The Social Organization

It's 2009 - Do You Know Where Your Customers Are?

With the exploding number of modes of communication channels, do you understand how and how often your customers are being contacted? Marketing departments do a pretty good job of tracking prospects via website hits, webinars, & conferences...and CRM systems track communications that employees choose to synch with them, but that has pretty high overhead so it is likely that only formal correspondence gets tracked. But what about IM, what about Facebook, what about blogs & comments, what about Twitter, what about LinkedIn?  What about all those short calls and emails that collectively demonstrate a close relationship but individually are not worth registering?

Increasingly the customers that your employees have the closest relationship with are 'unseen' by the company because they cross-over between business and personal and the communications happen outside of the formal channels... and that should be encouraged, but you should also know about it as it represents both opportunity and risk to your business.

The other issue is that people are increasingly overwhelmed with all the channels of communications available and it is left largely to individuals to decide for themselves how to interact with business partners. But how people choose to interact may have significant implications for how the relationship develops and then is maintained.  And what if your marketing, sales, and support organizations are all choosing different methods?  That then makes customers have dramatically different experiences across their lifetime with your company...which is a huge risk because if they are given communications (and therefore relationship) expectations by marketing that are not played out once they are customers, they will likely be unhappy.

The question I have for companies is: Do your communications with various constituent bases align with your business strategy? Do you formally train or encourage employees to interact is specific ways with specific audiences...or are you just scrambling to try to use everything available without much thought as to whether that really supports your strategy?  Twitter is not for everyone...but neither is email. It all depends what kind of relationship you need to achieve your business goals.

Think about it...and then figure out whether the communications that are happening really supports your strategy.  Social network analysis and other tools can help figure out what is happening in your company today - and give you a good idea of what might need to be better aligned. This is particularly critical if you are restructuring and reorganizing as customers often are often the unintended victims of upheaval.

On Profit Maximization, Sustainability, & Social Enterprises

Todd Van Hoosear wrote about how some of our collectively favorite brands are some of the worst offenders when it comes to creating intimacy with their customers.  In both Google & Apple's case, I think they would tell you that if you build a good enough product (or keep them perennially in beta which absolves you of product sins), you don't need to do a lot of marketing or conversing with customers. Well, OK. But is that the corporate image you want? Fortress-like, paranoid, and remote?

The conversation brings up a question that I wonder about a lot which is, Does the mass market care? There is obviously a sub-segment of people that want our businesses more transparent and easier to interact but will the likes of Apple and Google get significantly dinged by users and investors if they don't do it? I'm not sure.

There is a larger structural issue that will limit the number of companies who will really be able to reap the rewards of remaking themselves as a 'social' enterprise. Investors want to maximize profits and, from what I can tell, they seem to care more about short term than sustainable profits...figuring they will eat and run. That is a direct conflict with building communities and investing for the long term. Also in direct conflict is the primacy of profit maximization over other values...and that too will make it very difficult to create passionate communities because a corporations' constituents likely don't get that jazzed about helping an amorphous entity make an extra buck.

My guess is that the companies that will benefit most dramatically from social networking in the coming years will be privately held small and medium size businesses who see an opportunity to make in roads against larger, publicly-held entities because they are driven by a passion.  Examples might be Stoneyfield Farms, Jordan's Furniture (those of you in Boston will know this on), and the like. Big enough to have significant market presence but with enough financial flexibility and vision to invest in energizing their community.

Will investors, and their priorities, limit companies' ability to engage holistically with their customers? If not, how do we get around the trade-off between short-term profits and long-term sustainability?

A Social Culture

I have been thinking a lot about corporate leadership and culture lately and it is clear to me that current business leadership style and structure is not what will lead us into a brave new world.

First let me explain why we need a brave new world of organizational structure. Hierarchies of people were set up to facilitate the flow of information back when one-to-one communication was the only option.  It was the only way to scale a business. The problem now is that with the advent of email we entered an age where the speed and scope of information flow has increased dramatically and no longer needs middlemen to gather, filter, and channel it. But we have these 'leaders' who sit at what once were information hubs within the organization.  To keep their jobs - since they are no longer needed to help facilitate information flow - they often actively hoard information through their control of the resources and people that work for them.  It's actually kind of an ugly thing and they spend so much time hoarding and politicking that they forget to look up and realize that leadership, not power and control, are what is lacking. To keep it all in the family, the people that get hired and promoted into these positions are politically savvy, willing and able to be controlling, and part of the club. They are vastly more interested in whether they personally do well then whether to company does well collectively and they are threatened by too much initiative on the part of their employees. They act this way because that is what current organizational leadership rewards.

