The Social Organization

The Naked CEO

Today I gave a talk at PRSA's Digital Impact Conference.  My topic was how social media, communities, and user-generated content is changing organizations.

What I was hoping to impart was the following:

- Social media is not only something to 'deal' with but there is a way to thrive in this new environment

- Having customers and employees is no longer enough - you need to convert them to engaged members of your network so you they can become your army of online advocates.

- Strategy, operations, culture, and leadership all need to change to adopt to this new environment.

Here's the slides:

The Naked Ceo

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What Women Know and How it Drives Profitability

Forget about what women want - women may want a lot of things that have nothing to do with running a business (oh that cute pink handbag!). But let's discuss what women tend (and I say tend because nothing is absolute when discussing gender roles) to know and you can start to see why businesses with more women in senior leadership positions are more profitable and innovative.

In my experience, here's how what women know translates into business performance:

• Women know high risk comes with high potential upsides and high potential downsides. We tend not to get overly excited about what could be and focus on what can be today. That focus means we we more likely translate current market needs into solutions that will pay off today but we may not be as likely to go for the long shot ventures.

• Women know relationships and know that the more open and transparent we are, the closer the relationships are that we can foster. This allows us to form really persistent relationships with employees, partners, and customers - and not through the use of money and rewards - which is more profitable and less vulnerable. See Diane Hessan's excellent example of Return on Openness.

• Women know how valuable communication is - at all levels. That means a lot of us are chatty (it's been proven) but it also means the people around us are never left in doubt of what is going on. That means there is less distrust and gives others the chance to bring up any issues they see.

• Women know how to navigate emotional conflict better and interestingly have an easier time discussing deep rooted differences of opinion between colleagues in a more collegial fashion. This allows for conflict resolution before things escalate into business problems.

• Women know how to identify subtle social queues and can identify whether or not someone is being open with us - whether we choose to acknowledge that or not. This allows women to more accurately assess relationships with customers and others.

• Women know that telling people what to do is not the most effective way to lead. Showing by example and using Socratic methods of mentoring often facilitates the response we desire without the negative side affects of the other party feeling controlled.

• Women know complexity. We can never focus on just work, or just money, or just family. It is always about the best decision for everyone rather than the best decision for any one constituent. This gives us a balanced perspective of a business and keeps us from maximizing revenue in the short term if it damages relationships in the long term - thus preserving sustainability and long term profits.

This is not to say that women are better and that this is true for all women (or that men don't have these qualities) but bringing women into leadership positions will bring a diversity of approach, a different perspective, and some much needed skills to the board room. In a business environment where transparency and relationships are becoming core principals of business how can you afford not to bring more of those skills into your business?

From a personal perspective *not* having more of those qualities in companies is what has driven me to start my own. I don't want to work in an environment that doesn't understand balance, is driven to 'win' at all costs, and only values relationships while they result in revenue. It's not what I am about and the more senior I get, the more aligning my values with the businesses I associate with matter to me. Is that a zero sum rule? Of course not - women don't tend to view things that way and I certainly don't.

What do you think? Is this too generalized? Do you think this is a sexist perspective? Does it reflect the women leaders that you know?

Don't know the woman in the picture? That's Indra Nooyi wife of a former boss of mine (who was quite a smart cookie himself) and CEO of Pepsi - great to see!

The Value of Social Software and the Collapsing Cost of Content Management

The conversation around the ROI of social media/social software is one that gets batted around quite a bit and there are a couple of approaches to considering its impact:

• It improves existing metrics like awareness, positive brand association, lead generation, reduced support costs, etc.
• It improves relationships, increases serendipity, increases retention, increases innovation
• It reduces the cost of delivering the above performance

All of those approaches can be valid depending on what you are trying to achieve - a laundry list of metrics as well as some great commentary can be found here.

But I want to discuss a more fundamental shift that is taking place that is at the heart of social software's ROI - regardless of which metric you use to measure its effectiveness. Fundamentally social software does two things, it:

• Reduces the cost of content development and management
• Improves the value of the content

Content is what drives any business and the better the content, the better a business can align with its market.

First, social software collapses content authoring, cataloging, publishing, and distribution into one application. In the enterprise context that is particularly mind boggling. As an example, to publish a white paper, the process that I would go through in the past typically consisted of:

1. Draft the white paper in a desktop tool - transcribing notes and details regarding examples and case studies from other tools.

2. Send the white paper out to 10-20 interested parties. Remind them to edit. Remind them again. Get edits. 50% of reviewers are good about using the revision tool, 50% are not. 

