The Social Organization

Want Complex Behavior Change? Lower Your Standards

A couple of years ago I turned 40. Running a mile made me feel like I was likely to have a heart attack - it was more than wheezing, it was painful. I realized that I was at a precipice. I could either get in shape or spend the rest of my life couch surfing. That was not the kind of mother I wanted to be. It was not the kind of human I wanted to be.

Professionally, it was also clear that people and organizations had to change and adapt to our new connected and technology-enabled world. To effectively help my clients, I needed to really dig in and understand how to create a complex habit change.

So I started to run. On my 40th birthday. Painfully. Slowly. Incrementally.

These days I'm running 4-6 miles at a clip. That astounds me. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done that I have choosen to do. There are plenty of both silly and legitimate "excuses" to not run on a daily basis. The weather. A crazy tough schedule between running a business and my daughter's daycare schedule. The pile of laundry. Travel. The feeling of selfishness that I get every time I leave my challenging toddler with my husband yet again for a long weekend run. The stack of client work left to do. I have had to re-commit to running every time I lace up.

I've learned some things along the way about behavior change:

• Before you can change, you need people around you who think you are awesome.  Instead of looking at everything you do critically, they see and encourage your potential. I happened upon this - I found a boss, Susan Feldman at IDC, and my husband, Ted, about the same time. Before I met them, I didn't think there was any reason someone would think I was exceptional so I didn't object to being treated poorly. It turns out everyone is exceptional - and everyone deserves to be surrounded by at least a few people who understand that and encourage it. It is so critical that you find those people or be that person for someone else. Our organizations do a crap job of doing this for us - you must seek those people out yourself. By being with people who support you, you will start to believe that maybe you can change for the better - and you want to because they think it's possible.

• Reading The Power of Habit clarified some fundamentals needed for habit change: the mechanics of the change (what you will do differently), the belief that you can change and a community that supports and reinforces the change. This is one of the reasons I post my running to Facebook - to create positive social reinforcement from my community and make myself accountable to them. Find people who have made the same change you are looking to make - it is incredibly powerful.

• Micro changes (fractals again!) is what ultimately leads to big change. B.J. Fogg's Tiny Habits initiative got me started down this path but Beth Dunn gave this awesome presentation on Writing Like a God this year at Inbound13. You have to practice the change, in little bits, every day and you have to lower your expectations in order to do so. For me, I ran like sh*t for a long, long time. And that enabled me to run OK now.

• New research has discovered that willpower is a lot like a muscle. What that means is that learning to change one complex behavior makes it easier to change other behaviors. When we practice committing to a small change every day, over time we can increase the commitment. Related, Duhigg talks about keystone habits in The Power of Habit that then leads to secondary habit changes. For me, being a successful runner has reinforced the fact that I can choose my own destiny. I've let a lot of life happen to me. It hasn't been all bad but it has made me very reactive. The practice of setting a hard and very individual goal reinforced the belief that I can do the same thing in other areas of my life - and that belief is a large contributor to successful behavior change in the future.

• You need a trigger. For me, my 40th birthday was a milestone that caused me to wake up and decide that my current behavior was no longer acceptable. Your triggers will be different but ultimately it is as simple and as complex as making the decision to do something different.

• It is a long-term investment. Forget the 21 day rule of thumb that says if you do something for 21 days it becomes habitual. That was not the case for me. Over the last two years I've fallen off the wagon and got back on a few different times. I still don't feel like the change is so entrenched that it will automatically persist. I still have to make a commitment every time I go out, although it has gotten easier.

Reflecting on this at an organizational level, I also have a few thoughts:

• Our hiring and professional development structures are horrid. Supportive, not judgement-based mechanisms, are what we need for optimal achievement. That means the way we think about measuring education and training is all wrong too.

• The idea of the executive is outmoded. We need to think more in terms of coaches, not owners. Still incredibly powerful because they enable others, not because they amass riches themselves.

• The myth of the individual star is also wrong. I achieve because of the people around me - and hopefully vise versa - and my success is also their success. There should be acknowledgement and attribution of that. Instead because we are judged critically and individually, we are set up to compete against each other. In a competitive environment, we claim as much attribution as possible, which creates toxic cultures and arrests the very behavior that will make the organization or group radically more successful.