I think we are moving to an opt-in world where employees opt-in to projects, leaders opt-in and emerge into their roles.  Paul Hemp use Barak Obama as an example of an opt-in leader - he did not really rise up through a Democratic grooming process. True collaborative environment require leaders that not only opt-in but are given the mandate to lead because they can effectively inspire others to act. It is a very different leadership style - one I wrote about in my post "Lead from the Back". The organizational structure implied by that also means that the hiring of all employees needs to be primarily value- and motivation-based. What if instead of asking for a resume, HR asked for an essay on what motivated you and what your passions were?  It's how the best colleges and universities operate and you get very strong and consistent cultures in that setting. Plus, people wither if they are asked to do the same job for years on end - if companies hired on values and let people move to new projects and to new skills sets when they were ready the productivity and loyalty gains would be immense and you would have a employee based that was widely well-rounded and adaptable.

A change in leadership and culture of that magnatude requires radical rethinking of HR & operations - and new tools by which to manage that network of employees. It's a fun thought...but how do we get there? The big question for me is this - are investors ready? Without strong board and investor support the only companies that will be able to radically transform will be private companies with visionary leaders.

What's your vision of a social organization?

The Big Secret to Social Media Marketing?

First let me confess... I really think most traditional advertising is soulless and a waste of money so if you still think that is the way forward, you may not find this post very useful. 

I remember the 'Where's the Beef' and the 'Bud Bowl' ads as much as the next person...highly entertaining and I'm sure they won a ton of awards by people in the advertising business self congratulating themselves.  They were very memorable. 

The issue for advertisers? I almost never eat at Wendy's or drink Bud unless there are no other options. And you might say I am a bit of a curmudgeon and an outlier...but I just don't think so. Was there really ROI on those campaigns?

The issue for me?  Neither of those advertisements mattered. They didn't offer any compelling reason why my life - or anyone else's - would be any better for either consuming the product or sitting through the advertisement itself. And another beef (OK that was a pun!) is that the 'good' advertising is aspirational (i.e. it makes you feel bad because you don't have what is on offer) and the bad advertising displays foolish people making bad decisions that you are supposed to avoid by buying something (which makes you feel bad because you're expected to be just smart enough to not be one of the really dumb people in the ad). What is with making people feel badly about themselves for corporate profit? But I digress.

The exception to my general disdain for advertising is when it supports things I care about with relevant information that matters.  Let me say it again...because this is the secret...relevant information that matters.  For example I live in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston we have a local laundromat/car wash which advertises on local cable news.  The ad is completely ridiculous and kind of silly but it 1) supports local news which I care about and 2) I occasionally need a convenient car wash so it is relevant. But the ad itself would never win any awards. Ditto the local restaurant ads that advertise in the JP Gazette...but they give my neighborhood its character and they matter to me both because I go out to eat locally and it is associated with content that I want to support.

Taking an example of a mass consumer campaign the Dove 'Real Beauty' campaign is one of the better types of things coming out of marketing agencies these days. Sure it highlighted a brand but it also provided education and programing for teenage girls who notoriously struggle with their body image.  That matters to me. 

Notice how all of these are traditional marketing examples?  Well everything I'm talking about becomes infinitely more important if you want people to proactively talk about your product or service in a positive way online.  It has to matter...and it has to matter beyond just doing the job it is expected to do. For example, I'll keep buying my toothpaste because I like the taste...but I'm not going to talk about it...ditto for most of the other things I purchase unless the product or experience is really truly exceptional. So you have two choices - make the purchase of a product about something bigger than just buying the product or offer a truly exceptional product/service. If my toothpaste company gave a free tube of toothpaste to a foodbank for every tube I bought? I am much more likely to talk about that because it matters. 

The hard part, of course, is making it matter...and authentically meaning it. Making marketing meaningful is even harder in the B2B space because the goal is make your core audience rock stars in their own organizations which takes content, coaching, and time...and then get them to attribute some of that success back to you. Choose your customers wisely.

So, make your company matter whether it's by actually solving the world's energy crisis or by solving a much more mundane need but contributing to a bigger cause in the process.

