The Social Organization

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'.

Understanding Digital Body Language

Digital Body Language is not a new term but it is new to me. I recently heard Valeria Maltoni use it and after digging a bit more, found that it was originally a term created by Steve Woods, founder of Eloqua that referred to the anticipation of customer needs in the demand generation and lead development context which is not exactly what came to mind for me when I heard it.  However, I love the term and the idea behind it - that there are ways to infer a person's intent through how they behave online.

When I initially mentioned the term on Twitter I got a lot of 'huh?' type of responses back but after years of watching people interact online it is clear to me that you can infer quite a bit about people's unwritten intent.  How?

• When a person's cadence changes from their normal cadence when they interact with you - whether slower or faster
• When a person ignores a directed update on their Wall or in their Twitter stream
• When a person does not follow another back or friend them
• How and when someone inserts themselves into a public conversation
• How a person proactively requests connections and on which platforms.
• What and who a person RTs or shares
• How reactive and emotional individuals are (are they quick to judge or slower to respond to good/bad news?)

Relationships are in large part about the exchange of energy between two people. Relationships grow when that energy and enthusiasm is reciprocated. If it is not, one person is forcing the relationship forward despite the other person's lack of enthusiasm. Companies do that all the time. Lots of people do that all the time too. If you listen and watch carefully to both what is and what is not said, you can optimize your efforts on the people who are genuinely interested and engaged. It is both more cost effective and more fulfilling in the long run.

What signals do you watch for to determine others' intent online?

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...

Your Cultural Fingerprint - Van Gogh or Kindergarten Art?

I was speaking with Anne McCrossan of Visceral Business last week about socializing business processes and the cultural change management required to bring a more innovative, humane, and personal way of doing business to life. We were talking about the difficulties in articulating culture that can be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in changing culture. If you cannot describe or articulate what does exist, how can you hope to change it?

Anne mentioned that this challenge of articulating culture was similar to that of art in that you might know a Van Gogh when you see one but it can be hard to describe what it is about a painting that tells you it is a Van Gogh. This idea resonated deeply with me as I've found one of the best ways to help people understand their culture is through art and imagery. Art historians spend years understanding the nuances of artistic expression. However, even amateurs that have seen a number of Van Gogh's pieces can quickly get beyond the 'colorful' adjective and understand that it is the quantity and passion in the brushstroke, the thin black outline of objects inspired by Japanese print making, and the pixelated use of color that identifies Van Gogh's work. Understanding and articulating that allows us to copy it and as we copy it we see more differentiating details.

When we are learning to identify these differences in artistic expression, it is helpful to start with the more pronounced artists - like Van Gogh, Seurat, De Koonig, Pollock and those whose work is very distinct. Once you master those, you can move on to subtler differences found in Eakins, Copley, Degas, Homer, Cassatt and a host of others. The more you can describe and differentiate, the better you can define how one might approach a new painting to achieve a particular outcome. This is almost exactly the same process one needs to go through to understand and change organizational culture.

The question for organizations is this: Can you describe your culture in some detail and do you understand how various dimensions of your culture are affecting business outcomes? Have you purposefully created your culture to support specific outcomes or have you let it evolve as an unstructured group art project where the collection of contributions make no sense as a whole? Do you have a consistent cultural fingerprint that gives everyone who interacts with your organization a consistent expectation?

In a highly connected and inter-networked world, having a consistent fingerprint (many might call this 'brand' but I have always felt like brands have been largely disembodied heads, created by external agencies to be pushed out to the public when they often do not relate to the employees that make up the organization at all... but that is a different post) is critical because it means that there is less confusion, fewer clarifications, and more speed with which things can happen. While kindergarten art projects are charming I'm betting it is not the impression you want to leave with your marketplace - why leave culture to chance either?

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Cross posted from The Community Roundtable blog. If you're interested in learning how your peers in social media and community are facing the challenge of articulating (and changing) their corporate culture, you might be interested in joining TheCR Network. Tell us a little about yourself.

BlackFriday/CyberMonday: Sacrificing Stability for Cheap & Easy

I've noticed a disturbing trend in a lot of industries for many years - they seem to be chasing short-term wins at the expense of ensuring long-term sustainable business models and valuable brand identities.  The chicken and egg of technology and globalization have disrupted most sectors of the economy. Organizations established before this disruption are having a very, very difficult time adapting.  Instead, they respond by eating away at their value, one holiday discount at a time. My response to the frenzy of retail marketing in the last month of the year is to think that most retailers have an antiquated business model if they cannot reach profitability in the other 11 months of the year.  Not only does it suggest that the retail business model is broken but it makes those businesses very hard to operate because of the extreme seasonal volatility.

