Value | | May 19th, 2009
The following is an article I wrote and was published on June 19, 2009 in the CED (Council for Entrepreneurial Development) newsletter.
Can Social Media Help my Business?
The news is teeming with articles and updates about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the new social media vehicles.
You may find them compelling in that, “it might be interesting to get in touch with my old college roommate” sort of way. You may also wonder if all of this stuff can really help your business. The answer is yes…or no.
The thing to remember about all of these on-line tools is that they are just that, tools. Twitter is not a silver bullet. Having a Facebook fan page will not instantly improve your marketing. These tools are only part of your overall plan, and it’s essential to remember that it’s the concepts these tools represent that are powerful. The concepts of trust, transparency and simplicity, that define social media, can be the leverage points for transforming your business.
Improving social connectivity within your organization is the mechanism for facilitating that transformation. Deployment of social media tools is just one aspect of that process.
Improving the ability for people to connect within your organization will increase your operational effectiveness. Allowing employees and stakeholders to connect and interact freely, beyond traditional hierarchies, will lead to improvements in your organization’s ability to:
- recruit tomorrow’s best and brightest
- engage employees and get the added value of their discretionary effort
- manage your workforce, by being able to easily find the right people for the right role
- innovate
- manage key risk factors around projects
- educate and develop your staff, partners, vendors and customers
In the end, the technology associated with social media may be part of the solution for improving your operations. But for those tools to be effective, you have to first address your willingness to be transparent and authentic, the first steps in generating trust. Trust is the currency of social connectivity, without it, technology alone is kind of like a boat, which is often described as “a hole in the water, into which one pours money.”
Guest Columnist and CED member, Lee White, is the founding member of Decision 3D, LLC. Before starting his own company, Lee worked with GlaxoSmithKline for 14 years delivering innovative operational solutions and facilitating change initiatives. He established Decision 3D to help small to mid-sized companies envision and implement organizational improvement initiatives based on the concepts and tools embodied by the Social Web.
Tags: CED, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Technology, Social Technology Tools, twitter
Value | | April 27th, 2009
To help articulate why building a social infrastructure within organizations yields benefits, Decision 3D has developed a list of six reasons, that we call “REWIRE”.
- Recruitment
- Engagement
- Workforce Management
- Innovation
- Risk Management
- Education
In every organization, most, if not all of these issues are key to success. A concerted effort by organizations to enhance social connectivity will have the benefit of improving outcomes related to these issues. Let’s see how:
Recruitment
As individuals gain more control over their own information and have a growing ability to communicate globally, they will avoid organizations where these abilities are limited. Organizations that embody the principles of transparency, openness and sharing will have the advantage in hiring tomorrow’s best and brightest.
Engagement
Engagement means getting and keeping people’s attention. It means generating passion around a topic, issue or product. It means getting people to invest their discretionary resources in the organization’s behalf. If we are talking about employees, that discretionary resource is effort/time/focus. If we are talking about customers, that discretionary resource is money and/or time spent telling others about the brand.
Workforce Management
Retaining your best talent, knowing who knows what, and identifying competency weaknesses are all critical for workforce management. In an open, social environment where transparency is a core value, getting the right people to the right job becomes significantly easier. If someone is particularly skilled or has unique knowledge of a certain topic, that person is easily identifiable in a social environment. It is also easier to identify workforce shortcomings and find ways to overcome them.
Innovation
The key to innovation is combining disparate information to generate new insight. The process of social connection reduces the friction of information flow between disparate sources. This is essential if people are to get information that they traditionally do not have access to. Opening information channels across boundaries allows innovative ideas to emerge.
Risk Management
Projects, product development, organizational change efforts, all have elements of risk associated with them. The reduction of risk should yield improved results. An open, social environment that exposes all phases of a project, development effort or change initiative, will uncover problems sooner than traditional approaches. The sooner problems are identified and resolved the lower the risk of time-line extensions and cost over runs.
Education
It has been said that the only true competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than the competition. There are few ways better for learning than sharing your knowledge and experience with others. A social infrastructure that facilitates the easy sharing and finding of information will improve an organization’s learning capability.
REWIRE the Organization
The process of REWIRE’ing an organization is primarily a culture change. Technology can support the effort, but the key element is the willingness for decision makers and opinion leaders to move to an open, transparent mindset. The way an organization choses to approach information and how it flows through an organization is critical. To achieve the full impact of REWIREing an organization, access to information must be based on the assumption that all information, by default, is public. From that initial state a justification must be made to limit access to information. This approach is contrary to most organizations, but the opportunities are huge for those that can master this paradigm shift..
