Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

How will you make your mark in 2012?

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Picture credit http://bit.ly/vafRYw

One definition of genius we really like round here is genius is ‘the ability to connect two seemingly unconnected things’.

Truly successful social businesses do this, they make connections between ideas and people. They also stimulate responses to create action potential, like synapses do when they fire. Social businesses make things happen, powered by affinities and the connective tissue of networked technology. And there’s no doubt that 2012 will be hallmarked to no small degree by the impact social business will have on it.

This raises some significant considerations for marketers. For social marketers that concentrate mostly on the ‘media’ part of social media, the ultimate aspiration and the holy grail of social, is to go viral. Social contagion’s the big win, the coup. The crucial key performance indicator is to make things shareable.

What social media like that thrives on however, and not entirely healthily, is often a shareability based on the open-mouthed factor of things that are either insane or incredible, spread out of disbelief, or momentary pleasure, and not much more.

Are we shattering an ecosystem we can all thrive in by doing so? As this mildly amusing article in 2002 accurately predicted, and Nick Carr’s book The Shallows has covered since, our attention spans are getting shorter.

We’ve slowly been turning into digital goldfish where everything competes with a ‘best ever’ or ‘awesome’ kind of hyperbole for share of mind, in the place of simply being interesting and sustainably relevant to a particular group of people with a shared interest, purpose or sense of communal identity that has longevity.

If the two chief gratification buttons in life are ‘fun’ and ‘meaning’ what’s relevant in this context is how, as Thomas Friedman and the historian Walter Russell Mead have both observed, after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, the Russians had a saying that seems particularly apt today:

‘It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.’

Have a think about that for a moment. It’s the essential reason why some viral social media campaigns can actually be unhelpful to brands. The sticking plaster on a short and increasingly unpredictable sales cycle, social media campaigns that are designed to go viral can end up fostering audience relationships based only on instant and temporary engagement in a similar way.

In 2012, social media tactics unconnected to core social values can serve up content that at a deep level devalues rather reinforces the impact of a social brand and its sustainability. Social business brands need a purpose beyond profit or product and a core sense of the big picture.

The good news is here though. Beyond going viral, is going scalar.

To make a mark in 2012, the genius of making connections between two seemingly unconnected things is the kind of social media integration that can quite literally scale your business. Going scalar is pulling people into your business who are advocates beyond the act of sharing.

Scaling business through the harnessing of participation and deep insights that go beyond likes, +1’s and unique views can mean walls can become permeable membranes between a brand and its users, that business becomes designed around connections instead of divisions, that being ‘on brand’ can happen anywhere by anyone, and that talent can be brought into the business; that target audiences can be replaced by shared experiences that have lasting impact.

There’s no internal and external in the social organization, so the costs of managing another marketing channel (as social is so often seen as being) or of outsourcing your voice (as agencies so often encourage) become part of a leaner, more connected and more empowered constituency of committed users that can co-create the future fuel for business strategy with you.

It’s a sustainable strategy for how a brand’s or organisation’s social voice can get bigger, and have lasting impact. That’s why the two words embedded into Visceral Business are ‘is us’. We really believe in enabling the kind of social business that can create shared value, long term stakeholders and sustainable cultures.

If you want social business success in 2012 going viral’s not necessarily a bad aspiration, but going scalar’s possibly going to be a better one.

So the question is your business sufficiently adapted and suited to scalar, or will it rely on the flash in pan of short-term virality? Can deep authentic connections help you make your mark in 2012? It’s a genius opportunity.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Social business design |

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The 4 P’s of Social Business

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

It used to be the case, when marketing first became a profession, that the 4 P’s held sway. The 4 P’s were the shorthand to make sense of the plethora of activity that sales and marketing was becoming; they led to a code of practice of sorts that made sense, reference points in a unified framework able to guide a brand’s overall sales and business development.

They were the firstly ‘product’, the tangible good or an intangible service that’s mass produced or manufactured at large scale with a specific volume of units.

Then ‘price’, the amount a customer pays for the product which the business increased or decreased the price paid if other stores had the same product.

‘Promotion’, representing all of the communications that a marketeer used in the marketplace and finally ‘place’, the way of getting the product to the consumer and/or how easily accessible it is to consumers.

That was then and this is now, and as marketers think about how to corporate social business into what they’re doing there’s arguably just as much of a need for a framework, for the same kind of sense-making.

If we’re doing it all again, what might the 4 P’s look like today? Well, here’s a suggestion:

People. Your core asset. Whether they’re inside or outside the business itself, in social business people are number one, they’re both the creators, and the carriers, of your media and messages. As things turn out, no amount of viral agency cleverness comes close to doing the job without them; so get to know them, connect with them, create relationships with them in and across the communities in which they exist. The people are the new product that powers any form of social organization.

