The Social Organization

A Vision of The Social Organization

We have a pretty clear picture of what a social organization looks like on the outside - marketing and sales becomes a pull rather than a push discipline and customers are much more involved throughout the customer lifecycle. But what does this new organization look and feel like on the inside? There are not many discussions of how employment and management structures change to become more agile.

There is more agreement on the issues:

• Slow moving, rigid organizations do not adapt to increasingly fast moving markets.
• Siloed information within organizations creates huge redundancy issues and makes efficiency difficult.
• It is quite challenging to hire individuals that can operate in large inefficient organizations and drive innovation or think differently and therefore organizations lack the 'best and the brightest' talent.
• Certain kinds of talent, particularly in the area of collaboration, are poorly identified and rewarded.
• Middle management is incented to protect their turf and hoard information leading to archaic corporate politics and huge inefficiency for the organization.
• The hiring and layoff cycles have created immense distrust of employers.
• Employees are increasingly stressed due to unease about their job stability, the deluge of information, and increasing responsibility to fund their own health insurance and retirement.
• Families with two working parents are strained for time. Families with one working parent are increasingly uneasy about the risk of one paycheck. Single adults are increasingly stressed because they are viewed as the employees most ready to work long hours.
• More and more individuals want to be in control of their own work life since the perceived risk of working for a large organization is not significantly lower (and may be greater) than the risk working for themselves.

Most organizations have a long way to go to be places that employees are clamoring to work for but in the new communications environment that clamoring employee enthusiasm will drive revenues and market share if it exists. That employee enthusiasm also drives alignment with corporate values and messaging, increases opportunities because all employees are advocates, an decreases risks because employees feel more individual responsible for protecting the interests of the organization.

So what might this organizational nirvana look like?

Employment becomes a cross between a long-term commitment and free-agency: The organization provides employee overhead (benefits) in exchange for a commitment to work a minimum number of hours on organizational projects.

Managers are either focused on professional development or projects: Managers no longer 'own' a functional piece of the business but either manage a group of employees to help them choose projects and navigate their career or they manage projects.

Employees and Project Managers Negotiate Work Commitments: Employees are free to self-commit to projects for which they are interested and have time. Project managers define project roles, time needed, and associated pay and are responsible for recruiting team members and managing the project to completion. Employees can work as little (as long as the reach the minimum required for employment) or as much as they feel they are able to at that time. Project managers can solicit specific employees or change the pay to get employee commitment. This has the side affect of paying more, not less, for tedious or unappealing jobs.

Employees Manage Their Schedules. If an employee has a family member with an illness and needs to work the minimum required, they choose their project commitments accordingly. If on the other hand, they have time and want more hours to maximize their income, they can choose a heavy schedule.

Employees define themselves by skill sets, attributes, and experience based on a published taxonomy so that project managers can find and solicit team members.

360 Degree Reviews. Everyone on a project gets to review the performance of everyone else, with some templates and guidelines to do so based on organizational values and goals.

Executive Tasks Are Earned. Based on the successful completion of projects that represent bigger and bigger pieces of business, executives earn the right to budget or more loosely defined (risky/innovative) projects. Some executives will continue to select projects with bigger budgets and some executives will likely continue to choose more innovative projects, depending on their interests.

A Senior Executive Team Is Still Necessary. The C-Suite will still set the overall strategic direction and priorities for the organization - with plenty of input. The C-Suite will also oversee the initiation of projects, the arbitration of issues between teams, and they will ensure gaps are being addressed.

All Projects Are Vetted, Prioritized, Budgeted and Scheduled. Any employee or customer can initiate a project but there are various committees, depending on the size and purpose of the project, that vets and schedules them. These committees are filled with project managers that rotate on and off of them, based on the interest of the project manager themselves in participating.

Customers Can Be Project Team Members. If a customer is particularly invested in a particular project and have the appropriate skills, they are incorporated into projects.

The overhead of organizing in this way has been too high in the past, particularly for very large organizations. However, technology - both enterprise functional software as well as networked communications software - has made the overhead of managing this complexity much easier.  Models similar to this exist in the professional service world - the big management consulting, marketing, and accounting firms. I think it's time to test it out in more traditional organizations as well.

