Moving Beyond Counts & Traffic – Social Media Measurement That Works

Lots of interesting research coming out on Social Media recently. We take note because the results and conclusions continue to demonstrate that measurement remains a high priority for executives, but what is delivered is not meeting their needs. Let’s take a look at some recent examples of companies surveyed about their social media efforts from a measurement point of view.

First a study from White Horse of 104 companies using social media shows us that when companies try to measure the success of their social media efforts, that very few (less than 15%) are able to get to an ROI for their work. They continue to use traffic and participation (we put that in our behavior metrics) to demonstrate success.

Here is another study which demonstrates a similar point, that companies are using social media traffic and behavior metrics as a measurement of success. This study completed by King Fish Media in June 2010 has great information; unfortunately, it reveals that while many companies say that they have a social media strategy in place they don’t understand how to measure its results.

Perhaps it is the way the research is presented versus the actual question asked, but when you read the measurements used for value they are not representing economic value in most cases. Rather, marketers and others measuring social media continue to focus on representing traffic as some sort of proxy for value. Worse, many still believe that the number of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook is a valuable metric to use to demonstrate value. They couldn’t be more wrong…

Even the famed Guy Kawasaki is promoting an idea that the more followers the better during a TweetChat on MarketingProfs…but his perspective is the larger the audience from a sheer numbers perspective the better your results will be. In our experience, that is just not true. We see that the more QUALIFIED followers you have, the better your results MIGHT be.Why? Because the value of a follower is zero until they do something that brings value to the organization. If all they are doing is following and never taking action, can you assign a value to them? We think not. Have you analyzed your followers? How many are customers? How many are prospects? How many are competitors? (How many have followed your account to simply build their own counts through an auto-follow?)

So where does all this lead? Well, if you are attending theiStrategy meeting in Chicago on September 15-16, we’ll be there to address this issue. I’ll be presenting this topic on the morning of the 16th to the attendees.

I’ll demonstrate a stronger methodology for using a more integrated approach to your social media efforts which allows you to focus only on the metrics that really matter… those that lead to economic value for your organization.

For those of you who cannot attend, the presentation will be added to our social media resource center after the meeting ends. For those of you who are attending, please bring your questions!

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Has “Twitter Policing” Gone too Far in the UK?

Impact Interactions recently returned from a weeklong trip to London’s Internet World Conference held from April 27th – 29th. This journey across the pond allowed us to gain a firsthand insight on where the UK market is in terms of using Social Media in B2B settings. We learned that consumers and businesses alike are a bit behind compared to US efforts utilizing Social Media. Amongst consumers, Facebook is a popular site but Twitter is a foreign tool to many people in the UK. Businesses and consumers are struggling to figure out what philosophy and tools they should adopt in regards to Social Media. A recent court ruling has also raised questions over government policies in place to monitor threatening messages online.

For example, read this InformationWeek article titled, “Twitter Bomb Joker Convicted” for further evidence. Paul Chambers, a 26 year old accountant has been fined $1,500 for a Tweet he posted earlier this year which was clearly a joke. According to The Register, Chambers, frustrated with the closure of an airport due to poor weather tweeted, “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” Chambers was charged with sending a threatening electronic message and The Doncaster Magistrates’ Court left no doubt on where they stand for this type of behavior.

Now I do not claim to be an expert in terrorism policy. However, in my opinion this conviction goes a bit too far and like many businesses in the UK, government officials have a lot to learn. I understand that they must protect travelers at all costs, but convicting people who are obviously joking and present no immediate threat is going off the deep end. Not to mention that Tweeting about an impending airport bombing is not the best route to secrecy (even more reason to believe Mr. Chambers was just kidding). What are your thoughts on this, as well as other Social Media trends in UK and across Europe? Please leave us your feedback below. We would love to hear from you. You can also access our presentation at this year’s Internet World conference titled, “B2B Social Media: What Works 2010” by accessing the Social Media Resources tab above.

Eric Willey, Manager of Client Services

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Baseball and Social Media Success: It’s the Little Things

by Matthew Lees

Springtime seems finally to be reaching the northern hemisphere in actuality, not just in name. The April rains that crossed the US have caused their shares of headaches (or worse), but they should eventually bring May flowers; school children are sensing they’re on the home stretch toward summer vacation; and baseball season is underway.