This trend is not only happening in retail - it is happening in media.  Ted Koppel recently published a rant on the death of real news and his perspective really stuck with me "This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone."

The mortgage crisis is just one more example. It was cheap and easy money that everyone in the financial market knew was a house of cards but they did it anyway - and the consumers who bought the mortgages didn't stop to think either.

I see it in public companies and the stock market where day trading and automated trading has created enormous volatility and focus on the extremely short term.  A large percentage of the market is being driven by a gambling mentality rather than an investment mentality.

I see it in the cheap 6,000 sqft houses being built to last for 10 years vs. 100 - hey, as long as there is stainless steal and granite, who cares how it is built, right?

I see it in the health care debate... we don't want to pay to insure everyone but we accept that many will continue to get primary care in emergency rooms - adding unreasonable costs for everyone.

I see it in agriculture because people want cheap food but the result is less competition and lower quality because the only farms that can provide food that cheaply are huge industrialized farms.

Whether at the individual or organizational level, we no longer collectively know how to invest for the long term or why taking a financial/emotional hit now will make things easier in the future.  We seem to almost always choose the easiest and cheapest route to what we want. 

But doing hard work first has enormous benefits. It came up recently when speaking with Jamie Punishill about getting executive support for a new social initiative - it turns out, if you do the hard work of convincing your legal, regulatory, accounting, IT, and HR teams first it is much easier and quicker to get approval from business owners. Do the hard work first and everything else follows much more easily. 

Doing the hard work first also has amazing benefits when raising children, growing communities, learning, planting vegetables, creating new products, and building sustainable companies and brands. Don't take easy money, customers that are a poor fit, or advantage of employees just because you can. If you do, you will find out too late that it was a mistake.

However, the concepts of amortization and delayed gratification is not very socially acceptable these days. I'm here to tell you a secret... ok, it's not my secret... I think it is Warren Buffet's advice if I recall correctly: Buy when everyone else is selling. Sell when people want to buy. Be calm when everyone else panics.  If you follow the heard, you are too late to gain an advantage.

This holiday season, sit back with a drink by the fire while everyone else makes themselves crazy running from one store to the next. Chances are you will be healthier, wealthier, and wiser for it.

Survey: Assessing Social & Community Maturity

Over the past year at The Community Roundtable, we've been talking with our clients and members about the Community Maturity Model which lays out a high level framework to help organize how to approach either a discrete social initiative or general social business enablement across an enterprise. When we created the framework we did so at a very high level because we felt that there were not enough generally accepted best practices to built it out further at that time. That is changing and as we work with a variety of business we are starting to see commonalities in how these efforts are approached and what artifacts point to various stages of maturity.

While we have some ideas of what social maturity looks like, we would like to have a wider sampling so that we can take the pulse of the market and assess trends across different type of organizations. We will be analyzing and reporting on these results in our annual report, The State of Community Management that will be made available for free. Please help us by filling out our survey and/or sharing the link to it (http://bit.ly/SOCMSurvey) with your network. Thank you!

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.

Social Media ROI - Seeing the Forest for the Trees

There has been a lot of discussion about social media ROI lately - everyone is pushing very hard to figure out how it can be used to make money or reduce costs. Fundamentally we need to start any investment initiative with the goal of making more or spending less so the ROI conversation is very important. However, as an analyst I often had to chuckle because we hear very little from the companies making a lot of money (with high margins) off of social media and online communitities - companies like The Knot, Match.com, and UTest. Why? Those who have figured out the puzzle have no particular need to share their secrets and in most of the examples I know of they are market disruptors, not established brands.

The other reason I shake my head is that the ROI discussion doesn't include the discussion of time frame often enough and that is where the real challenge for companies lie.  In most business use cases that social tools are applied to, the revenue or cost impact is not returned directly. Instead social initiatives require constant investment for a period of time before the returns accumulate.  When they do they can grow quite quickly but if the organization does not understand the investment period required, they can easily cause themselves to fail by being too anxious for the returns to manifest. And this aspect of social media is really, really hard for large organizations to manage, particularly in the marketing and customer support functions. In large part, the business processes, infrastructure, and resources of marketing and support are not set up to support initiatives that have off-set returns. To get around that hurdle, outsourcing seems to be a good choice but that often means a time-bound project where both companies and their vendors push for returns in a relatively short period of time which can result in a long-term negative impact on building a community of advocates.