Platforms are the conduit of that connectedness. Platforms can be proprietary, like Facebook, Twitter and Google +, they can be bespoke as your own communities inside and outside the business, and they can be shared, as places of connected interest, the places of old, where people will gather.

Protocols. Old processes may still be in place in many organizations, culture change takes time, and neither people, platforms or points of connections can do much without being enabled by them. Social businesses depend on the cohesion generated by protocols, that is the ability to feed information through the pathways that can be easily understood and taken for granted. Softer and more fluid than processes, protocols are ‘how we roll’ the collective, intelligent, agile and learning ways the organization puts in place the means to grow and become more effective.

Points of connection are the pulse points that move people when brands are experiences. They’re the moments that matter, the values that are shared and everything that people come into contact with as the touchpoints of the social brand. As social business fundamentally changes how we ‘do interaction’, that thing we used to call marketing becomes a series of points of connection, a purposeful exchange between you and your people around shared social objects.

Many brands and organizations are just at the start of incorporating social business and media into the way they do things. The four P’s may have changed, but the idea of finding a framework to make sense of what’s needed remains the same, a kind of connective tissue that can unify and help frame what social business means. Ideas people can buy into create elegant transitions. It would be great to hear what you think – does this resonate with today’s networked business needs, what’s missing?

Posted in Brand, Business, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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Being a Visceral Business and your Brand’s Eu IQ

Monday, June 20th, 2011

There are a lot of people trying to put their finger on the special sauce that makes a social brand succeed, to seek and find the Holy Grail as far as where all this wired up connectivity is headed.

We think in a nutshell it come down your brand’s EU IQ. A brand’s or organisations EU IQ is a combination of Enjoyment and Usefulness. It’s how well the brand’s proposition offers this and how well it connects, communicates and stimulates conversation around it.

The big win in raising any brand’s profile is to amplify the sense of purpose, mission and cause it has, and that’s a strange muscle for many brands to flex because logos have mostly been badging devices and the ticket of entry to transactions.

Social brands ask for involvement and the fostering of relationships, where the intangible value of gathering around a cause to support a cause, to solve a problem and to pursue a goal has a big part to play.

And then there’s the enjoyable part. It’s got to be fun right? Social brands can work out how they enrich and add something to the quality of people’s lives through sheer interest and enjoyment, especially when brand moments are throwaway conveniences and utilities that you’re using but it isn’t going to change the world. Unless you want to compete on price and convenience, a brand’s Eu IQ is a core differentiator.

We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at where the business drivers in today’s markets are headed and think it’s time for new models of organisation to push the boat out beyond what Sara Roberts calls Qwerty thinking. As I said in my TEDx talk last year, there’s progress to be made by moving away from a mechanical approach to a biological one and reframing organisational transformation so that it promotes the organic strengths and capabilities within the brand and its essence.

The acid test, we think, consists of 5 markers for successful social organisations.

1. They’re Networked, incorporating network principles into their behaviour and operating via a
 distributed model, either in terms of how they’re structured and/or how they reward people.

2. They’re Seamless. Community blurs the lines between the inside and the outside of the organisation 
and collaborative, two-way dialogue’s built into all interaction.

3. They’re Open. The business model demonstrates transparency and user-centric perspectives.

4. They’re Compelling and the brand is congruent and credible. It has social and commercial
 value, comprised of people, rituals, symbols, values and behaviours that create competitive edge
 beyond the logo, that are the platform for a sustainable business.

5. They’re Beyond Profit. Their operating framework’s neither ‘for profit’ or ‘not for profit’, it’s ‘beyond
 profit’, satisfying a triple win for the business, the quality of life of its people and for the planet. They recognise social currency includes time, money, love and attention as part of the mix.

The blend of this may vary, depending on the business and the type of business its in, but as conventional business models find it harder to sustain business margins and deliver returns in value, hitting the mark on these is becoming a good bet for investment, participation and buy-in.

What do you think is the special sauce of social brands? Could it be the visceral connective tissue of people coming together around brands they understand and believe in? I’d love to hear your point of view.

Posted in Authenticity, Business, Business model, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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Social brand curation: How are you doing yours?

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Brands are moving on from being labels and concepts, packaged and sold to others.


Social brands are collaborative exercises, created from user-centric approaches to business planning embedded into the core of the organisation.

Social business applies emerging technologies and organizational, cultural, and process changes to improve business performance, and in an increasingly connected global economic environment this means collaborative workings that flex together, creating synaptic action potential, right through to the fingertips of customer service.

Social brands are collective experiences too, to some degree or another, where everyone’s memories matter, the sum total of the moments that shape them, that make an impact.

