The Social Organization

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.

Listening Well - It Involves More than Ears

I've seen a lot of people in my time who are very solicitous and who are patient as you speak to them but who are not great listeners. Why?  Because good listening is not just about hearing another voice - that is only one aspect of being a good listener.  The other - and from my perspective - the much more important skill is the ability to provide a safe harbor for someone to talk. 

What do I mean by that?  People will not share what they are really thinking unless they trust that the person with whom they are speaking will not use the information in ways that expose them or threaten them but who will also do what they can to help solve solve the problem.

I have had many a manager or colleague who would repeatedly express an interest in listening but when you expressed a problem would do any of the following:

• Publicly expose me and my concern to a group in a way that made me feel like I was causing problems and not competent to solve problems myself
• Reiterate the issue and tell me that they had full confidence that I could go fix the problem with the involved parties which left me thinking...if I thought it was so easy to do, I wouldn't have the problem in the first place  
• Bring up issues in a performance review discussion as a negative mark at some later date
• Look at me or respond judgmentally
• Cross their arms

All of which pretty much shut me down. Now over the course of my career I am sure that I've had problems that were wasting someone's time and probably very much my own fault. But here is the catch, once I had one of the above experiences there was no way I was going to take another problem to that individual. So they could hear everything I had to say and they never would have understood what was really going on with me because I wasn't going to say anything.  From their perspective, they may have thought they were spending a lot of their time listening...but they were listening to the sound of silence.

So, the biggest part of listening is that things go unsaid. Things go unsaid when others are not sure whether they have a supportive, non-judgmental environment in which to speak.

The result? It is not good enough to open your ears (or search for the name of your brand online) - you must actively solicit people's opinions and when they are negative or critical you have to hold back, not jump to conclusions, and explore with them what is causing those opinions...and not use it against them in a personal way.  In a world where things are speeding up, this is one area where we need to slow down or we won't actually hear anything. It's not about getting bigger ears, it's about getting a bigger heart.

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 a 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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How Can Communities Thrive in a Cynical Age?

The Advent and Christmas season is one where I think of my deceased father the most...he was a minister and for obvious reasons this was always a busy season.  It was also his least favorite.  He almost hated the celebration of Christmas - the gifts, the trees, the shopping.  He was actually pretty miserable to live with for most of December...and then, inexplicably, a gift would show up under the tree for me with a tag written in his highly formal script signed 'from Santa'. Clearly he was a bit conflicted but his real issue was that people didn't spend the time appreciating the meaning of the Christmas story and instead focused on the the selfish, superficial aspects.  Granted his ideal version of Christmas day was probably somewhat of a pious nightmare - sitting Puritanically on hard benches for hours contemplating what an innocent baby was trying to demonstrate to a world fraught with conflict and tension...

No one wants that - at least I don't - but he had a very important point. The world is a profoundly flawed place - there is war, starvation, conflict - but people have a huge capacity for good and so there is profound hope as well.  It is up to individuals to choose and it is a choice that we make every day - are we going to act as if there is hope or are we going to act on our fears?  Christmas is all about seeing the hope and the potential in a otherwise dark world.

Acting on hope, however, is not an easy task.  It assumes we've got to take the world and other people at face value - with all their flaws - and act on the assumption that the individual or organization we are dealing with will improve, because otherwise what's the point?  If we take the cynical view and assume that the other individual or organization will not improve, we are looking at a situation from a perspective of fear and it is paralyzing.  Religion then, is all about holding on to the faith that there is, indeed, hope for improvement. 

How does that relate to communities?  Well one, communities are all about forming ongoing relationships with people.  And people are hard to work with - not because they are necessarily difficult - but each person has different priorities and perspectives.  Communities require us to compromise our own priorities and perspectives so that the consensus can form and communities can make a difference.  As a society however, we have become more individually isolated, gotten used to having our way at all costs, and really don't like our decisions to be dependent on others.  We've become cynical and we lose our faith and trust in organizations very quickly.  We've replaced blind trust with blind cynicism.  That is a huge problem because no person or institution I know is perfect but all too often we are ready to simply pick up and move on if we run into issues, rather than dig in and try to help solve the problem.  I see this in myself and other customers all the time - I am incredibly impatient with poor customer service and I am still working on becoming a more patient person. Certainly the companies that I buy from are not actively trying to piss me off. Do they always do a good job in all aspects of their operations? No. But that makes them just like us...a bit flawed but usually trying to do the right thing given the resources they have available.

I don't know exactly where I am going with this but it's a time of year that I think about this topic a lot and this year I've been running into all sort of examples of people who feel entitled or ungrateful for other people and it's a hard year...we all need to give each other a break - and the benefit of the doubt that most people are not trying to sabotage us.  In that vein; go tell someone how much you appreciate their efforts, we're all doing the best that we can.

Personally, I'm quite thankful for my father's persistence in teaching me the lesson of hope & faith.  I don't go to church these days and I do occasionally think I could use a more regular reminder that I should act in faith that things will improve. My father's lesson was a strong one, however, and one that seems to become more important these days, not less. My father would be overjoyed to see someone of his faith finally make it to the White House, taking that message along with him. What can we do to help?

