The Social Organization

New Research: Communities in 2016 - Quantifying the Value of Community

It’s an exciting time to be in the community field. In the past couple of years, communities have gained the executive spotlight. It’s currently shining pretty brightly. But the spotlight brings its own challenges and pressures. There are more vendors, a wider range of understanding and expectations, and more pressure to produce and articulate value. That is at best stressful and distracting, and at worst it can undermine existing efforts to cover the basics.

In short - you may need shades.

It’s time to prove we deserve that attention and can deliver on the promise of a community approach. We have to tell the stories of our community value and articulate the resources we need to get there. We are at an inflection point, and it’s a challenging time to be a community program owner. As with any inflection point, chaos comes before consolidation around the new normal.

The good news? Executives are excited about the potential of communities and community management skills are in demand.

The bad news? All the attention and expectations can distract us from the things that have made us successful so far, and at the same time, we need to learn new lessons in scaling. Budgets are growing, but they are not keeping pace with the demand for our time, which is our scarcest resource.

Why is this all happening now?

• Community leaders have done a great job communicating the potential of communities and demonstrating they can deliver high engagement rates.
• Social media value is crumbling as social networks turn into social ad platforms. While they do deliver value, they have not fulfilled their potential for deep engagement.
• Organizations need to adapt to the pace of change and innovation is a strategic priority. Communities are the most effective way to deliver agile learning and change.

It’s rocky out there because a lot of people are feeling unsettled and there is no clear, correct path to changing our organizations. In the current environment, it's easy to question or second guess ourselves, but one thing I feel strongly about is this: a community approach can help navigate these issues in a way that brings along customers, prospects and employees. It is the best way, and maybe the only way, to keep our organizations in sync with themselves and with their markets.

As community professionals, we need to keep our focus on the fundamentals and continue to reinforce value and success:

1. Don’t lose sight of the basics.
2. Continue the dialog with those that can benefit from your community.
3. Develop an ROI model: define the specific business value that is generated from the community.

The 2016 State of Community Management report is a great opportunity to sit back and take perspective on where communities are going, where your organization is headed and how you can deliver on the promise of community.

 

The State of Community Management 2016 from The Community Roundtable

 
You can download the full report here:

 

Social Media Overload, Anxiety & Polarization

The 2012 predictions are starting and I will likely participate - the end of the year is always a good time to assess and evaluate where you have been and where you are going. However, these predictions can often take on a doom & gloom feeling. Ross Dawson's Themes for 2012 are particularly anxiety inducing: more speed, more people, no privacy, revolt, cyberwars, exposure, and more polarization among other things. While I don't disagree with much of the analysis it does induce a high level of anxiety. This is not because Ross got it wrong, it's because our world has exploded with information, apps, access, people, content, and ideas.

People are assaulted with too much of everything. That makes us all very anxious. The human reaction to this anxiety is to crave clarity and certainty - to grasp for a bouy in a storm. Without some certainty and truth to ground us we feel completely out of control and bewildered. We look for those with clear and simple answers because it cuts through the sea of confusion. However, this is exactly where the biggest risk lies - while the world is increasing in complexity it is pushing more and more people to focus on simplistic truths as a coping mechanism. The more intensely people are driven to simplicity, the harder it is to make effective progress of any kind in an increasingly complex environment.

Complexity drives anxiety. Anxiety drives simplicty & polarization. Polarization blocks progress. Lack of progress creats more complexity. And the cycle intensifies.

Part of the reason that social networking has taken off is that people have dramatically scaled back the people and organizations they trust to those that they know personally, because those relationships are something they can still evaluate in a world of ever shifting information. But ironically, in a world where we have so much access to information it creates increasingly narrow perspectives. This cycle has to be broken to really address some of the vexing global issues that we face.

For me, the biggest challenge of 2012 will be to better understand how to use social technologies to reduce overload and complexity instead of add to it. This is absolutely imperative so individuals have the mental space to feel proactively in charge of their environments so that they can make decisions and move forward - and to open their minds to alternative perspectives.

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Truth About the New Marketing - Operations Can Make or Break it

There is a lot of good content out there these days about conversational marketing and what it takes to be 'remarkable' in a conversational age. This morning, on Mashable was a great post on Finding your Social Media Purple Cow. And while developing robust brand content and deep connection with customers remains important, we rarely talk about how critically important operations is becoming as a marketing discipline. What do I mean by operations?

• Repetitive consistent marketing performance
• Theory of constraints or other type of process flow analysis
• Process standards - including decision-making frameworks and metrics
• End-to-end systems that integrate with ERP & HR systems

Here is the thing about operations. It was developed as a discipline to take a complex problem and make it repeatable - think about assembly line as an example. For large companies it is much more important to have consistently good marketing than to have big swings in marketing. In the broadcast era, marketing operations were artificially simplified because you could access a huge volume of customers through a relatively small number of channels. It allowed everyone in the value chain to get a little operationally lazy. You didn't really need to expend all that much effort to either control costs or find different ways to interact with customers - it was more the law of averages. However it also generate some content that was wildly successful and some that fell completely flat.

The complexity of marketing has exploded now that people are switching more of their media consumption to the highly fragmented web environment. Now, you can easily test which content plays well or not with a small slice of the audience before you take big risks with your entire market. Finding your customers and interacting with them efficiently requires a lot more operational discipline - including applications, processes, measurements, and various different roles.

