Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

My good friend (and fellow competitive swimmer, back in the day), Dina Mehta, wrote an insightful post based on her research work around the topic of product durability. Though she refers to her findings based on the Indian market and the changing nature of durability, locally, there’s no question that this is a global phenomena.

The central theme of the research is that consumers value product durability less and less as time goes on. It used to be that when we bought products and services, life of the product was an important consideration and products were advertised as such. In Dina’s post, Stuart Henshall provides the most well known example:

When I think durability I think of Maytag – the washing machines that go forever here. Yet today that “durable” isn’t expected to last 20 years and new features, energy efficiency etc are changing the definition

Dina provides some great local examples of how consumers look at durability today. Based on her research, she concludes:

Thinking thru current Ads on tv – only the infrastructure and paints guys seem to talk about Durability in their communication today.

As Dina points out, its obviously not the case that customers don’t want products that last; it’s just that the markets in India finally afford choice. When I grew up there, you could only by one of 2 types of cars, a handful of electronic or appliance brands or for that matter, chocolate (yes, a travesty). All that’s changed now. And with choice comes the desire and willingness to swap for newer, shiny models at a more frequent pace.

There’s plenty of parallels to be drawn in the rest of the world where choice has been standard for decades. However, the marketing approach to this was to turn up the volume when it comes to badgering the customer with more marketing emails. Or to throw in the towel and compete on price with promotions that were often loss leaders or just a way to empty out the warehouse.

Durable Relationships

The truth is that in this age of transparent and open marketing which is moving to influencer and peer to peer modes, one sustainable approach to respond to this consumer trend is to focus on building durable relationships with customers. Existing customer relationship programs and enabling technologies (CRM) often enforce a fenced-in transactive model where its about that individual sale. That needs to move to a relationship model that can outlast that single transaction. And with the proper strategic planning, create an interaction environment that results in durability. Choice is here to stay. All you can do it make the customer comfortable with the notion that your first in line when they are looking to exercise choice. And one way to do that is to preemptively help them understand exactly why and when you should be in consideration. Thats done through effective customer Networks.

From a programmatic stand point, the answer is not jut Social Media or some other over intellectual way of looking at public or consumer relationships. Social Media is part of the larger tapestry. The answer lies in reworking the process of building and sustaining relationships with customers via social and collaborative forms of engagement. That comes from revisiting the mode of engagement that extends far beyond the nominated “social media leads” but permeates the walls that today, omit interaction with traditional sales, marketing, internal and partner experts who truly have the most substantive knowledge. Anything less will come of as plastic.

In turn, from an enabling technology standpoint, that means rethinking how your Social Media, CRM and so called ‘SocialCRM" and ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ efforts come together to build and foster genuine, durable relationships.

I highly recommend you read Dina’s original and follow up post on the implications of durability taking a back seat in the context of purchasing behavior. She’s got a very passionate community of intelligent folks that have provided comment.

This post is not about what’s right and what’s wrong or whether we should or shouldn’t fight for using one or all of these concepts.  That said, each of these monikers need to be dealt with as they will become increasingly important as organizations begin to consider more efficient ways of interacting and transacting both on the social web as well as in the enterprise.

Here goes…

Transparent:

Transparent just got elevated to the top of the list. Most executives love the idea, just not the potential fall out that can come from transparency. As we saw with President Obama’s I’ll-broadcast-the-healthcare-debate-on-CSPAN unfulfilled promise, when you get into the politics at many large organizations, its as much about the lateral competition (in the case of the government, how the right and right wing media would interpret the open discussion) in the executive suite that worries more people about bringing transparency to their enterprises, as it is about top down / bottom up / emergent transparency.

Consider the recent fall out from Google Buzz. Personally I think its an excellent start to something very useful and promising. As I commented in a post by Alex Williams on  ReadWriteWeb:

The best thing about all of this for me is that Google has recognized and capitalized on the fact that email is the ultimate social network and they are aggregating- which is what they do best,” said Sameer Patel, a founding partner with the Sovos Group that consults about integrating social Web applications and collaborative technologies into the enterprise.

