Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Earlier this week, I did a Q&A with the folks at Helpstream on the need and importance of customer communities to the enterprise.

We covered the following topics:

• the importance of building customer communities as part of an Enterprise 2.0 design 
• the role of a community manager and skills
• which functional areas will get the most value from communities in the enterprise
• important questions you need to think about when building a community
• have we reached the ‘social tipping point’ wrt the need for a community

Here’s an except:

Helpstream: What’s your general feeling on the importance of building customer communities for companies today?

Me: A customer community is one of the more promising components of the emerging enterprise design that’s powered by social computing technology. In a world before online communities existed, insight into customer intent and sentiment was limited to the few people on the organizational front lines. In contrast, most community initiatives today offer an open format that enables everyone in the organization to see what customers expect from you. But that only signals the very beginning of the promise of the open enterprise. Eventually the best minds across your organizations’ supply chain, employee and customer base, and distribution partners will be able to truly rally around the needs of your prospects and customers – often in real time, to accelerate business performance. A critical initial step to realizing such a work model is a well-conceived customer community.

The rest of the Q&A is over on the Helpstream blog, here.

Thanks to the folks at Helpstream for reaching out.

Last week, I had the opportunity to review a draft of The Guide to Online Community Management, published by the ReadWriteWeb team and edited by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Simply put, if you’re planning or considering a community effort at your organization, this is a must have. The report provides answers to any “ifs, ands & buts” with regard to the strategic importance of community engagement.

Most readers of this blog come from larger organizations. I’ve kept that audience in mind when reviewing this report.

Overall Impressions

To be honest, about 15% into the report, I struggled with the idea of buying a premium report that was largely peppered with quotes from articles that I’ve read before. However, as I kept reading, it became clear that report does a great job of identifying major trends, challenges and opportunities emanating from specific community efforts, backed by rich and sometimes opposing expert opinion. What you end up with is a set of succinct recommendations that organizations can consider and evaluate in the context of their own business objectives.  Should you publish a blog? Should you invest in a Facebook or a Twitter presence? Should you hire a full time or part time community manager? How to guarantee that your community efforts will fail? The pros and cons are nicely laid out for you, complete with real word experiences from practitioners, consultants and vendors. All of this to help with not just planning, but also practical execution.

On to specific areas that really resonated with me…..

Addressing ROI – Head On

I was quite surprised to see so many consultants and vendors either advise against quantifiable return or set a tragically low bar for success measurement. Thankfully, the unrelenting focus on ROI in this report clearly shows how community based engagement can be justified at large organizations. Ultimately, in my opinion, it boils down to whether you have the tenacity to attach the value of community management to specific business activity or not. What the report does well is to contrast and highlight examples of both approaches that enterprises can learn from and apply accordingly. Citing scores of case studies from companies such as Zappos, Dell, and WholeFoods, enterprises should be able to quickly identify what types of community efforts make sense for their business, and market place in general.

“The Morning After”

Since a good chunk of my work centers on execution planning, I was especially thrilled to see a sub section within the ROI discussion that was devoted to life after launch. As important, stakeholder expectations that need to be set with respect to ongoing operational requirements, changes in the customer engagement dynamics and new opportunities that emerge from maintaining a thriving community. For instance, on the issue of getting disillusioned because only a fraction of registered users regularly interact, Rubicon Consulting Principal, Michael Mace advises:

Managing a community is hard work and labor intensive. The report cites detailed case studies on how to beat the odds. For instance, Ex-Microsoft SharePoint Manager, Lawrence Liu (now at Telligent Systems) realized that the cost per incident was 90% lower when it was dealt with in the community forum as opposed to commercial phone support. With that in hand, he goes on to illustrate how he leveraged his success with the enthusiast community to create a business case for more dedicated in-house community support:

In terms of execution, the report also details useful how-to’s on topics such as hiring rock star community managers, establishing required resource commitments to ensure community health and sharing insights with relevant constituencies in the organization about what prospect and users want. Some of this is probably after-the-fact ROI, since you don’t know what direction the discussion will take until its’ had some time to gestate. The take away is that that once you get started, your list of benefits and value proposition for the community can continue to grow, beyond what you initially planned for.

