Archive for the ‘Business performance’ 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 |

Add Your Comment

Falling in love with the back of the product

Saturday, August 27th, 2011

Few people in the modern industrialised world haven’t got something to thank Steve Jobs for. Some of his legacy’s very obvious, some it goes much further than the products themselves and is less so – cultural narratives of empowerment we’re only beginning to fully appreciate in reflection.

Absence is, sadly, often a way to view true value.

The ‘blow the top off my head off’ moment for me, and my first encounter with Steve Jobs’ genius, came in 1984. As a 23 year old account manager, I was given the job of producing the first advertising that Apple ever did in the UK.

It was nothing as glamorous as the famous Ridley Scott ads shaking up the States at the time. The budgets they had over there were way beyond what we had. Apple was still a relatively fledgling company and we were a new market, but we did get to do some classy and arresting black and white advertising in the quality press, perfect for the slightly unconventional architects, creative agencies and other firms that Apple were pitching to at the time.

What was really great about the gig though was the free prize that came with it, an Apple MkII that cost £5,000 installed in my office. £5,000! That alone made it a bit special. But when I got to move that mouse and wiggle a MacPaint digital spray can around a screen that it did it for me. Nothing like it had ever existed. It was a wow moment, a creative wonder that went way beyond working, and I was sold.

I think I can honestly say I can put my entire love affair with geekery down to that moment, just in the same way a stroll down the Kings Road at the age of 11 made me fall in love with creative design. Those moments are visceral, they go deep down and they stay with you.

A whole plethora of stories of Steve’s insight, vision, daring, focus and social impact have been unbundled as he steps down as CEO, and the reputation of the man, how it’s translated into serious dollars and cents in a way that has briefly made Apple this week the world’s largest company, is worth thinking about. Because Apple, despite everything about it that has been about product design, has also been about the quality of its people.

Brands like Apple are personality-led. Their culture, values and ways of doing things, built from and inspired by passion, have set it apart. And what stood out in the tributes for me is Robert Scoble’s take on something very important, nothing to do with the shiny sleek surface design that Apple’s renowned for.

What Robert Scoble’s said about what was special about Steve Jobs was this: Steve’s the ‘only one guy in the industry [that] has ever told me to look at the back of a product to understand its beauty’.

It’s worth considering that back in the day when Apple was spawned, user-friendly was a term that didn’t exist before then. Quite simply, no-one had ever thought of things that way.

Now, user-friendliness has become a holistic user experience. As organisations and all their touchpoints become more social, we can all learn a great deal from that little piece of Steve’s wisdom.

The look and feel of a product, the way Apple approached it, was ground breaking, it still is. Product focus is still important, but needs service and making meaning attached to it, now, to matter.

Today, the ‘back of the product’ is its people.

What makes Apple distinctive is the legions of fanboys and girls, people happy to be defined in no small measure by that ethos and what it’s led to for them.

Social organisations are all about this. Falling in love with the back of the product and understanding its beauty in the social organisation is about bringing out the people who are a part of it, making connections that go way beyond technical.

We can take people out of the boxes they live in within organisations and make more of them, relishing the inventiveness and creativity they have inherently. We can produce things of wonder as connected networks, like Steve Jobs did. The intellectual understanding and emotional commitment is there, often disaffected and unused; as with a technology reinvented and reimagined, with guidance, vision and social leadership, it can transform, in just the same way he did it.

Business didn’t used to be personal. Now it is.

Steve Jobs’ focus can live on in a new way.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Self development |

4 Comments

The Social Media Supermarket

Monday, July 4th, 2011

It’s not what you’re thinking. This is about what lies beyond the many tracking, posting, collaborating and measuring apps there are out there, all of which are a veritable supermarket in their own right.

As any supermarketer will tell you, there’s a big shift involved in helping a consumer in from the point they see the banners outside the store – the media – to how they actually navigate through it and the nature of the user experience – the modeling. The point is that social brand architecture, or the lack of it, can make or break a social brand.

In the early to mid 1990’s a lot of my time was spent advising retailers. We used fundamental sets of assumptions that were in service to, and all about, how customers shopped a store. Many of them are still used today.

Navigating one’s way through a large supermarket is one of modern life’s complex organizational events. Navigating the web’s and virtual organisation’s a step on from that again, which is why services like Google helping by pushing stuff to us.

A socially branded organisation is somewhere between the two. It has a multitude of elements – social objects – and a complex range of activities going on inside it, similar to the number of lines a supermarket may carry on its shelves.

