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Are you listening? The return of Employee Engagement

23 01 2013

“Employee Engagement” used to be a term reserved for the hollow halls of HR departments across the land. You’d hear a client say that was their main goal, and you knew a program was doomed to fail – usually because it was code word for “I haven’t got a clue what to do with this type of social application”. My eyes would roll, my sleeves would get rolled up, and I’d get down to work teaching them the need to rethink the requirement for innovation goals that would drive focused value and strategic change through their organization.

But that was 10 years ago – and today, as I was sitting down with the CEO of a multi-million dollar multimedia retailer, I found myself reflecting on how much has changed since those days with respects to “employee engagement”.

“Boris, I see tools like this” (referring to the Social Innovation program we outlined to her) “as table stakes for keeping today’s top employee base” she said – the first time I’ve heard a C-level executive say that with full conviction.

Bravo – for she struck the nail cleanly on the head. With social technologies increasingly being weaved into the fabric that is our personal lives – we’re getting used to being heard by the masses – and we bring that desire to be heard with us into the workplace. As Facebook and the other mainstream social platforms get us used to being influential in a bigger world, the dichotomy of then being ignored in the workplace is increasingly causing friction.

Where as yesterday’s employees wanted pool tables and quirky benefits , today’s employees don’t just want to be actively engaged in the company they work for, they DEMAND it.

Smart employees want to feel a part of the world around them, want to feel they can influence and enact change, want the transparency and responsibilities that come with active engagement – and if you don’t provide that level of autonomy for them – then someone else will.

These are after all, the table stakes of keeping bright employees nowadays – question is, are you stepping up to the table?

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: change, collaborative innovation, employee engagement, executive, facebook, innovation, linkedin, social, social innovation, social media, social technologies, strategic change
Categories : business strategy, innovation, social media

Gamification in Innovation

23 05 2012

A few months ago I wrote a post on the promise of Gamification in the Enterprise. You can read the whole piece but as a recap, here are some of the more salient points:

1) Gamification in the enterprise is not about trivializing business processes or activities, but rather about embracing a design methodology that taps into an inherent “addiction” inside all of us to the engagement mechanics and format of “good games”

2) Games surround us everywhere, if we choose to see them as such. Just because we don’t envision the business (and other) systems around us as games; just because we don’t design them as games; doesn’t mean they’re any less of a game – it just makes them bad games that no-one wants to play.

3) The ultimate expression of engagement is the human feeling of enjoyment – where we actively derive pleasure from engaging in a specific activity. What if we could bring that level of engagement into a business process, like Innovation for example, that would have people actively choosing to give up their free time to create new value for the company?

As in the past, a company’s Innovation process has become the best testing ground for new ways to engage the broader crowd – not least of which the history of corporate innovation becoming ever more successful with the increasing size of the crowd they’re able to tap into. Gamification is no different – and already companies like Citi, Cisco, Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt and others have embraced Gamification as a way to redesign systems to drive a new level of engagement within their crowds.

For example – at Citi, we were able to engage more than 263,000 employees around the world in 97 countries in a collaborative innovation challenge that incorporated Gamification techniques to drive a unique process that collected over 2,300 raw ideas, developed and refined 10 of those into full on business cases with accompanying video pitches, and then further refined those into 4 top quality concepts complete with prototypes that were pitched in front of Citi’s top 5 executives to be funded for development. The amount of collaborative builds was incredible – with each of the top ideas all-receiving input from multiple business units and geographies – something previously unheard of at Citi. And the most amazing part of all? There were zero incentives used to drive that high level of engagement beyond the gamified design of the challenge enabled by the Spigit tool. (You can read more about the Citi Ideas Global Challenge here)

But Gamification has impact in every part of the organization and has the potential to revolutionize the way we do business as a whole. For example – another technique we pioneered here at Spigit is the use of Gameboards – which effectively change good old fashioned process charts like this:

Into this:

The game board approach not only conveys the same information as a process chart does – but also the critical engagement elements of story line, goal orientation, levels, emotions, and more. It enables us, as social strategists, to at any one point in time look at the game board and ask ourselves “Would I play this game”? – a engagement perspective that we never consider in normal design. Why would you ever do a process chart ever again?

As always, there is much more to this concept – but I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: #innochat, business, business process, business strategy, Cisco, Citi, Citi Ideas Global Challenge, engagement, enterprise, framing post, Game Board, Gameboards, games, gamification, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, incentives, innovation, questions, social, social media, social science, social strategy, spigit, strategy
Categories : business strategy, collaboration, game design, gamification, innovation, social games, social media

Getting Inside the Game – The promise of Gamification in the Enterprise

15 03 2012

[tweetmeme]You’ve probably started hearing the terms “Gamification” or “Game Mechanics” in increasing frequency in your corporate hallways of late. This is especially so if I’ve been working with you, as Gamification theory and practice (not to be confused with the Economics based “Game Theory”) is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the next generation of highly engaging collaborative Innovation programs.

I probably get asked about Gamification (aka the application of Game Mechanics/Game Design to a particular system, process, or program) at least once a day now – Spigit has quite the reputation for incorporating Gaming Mechanics into its product design – and the Collaborative Innovation consulting practice I run at Spigit has now also pioneered the development a host of new techniques and methods to apply Game Design techniques into the successful design and execution of various types of challenges, communities and collaborative competitions with some quite astounding results.

Done properly, it’s probably one of the greatest tools in a Social Strategist’s arsenal – giving great insight into that hallowed (and much overused) word “Engagement”. Yet as a topic it’s rarely understood – and even more rarely applied – properly by most including those claiming to be in the field.

First and foremost, let’s tackle some of the misconceptions:

– Gamification is NOT the same as Social Gaming. Whilst popular games like Farmville, Cityville, etc incorporate gaming techniques and could in themselves be the end result of the Gamification process – Gamification itself is a much bigger subject matter.

– Gamification IS a Social process

– Gamification IS a design methodology – it’s about how you incorporate Game Mechanics into a system to make it more ENGAGING .

– Gamification is NOT about specific technology features and functions. Buying Bunchball, Badgeville, or any of a host of new companies cashing in on the Gamification trend and blindly incorporating their software into your website does not make you a Gamification King.

The key to comprehending why Gamification is so important to businesses in the future – is understanding that that there is something incredibly and intrinsically addictive about a well-designed game that engages us as humans at the very core of our beings.

At some point in our lives, we’ve all been deeply engrossed in board games, video games, or what have you – looked up at the clock, seen it was 1AM and uttered the words “Crap, how did that happen?”

A good game not only engages us, but it physically and emotionally satisfies a part of us. Left alone we will create games from whatever we have around us (“I spy with my little eye…”).. We actively WANT to, and some might even say need to, play games.

Given options, we will choose to spend time playing games above all other activities We will even PAY to play a good game – and we have whole cities designed to cater to our desire to play games!

What if we could capture the mechanics that make a good game so addictive to us, so engaging, and bring those into a business system that actively creates value for the company? THAT’s the real promise of Gamification.

Games come in many forms though – some very obvious (Monopoly, Blackjack, World of Warcraft. etc) , and others not so (political games, dating games, etc).

In fact, if you think about it – we are actually surrounded by games all around us everyday, although most of the time we don’t necessarily perceive or think of them as being games.

For example – take your morning commute – you get up and leave the house with the aim of getting to work on time. There’s a path to follow, and there are choices along that path:

– Do you decide to drive or to take the train?

– If you drive, which route do you take?

– Do you go the direct route over the hill that can be slower but has less traffic or do you go around on the main road that can be quicker but is more prone to traffic jams?