• Organizations need to accept people practicing and doing certain things like crap for awhile. This may be even harder to accept than failure. With behavior change you cannot fail fast because there is no failure, there is just crappy attempts until you become better.

My personal journey has been revealing, thought provoking and incredibly rewarding because I know now that I CAN do it - whatever it is. And that is worth much more than a few more hours of sleep... although I could use those too. I'm also starting to see much of what makes our organizational cultures toxic - and I hope my insight helps others see it too.

Have you changed a complex habit? What did you learn about yourself and your environment? I would love to hear!

Title credit goes to Beth Dunn.

Heading to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Why You Should Too

It feels like I've been going to the Enterprise 2.0 conference for a very long time. In reality, I first attended in June of 2008. It is when the enterprise market was just starting to pay attention to Twitter and I was on a microblogging panel with Laura Fitton, Chris Brogan,  Dennis Howlett & Loren Feldman... the full range of sunny to overcast in demeanor. It was a great panel but boy does it feel like a lot of time has passed! Chris is now a super star. Laura started OneForty.com and I started The Community Roundtable.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference has evolved just as much. Collectively we no longer need to discuss what microblogging is and, in fact, it has morphed into just another feature in a wide portfolio of social products. Like the market, the Enterprise 2.0 conference does an excellent job and evolving its topics and expanding as the market needs have changed. Last fall, they offered me the opportunity to help define the community management track and in Boston in June, the conference will have two tracks on community management - one focused internally and one focused externally.

Community management has quickly moved from an unclear activity to a strategic imperative for a market that has seen a tipping point in the use of social technologies for a wide range of business processes. I'll be kicking off the track by talking about the role community management has in the success of any social business initiative and why businesses of all sizes are working to figure out what community management means for them. I'm please too that the track will be full of case studies from companies activity using community approaches: Intuit, Cisco, Spiceworks, ArchSight and others will talk about what communities do for them and what new risks are introduced as a result.

If you are interested in how social tools and approaches are changing organizations - either from the IT or business angle, this is one of my recommended must attend conferences. Join me in Boston!

Disclaimer: I am on the Advisory Board of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

Photo credit to Stephen Collins.

 

What SXSW Taught Me About Building A Serendipity Engine

I just got back from the annual festival of musicians, geeks, engineers, film makers and, increasingly, marketers.  It is a great stew of people. This is my second trip and I thought that my trip two years ago gave me a pretty good foundation for navigating the event this year. However, like all complex systems it adapts and changes. 

This year was roughly 40% bigger than two years ago. That's a lot of change. I found the serendipity engine that I was so in awe of two years ago was not running at optimal capacity for me this year. It led me to some interesting conclusions:

• Productive serendipity requires boundaries - bigger is not necessarily better
• Serendipity requires unscheduled time by a large percentage of participants
• Serendipity requires aggregation

There was a lot of serendipity at SXSW this year - I looked up from drinks at one point and Ze Frank was standing in front of me. I love his stuff and that was serendipity but not really the productive variety - I'm more of a fan girl than someone who is interested in collaborating. Maybe I should have said hi but I left him in peace and continued the conversation I was having. 

The people that I might more likely collaborate with were harder to find. With more people generally, those specific individuals made up a smaller percentage of the total population. Also because the conference was so large, panels and events were dispersed all over town with few consolidation points.  Lastly and because the industry is growing, people were busy and had packed schedules so there were fewer people with the time and flexibility to mill around.

The social business lessons of SXSW this year was that aggregating a network that is not too small but not too big, giving them a catalyst, and then giving them the free time to mingle are all critical elements to productive serendipity.

That said, I managed to have some fantastic conversations, catch up with old friends, meet new people, and attend some great gatherings - it is no surprise that David Armano and Aaron Strout throw some of the best parties around. Thanks to all of you that made SXSW another great event.