What matters isn’t just how many click throughs or likes a brand gets; a social brand has traction because events happen in which people learn something about themselves, they’re iterative in nature and value is co-created. Gamification is a hot flavour at the moment because these moments that tingle are being recognized as part of the collective experiential value of a brand.

It’s also why data aggregation tools like Intel’s Museum of Me are fascinating. They help us see things in a new way.

As human beings, we’ve an innate need to see ourselves reflected in order to know who we are. This is a fundamental part of how me make sense and meaning, a strand of social anthropology that’s been going on since ancient man first picked up a shiny stone or looked upon its image in water.

As organizations coming together socially, the ‘collective we’ in the social brand has the same urge in it.

For individuals drowning in information, brands can create significant value by curating their stories, the purpose beyond the profit, the place where collaborative management makes sense in exciting and visceral ways.

All brands and organizations have a story in their soul and a whole set of stories within their collective culture. As has been mentioned before in this blog, there’s an opportunity for these stories to be told in highly compelling ways by brands, ways that help them to become distinctively social. Point of differentiation 2.0, if you like.

This Guardian timeline of modern music’s a really good example of the opportunities available in social brand curation and part of the excellent work in data journalism the Guardian data team are doing.

With data dashboard and performance management front and center as part of a brand story, think what your organisation’s next annual report could be like. There are immense opportunities for adding value through social brand curation.

What could your social brand be like if it was based on a wiki of collective experiences that you gather, as a movement? Thta’s the kind of brand people want to be part of, either as a fan, employee or an investor.

Social brand curation’s a good way of creating a contribution economy, where there are levels of sustainable participation built into the brand. It can help deliver the kind of brand experience that can boost value and differentiation around what brands do.

We think how brands tell their stories is going to be a cornerstone of future operational success. Good social brand curation creates compelling and credible stories based on the logic of the data and the magic of the people. What’s your approach to social brand curation?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Curation, Economics, Identity, Marketing, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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Injunctions, interventions and engagement

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Andrew Marr decided to drop a super-injunction he took out in 2008 the other day. Even if the move was provoked by the Private Eye, it was a small but significant shift in the unfolding narrative around privacy and reputation.

The visceral value of the news comes from the influence it has on collective storytelling and how it creates step changes in collective consciousness. Deconstructing news headlines can be a worthwhile exercise because they contain kernels of awareness around new opportunities, new perspectives and new ways of doing things based on the front-of-mind memes on offer.

As a journalist of course, Marr knows this well. What’s interesting about this story is how we’re wrestling with issues of engagement and living below the water line.

The eclectic nature of change at the moment is creating a wake-up call for organizations, businesses, brands – everyone operating in the public space; a wake-up call to reconsider and reappraise the fundamental root causes of their value.

We’re all public figures now, and being a public figure isn’t a tag that simply belongs to ‘other people’. This emergent fact of life comes with being part of a joined-up information environment. If you’re alive you’re going to get Googled, and if you’re digitally active in any way, consider it part of the territory.

In the past, if one’s not a celebrity or a CEO we have been quite used to, and comfortable with, being hidden. We’ve been used to being passive consumers of media, inside and outside organizations, rather than eligible producers of it, with all the shades of opinion that come with that. Factory-oriented, hierarchical, frameworks have demanded it be this way and in that world, of course, the news brokers have benefitted.

The problem comes with how in the networked world, productivity and efficiency doesn’t come from the 1% doing the heavy lifting. This has been our model of engagement and participation up till now and the platform on which we’ve created an expensive world either of paid media of expensively enforced embargoes.

We know there’s a real need for us to raise the engagement stakes within organizations and communities of interest for them to be more effective. De facto that means an environment where one size does not fit all. We’re bound by the principles of connected networks to be doing things that some people don’t like some of the time, which is why tribal organising becomes significant.

What the change highlighted by the subject of superinjunctions represents is obviously a very different conversational landscape compared to controlled publishing and one-way media we’re used to. The superinjunction is perhaps a symptom of a lack of comfort with where media management has got us to, a contra-indication of the rapacious and intrusive nature of mainstream journalism that itself prefers to peddle one-dimensionality.

Yet we live in an attention economy, attention is a form of social currency, all news is supposedly good news and the breaking news is that the socially connected and savvy have a natural and balancing remedy at hand, to connect with users direct through social media.

The subject of superinjunctions touches very deep nerves in our collective psyche about influence, integrity and social identity and it asks a question, which is the most desirable? - appearing to be better, or actually being better?

Superinjunctions have emerged as an attempt to bridge a widening gulf between two opposing positions. In the red corner, the rounded set of perspectives increasingly gathered and accessed by the socially interconnected, powered by the openness necessary to create social value and social enterprise.