Ancillary benefits that Community Managers can deliver across the organization

Beyond ROI that’s tied to the intended use case, the report discusses how other departments can gain from community efforts such as customer led innovation, recruiting, and awareness and research in the areas of marketing. Forrester Research Social Media Analyst Jeremiah Owyang says:

There’s some valuable discussion about how to generate leads in the context of B2B from community efforts, but this is an area where I believe that the report could have challenged interviewees even more. You’ll see some great examples at the end of the report about how sales reps engage on Twitter and surface qualified leads through conversations. But are two hours on Twitter more productive than say 5 qualified cold calls? Maybe; maybe not.

The end game

Overall, the only major component that’s missing for me is a deeper view into what a community managers’ career (and the programs they create) can look like in years to come. As new paradigm shifts in how to accelerate business performance emerge, there’s usually 3 phases to deliver lasting value:

Experiment > Operationalize > Institutionalize

This report has the first 2 phases covered. Experimentation is self explanatory and the report showcases some very effective emergent models. Operationalizing involves setting up a central command post that can incubate and manage these new work models as they bloom (much like what Dell has achieved, also covered in the report). Finally, institutionalizing requires that you get off the side lines, go to where process-laden, structured activities live, and improve, integrate with or take–out these inefficient forms of working. That’s where it can get truly transformational, towards an Enterprise 2.0 design. Business process management via ERP achieved this at larger organizations. In contrast, knowledge management largely failed at infiltrating each business activity and becoming institutionalized. How will the community function turn out and what are the risks that may cause it to fizzle? The good news is that we are beginning to see DNA-changing progress, primarily in the area of community based support. Helpstream is one company that’s leading the charge on this.

From a career standpoint I’ve always felt that today’s brightest community manager’s will not grow into VPs/CXO of Community or Social Media, etc. Rather, the very best ones will actually take over as leaders in charge of primary business functions such as Brand, Marketing, Customer Support etc. The catalyst will be successfully making relationships (not process) central to driving awareness, innovation, lead generation, support, and the like. This report confirms that hypothesis.

All that said, what the ReadWriteWeb team has done is brilliantly articulate how you can start and operationalize vibrant communities. And that’s what most enterprises are pondering, today.

The RWW Community Management Aggregator

Finally, this report is like the gift that keeps on giving. To respond to the dynamic nature of best practices as well as technology innovation, this report comes with a portal called the “The RWW Community Management Aggregator”. This important utility will keep subscribers up to date on the latest news, thought leaders and case studies in this space to make sure you are listening in the right places.

I fully expect that in the near future, this news aggregator will begin to surface insight into how to institutionalize community engagement in the context of specific lines of business activity.

Congratulations to the folks at RWW. Get a taste or buy the report here.

More reviews on the report here:

Jason Falls: ReadWriteWeb’s Guide To Online Community Management A Must Have For Businesses

Dawn Foster: ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Beth Canter:  Newsmastering for Professional Development 2.0 Dashboard

Google Trends is one tool that I put to work fairly often in my consulting work. Last week I decided to benchmark some of the concepts we hear a lot about in the area of Enterprise 2.0 (KM, Portals, SharePoint) and others that we should be paying attention to (business activities such as Lead Generation, HR, Supply Chain Management, etc). The idea was to see how current Enterprise 2.0 search traffic and news volume fares against these concepts.

Search phrases are subject to human interpretation and Google’s magic algorithms. However, Google’s advertising business is built on the premise that search is a very good measure of current interest and intent. And I’m piggybacking on that in the analysis below.

What I found wasn’t flattering, to say the least.  Here goes:

1. The mindshare is steadily fixed on older incarnations of communication and collaborative mediums

• If KM and portals are what we, in the social computing arena, consider to be older, inefficient communication and collaboration mechanisms, well, that’s still where the attention firmly sits.

2. Enterprise 2.0 nemesis, a.k.a Microsoft SharePoint, continues to dominate mindshare

For good or bad, a good number of Enterprise 2.0 vendors are focused on obliterating SharePoint. So have they been successful in making a dent in the current mindshare commanded by SharePoint?