 

Photo by Amancay Maahs

Content Bonanza... Just Not Here

I've been busy lately... but just not on this blog. But if you are interested, here are some of the things I've been thinking about and doing:

• Measure, But Measure Wisely
• Consistency & Translation in Community Management
• Community Is A Management Approach, Not Just A Role

I was also asked recently to contribute on Radian6's, Helpstream's & Adam Cohen's blog

• Helpstream Interview
• Radian6: Online Communities Are Like Dinner Parties
• Radian6: It's Not All Mindless Chatter
• A Thousand Cuts: Marketing Hot Seat

I was thrilled to be asked to participate in Valeria Maltoni's annual eBook project, particularly since she pulled together such a fascinating group of people - Jason Baer, Olivier Blanchard, Danny Brown, Mark Earls, Rachel Happe, Gavin Heaton, Jackie Huba, Jonathan MacDonald, Amber Naslund, Shannon Paul. While I know of or have met many of them, this is my first time collaborating with them. The result was a great combination of perspectives on Marketing in 2010 (post & eBook).

Lastly, there have been a couple of webinars that I've participated in:

• Awareness - The Community Maturity Model with Adam Zawel of The Palladium Group
• Social Media Today - Adding Value with Online Community panel discussion with Maggie Fox, Francois Gossieaux, and Neil Beam. (Recording coming...)

Plenty of things to peruse, or not, over the holidays.  I believe I'll be eating gingerbread :)

What's New in 'Social"

I was on a panel this morning with Mike Lewis and David Armano for Social Media Breakfast NYC titled Business is Social, Now What? (Thanks to Selina McCusker for organizing).  Maybe it is that we are at the end of conference season and I've been hearing a lot about social media, social software, E2.0, and social business lately and I'm a bit jaded (and yes, I've been contributing my fair share to this general conversation). But I struggled with what to say that would really cause the audience to think differently or provide inspiration that hasn't been said before.

What is really new? Over the last year - in terms of concepts - not much actually. We are at a different phase of the market right now. The phase of the market where the rubber hits the road. The phase where people are taking the concepts and applying them, tweaking how they apply them, and figuring out what works for them. Those use cases are not particularly generalizable because every business has its own strategy, culture, imperatives, etc. This phase of the market is full of hard work, not 'new'. Part of the challenge for event organizers is finding companies willing to share their 'experiments' - very few companies are confident that they are doing things right... or they've figured out something that works phenomenally well and consider it a differentiator that they don't particularly care to share.

Are conference and panels still useful?  Yes - they help give us encouragement, spark a slightly different way to think about or communicate an issue or opportunity, and give us critical access to others who are working on the same issues. If you are looking for the next new, new thing though you will probably be disappointed. Good business is about getting the fundamentals of a discipline right - making strategic decisions, creating plans, testing, re-working, negotiating, training, and project management. It's no different in the 'social' space. So dig in, this is not going to be something that passes quickly - and start looking for specific, tactical take-aways that you can get from events, not big A Ha ideas.

Enterprise 2.0 Recap

Wow - Enterprise 2.0 is not done yet but I am. Despite the potential for more great content this morning, I had to step away from the swirl.

I also must confess that in the blur of catching up with old friends and colleagues and meeting both new 'old' Twitter friends and new people, I didn't attend very many of the sessions... which is a shame because I missed some good ones. I did make it to a few panels that I thought were particularly interesting, however, and well worth the time. So for me, the value of Enterprise 2.0 was very skewed toward the people vs. the content. Below are my highlights:

Themes

- The debate over "Is this a revolution" vs. "Is this an evolution" rages on. It doesn't really interest me other than to say that 'revolution' is a scary word if it is happening to you so... I don't think it necessarily furthers the cause when talking to people about change.

- I was on a panel last year about Twitter in the enterprise - this year the subject seemed to infiltrate many of the panels and yet still a lot of discussion about its benefits and what its value is. I heard two interesting use cases - one was that a company I spoke with introduced Yammer under the radar and had seen significant adoption (thousands of people) and the other from one of the vendors (maybe SocialCast?) who feeds in data streams from enterprise apps so employees get alerts and notifications in their individual streams, side by side with conversational chatter.