In the blue corner, the die-hard legal defence mechanisms, hands-off media management policies, one-way traffic and the injunctions and superinjunctions that have emerged out of a friction-led, rather than a friction-free, business model.

These interventions have been deployed to paper over the veneers of public reputation that a few public figures and corporations have come to rely on in lieu of an authentic engagement with their audiences.

What a sad indictment this is, because ‘perfection is for the Gods’ and in the social web it’s very much easier to win out by just being decent. And it’s not a bad idea to have a few militant points of view that are prepared to get up and participate, too. They demonstrate a sense of passion, that it’s ok to think outside the box, the place where most of the progress we make springs from.

The basic framework of the web is granular and significantly more fluid than the large scale, fixed forms we traditionally associate with organizational frameworks.

All these factors suggest that acknowledging the social web involves rethinking how people communicate, how we organize, how we go about developing reputational value and enable social influence through the use of new strategies.

History tells us that no matter who rules the world, if they fail to adapt they’ll become obsolete. There’s no point being too King Cnutish about this.

When the sandbags are put away and the word ‘injunction’ is reframed, it can refer to another kind of intervention – an entreaty to deal with a fissure in a brand’s integrity. When social interest puts the integrity of what one does in the public domain, an emotionally and social intelligent brand will take this to mean working with its audience, not denying or fighting against them.

Contracting pairs of muscles work in symbiosis to create energy. Think of social dialogue in a similar way, and it becomes an intercession that directly utilises similar opposable forces around your brand where both parties gain.

I respect Andrew Marr for taking it on the chin today. This is something that public figures and brands can learn to do a lot better. If they lean into issues of public contention, using them as a cue to develop a dialogue with their audiences, then public opinion can serve them well.

There’s of course a weird tautology in suggesting that superinjunctions give celebrity a bad name, but it’s true. The reputations of public figures, companies and brands will be severely tested one way or another if the currency of celebrity and social influencers is devalued by not embracing user-centricity.

Whilst incongruence is as much as deadly a threat to public relationships as the silence that comes from avoidance and lack of engagement, it’s also important to realize that for every pearl in an oyster there has to be a bit of grit in it. So it pays to be publicly open, to encourage your brand managers to embrace the grit in social conversation, the nuances that come with the territory of a complex narrative, collective collaboration and the support of a broad church, as well as having the courage to fail occasionally, and to listen to what people think when we do.

Increasingly the building of reputation and influence, and ability to fascinate, to lead and inspire are aspects of value dependent on understanding the duality required in creating productive communication, where working well with adverse opinion and favourable points of view together in combination is a key part of creating satisfying user experiences.

The moral of ‘Marrgate’ is that to avoid public figure fail it’s worth getting closer to your users, especially the faster and looser you chose to go. It’s an indemnity, and the goodwill of being real is your insurance.

Social brand identity management is about being tuned into public opinion more than trying to configure audience perceptions via partial avoidance or a denial of who you are.

Rethinking injunction as a call to bridge a credibility gap is a cheaper, more effective and ultimately a more inventive way of dealing with challenges than hiring a team of lawyers and building a crisis management barrage.

And seeing opinion as an asset instead of a threat could make a difference in creating more trust and depth about who you are as a brand, and the nuances that go with it, if you want to garner goodwill, social connectivity and user interaction of lasting value.

 

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Dialogue is authenticity

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

The best ideas come out in conversation.

Have you experienced how ideas often tumble out when talking with someone, or in the shower, or even talking to the voice in your head?

It happens a lot, collectively and individually.

It’s only when we engage iteratively in that way that ideas get honed and polished, stimulated by the prism of different perspectives.

What happens is that in dialogue, we engage more than our brains. The interaction sets off our sympathetic nervous system, the power ingredient that creates a better solution.

Listening to an excellent talk by Tim Wu at the Royal Society of Arts yesterday on the Rise and Fall of Information Empires made me think about this too.

Tim highlighted an obvious but at the same time profound insight. It’s the acid test you can use to see whether an organization or person is generating new value or protecting expiring value. It’s done by watching whether a company is devoting its energy and focusing its behaviours on innovation or defence.

An innovation mindset will spread to others, as the sympathetic nervous system reacts towards it; a culture of defence will spread fear and propulsion away from that mindset. This is a basic survival instinct.

Collaborative dialogue however, one in which both parties adapt a little, will create solutions. That is why and how organisations benefit by adopting the behaviour of leaning into situations and becoming lean and agile in terms of working across silos. As with contracting pairs of muscles, in partnership with others they’ll also generate power.

I’m bearing all this in mind when it comes to reacting to the news today in the Guardian that ‘the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.’

It goes on to say, ‘the contract stipulates each persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 controllers must be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries’.

