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

We are “The Sims”

I like to think that sometimes my posts are pithy and clever, but I know that sometimes they are a bit abstract. This is usuallly cause I’m using this blog as a way to work through what i’m thinking about. This is one of those posts.

Back in the late 90’s, i spent a few years studying, designing and implementing “agent based simulations of complex systems “. I was studying emergent behavior. These were somewhere between “boids” and The Sims in their depth.

I was doing an incredible amount of online research, and realized that if I ever wanted to do related research it would be very difficult to re-trace my steps, bookmarks not withstanding. If I wanted OTHER people to be able to retrace my steps, it would be very difficult to share HOW I’d found what I’d found, in addition to the what.

These two issues put me on a tear to understand tacit knowledge.

So – I wrote a whitepaper that I titled the Self-Organizing Knowledge Manager. The idea was this. People are not very good at tracking things, but computers are. we could get a computer to track where we go and how we get there and what we do when we’re there, and amek it so we can retrace our own steps and share our pathways with others. You wouldn’t have to be explicit about what the relationships between the linked items were, just the fact that there were links at all. People are really good at divining meaning – unlike computers. So leverage what each does best to capture and share tacit knowledge. Simple, right?

Then I asked smart people how to build software that would track click paths, what files were open at the same time, cuts and pastes, etc. They told me I’d need a database as an operating system and it didn’t work that way. hmph.

So the punchline here of course is that Social Media tools are the perfect substrate for capturing this information. Micropublishing, in the form of wikis, blogs, tweets, etc, are capturing the little bits of insight and information, connecting them together – along with the people who contributed – to achieve a self-organizing knowledge system.

So – now people can

a) track the links between people, objects (content) and each other, capturing a ton of tacit knowledge in the process

b) enable people to participate, much like the “agents” in my old simulations, to create emergent behavior.

Unbelievable. I was reminded about all this stuff, and how (perhaps surprisingly) relevant it is in understanding social media. David Armano’s engaging and relevant talk about how his effort to help a homeless family connects the dots.

So – what do we know about tacit knowledge, and what do we know about emergent behavior.

1. We know that most people think those terms are inscrutable.

2. We know that neither are easily tangible or predictable

But – if we apply the study of complexity theory, emergent systems, and what Stephen Wolfram calls “A New Kind of Science” (the first couple hundred pages of which are fascinating, but while I love Stephen (i know him from way back) he could use an aggressive editor, the book weighs about 10 lbs (and thanks to Salinger for teaching me the art of the multiply embedded flourish of parens – there’s a quote somewhere)) and the study of communities and collaboration, then, I think we can help enterprise, government and society develop a language for expressing ideas in this area, and start to really pursue the possible.

I promise my next post will make more sense.

Oh – the title – “The Sims” is a very popular computer game which is, in essence a sophisticated agent based simulation. It is unpredictable in its behaviors and outcomes, and yet elucidates cause and effect very well. Try it and you’ll see. My obscure point here, is that the read-write web has turned its participants into real-live actor agents in a giant simulation game. We can’t predict its outcomes, but we can learn a great deal about cause, effect and the important drivers of various outcomes.

Filed under: social media, web 2.0 , collaboration, complexity theory, emergent behavior, social media, tacit knowledge, web 2.0

power shift from hording to sharing

At the Canada 3.0 conference, I met a headhunter.

He asked me how social media helps him

My first thought was “you’re in the networking business, how can you not get how social media helps”? But fortunately, i paused long enough to ask another question of him. “Do you use linkedIn?”, I asked.

“Yes, sort of ” he says, “but I’m afraid that people will see my contacts and steel them”.

Oh – fear. Now that’s something that I can understand and relate to.

So I asked him if he could see other people’s contacts. What if its sharing and not stealing? I asked him if that could make him the “go to” guy and if he’d see that as a good thing.

I started my spiel about information sharing replacing information hording as the new source of status and pride.

And then he asked the key question. The KEY.

He said – “Once I empty my little cup of knowledge for someone, what value do I have left?”