As social media analyst and baseball fan – I met my wife at Doc Gooden’s no-hitter in 1996 – I’ve often observed several similarities between the two realms, the most relevant of which is the importance that baseball and social media place on doing the little things well.

Baseball
Baseball is ultimately about the small moments. A game may ultimately hinge on a grounder that just glances off the diving second baseman’s glove with two outs in the 6th inning, an alert runner on second tagging up and taking third on a foul ball the right fielder catches halfway in the stands, or a sacrifice bunt that moves a runner into scoring position.

Sure, a game-winning three-run homer in the bottom of the 10th is exciting. Effective, too. But these don’t happen every day. More often than not it’s the small play, the play that goes unnoticed at the time, that makes the difference. Add these up over the course of a 162-game season, and it’s the little things that separate the playoff contenders from the “We’ll get ‘em next year” crew.

(The importance of the little things is the reason why there aren’t many great baseball movies. Baseball is about holding the runner on third base when there’s a grounder to first, fouling off four pitches before drawing a walk, and bringing in a relief pitcher an inning earlier than planned to give the starter’s sore arm a little more rest. And most of the time during a baseball game is spent with ostensibly little going on, with the inactivity is broken by intense bursts when the ball is put into play. But producers of baseball movies tend to require high drama, the 3-2 pitch with two outs in the bottom of the ninth that the aging slugger hammers into the center field seats. The pace and unpredictability of real baseball doesn’t play well in the theaters.)

Social Media
As with baseball, it’s the little things that matter in social media. For every video that goes viral – the social media equivalent, perhaps, of a home run – there thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions with customers in branded communities and throughout the social Web: the reply to a question in an online forum, the blog post that gets retweeted, the Facebook post that announces an upcoming event. It’s the aggregate of these day-to-day interactions between you and your customers, readers, subscribers, users, and partners that have the biggest long-term impact.

How? None of these actions is big or brash or glamorous. But they’re part of the slow and steady relationship building that, though unheralded, gets long-term results. The question you answer in the community forum could solve a customer’s problem without the need for them to call your contact center (thereby saving your company money while saving your customer the time and effort); the blog post you write could generate a conversation that sparks a new product idea; and the Facebook post could draw someone who eventually becomes a new customer.

If your social media initiative hits word-of-mouth gold, that’s great. But focusing your strategy on home runs is like stacking your baseball line-up with power hitters. You’ll get some dramatic wins, but be in last place at the end of the year.

It’s spring time, when everything can begin anew. And it’s the little things that matter most. Play ball!

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 4)

by Matthew Lees

In this fourth and final post on the potential for convergence between Internal and External communities – see Post #1 to start at the beginning – I want to touch on the individuals who are charged with building and managing communities, whether communities of employees or communities of customers.

The Practitioner Perspective
We’re still in the very early days of social software and online communities. Practitioners are the ones at the forefront of this field, which is at the interaction of sociology, technology, and business. And they’re breaking ground daily.

They’re the knowledge management strategists who think about ways of getting colleagues to collaborate more openly; they’re the HR professionals who want to retain top talent by ensuring all voices are not only heard, but also help shape what’s important within the organization; they’re the community managers and moderators who work to get customers to support and learn from each other; they’re the marketers monitoring brand value and customer sentiment across the social Web; and they’re the marketers, developers and researchers who look to engage with customers (and prospective customers) and glean insights in order to innovate and improve.

What they’re not, though, is omniscient. Because social practitioners are working in such a new space, success is a moving target. They don’t know – they can’t know – what things will be like in six months, in a year, or in five years. The guidelines, benchmarks, and best practices are largely still being created every day. Sure, some organizations and vendors are ahead of others, and there’s a lot that (happily) is known and at least somewhat agreed upon, but compared to more traditional disciplines, there are few, if any, codified bodies of knowledge.

Pulled in Multiple Directions
What this means is that it’s tough enough being a social media practitioner in the first place, let alone trying to work in multiple domains, specifically internal and external. Some of the tools and techniques involved in building, managing, and getting the most out of a community apply to both internal and external communities…but many don’t. And, as Post 2 touched on, the business goals are very different.

