Creating a Networking Culture

by Stefan Lindegaard

In my previous post, Why a Networking Culture Is Important, I argued that a strong innovation culture requires a strong networking culture. But what does a good networking culture looks like?

It is such a new concept that there are not lot of examples available to illustrate it, but here are some key components of a good networking culture:

• Top executives and innovation leaders have outlined clear strategic reasons why employees need to develop and nurture internal and external relationships. This includes making clear how your company's networking culture links with and supports your innovation strategy (which, of course, is an outgrowth of your overall corporate strategy.)


• Among the things to consider when developing your networking culture strategy is what types of networks you hope to build to support your innovation efforts. If your organization is moving toward open innovation, possibilities would include peer-to-peer networks for people working with open innovation in different companies, value - and supply - chain networks, feeder networks, and events and forums connecting problem solvers and innovators with your company.


• Leaders show a genuine and highly visible commitment to networking. Leaders must walk the walk, not just talk the talk. By making themselves available at networking events and by being visible users of virtual networking tools, they model the desired behavior and motivate others to participate. After all, who doesn't want a chance to exchange ideas with the top brass?


• Leaders should also share examples of their networking experiences whenever possible. Spread the word about your own and others' networking successes. Hearing leaders talk repeatedly about how networking is helping the organization in its innovation efforts will reinforce the message that this is important.


• Networking initiatives mesh closely with your corporate culture. This is not one-size-fits-all; each company's networking efforts will differ. You can take bits and pieces, concepts and theories, knowledge and experience from others, but you still need to make it work for your own company.


• People are given time and means to network. Frequent opportunities are provided to help individuals polish their personal networking skills. Not everyone is a natural networker. But almost everyone can become good at it with proper training and encouragement.


• Both virtual and face-to-face networking are encouraged and supported. Web 2.0 tools and facilitated networking events maximize the opportunities people have to initiative and build strong relationships.

Let me know what you think and please feel free to add more components.


Related Articles:

• Why a Networking Culture Is Important - by Stefan Lindegaard
  
• Tapping the Network to Facilitate Innovation - by Venessa Miemis

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Stefan Lindegaard is a speaker, network facilitator and strategic advisor who focus on the topics of open innovation, intrapreneurship and how to identify and develop the people who drive innovation.

Listening to Employees is a Best Buy

by Robert B. Tucker

Several years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an unusual cost-cutting move by electronics retailer Circuit City. The chain abruptly fired their top-producing veteran salespeople and replaced them with lower-wage new hires.

When Circuit City went bankrupt last year, you had to wonder if decisions like that were at least partly to blame.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, retailer Best Buy took a different approach. They began to focus on creating a deeper dialogue with the firm's 160,000 employees spread out amongst 1,150 stores across the United States and China, Mexico, England and a growing number of countries.

Best Buy began experimenting with social networking technologies centered upon the company's intranet site. They started conducting weekly online polls of employees. They set up wikis for people with common interests to brainstorm together. They invited senior managers to participate in agenda-free town hall meetings. And they established a "listening chair" where employees could survey other employees on such questions as "Do you think the Geek Squad uniform needs updating?"

When they started listening in earnest, employee turnover stood at 81 percent a year. Three years on, it had dropped to 60 percent. Last year, it was down to 49 percent.

All of this hyper-listening didn't just happen. And it wasn't something decreed by senior management.

Jennifer Rock was a mid-level marketing manager when she became aware of what lack of communication was costing her company. Highly analytical and a self-described 'Type A' person, she noticed that stores with higher than average employee engagement levels and lower than average turnover rates tended to be stores that outperformed the others in sales growth and sales per employee. But merely noticing an opportunity doesn't do any good.

To her credit, Jennifer took action. She created a new position for herself, Director of Intranet and Dialogue.

Next she and her team developed a clear mission: to use every low or no cost means possible to help Best Buy become extraordinary at communicating with employees (not just at them), and to connect employees with information and with each other as well. The goal of all this was to add to business success by helping the individual employee succeed.

If you've attended one of my keynotes lately or participated in my new "Innovation is Everybody's Business" in-house workshop, you have heard me rave about what Jennifer Rock and her team have accomplished. You have heard me extol this group of quiet revolutionaries for their innovativeness in seeing a problem, and stepping up to the challenge of solving it using every trick in the innovator's toolkit. And you no doubt heard me point out that developing one's innovation skills may be the smartest career move you'll ever make - especially if you want to become indispensible.

And you may have heard me say that Jennifer Rock represents the future of the innovation movement.

When I visited with Jennifer recently in Minneapolis, I asked her why would any company, especially a quarterly-results obsessed American company, give a hoot about listening to its employees, especially now? Why would they add headcount (Jen's team has climbed to eight people) when competitors were busy chopping heads?

Jen's unflinching response: Because she and her Intranet and Dialogue Team sold senior management on the bottom-line benefits of listening to employees. "Our success boils down to the interaction between one customer and one employee," Jennifer said. "Is that employee happy and productive and informed and excited? We need to know that employee's state of mind better than anyone else in the company."

Though we are loathe to admit it, the global economic crisis disrupted the Innovation Movement as more and more firms went into survival mode. A new survey conducted by Chuck Frey of InnovationTools.com suggests that most initiatives are in a holding pattern at best, and there is little enthusiasm for broad-based, enterprise-wide initiatives. CEOs and senior executives admit they are just too distracted with more immediate issues. But meanwhile, they are suddenly, desperately in need of more people like Jennifer Rock. As John Draper, senior VP marketing for Mead Consumer Products told me:


"I need people to be less risk averse, I need them to rattle the cage, challenge what we do and look for new ways to do things."