Maybe I'm crazy - Maybe I am part of the fringe...but the fring will start teaching the majority of the market to expect more from the companies with which they do business.  How are you going to make your business matter?

Learning to Hope. It's Hard.

 Obama is coming in to office on Tuesday on a tidal wave of support for his message of Hope.  I must admit that I never gave into it fully.  Don't get me wrong – I love the vision and I think Obama brings more into office with him than any other president in my lifetime – but I have not taken that hope on personally, I still hold it at arm's length. Why? Well no one's proven that the immense issues before us can be solved so why would it all of sudden be possible now?  I am thinking with my head – using models that I know from past experience. But the recent economic meltdown has also proven to me that models are insufficient – they don't account for the outliers. So I have a choice – I can sit and try to prove a double negative – because some things have never happened they will therefore not happen in the future – or I can hope.  I realize that I don't really have the option not to hope.

Here's the thing about hope however. It's really risky. It requires us to believe that there is a better thing waiting for us...and requires us to jump off the diving board believing that there is water in the pool before we have seen the water. It requires us to reject what we know as insufficient which makes us feel like maybe we failed because we still need something more...than we are not enough. Really scary for someone like me who is wildly independent and likes to believe that I can solve problems on my own.

In celebration of the new president – as well as a personal need to stretch myself – I am working on giving in to hope.  That first requires a little dreaming and imaging solutions to problems that I haven't necessarily thought could be solved, like finding work and colleagues with truly shared values, finding work that gives me the flexibility to have more family time, and finding work that strives to not just make money or produce something people will buy but work that strives to do something really valuable for its customers. But it's obviously not just about me – it's about asking how I can allocate my time in a way that serves a greater good.

Hope requires that we act. If we don't hope – and don't truly believe – we don't actually have to do anything differently.  But hope is predicated on belief, and if we really believe than it means we can do something about the problems we face.

So, on Tuesday I'll be contemplating the diving board – and the acting of jumping that it suggests. I don't know if I will completely transform myself, but I'm going to try.

What will you be thinking of on Tuesday?

The Social Challenge for 2009 - Scaling Relationships

Some of us have a hard enough time developing one or two strong personal relationships - let alone the multitude required for a large corporation. Mike Troiano rightly called me out a bit about scaling - businesses have to measure because there are so many different people involved with different priorities, values, and commitment levels.  And, indeed, I am not against measurement - you need some way to set goals and make sure you are progressing in that direction - I just think we need to step back more often then we do and evaluate what we are doing using our judgment.

Regardless, there is the issue of how can large organizations - and I mean the ones with tens of thousands of people - scale relationships? For example, if I am Sony and I want to ensure I have a highly trusted relationship with Ingram Micro - how do I evaluate the current state of the relationship and how do I improve it?  It involves thousands of people from both companies.  What companies have done, of course, is create processes and measurements to ensure consistency in interactions.  However that very consistency reduces the potential upside of the relationship as well as the downside.  You essentially manage to the lowest common denominator acceptable to you.  But you want to encourage the upside - the only option is to start loosening up the process and allowing some or all employees to go above and beyond (and maybe fail a few times too).The prospect is a bit scary since there is a huge revenue dependency between the two partners.

Social media tools have enabled better individual scalability.  So that helps in the one-to-many situations - an executive communicating with employees, an account manager sharing information with customer contacts, marketing communicating with a customer base.

But how do you scale many-to-many where all parties are communicating at the same time? Communities and social networks are part of the answer - but how do you keep individuals from going off deck with a small subgroup? I suppose you could shut off email and phone but that seems a bit excessive.  I think hiring on values as well as skill sets is a really large part of the picture (see the Zappos example) but for existing organizations you can't really re-invent yourself in that way very quickly. One piece of the answer is for corporations to better understand and articulate their values - for some reason this is almost as hard for companies as it is for individuals. By knowing themselves (i.e am the low cost, bare bones provider) they will know which relationships are most important to them...and it is not always the relationship with the customer.

I don't have the answer - any ideas?

I believe this is the big challenge for 2009.  How do you build a relationship-centric business at scale?

Just Do The Right Thing

I am getting tired of the conversation around optimizing leads and finding the calculated ROI of community and social media efforts. When did business leaders abandon the ability to just do the right thing? 