Last month I wrote about a practitioner in a marketing communications group whose B2B online customer community initiative was sidetracked into becoming an internal collaboration-based community. She was caught in a tug of war between the internally focused IT team and the outward-looking marketing group, with execs on both sides knowing they needed her social media expertise, but not realizing how vastly different their business goals were.

And she’s not the only one in this predicament.

The Downside of Employee Community and Customer Community Convergence
For practitioners, the downside of such convergence is the potential for being pulled unwillingly and/or unexpectedly into initiatives that you’re unprepared for, unsuited for, or uninterested in. It’s nice to ride the excitement of the social media wave, and to be appreciated and in demand for one’s expertise. But the excitement can easily turn to frustration. Here are some things to keep in mind:

•    Bring it back to business goals and business use cases. You may need to hammer on this over and over. It’s a big red flag if business sponsors are unclear on the business goals, or not in agreement with each other.
•    Make sure the technology platforms under consideration fit these use cases. Only a handful claim to support both internal and external communities, and they don’t necessarily do both things equally well.
•    Stay true to yourself. Boy, does that sound corny, but I’ve seen more than a few people take on something they knew they were ill-suited for, uninterested in, and/or knew things wouldn’t end well. It’s a good thing — really, an essential thing — to challenge yourself by going outside your comfort zone, but do this with your eyes open. And if you know it’s not right, try not to go there.

The Road Ahead
While I fully resonate with the holy-grail concept of having a single ecosystem in which both employees and customers participate, the realities of organizational behavior, social dynamics, and technology limitations will preclude this from happening on any sizable scale. Some organizations will continue to move in this direction, and some vendors will support them, but for the most part, inside will remain inside, and outside will remain outside.

The good news, though, is that while this wall will continue to stand, it will continue to become more permeable, with (1) customers and others outside the organization (e.g., customer advisory groups) being able to come in behind the firewall as warranted, and (2) employees being able to participate in more ways in customer communities.

For social media practitioners and community managers, who by nature and by practice place a great deal of stock in the value that customers can provide, this can be a good place to be.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 3)

by Matthew Lees

The first post in this series laid out the question and noted some important similarities between internally facing and externally facing communities. The second post discussed key differences between such communities.

This third piece looks at employee and customer communities from the perspective of the vendors that provide tools, technologies, and services to organizations that sponsor online communities.

The Vendor Perspective
In one of my semi-annual industry reports (“Online Community Platform Company and Product Update – 1H 2008”), I wrote the following:

“2. Blurring of External vs. Internal Communities. Our focus at the Patricia Seybold Group is on enabling those who engage with companies from the “outside,” so we tend to be more interested in systems that support external communities of customers and/or business partners. This is not a clear delineation, though, as Web 2.0—social networking in particular—hits the enterprise. But as advocates of customer-centric approaches to business, we are sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the “us vs. them” mentality (with employees as “us” and everyone else as “them”), and toward a more group- or stakeholder-based approach, with customers and partners simply being another group of stakeholders. It’s happening slowly, but internal systems are being opened up to allow appropriate access to customers and partners. And community platform vendors are leading this trend; half of the companies we cover have products specifically developed for combined internal and external collaboration.”

That was written in August 2008. Many of the vendors I cover still offer products to support both employee and customer communities. Here’s a breakdown of some of the companies:

Technology Solutions for External Communities
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies – Social CRM
•    LiveWorld – Community Center
•    Pluck
•    Powered – Social Marketing Platform
•    RightNow – RightNow Social Experience

Technology Solutions for Internal and External Communities
•    Blogtronix – Blogtronix Enterprise, Blogtronix Community
•    Ingeniux – Cartella
•    Jive Software – Social Business Software (SBS)
•    KickApps
•    Leverage Software
•    Mzinga – OmniSocial
•    Small World Labs
•    Telligent – Telligent Enterprise, Telligent Community

(There are a great many technology vendors that provide tools and services for supporting internal communities only. My fluency with these platforms is more limited, although some well known products are Atlassian Confluence, IBM/Lotus Connections, and Socialtext.)