Jennifer and her team realized the impact of what their team was doing when company leaders decided to reduce the employee discount. "The move set off a firestorm with employees," Jennifer recalled. "On the Watercooler [an online forum] hundreds and hundreds of employees talked about what this discount meant to them, and what it meant to customers, since employees could try out products and recommend them to customers. People wrote in to suggest other ways the company could save money without touching the employee discount."

And company leaders changed their mind and rescended their decision.


"They said to us, 'The next time you see a groundswell like this and we are unaware of what's happening, you have our permission to kick down our door. Don't even knock. We need to know.' And that's when we thought, 'Wow, we are adding value, we are making a difference.'"


Jen said she will remember that day for as long as she lives.


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Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

5 Ways to Prepare for a Social Media Disaster

by Mike Brown

I watched the @ThatKevinSmith and @SouthwestAir brouhaha erupt live on Twitter but didn't write about it last week. Bunches of tweeters and bloggers hashing out who was right and wrong based on second, third, or five hundredth-hand information simply wasn't interesting enough to warrant adding to the noise.

Getting ready for a social media presentation this week though, I've been thinking about service defects and service recovery in the world of social networking.

I sought an analogy to help think strategically about how a company prepares for an angry customer who wants to be heard and starts tweeting incessantly: handling a hostage situation is very comparable. Rather than a person though, it's a brand's reputation being taken hostage by a customer threatening irreparable harm unless demands are met. With the one-to-many communication capabilities of social media, this type of threat has never been more credible.

Here are five hostage negotiation principles and related implications for preparing to handle when your brand's good name is being held hostage:

1. Have a negotiating team ready - This means more than a single person monitoring Twitter and handling responses. In hostage negotiations, the primary negotiator, who is ideally the sole contact with the hostage taker, is joined by a coach/commander in charge of the situation and personnel along with a secondary negotiator to help monitor, listen, and offer input.


• Strategic Questions - Does your company have a pre-identified team and protocols for how it will work together in a social media-based service recovery effort? And how would you incorporate front-line employees when you're trying to recover from a service failure playing out both at one of your company's locations and online?


2. Gather as much solid information as possible right away - Beyond having standard questions to run through, there's added complexity in a social media-based service recovery effort. Suppose the customer issue IS taking place in-person. With social media monitoring removed from the scene, it may not even be possible from a customer's messages to determine where the issue is occurring. This creates an interesting implication for enacting rapid service recovery.


• Strategic Questions - If it's clear the issue is taking place in the presence of front line employees, what steps will you take to identify the location and establish communication with them immediately? Since multi-person communication with the angry customer is almost a given, how will you ensure your multiple contacts are speaking with one message?


3. Connect on a personal level - Social media throws a whole new wrinkle into this, especially when you want to move interaction with the customer to a private messaging stream. If it's even available, the company may have outdated phone information on the customer, making direct contact challenging to establish. A corporate tweeter may have to try to get a brand kidnapper to 'follow' the company so direct messaging can take place. And typically, the corporate tweeter is communicating under a corporate account without a personal avatar. It makes establishing a personal tone of, "I'm here to try and fix the situation," difficult when the customer is receiving tweets with the corporate logo.


• Strategic Questions - Are you following your customers on social media? Do you have multiple ways to reach out to customers? Do your company social media people have work-related, personal accounts they can use to reach out specifically in these cases?


4. Communicate openly and actively listen - When you have face-to-face contact, listening, and the silence that goes along with it, is easy to convey. It's a little tougher via phone. But in a medium geared toward short, back-and-forth messages, a pause associated with listening or contemplation comes across as being distracted or ignoring the other person.


• Strategic Question - Beyond having plans for migrating service recovery conversations to private channels, are you actively training your social media response team in dealing with the dynamics of these new service recovery situations?


5. Show empathy - One way hostage negotiators demonstrate empathy is by delivering on aspects of the demands that have been made. Granting small, detailed requests is done in real-life hostage situations to slow and drag them out, which is desirable. In a service recovery situation (especially one playing out in public), the last thing you want to do is extend it.


• Strategic Questions - Who is on your social media service response team? Have you included your best customer service people - the ones with strong understanding of what you can do to solve customer problems and are best at understanding issues from a customer's point of view?

No matter what your company is doing in social media, you have to address this reality. Even if your company doesn't want a proactive social media presence, there's a greater chance every day your customers will be talking about your brand via social media. When they do, and the discussion gets negative and brand threatening, you better have thought about your strategy, with a plan for what you'll do.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Four Models for Competitive Crowdsourcing

by Hutch Carpenter

Crowdsourcing is heating up in terms of corporate interest. Pepsi's decision to skip the Super Bowl in favor of a crowdsourced ideas initiative - Pepsi Refresh - is an example of the interest in the market. Digital strategy, marketing and design firm Last Exit called crowdsourcing a top digital marketing trend for 2010.

Contests are a particular form of crowdsourcing that are proving to be beneficial in a number of areas. Contests allow people from around the world to compete with one another on a specific challenge put forth by an organization. Participation is motivated by incentives commensurate with the level of the challenge.