He nailed it. The source of Social Media fear.

I did my best on the spur of the moment to answer his question with sensitivity and wisdom (not sure how good my best was, but I tried), so here’s what I said, and perhaps a bit of what I should have.

Information has some value.

Insight has more value.

Capability even more.

The  ability to reliably  find any of the above is perhaps most valuable. So a headhunter should be near the top of the food chain. But he did not see it that way.

So – how can someone like my smart, but worried friend move forward in this world? He’s got 2 key things he needs to do.

1. Become more familiar with Social Media in a non-threatening way. Take little steps that don’t feel high risk. I recommended some a while ago.

2. Start to think of himself in new ways. If he was useful when he horded information, he can be more useful, more influential when he starts giving it away. Just ask google. When people know that you’re the one with the info, they go back, they listen, you get an audience.

My new friend is worth much more than his rolodex.

More critically the point here, if I failed to make it yet, is that information isn’t the treasure, its how you got it and what you’ll do with it, and Fear is the only thing keeping you from discovering your post information, insight-economy value.

Filed under: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, web 2.0 , canada 3.0, enterprise 2.0, fear, information hording, social media

14 slides on enterprise 2.0

I was asked to put together a very fast deck suitable for internal evangelism – something that someone could use to convince other (technical) people in the organization that collaborative technology was something they should care about. I had one day to do it. Here it is – I’ll be working on it to make it more convincing, would value your opinions.

Filed under: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social media, web 2.0 , collaboration, enterprise 2.0, social enterprisel

2 hints that the future has indeed arrived

Web 2.0 or, as I prefer, the “Participatory Web” is basically about increasing participation, and not all of it is revolutionary. Some is, at best, a new way to socialize or self-aggrandize. At worst-  a big waste of time.

But there are some wildly interesting things out there too. Here are two things that struck me as glimpses into the (not yet evenly distributed) future.

What would you add to this list to expand this little spy-hole onto what’s next.

1. The library of congress has posted its photos on Flickr (the most popular photo sharing site) – in order to get the public to help tag/narrate them.

2. Lessig’s read/write vision. If you haven’t yet, just watch it. I promise you won’t find it a waste of time. (if you do, you can slam me in the comments)

What else?

Filed under: web 2.0 , library of congress, participatory web, read write web, web 2.0

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

5 steps to Web 2.0

Some people have been doing the Web 2.0 rhumba for years. But not everyone. Here’s how I got started.  I’m still on step 5.

Click on it to see the whole thing.

Anybody care to add to it? Have a different path in?

Filed under: web 2.0 , blogging, getting started in web 2.0, linkedin, Twitter, web 2.0

New media makes talk a lot closer to action

At first it was just email – as soon as you thought about someone, you could jot off a note, without searching for paper, stamps, your address book, getting it written, putting it in the mail etc.

Then it was IM – even more immediate.

Then it was these blogs – think a thought, type a thought, and boom, its published to the world (or the very small subsection of it that reads my blog). (Pro – more thoughts out there, lower barriers. Cons – not everything is as high quality as you might like.)

Now – I have an ear out to truly remarkable people that I might have never known about or met. Through Twitter, and Facebook, I have a very up close view of what they are thinking about and doing. Through Wikis, email, twitter, this blog, facebook and dozens of other websites, I can act almost as quickly as I find out about things. New conferences that are likely to collect wildly interesting groups of people – not only can I register, I can get involved. Contacting people about projects and expertise that I never would have tracked down, without this new social networking thing. Donating money to help women in Africa start businesses to support their families and communities. Keeping my imagination charged with the ideas and activities of others…. its pretty darn cool.

And another thing is going on. When I’m away from the internet – it seems so quiet. And I haven’t even begun to really get into things like digg yet.

So – what’s the next step in eliminating boundaries? If we look at Web 2.0 as the participatory web – a slightly different slant than the “social web” – then what are the possibilities? How can we make it easier to expand and achieve our goals, our dreams through technology?

Filed under: web 2.0 , participation, participatory web, web 2.0