One Foot in Both Camps
The vendors that provide solutions for internal and external communities have a foot in both camps. That gives them a larger potential customer base, but it also hampers their ability to excel in one area. So, while I am still “sanguine on the trend that is moving away from the ‘us vs. them’ mentality,” I’m not convinced this is the best long-term approach. I see three main reasons as to why:

•    Corporate Bandwidth. None of these vendors is in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 range. They’re all relatively small companies doing cutting edge stuff, mind you, but they don’t have the deep pockets to be able to do everything they want to…and do them all well.
•    Marketing and Sales Strategies. In a nutshell, they’re selling to different people in different business units. Convincing the CIO and the head of HR to sign with you takes different materials, case studies, and ROI analysis than selling to the CMO, the head of customer service, or the chief of R&D.
•    Development Efforts. Developing software for different use cases is a challenge. These vendors no doubt receive feature requests from customers of their internal and external products; many of these requests likely overlap, but many likely don’t. Desired integrations have similarities and differences, too; integrating with social Web applications (e.g., Twitter and blogs) may be wanted by both camps, but those managing internal communities may ask for integrations with ERP, accounting, and scheduling systems, while those managing external communities may need integrations with CMS and CRM systems. Deciding on the direction of developmental efforts is a tough enough call when you’re serving just one market, let alone two.

To some degree, online communities are online communities. But vendors with one foot in the internal community camp and one foot in the external community camp have more challenging strategic decisions than those focusing in one area. Things are pretty good now for all vendors, as the world of social technology continues to blossom. Within the next year or two, though, I expect to see some changes, such as re-jiggering product lines, acquisitions, and consolidation.

Next
The final post in this series looks at Internal/Employee and External/Customer communities from the perspective of the people charged with managing and ensuring their success.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 2)

by Matthew Lees

Part 1 of this topic framed the question of whether internal/employee communities and external/customer communities can potentially converge, and be managed via one group of people using one (pretty darn robust) technology platform.

My “Idealistic Answer” to this question was “Yes.” In the ideal customer-centric organization, the walls separating inside and outside would be more permeable than rigid, with customers being involved (as appropriate and as warranted) with a great many aspects of what the organization is doing across business units.

We live, however, in the real world…

Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?
Pragmatic Answer: No
While the walls that separate inside from outside may be coming down, the internal walls are seemingly as strong as ever. It’s hard to get those silos to tilt, let alone fall.

The unfulfilled promise of CRM is a good analogy here. Remember when “the 360-degree view of the customer” was all the rage? In theory, it was a great idea…have everyone in your organization working off the same system and the same data. Companies will benefit from the streamlined technologies and centralized resources (sound familiar?), while customers will benefit from more relevant marketing communications and offers, and from better-informed support reps who can provide improved service. This isn’t how things panned out, of course, largely because of the way that organizations are structured and operate.

So, in addition to the similarities discussed in the previous post, there are vast differences between internal and external communities, including:

1. Business Goals, Use Cases, and KPIs – While there is some overlap, the business goals are largely different (as are the Key Performance Indicators that measure them)…Employee communities are often looking to increase productivity, information sharing, knowledge retention (keep expertise within the organization), and employee satisfaction, while reducing, for example, the costs of system administration and training. Customer communities are often looking to positively impact the organization’s brand, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, generate awareness, get more people in the sales pipeline (especially for B2B communities), increase direct and indirect sales (upsell and cross-sell), reduce costs through deflected service and support incidents,  and leverage customer-led innovation throughout the organization. Whew.
2. Business Units and Business Owners – The differences in business goals stem from the fact that different business owners head up these communities. Employee communities tend to fall within HR, IT, or Administration/Operations, while customer communities tend to fall within Service & Support, Marketing, or Product Development/R&D. As was the case with CRM, it’s rare that these business units are aligned in terms of needs, process, and technology.
3. Social Dynamics – The social dynamics between employee communities and customer communities are more different than they are alike. Both types of communities do rely on a core set of enthusiasts/influencers who handle a lot of the heavy lifting, but the reasons and motivations for participating in each vary. People act and interact differently when they wear different hats; in an internal community you’re wearing an employee hat, with all the good stuff and all the baggage that goes with it. (Think organizational politics; how candid are you going to be if you know your boss – and HR – are listening.) You’re potentially more anonymous in an external community wearing a customer hat, where, for most of us, the stakes are lower.

So What?
In the upcoming Part 3 — yes, there’s a Part 3 — we’ll explore what this means for both technology vendors that provide social tools, and for those practitioners tasked with managing employee and/or customer communities.