However, Google stepped on a banana peel when they misjuded the level of transparency that the general public would be ok with then it comes to sharing our email contacts.

Its clear that we as social networkers seem to be perfectly fine with transparency when its looking at someone else’s data and gestures. Just not when it comes to exposing our own.

Social <insert enterprise context here>

Clearly the most hotly debated moniker in the enterprise context. A President (not CIO) of one of the largest healthcare organizations that I met with threw me a new curveball a few weeks ago.  As prepared as I was to address the ‘Facebook is too social for us” argument with solid business context, the new one thrown my way was “my kids are leaving Facebook because of the new privacy concerns. If social networks are not good enough for them when all they do there is socialize, how can I bring this interaction metaphor to the office?”

Socialized <insert process context here> with the emphasis on business outcomes or activities seems to be far more palatable but to each his own.

Customer Community

Less contested depending on who you speak with. The problem is that the discussion around community and marketing is often short sold due to lack of depth and process knowledge around core marketing performance.  As I wrote a few months ago in a guest post:

Finally, with respect to marketing, most of the community focus today (especially B2B) is on brand awareness and engagement. Certainly, there’s value to be gained there, however, lead generation is the elephant in the room most don’t want to tackle or acknowledge. Regardless of the economic times, the closer your marketing activity is to generating revenue, the more strategic your program remains to your organization. That’s where customer communities need to go – fast.

Of course there are a few seasoned marketers that can take this on. Not to mention, community as an approach to effective awareness and engagement has benefit. But when it comes to community based marketing, few in the “social media consulting space” want to or even have the credentials to tackle the moolah question.

Second, very few are prepared to objectively say when Community is flat out the wrong approach to accelerating performance for your specific business objective. Here are 2 excellent posts by Gil Yehuda and Rachel Happe about not lazily intermingling different concepts that seem similar when in reality, are very different.

Real Time

Though I wrote a report on this topic, the idea of ‘real time’ is a meaningless discussion in and of itself without core performance context. Worse, it scares the living bejesus out of the seasoned CIO who still sport scars from the millions and millions sunk into integration to come anywhere close to near real time, a decade ago. It’s far cheaper and simpler now but real time for the sake of real time invokes instant eye rolling.

However, customers are intermingling in real time and they increasingly expect feedback in near real time. The reality is that the organization (not just support and marketing) need to have that infrastructure to be able to respond as fast as possible. That’s a very different approach than trying to rudderlessly tune the enterprise for real time and then chase/manufacture use cases to back fill value from the investment.

Enterprise 2.0

And finally, yes, Enterprise 2.0. I could leave you with a link to a Google Search Result to Dennis Hewlett’s Posts (its here by the way), but frankly, too often Enterprise 2.0 gets casted as a solution to a problem that doesn’t give the customer adequate heart burn to become a top priority. Until we see a Chief Sharing / Social / Email-sucks, Productivity Officer emerge (NOT!), lets focus on discrete objectives around leads, sales, innovation, product development and the like. It’s awesome to see a few vendors starting to come around to this in their marketing not just in the context of selling the benefit but also adoption and participation. See this excellent post by the very sharp Michael Idinopulos.

In closing, as I said above, I’m not hoping to start a war on whether we should or shouldn’t use this terms.  Transparency, social, open, relationships, collaborative IS the future of work.

If you have opinions on these or other monikers, chime away, below. But they need to know their place and the context.

Credit: Inc Magazine

Lots of pontification today on whether the iPad will become that third device that removes the claustrophobia of surfing the web on a mobile device, yet takes some of the clunk away from a regular laptop.

Om Malik on GigaOm has one of the best analysis on this, saying:

Despite their evolution, laptops and desktop computers as we know them are essentially work tools. They’re designed for content creation — be that of writing blog posts (or a book), editing photos or creating videos. On the iPhone, we create content of another kind — personal, communication-centric content.