The article itself sparked a little conversation between Katie Smith and myself that led to this tweet -

Which led in another way, to this post – the observation that I want to share being that the grand shuffling of old protocols that disruptive technology’s creating is having quite a profound, but manageable, effect.

It’s having an effect across a number of management forms – across forms of government, upon business models, and upon marketing and communications. They all face having to accept a re-arrangement across traditional flows of power, and how to augment the duality of new power relationships into their businesses.

Even technology requires bio-feedback to work well, as the stricken Japanese are finding.

In all contexts, that feedback’s the single greatest reassurance one can have. Open data allows and enables this.

All this means that the value of win:win social contracts is ascending, whilst competitive power, based on I win:you lose management principles aren’t.

In communications and marketing terms, then, the implication is that dialogue’s never been more important to a successful operating model. We need to consider this and how to build dialogue into organizations through new processes.

It’s not enough to simply broadcast content using social media. Even if it’s done by as many people as possible within the organization who are ‘social communications’ literate, there has to be interaction and ongoing dialogue, as well as conversation which has the potential to be asynchronous.

Social media is about doing more ‘human business’ than has been done previously in the past. Increasingly, brand authenticity in this social media context is dialogue.

The kind of authenticity that breeds dialogue will be where relationships connect at a deeper level, that generate collaborative conversation, because the sympathetic nervous system will also be engaged at that point. Ultimately, this way of marketing and communicating will be more productive.

The challenge for organizations however isn’t small – all the triggers that reinforce the old ways of being have to be looked at as well as assumptions that can sit within a business model or marketing strategy.

This is one of the things we look at when going deeper into organizations to switch on dormant performance.

In real life and on-line, sock-puppets don’t do dialogue. A good volley of questions and answers and co-created conversation is where insight, ideas, value and satisfying user experiences are to be found.

Dialogue is authenticity. It’s also sustainability  – could this be something it’s now time to embed into an operating model and marketing strategy? What are your ideas on it?

 

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Corporate development, Data, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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Are you just managing social media or are you a social organisation?

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

To more than a few Marketing Directors and Managing Directors, social media is regarded as a set of tactical tools that sit within the Communications Department. More often than not, those tools are handled by digital natives on their behalf, those people that have a familiarity with social media that they themselves do not.

This leaves a significant deficit of understanding at the heart of many management teams and at the core of brand and businesses strategies about how to really adapt to, and make the most of, social media.

Social media is an experiential medium, it’s iterative and generative in nature, it’s designed to be, and it asks for human, hands-on involvement. This means that many brands and businesses have yet to appreciate how large a difference there is between an ‘organisation that uses social media’, and a ‘social organisation’.

This difference has a direct bearing on the level of success one can expect from social media. For example, the social web offers the advantages of friction-free connectivity and real-time, impactful engagement, but in return asks that brands and organisation are socially relevant and involved in a conversation. This asks for new perspectives on brand positioning, strategy and management.

To generate value-rich relationships and long-term user participation out of transactions, socially savvy audiences ask that brands develop social leadership skills that can encourage them to engage with, and not just manage through, social media. This asks for new perspectives on marketing communications, and new capabilities.

The social web asks that businesses are lean and agile, without being slowed down by the ‘middle third’ – that layer of management that’s below the parapet in terms of the strategic vision and also disconnected from the groundswell, the group of people ‘formerly known as the audience’. This asks for new perspectives on business modelling.

Socially fit brands operate with minimal slack. They operate in a way where every key contact connected with it is making a positive impact on the momentum of the business. Socially fit brands are networked. This asks for new perspectives on enterprise technology and how human resources are developed.

Organisations that are not socially calibrated beyond being in the game of social media run the risk of adopting 2.0 platforms to deliver 1.0 broadcasts, not unsurprisingly, with disappointing results. And what we’re seeing today is just the beginning of a fundamental shift, one that a great deal of business and organisations aren’t really ready for.

Without having the strategies in place to develop user participation, inbound communication, distributed, collaborative growth or the social skills to create network effects and cultivate communities of influence, these are organisations that run the risk of being completely unprepared to compete well for the minds and hearts of users and consumers in a new, connected, social marketplace.

For social media to have an impact, the adoption of social media by brands and businesses has to be much more than skin deep. Being a social organisation, able to take full advantage of the opportunities that social media brings, asks for a revisiting of an organisation’s positioning strategy, the establishing of new business benchmarks, new ways of working cross functionally across the whole organisation, new levels of insight gathering and user-centric research, social commerce initiatives, new marketing methods, as well as new cultural skills, corporate competencies, technologies and user experiences. Most organisations have quite simply never been calibrated to be socially effective businesses. Being in the game means they are only just starting.