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Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge? (Part 1)

By Matthew Lees

Social technologies have had a big impact on the ways that companies do business, both inside and out. Organizations are using social tools – discussion forums, blogs, microblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, and more – to help employees be more productive and effective. They are also using the same types of tools to engage with those outside their organization, i.e., their customers (users, readers, members, etc.) and business partners.

Social media is helping to break down the walls that separate internal from external. Those traditionally outside the organization not only know more than ever before about what’s going on inside (thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), they also have more of an opportunity and ability to influence things within the company (for example, through crowdsourcing mechanisms). For the most part, it’s easy enough to set up a collaborative space for members of a customer advisory group, for example, to interact directly with a group of employees. And if you manage a customer community, you can – in fact, you should – have employees intimately involved. The lines between inside and outside are becoming increasingly blurred.

I’ve had a handful of recent conversations — with vendors and with practitioners at B2B, B2C, and employee communities — about this potential coming together of employee and customer communities. If social software and social media are at the heart of the shift towards increased interaction, collaboration, and transparency, perhaps there is an eventual convergence that can be supported by a single social technology system. Why can’t there be one technology platform and one set of resources supports (1) internal communication, collaboration, and learning, as well as (2) external collaboration, customer engagement, and peer-to-peer support?

After all, social is social, right?

Will Employee Communities and Customer Communities Converge?
Idealistic Answer: Yes
As someone who resonates with just about any customer-centric approach, I love the concept of an organization that values customer ideas and insight (and builds process around such input), and looks to connect employees working on specific initiatives to relevant and interested. A convergence of employee and customer communities would enable this to happen more painlessly and more frequently.

Employee/Internal and Customer/External communities have a great many similarities. Both types of communities…
•    look to enhance communication and collaboration among individuals and groups
•    leverage similar tools and technologies (e.g., wikis, forums, blogs, microblogs, etc.)
•    have, at their core, user profiles and directories
•    need to support both individual users and groups, all with granular permissioning to provide appropriate access
•    require underlying technology that can integrate with other data sets and applications (e.g., CRM systems, registration and authentication systems, etc.), extend , be secure, and scale as needed
•    depend upon authenticity and transparency
•    benefit from data analysis by someone for whom the success of the community is important, and who can make improvements based on the analysis

Leveraging these similarities would mean streamlined technology and centralized resources, which are certainly directly beneficial to organizations, and indirectly beneficial to customers.

So there’s a lot to like about the concept of a single technology platform that supports both employee and customer communities. It fits in philosophically with the direction in which many social media enthusiasts think organizations should be headed. But there’s this little thing called “business reality” that sometimes gets in the way …

Next: Part 2 – Pragmatism Rears its Ugly Head

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“Calling a Tail a Leg Doesn’t Make it So” – A Lesson in Roles and Responsibilities from Abraham Lincoln

by Matthew Lees

One of my favorite collections of anecdotes is called “That Brings to Mind.” Full of humorous and poignant quips, most a page or less in length, the book was compiled by R.L. Marquard way back in 1975. Many of the tales are likely apocryphal, but they are timeless. It contains a wealth of fodder, then, for presentations, speeches, toasts…and blog posts.

Here’s one that was brought to my mind based on recent briefings and conversations with companies I cover as an online community and social media analyst.

The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was asked by a congressman why he hadn’t freed the slaves earlier in his term of office.

Lincoln replied that the time had not been right; he wouldn’t have been able to enforce the proclamation.  The congressman was puzzles and didn’t understand what the president meant.

Lincoln explained with a question, “How many legs will a sheep have, if you call the tail a leg?”

“Five,” responded the congressman.

“Not so,” said Lincoln wisely.  “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so.”

From Project Manager to Client Success Manager
Several vendors on my watch list have employees with the job title “Client Success Manager.” It has a hipper ring to it than “Account Manager,” and probably makes clients feel all warm and fuzzy, knowing that someone on the vendor side is looking out for their interests.

Most of these technology and service providers train their CSMs to be effective at their core responsibility, which is to make sure that their clients’ communities meet with success (which means, therefore, from a purely business perspective, that the clients will continue to engage the services and systems provided by the vendor).

One company I follow, though, recently created the title and bestowed it upon two community project managers, without any supplemental training, access to relevant materials, or substantive change to their schedules and other commitments.