The contest version of crowdsourcing has its own activities for gathering, filtering and selecting among the submissions of people. These activities are:

Crowdsourcing starts with the contributions of people from around the globe. These submissions are aggregated into a common site. Submissions are provided in the format matching the contest objectives.

People provide their feedback on the submissions of others. This feedback can be up-down votes, star ratings, comments and buying into ideas with virtual currency. This process can be collaborative, helping refine submissions.

Organizations establish panels of experts who review the crowdsourced submissions, and select those best meeting their requirements. Experts possess distinct domain knowledge to make the final decision in the contest.

The winners of the contest are determined by people's votes and other measures. This selection process is a mix of overall crowd sentiment, weighted for higher reputed members, and the power of individuals to leverage word-of-mouth marketing.

These components can be integrated in different ways to provide four different models for running crowdsourced contests. These four models are described below.


Model #1: Crowd Sentiment, Expert Decision


The Crowd Sentiment, Expert Decision model allows organizations to include the sentiment of the crowd as part of their decision-making process. This is valuable input for contests where the selected submissions will ultimately be put in front of the market. The crowdsourced feedback provides an early read on the potential market reaction.

This model is also ideal for cases where a collaborative spirit can refine and improve submissions. Especially for more complex contests, feedback from interested collaborators is valuable for fully understanding the opportunity in the submission and its weaknesses.

Two organizations are using our tools for this model of crowdsourcing contest. Cisco is seeking $1 billion ideas through its I-Prize contest. And the Enterprise 2.0 Conference is managing its competitive speaker proposal process with this model. Both are utilizing crowdsourced feedback as part of the decision-making process.


Model #2: Crowd Decision


The Crowd Decision model leverages the crowd for all parts of the contest. This model provides a great platform for organizations to better understand the meaning that is associated to their products and services. The submissions reflect the creativity of customers and interested parties. The feedback on a submission signals the intensity of feeling for someone's particular interpretation of meaning. Winners are determined by how the community rates their submissions.

This model is ideal for marketing purposes. It becomes a strategic engagement model, particularly where customers are talking about your organization in social media. It's a fun way to increase company awareness.


Model #3: Expert Decision


The Expert Decision model engages the global community to find solutions to complex problems. Experts review the submissions, identifying those best addressing the objective of the contest. The sentiment of the crowd is not an element in these contests, as they typically address more technical challenges.

This model also prevents theft by competitors of people's ideas. The submissions are only visible to designated experts associated with the sponsoring organization. The closed nature of submissions is important for generating interest from people with the technical competence to address a challenge.


Model #4: American Idol


The American Idol model is so-named because it reflects the selection process of that show. The community ultimately selects the winners of the contest. But the candidates in the contest are first selected by experts.

This model is good when the quality of submissions will fluctuate significantly. The experts act as a filter before the community votes. It's also appropriate when the sponsoring organization has a specific direction it wants for the winning submission. The experts identify candidate submissions consistent with the direction desired.

Four different models for running a competitive crowdsourcing initiative, each with its own characteristics and business objectives. The biggest takeaway for anyone considering such an initiative is the flexibility of approaches to accomplish different objectives.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Social Media Expert or Wannabe?

by Mike Myatt

Determining whether someone is a social media expert or a just another wannabe can be a difficult task for the typical consumer. There is a tremendous amount of noise out there being created by a plethora of "consultants" professing expertise in what I refer to as the new social sciences: personal branding, social networking, social media marketing, etc. I just did a Google search for the term social media expert and had more than 96 million returned search results... give me a break. So my question is this: what constitutes a "social media expert," and how do you tell the posers from the players? Which of these professed miracle workers are true professionals, and which ones are simply attempting to gravy-train a rapidly growing market niche in pursuit of a quick buck?

Let me begin by dispelling a popular myth oft espoused online - It seems to be fashionable of late to state that there is no such thing as a social media expert. The thinking (albeit flawed thinking) of those who hold this opinion is that social media is so new, and so rapidly evolving, that there simply could not be any real experts.

My answer? Ridiculous... Every industry has experts regardless of maturity of life-cycle. In fact, many of the real innovators and experts are those early adopters doing the heavy lifting and the ground breaking. There are experts in every industry and at every stage of maturation. Some early experts mature as the industry grows, and others fall by the way side because they don't keep pace giving way to new generations of innovators building on what the first generation of experts created. The issue is not whether experts exist, as they most certainly do. The issue is finding them among the hordes of pretenders and wannabes.

I'm going to cut right to the chase and give you six things to beware of when attempting to discern the true professional advisers capable of delivering a certainty of execution, from the rogues and scoundrels simply looking to separate you from your money:

1. Beware the Part-Time Expert: My father has an old saying that I've found to be very accurate over the years: "part-time efforts, yield part-time results." If the person seeking your business has a day job that constitutes something other than the services he or she is pitching, run for the hills. If your potential advisor is moonlighting then they really have no business asking for your business.


2. Beware the Shoemaker without Shoes: Your position should be one of "don't tell me... show me." If your would-be social media guru cannot be found online, doesn't blog, tweet, or is invisible on the major social networking platforms you might want to rethink their qualifications. Important Caveat: the mere existence of a blog, YouTube channel, LinkedIn profile, Facebook account, or a Twitter page doesn't guarantee competence... any idiot can amass thousands of followers on Twitter just by following everybody and their brother, so look for someone who has amassed a quality list of followers, who has more people following them than they follow, and who actively engages with their followers.