Generally we need to get away from the parental model of the organization to one that views employees as partners and both treats them and expects them to act like adult peers. This will require an adjustment for many employees as well - there are many people who like the easiness of just being told what to do but that makes them sub-performing employees which organizations can no longer aford if they want to compete globally.

This model also introduces new issues and risks - what are some of these issues in your mind?

Update: One emerging model that I really love is uTest - for more on their business model innovations, built around community, read their latest update here.

Social Media Algorithms, Context, & Decision Making

 
I started my career working with large enterprises on decision-making processes around new product development. It's an area filled with ambiguity and risk but requires executives to make huge bets on a future they cannot see. It also takes years to get valid feedback on whether investment decisions were right and those decisions are very often group decisions with limited accountability back to any one person. It is a squirrely business at its best and for that reason often called an 'art'. But I learned a lot about business decision-making in ambiguous environments. Enterprise decision-making in the social space is very similar.

One of the cardinal sins in decision-making is not understanding the biases and context that underpins the information you have. You will never achieve perfect information but it is absolutely critical that you understand where the information you do have is coming from and how you are selecting and prioritizing the information you find. Understanding the gaps in information is just as critical as understanding the information you have - it helps identify potential risks and mitigate them.

One of the issues that I find, generally speaking, with social media monitoring tools is that it is very difficult to understand the scope of what you are looking at and therefore challenging to make good decisions with the information. Talking about this issue recently caused me to have a striking aha moment about what has bothered me about Google for so long: the algorithms are considered 'secret sauce' and very tightly controlled. This is highly problematic for decision-making because whether it is search engines or social media monitoring solutions we absolutely need to understand what we are looking at (and what we are not seeing) and how that information has been prioritized for us. Without that context, our decision-making is biased toward to proclivities of the tools we use and that is extremely risky.

We don't even like eating chocolates without knowing what is inside... how are we to make good decisions if we don't know how we got to the information we have?

Photo by waldopepper

It's Not About Finding the Influencers, It's About Creating a Flow of Influence

There are so many discussions lately of what makes a person and influencer and a lot of people and brands are swarming around the people they have determined to be influencial. And it's not completely wrong but influence is so much more complex than that. To me services like Klout and a whole host of others miss the entire point by assuming that one person alone is influencial. That is rarely the case.

Let me explain. When making a judgement about something - at least for anything more complex than following and opening a shared link - people rarely hear about it from one person and then go buy or consume it.  The process is more like this: they become aware of it through a whole variety of ways - media, friends, advertisements - and then they might hear a friend mention it. Then they hear someone else talking about it. Then they take a closer look. Then they ask someone and do some research. Then they might not do anything for a bit. Then a need arises and they go do something about it. Now, tell me who was the 'influencer' that caused them to take action? The truth is, it was no one person alone.

Instead, it takes a network and a flow of influence to create action and it is hard to tell which part of that flow had the most relevance to the individual taking action. The other paradox is that the more one individual influencer pushes something, the more their recommendation gets called in to question because it often looks (and is) biased in some way. So pushing individual influencers to talk about your thing more is actually counterproductive.

So what is more effective?  If you are trying to get someone to take action, you want to target the entire network of inputs that surround them. It is just as important, perhaps more so, to get the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th people around someone to recommend something as it is to get one person to do so. By targeting dense sub-networks of individuals you can affect awareness much more than by targeting the hubs of multiple sub-networks.

To illustrate this point, image we have 6 sub-networks all with 100 people in them each. Each sub-network has a clear 'leader'. This obsession with influeners would suggest that you should target the 6 leaders.  To me you may pick up actual action from the 6 leaders themselves plus, a small handful of others - perhaps double. So you have reached 12 people, and paid for 6 of them to do something.  I would suggest that instead, target 4 secondary influencers in one of the sub-networks and you will get the action of a much bigger percentage of one sub-network - as much as 25%, maybe more and paid less to get that action. The ROI is much better. Why? People heard about something from a handful of people, not one and the people they heard the information from were perhaps more creadible then from the leader, who is always targeted for sharing information and thus is always sharing stuff but it's not always clear what the motives are or how strong the personal recommendation is.