• Not the case. I wasn’t expecting to see E2.0 having caught up with SharePoint, but since the 2006 coining of the term by Stuart Eccles, and subsequent evangelism by then Harvard Business School Professor Andrew MacAfee, you would have expected at least the start of an upward trend.

3. Business activities have at least 5 times more mindshare when compared to Enterprise 2.0

Finally, in line with most posts on this blog, I went a step further to see how Enterprise 2.0 compares against a representative set of business activities and pain points, faced by most organizations. I wasn’t expecting a break through here to be honest, rather I wanted to see how far away the E2.0 mindshare really was relative to business activity:

• Customer Satisfaction, the closet in terms of search volume was still approximately 5 times more popular when compared to Enterprise 2.0; Business intelligence is the furthest away.

Some thoughts on why this is the case and where we need to go from here….

Enterprise 2.0 is plagued by tactical value propositions

The focus needs to move away from replacing email and document sharing to say, competing more effectively by better serving partners and customers. Or shrinking the distance between sales and prospects. Or accelerating product innovation by extending a hand to your supply chain. And on and on.

Over on the FastForward blog, Jevon MacDonald wrote a great post on understanding and defining Enterprise 2.0, IMO, correctly stating that we need to differentiate between Social Strategy and Social Software. Jevon is spot on when he says that there’s a need for a more strategic framework to institutionalize socially enabled business processes.

At a more tactical level, positioning internal Enterprise 2.0 solutions as more efficient incarnations of general purpose Intranets may not be an effective approach for internal champions to sell social software to executives. In my experience, general purpose Portals/Intranets, often E2.0 predecessors, have in fact not been that silver bullet in the enterprise that was meant to remedy information overload, fragmented data access or inefficient communication. That’s partly due to them being general in purpose and lacking in activity focus.

SharePoint is easy to sell

Setting SharePoint as a target is again merely a tactical step to transforming an organization. However since so many vendors are focused on this, it bares discussion.

Sometimes I wonder if it‘s precisely the structured process put forth by SharePoint that actually made it easy to define and sell, up the food chain. After buying into multi million dollar ERP systems that strictly enforced workflow and control, structured ERP might be the perfect trampoline to justify structured SharePoint. SharePoint becomes the process-enforced file management and document sharing system across the enterprise to compliment process centric finance, HR, inventory management and the other 20 ERP-driven business activities.

For more color on this topic, follow this great discussion thread about SharePoint / Enterprise 2.0 recently, by the likes of Mike Gotta, Michael Sampson, Todd Stephens, Oliver Marks, Dion Hinchcliffe and James Dellow.

Lack of/minimal association with pain points

As I’ve previously written, too much of the Enterprise 2.0 talk takes place in a vacuum. I wish more solutions were aimed at fixing focused inefficiencies in business activity, brought about by those very ERP systems.

We need to stop patting ourselves on the back for small isolated gains that were never intended to go big and remove the high viscosity that plagues many business processes today. I’m an advocate of starting small (depending on the circumstances) for proof of concept purposes but small absolutely should not mean insignificant. Start with a very important use case where the pain is high and the benefits can be huge (a large account, a flagship product, whatever) and then scale out. Too often, starting small is equated with starting where it doesn’t matter.

We, the bloggers…

I’m looking in the mirror as well when I rate Enterprise 2.0 marketing. I share the stage with plenty of other bloggers and consultants who diligently opine on the subject of Enterprise 2.0. Yet, there’s a clear need to provide additional torque to effectively raise awareness to the level it deserves. My personal belief is that this can be done by celebrating institutionalized success but also by setting a higher bar and calling out timid implementations that won’t really move the needle.