3. Beware the Expert without Clients: No referenceable clients equals zero credibility. It's one thing to show you their own work, but quite another to show you demonstrated success on behalf of paying and satisfied clients.


4. Beware the Expert without Industry Recognition: If your so called expert isn't published, doesn't speak, lecture or teach, doesn't have a column, hasn't won any awards, etc., then they might not be a true expert.


5. Beware the Expert too Aggressive in their Pursuit: There is a big difference between professional follow-up and desperation. Let me be blunt... most professionals at the top of their game haven't made a cold call in years. In fact, even in this down economy they typically have more business than they know what to do with. If your world-beater of a consultant is chasing you down like a hungry dog after the meat wagon then you may want to take pause.


6. Beware of Bargain Basement Expertise: In most cases the reality is that you get what you pay for... True expertise doesn't come cheaply, but is well worth the investment. Few things in business will get you in as much trouble as not getting advice and counsel when needed, or worse yet, getting poor quality or incorrect advice. I would much rather pay an expert a larger fee for 30 minutes of their time and get what I need rather than pay someone $50 dollars an hour who is faking it until they can make it... Questionable advisors will take much longer to get from point A to point B (if they get there at all), and will likely cost you more money at the end of the day when contrasted with true professionals.

If you need help in integrating social media into your business I would recommend the following individuals (some you may know and some you may not) as they all pass the litmus test mentioned above. Those listed below are in no particular order of preference and you can rest assured they are not "info-product" sales people masquerading as social media professionals, but they are in fact the true subject matter experts who can get the job done:

• Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) - Chris is smart, approachable, innovative, has a high degree of integrity, probably the hardest working man on the planet, and a heck of a nice guy. I've enjoyed every interaction I've had with Chris, and he has earned my trust and respect.


• Mack Collier (@MackCollier) - I don't know Mack personally, but have enjoyed reading his candid and ever straight foward opinions online. Mack is well respected and his the loyalty of his followers more than speak to his capabilities.


• Lee Odden (@LeeOdden) - I've known Lee for several years (before he was rich and famous). In fact, in a prior life as a corporate executive Lee was the consultant I chose to place on retainer. He is smart, seasoned and delivers on his promises.


• Amy Martin (@DigitalRoyalty) - I guess the moniker Digital Royalty says it all... Amy represents some of the biggest names and fastest growning brands online. Nothing bodes as well for an agency as success, and Amy has plenty of pedigree in that department.


• Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) - Ashton combines his celebrity status, a fascination with social media, and a disarming and ever inquistive intellect to head one of the fastest growing social media agencies on the web.


• Liz Strauss (@lizstrauss) - Liz is well known for her approachability, friendliness and candor. She also happens to be one of the savviest bloggers and social media consultants online.


• And if you're slumming @mikemyatt - nuff said...

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

Picture - Trends for the 2010s

by Venessa Miemis

Here are a few recurring themes that have been popping up on my radar.
(click to enlarge)



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Venessa Miemis is a Media Studies graduate student at the New School in NYC, exploring what happens at the intersection of technology, culture, and communication. Connect with her at www.emergentbydesign.com and on Twitter @venessamiemis.

Aligning Social Media, Marketing and PR

by Matt Heinz

I'm moderating a panel on the alignment of marketing & PR in a couple weeks at Dan Greenfield's PR + Mktg Camp in Seattle. Should be a great day of discussion. Earlier this week Dan and I talked how marketing and PR teams have traditionally worked together (or not), and how those relationships are evolving now - especially with the maturation of social media as a cross-functional tool set. Excerpts from our conversation are below:


Question: Are PR and marketing more aligned or less aligned because of social media?

Matt: The idea of separating marketing teams and functions is a remnant of the "old way" of doing marketing. When most marketing was one-way (i.e. customers couldn't react, respond and create messages of their own), it was more acceptable to separate PR from product marketing, and even lead generation activities. Now, especially because the customer has so much control and such a strong voice, it's critical that brands act as one. That means PR, advertising, social media, lead generation - they all need to work from the same playbook in a coordinated fashion. Easier said than done, but that's exactly what today's most successful brands are doing.

Social media has enabled the consumer to talk back in a powerful way, which is accelerating the need for this consolidation and integration of marketing strategy by products, services and brands today.


Question: PR is generally about placement, reputation, messaging, impressions and storytelling. Marketing is generally about transactions, click throughs, key words and web applications. How is social media changing that, if at all?

Matt: Everything is about getting the sale. It always has been, but now it's easier to see and map the progression of a customer from awareness, consideration, intent, trial, purchase - then repeat, renewal, referral, etc.

Social media is blurring the distinction between customer engagement stages. Ten years ago, it was easier to segment the functions - PR talks to the customer at the beginning, then product marketing takes over and offers demos, free trials, etc. Then once they're a customer, your loyalty/retention team takes over. That approach doesn't work anymore.

The way we measure different marketing elements, by function, probably still works. But it has to be put into the context of a more immersive, cohesive customer engagement strategy that blends messages and tactics across stages of a customer relationship.


Question: What disadvantages (inefficiencies, lost opportunities, customer confusion) and advantages (integration, cost savings) are these shared tools like Facebook and Twitter creating for PR and marketing?