- One of the more interesting things that I heard came out of a discussion with someone at IBM about the need for large enterprises to fund 'marketing labs' the same way tech companies fund pure research labs on the technology side. The next day on a panel with Allstate, Jet Blue, & Humana it turned out that in the case of Humana and Allstate at least, their teams are separate and have more flexibility than the core marketing teams - along with their own IT support. I think this a great trend for large enterprises to figure out the new communications environment.

- Another thing that I heard - from both Humana & Comcast - was an awareness of their need to become, in essence, product managers for software solutions. Instead of taking the technology at face value and using it in the way it was presented to them, they are both thinking about how they want to manage... and figuring out how to get their solutions to adapt to those needs. Both consider themselves to be in the application development business as a way to support their core business processes.

- Semantics are tricky. I spoke to a woman at a large services business struggling to define what a group/community/network was. There are user generated groups, well defined groups that align with lines of business, affinity groups, functional groups - all with potentially tens of thousands of employees. How do you distinguish? I don't have a great answer but I know she is not the only one struggling with this topic.

Quotes

Nate Nash "ROI is kinda like envisioning your funeral: Who'd show up? What happens when you don't have it?" via @rawn

@stoweboyd "In a risky economy, people are willing to take more risks because they seem less risky...relatively speaking"

@Armano "If your company is 1.0 and it's using 2.0 tools externally, it's going to be transparent about how 1.0 it really is"

@MikeLefebvre: This morning I'm beginning to gather one male and one female of every species of animal on the planet. Just in case [this was not in particular reference to Enterprise 2.0 but it nicely summed up the weather situation in Boston!]

@benphoster from Allstate talking about trying to avoid "A cure looking for a disease"

"Email domesticates thinkers" [sorry, missed the attribution here - but I believe it was the CEO of BrainPark]

@comcastcares "We need to get back to Helpful1.0, not Sales2.0" & "You have to earn the right to sell to customers"

People

I can't begin to document all the fascinating discussions that I had but this event was great for catching up, reaching out, and connecting.

I got to reconnect with: @mwalsh @goodridge @schneidermike @rawn @marketingprofs @sirmichael @geechee_girl @amcafee @peterkim @laurelatoreilly @elsua @chrisbrogan @srog @dhaslam @johncass @jeffcutler @MaThurrell @justinmwhitaker @bostonmarketer  @robertcollins @joselinmane @gradontripp @sarahbourne @CarolineDangson @mlevitt @AmberCadabra

I got to meet (so fun!): @comcastcares @dhinchcliffe @stales @stoweboyd @theRab @cflanagan @KMHobbie @benphoster @itsinsider @marciamarcia @DanYork @Armano @dougcornelius @michaelido @cbensen @gialyons @lehawes @Greg2dot0 @Ed_Sullivan @danlarsen @amber_rae  @cmajor @GeorgeDearing @wacom @robincarey @maggiefox @jyarmis @Matthew_T_Grant @jamiepappas @mwthomasSCRM @robhoward @MikeG514

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch but these people are what made the event fantastic - whether talking shop, discussing The Community Roundtable, or fooling around - see some fun Twitpics: Fun with micro-celebrities @comcastcares & @jimstorer; Three stages of hair growth; snorting shrimp (they were that good!) - and some pics from our Crab Tweetup.

New Terms

Breakfast Bingo - when you're in a hotel lobby looking for someone that you have never met but have arranged to have breakfast with... you could play Lunch Bingo and Dinner Bingo but the alliteration is not as good. Reminds me of the children's book "Are You My Mother?"

Twitter Litter - any superfluous use of Twitter, specifically pertaining to extraneous RTing or bots.

Oy - so much in just three days. What a blast... but glad I'll have a few months to recover until the next big event!

Flurry of Events

I've been working on a number of events and presentations. The good news? Many are virtual so you can join.

The first - a crew of marketing, social media, communications, and community people from Boston are running a series of webinars. Robert Collins, Frank Days, Jeff Cutler, and I will spar on whether this whole community thing is worth it. This won't be your typical presentation but rather a lively conversation (Frank is the skeptic BTW!)

The first - The Skeptical CMO and Friends - The Value of Building Your Online Community - will be next Tuesday, May 19th. To sign up, go here.