The consumer web is slowing moving away from ‘Read and Write’ mode, back to ’Read More, Write Little’ status as I tweeted earlier today. But not as we saw in the pre-social days before blogs and wikis.

We’re going to be writing more than we ever did, just a lot less every time we do. Tweets are 140 characters, the Re-Tweet is the new gesture to simply express acknowledgement or endorsement, LinkedIn imposes character limits on some of the fields in Groups, Yelp Reviews are a paragraph or so. And auto posts from Tumblr and Posterous to Facebook are primarily visual media uploads with a few lines of description. Lots of limits on each gesture. But many many more of them.

That’s just touching on the writing elements of our web experience. Gaming, enjoying videos with your family at the dinner table,  and other visual consumption models are overdue for some fresh blood as well.

And so the iPad will sell and will sell big. Save a few really ridiculous omissions (seriously? no webcam?) it’s the perfect device for the type of text based communication that’s becoming more and more prevalent. And sadly its the optimal device for the attention deficit online world we’re participating in, every day.

I’m going to be on a panel at the New Metrics for New Media Workshop at Stanford University on August 6th, in Palo Alto. The event is organized by Martha Russell, Associate Director of Media X at Stanford, and Marc Smith, Sociologist and Chief Scientist at Telligent Systems.

Some details about the event here:

The conundrum of the participatory media culture is that participation is expected, but continuous, dedicated attention cannot be assumed.  Legacy audience media metrics, such as CPM (cost per thousand) and CPI (cost per impression), have broadcast media as their reference. These metrics were developed because channel developers, advertisers and their clients needed to quantify the cost/benefit of media purchases. At the time they were developed, these legacy metrics assumed that each channel delivered media to its audiences (individuals, family, etc.) in a singular fashion.  The legacy media metrics assumed that each media exposure occurred in isolation, that viewers were attentive, and that viewers’ attention was dedicated to a single medium.

Consumer generated content has further complicated the differentiation of purchased media (space in the media that is purchased by advertisers) and earned media (space in the media that is acquired without payment through journalistic and public relations efforts).  To more accurately measure the quality and quantity of viewers’ engagement, the distinction must also be made between assumed attention, in which audience metrics count the number of people who could potentially pay attention to a message, and earned engagement, in people actively choose to pay attention.

Social media and virtual worlds offer two important frontiers for measuring earned engagement. In both, audiences are actively engaged as participants. This workshop will cover foundational concepts in media measurement, describe new frontiers in measuring audience engagement in social media and virtual worlds, and provide hands-on experience in using new analytical tools.

I’m involved in this session:

Day One:
Media usage, measurement and analysis: legacy concepts, forces of change, emerging metrics for social media and virtual worlds, and the creative tension of academic and business influences.

Given my Enterprise 2.0 focus, and in particular, our work with Sales and Marketing groups at large organizations, I plan to focus on how businesses can accelerate performance via new forms of insight, brought about by social media analytics. Something that’s integral to overall Enterprise 2.0 enablement.

Full details on the event and a short video by Martha and Marc available here:

http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/metrics.html

If you would like to see specific data points covered, chime in in the comments or drop me an email.

Hope you see you there.

Earlier this week I wrote about the Google ChromeOS announcement and its impact on the Enterprise. Disqus, one of my all-time favorite blog tools, dutifully posted Social Media reactions across Twitter and Friendfeed. However, the most spirited debate sparked by this post happened not in my blog comments or on Twitter. It happening on Facebook as I write this. Here’s what’s there, so far.

(sorry for the low res pic. Ill update with another one as soon as I can)

Want to know who these very smart folks are? Too bad.

The irony here is that Facebook and LinkedIn do allow my friends, who have never heard of each other, to have a discussion. And Facebook is happy to make it very easy to pull in my blog RSS feed to spark that discussion. So why not let Disqus expose this to all my friends on other networks. If you must, insist that a participant sign in or sign up to your network to add to the discussion, but expose the damn conversation, will ya?