These two individuals are definitely good at what they do, but their experience has really been in getting to launch, not in what happens afterwards. They know their technology platforms inside and out (good tech chops), they know how to work with both clients and colleagues (good people and communication skills), and they know how to identify potential roadblocks and how to keep things on schedule (good organizational skills).

But they don’t have much understanding of the community arc; how things should ideally function after the community goes live. They know what the key metrics are, but only in theory, not in practice. They don’t really know how to advise clients if, say, the registration rate of a new community starts to drop, or if important influencers drop off the radar.

Without some training or resources to help them help their clients, it’s going to be a rough road ahead, particularly in the crucial first six months after new communities launch. Because they’re sharp cookies, they’ll eventually become solid CSMs. (They also work well together, so they’ll help each other learn the ropes.)

What Client Success Managers Need to Be Successful
They’re in for some challenges, though, largely because the company gave them new titles without giving them two other essential ingredients:

1. Understanding of community best practices, particularly around moderating and managing communities, the social dynamics within communities (super users, reputation systems), organizational issues such as internal communication, how to connect community success to business success, and more.
2. Time to be proactive. Built into CSM’s job descriptions and schedules should be the regular assessment of client communities they’re responsible for. They can’t just wait for their client contact to raise issues. They should be reading reports, watching the metrics, and keeping an eye on things, ready to provide guidance when it’s needed.

Their company could suffer as a consequence, because if the community doesn’t gain traction, the chances for a license renewal (or further professional services) are unlikely.

Takeaways
If you’re a technology or service provider, make sure you do more than give someone a new title. If you’re committed to the success of your clients, make sure your CSMs have the training, tools, and time they’ll need to do great work…for your clients and for you.

And if you’re evaluating technology vendors, consulting groups, or agencies to help with your online community, ask about the people who will be working with you to ensure the project’s success. They should have not only good technology, communication, and project management skills, but also experience in helping you successfully navigate the development, launch, and growth of the community.

To paraphrase Lincoln, calling a project manager a client success manager doesn’t make it so.

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Social Business Summit 2010- Looking at the Big Picture

Image by Worldle.net

The Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit 2010 in Austin has come to an end. Like many conferences, it featured a variety of dynamic speakers providing their view on the topic at hand whether it was macro trends or the specifics of their experiences. But what comes from this conference is a little bit more interesting than most…

Taken as a whole, the Social Business Summit 2010 presented a compelling case of how doing business has changedand how successful organizations like Intuit, Citibank, Comcast, Yum Brands (KFC), and many others are dealing with the change in a way that creates value for their organizations. But where the summit differs is in the organizational aspect of that change. Having taught Organizational Design & Behavior during my MBA program, this is always an area of business that I believe is overlooked when a disruptive event or technology occurs. My eleven years and counting in the online community/social media/interactive industry have provided numerous examples of how organizations embrace the change or ignore it.

For example, in Charlene Li’s session on “Making the Case for Open Leadership” I could identify with my own experiences in the Property & Casualty Insurance industry where closed, top down leadership is practiced with vigor. At Safeco Insurance Company, we sat on huge volumes of customer data that were stored untouched in company databases. In 1998, working with several agencies, brokerages, and employees, I put together a business plan for using the data as a means to drive down the combined ratio (the main metric for insurance companies) and generate new revenues. The plan was shot down immediately with the statement “we’ve been doing it our way for over 100 years and it works, why change?” Management at Safeco was unable to be open to ideas that came from its sales team (agencies) and employees in the field. Instead of listening and treating them as partners, and adapting to the market’s direction, Safeco was stuck in its past where control dictated that you told your sales team and employees what to do and didn’t want feedback. This idea was so culturally enmeshed at Safeco that as business practices changed with the adoption of the Internet in the late 1990’s, it could not and would not adapt. By believing that only one way communication worked, Safeco missed opportunity after opportunity in its business to stay successful. Instead it slowly died with consistent management turnover and poor financial results until finally Liberty Mutual purchased them. It’s not that Safeco senior management missed one opportunity, it’s that their management style and lack of vision missed so many that their organization became less relevant over time. 