The Alignment Gap Between Organizational Structure & Organizational Priorities

Large companies have necessarily needed a functional structure in order to manage the vast number of people they employ. Somewhere it was decided that any one individual cannot be responsible for more than 7-10 direct reports...and consequently you get functional hierarchies.

The big issue? Whether functions are determined by job type(engineering, sales, etc.) or by market segment (consumer, channel, etc.), corporate priorities and initiatives typically cross function. That may not seem so bad, except that each functional head understands the priorities just a little bit differently. One function may see the number 1 priority as 10x more important than the number 2 priority while their colleague may see them as roughly equal in importance.  That has huge implications on how many and which resources get assigned to different initiatives.  Below is my simplistic graphic of this problem:

You can see where an organization may start to go horribly wrong.  Whatever initiative that is #2 may cause huge engineering and services issues because while marketing and sales ramped up investments...the company isn't staffed appropriately to deliver.  On the #3 priority, the company may be making huge investments in something but if marketing and sales are not also making investments, the initiative will fall flat and ultimately not succeed.  Yet many companies do not hire business owners for their initiatives and priorities (instead they tend to spend lots of money on consultants to try and fix the problem) and incentive structures typically reward functional heads for meeting objectives that are within their scope of control.

In the social media circle we talk a lot about how more open and transparent communication can help identify the gaps and issues but communities can't really solve the problem.  If anything they just put more pressure on understaffed resources to keep up with initiatives in other groups that may be much better staffed.

Let's take a bit of a radical view and say...why don't companies staff initiatives instead of functional groups? For example, a corporate initiative could be to increase customer satisfaction.  There are likely things in every functional area that need to be addressed.  Then maybe skill set based groups become more communities of practice and maybe groups that pool resources when individuals roll off of projects and get assigned new ones...and maybe that is how you also measure individual performance.  Those that always get snapped up for projects should be rewarded while those that are regularly returned to the pool get put on development plans.  This is more or less the way consulting firms work...why not other types of corporations?

My guess?  Most people don't like to leave their comfort zone. Instead of exciting, people prefer predictable.  The problem?  Very little is predictable anymore.  GM is near death's door, The Chicago Tribune has declared bankruptcy, and a handful of well-armed terrorists can create chaos for weeks in the world's largest cities.

I think initiative focused cross-functional teams would be an interesting way to approach this problem.  Hire pure resource managers to manage people who are 'on the beach' as we used to say in consulting and between initiatives.  In my mind that would give individuals one primary goal - for the length of the initiative (which could be multi-year if it involved expanding into a new market).  Communities of practice could then be set up - using social software - to help share skill-specific best practices across individuals.

Anyone else think that sounds like a good approach?

The Importance of Social Networking to Information Work

Collaboration software was designed for the information worker and it has indeed, helped tremendously by giving people more ways and channels to communicate and work together on content.  However, collaboration - in its more traditional definition - is too limited for what information workers need because it doesn't acknowledge the entire work flow, it typically helps with different points along that process.  What instigates collaboration in the first place?  What is the actionable results from the collaboration?   Who and what are the actors in collaboration and how trustworthy are they?  When are formal processes appropriate and when are more informal processes needed?

I like to think of this information work process as a circular thing, one work flow impacting and influencing others.  The process is sometimes kicked off formally - through perhaps a executive strategy discussion - and other times the process is kicked of by an informal conversation between two colleagues.  To me, the process looks something like - each step informed by the information source:

The other thing about information work that sometimes goes unacknowledged is...if you don't publish, broadcast, and get buy-in you might as well have fell a tree in the middle of Alaska for the amount of impact it will have. So to me information work is not effective if it doesn't get marketed to the audience it is intended to impact. Many, many people do not get this...working slavishly but feeling like they don't get the acknowledgement they deserve because they fail to 'market' their work.

Social networking software adds a critical layer to information work by giving sources (people, groups, organizations) referenceability and trust from people in the network - and making work transparent.  That trustworthyness makes information work go much faster. Social software adds to the mix, giving the participants in information work different ways to informally discuss, promote, and publish information.

However, one thing that social software does not address is that there are also structured and formal methods to operationalize a great idea and all organizations have these structured processes.  Organizations need both the structured formal processes (to ensure reliability, compliance, quality) and the informal processes (to encourage innovation, affinity, and to expose differences & opportunities).  There is need and a place for both...but in order to really help organizations, the formal and informal processes need to be closely linked so that information can be viewed through the lens of an organization's formal structure or through the lens of and individual's perspective...but each view needs to include everything. 

The challenge for collaboration, social media, and content management vendors is to enable customers to associate content with both formal and informal methods of discovery and tracking.  Both matter - and it is not a holy war between a monarchy and anarchy... what we are shooting for is democracy.

You Can Count Your Money...and You Can Count Your Leads...

