The Social Organization

The Community Landscape in 2016

It’s that time of year. Time to reflect about what has happened in the past year and where things are headed next.

It's an exciting time for TheCR team - as we end the year we are welcoming two new team members, soon to be three, one of whom is a VP of Sales.  That takes us from 7 employees to 10 - a pretty big leap for a small organization. For many reasons, this signals that both TheCR and the community industry is growing up. I watched my five-year-old head off to elementary school this fall and it feels like we’re on the precipice of a similar milestone with TheCR.

At TheCR and more broadly, we are no longer figuring things out or incubating ideas. We know how to run communities effectively and the market is ready to get things done. Here are some of my observations about what we can expect.

The Community Landscape in 2016

We know from our research that 70% of community budgets are approved by VP- or C-level executives. The community opportunity is now strategic, rather than a tactical mechanism of execution. That visibility is awesome - but I also believe the window to act upon it is limited. Community program owners have to reward that strategic interest with new revenue, effectiveness or innovation. If community programs cannot demonstrate value in terms the business cares about, executive attention will wander.

The time to scale community programs is here and it’s a huge opportunity for those of us in the space.

However, as communities go mainstream and more dollars are allocated to community initiatives, more players get involved. There is chum in the water and sharks big and small want a piece of it. The community market is attracting a lot of different players with solutions and services to sell. That’s a good thing - many of these players have a lot to offer and organizations will need them to scale. However, many of them don’t really understand the space - and that is a risk.

This happens in every market - it’s not unique to the community industry - and it can be a treacherous time. The CRM market went through a bumpy growth path as organizations and the vendors that served them made mis-steps, fought for attention and figured out what worked. The better the choices organizations make the more the community market will thrive. If organizations fumble about without clear direction and thoughtful approaches, achieving some hits but a lot of misses, the community market will suffer.

How fast will the community market develop? That will depend on a few things. Whether:

• 
  CIOs and their teams develop a sophisticated understanding of what software, infrastructure and integrations are needed to really succeed. (Hint: having a social stream is not sufficient. If social does not integrate with other communication, collaboration, content management, analytics, CRM and HR systems it will limit its potential value). The value of community architects is growing as this sophistication grows - people who can design the ecosystem in ways that maximizes value and minimizes confusion for individuals as they navigate it.
• Business owners understand how to manage these networks and communities effectively. We believe networked leadership and community management is the future of all management - we are not alone. Far too few people in leadership and management positions understand how to adapt their approach to take advantage of these new environments.
• Leaders use top-down organizational change methodologies that don’t inspire and reward behavior change at the individual level. The Future of Work is self-directed and the only way to adapt an organization to that future is to change how individuals operate within it.
• Community budgets grow. Community teams need reinforcement in order to scale and meet the needs of their organizations. Depending on each community team’s skill set any of the following are open to external guidance: strategy, planning, vendor evaluation, systems deployment and integration, training (for executives, managers, community team members/specialists and employees), playbook development, analytics and reporting, community architecture/UX, community management and moderation, advocacy program development and executive coaching. Community teams are in a unique position to help the individuals - including executives - within their organization change and are key to changing how organizations operate.

At The Community Roundtable, we obviously have a self-interest in seeing the market succeed because we help our members and clients address some of these issues. However, I also have a personal passion in seeing this approach succeed.

By evolving our organizations to adaptive networks, individuals have a great degree of choice in how they work and with whom. Communities provide individuals with both support and challenges, in a way that enables their potential. This is my passion - to help individuals define work on their terms, in a way that fulfills them and makes them happy. A networked approach to organizations is the way to deliver on that potential.

Here’s to an exciting 2016!

Unlocking Human Potential and the Risks of Gamification

Games are amazing vehicles for learning. Watching my almost three-year-old do puzzles is awe inspiring, not the least of which because she currently thinks of the alphabet as one giant puzzle that unlocks books, another thing she loves. That drive means that she has known her alphabet for a while and can now spell her first and last name with scrabble letters. She has learned this largely on her own, using iPhone apps which while I've downloaded for her to use, I do not encourage or discourage her use of any particular app. While she certainly gets exposed to her letters at daycare and at home, most of her learning has been motivated intrinsically.