3. Reconcile edits (or the other option would be to send it out to 10-20 people sequentially). Ugh. This takes longer than the original draft.

4. Send draft to 1 or 2 people for final business edits. Reconcile.

5. Upload document into content management application.

6. Create a ticket in a project management/ticket tracking application for MarCom/editing group to do final edits on.

7. Receive notification of final draft available in content management system.

8. Create a ticket for the web team to publish it to the website. Wait.

9. Receive notification that it is published to the website.

9. Create an email marketing campaign to let the core audience know that it is available.

10. Send email. Hope it's opened.

If lucky, this process takes 6-8 weeks. If the content and writing are being outsourced to a third party, it takes even longer.

With social software, the process looks something like:

1. Write draft. Incorporate content from other sources but also make certain sections of the draft available for others to contribute directly.

2. Alert 10-20 editors that the document is ready for editing. Remind them to edit. Remind them again. (sorry that part won't change). They make edits directly to document.

3. Review edits - accept them or go back to the previous text or edit them.

4. Alert the final 1-2 people to review. They make edits directly.

5. Create an alert for MarCom/editing group to do final edits.

6. Receive alert that the final draft is complete.

7. Change permissions on file and publish to website directly. People subscribed to RSS feed will get notifications immediately.

This change to the fundamental process of content creation and management is not only a cost reduction in the number of applications needed but it is also a reduction in the workflow steps and people needed. In any business process that involves content creation and management, social software can dramatically reduce costs - and ensure that content is stored and categorized centrally...no more losing tons of data when employees leave.  It's almost enough to recommend to IT departments that they not give employees MSFT Office apps - although we are not there yet because of the need to share documents with external partners and customers.

Secondly, once content is published, social software allows the audience for the content to add tremendous value to the original content. Simply by adding ratings and reviews, the value of the content is doubled. Think of the Amazon model - the publishers content is useful but the ratings and reviews are even more so. In niche markets these ratings and reviews increase even more in value. Why don't most companies allow for this?

Then think about enabling customers to create content about your products or services. That probably doubles again the usefulness and value of the content to the end customer. ExpoTV is exploiting this by allowing people to upload video reviews of products - essentially taking that value away from the manufactures and distributors of the products themselves.

So your executives are afaid of negative reviews? Clearly they are happening anyway and if a product is truly that bad...shouldn't it be taken off the market anyway since it will undoubtadly lead to high service costs and a negative reflection on the brand...don't they want to know that? It's happening anyway, the support and brand costs are just hidden from sight and impossible to track if you don't encourage customers tell you directly.

Content. It's what drives business. Making it easier and cheaper to create - and then allowing customers to add to it - will be the way businesses win. Win repeat customers, win new customers, win loyalty, win evangelism. And in this day and age you can't affort to not make your customers into marketing partners.

Nothing to Say Here

Maybe it's because I just wrote a 50+ page report on the social software market, maybe it's because I just organized my 200+ social media feeds but I can't think of a lot to say this week that would really add to the conversation. Chat, chat, chat - yeh, we all know that talking to our customers - and really listening are important by now (shouldn't we have already known that?!?)

What I did notice by organizing my feeds is that social media and community blogs focused on PR/Marketing Communication blogs far exceed the number of social media blogs focused on customer support, market research, product innovation, HR, or collaboration.

So - I'll ask you to participate this week. What blogs have you seen about social media or communities focused on something other than outbound marketing? What are the blogs the really discuss the practicalities of bringing more conversational tools into existing operations - dealing with the data implications, the cultural implications, the measurement implications?

Please leave a comment about your favorite non-marketing blogs. Thanks!

The Truth About the New Marketing - Operations Can Make or Break it

There is a lot of good content out there these days about conversational marketing and what it takes to be 'remarkable' in a conversational age. This morning, on Mashable was a great post on Finding your Social Media Purple Cow. And while developing robust brand content and deep connection with customers remains important, we rarely talk about how critically important operations is becoming as a marketing discipline. What do I mean by operations?

• Repetitive consistent marketing performance
• Theory of constraints or other type of process flow analysis
• Process standards - including decision-making frameworks and metrics
• End-to-end systems that integrate with ERP & HR systems

Here is the thing about operations. It was developed as a discipline to take a complex problem and make it repeatable - think about assembly line as an example. For large companies it is much more important to have consistently good marketing than to have big swings in marketing. In the broadcast era, marketing operations were artificially simplified because you could access a huge volume of customers through a relatively small number of channels. It allowed everyone in the value chain to get a little operationally lazy. You didn't really need to expend all that much effort to either control costs or find different ways to interact with customers - it was more the law of averages. However it also generate some content that was wildly successful and some that fell completely flat.

