer, when he’d finally had enough? “What’s the ROI of your mother?”

Cue the laughter and give Gary Vaynerchuck a high five. Saying something like "what's the ROI of your mother?" is bold, human and funny. Several years ago I watched as Ford's Scott Monty delivered a talk in Paris and he also asked "what's the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?". Also a great way to work a crowd and get you thinking. But keynotes and meetings in boardrooms with executives are two different things. I bet Scott digs into things like metrics a bit deeper as he plans multiple marketing campaigns which integrate social strategy and implementation. So to be clear, Gary is great, Scott is great—now let's talk metrics, behaviors and financials. In fact, let's get specific on an example for illustration. Many of you who know me, may remember that we raised nearly 17k for a family in need (12k in less than 24 hours) a few years ago. We used nothing but social networks to do this. Let's break this case down to see if the above model holds:

Metrics: Things you can measure
There were so many metrics that I was able to look at during that initiative and they meant different things. Here were a few that I noticed:

-Re-tweets: The number of re-tweets from my Twitter updates was something I kept track of for a while. It Was one of the main indicators that the messages I was sending out was indeed getting amplification.

-Page views/traffic: Traffic to my blog was over 10x normal traffic. This gave me an indicator that the message was not only being amplified but that it was driving traffic the the right destination at a rapid rate.

-Clicks, Diggs, Referrals: Back in 2009, Digg was still kind of a big deal in terms of routing traffic to a destination. Today, shares, likes, and any type of measurement which tracks sharing across networks mean your content is being routed.

-Google Page Rank: The word "Daniela" ended up being the 8th most popular result out of 42 million. In this case, not hugely relevant. However, to go back to Scott Monty for example, I'm confident his teams are tracking Google page ranks of words such as "Focus" and what they can do to improve Ford's ranking.

Behaviors: Targeted actions and desirable outcomes
There are lots of actions which lead to micro metrics, for example influencing the behavior to share a link or click on something. These are hard metrics. Then There are soft metrics. During our experience with the Daniela effort—I was caught off guard at the fact that it drew criticism. This was due to fact that it got amplified so quickly and drew so much attention. There were certain things that I did intentionally to help influence a certain behavior; Advocacy. As some of the criticism was documented, a small percentage of "nodes" in the network became activated and advocated on our behalf. Advocacy was the desired behavior. The desired outcome included things like Twitter being pressured to shut down an account which was impersonating me. That was a favorable outcome. Behaviors lead to outcomes—don't forget that.

Financials: Cost savings or earnings
Typepad costs me under two hundred dollars a year. Twitter costs nothing. However I spent hundreds of hours of my personal time in putting effort into informing the stakeholders of this initiative, blogging, setting up the payment infrastructure etc. In addition to that, there was the thousands of hours spent actually building up the network. But, ultimately there was a number reached which we could point to: $16, 880.60 to be exact. There was also a percentage we could point to—we had exceeded a targeted goal by 337%.

The bottom line: Business likes tangible results
There were a lot of intangible results I could go which relate to this example. It was the catalyst for many interactions which have benefitted others as well as myself. All soft "ROI" indicators but valid nevertheless. This side of the equation speaks to the "what's the ROI of your mother" part. Or you could just say we did the right thing, and it paid off for all parties. However, for most CEOs, CMO's and business execs—doing the right thing isn't often enough. And it's why we need to measure and analyze and report. The ROI of my mother is common sense—I would not be here today without her. I just don't expect the CMO of a global organization value that as much as I do. We're in the "doing" stage now of all of this and like it or not—we need to move business conversations beyond putting our pants on and invoking our moms.

The Cure For Social Media Schizophrenia? Simplicity.

I recently put together a profile on About.me and I suggest you take a look at it if you have multiple social identity disorder. But why—isn't it another social profile to manage? Well ironically yes, it is. However, in my opinion it serves a function. Come to my blog and I'm throwing around some pretty niche content that can seem a bit foreign to a first time visitor. Stumble upon my Twitter profile and I'm sharing links and chatting with a bunch of folks. Go to my Flickr or YouTube account and there's media without a lot of context.

The point is that this makes a bunch of complex things simple. I compared it to an introduction to a stranger. You wouldn't walk up to someone you didn't know and begin speaking out of context would you? My friend Jeremiah Owyang disagrees. He says:

"I think in your case it's not really needed (an introduction). Folks know you for your work and thought leadership in your blog."

I'm not so sure. I'm known to a few people yes—but the Web is a big place. Maybe it's not this particular service, maybe it's something else—but as I opined in my 2011 trends, we'll all feel a bit more social media schizophrenia in the years to come. And when that happens, a simple introduction can go a long way.

Moving From Social Media Tactics To Your Social Business Plan

Over a year ago, I put a presentation out in public titled "Social Media Is Dead. Long Live Common Sense". Admittedly, it was a little ahead of it's time. Most companies back then were not ready to think about social media outside of anything that looked like viral marketing at most and at the least, a place to monitor conversations. Today is different—many organizations find themselves in either the "crawling" or "walking" phase of social business integration and desire to rapidly move toward running and flying even if they are nowhere close to it.

In short, organizations are beginning to realize that "social" needs to be integrated into how they do business and because of it's disruptive nature and the fact that "social" refuses to be silo-ed in a single department. The future of all things "social" is integration—this is inevitable. But in the present, the here and now—many companies are struggling to scale their social experimentation into something that they can point to as a success. This piece is meant to illustrate the way to do this which takes into account the three parallel paths needed to work in tandem to accomplish this:

Social Business Planning & Integration
For organizations who have set up a steering committee and a center of excellence, a social business plan which is coordinated from the center, charts the roadmap for the organization across multiple brands and/or business functions. Social business planning is the holistic view and sets the agenda, outlines what infrastructure is needed and shares knowledge and best practices across the company. Without a social business plan in place which manifests itself as a roadmap—efforts end up as one off or ad hoc initiatives without orchestration.