Secondly, I'll be presenting 8 Competencies to Socializing Your Organization hosted by KickApps on May 27th at 3:30pm EST. For Info and to sign up, go here.

And finally, The Community Roundtable is ready for lauch. Our initial roundtable will be June 3rd. We will be running roundtables for our members every other week. Our roundtable schedule has a complete list of experts and topics such as the state of community management, effectively developing and using eBooks, online video production, IP and legal issues, how to use twitter effectively in the enterprise, and more. For more information about membership (no, it won't be free but it will be worth it - I promise), go here.

For those of you who are not members of The Community Roundtable and are in the Boston area, Jim and I will be hosting TheCR Live! every other Friday for lunch at John Harvard's in Harvard Square. First one will be on June 12th.

SXSW '09 Retrospective

If you are just not that into the whole SXSW navel gazing...no need to read further :) I thought I would recap my impressions as a newbie and someone who was slightly intimidated about the whole thing...I tweeted before I left "I fear being swept up by rapid podcasters and forced to create content" - I wasn't that far off! SXSW was three months of interesting conversations and socializing compressed into three days with a healthy dose of both business and just plain fun.

People - people are really the heart of the SXSW experience and my first roll of the dice did not disappoint. In fact, I missed most of the conference tracks in favor of talking with people. I had both a ton of people that I wanted to reconnect with as well as a lot of people I know virtually that I wanted to meet. Sprinkle in some other folks and a few "celebrities" and there was never a dull moment.

Friends I got to reconnect with: @aaronstrout @heatherjstrout @adamcohen @billjohnston @jeffcutler @peterkim @jenrobinson @seanodmvp @jakemckee - not to mention hanging out with Boston people I see more regularly like @jimstorer @mikelangford ...and thank goodness for @pistachio who I saw at the registration desk and skillfully steered me in the direction of the blogger lounge where I could recover from my attack of over-stimulation.

People I knew virtually but had never met: @scottmonty @lizstauss @davidalston @yojibee @jljohansen @bryanperson @ckieff @bobpearson1845 @mvermut @ayeletb @bethharte @sirmichael

People I didn't know but got to meet: @just_kate @kimhaynes @lavannamartin @DougWick @peterfasano @natanyap @smcdonaldatdell @twalk @kyleflaherty @conej and many others...I did a somewhat horrific job of keeping track of names & Twitter IDs so apologies if I missed you here - it's all a bit of a blur.

The hot tickets (some of whom are friends but their status transcends that at #SXSW) that I tripped across:  @pistachio @loic @jowyang @JasonFalls @briansolis @stevegarfield @conniereece @guykawasaki @scobleizer @chrisbrogan

I was also really happy to get the chance to cheer on @aaronstrout (as well as other ex-Bostonians @bryanperson & @kyleflaherty) during the Texas Statesmen Social Media awards...well deserved all around.

Fun - the second piece of SXSW is really just about having a good time and that obviously overlaps quite a bit with the people. I'm a little bit of an introvert so I am probably not the best example of people who have fun at SXSW but I managed to do OK. Friends like Aaron Strout, Mike Langford, Heather Strout, Jim Storer, and John Johanson were kind enough to let me draft their peloton while cruising around Austin during the party hours on Saturday and Sunday night. On Saturday night we caravaned out to The Salt Lick - an Austin institution - and devoured heaping plates of BBQ, German coleslaw, and beans. On Sunday evening, Guy Kawasaki was kind enough to invite me and a couple of friends in to the Alltop party despite showing up unannounced - Guy throws a hell of a party - replete with hay, cowboys, and some very good music & BBQ.  He was announcing the launch of My Alltop, among other things, and being as generous as ever with his time and attention.

Random - While I certainly didn't head down to Austin thinking that I would try to do anything other than the SXSW circuit, Lavanna Martin flattered me by asking to paint my portrait and invited me to another Austin institution - The Spider House - to do so.  On a lovely spring morning I sat on the funky patio of Spider House chatting amiably with Lavanna and "Spider House Paul" while sipping some wonderful coffee and having my portrait painted. It was a great break from the bustle of downtown and was a slice of Austin that I appreciated seeing - and I really liked the artistic results. Lavanna is working on a series of cafe portraits that represent the tech and online culture with the idea that she may visit tech hot spots around the country doing a number of series. I love the idea and suggested that she also incorporate the art into a multi-media display or as part of tech events. Regardless of where she goes with this - I love her style and she posts much of her work on her blog, I Stare at People. If you are in Austin and also like the idea - get in touch with her!