I get that LinkedIn and Facebook sprouted back when it was all about creating closed networks and these platforms have adapted since then but the willingness to let specific conversations seep out is woefully tepid. Had you let MY social network (of which any one platform controls but a small fraction) see the discussion ensuing on YOUR service, between very smart people in YOUR network , my guess is that more people would be inclined to engage on your platform. And maybe others would be compelled to sign-up if they haven’t already done so.

But no – you’re so hell bent on keeping Google’s crawler in the dark that you’re willing to prevent plenty of super smart people on my other networks from participating in a great conversation that you facilitated.

User engagement on a blog post or other social objects (photos, videos etc) that I syndicate into Facebook is a true showcase of intent, and that’s gotta mean higher CPMs for you. That’s much better than silly defensive tactics such as copying FriendFeed/Twitters UI that early adopters like me might appreciate but alienate your mainstream users.

You’re just cutting your nose to spite your face.

End of rant.

Update: After writing this it got me thinking about the TechCrunch Real Time Crunch Up that’s underway right now.  Its great that were discussing this topic but really, what’s the point of real-time anything in the context of the social web, when two of the largest social networks throttle output to any real time engine.

I’m headed over there this afternoon. Lets see if this topic comes up.

TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and CoTweet -  three of the leading social media dashboards that are in fierce competition to be our chosen gateway into social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. These, amongst other worthy competitors, have been analyzed with a jewelers loupe on criteria such as breadth of service, social network integration, stability, usability, and more (see Techmeme).

What these apps are really good at is facilitating stronger explicit relationships and conversations: View and engage with friends, group followers, monitor topics. And being rescued from Twitters terrible UI. And these are huge benefits.

But does this really helping me leverage the social capital that’s created every second, across my network? No. These apps are really duking it out on convenience as the primary value proposition. Via any of these services, I get to interact more efficiently with those I know or happen to stumble upon, IF I’m online at the right time. And I get to do hail mary keyword searches, across the wild west, that is unstructured social media content.

The Neglected Smarts

The metadata that exposes my current interests is sitting in a number of Twitter services as well as in my Twitter client today. And it’s mostly freely available. Associating that data with the metadata of millions of Twitter users is also available for the taking (more on that below). Simply put, connecting those two constructs is what makes a Twitter client (and me) smart.

Here’s a couple of ways that these social media dashboards can move from being a better gateway to social networks, towards making me smarter via social leverage.

• Groups Sharing: Let me share groups with experts on a topic. For instance, Susan Scrupski, an Enterprise 2.0 thought-leader I respect, most likely has a group of Enterprise 2.0 related folks in her Twitter app of choice. So do I. With her permission, I’d like to us to share access to our groups, so we both make sure we are following the smartest minds in this space. That’s 2 individuals who by sharing will each create a better grouping of people, around the topic of E2.0. We in turn share these with other users of said Twitter client. Lots of value to us users and sticky for the client, on many levels.
• Hottest links in my groups and networks: Persistent search is a hopeless way to find important, relevant links. Todays solutions at best represent a flash back to pre Alta Vista days, let alone pre Google. There’s too much noise with no social search considerations, built in. For starters, Twitter clients should flip the persistent search feature on its head and show me hottest links by topic. Across my network and across Twitter. Consider how the incredible Microplaza facilitates this:

An example of the  hottest stories on Microplaza for “Enterprise 2.0”, right now:

• Smart Follower Sorting: Finding relevant people on Twitter, sucks.  For instance, Innovation is becoming increasingly important to me in my Enterprise 2.0 work. But the idea of being subjected to the noise via a persistent search on ‘Innovation’ is heart-burn inducing. Here’s another way to do it: Hutch Carpenter is someone I follow and trust on the topic of innovation. When I search for Innovation, let me know who Hutch is influenced by (as Klout does) and who he interacts with on the topic of innovation. Show me people (both in my network and outside) who tag them selves as Innovation (as provided by WeFollow). Let me find people based on what you the client, and the Twitter marketplace already knows about me.