• The right thing by customers (if they have a question...why are you charging them for calls?)
• The right thing by employees (give them credit, opportunity, and encouragement instead of treating them like disposable widgets)
• The right thing by partners (tell them about problems sooner rather than doing damage control later)

Many business decisions do not need calculated proof to know that they are right. In fact, I think models get us into more trouble then not....and the cost of all of that data collection and analysis is outstanding. It's cheaper to just do the right thing...most of you know what that is so? Just do the right thing. Stop the analysis, stop the wondering if you are right, stop the endless hand wringing, and more than anything stop the fear that you don't have 'proof' that something works. Just do the right thing.

Part of my passion around social media comes from wanting us as a business community to start treating each other like humans again rather than protagonists in a plot that can be compartmentalized as 'just business'. Turns out consumers would like to be treated like humans too. And maybe that is too much to hope for - there are a lot of people out there who believe that they can't win unless someone else loses - but that is not the environment in which I want to spend my life.

I think businesses have completely forgotten that at the end of the day they are just like my corner drycleaner who looks out for customers by looking over cloths, recommending sometimes that it is better to clean something by hand at home, knows most customers by name, rings you up if you have orphaned your clothes for too long, and feels a vested interest in participating in the community because he knows that the community is what makes his business successful.  And my drycleaner does not need a model to tell him to do any of those things.

And no, I am not entirely against tracking metrics - I just think we've used them as a cruch for so long that we have forgotten how to think for ourselves and use our judgement to solve problems. And sure, it is easier - you can blame the data if your data-driven decision somehow doesn't turn out well - but is that the best leadership we can hope for?

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A New Year - New Potential

I have an admission to make - I'm a little addicted to Wordle. It's a quirky little Flash app that lets you create a tag cloud. I've used it for presentations, for seeing what my blog tag cloud looks like, and just for playing about. 

Every January first I like to go through an exercise of what matters to me in the coming year and I got the idea to enter those terms into wordle.  These words often reflect not only what I want to strive for but also what I've been stuggling to achieve in the prior year.

This year, I unexpectadly have gotten the opportunity to redefine my work life. All of a sudden, those concepts that I put down on paper on January 1st have taken on new meaning.  And if I start stringing these concepts together, I come up with the things I really love to do:

Create Exciting Connections
Egage in Listening in order to Create
Inspire Respect for each other
Prioritize in a way to achieve Contentment
Build Excitement and Connections
Practice Placid Excitement (by this I mean excitement witthout drama)

These are all great things by which to guide my decision making when exploring new opportunities. They are not only the qualities that I want to practice, but they are also the qualities I am looking for in a new work environment.

Chris Brogan does something similar that I love - his three words for the year - and takes a little more concrete approach. I find that the things that really matter to me are more environmental or attitudinal. I clearly can't narrow my list down but if I had to pick one word it would be contentment which is actually a pretty loaded word for me because I am driven to create and build and I feel strongly about making sure that work adds value to others...but I also need to make sure I do that in an environment that is energizing. Tough to achieve but it is a great goal.

What matters to you in 2009? Has it changed much from last year? Has the economy changed things for you?

The Richness of a Cultivated Network

While I've had a personal blog for years and was surprised to find that I've been on LinkedIn since 2004, I've only more recently been cultivating a digital network.  I started this blog about a year ago and have been on Twitter since late 2007. So let's say I've been working on a digital network of people that know me and my work primarily through the web for about a year. 

My motivation for starting a blog was varied but as an analyst I believed the only way to generate interest in a new research program was to publish my perspective freely.  I've also always like blogs for their informal nature and it allowed me to play with research ideas that were only partially formed.  As part of that, the input and feedback I got - or didn't get - helped me figure out what direction to pursue.  So the blog was part research tool, part intellectual journal, part marketing.

Twitter on the other hand, was a great way to keep in touch with the myriad of people I met as an analyst. So often with business contacts you exchange each others' cards and then never speak to each other again because there is no specific reason.  Twitter allowed me to keep ambient tabs on people and actually reengage in a casual way which was incredible.  Then I found I was actually meeting people through the conversations I was having and the simple feature of following instead of friending became a huge differentiator.  I have more than a handful of people that I met on Twitter that I now consider friends and meet with regularly offline, and many more that I feel like I know from our Twitter conversations although I wouldn't be able to point them out in a crowded room.

