A Means to an End: Aligning Social Media and Business Strategy.

Social media is many things with many definitions. Ultimately, however, it is a collection of tools that enable us to get some things done that were difficult, impossible or just less satisfying than before.

This is a discussion is about what types of business objectives are better achieved with social media. I will look at social media as a tool for market engagement, customer service (in the broadest sense), lead generation, as well as a productivity tool, and a tool for creating high-performance corporate cultures. As with any good tool, the real value is in how its wielded – and the applications of it are limited only by the insight, imagination and ambition of the craftsmen who use it.

Lets begin with an overview of business objectives:

Market Engagement

Businesses want to engage their markets for several reasons:

- To understand market needs, wants, goals and desires so as to craft products, services, messaging and pricing to suit.

- To create awareness of their brand or offerings.

- To get new customers

- To improve their reputation Mainstream Social media has proven to be remarkably useful in each of these regards.

Enabling brand and product managers to listen to their markets, engage and discuss their needs and their offerings in a way that was nearly impossible before. Key tools: Mainstream social media sites and aggregators: Facebook, twitter, youtube, myspace, niche social networks that cater to your target market. Connections back to your own web properties is essential.

Customer engagement

Customer service in the form of providing information, support, service, updates and more for the purposes of increasing satisfaction, optimizing revenue opportunities, creating loyalty and customer advocates.

Social media has made customer engagement far less expensive while making it far more effective and satisfying for both customer and company. Key tools: Some mainstream social networking and media aggregation sites, but your own web properties play more of a starring role here. Custom Social networking sites for customer service, account management, customer communications are the primary tools, external social media tools are a place to reach out in order to bring your customers into your communities.

Employee engagement

Corporate intranets are intended to share corporate information, policies and processes with employees. In general, they are poorly designed, and disrespected as having only the most banal information. Adding a social dimension here can help increase relevance, share leadership thinking more deeply and in a fashion that garners greater buy in by employees. Employees can also be encouraged to share ideas, find answers to policy and process questions, make suggestions and generally get more benefit from the core corporate support services such as HR, facilities, finance and procurement.

Key tools: discussion forums, ratings, Q&A, idea management, blogs, microblogging.

Employee productivity

While social media is frequently thought of as a social, extra-curricular activity that may have some benefit in the brand reputation and PR realm, the same tools that allow this form of communication can also be leveraged to create super-effective, next generation productivity tools.

These tools are not toys, but leverage the new communications paradigms offered by these tools to quickly get good work done. Most organizations, particularly those that deal primarily in information and ideas – that is any company that has a significant creative, analytic or R&D arm – needs to optimize and leverage that work and those work processes to the greatest extent.

Social media tools, because of their ability to improve communications, as well as create and maintain weak ties, make it easier to support the three most important forms of collaboration and productivity:

Creative – a team can use shared workspaces and other social media constructs, such as feeds and wikis to organize work, collect individual contributions, review, edit, and iterate vastly more efficiently than only through the use of in person meetings, email and conference calls.

Connective – knowledge workers can tap the collective intelligence of the organization by finding and friend-ing knowledgeable people within the organization, spotting trends and activity that may be relevant, and contributing their own value where its relevant and valued. This type of activity can save thousands of hours in the “who knows x about y” department and research has shown that tapping a diverse set of skills and perspectives leads to higher quality outcomes in less time.

Compounding – Here’s the fundamental idea: all work should leverage, to the greatest extent possible, leverage work that has already been done. Most companies currently have the basic capability to let employees search on documents and find things of relevance (this is rarely perfect, but even so). Social media tools, however, capture not just work product, such as documents, but work processes and resources as well, making it possible to find not only a document, but how it was created, how it evolved, who contributed, and what resources were used. The ability to find and follow this type of information is vastly more valuable than having just the end product to an employee who must accomplish a similar task or bring it to the next level.

Key tools: shared workspaces, communities, friending, profiles, wikis, feeds, instant messaging, planning tools, and other technologies that promote information aggregation, communication and networking.