...but you can't count on how much money your leads will turn into.  At this morning's Social Media Breakfast the topic was ROI in Social Media. Brian Halligan of HubSpot and Matt Cutler of Visible Measures gave great presentations about how they track social media efforts.  Andrew McAfee, however, dropped a bit of a bombshell in saying that ROI from enterprise software cannot actually be calculated. Not that enterprise software in not valuable mind you...just that its value is too complex to effectively calculate with models.

This was a very interesting line of thinking for me for a variety of reasons. 

First, with the financial meltdown there is a lot of conversation swirling around about whether there was enough good old fashioned experience and intuition governing the big financial firms or whether they had become subserviant to their models which, apparently, told them that lending to people who couldn't pay them back was a good idea.  I'm being a bit cheeky here and I can't begin to know all the factors that led to the crisis but it has started a conversation around the use of models in decision-making and management.

Second, I spent a number of years benchmarking the supply chain and product development performance of Fortune 500 technology companies.  It was a fascinating exercise and from it I brought away two primary lessons.  One, benchmarking can be incredibly useful.  Two, people misuse and misunderstand the use of metrics quite a bit.  The metrics won't tell you what to do they will just show you where you've been and how that compares, directionally, to others.  It is one piece of information to use in decision-making but it should not be used alone to make decisions.

Third, I've build enterprise software ROI models.  There are a lot of assumptions you build in and a lot of exceptions that you have to ignore (and unfortunately for the models...business is mostly about managing exceptions).  I've also build system dynamics models which are incredibly cool and handle behaviors better than your standard database models.  However, the important lessons that good models provide are not the results.  Good models help you test changes to assumptions and see the relative/directional implications.  They will not give you an accurate projection.

So...where does that leave us? For Andrew McAfee, he suggests measuring what you can but trust that business decision makers are wiser than to trust any enterprise software ROI analysis.  But here's what I think.  Business is about relationships and the better the relationships you have, the more stable and secure your business will be...but you may sacrifice growth because scaling good relationships is difficult. 

The real value of social software is that it helps develop and maintain closer relationships with more people than you could without it.  The business leaders that have really succeeded get the relationship angle...if they can see clearly how social media can increase their ability to maintain more relationships, the ROI will be obvious.  But not calculable.

Participating In the Market

Today is Blog Action Day to fight Poverty and while I haven't done much to fight poverty lately other than donate to the Heifer Project, I do have markets and equality on my mind.

Yesterday I gave a presentation titled "This Little Piggy" done by Mzinga's talented Alexa Scordato:

This Little Piggy Went to Market

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: summit marketing)

At its most basic, the message of the presentation is "the market is moving online" but the more nuanced message is that markets are all about access to information. When access to information about a product - whether the product is stocks or candy - is unevenly distributed, someone has the opportunity to make more money than the product is objectively worth.

What I mean by that is if I as the consumer am offered a piece of candy for $1 at my corner store...and don't have any information about where else that candy is offered and at what price, I am unlikely to object paying that price.  However, if I know that the store across the street is selling that piece of candy for 25 cents, I am unlikely to buy it for $1.  Same goes for cars, stocks, software, groceries. 

My point to the marketing crowd yesterday was that if you want to maintain high prices and margins on your products (and that is the reason marketing exists to begin with), marketers need to know more about their customers and the market than their customers know about them and their market.  The internet has disrupted the balance of power between companies and their customers because it dramatically increases the distribution of information...and now customers often know more...and know they have choices where in the offline world they may not have. So...social media marketing is not just about keeping up with the tools and methods your customers are using, it is about keeping up with them in terms of what they know - all of which is captured in conversations.

Getting back to Blog Action Day... what does that online market dynamic do for the impoverished?  First and foremost, the digital divide is an enormous issue - if one segment of our society has to operate from a position of information weakness, they are likely to pay more than they have to for all sorts of things...which seems ironic in the extreme. So getting online is important.  Second, access to information is not alone enough - the ability to sort, filter, and find information from reliable sources is also critical which suggests education is a key component. Operating in an information economy without the skills to filter is a scary thing. 

Do I have a solution. No, I'm afraid I don't but also I don't think the topic of information inequity and its various ramifications are talked about enough in the always connected, gadget friendly crowd I tend to hang out with online.  What do you think? How can we help?

Got Leadership?

Communities, like any organization, need strong leadership to be successful. Leadership in communities, however, needs to come from many if not most of the members of the community. Strong communities are ones where there is a lot of discussion, dissent, and negotiation. Strong communities often include a lot of tension. Strong communities are made up of people with strong opinions who are not afraid to voice their opinions but also have enough respect for other members of the community that dissent can be negotiated without escalating to anger and resentment.

The problem? There is not enough leadership to go around. There is not enough empathy to go around. There is not enough respect to go around. There is not enough listening to go around. There is not enough strength of character to go around.

How do we get there? The best way to learn how to build strong communities is to experience a strong community first. It requires time, mentoring, observation...things that in the business world we often don't allow for.  In business, we need to show progress quickly and be show effectiveness.  The cadence of business and the cadence of communities are quite different - as is the leadership required.  Seriously considering developing a community for your business? Look for the really smart people in your organization who don't quite fit the management mold but are always pushing the envelope...and put them in charge of the community - and give them the time to explore other communities.