The complexity of marketing has exploded now that people are switching more of their media consumption to the highly fragmented web environment. Now, you can easily test which content plays well or not with a small slice of the audience before you take big risks with your entire market. Finding your customers and interacting with them efficiently requires a lot more operational discipline - including applications, processes, measurements, and various different roles.

Marketing will always require good content but using the internet allows you to see exactly how changes to content change the behavior of your customers. If you are not thinking about stealing some supply chain resources from the big manufactures - or military ops staff - to help you with marketing, you should be. And yeh, they may not be your super fun creative types but they will help you drive revenue higher and reduce costs significantly.

Who is your operational super-star or are you struggling to do it yourself? How do you think about your marketing process flow? How stardarized are your processes? Can you all march in the same direction at the same time?

The Best Social Strategy: First Know Thyself

I've been asked a number of times (and most recently for one of my favorite SXSW content projects by Crystal Beasley) what I would recommend to people starting to blog, twitter, etc. I typically recommend that they first follow a group of people they find interesting through blog and Twitter directories and then jump in to the conversation. Other people recommend doing a lot of listening first and I don't disagree but I think to really understand the culture and find your 'voice' in a new medium you need to just start trying things, albeit slowly at first.

The corollary to "How did you get started" is "What is your strategy? which to be honest, always leaves me a bit at a loss for words. My first thought is always "Oh *^&^%, I should have a strategy!". After thinking about this topic however, I don't really need a strategy and here's why: I am an individual so my online presence is obviously scoped by that fact but more importantly, I know myself fairly well - and I know what I am comfortable sharing about myself with others and what will likely get me into uncomfortable situations.

However, companies are a very different beasts than individuals and therefore the advice has to be different. Just like individuals however, the better you know yourself the easier it will be to participate in all types of social media conversations. So my first piece of advice would be for companies to figure out who they are before they start down the social media path. In the majority of companies this is different from the brand. Brands are often an abstraction created by the marketing departments or agencies, not a personality based on the aggregate employee values. It's why Tony Hsieh is such a bellweather leader for the social age - he is leading the charge to hire on values and make those values the brand. I would bet it is a much easier process for Zappos to create new conversation channels than for other companies to do so. 

So how does a corporation understand who they are? Likely a bit of cultural anthropology would help. Understanding yourself as an organization includes understanding where fine lines exist between what is acceptable and what is not. Things like publicly apologizing to a customer - some companies will be OK with that idea and others will cringe at it. What about sharing booking numbers internally? What about externally? How transparent are you as an organization - is everything laid out and accessible? It it theoretically accessible but not easy to find? Is it controlled?

Understanding the boundaries of what is comfortable for the vast majority of people in your organization is critical to understand what you should be talking about and sharing in different online environments.

The second part to me is listening for what your customers, prospects, and influencers want to know. This likely doesn't line up with what the organizational culture is comfortable sharing. Identifying this gap and then negotiating how to respond to what people want to know is the critical key in navigating the online world. Ideally it is a dance between pushing people to share a little more than they typically would want to and not giving the audience everything they are asking for but enough to satisfy them. Navigating the gap takes a skilled facilitator - just another reason companies should not just go 'hire a blogger'.

How do you approach this exercise of really understanding the organization for which you work?

Massive Multiplayer Online Innovation

Last week I got the opportunity via Ehsan Ehsani (@eehsani) to interview Dr. Robert Chapman Wood, a professor of strategy at San Jose State University who had studied IBM's first Innovation Jam in 2006 (a second one was held in 2008). It's a great case study to read about - the original article was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. A couple of things that really stood out for me were:

• The scale - 150,000 individuals, 104 countries, & 46,000 ideas
• The involvement of customers and partners - 67 companies were involved
• The openness of IBM to share its internal innovation process so publicly

One of the more interesting challenges that I discussed with Dr. Wood in the podcast was the issue of brainstorming vs. consensus. Turns out that wrangling 150,000 people online is quite a challenge - you don't have some of the same facilitation tools (voice, tone, physical signals, a whiteboard 'parking lot' at the ready, etc.). Brainstorming and consensus/decision-making are also two very different processes and play different roles in the innovation process - and different online tools are optimized for each of those processes.

Here's the whole podcast (warning: it is about 45 minutes long and available on iTunes - search E-Novation or Ehsani - if you want if for your drive):

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