 

Challenges

The Challenge of acting human: As I’ve said before – acting human is an unnatural act for most corporations. They’ve been trying for so long to be perfect and distance themselves from the warmth and fallibility of humanity so as to project flawless, rock-like solidity. The problem is that in this post-commerical era, where consumers are jaded, the corporate façade is not trusted – its considered more of a sham than deserving confidence above and beyond people. People now trust people more than brands. So how do you act human without being inconsistent? Warm without looking incompetent? Sympathetic, interesting and engaging without looking unprofessional?

Well, it takes a leap of faith. Savvy employees will understand that they are aiming to reflect well on the company as well as engender excitement and loyalty from the market. Mistakes will be made. Respect will be given to those companies who admit their mistakes immediately, and offer thoughtful, meaningful responses to them. Plan for success and plan for the mistakes

The Payoff: Trust, credibility, loyalty.

The challenge of the collaborative culture: collaborative cultures are different. They are mission focused, ego-swallowing machines where every problem and challenge is quickly surfaced, discussed and dealt with. Individuals, and the team as a whole learn quickly, act decisively, and efficiently  by quickly engaging people, harvesting their work, and letting the entire team polish and hone it to perfection.

We aren’t used to working this way, however. It takes a tremendous leap of faith that I can show my vulnerabilities and still be respected. information sharing is valued over information hording, and leadership is distilled into its purest form of setting direction, orchestrating activity, inviting and responding to new information from any part of the organization.

Management by fear and blame is left behind along with its tendency to breed mediocrity from people who either don’t want to take risks, or who have lost faith that their best contributions can be valuable in the organization.

The payoff: agile, smart, streamlined efficiency that can shine like a laser beam on any challenge. Fierce productivity.

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, team building, web 2.0

10 Reasons to wiki

I’m speaking at the Potomac Forum at the Willard Hotel (Washington, D.C.) this Friday, October 16th. Its a how-to workshop focused on government – how to create a social media campaign, how to create effective policies, how to blog, how to engage with communities, and my subject – how to use a wiki.

It used to be that wikis were techie things where you needed to know a markup language or worse to use them. But times have changed.

The last time I spoke at the forum I asked how many people in the audience had never used a wiki – so – this workshop will focus on two things – 1) the mechanics of how to actually set up and use a wiki, and 2) why you might want to.

After defining what a wiki is, I’ll walk through some of the many uses of wikis:

1. Wiki as team roster.

2. Wiki as document organizer

3. Wiki as issues list

4. Wiki for FAQ

5. Wiki is the document

6. Wiki to get organized

7. Wiki to aggregate resources

8. Wiki to build a portfolio

9. Wiki to plan

10. Wiki as knowledge base.

Next, I’ll cover some rules of engagement:

1. Make sure you have a purpose, and that you’ve expressed it to your co-contributors. Focus is the key to success.

2. Capture your roughest thougts. If you do this, you’ll always be giving yourself something to build on.

2. Be appreciative when someone else contributes, and let them know.

3. Don’t forget to go in and prune.

4. The earlier you share, the more collaborative you can be. Once you or your colleague have formalized your thoughts, its much harder to change them, and much harder to accept well meaning critisicm. So – share while you’re still open to feedback, and comment while they are. Its very hard to put hours into creating something, and then have people point out its flaws. Its much easier to remain open to new ideas before you’ve invested too much in developing them.

Last, I’ll cover some of the features to look for in a wiki, depending on the purpose you’re after, and show some examples of great wikis.

If you’d like to learn more about how wikis can bring a new level of efficiency to a team, then register here for the two-day event, or leave me a note in the comments here.

If you’re new to wikis, or  just love a really good explanation,  this video is surely the best basic introduction to the wiki concept:

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, social media, team building , collaboration, how to wiki, social media, team efficiency, wiki

The radical enabler: Many to Many Communication

What’s different about today’s internet and technology – what we’re calling social media?

Many to many communication. For the first time in human history, people can converse en mass without being in the same room. The implications are many and highly varied, and this is why people have such trouble defining the terms.