ROI is important but if the dynamics of social initiatives and how they produce results are not well understood it is quite easy to force failure before you give projects the space and time they need to succeed.

As an analyst who is now running my own business I have been fascinated by how large the marketing ROI really is when social media tools are used effectively but it has also reinforced the fact that the returns are slow to ramp at first and accelerate over time. Judging the results too early would have definitely made the investment look like a failure. 

Selling Community: Getting Stakeholders to the 'Aha' Moment

Whenever we make investments in organizations, we need a business plan that makes financial sense. With social and community initiatives, that is required but often not sufficient. Why? Communities take a long time to gestate and mature before they start to realize their potential - certainly more than a quarter which is how a lot of large organizations are managed these days. Corporations tend to understand long payoff periods for new products but not for changes to business processes so unless expectations are set well in advance, social initiatives which mostly involve process change, can often be judged a failure before they have the chance to succeed. Because of the long investment period required, business sponsors need to have both the business plan and some faith that when mature, the initiatives will pay off. Getting stakeholders to viscerally understand how social processes and tools impact speed and productivity - both for themselves and for the organization - is critical to developing the faith they need to remain supportive throughout a long initial investment period. This understanding is most often created through a series of 'Aha' moments when people grasp for themselves the power of online social environments. Aha moments will happen organically for people who are participating in online networks and communities but it may take a while. I believe there are also ways to orchestrate these moments for people that will get them there faster, if they are inclined and able to understand them. For social business owners, it's critical to understand how this can be achieved for various stakeholders. While the best social leaders do this intuitively, we are only just beginning to see the tactic articulated. I'm planning a session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in November where we challenge a panel of experienced community managers to articulate how they have orchestrated Aha moments for others. In the meantime, I would love to start this conversation and crowdsource your approaches. For me, my Aha moments came fast and furiously when I started using Twitter in 2007. Because of its ease of use and large network, Aha moments seemed to happen faster on Twitter. Here are some of the revelations I had during that time:

• How I was welcomed to the network had a huge impact. Aaron Strout (@AaronStrout) was the person that finally convinced me to join after a few months of hearing less than interesting uses for it ("my mother loves it" etc.). Aaron is a great host and once he convinced me to join, he took it upon himself to make sure I was introduced around. This was critical to finding some immediate value and feeling positive about the experience.
• Getting the attention of influencers through content they found interesting is important. Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) was generous in promoting my work and that gave me early exposure to an audience I never would have had otherwise.
• I knew quite a few people that were social thought leaders but until I saw them all chatting with each other, I did not know that they all knew each other. Knowing that made me appreciate just how influential they each were and it was a good way to assess others' influence.
• When watching the network of influential people on Twitter, I could easily spot others that I didn't know that were also in the sub-network (back when Twitter allowed you to see who your friends were chatting with). I 'met' a large number of people this way, all of whom were important to understanding what was happening in the market.
• Knowing most of the thought leaders in the market completely changed the conference experience. At Enterprise 2.0 in the spring of 2008, I met a ton of Twitter connections in person. Instead of standing around at a big industry event looking for people to chat with or walking up blindly to individuals and chatting only to find we had nothing in common, it felt more like a college reunion. This picture of me, Chris Brogon, Loren Feldman, Laura Fitton, and Dennis Howlett taken by Stephen Collins still makes me smile. It was my first time meeting Dennis, Loren, & Stephen and we immediately connected. That conference experience blew my mind because it was such a change from a decade of conference going experience.
• Live tweeting events created much more value around conference content by extending its reach to more people and experiences. I got more out of conferences but I also met many new people because of my (and their) live tweeting.

While those were some of my early Aha moments, I am still having them. Read my previous post on tacit knowledge and communities' critical role in its development into explicit knowledge (which is what I'm attempting to do here - move what I understand tacitly about Aha moments into more explicit examples that can develop into tactics for orchestrating these moments for others). All of these experiences let me really understand how fast and productive social environments could be. Now, I try and encourage these experiences for others. Here are some of the things I do:

• Welcome and make connections for others
• Encourage people to comment on other blogs and blog themselves
• Encourage people to share some of their personal lives in social environments because it makes it much easier for others to engage in conversation, which is a critical first step to having more substantive conversations
• Point out online conversations that I know are interesting to the individual
• Do simple searches on social networks (LinkedIn, Slideshare, Twitter, etc) for topics of interest to the individual and show them how easy it is to find and connect with others who share their interests.
• Show people examples of how others are doing something small well (i.e. x person tweets really well, watch them)

How do you help others get to Aha moments?

[This is cross-posted at 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!