Most adults can hardly even understand that kind of motivation, let alone access it. Why? Most of us have been pretty screwed up by extrinsic motivators for so many years that we don't even know what makes us happy any more.

First our parents set all sorts of expectations for us and while I am nowhere near a free spirited parent, the historical and more traditional method of parenting that my generation and previous generations grew up with was mostly a do-as-i-say-when-I-say-it-and-don't-ask-too-many-questions approach. In my case, my father (who I loved dearly) had expectations of me that were pretty misaligned with the child I was. He wanted a demure daughter who liked to follow the rules. I was impulsive and passionate. It created an internal conflict that still rages on and is not all negative but it clouded my ability to understand myself because I was so eager to please him. In many ways, his relatively early death has helped release me from that extrinsic motivator that kept me from accessing my own natural motivations - and my potential.

We then move on to school and work environments that are not set up to understand us, they are set up to make us conform to standards. The more standards we push onto kids - and adults - as they learn, the more our natural motivators are subverted and forgotten. And the more our potential is squandored.

As companies get excited about the ability to "gamify" work, I worry that they are just replacing or adding one system of extrinsic motivators (traditional performance management models) with another, cheaper model delivered through software. But that will not unlock the potential of human resources - to do that, they must re-discovered their intrinsic motivators and to do that, extrinsic motivators need to be removed to the bare minimum necessary to operate. For most organizations, it is impossible to remove all of the extrinsic motivators (salary, legal constraints, raises, promotions) but those core pressures exerted on human performance should be the first thing we evaluate before we add even more game mechanics.

Gamifying the wrong motivators is worse than doing nothing at all and in a world where we want to unleash human potential, we desperately need people that have the drive my daugter has in understanding the alphabet because she really, really wants to.

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.

Communities - The New Strategic Imperative

By now most of us have a rough understanding of Moore's Law and the exponentially increase in the processing power of technology:

While this increase in technical productivity has been celebrated liberally over the years and has generated huge amonts of value and wealth, it has changed the cost structure of businesses in ways that put increasing amonts of stress on people. Unfortunately human cranial capacity does not evolve quite so fast - changing over millions of years, not hundreds:

What does that have to do with social media?  Well, networked communication channels have existed for quite a while but there usage was limited - IRC chats were typically frequented by the more technically inclined, for example. But as organizations have applied technology and their operational speed has increased, humans - not technology & tools - became the biggest limitation to innovation and productivity. With that change, individuals have become more and more stressed because their processing capacity has not evolved. My hypothesis is that social media took off when it did in large part due to the strain being put on individuals to keep up with the pace of technological change. Social media has created an immense improvement in the speed of which individuals can share information and make decisions. This is great as it reduces some of the stress on the individuals in the system.

The problem? Technical processing power will continue to increase and once everyone is social tool-enabled they will end up in the same spot where they were before - as the biggest limitation to operational speed. What then? Humans cannot go faster and faster without breaking the quality of their decision-making and judgement. So while social communications channels will persist, their value to the organizational system will plateau. For those most connected now, they are the canaries in the coal mines - completely overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them from a myriad of communication channels.

This leads me to the conclusion that a strategy of faster will no longer be effective and, in fact, it will eventually lead you to crash and burn. What humans need and what will give an organizational competitive differentiation is the time and space to build quality products and services that are rewarded with higher margins. The way to acheive that time and space for people to do their best work is through highly trusting relationships with customers - and it is the only way. Customers must trust that by giving your company time to build a quality product or effectively support them, they will be better served.

That has some pretty broad implications. It means that to win, organizations will have to:

• Focus on building relationships first, rather than focus on the products and services first
• Educate and expose customers on internal processes so they understand and have realistic expectations of delivery
• Build in boundaries that allow individuals to slow down and focus
• Build trusted relationships with employees such that they not only don't feel pressure to go faster but are incented to make sure they are thorough and inclusive in their work

Communities are one of the few ways to scale some aspects of relationship development and building. Those companies who are ready for this next phase of operational effectiveness are busy investing in relationships today and not worrying quite as much about the short term ROI.  Those organizations too focused on the short term, transactional ROI of social media may find that they missed the boat as social media effectiveness flattens because their customers and prospects are off building deep, rich relationships elsewhere and, at the end of the day, those customers and prospects only have room for a limited number of those relationships.