– How fast do you drive – do you increase your speed when you hit the highway to make up for your lateness but also increase the risk of getting a ticket that would make you even later? (and poorer financially..)

– And so on…

You make decisions and take actions to beat your fellow competitors (other commuters) to get to your ultimate goal – getting to work on time. It is, in essence, a game.

Of course, we don’t associate it as a game because it’s not structured and presented to us as a game – but essentially it has the same structure: A goal, a story, a reason to act, and multiple actions and decisions to get to that goal which ultimately delivers you a reward – in the example above, not getting told off by your boss for being late to work.

Almost everything else you do during your day could also be reframed as a game:

– Lunchtime: When do you leave your desk to avoid the lunchtime rush/get the best grub?

– Airport Security: Which queue do you join to get through as fast as possible and not miss your plane

– Travel – Whom do you fly with? Do you go with the most direct flight, or do you go with the one you fly the most in case you can pull off an elusive upgrade?

– Sales Reporting: What percentage certainty do you report that elusive deal you’ve been working on in your CRM system? Do you raise your boss’s expectation and hope not to disappoint? Or do you low-ball it and aim to surprise?

– At Work: Which order do you attack your workload to be the most efficient with the least amount of pain (and most acclaim from your peers and bosses!)

– At Home: How do you get your child to eat the brussel sprouts that they hate? Cue the airplane game!

Consider that all of these activities you choose to engage in during your day have the same elements as a good game:

– They have a clear start and end to it

– There’s a pay-off for “playing” it well and achieving a “win”

– There’s a clear storyline/reason to play that’s clearly communicated

– A good activity isn’t repetitive

– A good activity doesn’t throw complexity at you all at once, but rather in stages with mini-pay-offs to keep you interested and wanting to “throw the dice” until you finish.

And so on.

We play these games, and we “game” these games (incidentally – people “game” every game out there – given the option of two routes with an equal reward, we will always pick the shortest/easiest route to the prize – maximizing the prize wherever possible), and ultimately we win/lose the games we play.

The problem (or opportunity) with most business systems though, is that, as we don’t envision them as games, we don’t design them as games. That doesn’t make them any less of a game; it just makes them “crappy” games that no one wants to play!

They’re “crappy” for the participants because they’re tedious and unrewarding to play/participate. They’re “crappy” for the business because participation is low or non-existent, compliance to the task at hand is minimal, and because ultimately the system is being gamed for the participants’ benefit and not the company’s benefit.

Instead by building and designing business systems with the mindset that we’re really creating a game, with a specific outcome, and incorporating the same rules and mechanics that naturally engage us in games – we actually end up building a system that is a win-win for all.

The net effect? Imagine creating systems that are so addictive that people will gladly spend their own free time to participate in something that is adding value to the company – and enjoying the challenges involved in doing so.

That they will even give up their own time on the weekends to submit ideas into your innovation system.

Sound impossible? It’s not – we’ve been able to achieve this effect at companies like Citi, Cisco and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as we applied these new design techniques to the practice of Collaborative Innovation at each of them. More on this to come…

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: badgeville, bunchball, business strategy, business systems, Cisco, Citi, cityville, collaboration, collaborative innovation, design, design methodology, engagement, engaging, enterprise, farmville, game, game design, game mechanics, game theory, games, gamification, gaming, gaming techniques, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, innovation, innovation consulting, innovation programs, methodology, social gaming, social media, social strategy, spigit
Categories : business strategy, collaboration, game design, gamification, innovation, social games, social media

2011 – The Year of The Social Enterprise?

4 01 2011

[tweetmeme]
A New Year brings with it many opportunities – and we generally take advantage of the new start every year gives us to make numerous promises and resolutions for change in our life.

For me, Jan 1^st 2011 saw me make promises to write more often, get fitter, achieve great things for my clients, and generally embrace what is sure to be a year of great changes for me.

However, another opportunity afforded by the New Year is the ability to look like a right royal fool, or alternatively a prescient visionary genius, by looking to the year ahead to predict what it will bring.

My track record at these predictions is not necessarily to be envied – although I don’t seem to usually be “completely wrong”, my timing seems to be somewhat off.

Had the predictions of my youth come true, we’d all be living in a Star-Trek like world of spaceships, teleportation, and holographic entertainment systems in every home. Heck, even more recent predictions of a global ubiquitous Internet connection seem to be off by several years at least.

Nevertheless, it’s fun to look to the future, and I’d like to think that with age comes a certain realism as to what’s possible in a year – so here goes this year’s effort.

I think 2011 is going to be an especially exciting year – especially if the one big prediction I have for this coming year ends up coming true – that we’re about to embark on a new era of unprecedented collaboration and social interaction, that we’re doing that with a renewed sense of discipline, all-inclusion, and transparency, that we are, in short – on the cusp of seeing the world’s first fully social business.

Companies embracing social is nothing new admittedly – indeed my own work has centered on helping companies to use social technologies to drive corporate strategies for over 15 years now. So what’s different now?

For starters, I think this year sees companies finally take it seriously – as a corporate competence to be achieved and maintained, rather than a faddish concept to be played with in any of its prior incarnations (knowledge management, collaboration, social media, etc). I see companies increasingly throwing away the intangible mantle of “social media” programs focused on improved interactions with the consumer – and instead looking for ways to integrate social technologies to produce some very tangibly sized profitable gains. Nothing moves a company to embrace a new way of working more than big profits.

I also think that Social Technology companies themselves have matured more – taking ownership of the need to provide companies with a tangible route to those big gains. The increasing differentiation within the current software market is proof of that as vendors realize that companies don’t (and can’t) buy general “Collaboration” or “Social” tools – because they simply can’t achieve anything (let alone everything) with them. General collaboration platforms like Sharepoint and Jive will continue to exist – but will continue to become secondary to the applications, (like Spigit, Yammer and others), that are developed to run on top of them and will drive the real value of social tools to the organization.

2011 will see Innovation continue to be the “Gateway Drug” to Social Tool adoption in the enterprise – providing an easy route for large companies to value and monetize the global interaction of the “social populations” (employees, customers, vendors, strategic partners, shareholders, and more) at their disposal.

Once that value is established – I see companies starting to effectively inject “social input” into increasingly strategic parts of their business. We’re already starting to see the first variants of this emerging in Finance (eg Microfinancing), Manufacturing and Design (eg Crowdsourcing), HR (eg Employee Engagement initiatives), and even Management generally (eg Collaborative Decision Making).

All this leads me back to my initial prediction – the emergence of the first true Social Enterprise. That is, a company that has social input strategically injected into EVERY part of their organization. Where every business process includes elements of mass social interaction between people inside and/or outside the traditional company walls. A fully open business that is able to leverage a global knowledge resources pool in multiple ways to achieve its strategic goals.

Is that possible in 2011? It’s a bit of a stretch I admit – and more likely to happen at the start-up level rather than a large global enterprise at this stage – but I believe that even that’s coming in the longer run. In the words of Hamel and late C K Prahalad – companies will eventually be forced to redefine what their true “core competencies” are – and then outsource the rest. Although instead of outsourcing it to an emerging global economy because labor is cheaper, they’ll be outsourcing it to a global social population because the work, the solutions, and the results will simply be better than they can achieve on their own.

The winners in the next generation of businesses won’t be the companies that can come up with and produce the next winning product – but will be instead the companies that can rally the world around to do it for them.

That’s my big bet for 2011 – what’s yours?

Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: 2011, business strategy, collaboration, companies, core competencies, hamel, jive, knowledge management, open business, outsource, prahalad, predictions, sharepoint, social, social enterprise, social media, social populations, social technologies, social tools, spigit, transparency, yammer
Categories : business strategy, collaboration, innovation, social media

6 Secrets to Corporate Authenticity

25 08 2010

[tweetmeme]“Authentic” is undoubtedly one of most echoed words in the Social World nowadays – applied especially liberally when explaining to companies the means by which they should be conveying themselves to the broader world in order to be heard.

The term seems seldom explained more than that, and yet the implications are deep. It amuses me to no end that the word “authentic” has staged such an emergent come back into our vocabulary – not least of which when used to describe a media and communication form so recently embraced for its ability to allow people to engage in an almost schizophrenic array of multiple online personalities.

Ironic then, that in the current online world that we’ve created, where it’s so easy to be anyone or anything you can imagine, it’s never been so important to simply be yourself. That in a world of Avatars, Second Lives, and Virtual Worlds – we want to know that we’re communicating with real people who are being their real selves.

Maybe it’s a sign that the Social World is growing up – moving from a prior youthfulness happy to live in a world sporting fake Rolexes and toting counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags; to a decidedly a more mature mode preferring to spend their newfound wealth buying the real thing on 5^th Avenue.

The formula for being “authentic” as an individual must surely be simple then: Be yourself, communicate from the heart and be consistent. But how do you achieve that in an enterprise setting? How does a company made up of thousands of voices come across with the same effectiveness as one? Here are some guidelines for your internal “social champions” to follow:

1) and 2) “Know Who You Are and Live It” – Earlier this year I had the good fortune to go to the Front End of Innovation Conference in Boston where Bert Jacobs, one of the founders of “Life is Good” was speaking. In his speech, he relayed the story of how the two brothers started their fledgling business on a street corner selling t-shirts and how they were able to translate that into the marketing empire that Life is Good is now.

During his session there was a comment – one that he repeated during his speech, and then signed along with his name on the Frisbee he flung into the audience and pinged me squarely on the forehead with (there was a ricochet involved from a nearby audience member – honest!).

The comment was “know who you are, and live it”. Now Bert’s no social media guru, nor is he making money from his insight (I believe he donates a lot of his speaking fees to charity – He’s a quiet, down to earth, and confident guy who’s simply figured out the secret to his success.

That secret has helped him translate a feeling, an emotion, and a mission from his heart to his products – and onwards to his customers.

This effect though is multiplied in the social world and the necessity to “know who you are” with ultimate certainty and to consistently live out those values in the social worlds is the real key to success for corporations in what has to be one of the ultimate brand challenges of the modern business world.

Why the “ultimate” brand challenge? Because the Social World has an incredible memory – infinite actually.

What you say, what you do, how you do it, and who you do it with is preserved along with people’s opinions of your actions from the moment it happens, until the end of time. Like an elephant on steroids, your image in the social world is established by your actions, and remembered forever.

If “Knowing Who You Are” is number 1) on the list of things companies must do – then “Live It” has to be number 2). Consistency is a key element of authenticity – people want to know that you not only “talk the talk”, but also “walk the walk”. One communication effort can set an intention, but it takes consistency to set an image.

A positive Social Image is a fragile entity and is re-enforced or recast depending on your actions, engendering strong levels of customer loyalty and advocacy to those who get it right – and equally strong negative reactions to those who trip up on the path. Never mind women, hell hath no fury like a customer scorned in the social world – where one negative voice can sound like hundreds online.

The need for consistency in your actions is then further exaggerated in the current Google-centric world where information is omnipresent and easy to access. In this world, it’s not just your actions that matter, but those of everyone you associate with too. Nestlé’s well publicized controversy regarding the source of Palm Oil used in some of their confectionary is just one example of this in action.

3) Be Real – The Social World is made up of individuals – not corporations. Talk to them in the same formal way you approach your PR campaigns and you’ll find the same level of interest and disengagement you probably got from journalists when you sent them that Press Release announcing your new six sigma process (yaaawwwwnn).

Interactions with actual people and personalities are simply more “sticky” than formal corporate approaches. Whilst it’s important to institute guidelines and rules for those interactions, you should, whenever possible, make sure that your company’s interactions come across as being made on a person-to-person basis and not on a corporate entity-to-whomever-will-listen basis.

4) Be Transparent – Part of the potential poisoned chalice that can be connecting to thousands of people is that you’ll find it very hard to hide information – so don’t bother doing so! Treat your social world as if they’re an integral part of your company. Let them know early when good news is underway, and apologize early when you screw up. Open up to your community and they’ll reward you with understanding, forgiveness, and loyalty.

5) Cultivate Relationships, not Transactions – Treat the communities you interact with as if they were integral partners in your company’s success and not just simply a transaction source. Care about them, ensure they get value out of the relationship then have with you, and make sure the flow of information and value goes both ways.

6) Do it yourself – This last one is the simplest – you want to be yourself? You want to be “real”? You want to cultivate lasting relationships with your social community? Then do it yourself – don’t hire external partners to do it for you.

Partners have their role in all this – as teachers, thought leaders, and general resources – but you shouldn’t rely on them for execution – that’s just lazy, and in an age of transparency, it won’t take long for the social world to see through you.

Invest in the internal capabilities and expertise to drive and deliver value to and from your communities and the returns will be hundred-fold.

Got more tips on how to be Authentic? Share them below!

Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: authentic, authenticity, avatars, bert jacobs, brand, brand challenge, brand management, communication, community, conference, consultants, corporate, corporate brand, enterprise, front end of innovation, guru, life is good, nestle, online communities, online teams, online world, person-to-person, personal brand, relationships, second life, social business, social champion, social image, social media, social world, teachers, thought leaders, transparency, transparent, virtual world
Categories : collaboration, social media

Is your Community Contaminated?

21 07 2010

[tweetmeme]This morning I found myself at the W Hotel in Hoboken, accidentally (no really!) listening to an interesting story on one of the many breakfast shows on at that time. On that show, author James Fowler was describing research he had done that showed how social networks surrounding us can impact each of our lives in a much deeper way than most people realize. To make his point, (and the news presumably) he used as an example that divorce can be “contagious” amongst friends – mentioning that having a close friend experience divorce, increases the chance of your own divorce by 147%. Needless to say shock and horror ensued from the hosts and other assorted pundits on the show who naturally dislike the idea of someone asserting such high correlation to such a dreadful outcome.

Yet when I thought about it, I don’t think I was really surprised. After all, it kind of makes sense. Your social circle represents more than just a group of people you like to get together with for a beer. Your social circle represents the segment of society (or community) with whom you most closely identify and associate.

As with any society, the activities of one affect the activities of the many – word of mouth campaigns are one of many business efforts to capitalize on this effect. Communities and Societies have social norms and unspoken rules that govern membership – and it’s only natural when an outlier emerges (say, the first of your group goes bungee jumping on holiday, learns how to scuba dive, or, god forbid, gets divorced) that the community takes a moment to reflect on whether that new behavior or activity is a true outlier or simply a leading indicator of something they too should be trying/considering/experimenting.

The elements of peer pressure and groupthink are not new either – it’s well known that many people get into/stay in gangs, or conform group actions against their natural wills because of the innate fear of rejection/fear of social stigmata/fear of ridicule/fear of the unknown that we all suffer from. Humans are inherently social creatures, so why would we be surprised that the social actions of someone we know, like and respect would also impact our own decisions?