Social Business Strategy
Strategic initiatives are formed at the brand or business function and are channel related but also somewhat channel agnostic. For example, a brand may look at how it approaches content or customer service or engagement with customers and determine what strategy they should pursue to evolve these functions into something that aligns with the way customers or other stakeholders expect to interact with the brand. Instead of a "Twitter strategy", or "Facebook strategy" for example, brands must look at strategies against things like crisis, communications, marketing, customer service, product development, and form strategies for how they make these activities more connected.

Pilots
Once an organization determines what strategies it should pursue against a business function which can integrate social into it, manageable pilots should should be identified to pursue to the point of implementation. Pilots generate data and insights which then need to be analyzed and fed back into the social business plan and roadmap. This is where the system becomes a giant feedback loop for the organization—instead of being a top down approach, initiating a comprehensive plan puts a foundation in place and pilots serve as small validation or invalidation points which help inform the broader direction. A pilot can be a promotion, blog, a Facebook page, Twitter account, social intranet or the types of interactions, content and community management applied to them. What's critical is that they are doable and result in a tangible "thing" where outcomes can be measured.

Most organizations who were the pioneers tapping social media for business launched pilots as the first salvos before engaging in broader initiatives (think Dell's Idea Storm or GM's Fast Lane blog). Today, pilot programs must feed back into a broader social business plan and the organizations who become the first to integrate or "fly" as a social business will manage efforts in these streams simultaneously. What's your social business plan? Do you have one?

Campaigns & Ecosystems

 

From Business Insider:

"Here’s the thing about many social media agencies: they often find themselves in the position of having to polish a turd. You pay them to get the word out about something, but you might not have an actual thing (a “social object” if you will) to talk about. The internet likes to talk about things - cool things, new things, awesome things, shiny things, fun things. Social media agencies don’t make things. They talk about things"

Go ahead and read the rest of the article. I found it to be a shallow industry perspective and poor use of earned media in my opinion. Essentially it was an advertisement for the firm who's CEO wrote it. That said, it does underscore a huge challenge any business will face and I think it goes beyond the notion that having a great product leads to great marketing. Well of course it does, but if we're going to define business through a marketing lens, we are forgetting the relationship between two essential constructs.

Campaigns
Products that sell themselves are a myth. We only have to look to Apple for the truth in this. Of course they create solid products through offering up a desirable experience, but they also have some of the most well integrated and executed marketing initiatives on the planet. What should a campaign be like when the product itself is no Apple? When Domino's Pizza realized that their product was not all it could be, they launched a truthful campaign admitting that they could and would do better. Results? The campaign along with menu change increased sales.  

Ecosystems
Back to Apple. It does marketing. Lots of it. It also builds ecosystems. These are iTunes, the App store and what they are attempting with mobile me. But you don't have to be a software company to build a business ecosystem. Starbucks (Edelman client) is doing this with mobile payments, Nike does this with Nike+ and American Express does this in the B2B world with Open Forum. Ecosystems are systems, not messages meaning that they are complex and go beyond telling a story. The really good ones though, empower stakeholders ranging from customers to employees to tell their own stories.

CEOs, CMOs & Agency Partners Unite
Good agency partners will challenge their clients to do the right thing, which in this economy is to integrate campaign and ecosystem initiatives. However all agencies react to market demand. When a CMO with a limited lifespan forces them to get quick results—they often create significant demand for "viral marketing"—quick hits which can lead to short term results which can validate their existance. But the businesses which succeed in the long run (and the CEO's driving them), understand that it's the coordination of a good product and service, combined with an integration of ecosystems, support and marketing initiatives which will result in long term value for not ony customers but all stakeholders. My advice to business and agency alike? Take a pass on spinning the wheel of marketing misfortune and work on integrating these efforts today.  

The Multiple Choice of Criticism

The thing about criticism is that it's less about the criticism itself and more about what you do with it that counts. I always find that when criticism comes my way, there's a sort of multiple choice scenario that goes through my head which looks something like this:

Option A: Reject and retaliate
In this scenario a voice in our head says something like "they don't know what they are talking about" and our brains go into overdrive figuring out ways to poke holes in the criticism and fight the "attack". It's the most spirited of the options and can leave you the most bitter.

Option B: Accept and agonize
The voice in this option is the exact opposite of the first. It tells you that you're no good and that everything in the criticism is true and that your best course of action is to just accept it and try better next time. This option causes the most agony because we just don't know when to stop beating ourselves up.

Option C. Filter and move forward
Criticism comes from a variety of sources. Sometimes it's meant to tear down, other times it's meant to build up. Regardless, all criticism contains both truths as well as untruths. The master recipient of criticism looks for the grains, nuggets and sometimes boulders of truth embedded in the critique. The rest is opinion--it's subjective and most criticism contains a great deal of that. In this option, you filter the signal from noise, identify opportunities for improvement and move forward.

As you can probably tell, I've done my share of A and B and have that experience to draw from. But these days, I most often land on C as the best choice for how to handle criticism. Listen, learn, adapt. Above all else, be very selective about what you take to heart and never stop moving forward after you've finished answering the multiple choice question of criticism.