It's time to fundamentally rethink how value is assessed, created and distributed and how we think about our competitive landscape.

Want to hear more about this from me? I'll be presenting these and other thoughts at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on Tuesday, June 21st in Boston.

What do you think? Are you personally feeling stressed? Do you think your organization wants to keep its foot on the gas to the exclusion of quality? Which companies have always done this relationship piece well and have they prospered?

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Social Software Could Stall Social Business Evolution

It's funny, my background is in technology and I really geek out about what technology can do but I don't talk a lot about technology explicitly on this blog. Why? It's not the *most* interesting part of the value chain. What people and organizations DO with software and the implications it has are far more interesting to me and have a far larger impact on business outcomes.  This is particularly true of social software because it is not something you can force people to use - or at least use well... I suppose there is some crazy company out there who could mandate that people update their status 5 times a day but you can guess what the results of that would be - a lot of crappy updates.

Danah Boyd just wrote an excellent post about why the Facebook privacy issues are such a problem. Like many of the issues that result from social technologies, the problems have little to do with the technology itself - it is about how the technology is used, configured, and communicated to its users. The Facebook privacy issues are frankly why I've always been a bigger fan of Twitter - with Twitter my contract with them is relatively clear - everything is public.  Even Twitter, however, has added new functionality and not communicated very clearly what the impact is. For example, they added location identification to tweets which has some big implications.  This issue of clarity for the end user about what they are doing and with whom they are sharing their information (including search spiders) is enormous - and not only for public social networks - it is one of the biggest issues that could stimy progress with enterprise social applications as well.

In the enterprise, the more one person is responsible for, the more constituencies they interact with on a regular basis and any good executive adapts their communication tone, content, and style to the audience - and in fact has legal responsibilities for doing so in some cases.  Some in technology circles would call foul on this and say that the communication lacks transparency but that ignores common sense and reality.  In reality if you are working on business plans with a group of other managers, it would be foolish to share half-baked ideas with everyone because everyone may not be paying attention when the final plans come out thus much communication would add to, not eliminate, confusion.  There are reasons that not everyone in the company gets invited to every meeting and if you don't offer people some measure of protection from exposure, they will not share their real opinions at all which carries with it huge business risks because that is, in fact, the way you negotiate and drive alignment. 

Social technology companies - if they ignore the reality of the decision-making process - risk the very potential of their market to flourish.  There must be ways for everyone to share information judiciously and with different groups. The flip side is that, yes, most enterprises are *too* locked down about how information is shared and the ease of information distribution and access. However, getting to a more fluid information environment is not fundamentally a technology problem - it is a cultural and management problem.  To effectively change culture and management, users cannot feel duped into sharing more than they wish - they must be made comfortable that they understand and control how they are sharing information and then get encouraged and supported when they choose to be more open. This is both a technology and a management challenge.  The UX of the software being used must be very clear to the user and the management culture must encourage and support people when they share.  The technology itself is necessary but not sufficient to make this change and it is the reason the debate over whether 'social business' is about technology or about management exists. 

The upshot - understand and think deeply about the UX (user experience) of the software being presented to your users.  Technology can obfuscate its mechanics pretty easily which can result in more sharing and that may, in the short term, look like a success but may have a high likelihood of backfiring if users are confused about how it works or worse - they get burned for using it because they didn't understand how it worked.  The UI/UX should not be an afterthought and it is not a insignificant challenge, especially for enterprise software groups that have not typically included UX issues as a major factor in purchasing/RFPs in the past (because with transactional systems it has been less important).  Along with finding a software experience that works, invest in training so that everyone is encouraged to use the application appropriately and when people mis-step, they are gently redirected vs. punished (whether by management or by other users).

