The Social Organization

The Social Business Log Jam

Working in the social business field has become a frustrating place - the field is littered with examples and advice that should be a distraction but instead has become the focus of the market conversation. What's worse, is that the people who everyone is looking to as the innovators (and therefore experts) don't really get it either. A recent article in The Atlantic, Why the Social Media Revolution Is About to Get a Little Less Awesome, demonstrated this to me in spades. First of all, I do believe Facebook doesn't get part of the revolution that they created for the reasons I wrote about in Facebook's Black Ice. However, to then extend that logic and say that a phenomenal customer experience is antithetical to a successful business model is, well, a bit inane in my opinion.

What is wrong with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and a raft of other social networks and the thinking behind them is that they are focused on scale, not value creation. The simple act of connecting a lot of people and then expecting value to flow from that is definitely a 'build it and they will come' mentality that from my experience does not work. Facebook is experiencing on a large scale what I caution clients about all the time on a smaller scale - building scale before you have created an environment that entices people to co-create and changes behaviors typically leads to a quick spike and then a cliff - because it looses peoples' interest.

But because of the scale, these networks have sucked the energy out of the market and distracted people into building Facebook pages and Twitter accounts but without any strategic thought around their business model, their relationships with different constituent bases and how these tools might impact the cost and returns of those relationships. So instead, organizations are paying consultants a lot of money to compare how many Twitter followers they have as compared to their competitors instead of realizing that we live in an environment of abundance and competition is no longer the yardstick by which you should be measuring yourself.

This strategic thinking is stuck in the industrial age and creating a huge log jam in the social business market. Social strategists are doing their best to stay afloat and on top of the logs but they seem to keep piling up. Instead of worrying about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or whatever other new social network has popped up, we should be starting our conversations with questions like:

• What unique value does your organization create, or in other words what value is core to the business?
• What value creation is outsourced or could be outsourced because it is not unique or core?
• Who do we need to help us create that value and what type of relationship with them is ideal for efficient value creation?
• What types of relationships do we have with different constituent groups today? Is there trust? Is it contextual or absolute? Would a better relationship generate more value? 
• Where do these constituent groups interact? What do they say about us when we are not in the room?
• How can we build the relationships we want to have with these different groups in the most efficient way possible?

But no one is having these conversations with executives. Instead we are telling them they should blog and when they go glassy eyed or object we try to convince them why blogging is so important. No wonder this isn't working. And yet, these same executives are the ones we need to support social business initiatives in order to really transform our organizations. And some of them, despite our best collective efforts to make this about technology, are getting it.

At The Community Roundtable, we are kicking off a new research effort called The Social Executive to try and learn from both the executives who 'get it' and actively participate themselves as well as those who object so that we can understand how to better demonstrate the strategic benefits of social business in a way that is meaningful to them. So that we can all stop talking about The Twitter and all start building real relationships with each other. That will be a relief to everyone and it will allow the rest of the world to take us seriously.

Social Media's Pull: People Want Comfort More Than Food

We don't often like to compare ourselves to children or monkeys but the truth is that we're not that different.  As adults, we often hide our needs, desires, and disappointments but when looking to understand the behavior of adults, it is useful to watch children and animals because they have no artifice masking their instincts.  One of the most powerful and heartbreaking experiments ever done was by Harry Harlow on how baby monkeys form attachments and how important comfort was to their existence.  The video below shows that baby monkeys will take comfort over food - in effect starving themselves in order to feel OK.

I can hardly watch the video but the point is that animals and people (we're not biologically all that different after all) will choose something comforting over a more obvious need like food.  To me, this gets at the heart of why the social interactions facilitated by social media and social software can make such a big difference to the individuals that interact with organizations.  Individuals will flock to organizations that offer comfort (personalized attention) even if the 'food' - i.e. salary, product cost, partnering costs - does not make economic sense for the individual. 

For organizations, this has a couple of implications:

• Resources and time spent on effective personalized experiences with employees and customers will see the returns in the form of higher margins, lower operating costs, and increased retention rates.
• The recent conversation about applying business process and integrating 'social' into existing processes should be very carefully pursued.  If the social element becomes just as standardized as current processes, it won't have much impact.  The business processes themselves must become more flexible and adaptable to individuals which is now possible because social software reduces the cost to support that flexibility.