For businesses and brands that struggle with social media adoption, most that resist using it do so because they don’t have the time, they’re too busy or they can’t see the benefits operationally – all valid arguments given the pressures of managing a hectic pace of change. But a lot of that pressure of change is coming from managing the shift from being old model to new model businesses without having a fully integrated social strategy.

This creates a great deal of fragmented activity across core user groups and activities, but no movement. Organisations need to develop bespoke migration strategies for this that can deliver returns with minimal disruption.

As social media plays an increasing part within marketing communications and business management, one key challenge is how to maintain local intimacy and meaning as things scale. We work with large organisations to develop strategies that deliver the answers to these challenges and that do so without compromising the potential strength of the social brand. This can happen by either outsourcing the brand’s social voice or by taking a too-technical approach to data management. Both can end up stripping the organisation of its ability to add value by creating deep, visceral connections with users.

The social organisation offers one big advantage beyond just using social media, in that social organisations are sustainable. They’re sustainable because they help people connect where they buy (and buy in) and buy where they connect. But building user engagement and participation into the way organisations do things and making the shift from industrial-style structures to fully operational distributed networks, involves making more human, more attentive connections, not just scaled up ones.

Social organisations offer more than automated transaction. They have human business principles embedded into their core and make social influence, the strength of community and operational productivity three intertwined and inclusive objectives.

For many organisations managing social media, the Achilles heel is still, as one client put it recently, ‘Heaven help anyone who wants actual conversation!’

Steve Bridger, Visceral Business partner, puts it this way. ‘We get the return on social media we deserve’.

‘The so-called failures of social media to deliver are misplaced; rather they are the result of our own failure to commit – to sustain an online presence in more than a fleeting, one-night stand.

Social media may fail to deliver the campaign result you had pre-determined, but instead unleash a series of promising relationships, connections and surprises we ourselves are unable or unwilling to embrace.

Consider our failure of exposing our meeting culture (or our advertising) to the same rigorous demand for immediate return that we demand of social media.

Social media lifts a mirror and reflects back on our own failings to make time for other people. When contemplating the failures of social media, we need to first look at ourselves.’

Not doing so is a sure sign of an impending social media #fail. If that describes your business, then talking about it might be a good place to start.

Posted in Authenticity, Business, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Management, Marketing, Self development, Social business design |

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Joining forces

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010


Visceral Business exists to help organisations thrive; smart, agile and purposeful organisations, socially potent brands, organisations as movements; the kind of organisation that happens because it offers the potential of making connections that move people, the kind of organisation that makes people want to respond and contribute.

This is organisation as phenomenon not factory, powered by strategic intent and collective intelligence in which a visceral moment shared is a visceral moment squared.

Social technology, connected leadership and network effects offer the ability to generate spontaneous growth in new ways. If we consider social business to be more about relationships than about transactions, then it follows that the conjoined forces of a compelling singularity of intent, aligned with indomitable human initiative, is what powers social businesses and is the fundamental foundation for growth for organisations today.

To ensure we’re completely aligned with the full potential of this way of doing business, Visceral Business has always operated as a networked partnership, based on the principles of collaboration, integrity, (the more blatant the better), sustainability, inventiveness and mutual respect between ourselves and our clients.

It’s been important to us that we walk the talk, representing the change we provide in the way we act and in what we do. It’s mattered to us, for example, that we aren’t talking about how social media can benefit our clients in the way a VC funded business does, driven ultimately by debt and the bottom line.

We’ve been crystal clear from the beginning that our objective is to empower our clients to be effective in supporting themselves sustainably by developing their own capabilities; helping them to develop their own vital social voice instead of encouraging ways to process or outsource it.

We haven’t grown by putting together a payroll. We’ve been a fluid business framework for supporting talent rather than exploiting it, and we’ve shown that these principles can all work to improve an organisation’s potential as part of a new, effective user-centric business model.

We want to amplify the potent points of difference that are sourced directly from the existing inherent strengths of the organisations we work with, as the smart alternative to offering them artificially manufactured marketing veneers and the kind of factory models that are costly to prime and maintain.

Visceral Business has developed organically as a social impact enabler first and foremost, not a profit machine. We care about the ecosystem we exist in as much as we do about ourselves because we recognise that the two are interconnected.

We’re here to help existing organisations and brands become socially enabled and discover their latent talent, so they can create new forms of value for themselves and their customers and stakeholders through the power of their networks and, essentially, we want to be the best ally any organisation can have when it comes to thinking about how to create a social strategy or to develop an existing one, and for our work to develop deep relationships that resonate with everyone that comes into contact with us.

With all this in mind then, it’s with enormous pleasure that Steve Bridger has joined forces as a networked partner in Visceral Business.