Plenty of other concepts come to mind but these should get the juices flowing.

As these Twitter clients move from primarily capitalizing on the network effect created by Twitter, to creating their own network effects and facilitating social search, they become indispensable. And we become smarter.

This post reflects what I’ve learnt from a few Twitter tools I use. So how do you use Twitter and how can social media dashboards make YOU smarter?

Umberto Mellitti, CEO of on-demand sales intelligence provider InsideView, said on Twitter:

Umberto’s analogy is spot on. Also, if you’re worried about your Sales folks getting distracted by Social Media tools such as Twitter, sorry, but you have bigger problems. Either your compensation structure is just not juicy enough to keep them focused or I’m afraid, you got the B team. Or maybe marketing isn’t filling up the funnel effectively with qualified leads from Social Media channels.

My ex-colleague from marchFIRST Margaret Francis (now killing it at the awesome ScoutLabs) responded:

If your sales team is going to goof off, Social Media hardly presents the first opportunity to do so. There’s over 300 channels on cable TV, Golf Courses, Hulu and if all else fails, Vegas.

In the course of my work, I’ve conducted user needs assessments with well over 200 sales reps and sales managers at large organizations and it takes under 3 minutes to spot the ones that have “time is money” ingrained in their DNA. They have a nose for islands of opportunity and know how to use it effectively, always keeping the goal in sight.

I’d argue there’s ridiculous amounts of un tapped sales opportunity hidden in social media, and the good sales reps are figuring it out. And it’s time to fold in lead generation and revenue as outputs from Social Media, beyond awareness and engagement.

What a Good Sales Rep Would Never Do

I can’t imagine any good sales rep actively scouring Twitter for leads at the expense of traditional prospecting, especially in the B2B area. Sure, set up some persistent searches and if something juicy shows up, engage. But beyond that, carpet bombing Twitter or actively following (by following I mean reading) thousands of people to see if someone pops is obviously a waste of time. And the good ones know it.

Where Social Media Makes Sense for Sales

Social media for Selling pays huge dividends 1) as a lead qualifier and 2) as an engagement platform, after you have established a requisite qualification level.  Start with a qualified list from your existing funnel and using Social Media to connect, network, nurture and enrichen your prospect intelligence, as you begin the close.

Social Media rock god Chris Brogan has some good advice here.  After marketing has created awareness and surfaces leads, selling can commence:

So now you’ve put someone into your lead cycle. You’ve decided you are going to close them for a sale (and remember, let’s use “sale” loosely. Maybe you’re “selling them” on donating to your charity, or watching your video channel. The advent of services like Twitter allow you to mind read from afar. If I’m going to hit up Len Devanna from EMC to sponsor a conference of mine, I’m sure as hell going to read his Twitter stream from the last two days and make sure his dog hasn’t gone into the hospital or that he’s not dealing with a budget cut, etc.  It also allows you to gently touch (without selling) your clients so that they keep you top of mind.

Mark Hausman of the Strategic Communications Group also lays out a good approach, though focused more on how Marketing can use a Sales reps time more effectively:

• Step 1 Prioritize the Hot Ones. By working closely with your sales team, a set of prospects can be culled based on their standing in the sales pipeline, intimacy of existing relationship and potential size of the transaction.
• Step 2 Map and Monitor. Compile an overview of each prospect’s [Social Media] engagement
• Step 3 Engage in a Prospect’s Communities of Choice.
• Step 4 Evaluate. Get Sales reps to give you feedback on how social media has helped move these deals forward.

There’s some basic tenants of what defines the work model of a killer sales rep. These hold true for the use of both internal sales operational data as well as prospecting insight. The simple fact is that the availability of data or any other potential distraction such as Social Media will never, ever, come in the way of a good sales rep making his or her numbers.

Of course, there’s always another perspective on all of this, best characterized by Conan O’Brien:

“In the year 3000, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook will merge to form one super time-wasting site called YouTwitFace.”

Happy Friday