And, although it was a vlogger and not a podcaster, I did get swept up into participating in an interesting content project. Crystal Beasley came up with an ingenious idea after struggling to come up with one interesting question that she could ask everyone and thinking that it is much harder to find the right question than the right answer. Crystal created a game of vlog tag whereby the person tagged had to answer the question of the tagger and then formulate a question for their tagee - in that way creating a running string of video linking one person to the next. Really interesting concept and I can't wait to see the result - despite my aversion to participating in the media portion of social media ;)

There are other random things that happen all over SXSW but really too many to mention...the green kilted man, the superhero being interviewed...papa smurf. That is just how it rolls.

Business - Jim Storer & I are working on a new business idea and part of the reason to attend SXSW was to get reaction and feedback to the idea.  The business? An online roundtable for social media and community practitioners to help them in their day to day world which will include weekly programming, peer matching, online events with experts, peer support, vendor/consultant lists and evaluations, and curated content from around the web. While we will limit the roundtable both in size and to practitioners we will also be looking for sponsors who are looking for unbiased market research, a chance to present to roundtable members, opportunities to be spotlighted, and a chance to provide input into programming and surveys.   More about the concept? Visit http://www.community-roundtable.com

We heard some interest from potential participants, interest from potential sponsors and a lot of opportunities to work with experts and consultants that a roundtable would be a good compliment to their products and/or services. So with that encouragement, we will continue our planning. Stay tuned for more information on specifics.

Meanwhile I am also doing some work as an independent analyst and writing a landscape report on the social software market and got the chance to catch up with a couple of the vendors at the show although I must admit, did not get into many of the details while I had BBQ slathered across my face (have you ever seen a Texas-sized beef rib?!?)

Would I recommend SXSW? It depends but it was definitely worth it for me. Want to see some great photos? See Jim Storer's photo stream.

I Hope I See You There!

I'm excited - I'm attending a few upcoming events that I am looking forward to.

SXSW Interactive - in Austin, March 14-17th; tweeting

The Business of Community Networking - in Boston, March 24-26; blogging

PRSA Digital Impact Conference - New York, April 30-May 1; speaking

If you are attending any of these events please drop me a note (rachel at thesocialorganization.com) or catch up with me on Twitter.

Other possible conferences on my roster: Community 2.0 & Enterprise 2.0

It's Good to Feel Like a Kid

 On this particularly grim Friday after a long week of financial anxiety and the cascading effect that it has on almost everything else from how we feel about politics to our own security and future, I just want to talk about having fun.

Last night I got a special treat.  1 - My husband and I donated to a really worthy cause this summer - the Pan-Mass Challenge - and that felt really good since it was a way to proactively combat the disease that took my father and  2 - In return, the Red Sox donated special tickets to us which meant we got to take two friends and watch the start of the game from the infield, sit in the Green Monster for three innings, and then watch the rest of the game from really good seats. 

Having grown up in Boston, the legend of the Red Sox and Fenway looms really large so this was a once-in-a-lifetime event that just tickled us to death.  It made us all feel like we were six again and going to our first game. The toys are different - the boys had their fancy cameras - but the feeling was the same.  We got to spend time on the field before the game, three innings hanging around in the Green Monster peering through slats to watch the game...and at after all that the Red Sox won on a beautiful fall evening at Fenway. 

It was a great reminder of how to savor the moment, enjoy friends, and set aside the worries of the day.  We could all use a little more of that these days.

And I have to add a special note regarding the Red Sox community relations team.  Last night our host, Kate, was great and made sure we got the best experience possible. Earlier in the year we also had a problem with tickets and the Red Sox staff went out of their way to help us get the tickets we thought we had purchased through the website. It was an example of great customer relations in a situation where the Red Sox really don't *need* to spend the extra time and money to go out of their way.  And that is a community relations lesson we should all take to heart.