Tags: education, engagement, innovation, recruitment, REWIRE, risk management, workforce management
Tech | | April 06th, 2009
If you take a look at my home page, you will notice a widget in the right column. It is a new service I am trying out called IdeaScale. It is essentially a personalized suggestion box, pretty much the same thing Dell is doing with IdeaStorm.
Here is the Read/Write/Web review of the service.
My intention here is mainly to road-test the service to see if it can be a viable tool in the “Community Partnership Development” toolbox. Test it out for yourself. Vote on some ideas that are already there, or ad your own ideas about Decision 3D.
Tags: crowd sourcing, ideascale, wisdom of crowds
Behavior | | March 26th, 2009
Here is a classic case of a project that did not engage with its communities. The UK National Offender Management Information System project (called C-NOMIS) has been a colossal failure. Reading what happened is a point by point litany of how to do a project poorly.
- Poor vendor relationships
- Sponsors out of the loop
- End users unprepared and resistant to required process change
The underlying theme across the board is poor information flow between the project team and the communities that had an interest in the project outcomes.
Hiding the facts, not listening to stakeholders, and dismissing supporters will inevitably lead to sub-standard outcomes for your project. Opaque project management is not the way to go.
Transparent Project Management is! Transparency is key to project success. Making sure that at every step, any interested party has full access to the details of what is happening and giving them the ability to provide feedback will significantly reduce the types of problems seen in the C-NOMIS project.
Decision 3D can help build transparency into projects, and avoid these types of problems.
Tags: Case study, project management, risk management
Tech | | March 24th, 2009
For years companies have created customer bundles based on age, ethnicity and gender on the assumption that if a group of people share some physical attribute, they must all think and behave similarly. In the distant past, maybe that made some sense. Today it doesn’t.
This is not to say that groups of people cannot think and behave similarly. A group of people that share a common interest or objective is called a community, not a demographic segment.
There are many distinctions between a community and a demographic segment. Let’s look at a few and consider why the continued use of demographics makes less and less sense in today’s connected society.
Interests vs. Attributes
By definition, a community is created based on shared interests. If a company can identify a community whose shared interest is relevant to the company’s objectives, you have a nice hand in glove fit. Here is a self-defined group of people that are already talking about something the company wants to learn about.
On the other hand, a demographic segment based on attributes, is just a random heap of people that will have a variety of opinions on any given topic.
Many vs. Single
By definition, individuals can only be associated with a single demographic group at a time. It is kind of hard to be “35 – 44″ and “45-64″ at the same time. The problem with this is that if your interests and opinions differ from the majority of your “Group”, then you have essentially no input.
An individual’s opinion can be represented many times by being affiliated with multiple communities.
Choice vs. Defined
People choose to be a member of a community or not. It is their choice to engage and be heard, or not.
As a demographic statistic, you are defined by a characteristic that has nothing to do with your thoughts or opinions, and you have no option but to be affiliated with a specific group.
Engage vs. Research
Companies are looking for information from groups. Gathering information from a community is a rather straight-forward, and cost-effective process. Simply join in the conversation the community is already having. A company can just listen, and obtain significant understanding. Actively engaging in the community conversation yields even more benefits.
Getting information from a demographic group is a tedious and expensive process; focus groups, surveys, etc. Once you gather the data and process the information, you only have a snapshot in time, that is probably already out of date. To maintain current data, the process needs to be repeated over and over again.
Emergent vs. Stable
Communities are emergent, meaning that they form spontaneously as necessary, and disappear as the need diminishes. This means that when you find a community, it is by definition active, full of energy and ideas.
Demographics are nice and stable. Men are men, women are women, a nice straight-forward way to collect data. IMHO this leads to a false sense of security about the information you collect, because there is an underlying premise that stability connotes meaning, and therefore is good.
Current vs. Unknown
Because of their emergent nature, communities inherently deal with what is current. Discussions are about current events; conversations address current issues.
A demographic group has no center, so there is no focus of discussion, or even a discussion for that matter. The group only exists in the data tables of the demographic researchers. The only conversation among the “group” is one that is forced and artificial, in settings like focus groups. So what do you really know?
Conclusion
This all reminds me about the old joke that asks why do dogs lick their (well you know) …because they can. Why do companies collect demographic data … because they can, not because it provides the best insight. I believe that all the nice structured data collected in demographic research provides a false sense of security to company decision makers, and ultimately does a disservice to the company’s stakeholders.
Engaging with communities is new, it feels soft, non-analytic and not very comfortable to company decision makers, but in the long run it will lead to better decisions and yield better results than over-reliance on demographics.
Tags: community, demographics, REWIRE