Steve’s one of the wisest and most considerate voices around within the social networking community with a highly respected perspective in particular on not for profit and public sector social organisations where together we’re currently doing some exciting stuff.

We first met up about a year ago through our mutual connection with The Child’s i Foundation and Lucy Buck, through whom we’ve had a great opportunity to get to know each other (and if you haven’t yet come across The Child’s i Foundation, please check the community out and prepare to be inspired by the infectious enthusiasm that Lucy’s vision generates.)

The idea that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’ is one of the guiding principles of our combined approach. Working together with Steve on developing truly social organisation has been such a synchronous and hugely all round enjoyable experience that the obvious next step was to take it further.

So, our ecosystem’s expanded, the synapses are firing, and forces have conjoined. We’re looking forward to the action potential on every level.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Identity, Management, Public sector, Self development, Social business design |

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Working it through

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

It’s just a perception, but I sense an important threshold’s been crossed over the course of the last few weeks.

‘We’re working it through’, was how Danny Alexander described what was happening in the days immediately after the General Election in the UK a month ago, after the electorate handed back the most exquisitely hung Parliament to politicians for more than a generation.

‘We’re working it through’, is how Mark Zuckerberg might put having to deal with consumer mutiny over privacy control plus an increasingly deep questioning by some Facebook users about what the DNA of Facebook and the core values of ‘being Zucked’ are all about.

‘We’re working it through’, also describes the grim reality as B.P. struggles to find an authentic response to a global sense of condemnation, cynicism and disbelief that’s attaching itself to the B.P. brand as surely as the oil slicks are landing on the beaches of Louisiana.

These three situations all have something in common. They all ask for organizational adaptability at a deep level. They challenge what all the parties involved stand for and represent.

What’s interesting about the phrase, we’re ‘working it through’ is that it’s an iterative, hands-on approach to problem solving. It involves contradictory pairs of muscles and often the engagement of opposites to achieve progress.

In the case of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats who have formed the Coalition Government, ‘working it through’ led to harnessing a collective imagination and a bigger ambition than either was capable of alone. It led to ‘new politics’, a clear and confidently articulated manifesto, a shared cabinet creating credibility for the platform of an inclusive ‘big society’.

It didn’t take much to turn the dial on the mood music about the election. In a few days it shifted from mainly doom mongering conversations of conflict, woe, indecision and a re-election within the year, to ‘lawn love’ and a decidedly pacified and somewhat surprisingly positive reaction from the electorate.

It was the body language that did it, a change in behaviour, the emotional maturity to go from combatants to colleagues in pursuit of a collective national interest.

There’s a creative truth that comes to my mind in this context which is, ‘if an idea’s not working then it’s time to get a bigger one’. I think both David Cameron and Nick Clegg became receptive to that as a result of that impasse; our politicians have become more consensual and to some degree at least, have adapted. For the time being, it’s paid off and the voters have been largely assuaged by their creativity.

The difference for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is the opposition to what’s being pitched on user privacy’s led to the biggest backlash a social media platform’s ever experienced. This is new territory. It raises questions about what happens when you represent the digital footprints of more than 500 million people and how much licence any provider has to act unilaterally in a connected age.

The response has been that there are privacy protection groups within Facebook promoting user control over privacy settings to fill this vacuum of management. In doing so, they’re acting like the cleaner fish of the network, helping Facebook stem the attrition of disgruntled users, in many cases persuading them to stay within the network better than Facebook’s capable of doing by itself.

It makes good business sense for Facebook to embrace these efforts and to knead them into their overall operating recipe. It’s an example of how the seeds of corporate strength and survival are often to be found within the opposable forces of a networked organization, in the same way as recombinant genes are said to be part at the core of our own DNA and our sustainability as a species.

The question in this is how many organizations recognise this and are equipped with the capability to be this adaptive?

As B.P. embarks on one of the largest shoring up exercises in corporate reputation we’ve seen in years, spending $50million on a slick damage limitation communications campaign, are they capable of being hands-on and credible enough to connect with the gritty realities and the issues, from a position of blatant integrity, to restore the trust that once existed in its brand?

Blatant integrity is present when people and organizations are comfortable with being held up to scrutiny and we’re big on ‘blatant integrity’ at Visceral Business. Organizations that can manage this welcome attention as a compliment knowing it’s a commercial currency, and welcome the opportunity to cushion and objections because they’re more interested in creating a moment of truth than making an expedient sale. Knowing that one leads to another in a skittish, no-mercy, click happy culture, they see the value in relationships over transactions.

Increasingly, corporate success is a co-owned and co-created experience. Increasingly, this is an experiential economy in which control has to be surrendered in the interests of benefitting from a multiplicity of voices, the voices that are at the heart of what’s known as swarm smarts, and of working that through.