Take the divorce case – the first person to get divorced in a social group of couples challenges the group norms. All of a sudden the group has to decide whether or not they approve – whether or not to maintain the two separates in the combined. Once that norm has been broken, it’s only normal for the rest of the group to question their own commitment to what they had considered a societal norm of marriage. I daresay that if the author had dug further (and he may well have by the way, I haven’t had a chance to read his book yet, and it was a short segment on the program), he would’ve actually gone on to find that whether or not other couples in the group started to consider divorce would also have been impacted by the relative happiness exhibited by the two singles that initiated the first divorce. Did the initial sadness give way to euphoria commensurate with a perpetual trip to Hedonism III? Did the two newly single people now face a miserable existence akin to that of a lonely penguin in the Sahara?

Our understanding of alternative realities in the communities to which we belong influence our own decisions by opening up an understanding of what those alternatives actually look and feel like in real life. If we find our close friends being happier single than married, then it’s only natural for us to consider a similar move.

There are implications of course, for the Social Business World in all this of course (I bet you were wondering when I’d get to the point of all this, eh?).

Social communities maintained (or not) by businesses are fickle things – more akin to organic creatures than to mathematical formulas (which adds to my confusion as to why so many companies seem to be lumping in the Social Media functions with their SEO functions internally – but that’s a different discussion) – and the analogy of new societal norms spreading through a community like a virus is just as accurate, if not more so, in the social world.

Engender a strong goodwill and feeling within your community, and you’ll find that it’ll be resistant to negative vibes. Take the iPhone 4 – despite all its difficulties and problems, people are still buying it – not because it’s that much of a better phone than anything else on the market (nor even its previous version the 3GS) – but rather because Apple’s conditioned its community to be resistant to negative viruses by ensuring that they not only respond, but also try to over-satisfy the customer whenever possible. As a result, the community of Apple buyers continues strong, and continues to grow in number.

Cross your community though, and that bad feeling will spread far and wide like wildfire. You only have to look at the many Facebook faux pas of the likes of Nestle and others to see that at work.

It strikes me then, that we might well start seeing a new type of competitive behavior showing up in the future – that of setting up deliberate social viruses to attack and/or convert the social networks of competitors. I can certainly envision ways in which companies could manipulate a few key individuals to enable them to corrupt a competitor’s user community for example – sowing seeds of discontent, and setting up the consumers to be virally vulnerable to the possibility of alternative realities. Could we then be on the verge of a new weapon in the Corporate Strategic Arsenal?

In many ways we need to nurture a new skillset in corporations – that of the Social Doctor – Able to diagnose potential viruses prior to them taking effect and injecting the corporate social world with the virtual equivalent of vitamins to re-enforce it.

Part strategists, and part social scientists, this new breed of business executive will need to show a sensitivity and concern for customer communities that is currently alien to the majority of companies who still treat their social networks as a sales and marketing tool rather than a living, breathing symbiotic organism.

Mix that social awareness and responsiveness with corporate strategic ability though – and you get the ability to build and maintain a Social World that will drive unrivalled competitive advantage in your direction. What do you think?

Comments : 14 Comments »
Tags: Apple, communities, community, competitive advantage, competitive behavior, connected, corporate, divorce, facebook, goodwill, infection, infectious, iphone 4, james fowler, loyalty, nestle, social circle, social doctor, social rules, social science, social team, social world, strategy
Categories : collaboration, social media

Talking “Social Teams” – LIVE EVENT – #smchat – Wednesday 26 May, 2010 – 1PM EST

24 05 2010

So a few months ago I put up a post on this website about a concept I’d formulated whilst listening to some of the fine speakers at the annual World Business Forum last year. That post, entitled “Why companies shouldn’t build online communities” proposed that the entire mentality with which most companies approach collaboration and communities primed them for failure straight away.

In the next post “Continuing the Conversation: For Companies, Build Teams, Not Communities” I continued to explain my rationale : namely that by looking at these virtual groups as “teams” instead of “communities” you moved away from treating these groups as unreachable, undefinable, and unmanageable groups – and instead could begin to add the essential elements of teamworking and value driving that would make these groups both more sustainable and more valuable from the corporate perspective.

In the latest of the series, I went ahead and defined what I since began calling “Social Teams” – namely as “a collection of individuals who have a common understanding of the “game they’re playing” (ie the team’s purpose); know in which goal they’re trying to score in (ie have a shared understanding of what ‘a win’ looks like); and are collaborating together to achieve that aim.“. I went on to detail the roles that people played in a Social Team, and some of the basic ways in which it could be used to drive value for an organization.

The “Social Teams” post has gone on to be one of the most popular things I’ve written, and has drawn the interest and curiosity of many in the social media and collaboration worlds. This Wednesday I’ll have the honor of leading the very first live conversation on “Social Teams’ with one of the virtual teams I actively belong to: #smchat.

I’d like to extend the invitation to attend this session to all of you – it’s easy and free of charge – and hope that you’ll enjoy the typically very productive, energetic and lively discussion and debate for which #Smchat is known for.

If you’ve never attended one of these type of debates on twitter – the process is simple: At the prescribed time (#smchat meets every Wednesday at 1 PM EST (-5 Hrs GMT) ) – go onto the twitter application of choice (Twitter Search and Tweetchat seem to be favourites), and do a search for posts with “#smchat” in them. By making sure that all posts have that string of letters in their contributions, participants are able to have a mass live discussion on the preset topic. If you have any questions on how to participate, feel free to contact me and I’ll try and help as best I can.

As this is the first time I’ve formally spoken about Social Teams, rather than writing out a list of topics and questions to guide the conversation – I’d like to invite you to use the Comments section below to write down specific questions that you’d like to see addressed, and I’ll make sure to tee up as many of them as possible in the hour time slot we have allocated!

I’m looking forward to speaking with you all!

Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : collaboration, social media

Defining the “Social Team”

9 02 2010

[tweetmeme]If you’ve been following me online on Twitter or elsewhere, you’ve probably heard me mention the concept of “Social Teams” more than a few times recently.

It is, in my mind, a powerful idea that has the ability to change the way companies and individuals view online collaboration efforts – with the potential to achieve dramatic results.

I’ve always believed that people want to interact online in a similar structure to their interactions in the offline world. The fact that we’re not usually able to doesn’t mean that we don’t want to.

In the real world, we associate ourselves with communities to find people of similar interests with whom to interact. These communities are important to define the overall population of socially connected people; but they’re useless as a way to actually get anything done. When we set out to actually achieve something, we abandon the broader “community” concept in favor of focused subgroups of active individuals that are more motivated and able to get things done.

For example, in my sport of choice, rugby, we talk about a wider “rugby community” around the world. When we go out, we socialize, drink, and have fun as a community – it’s a bond that ties rugby players around the world. But we don’t compete as a community, we compete as individual teams. We don’t govern the sport as a community, but rather using an elected “team” of individuals picked from the community.

In other words we “exist” as a community, but we “achieve” as a team.

The same concept is true in the online world. Technology has given us the methods by which to define and connect to, our own communities. Each of us “exists” within a multitude of communities with which we associate – with differing levels of interest. However, to actually achieve a specific aim/goal, we need to tap into a subset of that group to create a “team” to help us achieve that.

It’s important to understand that whilst I use the term “team”, these sub-groups of people don’t exactly conform to the standard idea of what a “team” looks like or acts like – we’re no longer looking at working groups of enlisted employees in a corporate environment, nor the familiar images of a band of 10-15 athletes playing a game “on any given Sunday”.

These “Social Teams”, can be massive groups of hundreds, or even thousands of people in an online setting. They are teams on a scale never seen before, and on a playing field of incomprehensible proportions. Team members may never have met each other, but nevertheless choose to work with each other to achieve a mutually desirable goal or function.

Social Teams are not top-down, nor bottom-up; they can be purposely set-up, or self-formed by team members; they can exist in purely social settings or as corporate sponsored groups.