We’ve moved from letters to Newspapers, Magazines and  telephone. Modern one way media like television and radio emerged. New social media tools are truly radical in that they enable multi-way communication that is so different from what precedes it, that we don’t really even have words to describe it.

“Conversation” is the best, really the only, word we have to describe this, because the only precedent for it is social events of relatively small groups of people meeting face to face. But the term is overtaxed. Appropriate in many circumstances, “conversation” does not quite get to the heart of issues like ambient awareness, group filtering, and the strange patterns of the spread of memes, ideas and information that feel like we can almost grasp them, but haven’t yet.

David Armano and the Dachis Group have started defining the terms, if not completely yet the dynamics of this in an exciting way that promises to be a useful framework for discussion. I’ve written on the various types of collaboration that people seem to struggle to articulate (though I lack Armano’s considerable skill at illustration).

We also lack words for multi-modal communication. If i want to invite someone to call/email/IM/Tweet/Social message me in the form that is most convenient, the only word I have is “ping” – an obscure term that I got from old unix guys, who got it from even older radar operators.

This strangely, but radically new form of mainstream many-to-many communication is the unique thing that social media enables, and its no surprise that we’re still grappling with its implications. We’re still figuring out what to call it.

Lawrence Lessig gives a breathtaking review of what “read-write web” means (if you haven’t watched this yet, you really should), but I think there are other basic issues that many-to-many unearths:

- We’re not completely sure how to listen. We use each other as filters, but we’re still working this out.

- We’re still working on how to engage. Best practices exist and are developing, but we’re in early stages. So what’s my point here. As always they are several.

1. We are just beginning to unpack the value of many to many, and will be doing so for the next decade or more.

2. We need more and better vocabulary to describe what we have and what we want. if we can’t discuss it, we can’t easily get it.

3. Along the way we will be articulating, demonstrating and leveraging what many of us already sense in our guts about the many ways information and insight travel from mind to mind. This hints at the astonishing power to truly connect minds, harness enthusiasm and make nearly all human endeavor more productive and efficient.

Filed under: best practices, social media , collaboration, hive mind, many to many, signals, social media

A repost: Enterprises aren’t human

When someone you respect suggests you repost something, its a good thing to do on a late friday afternoon. So for Oscar Berg, I offer you a classic post from last fall during the Obama/Hillary race for president. I’ve fixed some of the grammar, but left the rest in tact. Have a great weekend.

December 29, 2008 • 5:10 pm (Edit)

why social media is hard for government and corporate america

Since the dawn of commerce and government we’ve been programmed to believe that enterprises are not human – they are better: polished, powerful and perfect. They have a presence (rather than a personality) that does not include human characteristics, like warmth, empathy, vulnerability, hobbies or ears. The job of the people in the enterprise has always been to perpetuate and perfect this presence.

Now employees and leadership both are confused by their centuries old mandate not to act human, and their new one to do just that. They see the risks – revealing too much, legal liabilities, leaking information to competitors, and all – and are unsure of the rewards.

But they’ve heard about “viral” and “loyalty” and “word of mouth”, and “customer-evangelists”. they’ve seen Obama be cool and successful.”

And they’d like to too. But to do this they need to take a big risk. They need to be human – vulnerable, imperfect, and all that. The people in the enterprise need to be free to (and encouraged to) come out from behind the curtain, and to know what that means.

Barriers
1. Most enterprises don’t share enough with their employees for the employees to feel confident as spokespeople.
- Beyond the mission statement, the leadership needs to discuss with people  the priorities and values of the company. Not just in an annual meeting, but constantly. It needs to be true and real – not white-washed. If you can’t convey your mission, aspirations and values to your employees, they can’t internalize them and carry them outward as people. Solution? Internal dialog. Perhaps facilitated by internal social media. Its NOT rehashing the phrases coming out of the PR team. Its not a ghost written memo. This means that YOU, the CEO, the VP of whatever, need to be in constant dialog with your team. It seems as though that would have more than this one benefit dosen’t it?