It has a wide choice of elements that consumer and participants can pick up and engage with. It’s accessible via the web, but is still one with a threshold, a sense of inside and outside in terms of belonging that makes it a virtual environment; a brand is by definition an identifiable space.

If you’re a maker of a social brand or business, or a consumer of and participant in one, the degree to which that social organisation can be thought of as your ‘local convenience store’ in terms of familiarity and loyalty, depends on how well the user experience delivers an interesting and sensible shopping experience that makes it something that’s easy to go back to.

In the same way as those retail principles did out of physical spaces two decades ago, there’s a big need to make sense of the digital cultures of brands today, because the curation and cultural meaning of social brands is crucial if people are going to come along and browse, select activities to participate in and commit to involving themselves in your brand, what we quite quaintly call ‘social engagement.’

There’s the things like the merchandising of your hashtags, how are you doing that?

There’s the clustering of social and digital events. How do people get a snapshot of all of it very quickly? It asks for a framework for social category management.

There’s the livery of your social brand architecture. Just as there are semiotics – colours, images, words – associated with fresh food, the pharmacy, the deli, the meat, fish and diary sections of a supermarket, things that create distinctive associations and triggers of understanding, so there are social semiotics. There are the ways people sense-make online around different parts of the social organization as well as unique and distinctive cultural attributes you can call your own, the social differentiators and protocols, visual and verbal languages and points of focus, that need to be easily known.

Many companies are using social media for rapid fire business as usual in the same way as supermarkets are geared to everyday transactional exchanges. The social media supermarket today is a trolley-filling of Likes and +1’s and Share buttons and clickthroughs. But these items are not where the value is for consumers. The cultural value of store environment, the ranging, matters just as much, the social ambience and the ease of shopping.

No social consumer’s going to go out and put 10 Likes and 5 +1′s’ on the shopping list of their social activity today. That’s why brands must become ‘go-to’ destinations to be truly socially potent.

Consumers shop the stores they like because they know where the categories are and because they’re easy to navigate. It’s not just about what social media can do to get people ‘into’ the social organization, it’s what you’re going to do with them once they’re in there that matters. The modelling of your social environment makes sense of the media and the platforms that support it.

What we see is that many organizations are currently frantically trying to put social media on their shelves while ignoring the basic layout of their social environment, but without a social brand framework at an operational level it’s an approach that can only lead to a shallow depth of engagement and restrict the size of user buy-in.

Beyond the frenzy of tooling up to be social, social brands and organizations have the challenge of creating special ambiences, experiences and making sense of what’s on their shelf.

They should be considering the question of how they’re going to create a compelling user experience, because when there’s a high volume of goods and competing calls for their attention on offer, what really matters is the means to navigate through it in a way that’s capable of continually connecting with a consumer’s desire to shop.

Posted in Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Management, Neuroscience, Social business design |

2 Comments

Being on Fire

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

(With apologies to Seth Godin for riffing off one of his favourite pictures).

There’s a phrase we’re all familiar with, ‘So and so’s on fire today’. You hear it all the time.

Being on fire’s a state that talks about the temporal nature of influence, how it’s no longer a permanence, as well as the patchy nature of knowledge, and how it’s lumpy.

Another phrase I like describes what I think is the true nature of talent, and it’s ‘everyone’s a genius some of the time’. Einstein apparently couldn’t navigate his way home from the office too well. We’re all better at some things than others. Peak experiences are peak experiences because they do exactly that – they peak. Elizabeth Gilbert in her TED talk speaks about creative genius as a divine attendent spirit and Ruth Stone, the poet, who first encouraged her to recognise that genius as something that comes to visit, when we’re ‘on fire’.

This approach to creativity and talent development is a substantial shift in thinking away from the imperative of ever accelerating performance that people have been conditioned to, where there’s no room to relax in driving operating performance to new levels.

When it comes to talent development, the phenomenon of metaphorically being ‘on fire’ asks us to recognise that genius and flashes of inspiration come at the least expected moments.

Eureka breakthroughs involve accepting the nature of value is undulating. Social community expects that people will ebb and flow in their interest levels to us, in fact it’s part of the attraction. In being this way, it offers the opportunity to create human resource principles for developing social business equity that are more sustainable.

Fortunately now, there is the ability to aggregate the responses and contributions people make through social CRM. We can recognise and accommodate undulating performance, more easily and more of the time. We can develop a body of work as a part of our online credentials, the tracks and markings of the digital footprints we’re making, individually and as organised social brands collectively over time. And we can create a contribution economy in which people are freer to play to their peaks.