They are a collection of individuals who have a common understanding of the “game they’re playing” (ie the team’s purpose); know in which goal they’re trying to score in (ie have a shared understanding of what ‘a win’ looks like); and are collaborating together to achieve that aim.

They incorporate the structure of a traditional team, with the social contract of a community.

Although Social Teams differ from the physical world in terms of the actual method and depth of their social interaction – many of the same rules for success in the offline world, hold true in the online world.

For example, if we use a typical amateur sports team as an analogy; we can define roles that need to be fulfilled by in order for the group to be successful:

1) A good Captain – someone to lead, motivate, organize and drive participation and effort from the team. The best Captains are charismatic leaders who drive from the front; which entails being seen as a valuable contributor to the group; garnishing respect from other team members, and being effective networkers who are able to gel and glue the team together.

2) An astute Manager/Coach – someone to define and drive what is success for the team. To co-ordinate the team’s efforts, to let them know what game they’re playing when they get to the field, and in what direction they need to advance. To provide them with a strategy, a formation, and to provide the team with the tools required to succeed – whether it be drafting in new players to bolster the squad, or providing appropriate training aids to keep players sharp.

3) Superstar Goal Scorers – people who might not always be the most active or hardworking on the field – but nonetheless are able to provide that spark of brilliance that will provide you with a large percentage of the goals, (or commercialized value) produced by your team.

4) A group of Creative Midfielders –ball/information distributors who make connections, provide links, and drive the conditions that create opportunities for goals to be scored.

5) A Solid Defense – the building blocks and foundation of the group – providing a core level of input, and information that gives the team a platform from which to build an attack.

Unlike the real world, in a Social Team, it’s important to point out that most of these positions are not usually assigned by anyone to anyone, but rather assumed with group permission by team members on their own.

This is not about imposing a hierarchical structure on a group of people, but rather about providing the team with the basis needed to work efficiently together towards a common goal.

Using this model, you can see how so many companies fail in their collaboration efforts. By relying, as so many companies do, on simply “enabling a community” to exist, they’re essentially doing the equivalent of sitting on the sidelines of a soccer field waiting for 11 random people to find the field, collectively decide that they want to play the same game, and then set out to beat Arsenal Football Club with no organization at all.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s folly – it’s time to let go of that folly and get a good game going!

So how do you use all this information to drive results within your collaboration efforts? I’ll discuss that in my next post – in the meantime, as always, your comments and thoughts are gratefully received!

Comments : 14 Comments »
Tags: collaboration, communities, corporate, definition, online communities, online teams, social captain, social defense, social manager, social media, social midfielder, social superstar, social teams, strategy, team roles, teamwork
Categories : collaboration, social media

Continuing the Conversation: For Companies, Build Teams, Not Communities

8 12 2009

Yesterday I posted a response to all the wonderful comments and contributions that you all made to my last post on “Why Companies Shouldn’t Build Online Communities“. As I plan to delve further into this idea of “Social Teams”, I thought I’d repost that reply as a post in its own right so as to make it easier for people to find and read – so here goes:

Dear All

Many, many thanks for your responses – they’re both very welcome and very appreciated. I wanted to take some time to reply to some of the concerns that were expressed in the comments.

It seemed that many of you think I was advocating that companies should no longer value the input of large groups of people. Far from it – the main point in the post was to point out that as a structure for large groups of people, the community concept is a flawed one – at least from a corporate perspective. It’s simplistic, unstructured, and lacking in motivation and purpose to name but a few flaws.

That’s not to say that value can’t be created in a community setting – it’s just very hard to do so because you’re relying on value being created through serendipitous interactions between community members. It’s not unlike advocating participating in the lottery as your prime way of getting rich – sure, it’s possible that you could hit the jackpot if you take part, but only a fool would rely on that as their sole chance at fame and fortune.

Likewise, whilst there is definitely a place for serendipity in an organization (more on that in a future post) – it would be a foolish management team that would rely on its occurrence to generate value for the company. My argument instead is that the team framework is a much more robust and reliable one when it comes to generating value for a company. In fact, in the few cases where looser community based initiatives have created value, I’ve found it’s usually because they began to adopt the characteristics and roles of a Social Team – namely things like purpose, direction, shared goals, diversity in skill sets and specialized roles, etc.

You could also make a good argument based on semantics – ie, that a Social Team is merely a type of Community; however, I think it would be equally valid to say that a community is simply a dysfunctional Social Team.

I think it’s also important to point out I focus on strategies and processes specifically to drive corporate value. Whilst I believe the Social Team concept still holds and still works in more social groups, the concept of what constitutes value and the expectation of it being created in those groups is very different to that of a large enterprise investing in this area.

Companies invest real money as well as intellectual capital into creating and participating in these networks, and as such, need to see a reasonable return, ideally on the bottom line to justify investing in these initiatives.

Having said that, my core belief is still that people function and perform better with a degree of organization when compared to loose collectives. In addition, the visualization aid that thinking of these groups in a similar fashion to that of a sports team, gives us to analyze and improve the quality of that interaction is invaluable.

I’ll go deeper into the Social Team concept in future posts, but in the meantime – please do keep your comments coming, or contact me directly via e-mail or twitter (@bpluskowski) – to discuss this further!

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: corporate, online communities, online teams, response, social media, social teams, strategy, teamwork
Categories : collaboration, social media

Why Companies shouldn’t build Online Communities..

22 10 2009

Forget about Communities.Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. Oh I know that communities are all the rage currently – companies are falling over themselves to create, build and own their very own communities: Communities of Employees, Communities of Customers, Communities of Interest Groups, Communities, Communities, Communities….

But with all of these efforts out there, how many of them are yielding real tangible results for the sponsoring organization? It seems that the very concept of communities is a flawed one for most corporations – leading to wasted time, money and effort – and I think I know why.

Let me explain:

I find that many, maybe even most, companies approach social media, and other online community projects – with very little, if any, forethought on how value will be achieved as a result of jumping on this particular bandwagon.

They seem to share a belief that value will just “be created” by the mere existence of a new online channel; that innovation will simply appear if you provide a new collaborative tool; that competitive advantage will be retained through the “ownership” of a new networking group. Yet that’s rarely ever the case.

Unlike in the movie “Field of Dreams” – you can build it – but “they” rarely come spontaneously – or if they do, they may well end up playing a jovial game of scrabble rather than a vintage MLB baseball game on the back lawn.

Even the word Community itself is somewhat flawed when applied to a corporate setting: Here’s the Dictionary.com definition of the word:

com⋅mu⋅ni⋅ty [kuh–myoo-ni-tee]

–noun, plural -ties.

1.	a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2.	a locality inhabited by such a group.
3.	a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the): the business community; the community of scholars.
4.	a group of associated nations sharing common interests or a common heritage: the community of Western Europe.
5.	Ecclesiastical. a group of men or women leading a common life according to a rule.
6.	Ecology. an assemblage of interacting populations occupying a given area.
7.	joint possession, enjoyment, liability, etc.: community of property.
8.	similar character; agreement; identity: community of interests.
9.	the community, the public; society: the needs of the community.

There’s a lot of nice words and feelings in that definition. “A social group”; “common heritage”; “interacting populations”; “shared identity”….The word conjures up a nice warm vision of a collection of friends and associates sitting around a fireside or, for the more cynical among you, images of suburban old age homes in Florida and Arizona maybe.

As I look at that definition however- I ask myself – where’s the value in that for a company? Where does it get created? Augmented? Shared? Delivered? Whichever way you look at it, communities are about people gathering with no set agenda or action in mind – so why would a company invest/waste resources to simply enable random conversations amongst a group of people? At best, it’s an exercise in corporate branding to be associated with a particular conversation topic; at worst it’s an exercise in wishful thinking.