After all, the popular girls are only popular if they have a posse. The posse matters a lot. Without their support, there would be no popular girls. Followers matter as much as leaders... we just forget that.

We should be thinking about creating networks and flows of influence, not piling on to already overwhelmed 'influncers'.

Miles To Go Before We Sleep

I am fortunate to have far flung family and friends who work in a wide range of industries. Over Thanksgiving and Christmas I traveled to see or hosted many of them and got an interesting and sobering perspective on how socially mature our organizations are in general. The reality is that we have a long way to go. 

One of the anecdotes that I heard was how a manufacturing professional was never consulted when 'improvements' were made to his die cutting process that made it worse and how the quality of materials had declined year after year even though his management keep on and on about quality and performance improvement. The profound disrespect for colleagues represented in his stories was maddening. And then there was the company that launched an internal blog only to have it become a dumping ground for complaints that were never responded to or resolved, leading the company to shut down the blog because *it* was damaging moral. And then there was the business owner who didn't feel the need to share a letter of heartfelt thanks for his staff's work because it was 'distracting'.

All of these stories were disheartening and, I believe, somewhat linked to the economy. Employees are trapped which makes it easy to take advantage of them or treat them poorly. The issue for companies is that their employees will have a long memory and no particular need to go above and beyond for their organizations. In fact, they may go out of their way to dissuade others from doing business with the organization or working for it. It doesn't make good business sense now, when everyone is trying to do more with less or later when the economy improves and employees flock to leave.

We have miles to go...

The Inextricable Link Between Social Media and Enterprise 2.0

Social media and enterprise 2.0 are largely thought of separately these days, in large part because social media primarily affects communications and relationships with constituent groups outside of the organization and enterprise 2.0 addresses collaboration and innovation behind the firewall. In reality, organizations will find that by doing one they must address the other. Why? Social technologies significantly reduce the cost of content creation, distribution and discovery, thereby significantly increasing the speed of information and value transfer. If implemented on one side of the corporate firewall but not the other, it creates an imbalance that grows quickly, increasing tension and strain felt in other parts of the organization.

In most cases, the information environment outside the organization is changing far more rapidly than the information environment internally. Customers, partners, prospects, and employees can find, access, and share information in a way that corporate infrastructure, security, culture, and policies inhibit. Organizations are having a hard time keeping up with - never mind responding to or taking advantage of - these new environments. As organization do adapt, the external environment is continuing to speed up and become more efficient at arbitraging information and value. In a particular market that means the advantages go to people and organizations that are first to see the opportunity.

If as an organization, you have built a robust social media ecosystem for marketing and customer support, but have ignored applying social and networked communications technology internally, new opportunities will be found quickly in the market only to hit a brick wall once introduced internally. On the flip side, if you've applied internal social technologies that enable rapid innovation and collaboration, but you have no external channels by which to inform your market and gather feedback rapidly, that innovation will have limited value to the organization.

Those companies that have been at this a little longer than others realize this and we are starting to see how radically it is affecting their entire enterprise - Dell, SAP, EMC, CSC and many others now understand that this is not about a Facebook or blogging strategy, it's about increasing the speed of business and increasing their competitive advantage.

It's no longer a question of if, but when. Is your organization the one hitting the gas pedal or are you still riding the brakes?

This post is cross-posted from The Community Roundtable blog.

Socially Disagreeable - The Power of Social Media to Innovate

 Last week, Ron Ashkenas wrote a post 'Is Your Culture Too Nice?' about the risks of being too agreeable. It's something I think about a lot because it seems that while our culture is increasingly polarized, we are able to disagree politely less and less.  I went to a women's college and we often discussed how the culture was too 'nice' and that it affected our ability to learn - of course we all agreed but didn't always do anything about it and I certainly think it affected how quickly we learned.