Matt: The sales cycle has always been far shorter than the customer's buying cycle. Five years ago, the customer buying cycle was a black box for marketers. We had no visibility to what was happening, what prospective customers were thinking or asking, who they were even considering. Now, thanks to social media, we have insight into how customers are thinking well before they engage directly with brands.

But this isn't an opportunity for selling. It's an opportunity to engage and become part of the community - add value, answer questions, provide valuable content. Earn trust, respect and credibility. Community engagement and social media are at the very top of the buying cycle, before the sales cycle, and it doesn't really matter which part of the organization manages and executes there, as long as the approach is right.


Question: Should social media ultimately be the responsibility of PR who manages reputation and conversations or marketing who is in charge of transactions and sales?

Matt: It doesn't really matter. Everyone in the organization needs to understand the customer, what they want, what they need, and how to address them - with or without a paid relationship current or pending. Every member of your organization should know how to address customers in a respectful, value-added way.

Social media has accelerated the tearing down of walls between customer and provider. There's more transparency, less formality. Brands need to be accessible, approachable and authentic to be accepted.

The social media strategy doesn't end when a customer enters a selling cycle. They aren't going to stop talking to their friends, and using Facebook, or commenting on Twitter, just because they're talking to a sales rep. Their interaction with and reflection of your brand continues across functional sales & marketing groups. That's why ownership of the social media "voice" within one marketing function or another is problematic. Today, that strategy (and especially the execution) is a job everybody has.


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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

10 Simple Ways to Stay Connected

by Matt Heinz

No matter what you do for a living, an active network is critical to your current and future success. That said, it's very easy to ignore the often simple, tactical things you can do to keep your network engaged and growing.

Here's a list of ten things to consider doing daily. If ten is too much to start (although this list should take all of 15-20 minutes if you stay focused), start with just 2-4 and expand from there. Each piece incrementally will help, and you'll be surprised how quickly your investment comes back in the way of opportunities, introductions and more.

1. Email three people you haven't spoken with in some time, just to catch up
   
2. Scan your LinkedIn home page for profile updates, and comment back on 2-3 that are particularly interesting to you
   
3. Use Gist.com to see what your contacts have done, read or published recently
   
4. Send one hand-written thank you or congratulations note to someone
   
5. Return one phone call or email from a sales rep. Make it short, but return the connection. You'd be surprised how often these turn into something more valuable than the pitch.
   
6. Give someone an unsolicited recommendation in LinkedIn
   
7. Scan your blog RSS feed, and forward 1-3 articles to people you think will find them interesting or valuable
   
8. Invite someone to lunch today. You have to eat anyway. If they say no, they're happy you asked. If they say yes, you get a valuable chance to reconnect.
   
9. Thank someone for the hard work they did yesterday, and copy their manager if sent via email
   
10. Send an unsolicited email to someone you've always wanted to meet, asking for a quick phone call or coffee. Do this daily, and I guarantee your response rate will be better than zero.

What would you add to this list?


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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Two Biggest Mistakes in Social Media

by Mike Brown


What are the two biggest mistakes in social media marketing?

1. Believing everyone sees your content

2. Believing no one sees your content

In the first instance, thinking you can simply dabble in social media and get lots of people to see what you're saying doesn't work. For nearly any traditional brand (and @shitmydadsays isn't a typical brand) wanting to talk about itself, audiences don't spontaneously emerge. It takes time to create an effective fan/follower base. Simply picking a fast-approaching date and saying "implement Twitter (or Facebook) by such-and-such date to get our message out" is asking for disappointing results.

The second mistake rests on the assumption you can ease your way in, make some mistakes, and find your social media footing. Maaaaaaaaaaaybe. But there are too many counter examples of brands that screwed up and got burned because of not knowing, understanding, or working within the evolving conventions of social media. If you've got a brand worth anything, you need to be ready for prime time the instant you step on the social media stage.

How do you avoid these terrible two?

Focus first on developing a solid social media strategy and ignore the ridiculous peer pressure you may feel to create a social media presence ASAP. This is a game made for deliberate, smart followers - not fast, unprepared, first-movers - to win.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Role of Social Media in Creating Word of Mouth and Customer Experience

by Paul Williams


What's the role of social media in creating Word of Mouth (WOM)?

You could say there are two parts to WOM - the analog and the digital.

• Analog is person to person... face to face. I'll also put written and print media into the analog category.


• Digital WOM is converted and stored in a format that can be sent and re-sent electronically.

Social media refers to tools that allow us to easily spread the story electronically, digitally. Like a pyramid marketing scheme I tell my network, and they tell theirs, and they tell theirs... Social media tools (blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc) make the spread easy.

In fact, I may have to contradict my earlier statements indicating that Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin are the father's of Word of Mouth (WOM).


The REAL Originators of Word Of Mouth

I think the folks who wrote the Faberge Organics Shampoo commercials in the 80s invented it.

Do you remember those ads?

If you tell two friends about Faberge Organics shampoo with wheat germ oil and honey, they'll tell two friends, and so on... and so on... and so on...

Sorry about the poor quality - this is all I could find.


(Feed Link For Faberge Commercial)


Has the focus of Social Media had a negative effect on the Customer Experience?

I'll say potentially, YES. Marketers dazzled by the shiny object that social media is, may think they've solved their communication problem - or are engaging in a 'meaningful' way because - for example - they've created a Facebook Fan Page for their business.