So I met some great people, I wrote some things - some of which were interesting - some a little less. And, for the most part, I haven't done much to aggressively increase my followers but somehow, over the year I have found a band of people who find my blogs and tweets interesting enough to keep up.  I do chat regularly via Twitter and find having an extended network of people who understand the space I operate in very energizing. And that all makes me happy.

When I moved on to a executive job, I became so swamped that my blogging and Twittering became more erratic and its value changed.  I used my blog and Twitter to expand my horizons and make me think outside of my own daily work, which while important was not as dynamic as my days were as an analyst. My merry band increased but more incrementally.

Yesterday, as many of you know, I was given an unexpected vacation.  And, cut off from my daily work network, I of course turned to my band of online friends.  I was also a little curious about what might happen...I am not typically the type to ask for help so, I'm often surprised when it appears...so I was curious.  And what happened, was an amazing outpouring from my network .  Some expressions of empathy, some humorous or entertaining tidbits, but more than I was expecting, people who wanted to help or had leads.  I spent the day today talking and emailing with people and finding all sort of opportunities. I am in awe - and I feel so fortunate and blessed. So, if you have a boss or a colleague who is a cynic about social media, tell them my story...and if they do not value that (or heaven forbid they don't see the ROI), they will reap what they sow and never understand why social media is so powerful.

Lastly, thank you.  Thank you. While I will be OK regardless, you made the cushion that I landed on infinitely softer.

The Implications of the Information Economy

Amazon, eBay, Google, Craigslist, Yahoo and others have successfully ushered in the information age. This has been universally acknowledged as a miraculous and valuable thing.  It is transforming the economy in ways not seen since the industrial revolution but doing so much more rapidly. In 2008 we saw the negative results of this upheaval and they were not pretty.  There has been and will continue to be a lot of collateral damage.

What's going on? My view is that we haven't been thinking about the human implications of high speed information access and transparency.

What happens when mortgages can be requested and received within minutes?  Borrowers can purchase property impulsively.  That is not a good thing because it obscures the gravity of the decision and doesn't enforce time to think about options and the implications of a buying decision.  Result: a lot of people taking mortgages and home equity loans because they could without really thinking about how they would manage the purchase over the long term.

What happens when people can buy and sell stock online without having to speak with anyone?  People trade on rumors, panic, and impulses.  The speed at which bad news translates into financial implications has increased significantly.  Result: People don't take time to consider all the factors, there is no filter between an impulse and a transaction, and the network effect of people sharing information causes enormous volatility in stocks.

What happens with a company's strategy for customer acquisition has been advertising based (not product or relationship based)?  As we've seen with Chrysler & GM, customers who now have a high degree of transparency regarding product quality but no loyalty or relationship with the company have abandoned those brands.  While a generalization, Japanese manufactures have been focused on value - great products at reasonable rates and the European manufacturers have been focused on relationships - great products supported by car clubs, gear, events, etc - both groups have performed better than domestic car companies because they do not rely as heavily on advertising and price incentives.

The information economy has changed the way people behave - particularly in the consumer world:

- More product and service transparency is making it vital for companies to think hard about the quality of both their products and services and ensure that the experience is consistent across the customer lifecycle.  Most companies today hand off their customers from marketing to sales to delivery to support and the experience for the customer is often quite different depending on where they are in the process.  This is less and less acceptable to customers that can now 'see' the entire process through the eyes of another customer.

- People can now act immediately on information.  This is good and bad - for companies with discrete products, selling things through search advertising has been a huge boost. Independent niche product companies can survive like never before - and customers can find just about anything they need or want. For complex products and services however, customers can make purchases without thinking through the implications of their actions. Most companies are not set up to help customers much in this regard but, as we've seen in the mortgage market, it would have been smart to educate its customers better and then stick withthem supportively through the life of their loan. However because companies too were after short term gains (which had big financial gains through the stock market), they were not incented to slow down the process. That may be where regulation must step in.

The information economy has created a better informed but often impulsive consumer and it has created a networked information effect that ripples quickly through society allowing small pieces of information to set off a disproportionately large reaction - some positive and some negative. Like never before we can also act on information immediately creating economic whiplash.

This happens on a person level as well - information overload has increased dramatically so much so that I spend more time absorbing and less time thinking/processing than I used to.  My goal for 2009? Working on my filters and behaviors so that the balance of information intake and work output changes.  I may even try a few 'unplug the internet' and 'turning off the computer' days...we'll see.

How do you see information access affecting you or your business?  It is a net gain for you or a troubling challenge?