The issue many of us have is responding to requests to quantify how much comfort is enough. In essence, we are being asked to put a dollar amount on feelings. If you have any suggestions on how to do that, I'm all ears. In the absence of being able to do that, each organization will need to experiment (which, I'm sorry to say, will cost some money) and turn the dial up and down until they find what balance of 'comfort' and 'food' works best for them given their unique market and the unique constraints of their organization.

The Social Marketing & Sales Funnel

Social marketing does some interesting things to what we traditionally think of as the marketing funnel. You know - the one where we generate a lot of content and events, then keep pushing more content in front of people until we finally sic sales people on the lead.  It has led to some fairly dysfunctional behavior - both inside organizations and with leads.  A game of cat and mouse ensues until someone gives up. Exhausting. And expensive.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Content and social marketing has given us another option - one which, frankly, I'm pretty relieved to see. In this scenario we also produce a lot of content but in more formats, often in smaller pieces (although not exclusively), and we do it much more frequently. The majority of that content gets openly published for all to see.  Prospective customers can lurk and lurk without being noticed - and engage in the way and amount they want, when they are ready. It doesn't mean we abandon email marketing and other things but the focus is on pushing content out that provides some value vs. banging on the 'buy now' drum.

This creates a pretty dramatic change to the width and the length of the marketing and sales funnel:

1. All the world's a stage. Leads are everywhere but they may be close to impossible to track.
2. Not tracking unqualified leads is a good thing: It is expensive and there is such a high percentage of them that are not interested or ready to become customers that companies typically waste a lot of time, energy, and money trying to convert them. 
3. Without tracking early leads, the marketing organization has to wait for leads to emerge and declare themselves. This will drive them crazy... but reduce overall costs. It requires a very different mindset and over time the amount of content vs. leads will be relatively consistent but... it requires giving up control of knowing exactly who will emerge and when.
4. Because you are giving leads more control over when and how they engage, the effectiveness of each conversation is higher because they are ready and interested - i.e. the holy grail - they are engaged.
5. Because in many cases (this is not true of all products) prospects can get the majority of what they need to make a purchasing decision without a conversation, when they do reveal themselves time to close can happen extremely quickly.
6. A much higher percentage of leads that contact you proactively are ready to buy. This clarity is refreshing and efficient. And wonderfully cost effective.
7. You don't end up convincing someone they need your product only to find out after the sale that it doesn't really work for them or they aren't ready for it and therefore they don't use it - both of which cause them to be unhappy and difficult, which is expensive for the company and potentially damaging in the long run if they choose to share their feelings publicly.

By letting your content be free you can increase the width of your lead funnel but you may not be able to know by how much and you can dramatically shorten the funnel.  And, yes, it may take leads a little longer in the beginning but when they are ready, they are ready and you'll end up with much more constructive work to do - with customers that really appreciate what you have to offer.

Ahh - feels like a cold glass of spring water.

If I Started Today

 Chris Brogan recently published a book Social Media 101 and in his post about it he linked back to a post he wrote over a year ago called "If I Started Today" and I thought it was an interesting topic to pick up.

I often talk to people who are facing this huge social ecosystem but don't participate in it yet - it looks complex and hard to understand and it can be.  When I started experimenting with social tools, they weren't this big thing - and they were mostly used by individuals and very small businesses with a technical proclivity. Back in the 2000-2003 period, no one was using Friendster for business and MySpace was becoming the rage. Blogs and wikis were not entirely new but they definitely did not have mainstream attention. Today that has changed completely with the explosion Facebook, Twitter, Ning, and a lot of proprietary social software applications used by businesses. Blogs are THE mainstream news source in some markets.

In this environment, where do you start? Particularly if you feel that you are late to the party and don't know the rules?  Here's my advice:

1) Familiarize yourself with social tools and outlets.  Identify a topic you care about to guide your exploration - say shoe supply chains for example. Over on Slideshare it's amazing what you can find. On Twitter that term didn't result in much but 'shoe business' did. Over at The Community Roundtable, we put together a set of resources to help explore this social ecosystem - Getting Your Feet Wet in Social Media.  Books like Chris' can definitely help in this regard. 