False Sense Of Security

Let me pick on one of my favorite brands, Starbucks Coffee, as an example. Specifically, their "My Starbucks Idea" website. Through this site, Starbucks welcomes everyone to submit product, program, design, service, or ANY idea.

The My Starbucks Idea home page declares:


"You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What's your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple - we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people's ideas and join the discussion. We're here, and we're ready to make ideas happen."

• Starbucks thinks they are listening.


• Customers think Starbucks is listening, and taking action.


• Starbucks thinks they've "checked the box" (to some extent) in being a social media player by having this site.


• Power to the people!

However, if you look at the "milestone" of the 50 Ideas Launched and Still Counting! - celebrating customer ideas implemented - Starbucks has technically only implemented six (6) ideas submitted by customers. If you dig into it - as John has on his Brand Autopsy site in his Tough Love For Starbucks post - you'll see that most ideas were already in the works, would have been done anyway, or aren't even customer-facing ideas (e.g. Employee discount on work clothes).

A problem with social media is that companies may think - simply by participating in the trend - that they're meeting customer need. Starbucks has invested in this suggestion site and believe they are checking the "we care and listen to customers" box. They think they've fulfilled the portion of their strategy, that supports the objective: to "Develop enthusiastically satisfied customers all of the time."

Starbucks isn't being as democratic with ideas as they claim (and think) they are. It really isn't "power to the people." Social media (or maybe improper use of social media) is giving Starbucks a false sense of security.

Social media isn't for everyone. To "engage in meaningful conversation" may actually mean a conversation. A face-to-face, human-to-human dialogue. For example, the kind a barista can have with a customer at Starbucks.


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Paul Williams is a professional problem solver at Idea Sandbox. He can help you create remarkable ideas to grow your business. You may read more at his website and find him Twittering as @IdeaSandbox.

Internet Future Driven by User Reputation Scores

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent interview with EMC's Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we'll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

Three different trends come together at some point in the future to make this happen. These trends have been underway for a while, but come together at some tipping point in the years ahead. Here's a visualization of the trends:


It's helpful to discuss each one, in the context of online reputations.


Rate performance of businesses

eBay, which went public back in 1998, played an important role in socializing the concept of people providing online ratings for online sellers. After we receive our purchase, we rate the seller. The collective wisdom identifies top sellers. Got your eye in that Donkey Kong game? Who are you most likely to trust...?


Amazon picked up on this, once it introduced third party sellers into the mix. You can see the percentage of positive ratings for the different sellers. Personally, I have paid premiums (i.e. higher prices) for the assurance that comes from a higher rated seller.

Yelp has taken this concept of rating a seller, and applied to offline consumer experiences. Want to get a burrito in San Francisco? You're likely to go with the highest rated restaurants.

These ratings make up for our lack of information about various providers of services. One could do a lot of online research, and asking friends, before buying. But these ratings do quite well as shorthand ways of assessing quality. They've made it easy to transact, without knowing someone ahead of time.

The rating ethos is expanding. On Facebook, you can 'like' people's entries. We 'love' music on Last.fm. We 'favorite' tweets. We 'digg' and 'buzz up' stories. Implicitly, we provide ratings when we share content via different social networks. Online engagement allows for this.


Migration of transparent work and information online

I found this recent Kaiser Family Foundation study fascinating. The amount of time kids spend online - smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device - is now at an all-time high. There's no denying this: future workers are going to be more accustomed to online engagement and information-seeking than any generation before. It's their lifestyle:


More generally, an important distinction from the web of the 1990s and early 2000s is that we aren't just reading and transacting. Individuals are providing the content. More every day, in fact. We have transferred some of the engagement and contributions from the offline world online. Actually, we're probably creating more content than we ever have,

For workers, the growth of Enterprise 2.0 continues. A key outcome of that? More and more work is making its way online. When it's available there, and not just in a Word document on the hard drive or email in an inbox, it's findable and usable by everyone. Your colleagues know quite well what the quality of your work and contributions are.

Do you think all of this stops, and we go back to message-relaying marathoners, smoke signals and carrier pigeons? No. Enterprise 2.0 and social media will continue their growth apace. And increasingly, this time spent online is through social media.

More and more people will be publishing their work, their ideas, their knowledge, their conversational bits, their creativity... online. It's just going to keep increasing.


Rely on social media for information

An emerging trend is the transition of where we seek information. Remember libraries, magazines and microfiche? Then the 1.0 websites where we got information? Then the portals that aggregated information from major media sites? Then search augmented all this information consumption?

Well, the next wave is to rely on our social connections to deliver interesting, relevant information to us. As was famously said by a college student in 2008:


"If the news is important, it will find me."


A recent Nielsen study confirms this growing tendency to use social media as a first stop to find information:


Admittedly, the leading social sites of today - blogs, Facebook, Twitter - have a ways to go before they become a large percentage of the population's first choice. And it'd help if Twitter could get their search working further back than a week or two.

But this survey and anecdotal evidence points toward an increased reliance on others to provide information to us.


Putting this all together

It's that last trend, still early in its cycle, that really points toward the development of formal, online reputations. When we started transacting online with complete strangers or small businesses we never knew, we needed a basis for understanding their credibility. It turns out, crowdsourced ratings are excellent indicators of quality. It also causes small businesses to be aware of the quality of their products and services.

In the years ahead, expect increased usage of social media for getting information and sourcing people, products and services. As an example, research firm IDC just released these survey results:


"57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week. The number one reason cited by U.S. workers for using social tools for business purposes was to acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community."