At the recent World Business Forum, held in New York City on Oct 6-7, Patrick Lencioni (founder and president of the Table Group, and a fantastically articulate and dynamic speaker incidentally) spoke to the audience about “What makes a good team?”. One specific question stuck with me: “If you have a bunch of people who play in a sports team each week, really get on well with each other socially, gel as a unit, yet still manage to not win a single game – are they a good team?” Patrick asked with a mischevious look at the front row and a pause for effect. “The answer is NO – they’re just a bunch of LOSERS!” (cue laughter and some nervous side glances between executives either side of me).

Whilst maybe declared a tad glibly by Patrick, the core message was clear, and it got me thinking about what had been bothering me with the concept of communities for so long: That lack of performance, of achievement, of purpose. It struck me that the relative value of the concept of “communities” to most organizations is not dissimilar to Patrick’s example of a team that doesn’t win – they are, in essence, Losers. And why would companies waste time creating groups of Losers?

It seems to me that the failure companies are making starts right at the beginning with a badly formed misconception as to what they really need – and it’s not an online community – it’s an online team.

It may seem as if I’m nit-picking or playing with semantics in making this differentiation – but consider what this simple change in mindset would mean to projects as you think about how to build a great online team instead of an online community. All of a sudden you add dimensions of:

Direction and Leadership
Shared Goals, Shared Failures, and Shared Successes
Ensuring Participation of Diverse Skill Sets
Tangible Achievement
Passion, Purpose and Loyalty

Whist still retaining all the collaborative, cooperative and creative structures usually associated with Communities.

I don’t know about you – but I know which one I’d rather build! You tell me – What’s the more powerful concept?…

Comments : 25 Comments »
Tags: corporate, online communities, online teams, social media, social teams, strategy, teamwork
Categories : collaboration, social media

The Blogger’s Hub Mark II – The World Business Forum 09 and Social Media Innovation

5 10 2009

Thanks to the good people over at HSM, I’ve been invited to take part in the Blogger’s Hub at tomorrow’s World Business Forum – something I’m really quite excited about for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, look at the lineup – where else in the world can you go to and see Bill Clinton, George Lucas and Gary Hamel all on the same agenda? The topics being addressed are equally diverse – ranging from Leadership, to Branding, to Economics, to a simple “Conversation” (well you didn’t think George Lucas would address the audience on something like “Quantitative Analysis Techniques for the 21^st century” did you?).

However, and not to take away from the power of the content itself, one of the main attractions for me this year will be to see how HSM has evolved its’ “Bloggers Hub” concept. Whether or not HSM were the first to embrace Social Media (SM) and the concept of an “alternative press core” as part of its conferences I don’t know – but I think I can safely say that they’re the current leaders when it comes to integrating SM into their conferences. You certainly can’t fault them for lack of commitment to the concept – and it’s reaping some great results from them in terms of market exposure and attendee response.

Regular readers will remember a piece I wrote about the Blogger’s Hub at the World Innovation Forum – also run by HSM – where they first tried out the concept. Inviting a core group of innovation bloggers, tweeps, and writers of various sorts to their event – they then set up a unique experience with reserved seating, dedicated WiFi channels, powerpoints, press packs, and more for this group. It was a bold statement at the time of HSM’s belief in Social Media – and one that was then rapidly adopted by many of their competitors to varying degrees of success.

So needless to say – I’m fascinated to see how they’ll push the boundaries again with their second go at it. Already they’ve done far more pre-conference than in the past. Having established an already pretty active hash channel on twitter (#WBF09 in case you want to follow the live tweets on Tuesday and Wednesday), a LinkedIn Group, a Facebook page, and several networking opportunities both before and during the conference specifically for the Blogger’s Hub members – they’ve done an admirable job of embracing what I think are the key components of a successful corporate SM campaign, namely:

1) Open a channel to your target market and give them a means by which to communicate with each other – through the various linkedin, twitter, and other channels that they’ve created, HSM have provided the potential community with a set of tools to use. More critically, rather than attempt to create proprietary channels; they’ve built mini-channels within already established platforms so as to reduce the barrier to entry to new community members.

2) Enthuse the community – Membership to the Blogger’s Hub has certain perks: Special invitation-only channels; exclusive networking opportunities; special press packs and media libraries; the specially reserved and equipped area at the conference itself; and more – all contributing to participants feeling “special” and thus more enthusiastic about the entire experience. Just as with any PR – giving a channel exclusivity to content gives it a better chance of being picked up

3) Take an active role in the community – throughout, HSM has not only used the various channels as a way to put out marketing messages, but crucially, they’ve taken an active part in the online discussions – thus getting adopted by the community not as a sponsor, but as a member – and as a member, credibility and acceptance is much greater.

Having covered all these points admirably, George Levy and his colleagues at HSM have ensured that come the Wednesday evening close of the event, not only will they have driven a modern day PR campaign that would be the envy of most corporates out there, but they’ve also created an active community that they essentially “own” and are a trusted member of. How many companies active in the SM space can say that? Talk about creating an asset!

Will there be more surprises for us when we get there? I’m willing to bet so – so make sure you track #wbf09 over the next few days and I’ll make sure to tell you all about it as the event unfolds!

More Resources

I’ve created an RSS Feed of Blog Posts on the World Business Forum from Blogger’s Hub participants
If you’re not an active Twitter user – you can follow all the action from HSM’s dedicated page
If you are an active Twitter user – make sure to follow #wbf09 to see the whole thing unfold live
Here’s a full list of the Blogger’s Hub Participants so you can follow each individually:

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Tags: 2009, Blogger's Hub, blogging, collaboration, Gary Hamel, George Lucas, HSM, innovation, social media, World Business Forum, World Innovation Forum
Categories : innovation, social media

What in the Wide World is Web 3.0? – Let’s find out….

22 09 2009

So it all started with a bit of a joke – I was chatting to moderator-extraordinaire @sourcePOV (Chris Jones’ alias on Twitter to the rest of you) at the end of a particularly well attended #smchat session to brainstorm some ideas for future chat topics (click here to find out more about #smchat). “Hey”, I said with tongue firmly in cheek, “we’ve been talking about social media and web 2.0 for some time now… aren’t we due another point release soon?”…. Chris, with what I’m now realizing is a rather impressive ability to spot an opportunity, quickly managed to convert my offhand quip into a somewhat tenuous agreement to take over from him as moderator for next week’s #smchat gathering, with rather daunting task of leading the 50+ participants through “Qu.20” – figuring out what Web 3.0 is, might be, or would be, if it is anything at all – and then trying to understand the impact on business and beyond.

I found myself wondering if this was how Justin Timberlake found himself not only guest hosting Saturday Night Life, but then also in tights and high heels for a parody of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”… At some point he must’ve found himself thinking “How the heck….?”… I guess in retrospect I should thank my lucky stars that I get to keep my trousers on to host #smchat…

Taking a closer look at the topic though, led me to some very interesting search into a future that really isn’t that far away – (many experts seem to suggest that Web 3.0 will be a real entity as close as 2010) – but one that is still unclear and the center of some debate as to what it really is, will be, and what it will mean.

Let’s take a quick look down the “point release” history of the Web:

Web 0.0 was the first interactions between computers – the beginning of a networked world as it evolved. Crude, and of limited use (by today’s standards), but a huge step change on what was possible with individual computers.

Web 1.0 took the next step and evolved protocols and common language to begin making sense and use the growing “web” of interconnected computers in both the private and public sectors. Data was primarily pushed at you with little intelligence about how and why; and content creation and distribution was the sole domain of the website owner. However it spawned a wealth of business models that managed to take advantage of a new, non-physical channel by which to sell and promote goods and services.