2) Find people to watch.  Find a few people that are leaders in your market or industry but then look to some of the leading bloggers and Twitterati as well.  A few suggestions include Liz Stauss, Aaron Strout, Jeremiah Owyang, Francine McKenna, Adam Cohen, Laura Fitton - you'll find that they are all remarkably approachable and human and yet also do a great job of talking business. Take some time to just observe how they interact and share information - they are great models.

3) Develop a simple social search plan. What terms, concepts, people, and companies do you care about? Use a RSS reader and search tools to scan that set of terms regularly.  You will get a great sense of the volume of information being shared, the most active people in your space, and which tools/channels are used most frequently.

4) Dip your toe in.  I started an anonymous blog way back when... just to see what blogging was all about.  If you are unsure of what 'voice' you want to have online (and yes, it is a legitimate question despite people who say that personal and work are colliding), there are plenty of ways to make your initial forays in the social space protected. Use Facebook and make sure you turn off search engine indexing and limit your security/permission settings to your friends. Make your Twitter stream private. Put a log-in on your blog. There is nothing wrong with that while you are still figuring it all out.

5) Determine how this social thing adds value for you and/or your business. Once you've done some experimenting, you'll start to get a sense of how you might use it to achieve a goal.  When I was doing my first anonymous blog, the goal was to learn and experiment. When I started using a blog internally in our marketing department in 2002, it was to centralize and organize the storage of information for our team. When I started this blog and started out on Twitter it was to do research, drive awareness, and build relationships with people in my market. On our corporate blog, the goal is to drive awareness and educate with the goal of establishing our credibility.  Knowing what you want to achieve will help you make the best decisions about how and how much you use social tools but admittedly when I first started out I hadn't articulated those goals as such - I am just an explorer by nature. So experiment until you identify other goals.

6. Get out there. Ultimately, you will only learn if you step out into the fray.  Open up your blog or Twitter stream and join the party.  You may make some mis-steps but most people are remarkably forgiving and you can only learn how to use social tools well - and what their benefits are - with a little scale.  Part of the value of social tools is their serendipity - once you start talking about something that really interests you, you will be amazed at who finds you... and THAT is where you start to get some incredible A HA moments about these tools.  Their ability to organically connect people in what seems like slightly mysterious ways is partly what is so remarkable.

7.   Give back and promote others.  This is the best way I know of to gain respect and with it influence. It doesn't matter how many people follow you - it's about the percentage of those people that follow you who are likely to share what you are doing that matters. Your followers will be more likely to do that if you do the same for them.

8. Have some fun.  Don't take this all so seriously - even if you are doing it for business. The best conversation starters often have absolutely nothing to do with business.  See my post "It's Not All Mindless Chatter" or Jim Storer's photo series with @redsoxgnome.  If you can put a smile on someone's face, they will likely remember you - at that is the first step in building a relationship.

Social Software - The Value is Not Really About the Conversation

Heresy you say? Your company really doesn't care about your idle chit chat? Well...they may but there is something much larger at play here and like many things it comes down to simple economics.

Content has always driven exposure and conversation. Remember Coke's Teach the World to Sing?

Remember the Pillsbury Bake Off? Old school social media. The problem is not that all of a sudden we've discovered content marketing. The problem is...it was friggin' expensive.

Think about all of the different types of content and how you would have presented it to the world ten years ago:

Documents: Someone wrote them in MSWord, sent them around to 20 different people to fact-check, edit, add to, comment on, etc. which probably took about a month and created a headache for someone to parse through even if all 20 people did use their review tool correctly which, of course, they didn't. Once the text was finalized it had to go to a publishing group to ensure it used the correct language, formatting, etc. based on company policies. That group would then publish the document to the corporate document management system so that edits could be tracked. Then you had to get the person in the web publishing group to post it to the website - maybe putting the request into a ticket tracking system to accomplish. After a couple of days or a week (faster if you begged) it was finally on the website. Yay. But wait...how would anyone know the website had new content? So then you have to get the document highlighted in the weekly or monthly email newsletter or create a webinar to promote it. I'm tired just thinking about it. Writing it was really only half of that battle - and probably still is for most companies.