As reliance on people for information increases, expect an increased need for knowing which strangers provide the top quality information. Note I said "strangers" there. One thing we will continue to do is to rely on our "friends" (social media sense of the word) for ongoing daily information. The people we connect with on the various social sites.

But that's the only way we will get information. Or make decisions. Great case in point? Google's real-time search results:


If innovation is the focus of your work, wouldn't you want to be included in those Google results? Here's the thing. Google doesn't just put any old tweet or other form of real-time content in there. As Google's Amit Singhal stated:


"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone - then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers, his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely," Singhal says. "It is definitely, definitely more than a popularity contest," he adds.


Note his words: "You earn reputation."

PR agency Edelman created a ranking algorithm called Tweetlevel, which analyzes people on the basis of influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Tweetlevel was recently used to create a list of the top analysts on Twitter. As the author of that post noted, one purpose for the list was to answer the question: "Should they spend their limited time interacting with analysts via twitter?" Presumably if you're an analyst in the Top 50, 'yes'.

Again, reputation being used for a defined purpose.

Ross Dawson wrote a good piece about the changes coming due to the increasing visibility of "people's actions and character." He notes the impact of reputation on seeking professionals for work:


"Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry."


And Bertrand Dupperin sees a similar dynamic playing out internally:


"Use internal social networks to build a kind of marketplace that would put work capacity and competence on a given subject in relation with needs and allow those who can apply for an assignment instead of blind assignments to those who can't."


In a world where individuals emerge as important sources of information, products and services, people will need a way to break through the limited knowledge they'll have on any one person. Look for online reputations to emerge as a way to fill that gap.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Small Business Needs Social Software

by Hutch Carpenter

A general observation of collaborative work is this:


"The larger and more diverse are your personal network of contacts, the higher the quality of your ideas and project work."


In the enterprise market, the opportunity being seized by companies is to better connect employees. The sheer size of these firms makes it obvious that they are not optimizing collaborative activities. Social software plays an important role in helping that. SunGard's CEO has a great take on this issue in the New York Times.

But what about small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)? Do they have issues with maintaining connections? We'll tackle that issue in a second. First, however...

The Challenge of Growth: Traditional Collaboration Modes Don't Scale

When a small company starts out, it's rather easy to stay on top of what colleagues are doing. There just aren't too many of them. You easily banter, bounce ideas off one another and contribute your part to projects.

It's natural human interactions.

The problem is that small businesses continue to rely exclusively on the tried-and-true methods of collaborative work as they grow. Keep on with the emails, the desk meetings, the lunches. Sure, it's fun to keep with those who sit essentially in your visual perimeter. But it means you're missing out on a lot of valuable ideas and insight from colleagues.

The graphic below shows the challenge of scale in collaborative work:



The easy interactions of old are now replaced by the departmental exchanges, and the daily work inherent in those micro environments. The small firm mentality that employees enjoyed with fewer employees is no longer applicable as the company expands.

Yet as research has shown, employees who are able to break out of departmental silos and leverage a diversity of connections perform better in terms of innovation.

So how does this fit SMBs?

Metcalfe's Law Hits Dunbar's Number

Metcalfe's Law. Initially addressing fax machines, it speaks to the value of networks. Specifically:


"The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected participants."


For those who study the value of information networks, this law makes sense. You increase your number of information sources. And all things being equal, the person with greater information has a decided advantage in term of:

• Awareness of key issues
  
• Long tail knowledge of different issues
  
• Access to information that will solidify an idea
  
• Identification of colleagues who can help advance an idea or a project
  
• Different points of view and information that make up for the knowledge limitations we all have

Every new connection inside a company increases these information advantages, for all members of the network. The problem occurs when employees are only using traditional methods for making and accessing these connections: email, desk conversations, departmental meetings.

They run into Dunbar's Number. I use Dunbar's Number here as a heuristic, describing the mental limit we each have to stay in top of what others are working on. With traditional means of engaging in collaborative work, the Metcalfe's Law advantages of information diversity are limited by our Dunbar's Number ability to keep up with the new connections.

This graph describes the issue, and SMBs' opportunity:



Up to a certain point, employees can stay on top of what their colleagues are working on, and interact relatively easily. Is this up to 150 employees? Maybe. As Danah Boyd noted about Dunbar's Number:


"He found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn't mean that people don't have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point."


150 is a maximum number. Meaning for many of us it's less. And I'd argue, in a work context, where we're busy delivering on the daily tasks that define our jobs, it's an even lower theoretical maximum.

Which means at some point, small businesses begin to lose out on those information advantages when they rely only on traditional collaborative work modes. In the graph above, that's the part of the graph where Dunbar's Number crosses over Metcalfe's Law.

Call it the Metcalfe's Law Opportunity Gap.

At that point, companies need to look at systems that allow employees to share and filter information, and to interact with others outside their daily sphere of contacts. To access non-redundant information and points of view.

This is a problem well-known to large organizations. It also applies to SMBs as well. It's why they need social software at a certain point in their growth trajectory.

This is an important issue for innovation. So many of these employees will have front line customer and supplier experience, and ideas for the business. But visibility on these ideas will get harder and harder as the firm grows.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Presenting Twitter in Search Results

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent post, I described some ways in which tweets should be ranked in search results. A good follow-on question is...