The problem is that nothing groundbreaking comes from agreement or avoidance. If you want to leap productivity curves, you have to understand others that disagree, engage them, and be open to being convinced.  You need to hash things out and come up with a compromise between all the affected parties - which is what reduces the risk of innovation. But if a group agrees too quickly they will either take a leap and ignore the risks or not do anything at all.  Major productivity gains and learning simply do not occur without disagreement.

How do we foster a culture of disagreement that is comfortable?  It comes back to trust - trusting that there will not be negative consequences (personal, social, political, or economic) for arguing.  Social media can help leaders who want to foster innovation see those within the organization who are presenting differing opinions and engage them when their direct supervisors and peers may not. Of course, that relies on leaders to seek out the disagreeable. When is the last time you sought out a discussion with someone you knew had different opinions then yours and had an argument?  It's a skill we should all sharpen on a regular basis.

Think arguing is a bad idea?  Feel free to disagree!

The Downside of Being Popular on Twitter

As social media has gone mainstream, the more articles, lists, and projects come out like The 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter and the Fast Company Influence Project.  Some of these things make sense - after all for the uninitiated it can be a confusing space so having a place to start is helpful.  However, so many others are ill-conceived because influence and popularity is confused or because they are biased or because they are not well constructed.  I keep moving around and falling on and off the 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter list which I think is kind of appropriate... popularity and power are fleeting after all.

There is a deeper issue going on though - many people and organizations still see social media as a numbers game or a popularity contest.  Popularity is OK - certainly it brings with it recognition but it has some disastrous downsides depending on what it is you want to do.  I learned fairly early that if you are too perfect and shiny there is a lower likelihood that people would take you seriously... people interact and use beautiful and popular people and they take their other qualities less seriously.  I actually used to feel badly for the really beautiful girls in high school because most of them were ONLY that - beautiful.  They had a hard time being thought of for their personalities, their intelligence, or their athleticism.  It seemed I had an easier time being multifaceted because I didn't have one quality that overpowered everything else.

As people and as organizations, it is worth thinking about what persona we want to have in the world.  Do we want to be the shiny object with fleeting popularity? Do we want to be thought of as serious, fun, reliable, comfortable, intelligent?  Social media channels should reflect those basic core 'brand' attributes.

I'm a bit wonky...with a slightly off sense of humor and I don't take myself too seriously. I'm OK with that... and you can probably guess that if you are a regular reader of my blog or Twitter stream.  I don't trust popularity or beauty... it is too elusive and transient although I do occasionally like hanging out with the cool kids because the spotlight is fun in small doses.

Social Media's Pull: People Want Comfort More Than Food

We don't often like to compare ourselves to children or monkeys but the truth is that we're not that different.  As adults, we often hide our needs, desires, and disappointments but when looking to understand the behavior of adults, it is useful to watch children and animals because they have no artifice masking their instincts.  One of the most powerful and heartbreaking experiments ever done was by Harry Harlow on how baby monkeys form attachments and how important comfort was to their existence.  The video below shows that baby monkeys will take comfort over food - in effect starving themselves in order to feel OK.

I can hardly watch the video but the point is that animals and people (we're not biologically all that different after all) will choose something comforting over a more obvious need like food.  To me, this gets at the heart of why the social interactions facilitated by social media and social software can make such a big difference to the individuals that interact with organizations.  Individuals will flock to organizations that offer comfort (personalized attention) even if the 'food' - i.e. salary, product cost, partnering costs - does not make economic sense for the individual. 

For organizations, this has a couple of implications:

• Resources and time spent on effective personalized experiences with employees and customers will see the returns in the form of higher margins, lower operating costs, and increased retention rates.
• The recent conversation about applying business process and integrating 'social' into existing processes should be very carefully pursued.  If the social element becomes just as standardized as current processes, it won't have much impact.  The business processes themselves must become more flexible and adaptable to individuals which is now possible because social software reduces the cost to support that flexibility.

The issue many of us have is responding to requests to quantify how much comfort is enough. In essence, we are being asked to put a dollar amount on feelings. If you have any suggestions on how to do that, I'm all ears. In the absence of being able to do that, each organization will need to experiment (which, I'm sorry to say, will cost some money) and turn the dial up and down until they find what balance of 'comfort' and 'food' works best for them given their unique market and the unique constraints of their organization.