But what if the website was a wiki and as the head of product marketing for one of the products, you had permission to change the pages on the website related to your product? What if everything on the website was RSS-enabled? You write the document in the wiki - send out the link for 20 people to edit and they make their changes directly to the single source of the text. You review it, clean it up and have someone look at it for final edits. The CSS already ensures proper layout and formatting. Once reviewed/approved you change a setting and save. Presto - it's on the website and in the feeds of everyone who is tracking your company through their RSS reader.

And that is just text. In the video world, we have gone from needing this:

to being able to use this:

Never mind the editing, publishing, and distribution channels necessary.

What's going on here?

While we used to have to use different tools and channels to author, produce, publish, and distribute we can now use the same tool to do all of those things because the content is saved in the same action in which it is published and because it is all wrapped in social functionality - it gets immediately broadcast out to the people who care the most.

So while it's nice that it is 'social' what really matters to companies is that the cost to produce content has dropped like a manganese nodule in the middle of the Pacific.

Update: I'm extremely flattered that my friend Heather Strout voted this post the runner-up for Social Media Blog Carnival this week - see her post about it here.

Job Search 2.0

While not necessarily of my own choosing, I've been thrust into the 2.0 world looking for new opportunities. In my case, I've decided not to focus on finding *the* job and to look for contract and consulting opportunities instead (and working on creating my perfect job on the side...more about that later). I want to pursue work that is a really good fit for me personally...and a tight fit is much easier to find when you can control more of the decisions about what you work on and how you work.

Regardless of my preference for for contract work vs. looking for a position, it requires much of the same networking and opportunity scanning that a more traditional job search does. And it has been an interesting experience in this hyper-connected new world. Having a blog, a decent Twitter presence, and connections via LinkedIn & Facebook has been a phenomenal resource. It matters more than ever that you nurture your network before you need it. I thought I would share some of my observations in the hopes that it may help others:

• Twitter: Twitter allowed me to let everyone know what my situation was without the awkwardness of a mass-email. Why? By allowing people to opt-in to getting in touch I never made anyone feel bad by asking them directly if they could help. The reality is that you never know who is your network has opportunities and asking people who have no ability to help just makes them feel badly because they typically want to help but just don't have any information to give you. Making people feel badly can in the end make them avoid you a bit just because they don't want to disappoint you again.  I don't think the power of that dynamic can be underestimated. You are letting others decided for themselves if they don't have anything to say, whether they want to offer condolences, whether they would like to reach out for a conversation, or whether they have an opportunity to discuss with you. And I can't tell you how overwhelmed I was by the response of my network when I let people know I had been laid off.

• Blogging: If people are curious about my views on my work they need not go any further than my blog. I try to be fairly candid about what I think - and the more I share the better my ability to attract people who are looking to solve the same problems I am. That audience is likely to be the same types of people who may be interested in hiring me for a project or referring me to their network of associates. It's a prime example of content marketing. Offer something of interest or value on a somewhat consistent basis and you will be on the minds of the people who are most likely to make a difference to your business.

• Social Networks: Like marketing engagement metrics, all the social networks I'm involved in give me an ambient sense of what kinds of people are engaging with me. LinkedIn allows you to see who is looking at your profile and I still get alerts for new Twitter followers so I can see what types of people are finding me. Luckily I am not attracting just the 15-year-old gamers en masse.... that might indicate an issue with the content I distribute since they are not the ones likely to help me with my endeavors :)

So the social technologies have helped immensely but there are some behaviors that are also useful to consider:

• Tell people what you want to do and what you are passionate about - while projects and jobs aren't likely to come in that exact form, it will give people a very good idea of whether you are a good fit. It may also attract opportunities that you didn't know were out there.

• Take anyone who offers up on the chance to talk or meet - and don't use these conversations to press people for specific opportunities - just be engaged. If they have an interesting conversation with you and have an opportunity, they will let you know.

• Make connections between others. If you hear about an opportunity that is not right for you, pass it on and make a specific connection if you know of an individual that is a great fit. Call is karma if you want but it will make you feel good even if you never get anything else in return.