Here’s a simple example of corporate leadership being human in an inspirational way:
http://about.networksolutions.com/site/network-solutions-executive-team/

That’s not too hard. A nice step. A nice example. You could do that. You could go a step further and add an email address or a blog. You could go a step further, and do it a couple layers deeper in the organization, or for everyone in the organization. Think about how that would make the people on your team feel about being on the team.

2. Government and Commercial enterprises fear the loss of the power of the curtain.

It takes a tremendous amount of confidence to be human. It means that you are confident that on the whole, the value your organization brings to its customers is very high, and that you are operating with integrity. That you are generally proud of what goes on inside.

This is a kind of confidence that companies have not had to develop or test. But the people and organizations that we respect most are the ones with these qualities. Its the difference between Hillary and Obama, in many ways.

3. Unclear on the upside.
Well, here it is. Corporate credibility is on the decline – not because corporations are, but because people have now had enough experience to know that the facade is just that. Who believes advertising? Who trusts the literature? But they’ll trust a person – one they know, for a recommendation. They’ll trust someone they don’t know who makes the effort to gets to know them by listening, showing an interest, speaking clearly and honestly, sdoing what they say they’ll do – someone who builds a relationship with them.

If you want credibility now, you need to be communicating as an organization of people, not a corporate entity.

Filed under: best practices, enterprise 2.0 , best practices, enterprise 2.0, social media

collaboration is not a technology

Collaboration is not a technology – it is about people choosing to cooperate. Its a cultural thing.

The tighter and more explicit the collaboration, the more sensitive it is to the culture in which it resides. I’m a big fan of workplace collaboration. If you have it, you’ll recognize that it makes work thrilling, makes you invincible, and as I’m fond of saying, amplifies our strengths and diminishes our weaknesses.

If you actually read this blog, you’ll find it repetitive of me to say that collaboration is not a single behavior, but a constellation of them, that I broadly categorize as Creative, Connective and Compounding.

But the underlying human construct of collaboration is a sense of team. An esprit de corp of some kind or magnitude. And here are the attributes of teams:

1. A shared sense of goal or mission (even if that’s to identify a shared goal or mission).

2. Mutual respect.

3. Trust

4. A commitment to continual improvement. (this is the hardest one, because to improve, one must admit imperfection, must make it a virtue to go looking for trouble, and see it as an opportunity).

What these things together allow is a powerful, compounded beam of intellect focus on the issues at hand rather than on the politics, insecurities or personal quirks of the contributors. ie – the fastest route to success.

Without these, all the microblogging, profile, yammer, twitter, wiki-tech in the world will not help. Of course if you are powerful enough to build such a culture, those tools will grease the skids in delightful ways.

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media

we all just want to be valuable

So we all talk about the benefits of collaboration (or at least all of us within a very narrow circle), but I rarely hear any discussion of one of the most critical components to unlocking potential productivity.

Most knowledge workers I know (and this varies widely with where they work) do not feel as though they are living to their potential.

When people have a sense of mission, that they are striving toward something meaningful, and that their contribution is making a significant difference along that path, then they are motivated and focused. They make decisionss, they don’t waste time, they are excited to be there.

This is the role of leadership. To ensure tht people have a mission and a vision that makes sense to them and that it is clear to them how their work forwards those goals.

Another great thing this does is to help people make the many decisions they need to in a way that will always tilt toward the goal. Including finding problems or challenges that would prevent the organization from reaching that goal, and sharing them in a way that they can be addressed and solved.

FOr example. I’ve never seen a team get really excited about “we’re going to launch these 10 features by March or else!!” Woohoo! rallying cry. Nope. And every one of you knows it.

Now try “We’re going to take this product to the next level, and become the most useful widget this market has ever dreamed of. And we can do it by getting these 10 things done”. Better.

A collaborative environment helps people get constant affirmation that their expertise is useful and their work is valuable. A well lead collaborative organization has a fine set of leaders at every level who understand that their role is to have a mission and include their team in it.

A collaborative environment keeps people engaged and focused on the work at hand – and that makes people happy. Really. There are several books on the subject. One of the most readable is called “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, though there are many academic articles and books on the subject.

So imagine a workplace where the vast majority of people are engaged, valued, “Flowing”, toward your corporate mission. Would that be more productive than what you have today?