Marketing will always require good content but using the internet allows you to see exactly how changes to content change the behavior of your customers. If you are not thinking about stealing some supply chain resources from the big manufactures - or military ops staff - to help you with marketing, you should be. And yeh, they may not be your super fun creative types but they will help you drive revenue higher and reduce costs significantly.

Who is your operational super-star or are you struggling to do it yourself? How do you think about your marketing process flow? How stardarized are your processes? Can you all march in the same direction at the same time?

My Twitter Election

For me, this election has been very different than previous elections.  Yes, there are historic choices to be made and our country is embroiled in crisis.  But I've felt in the past that those conditions were true too.  What's different for me?  Twitter. And for me, it has profoundly changed how this election felt and for me it reinvigorated my faith in the democratic and civil processes we have in the US.

Why?  Instead of feeling talked at and broadcast to and somewhat isolated, I was participating in a national - and indeed international - town hall conversation.  This discussion added a low latency hum to the entire election season but spiked around events such as the conventions and the debates. Red, blue, and purple it was great to be a part of a giant conversation around issues in which we should all be involved.  By having these huge online conversations we all took just a little more responsibility for the issues themselves and that made the election more relevant.

For those of you who know me, you've probably heard my soapbox around the need to teach civics in schools again.  Why?  Because government is not this far away concept that is only there when you need something; it is the rules by which we collectively decide to live.  The FCC controls information transmission. The Department of Agriculture regulates our food supply. The Social Security administration manages retirement benefits.  These are, in effect, the values that we have collectively codified. We want to control who can broadcast information, we want safe food, and we want our elderly population to have a dignified end of life - enough that we are willing to pay for it.  Any one of us may not agree with all of those values but they are what we have collectively agreed to.  Don't like it? Lobby. Run for office.  It's not the politicians' government. It is our government.  Too often I feel like we miss this point...we like to complain a lot but don't always realize it is up to us if we want something different (back to why we need civics).

Having a collective conversation hopefully helps us understand different positions, parse apart our own positions into the values we really care about, and understand where there may be room to find agreement between people - I truly believe that we all have more values that we share than not.  Politics is little more than this conversation of vetting differences and finding middle ground.  And unless each of us individually wants to find a plot of unused land (a bit hard to do) and build our own self-sustaining complex, we need to learn how to live with each other...in all our wonderful and bizarre variations. 

One direct impact of having this Twitterized conversation?  I went to the polls today.  I have tended to vote absentee and the election process is very transactional.  This year it felt more neighborly and wanted to see my neighbors and to thank the many election volunteers that make voting possible.

Here's to more important conversations.

How has Twitter & other online tools changed your experience?

The Rise of Innovation in the Hub

I've worked in technology in Silicon Valley and Boston and the environments are pretty different.  In Boston you often get the inferiority vibe...I guess now that our sports teams have won their share of national titles we have to keep the inferiority complex going somewhere.  From my perspective, having worked in both places, Bostonian technology people are simply less social.  In Silicon Valley, whether you are an engineer starting out or a tech executive who has been in the business 20 years, the weeks are filled with happy hours, launch parties, breakfast meetings, impromptu office parties and the like. In Boston you tend to go to work and go home. Breakfast meetings and launch parties happen occasionally but more often than not, they are intra-company affairs.  Networks in Boston take a long time to develop and are based primarily on who you have worked with in the past.  This may be partly geography - there are a few more logical hubs of activity in Silicon Valley, San Francisco's SOMA district, Palo Alto, & San Jose but that seems like a poor excuse since Waltham, Burlington, & Kendall Square in Cambridge now have significant critical mass.

Now that I am back in Boston and working in the social media world things seem to have changed and I wonder if we are at a tipping point - as least in this market.  The community has leaders - Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton, Doug Haslam, Todd Van Hoosear, Adam Zand, Maria Thurell, Alexa Scordato, Amanda Gravel, Aaron Strout, Jim Storer,  Steve Garfield, Beth Kanter, Adam Cohen,  Mike Langford, C.C. Chapman, and many others who are very active and instigate tweet-ups, conferences, rock climbing get togethers, dinners, apple picking trips, etc. sometimes formal and sometimes spontaneous. This is critical because while this crowd knows each other pretty well, they are also adept at pulling others into their vortex making new people feel welcome and growing the community - and they do not represent just one company or one discipline.  There are also enough local technology companies in this space. Mzinga, Communispace, Awareness, Lotus, Cymphony, MoCo Space, Sermo, ChoiceStream, Trip Advisor, and MatchMine are all local software companies working in the social media space in some capacity. Topaz Partners and Perkett PR also participate extensively from the marketing side of things.  This all rolls up to make Boston a real Hub in this particular market and to me, feels a lot more like what makes Silicon Valley so powerful - a critical mass of technology, business, and marketing professionals dedicated to the same vision.  To investors and potential employees who are interested in this market, it makes Boston the place to be.

Like the Red Sox, and the Patriots, Boston seems to be coming into its own in the software industry and taking a leading role in pushing innovation and adoption. Our challenge now - convincing all of those talented kids coming out of MIT, Harvard, BU, BC, Wellseley, Tufts, etc. to stick around and play. That, and we need some better cafes and restaurants to hang out at on the 128 loop so I encourage any of you who are thinking of starting your own business - we need a couple of cool, hip, unique places to hang out somewhere between Waltham and Burlington - essentially we need a Buck's of our own.