The Social Organization

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.

Red's - A Community Built Business

I've been on vacation and, frankly, not doing a whole lot of thinking about social media or community.  However, I did eat a lot of lobster and got the experience of going to Red's Eats in Wiscasset, Maine.  It's been ranked by many as the best lobster roll in Maine and after having eaten there I have no evidence to disagree with that assessment...with tail meat spilling over a warm, perfectly toasted roll and all.

But Red's did get me thinking.  It's a family run business and it is housed in little more than a shack on a busy street corner.  We stood in line for over an hour in blazing heat and sun along with many others, some of whom were from as far away as Texas. It is only open part of the year and only from noon on. They do have some friend clams, hot dogs, and other assorted things (the onion rings were great) but really, people go for one thing: the lobster roll.  From what I know, they do no advertising.

So here you have a highly inconvenient restaurant that is hard to find out about (and out of the way), serves a severely limited number of things, and has little ambiance. Yet, it is busier than any other business in town certainly and probably busier than many restaurants in cities like Portland. How do they do it? They focus on doing one thing extremely well, they invested in it for years, and the wider Maine community takes care of the rest. 

So if you are thinking of taking advantage of existing communities to help drive your business...learn from Red's.

1. start by providing the best product/service in your market
2. invest in it for the long run
3. deliver it with a smile

Sounds easy, right? 

SAP Video on BPX Community

Not quite as exciting as seeing Coke and Mentos exploding but good video profiling members of SAP's PBX community.  For highly skilled knowledge workers that are often somewhat isolated in their own organizations, like many business process professionals are, it is critical to be able to reach out and collaborate with others who have similar issues.  And it servers multiple purposes, making its value pretty effective:

• It allows individuals to grow and develop - and possibly find their next gig
• It allows companies to 'learn' in a way they cannot in their own echo chamber
• It gives services firms a platform to demonstrate their knowledge

Getting to the Aha Moment

Enterprise social media projects have a unique characteristic that is different from almost any other enterprise software deployment… and that is the personal 'Aha' moment where users suddenly transform from willing (or not so willing) users of tools to enthusiastic fans almost instantaneously. There is a user tipping point when the power of the medium is suddenly and starkly apparent – and from which there is no turning back.

A few personal examples:

Enterprise Blogging

I started using enterprise blogging (OK…it was a start-up but it was an enterprise in that it was a corporate situation, not personal!) five or six years ago now for an internal marketing blog. When I was in product marketing I was the go to person for all sorts of information from everyone in the company and it was my job to troll through information about the market, the products, the customers, and the competitors. In previous positions I had built Intranet sites to consolidate a lot of the formal documents and links that were applicable to various teams. I was not new to using various tools to organize and disseminate information. Initially blogging seemed no different…a lot of effort to post and categorize information. But I was diligent and it seemed like it might be useful since the whole marketing team (all three of us at the time) had access to post – and it addressed a more informal set of information than what I had posted to portals in the past. My Aha moment came a few weeks in when I realized:

A – No one was sending out emails with links to articles to the entire company any more (phew)…with some exceptions of course but those people got steered to posting in the blog fairly quickly because everyone was relieved to have less 'FYI' emails.

B – I didn't have to keep every d*mn email I got that had something that might, one day, be interesting. Once I posted it to the blog and categorized it, I was done with it.

C – I no longer had to be the bottleneck between people and the information I had on my computer or in my email – I could point them to the blog and they could service themselves through the blog search, content categories, and posting dates. Brilliant!

Twitter

I was an early user of LinkedIn and I build a social networking site around independent music in 2002-2003 so I got social networking and how it enabled information discovery and trusted filtering but there was an immediacy and velocity that I didn't get until I used Twitter. Here's what happened: I knew Giovanni Rodriguez (@giorodriguez) through some client work. I knew Aaron Strout (@astrout) through my work. Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) introduced me to my old start-up years ago. Giovanni introduced me to Mukund Mohen (@mukund) via phone/email. Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) introduced himself to me after my presentation at the Gilbane Conference. Somehow I got introduced to Bill Johnston (@billjohnston) and I attended one of his great community roundtables. I wasn't communicating with any of these individuals via Twitter but Aaron convinced me to sign up so I gave it a shot. A few weeks in after I had linked up with these social media experts that I knew from other channels I had a lightning moment one day when I realized – because I could see their conversations with others – that they all knew each other. Now I thought they were all interesting anyway but knowing that they were in a highly interactive subnet made them all immediately more relevant to me. Being able to 'see' the conversations they were having with others I was introduced to all sorts of people that I 'met' on Twitter. Some of those individuals like @pistachio, @stevegarfield, @joec0914, and @slmader I have now met in person. While this example is intra-enterprise the same benefits could be seen in a large complex company – providing a way for people with relevant information and practices to network and share information.

Digg

I am going to borrow an example from my husband, Ted McEnroe, who is doing some very interesting work at NECN – a local 24-hour news network here in the New England area. In the past, their website was part of the umbrella of Boston.com but they recently rolled their own site, although they still provide video to Boston.com as well. Now NECN is a traditional broadcast media company – most people are not particularly enthusiastic about the web mostly because they perceive it as additional work not as a new opportunity. Ted is changing that perception but as we all know, changing culture takes time and hard work. So Ted has been working hard with his development team on video-encoding and compression, workflow to get content up on the site in a timely fashion, guiding his staff editorially to ensure that the news is presented correctly, etc. On the side he has been experimenting with Twitter (my fault), blogging, and he occasionally posts videos to Digg. A few weeks ago Nancy Pelosi was in town and NECN's excellent political reporter Alison King got a quote from her to the effect of "a Clinton-Obama ticket is impossible". Ted thought that was quite interesting so he posted it to Digg and it got a few hits before he went home for the night. Upon waking up in the morning, the video had been posted to The Huffington Post and a number of other well trafficked political blogs. Then it made it to CNN (although they did not attribute it correctly to NECN) and the front page of USAToday (they did attribute it but mis-identified NECN as "New England Cable Network"). The Elliot Spitzer story broke the same week so it wasn't exactly a slow news week. For NECN and its staff, having a video go viral and be picked up by national news outlets was an instant, collective Aha moment.

The question: What will your company's Aha moment be and how can you encourage that moment to happen. Until you can reach the Aha moment, your social media efforts will not really take hold.

Blog Roll: Examples of Enterprise Social Media at Work

People ask me all the time for use cases, examples, and best practices around using social media in a business environment - for a variety of business purposes: Marketing, customer support (internal and support team collaboration), new product development, HR (new hires, alums, recruiting).

I've pulled together an initial list of examples that can be seen publicly - there are many others that are behind firewall that I can't link to.  This is an initial list but I would be happy to extend the list - just email me at rhappe at idc.com. 

Hope you find this useful.