This is the goal of enterprise 2.0. A fully engaged workforce where the product of that work is instantaneously available where its needed anywhere in the organization.

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, team building , engagement, enterprise 2.0, flow, leadership, productivity, satisfaction

What’s in a name nayme naime mname?

Ok – I haven’t blogged in about 2 months, but this I just have to say.

Its about names. I have worked, in some capacity or another with about a dozen start ups, and maybe three dozen or more products. All of which had names.

Startups especially tend to spend an undue amount of time, and often money as well, on choosing one.

What is a name for? Its for identifying a product or company. I know your name. It means I can refer to you, talk about you, and others know who I mean.

So. Let’s talk about the online music company I consulted for that wanted to name themselves “Audacy”. Cute. I get it. But this is an audio thing. Anytime the name was mentioned, it would have to be spelled. Oy.

Or my recent client who wants to change a perfectly good, though 5 syllable, name to a 3 syllable one that is clever but unspellable and unreadable. I won’t mention Will by name (sorry Will – perhaps I can change your name to whylle) who has a geat idea with an absolutely inscrutable name.

People want their name to be clever, memorable, evocative of the intense thoughtfulness and wonderful qualities of their brand/company/product. They want it to become a “verb” like “Google”.

Horse manure.

If you are successful, then your name won’t matter. Who gives a second thought to coke, google, ebay, intuit, adobe, charmin, amazon, aol, fedex as to the quality of the word itself?

So – there’s not a ton of upside to a great name.

There is, however downside to a bad one. Like one that you can’t spell or remember, or get the URL to.

Here are the 3 laws of acceptable product and company names.

Breaking them does not mean you’ll fail, it means you have an extra challenge that you could have avoided. And aren’t there enough when you’re trying to launch something successful?

So -

1. You gotta be able to get the URL.

I know its hard these days, and this motivates people to all sorts of twisted spellings and such. But here’s number 2:

2. It should be obvious how to spell it.

I hear about it from a friend, i go check it out. Except if I can’t find it cause you spelled it Cynergy (sorry guys). This is ANTI-MARKETING. you are loosing people before they can even get interested. Word of mouth? Doesn’t work! Yeah- most people will send a link. But I still have actual conversations with people – don’t you?

3. It should, please, be obvious how to pronounce it.

So my friend, Whylle – the way he pronounces it makes it make some sense. But I he had to spell it out for me, so to speak. Same with the little 5 syllable to 3 syllable company.

I expect both of these companies to meet with some measure of success. 5 syllables, in fact, really rocks (I don’t know as much about Whylle’s company yet – stay tuned, cause after this I’ll owe him some good press, if I like it). But this success would come just a touch easier if they got a name that worked for them, instead of against them.

Oh yeah, Audacy? They blew half their operating budget on getting a new name, and that was good indication of their general decision making ability.

So one last thought on this – if you’re spending more time or money on your name and logo than on making sure your product knocks it out of the park for your intended users – then its time to re-think. Are you futzing with the name because you feel blocked on other fronts? Or is it perhaps time to take a breath and get focused again on what matters – providing value for people who care in a way that has a reasonable chance of paying the rent.

faithfully yours,

ddebbbbb_B

Filed under: best practices, online marketing , Marketing, naming, startups

The Distant Voice of the Customer

My current project (full time) has been challenging  – its so different from what I’ve done in the past that its taken me a while to get grounded, identify the key challenges and plan of attack. I’m working with enterprise software.

Now this particular software, digital asset management software, is powerful stuff – to the point of the near magical. It – when properly applied – powers creativity, collaboration and distribution of some of the worlds most interesting and valuable rich media.

But its enterprise software, which, I’m coming to understand, means that it must also be somewhat of a chameleon. It gets customized, enhanced, and integrated in nearly every installation. And the customer list reads like a who’s who of several media-intensive industries.

So – as a new leader for this product, there are several huge challenges that make it very different from the consumer software I’ve lived with.