B.P. illustrates how interested parties that give a brand attention have a range of perspectives that need to be incorporated into the strategy of the adaptive organization at speed. B.P. has often appeared in denial about this, which Tony Hayward’s ‘I want my life back’ comment only served to amplify. The quicker a business environment develops, the bigger the risk any kind of blind spot is, and the agility with which an organization can react is a severe test of how well a brand is truly aligned with its stakeholders.

For an engaged brand, challenges will come thick and fast because that’s a facet of iterative learning, and working through the unknown is ever-present characteristic of doing business that often requires a degree of faith and goodwill to succeed.

The big imperative for all organizations now is to know how to operate iteratively like this. In Rework, 37 Signals, an organization I greatly admire, suggest that these days a business plan stays relevant for about 15 minutes. This is an inherent characteristic of a lean organization and an important shift that all brands and businesses should now consider.

The UK Election, Facebook’s privacy saga and the social and environmental accountability of B.P. are all examples that illustrate formative organizational experiences. They represent a shift that goes beyond social media. What we are entering now is a new chapter in how we organize, a shift that goes beyond a social revolution to a semantic one.

The semantic web has arrived and the semantic revolution’s about collective smarts. It’s about how, when it comes to solving management problems, we’re going to need to feel comfortable ‘working it through’ and to be able to lead and inspire confidence from that position.

Smart organizations will evolve by creating adaptive fits with their stakeholders at a deeply engaged level.

Semantic value is going to be our daily bread of the future. Semantic value, as we’re beginning to see, depends on the ability for diverse forces to work together. Semantic organizations will have the kind of adaptable, recombinant genes, the big ideas, heightened ambitions and the new horizons that our survival as a species has always depended on.

‘Working it through’ is a means of communication and engagement that’s becoming a critical success factor. Which is one reason why organizations and brands need to know how to engage at that visceral level if they want to succeed in the semantic age, not be defeated by it.

Thanks to Erica Marshall for the photo.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Corporate development, Dot.life, Human Relations, Management, Neuroscience, Social business design, Society |

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Cogs and corpuscles

Friday, March 5th, 2010


HR operations for organizations make a fine art out of developing job descriptions, roles and responsibilities, duties, and key performance indicators.

They’ve led to management layers and mechanical thinking, and sometimes to zombie businesses that work to the script but can miss essential opportunities.

In effect, they’ve developed cogs for factory structures. This ‘division of labour’ model, whilst not necessary entirely obsolete, can have the effect of doing business today a lot of harm.

The problem with cogs is that a cog out of alignment can halt a whole machine. Cogs are geared to work in a pre-prescribed fashion, they’re passive processors, part of ‘the system’.

Many a corporate structure today is based on a structure comprised of cogs.

One of the principles of Visceral Business is that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’; we help organizations adapt to become socially calibrated so they’re more strategically connected and dynamic.

As we become more networked in general, as the lines between inside and outside the co-created business become blurred, I have a hunch that we may look at mechanical business models one day and see this way of organising as having as much sophistication as a set of meccano.

By comparison, corpuscles are rapidly adaptive receptors that respond to mechanical pressure or distortion. They balance introvert and extrovert stimuli within the corporate body as a whole, based on a combination of shared imperative and free will.

And because they’re adaptive, they can coagulate.

In business management today, there are strong arguments emerging to think of people as corpuscles not cogs, as vital, dynamic and highly differentiated elements of ability, and to work with them in this way.

Evidence is emerging to suggest incorporating (quite literally), the biological nature of human networks into business strategy, that strong organizations are ‘super-organisms’ as Nicholas Christakis, talking about the power of social networks at the RSA, described them last week.

Matthew Taylor, writing in the RSA blog yesterday, expanded on this by referencing the RSA’s Connected Communities project, and saying ‘it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.’

Coagulation, at a very primal level, breeds creativity. It happens when corpuscles cluster together through shared purpose and affinity and, today coagulation doesn’t just breed creativity, it breeds profit.

Have a look at this video of a talk Robert Scoble gave recently at Stanford. Making some leeway for the slightly amusing subtitles, it hints at the way social business is going and makes the point compellingly that how we need to be thinking and organising today, how people work and how ideas spread now, is a biological business.

Businesses can gain ground today by re-imagining their business frameworks to be less about structures and more about genetics, by thinking about making a move from managing cogs to cultivating corpuscles.

Organizational structures are highly interconnected, and as we move away from the mechanical concepts of organization they’re becoming more permeable; as such, I think they’re going to be more capable of spreading ideas through affinity, by receptive people as a process of osmosis and by working with the talent connected to their brand, both inside and outside the walls of the organization.

What are your thoughts?

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Posted in Business, Business performance, Business science, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Management, Neuroscience, Social business design, Society |

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