The Economic Value of Communities

Every time a customer submits a question or answers a question in a support forum they are creating value for an enterprise. Every time an influencer with no direct economic ties to an organization, mentions a product to someone they are creating value for the enterprise. Every day, for large enterprises, there are millions of very small pieces of value created. However, in most cases these little pieces of value are lost to the winds of time because they cannot be captured, centralized, and organized for re-use. Online communities are part of the way to address this knowledge capture and distribution so that the value already being created can be extended and shared with more people.

Historically, these little bits of value were not formally recognized by organizations because the transaction cost of finding, capturing, organizing, and distributing these small bits of value was much higher than the value of the bit of information itself. The Internet, particularly with the addition of social networks, has drastically changes the cost of information discovery, capture, and distribution making it possible for smaller and smaller bits of value to be used in an economically viable way. And while each bit is not worth much on its own, collectively this value creation can fundamentally shift the cost of sales for an organization by creating marketing, sales, product, and support documentation faster and more accurately than the enterprise itself can.

The big trick in all of this, of course, is discovering the small bits of value, aggregating them and incenting those who are likely to continue to add value to make it even easier/cheaper for you by bringing them to both outposts and central locations where the enterprise can more easily collect, manage and distribute the information. That is not easy to do unless there is some value created to attract those individuals to your outposts or your home on the web. The enterprise has to provide some value freely to attract whose who will create even more value. Once this flywheel has started, the organization can shift into more of a curation than a value creation mode because participants will create value for each other. This is the essence of online communities. Communities are a constant process of its members creating and using value.

So what does this mean for enterprises in terms of their social strategy? I like to think of it in economic terms and it is helpful to segment the various audiences of an enterprise and identify those segments by thinking about the ratio of value consumption to value creation. The closer that ratio is to 1:1 (for example, employees), the closer tied to the enterprise they need to be so that all of their value creation is captured and used. As you address audiences less connected to the organization - leads or the general public - the value proposition to capture and distribute value becomes weaker and the tactics to do that necessarily are less centrally integrated with the core business. The implications are that employee and customer communities will produce the most value back to the organization but the cost to the organization will also be higher than for other groups. This is interestingly, however, not how many enterprises get started with social media and online community initiatives because, while the value proposition is higher, the cost and complexity is also quite a bit higher. So many organizations start by aggregating mentions of their brand by the general public (social listening) and using that for insight and public relationships management. This is a great way to dip the enterprise toe in the water, so to speak but it is also The Shallows, or the least valuable bits of information for the enterprise to collect and often not worth re-distribution. It has limited impact on the fundamental value structure of the enterprise (although not engaging in this way has some direct risks for public companies whose stock has been affected by public outcries).

The opportunity - and the appeal - of online communities is not that they make everyone feel better about their relationship with an organization, although that is a nice side affect, it is that they contribute tangible economic leverage back to an organization. For companies that figure this out, they will have significant advantages in their markets but the process of building a robust and integrated enterprise ecosystem is disruptive, expensive, and challenging - and many enterprises who launch discrete support forums may not always realize that they have put one foot down on the road to changing the way the organization thinks about its value chain.

If you would like to learn more about developing and creating communities, download our report The State of Community Management or consider joining The Community Roundtable - we would love to have you. More about membership can be found here.  This post is cross-posted from The Community Roundtable blog. 

Do You Need Your Social Media Expert To Have Social Skills?

For a while there was a meme going around about how to qualify your social media expert and my take on that is that people find the partners they deserve - meaning if someone at a company doesn't do their homework or doesn't know what they want/expect and hires a snake oil salesmen... well, that's really what they were asking for by not preparing appropriately.  On the other hand, if someone legitimately researches the space and does some work to understand what they want and need, they will likely be able to determine those most able to help them.