First – the value proposition. Its a rare consumer company that can spit out its value proposition cleanly at any given time. (Course, think of the ones who actually can – google, intuit, ebay – notice anything?).  For a highly customizable giant of enterprise software, well, they certainly don’t have any less of a challenge there.

Second – the voice of the customer. Enterprise products are not sold to an individual, but to a committee, and not to the end users, but to someone who has various motivations, hopefully one of which is to enable those end users to do something, better.

So – the voice of the customer – which I’ve gotten pretty good at seeking out in the consumer world is now in a different place. And I’m trying to chase it down. I’m starting with customer visits – but frequently you meet with the IT folks responsible for implementing the solution – not with the people who feel the need, or the people who will be using it.

The team is all in agreement about the need to find the voice – and is pursuing several ways of getting there (hey – you heard of this web 2.0 thing? its pretty cool, and fortunately, they have).   I’m not sure how the company will feel about it, but I think that the pursuit of this voice is important, and I hope to document how we get closer to it, and how that intimacy changes things.

Filed under: Product Management, best practices

Glassbooth: Perfect – but why keep it a secret??

I was “facebooked” a link to Glassbooth. It is a very well done, non-partisan tool to help you explore the candidate’s positions and how well they match yours. Its fun, quick, and thought provoking. And it doesn’t make me feel as though I need to be radically one thing or another. And it doesn’t make me feel under or misinformed.

In other words – its unusually good.

But here’s how I’d like to see them expand their value and influence:

1. Hey guys – an “email this to a friend” link?

2. Even better – make it a facebook widget that sticks around. (Here are my 5 product requirements for social media widgets)

3. Begin a dialog on facebook and on their native site. Create an “add your question or comment here” spot. see and respond to the questions and comments of others. These are topical, important issues that people want to engage on – if they can do it without being shrill or having people be shrill back, or make them feel stupid.

Fill out the survey. Ask people their opinions. Ask people what they do and don’t feel they understand and know about. Make adding the widget part of a super group where there’s real stuff on the notice and comment board. You know – things like – how many of you feel like you know the difference between x and y. Or – this is how the No Child Left Behind act works and doesn’t.

4. Provide links to clear, non-partisan or at least bi-partisan info on key issues. Not all of us feel knowledgeable enough to have strong opinions on economic or health issues.

5. Create an opportunity for the community to engage with the ideas here.

(isn’t it funny how the most divisive issues in our country seem the simpest – civil rights, abortion, etc – people know, or think they know deeply, and the most complex issues, people are mushy about. Human issues versus administrative issues. Human issues are issues everyone understands and therefor have strong opinions about. Hm. Note to self – make all issues simple issues.)

Filed under: best practices, web 2.0 , community, election, facebook, Glassbooth

trouble in the middle of the room

I have this big color laser printer. You know the kind – its about the size of a large old fashioned tv set, and about as heavy. Its sitting in the middle of my office. On the floor. Its been there for over a month. Its in a spot where I actually have to walk around it to answer the phone, or to get on my elliptical trainer, and I makes it difficult to pace the way I prefer when on conference calls.

So why is it still there? Cause I don’t really know what to do with it. I don’t want this giant to take up the space where my current printer is. Its too nice to get rid of. I don’t feel like taking the 15 minutes to hook it up.

This is exactly the kind of thing that happens in most product development cycles. These problems. That everyone knows about, but doesn’t exactly know what to do about.

And there’s the opportunity right there to make the difference between good and great. Find those things littered around the floor. Sometimes they are UI issues. Sometimes its a feature that’s lacking. Or the fact that the customer research says everyone wants green and you have blue. Or the fact that the licensing isn’t (and won’t be) in place. Don’t ignore them. Make it an absolute virtue to say – hey look everyone – theres this stupid printer in the middle of the @*#&^@ floor.

You may catch some heat, at first. In some companies I’ve worked for, the pressure to ignore these things gets greater as you go up the hierarchy (I’ve never been able to understand this, and its one reason I find consulting to suit me). But ultimately, if you can be part of a team, that will never pass a printer in the middle of the floor without deciding what to do about it and then doing it, you will do great things.

Filed under: Product Management, best practices , best practices, Product Management