But don’t think this type of thinking is relegated to heavily regulated industries. Citibank’s Jaime Punishill relayed to me at lunch that it takes time and a lot of pushing to move your organization, but it can be done if there are senior managers willing to listen. Citibank whether it wanted to or not is moving towards open leadership and working with its stakeholders to drive change (and hopefully value) to its shareholders.

Where does Open Leadership work? Our client Cisco was mentioned by Charlene. We helped Cisco launch its first online community in 2000, the Cisco Network Professionals Community. Over the years, we’ve helped launch and manage numerous communities for Cisco around the globe. There is one constant. While Cisco may have many of the same issues as any other large organization, it recognizes that command and control model of management doesn’t work. It lives and breathes the strategic and tactical oxygen of change, adaptation, and listening to the customer. While macroeconomic forces certainly helped Cisco in the 1990’s, it culture has helped it succeed where others like 3Com, Lucent, and Nortel have failed. Other successful organizations with this approach include our clients NetApp and SAP.

The second most important theme of the summit to me was the network. Not just a social network, but the network of customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and competitors. Too often conferences confuse strategy with tactics. Taken together, the summit’s sessions provided a strategic look at how business is moving quickly to a social business model and presented the tactical results to back that assertion up.

While I don’t agree with some of the comments about how corporations have ruined networks, trade, commercial transactions, etc. or how we’re moving back to a peer-to-peer economy,  I do agree that the network has always been in place. First it was local, then regional, then super-regional (think Europe), and more recently global. Large multinationals have made the economic process more efficient than it has ever been. Yet, it is still rife with inefficiencies. The understanding that building relationships with your network can make you more efficient is just catching on. For all the talk of rapid adoption of social media, we see far too many disjointed efforts where marketing, support, sales, and internal efforts are all operating independently (and inefficiently).

One great example of using the network properly is that of Intuit’s TurboTax team. Christine Morrison gave a wonderful talk on how it is about making money with the network while also meeting the network’s needs. The overall takeaway was that it is more profitable to pay attention to the network and become part of it than to try and dictate to it or worse, ignore it.

While there are differing opinions on how to utilize the network, several key features of successful networks are:

1. An executive who believes in the power of interacting with stakeholders and has the power to implement a plan, hire staff (in-house or outsourced), and measure the results objectively
2. An organizational culture that truly wants to listen to its stakeholders (lip service doesn’t work) and take action based upon what it learns
3. A focus on results that matter to the audience (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, etc.) which in turn translate into value for the organization in the long run

Corporate culture leads the way to long term success or failure (the Safeco example above shows what can happen when you believe that your organization can dictate to the network rather than work with it). And that’s what social business is all about to us. It’s not the technology, it’s about understanding how your targeted audience wants to interact with you and if your culture can withstand the change or not. In our consulting and management projects with Global organizations such as Cisco, SAP, NetApp, Intel, and others we’ve seen how this idea is so much a part of the firm’s success.  

So what was missing? Well from our standpoint, there were a couple of items that were either untouched or glossed over which are incredibly important to the success of any social business project. First is the issue of trust. Until the last session of the day by Lee Bryant, trust wasn’t even mentioned. Social business runs on trust. If you are unable to trust your audience, peers, employees, and other stakeholders you will be unable to act upon their input.

Second, the idea of globalization and culture was not discussed despite its implications on social business. There is a very large difference in how people do business because of their cultures. Social businesses must account for this. The culture in Japan is different than Poland which is different than Germany which is different than the U.S. Online activities reflect that difference. We’ve seen it in action in our work with Cisco’s NetPro Poland as well as SAP’s local communities around the globe. The one comment about global efforts was from KFC’s Rick Maynard who said ”We don’t have a global strategy, we have a strategy that we localize for differences.” While the network is global, local tactics that meet your audience’s needs demonstrate that you understand the local culture and how it impacts your communications.

Overall, the Social Business Summit was a success.If you take a strategic view of the content presented, you hopefully came away with a better way of looking at social business. There are several other folks who attended who have shared their comments and the tweetstream from the event as well:

• Steve Ellis
• iMediaWorks
• @CarrieBugbee (Tweetstream of #SBS2010 tweets)
• @adamcohen (Tweetstream)

We’re looking forward to next year’s event, you should too….