Web 2.0 introduced the concept of a two way web – with users not only reading information, but also writing, contributing, and creating content.

It’s given birth to the business models of co-creation, open innovation networks, crowd sourcing, wisdom of crowd approaches, and enough buzzwords to run a truly interesting and diverse game of “buzzword bingo” at the office. It’s also introduced the concept of data and application mobility and a whole new level of interconnectedness with open standards beginning to evolve and standardize how machines, even from competing brands, talk to each other.

It’s a social, collaborative, and altogether more responsive and interactive web that is no longer just a tool, but a part of us and how we interact with the wider world around us.

So bearing in mind that marketing guys can be as unoriginal as a mullet at a Lynard Skynard concert when it comes to naming new concepts – we know a Web 3.0 is on its way – but what, if anything, will it be?

Here’s a nice little short movie from Dutch think tank EPN which does a nice job of introducing the Web 3.0 concept in relation to what’s gone before:

I don’t know about you, but I’m quite excited to see what the #smchat participants will come up with (Bet you’re jealous now Chris! :p ) – and to better prepare you all to discuss the topic, here’s some background reading on what some people think the Web 3.0, along with a list of some of the questions we’ll try to tackle on Wednesday:

Q20a) What is Web 3.0?

So what will Web3.0 bring us? Will it simply be a natural extension of Web 2.0? Will it just be a marketing gimmick devised by bored marketers looking to revitalize and differentiate a market where almost everything has been branded with a “2.0” by now? Or something totally different?

Alan Cho wrote a pretty nice article on the subject last year that does a good job of amalgamating some of the current arguments out there into a comprehensive prediction of what Web 3.0 might be characterized by, including:

– The advent of a truly intelligent web – the development of contextual searches will finally make sense of the plethora of online information and will eventually spawn intelligent web applications able fully understand what you’re really looking for in natural English.

– New levels of Openness and Increased levels of Interoperability – with users being able to skip from device to device and application to application using one single ID to seamlessly manage their online world – with the web being seen as essentially one really huge database. A worldwide cloud without edges if you will.

– A 3 dimensional web – not only in terms of Second Life type Avatars, but also crossing into the real world and integrating into everything you own. The web becomes an additional layer of information overlaying all aspects of your life, enriching the information flow your eyes process.

Q20b) What will be the hallmarks of a Web 3.0 world and how will it revolutionize the world?

Here’s a more academic view of Web 3.0 by a UCal professor:

Q20c) When will Web 3.0 be officially here?

The phrase “Web 2.0” was apparently coined in 2003 by Dale Dougherty, a vice-president at O’Reilly Media, and the phrase became popular in 2004. Some experts are saying that if the next fundamental change happened in roughly the same time span, Web 3.0 will be knocking on our doors sometime around 2015. Others seem to think that it could be upon us as soon as 2010! Time for all you Nostradamus wannabe’s to get your diving rods out on this one!

Q20d) What are the barriers to W3.0 ?

What’s stopping us from getting there? What are the major barriers that companies and consumers need to overcome? And what are the enabling features?

And finally, what I think is the most important question:

Q20e) What does Web 3.0 mean for businesses?

In this amusing interchange with a journalist, Eric Schmidt of Google gives a brief insight into what he thinks are some of the implications of web 3.0 including an interesting prediction that “Applications will be distributed in a viral manner” in the future.

Want more? Some further suggested reading:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/web-3-concepts-explained/8908/ – has a bunch of presentations from various peoples on what web3.0 might end up being.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-30.htm – a good comprehensive look at all elements of Web 3.0

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2102865,00.asp – A nearby vision of how web 3.0 is evolving (hopefully not with all the annoying ads their site seems to be overridden with though…)

This #SMCHAT will be held on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 1PM EST on Twitter. If you’ve never participated in a Twitter chat before – here’s a useful post by Jeff Hurt that can help you get started!

And if you want to suggest some more questions for us to tackle (time permitting) feel free to post your suggestions in the comments below or via twitter on @bpluskowski – See you on Wednesday!

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: #smchat, collaboration, communities, future, immersive web, innovation, internet, social media, twitter, Web 3.0
Categories : social media

“Follow Me to Profit” or…Business Strategies for a Twittering World

29 05 2009

Twitter continues to be the fastest growing social media platform at the moment – but that growth seems to be primarily led by individuals with varying degrees of success and sustainability. By now I’m sure you all have several friends who have tried Twitter – some love it, others can’t see the point of it – which doesn’t tend to help its credibility as a business tool.

The truth of it is that it can be a very valuable tool in your business arsenal – BUT – unlike other social media tools, it delivers little value until you put a significant amount of effort into developing it. Now when I say “developing” – I don’t mean in the classic “programming lines of code” sense – but rather, in order to be useful to a business – you need a defined strategy, and a sustained input from your part before it begins to yield results back. What that input is, and how long it takes you to put in enough input to yield an output, really depends on which of the main strategies you decide to pursue – and as with most applications that work on the establishment of information flows – there are two main strategies: Push and Pull.

The Pull strategy for Twitter is simple. It revolves around an understanding that what Twitter can provide to you is an unrivalled personalized information source. Whatever niche information requirements you have – chances are, there are people out there posting tweets on it. Find them, follow them, and eventually your information feed begins to deliver a constant source of valuable data – be it important headlines, links to interesting articles, relevant quotes, allowing you to follow conferences remotely, etc etc – the more careful you are in selecting the people you follow – the more relevant that data feed becomes. In pure Pull strategies – you don’t care how many people follow you – it’s irrelevant and secondary to achieving a quality information flow to your desktop. For those of you considering this strategy – Don Smith has written an excellent Twitter 101 Primer for you.

The Push strategy is a little more complex – as what you’re trying to do is be read rather than necessarily do the reading. Maybe you’re a company with a product message to distribute, maybe you’re a consultant trying to build up your personal brand, maybe you’re a store with product specials to sell – whatever you are, the basic concept is that you have a message that you want people to see and read. Here, the name of the game is to amass followers – to get the largest possible following to actively subscribe to, and read, your feed. Whilst that sounds easy – it’s far from that – you have two big challenges ahead of you:

1) to get people to want to subscribe to you and

2) To get subscribers to pay attention to your tweets.

It’s no easy feat to convince thousands, or even millions of people to want to subscribe to you. Unless you’re a chique celebrity like Ashton Kutcher, a regular media outlet like CNN, or a cult brand like Whole Foods or Twitter itself (To see a list of the most followed on Twitter, go to http://twitterholic.com/ ) – you’re not going to get a million people seeking you out to follow you just by being present online and twittering any old rubbish you feel like. That means you have to do it the hard way.

At the recent World Innovation Forum – I had the unusual opportunity to poll a bunch of fellow veteran social media mavens and active twitter users (“twerps” is apparently the preferred group name currently by the way) on what they look for when they decide to follow someone new. The results were interesting with the top three answers being:

1) User name – is it someone I know, want to know, or have heard of in the past.

2) Profile – What do those 160 characters you use to describe yourself on the right hand pane of your Twitter page say about you and what you do? Is it of interest? Are YOU of interest?

3) Your last 20 tweets – what kind of information have you been posting? Is it all self-serving nonsense? Is there value in your flow? How often do you post? Do I want to read more?

So on consideration of these three points – people make the decision as to whether or not to follow you. So how does that translate into an actionable strategy? Here’s how:

1) Understand who you are and what social role you want play online – Decide upon your “social brand” – are you posting as a corporate entity or as an individual? Is this an official feed or a casual conversation? What’s the ultimate goal of this interaction? Is it to sell? To build a community? To build a brand? – use the answers to those questions to come up with a username that expresses your intent and your identity.