Assessing the social dynamics of how people share information within your culture is the first step toward creating a more 'social' organization. Deploying software and cultural change that encourages individuals - in a relatively comfortable way - to take the next step will only be successful if it's understood how far the culture can be pushed before it will shut down.

Defining Social CRM - Altimeter's Take

Altimeter recently published a report - written by Ray Wang & Jeremiah Owyang - called Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management and it is an ambitious attempt to define Social CRM and place and rate vendors according to 18 business use cases they have defined.

I am a big fan of frameworks as I think it helps people segment and define their needs so despite being a bit of a mouthful, the Monitor-Mapping-Management-Middleware-Measurement breakdown is a great way to look at the role of different technologies within the SCRM landscape. I also thought having concrete definitions for each use case is a really helpful approach to guide the conversation between IT professionals and business professionals.

Jeremiah & Ray also evaluate the maturity of the technologies that support each of the 18 use cases. I loved this approach but I did find the criteria and presentation a bit confusing although still think this is an immensely useful first step in separating out what companies should focus on from an IT-enablement perspective.

One thing that I am sure we'll see more conversation about is how Altimeter defines Social CRM - which includes collaboration and product innovation/development. I don't have a particularly strong opinion one way or the other (not being a CRM expert) but from my perspective it does expand the boundaries of what was traditionally considered part of CRM.

Overall, it's a great document in assessing the social software landscape and determining where to focus one's energies given the current maturity of the market - and paired to the business use cases which is critical for companies.  I highly recommend a read:

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

In related news, Radian6 just announced its Engagement Console which greatly helps to consolidate some of the fragmentation between information on the open web with internal CRM data structures.  I expect to see a lot more technology deployed in this area to help companies rationalize and respond appropriately to the highly unstructured data coming into the organization from the outside.

The Future of the Social Web

 It's hard to step out of my little world sometimes - my online world consists of the following social tools:

• LinkedIn
• TypePad
• Blogger
• WordPress
• Facebook
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Google Reader
• ShareThis
• Zmanta
• TweetDeck
• TweetWorks
• PBwiki
• Utterli
• Flickr
• Ning
• Akismet
• OpenID
• Google Analytics/Feedburner
• TwitterSheep (tool or toy...too close to call!)

I could go on...but my real point is I think I'm a little odd. I explore, I pick up new tools because they are there. I don't think most people are like that and...I think it distracts me a lot of the time from doing 'real' work. It is easy to lose hours lost in a pretty complex web of tools - some of which are integrated and some of which are not, many of which do not add much to my existance other than to feed my unhealthy compulsion with gadgetry.

This is insanity. This is why the vast majority of people use Facebook and call it a day. This is why Google ends up sucking us in because at least our email, feed reader, calendar, and documents are centralized and sharable with the same network of friends.

Open APIs and standards such as OpenID are helping but they do not necessarily ensure centralized control. And because the ability to give the user fine grain control over sharing and privacy - that is extremely easy to use - has not been figured out yet, we aren't really ready for centralized control anyway. But you can get a glimmer of how this world is going to work out there on the consumer web.

This world is fast encroaching on the enterprise. And in someways, because the social network is more defined and there is more centralized control of access and authentication, enterprise IT has a leg up. However, enterprise IT departments need to start thinking about a few things:

• How to integrate a variety of social tools with identity, presence, unified communications, individual workflow, productivity tools, enterprise apps, & accounting/ERP systems.
• How to provide individuals with control over the tools they use, their distribution channels, and settings on their social graph.
• How to give enough 'open' controls to users to allow them to configure and mashup additional tools and widgets they they find useful even though it is not part of the enterprise stack. Because people like me will always be lurking around and 'breaking' things otherwise.
• How to use an SOA architecture in a way that enables individuals to have custom solutions. Imagine everyone in the organization having their own application that seamlessly integrates the productivity, publication, communication, intelligence, and enterprise management features that they need with appropriate information & content in a way that was focused on their responsibilities and goals? All integrated with a social graph and managed through presence such that a person's information stream turned off when they were 'off' and general requests got re-routed to others and then switched back on when they were ready to work - letting through anything that was urgent and for which the individual had no substitute?
• Imagine a resource management solution that was flexible enough to handle emergent activities. An employee gets involved in a project for which they are not directly responsible but their contribution is 'accounted' for and if they end up playing a larger role in the project it automatically shows up as a line item on their time sheet and a notation is automatically made in their HR record so that when their manager sets up a review s/he is aware of the attentional contribution that was made.