Mike Rowland, President

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Social Media Management Tools – Are they Ready for the Enterprise?

by Matthew Lees

Over the past 6-12 months a lot of companies and technology platforms have entered the market purporting to make it easier for individuals and organizations to participate throughout the social Web. If you’ve got accounts at one or more social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn, why, for example, should you have to log into each one? Wouldn’t it be much easier simply to log into one interface to organize, read, post, and search comments?

I’ve seen the phrase Social Media Management used as a catch-all for these types of tools. That sums things up as well as anything else.

To a basic degree, this is the idea behind Twitter-centric apps such as HootSuite, Seesmic, and TweetDeck. If you’re using Twitter on your own, these programs may meet your needs just fine. But the social Web stretches beyond Twitter and, if you’re responsible for social media at a large organization, you’ve got quite a few requirements beyond convenience. When the stakes are high, when there are more than one or two stakeholders involved, and when time – yours and your colleagues’ – is at a premium, many of these systems fall short.

What Makes Social Software Enterprise* Ready?
I see six main categories where enterprise social applications differentiate themselves from software that isn’t ready or appropriate for enterprise environments:

1. Security – We’ll start with what’s probably the most obvious item on the list. Enterprise social software adheres to high standards of security, both in terms of technology (i.e., secure protocols) and process (i.e., the ability to define access and keep audit trails; see below). How comfortable would you be sending your social security number to someone via a Twitter direct message?
2. Access, Accountability, and Auditing – These are the three As of enterprise social software. (Well, I just made that up…but it works well.) Social software for the enterprise lets system administrators set user permissions and access in a granular and effective way; it tracks activity and creates an audit trail, so you can determine who did what, when; and it allows for passwords to be recovered and/or changed as appropriate.
3. Content Management – Twitter is an example of a very rudimentary form of content management, which is pretty much based purely on a “push” model of publishing. Once you tweet, it’s out there…you can’t take it back and you can’t change it. Enterprise social software includes content management capabilities that let you save, undo, modify, and schedule for publishing at a later date. It also lets you adapt content to the particular channels you’re sending it to, and to choose which channels to send what (i.e., “I want this post to go to Twitter and Facebook, and I want that comment to go to our corporate blog).
4. Performance – This primarily encompasses speed, scalability, and reliability. For example, if Flickr or Facebook go down for a while, you’ve got little, if any, recourse. With enterprise social software, you should have support people to talk with and (usually) SLAs in place.
5. Integration Points – Enterprise social software will have hooks that allow for bi-directional integration, so data can come in from appropriate sources, and be sent out to other places (such as other applications, such as a CRM system, sites on the social Web, or your branded customer community). The architecture is important here, as ideally the platform’s engine is robust enough so that when the next new big social network crops up, it would be easy enough to configure its integration.
6. Analytics and Reporting – Social analytics providers are doing strong business helping organizations make sense of the social Web. Most social sites and tools provide woefully limited statistics. Of course, they weren’t designed with reporting in mind – particularly unified reporting, which lets you look at everything from one place — but if you’re using them for your business, you need to understand their effectiveness and impact. And that goes beyond counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have.

Note that many of these items translate into increased productivity. Social Management Tools, whether enterprise-ready or not, are largely, though not exclusively, about making it easier for individuals and organizations to do social media more efficiently and effectively.

Social Media Management Platforms
A few of the companies doing some interesting and promising things in the Social Media Management space are:
•    Socialize Your Stuff (Butterfly Publisher platform)
•    Regroup
•    Social Agency (Spredfast platform)
•    Spry Hive Industries

Community platform vendors are also thinking about how branded communities fit into all this, as well. On the leading edge of the trend toward connecting your customer communities to the social Web are:
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies
•    LiveWorld
•    RightNow Technologies (Social Experience platform)
•    Pluck

Of course, the tools can only do so much. Technology platforms won’t get you where you want to go without a sound business strategy and a plan for engaging with your customers, members, readers, followers, prospects, etc.  But if you’re evaluating — or reevaluating – your social media strategy and presence, the six items above will play a central role.

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* What I Mean by “Enterprise”
“Enterprise” is one of those buzz words that means different things to different people. I’m using it here in a somewhat non-rigorous way to really mean a level of sophistication and maturity. Enterprise software is sturdy and full-featured, to meet the many and varied needs of professional organizations. In this way, it relates to the concept of enterprise architecture, particularly the definition from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research: “Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.”

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