• Go out to as many events as you can - get in front of people and meet new ones. Have interesting conversations - people are likely to refer you to opportunities if they hear about them.

•  Don't be afraid to have a position or an opinion. While a strong opinion will likely make some people decide that they do not agree, you are more likely to connect closely with others. You don't need to find opportunities from 100% of the people you meet, you need to find the opportunities that are a good fit for your personality and skill set. Ask me about how I met my husband sometime if you are still wondering about this.

• Ask and you shall receive. If you need something specific, ask your network...again let them opt in, don't ask specific individuals unless they are uniquely suited to help. The more specific you can be in your requests, the more likely people can judge their own ability to help or refer.

Anyone else have more advice? Would love to hear about your experiences - not so different than general online marketing but much more personal.

Oh...and if anyone doubts the power of networking, thanks to Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio) and her generosity in helping friends with pink slip parties, I am now getting a lot of press...just for being unemployed. See coverag: WBUR, Mass High Tech, & WBZ/Channel 4 Not exactly what I'm looking to be known for but...if I can help others I am all for that.

My contribution to the general issue is The Deep Bench Series.

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The Big Secret to Social Media Marketing?

First let me confess... I really think most traditional advertising is soulless and a waste of money so if you still think that is the way forward, you may not find this post very useful. 

I remember the 'Where's the Beef' and the 'Bud Bowl' ads as much as the next person...highly entertaining and I'm sure they won a ton of awards by people in the advertising business self congratulating themselves.  They were very memorable. 

The issue for advertisers? I almost never eat at Wendy's or drink Bud unless there are no other options. And you might say I am a bit of a curmudgeon and an outlier...but I just don't think so. Was there really ROI on those campaigns?

The issue for me?  Neither of those advertisements mattered. They didn't offer any compelling reason why my life - or anyone else's - would be any better for either consuming the product or sitting through the advertisement itself. And another beef (OK that was a pun!) is that the 'good' advertising is aspirational (i.e. it makes you feel bad because you don't have what is on offer) and the bad advertising displays foolish people making bad decisions that you are supposed to avoid by buying something (which makes you feel bad because you're expected to be just smart enough to not be one of the really dumb people in the ad). What is with making people feel badly about themselves for corporate profit? But I digress.

The exception to my general disdain for advertising is when it supports things I care about with relevant information that matters.  Let me say it again...because this is the secret...relevant information that matters.  For example I live in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston we have a local laundromat/car wash which advertises on local cable news.  The ad is completely ridiculous and kind of silly but it 1) supports local news which I care about and 2) I occasionally need a convenient car wash so it is relevant. But the ad itself would never win any awards. Ditto the local restaurant ads that advertise in the JP Gazette...but they give my neighborhood its character and they matter to me both because I go out to eat locally and it is associated with content that I want to support.

Taking an example of a mass consumer campaign the Dove 'Real Beauty' campaign is one of the better types of things coming out of marketing agencies these days. Sure it highlighted a brand but it also provided education and programing for teenage girls who notoriously struggle with their body image.  That matters to me. 

Notice how all of these are traditional marketing examples?  Well everything I'm talking about becomes infinitely more important if you want people to proactively talk about your product or service in a positive way online.  It has to matter...and it has to matter beyond just doing the job it is expected to do. For example, I'll keep buying my toothpaste because I like the taste...but I'm not going to talk about it...ditto for most of the other things I purchase unless the product or experience is really truly exceptional. So you have two choices - make the purchase of a product about something bigger than just buying the product or offer a truly exceptional product/service. If my toothpaste company gave a free tube of toothpaste to a foodbank for every tube I bought? I am much more likely to talk about that because it matters. 

The hard part, of course, is making it matter...and authentically meaning it. Making marketing meaningful is even harder in the B2B space because the goal is make your core audience rock stars in their own organizations which takes content, coaching, and time...and then get them to attribute some of that success back to you. Choose your customers wisely.

So, make your company matter whether it's by actually solving the world's energy crisis or by solving a much more mundane need but contributing to a bigger cause in the process.

Maybe I'm crazy - Maybe I am part of the fringe...but the fring will start teaching the majority of the market to expect more from the companies with which they do business.  How are you going to make your business matter?