How should tweets be presented in search results?

It's an interesting question - how exactly would you want to see tweets in your Google and Bing search results? And it's an important question, as searches are critical bases for discovering information and huge drivers of traffic.

Tweets are different from web pages. They are more ephemeral, but also much more current. They're short nature means we can consume them much more quickly than fuller web pages. In many ways, their brevity reduces their "burden of interestingness". Read, move on. Read, move on. Read, move on.

Tweets are small nuggets of insight, and pointers to good content. Web pages are the foundational information components. The value of the two digital forms is different. Thus, it makes sense to consider options for presenting these different types of information to people.

Three different designs for presenting tweets in Google and Bing search results come to mind:

• Separate tweets-only search page
  
• Tweets displayed in a box on the same page with web pages
  
• Tweets integrated into the overall search results

Let's take a look at the options. For added context, I've included appropriate musical selections.

At the bottom of this post, I've set up a poll asking which approach you'd prefer.

Tweets-only search results

Musical theme: Gotta keep 'em separated.

This is the Bing way. A separate URL for tweets. It's an acknowledgment that tweets really are different from web pages. The graphic below conceptualizes this approach, with a search on 'Madrid':


The graphic above puts tweets searches more in line with overall searches. Right now Bing has no link to tweet searches on its home page. You just have to know the URL exists. Of course, the Microsoft Bing team is working on incorporating the firehose into its search experience, so that may change.

Positives

• Dedicated page allows for much more creativity with presenting tweets, as Bing has shown
  
• Visible link/tab keeps tweet searches more in-the-flow of searchers' actions
  
• Users could easily toggle between the tabs for different types of information
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Forces an extra step to see potentially relevant information - click the tweets tab
  
• Somewhat diminishes the awareness of tweets' real-time, up-to-date nature by using same tab structure applied to more static web pages

Tweets in same-page box

Musical theme: Man in the box.

The presentation of real-time tweets on the same page is something Google is experimenting with currently. The philosophy here is that you're looking for multiple types of information in a search. Google already displays web page links, images, YouTube videos, maps, PDFs and other types of content. Tweets are just another type of content.

Something I'd like to see is a separate box of the tweets on the search results page, as shown below:


This design effectively distinguishes tweets from other types of content, while preserving the "all information on one page" philosophy. This is important for Google and Bing advertising, making the search results page even more engaging.

Open question: what's better for ad click volumes? Multiple pages of different content (e.g. separate tabs described previously)? Or a single page with more engaging content?

Aside from the information aspect of tweets, there is also a people aspect. Tweets are as much about the person as they are the content. The separate presentation of tweets distinguishes them from web pages, PDFs, videos and the like.

Positives

• Relevant, up-to-date content improves value of searches
  
• In-the-flow of existing search behavior
  
• Real-time nature is engaging
  
• Find people as well as content

Negatives

• Smaller space constrains presentation options
  
• Potential for a too-crowded visual presentation

Because of the volume of searches run through Google and Bing, there will be a premium on ensuring the quality of the tweets presented. This is important regardless, but even more so here with the number of times people will see the tweets. See Search Engine Tweet Ranking Algorithms for thoughts on how to do this.

Tweets integrated with overall search results

Musical theme: Happy Together

There is a third design option. Why not put the tweets right in the mix of overall search results? Treat them less as exotic new forms of content, and more as just another type for searchers to click on. The graphic below conceptualizes this:


A tweet is just another URL that can point searchers to relevant content. The challenge is that Google and Bing need to alter their ranking algorithms to allow tweets to be served up high in search results. Something like a pagerank for the twitter account itself. If it has relevant content and a high "Twitter pagerank", it gets served up higher in the search results.

Positives

• Searchers get tweets in a highly familiar way
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Undermines the fresh, up-to-date nature of tweets
  
• Will limit presentation of relevant tweets due to inadequate "Twitter pagerank"
  
• Reduces the people aspect of the tweets
  
• Lack of real-time flow diminishes engagement of the results page

Of course, tweets are served up in search results today. But that generally happens with very specific multi-word searches that match the tweet, or including the word "twitter" in the search. The design above brings tweets more fully into the pantheon of content, displaying them highly in search results for basic keywords.

I imagine smart folks can come up with other designs for displaying tweets. Leave a comment on these three or any other designs you think might be interesting.

Also, take a second and vote in the poll below. I'm curious what people think about the different possibilities for displaying tweets.

Thanks.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Who Should Be Driving Social Media?

by Mike Brown

The title topic came up recently on Twitter, as it had at a B2B social media roundtable late last year: Who should be doing social media strategy and implementation for a brand - organizationally and individually?

My take is a strategic perspective is the foundation for a social media effort to build a sustaining impact. When it comes to questions of social media strategy "ownership," it's clear sole responsibility for it doesn't fit nicely into a box on today's org charts.

Stepping back from the discussions, I forced myself into three criteria which seem necessary for taking on social media responsibilities in corporations:

1. Ability to always be on message for the brand, which implies effectively linking brand strategy to messaging


2. Appropriate sensibilities for social media channels


3. Diverse communication skills that work across various social media channels

Sometimes those people are in marketing communications, but you may find them in other parts of a company as well. They may also exist outside a company's employee base; that's fine too.

Most importantly, given the rapid pace of social media, you want the best strategic writers crafting the communication. Where are these people located in and around your company? Find them wherever they may be!

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!