2) Describe yourself and your interests – the profile section tells people who don’t recognize your username why they should join you. Who are you really? What are your interests? What kind of posts do you find interesting and will you be posting yourself?

3) Provide value to your community – In order to get people to follow you, and to stay following you – it’s ultimately about content. It’s about providing value to your following. It doesn’t matter if you post several times an hour or once a month – make those posts worthwhile reading, and people will stay subscribed to you.

Don’t tell us about your trip to the bathroom, or the pain of not getting upgraded on your trips across the Atlantic, or that you’re on your way to get your kids from school – trust me, no one wants to hear that on Twitter – use your Facebook account for that kind of interaction (incidentally – by now you should understand that the social media space is complex – and there are different tools for different uses. For example – LinkedIn is all about connecting to business connections and maintaining business networks; Facebook is all about staying connected to personal friends and family; Twitter is about establishing an information flow. Each of these is a different tool, and whilst it’s possible to link your status updates and tweets – it’s usually a mistake to do so in my opinion as what constitutes “useful and valuable content” is very different for each network – and to ignore that when posting, will lead to others ignoring your postings. Ultimately, the point of all social networks is to be heard! Hey – who ever said this was going to be easy?). It doesn’t even matter if the content is not yours ultimately – even a series of posts with links to interesting content can be deemed valuable. Just keep people interested and reading!

There’s another reason to provide valuable content, especially on Twitter – Twitter is a “viral community”. That is, it works on a viral process of message dissemination to the community at large. You post something of value, I see it, and I “Re-Tweet” it – meaning I pass it on to my own subscriber list with appropriate attribution to the original poster. I get kudos points from my community for passing on something valuable, and you get exposure to my subscriber list who may well decide to subscribe to your postings too (assuming you’ve followed the three steps above to create an interesting profile page!). There’s also exists a general concept of mutual following – You follow me because I post good info, and in return I’ll probably follow you too to see what your feed is like. Of course, if you then post a load of rubbish, I’ll probably end up deleting you from the list of people I follow – but that’s up to you to establish the value to me as a reader 🙂

So keep posting value add to your twitter feed, keep following people in your target market as well as those who decide to follow you, and be an active participant in the conversations – and you’ll soon amass a growing “following”. That then gives you the opportunity to slip in marketing, sales, or branding messages into the flow to not only a large audience, but – if you follow the rules above – an actively listening audience – the nirvana of corporate sales and marketing folks!

These are of course, very general strategies – and several other variants exist – I’d love to hear what YOUR Twitter strategies are – or tips you may have for “pushers” and “pullers” – share away!

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: debater, enterprise 2.0, facebook, HSM, librarian, linkedin, minuteman, participation styles, social media, strategy, twitter, World Innovation Forum
Categories : collaboration, social media

“Hey – Didn’t you know it’s not rude to tweet whilst someone talks to you?!” or “How to incorporate user generated content to the conference format”

12 05 2009

This last week I had the pleasure to attend the World Innovation Forum held in NYC’s Nokia Theatre. Although the conference was well stocked with top class speakers, it wasn’t their content and inspiring speeches that really made the conference noteworthy to me – but rather the attendees – or more specifically, a sub section of the attendees and the conversations that were ongoing throughout the speeches. You see – what made this conference unique, at least to me, is that it was the first conference I’ve been to which has explicitly encouraged and exploited the work of social media mavens during the conference itself.

Imagine the scene then – as you walk into a classic theatre type settings – only with two balconies either side marked explicitly for pre-registered bloggers and twitterers ( or should that be “twittees”? :p ) looking not a million miles away from a press box at a sports game.

Once up there, the dedicated space had everything you needed to cover the event live – including plenty of power outlets for laptops, and several dedicated wireless signals to ensure plenty of bandwidth. Outside the conference, several large elongated screens displayed a constantly updated feed showing all the entries in the Twitter-sphere which had been marked with the pre-agreed “#wif09” tag – allowing non-twitters and other mere mortals outside a voyeur-esque view into ongoing virtual conversation. The effect was quite startling with a large amount of content being exchanged in real time during the various speaker’s speeches.

Now, I’ve been playing with Twitter for some time now, albeit with limited ideas of how useful/applicable it was to the business world…until now. Watching and observing the interactions between the people in the room was a revelation, and you could quite clearly distinguish between several different participatory styles/roles of Twitterers:

1) The Minuteman – The Minuteman would primarily be taking notes of the speaker’s talk – including any noteworthy quotes, points, and stats that they might mention. The end effect was to enable people not physically at the conference to follow along, and judging by the response rate, there were several people who were indeed “watching” the conference live in this manner. Personally I also found this role increasingly useful to me – as the rate of information exchange increased, I found it increasingly hard to pay attention to both the conversations taking place online in addition to the material the speaker was sharing. A quick glance along the various minuteman entries gave me an easy way to catch up on what the speaker had been saying whilst I was debating his previous point with other participants online.

2) The Librarian – The librarian role would primarily be adding supporting material and/or other referenced material from the speaker. Maybe it would be a link to a video shown on screen, or a to a report referenced, or to a list of articles recently authored by the speaker – the end result was a steady flow of material enhancing the content being shared by the speaker that greatly added to the value of the speaker’s talk.

3) The Debater – Focusing more on comments, opinions, and shared viewpoints – the debater added unstructured and less formal contributions, essentially contributing a discussion flow that allowed people to openly support/refute arguments made by the speakers in real time as well as provide a more interactive community experience to the group.

The end effect of these three roles was to provide an enhanced experience for both the conference participant, as well as for the remote non-participant – and to further network and connect a group of people interested in the same topics.

Personally I can’t see why all conferences in the future shouldn’t be organized in a similar vein, and I have to take my hat off to HSM Americas, the conference organizer, for taking on such an innovative approach to an Innovation conference. Bearing in mind the buzz created by the invited bloggers to this event, it’s sure to increase interest in attendance next year, and thus benefit them in the long term. The whole effort was also sponsored by Pitney Bowes who definitely got some very positive buzz and attention out of the effort – so well done to them too for a very open minded and innovative approach to attention marketing.

If you haven’t already, make sure to do a twitter search on the #wif09 tag and read through the contributions. One of my blogging colleagues at the event, Stefan Lindegaard was talking about the changing nature of the conference market in an increasingly digital, global, and economically challenged world. I don’t know about whether or not some of his ideas around the death of the conference industry will ever play out – but by adding value enhancing innovations like this, the conference industry certainly seems to me to be prolonging its lifespan substantially.

For those of you interested in following some of the participants in the #wif09 event – here’s the partial list I have of active Twitterers at the event:

@AndreaMeyer @YourBoot @HelenWalters @georgelevy @Jeffhurt @FHInnovation @dixitboy @innovate @chrisflanagan @ReneeCallahan @katiekonrath @stu @stevetodd @ssusman @bhc3 @twinnovator @ctcoco @pinnovation @PBConnect @wearewhatif @vidales @wrighth1 @hsmamericas @lindegaard @donpeppers @Pauldunay @dominicbasulto @LeftTheBox @Stu and of course, if you’re not already following me on @bpluskowski, shame on you :p

If I’ve accidentally missed your name out please add it to the comment section below) many have since put up blog posts on the event too and are definitely worth looking at in more detail!

Do you agree with these viewpoints? Have something you can add to improve them? As always, would love to hear from you!

Comments : 10 Comments »

Categories : collaboration, social media

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