I have a slightly different take on the social media expert conversation and it is that there exists an irony that many people highly active in social media don't actually have great social skills.  Now this may be a bit unfair (there are many people highly active in social media that DO have great social skills - and yes, that's my biased judgment) but it is something that continues to amuse and befuddle me although I understand why it happens.  Social media emerged from the technology sector and it gave a huge group of individuals who had previously struggled to connect socially a mechanism for doing so.  They finally understood the importance of social connections and conversation in moving their perspectives forward and found the means with social media to do so. And because their 'a ha' moments happened later in life, they are in a better position to appreciate and articulate exactly what the impact is - and they are quite passionate about its influence. That is a great thing because being right or smart is only half the battle when trying to move the ball forward - the other half is socializing the idea, winning friends, and building consensus. 

Social media has enabled a lot of very smart people to enjoy some of the benefits of social skills that others had all along.  This is not to be dismissed - it changes the balance of power and gives access to decision-making to a new segment of people.  But once it is brought into an enterprise setting it also sets up a show down at most organizations between the people who without social media were doing just fine on getting their agenda executed thank-you-very-much and those that felt a bit ostracized by the traditional decision-making culture.  It can be an ugly dynamic... which is why it is really important for anyone consulting in this space to understand both traditional social skills within the organizational context and how social media impacts the social process - the combination can be very powerful and is much more likely to win friends among executives.

My point is that using social media effectively and having good social skills does not necessarily correlate.. and it's important to be aware of because if you are looking for advice on how to socialize a business process and you hire a social media expert, you might end up with someone who understands how to get a lot of attention on Twitter... but may not get you closer to incorporating social tools and processes in to what you already do.

So what do you look for?  Depends on what you need but if you are really looking to socialize a business process you need someone who understands the business process, understands social technologies, AND has social skills. Qualifying someone for their experience with a business process or a technology is pretty straight forward but assessing good social skills is quite difficult - they are often subtle skills which is why they are so effective to begin with but it also makes them hard to identify. Here's my starter list. People with good social skills:

• Warm up their audience - whether in one-on-one conversations or meetings or presentations, people with good social skills know that jumping straight to the goal without a little low impact warm up is not the most effective method to get their point across.  As humans we all need to assess the social situation and get comfortable before we will put ourselves our there. It's why so much air time is spent talking about the weather, sports, and entertainment.
• Engage in an active dialog and questioning.  People with great social skills understand that they will only positively affect others if they understand the other person's perspective, concerns, and issues and expose some of their own perspectives. Every conversation is a type of negotiation.
• Understand how social dynamics change between one-on-one interactions, small groups, large groups, and crowds - and use those dynamics to effectively drive their agenda.
• Actively prepare for events - people with good social skills will do social research about meeting, conference, and event participants ahead of time. While 'serendipity' is great, they want 'serendipity' to occur with the individuals who can make things happen.
• Have the self-awareness to understand how they are perceived by others in their group, organization, or market - and they don't try to convince others that they really play a different role.
• Do none of the following: look at the ceiling/floor while speaking to others; continually talk about the latest, greatest thing that happened in their life or organization; present for an hour straight without scanning their audience, asking questions, or coming up for air; yell or act dismissively of others; continue to argue a point despite blank stairs and stunned silence; leave you with the feeling that they got a lot of information from you but gave you little information in return. 

Now don't get me wrong - there are a lot of experts in a variety of areas without great social skills and they can be extremely valuable in helping you understand the specifics of something - just don't expect them to be able to help you with a social strategy, management, cultural, or leadership issue.  Even in the social media space, if you want someone who will get you attention in a social media channel and you have a narrowly defined role to do that, not having social skills may be OK. Knowing what you want is always the key. If you are looking to integrate social into business processes or socialize your organization... being an expert user of social media is not enough.  Like almost everything in life, hiring people or expertise is much easier if you know what you want and where your boundaries are - and that is the hard part. Do you need social media presence or do you need a social strategy and should you be building a social media presence without a strategy?

Oh, and if you are hiring a social media expert just to satisfy the CEO who wants one but you really don't want to ensure the effort is successful... well, any random social media 'expert' will do... just be sure they don't know too much :)