'Social' in the enterprise will not be about a destination or a tool - it will be the method by which information is filtered, how collaboration happens, how information is shared/distributed, how contributions are judged, and ultimately it will allow for more fluid and organic careers. Rather than working in one role and always getting 'assigned' to projects, individuals' experience, skills, and interests can determine how they get involved with new projects and how they get compensated/rewarded and moved through the organization. We don't yet have the tools that integrate in a way to make this easily manageable but it's coming.

I've seen the argument to this that goes something like 'people will always need to be assigned to things because there will always be things that no one wants to do in large enterprises'. I agree that there are things that just need to be done - repeatedly - over and over but I disagree that you will never get people to do them.  There are a lot of people out there that like operating in their comfort zone on discrete tasks that they can do, spend 8 hours a day doing, feel like they've contributed, and go home satisfied. In this new world that is still an option and organizations will still need to staff such that they have the right mix of people to do all the different things they need done.  Those individuals will also likely get customized apps that have a more limited stream and breadth of content, fewer communications channels, and more discrete functionality. And that is OK.

I'm starting to see this world take shape - in fits and starts. What do you think the primary barriers to this are? What are the underlying technologies and how will they need to change - or are they ready today?

Search Reconsidered - Yahoo!'s Open Search

Today Yahoo! announced details about its open search project in a move that changes the debate about what search effectiveness is.  For years the discussions around search have focused on relevancy of the query results and the algorithms that prioritize what gets shown first.  But Yahoo! is now showing that relevancy is only one part of the search process.  Just as important is how quickly the user can act on the results.

Yahoo!'s Open Search platform will allow anyone to add data and semantic relationships to Yahoo!'s index.  Take a search for a Cannon Elph for example - an online store like Amazon could provide Yahoo! both the link to its Canon Elph products and links to a photo, reviews, product details, and a buy button.  When the user searches at Yahoo! for a Cannon Elph they would see the Amazon link to the product page alongside the photo, a link directly to reviews, basic product details, and a buy button.

This dramatically changes the conversation from "Did the query result in the most relevant content" (which may be a little esoteric for users anyway) to "How effectively did search get the user to their destination".  Wow.  It makes the user's goal, not the search alone, the primary focus.

A couple of weeks ago I published a post call "Publishing is for Acting" which highlights that people both post and consume information in order to *do* something with it.  Yahoo! just  created a workflow around the information that gives users a way to seamlessly move from their initial search to the action they want to take.

I'll be looking for more nifty announcements to follow - I can't wait to see how developers use this.

The Case for Enterprise Social Networking

While Mzinga was twittering this morning, Neighborhood America was using YouTube:

Mzinga Acquires Prospero

I couldn't end the day without pointing to the news that Mzinga has acquired Prospero. Chris Brogan pointed out that one of the cooler things that they did with the announcement was to use social media to do the launch - as witnessed by an active conversation on Twitter this morning. While that was cool, what I like about Mzinga is:

- They have internal enterprise solutions for eLearning and HR
- They have external enterprise solutions for B2B customer and partner communities
- They now have consumer-oriented solutions
- Prospero has a very distributed architecture with APIs so social functionality can be distributed and integrated with other content and functionality.
- Mzinga has the marketing and management strength to growth the company.

But others are not sleeping: Passenger and HiveLive just raised money; Cisco early last year bought 5Across, Neighborhood America bought MOVO Mobile, OneSite bought Social Platform...

Competition is also coming from enterprise communication and collaboration applications, content management vendors, and enterprise search platforms.  Microsoft recently announced that SharePoint Server sales have surpassed $1B.  Enterprises who want to deploy communities have plenty of options and it is already clear there is huge demand for this so there will be plenty of room in the market for multiple solutions.  The winners will likely be those that not only have interesting and flexible technology but the services and experience to make companies successful.