There’s plenty of visionary speak going on at the 100 thousand foot level. Most recently, Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior (on Twitter) wrote an inspiring post predicting amongst other things, that ‘Collaboration Networks’ will be to the Enterprise, what Social Networks are to consumers. Other terms such as ‘Social Business’ and ‘Social Business Software’ are often used to describe the new design of organizational behavior. These concepts are pertinent to board room and executive level introductions but very little is said about how to change the organizational DNA to make this happen. To be clear, I believe these visionary benchmarks are extremely important to ignite wholesale change and I’m even currently involved in such discussions with senior executives at very large organizations. But more guidance needs to be provided to managers who will take the necessary steps to institutionalize this change. That’s where strategic case studies will emerge to fuel the news cycle.

I’m looking forward to discussing this at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this summer and really talking execution, which is my focus. By execution I don’t mean only how to drive adoption for a wiki or employee social network. I mean how to also change organizational behavior to capitalize on an Enterprise 2.0 design which may well include wikis, micro-messaging tools, etc.

I’ve seen over and over again that smart business leaders who give you the time to discuss a bolder better strategy, will want to hear about how it can be successfully executed. So we need to be ready to address that from the get go.

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Steve Rubel points to a report from Forrester that shows an anemic growth of 11% for RSS over the last few years.

The report cites many reasons leading to 41% of users not being sure whether they are interested or not interested (I love that survey response option btw) and 78% of those that know what RSS is, actively choose not to use it. ikes!

So why am I jumping in the middle of this parade? Simply because RSS was bone headedly given consumption status when it should have been confined to the plumbing that no one wants to look at. Max Kalehoff sums it up in a comment really nicely:

Who cares about RSS? It’s only the format in which data travels through the pipeline, to someone who opted in. There’s no reason most people should even care what it stands for. I predict RSS will become huge when, or if, more relevant services adopt it as invisible infrastructure, not as a consumer-facing value proposition.

Marketers: Don’t buy the argument that engaging your prospects and customers via MyYahoo or Microsoft Outlook-enabled RSS will do you any good.

This short lived ray of hope will prove to be less effective than driving traffic to your sites regardless of how expensive the later has become. I used to subscribe to a boatload of print magazines that piled up on my desk and eventually hit the trashcan unread. Too much to sift through. Then came RSS making it ever so simple to subscribe to any number of rags and blogs, all available in one one place, to be read on my terms. The ease of subscription soon made this just as bad as the pile of unread rags on my desk. Opening Google Reader to see the dreaded “1000+” unread items, (including your marketing message) became a daily joy. Sure, MS Outlook, iGoogle & MyYahoo can be useful but respect the mediums limitation and provide pointed feeds based on topics, not source.

On to the solution for marketers:

• Lose the intimidating orange RSS button that takes your prospects and customers to an even more intimidating RSS feed page or as bad, an option to add it to a something called an “RSS Reader”. They haven’t heard of any of those things.
• Let your users opt in to monitor topics and not the fire hose of content from a given source. Think about it -there’s very few instances when you want to know everything someone says. Topics across sources are more important to one’s entertainment, purchasing intentions or news consumption feeds. Your prospects and customers feel the same. There’s a few solutions that help with this. Los Altos, CA based Simplefeed, is one of them.
• Consider putting RSS search results in place on all of your content and allow users to monitor this via known mechanisms such as Email to begin with. Start with something as simple as what firms such as SimplyHired does: Email notifications for search results. Its simple. It covers only what I ask for. I get it pushed to me when there’s new stuff.
• Don’t rely on a Reader to get your message across. I’m biased here but enable consumption that doesn’t require adopting yet another web or client application such as an RSS reader, desktop download or a FireFox plug-in. Email, IM, Mobile Device – have all the distribution muscle you’ll ever need. That’s the way to go.
• Kill the RSS feeds index page. No one goes there. Really. Its a waste of dollars and results in a false hope that people will click on some link hidden in the footer of your site. If you don’t catch the visitor at the point where they saw the interesting product description, press release, a support forum thread, promotion or item for sale, it’s just not going to happen. Enable opt in mechanisms for narrow content topics on relevant pages on your site.

Ive focused on what enterprise marketers should think about. As to overall adoption of RSS, well beyond just blogs and news, Keith Teare and Jeff Nolan (who know a thing or 4 about RSS) dive deeper into the role of RSS behind the scenes and the unaccounted value.