So now, the question is, what can you do to enable your fans and supporters and employees to be on fire, more of the time? What can you do to enable your organisation to do the same? What is your strategy for embracing imperfections and off days? Is your brand capable of fostering and holding the fire in people, or is it in danger of going downhill by saying ‘use the stairs’?

Posted in Business model, Business performance, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Self development |

Add Your Comment

Going beyond ‘Not for Profit’. Thoughts from The Third Sector Conference.

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

There’s been an intensive look at the state of social media in the Third Sector going on at the Not For Profit Social Media Conference in London this week and the hashtag’s been #nfpsm for anyone who wants to check it out.

Here’s me and Steve talking a little about this, with many thanks to the marvellous David Wilcox who never eases to amaze me about the things he can do with an ipad. Thanks and appreciation go to everyone who put on and was a part of the making of the forum into a significant stock-taking event, both at the venue and online.

It certainly was a conference full of friends. Steve Bridger did a fabulous keynote and Lucy Buck and Kirsty Stephenson spoke about how the Child’s i Foundation’s campaign to save Joey was so successful through its approach to using social media.

Standing back and taking a look at how the whole thing rolled, it’s encouraging to see how much social media’s being adopted and it was also obvious there’s still a long way to go. The journey from managing social media to being a social organisation, packed with social leaders able to inspire, support and solve big problems collaboratively, is full of opportunity as well as some substantial challenges.

On the opportunity side, much of what’s being done now is largely proprietary and off-the shelf; there’s a road map to follow which is comforting but that also contains the danger of being a bit ‘me too’ in terms of social brand marketing.

NFP’s now have a great basis on which to build on what they’re doing by developing truly differentiated social brand strategies and identities as part of the way they do things. They can develop social values and social cultures capable of creating communities of purpose, belonging and compelling points of difference.

On the challenge side, the scope to welcome, accommodate and adapt to marketing activity coming in from outside the organisation and to embrace the experiences of supporters and volunteers into ongoing product, service and process design has yet to be started in earnest.

Organisations do find it hard to adapt to and embrace all the experiences of those connected with NFPs at the moment much beyond listening and in that sense there’s still a hangover from the old days and sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ to grapple with. I look forward to the day when, for example, community participants in Not for Profits come to these events and talk directly and spontaneously about the difference that their one is making, to them.

Ultimately we think there’s no inside or outside in a social organisation. Yet the architecture of participation at this point is not quite the collaborative dialogue it’s capable of becoming. It’s still about target audiences instead of target moments. Job descriptions remain fixed, corporate reputations struggle with how to accommodate and integrate personal profiles into their own, the scope to build on the kind of affinity that can reshape organisational structure so it’s more fluid is limited. Hopping over the walls of internal departments to contribute to initiatives is often regarded as too provocative and challenging to the status quo.

Making meaning by being better connected at a deep and more intimate social level is a big ask for many brands. Old sector divisions and boundary lines between commercial and not for profit are clearly evident too, just the name of the Third Sector Conference also suggests that. We do rely and need these labels and definitions to a degree as things to hang our hats on of course, but the question around how much these labels help or hinder organisations should be asked as part of where this all goes from here.

Doing the work on business modelling that we do, we know there’s a point to taking another look at the whole way Not for Profits view themselves. To be socially successful as user-centric organisations there isn’t one that shouldn’t be thinking about how they can make their core purpose come alive in the minds of the people who are connected to them as ‘not only for profit’ and ‘beyond profit’ organisations whatever they do, so that they’re fully effective. NFP’s can be social businesses in the pursuit of big important causes. For NFP’s there’s an irony in that being well-meaning isn’t necessarily the whole social story. The organisation, its processes and protocols, overarching strategy and social brand positioning, have to be fit for purpose too.

Adding a social media overlay to a brand won’t make it resonate and make a difference to people at a netroots level, and perhaps that’s the cautionary note of the conference. There’s developing revenue streams and network effects in tandem with partners and advocates to think about, different types of relationships and social technology to embed at deep levels, new ways of working to raise the effectiveness, efficiency and value of social knowledge flows and streams of activity. What happens next in terms of commitment, making the business case and the appetite for being social’s going to be crucial.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business model, Business performance, Charity, Management, Public sector, Social business design |

Add Your Comment

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 |

Add Your Comment

When the consumer’s the connection

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

At a fundamental level, business dynamics are up in the air around how brands can build their business models and market themselves.

It used to be that it’s the company that’s the distributor, that’s the long-held assumption. Distribution‘s been the bedrock of an entire business model.

So what happens if that changes and the customer is the connector?

To give you an example, I’m a bit partial to Rude Health’s Morning Glory porridge. It’s great with raisins and keeps for a week in the fridge. Camilla Bernard is one of the two founders of Rude Health and someone I’ve met at a meetup which helps. She’s the one that gives Rude Health its social voice. I like what she and the brand stands for, that the brand has a passion around it, that it’s healthy and full of authentic value. I especially like how Rude Health responds and joins in with social conversations.

As a result I’m prepared to be part of Rude Health’s contribution economy, and I’ll speak up for it as an advocate, not because someone pays me to do it, but because I want to.

I also like Waitrose. I shop there regularly. I especially like the way John Lewis partnership’s building on its impressive trust credentials by being open about its sales data.

Good or bad, I’m rooting for them for that, it helps me build a belief in them, I’ll maybe shop there more if I see they’re struggling.

Like any customer, for me supermarket retailing’s about ease and convenience, but I want to get as much bang for my buck as well. The trust that’s in the equation and Waitrose’s values and personality are at least as important as the ability to transact with them.

At the moment my local favourite supermarket doesn’t stock my favourite breakfast cereal. Disaster. This messes up my user experience! So I’m happy to connect the two brands together via social media.

Everyone wins in this scenario. Waitrose gets information about a Key Value Item on the shelf that virtually guarantees my weekly food spend goes to them. They also get to understand more about their local demographics at no cost. Rude Health hopefully gets a listing. I get the breakfast I like more easily.

Businesses that understand social commerce principles and the network effects of social media can do a great deal to create lucrative and compelling user-centric business models around that.

As a new kind of distribution model though, it asks brands to organize around the fact that the customer has become the connection.

When the customer is the connection, you’re really looking at the prospect of marriages made in heaven. The game’s no longer about brands pushing out product through a variety of (expensive) communications channels but about playing a proactive part in a mesh of demographic interests, powered by social media.

How well many are prepared for this change though is another matter. Are brands really making the most of this shift? Are they realigning themselves and their business processes and competencies around it, and how much are they losing by not doing so?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business model, Business performance, Data, Human Relations, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

2 Comments

What’s your social worth?

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

Warning: Stocks may go up instead of down

Picture credit from New Think Inc

Beyond the vanity search on Google and the thrill of the Klout score, a new sense of social worth is emerging, significant and long lasting.

And despite the litigious dramas being played out at the moment on Twitter and elsewhere, it’s becoming more possible for social brands to be in naturally in command of their reputation more than ever before.

Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, is the head of a very hierarchical sense of the law and he’s dealing with a networked jungle. The Lord Judge says social technology’s out of control and it is, by its very definition.

The social web is out of control because what matters in the social mindset is not what a Fleet St proprietor thinks but what a friend does. This is frightening to many still wedded to industrial-style marketing management and that’s the mindset that will keep brands back.

The golden ticket to this nirvana of social brand goodness comes through developing a slightly adjusted sense of worth. The currencies of social worth are not the same now as they’ve always been. What we’re seeing now is a convergence of mobility, technology and value that radically affects the genome of reputational systems fundamentally, of brands as organisations and of brands as people.

To riff badly on a John Lennon line for a moment, happiness today is no longer a warm gun, it’s a warm digital footprint. The social internet involves thinking about how your brand is creating network effects in the long term.

So getting a quick thrill about a Peer Index ranking is one thing, but if you aren’t maxing out the opportunities for your brand that this intersection of mobility, technology and value provides, then it’s arguable whether you’re doing much good at all.

Celebrity today is not a steady state. Attention is moving too fast and too far for that and influence is being increasingly grown out of inter-action. That makes it inherently more fleeting and strategies have to therefore become more self-sustaining.

In parallel to this, with mobile money coming on-stream and the creation of Empire Avenue, the last few weeks have ushered the birth of micro-credit.

This kind of social technology allows people to contribute in many possible forms. It allows for a ‘contribution economy’ to become possible, one with several components to it.

If you ‘follow’ me you’re giving me attention (thank you). Attention is a commercial currency and part of the contribution economy.

If you ‘Like’ me, you’re spreading a good word about me. That like raises my stock and is precious.

If I give you a hat-tip and credit you for doing, saying or producing something valuable, I‘m strengthening our connectivity and networks by doing so.

If you donate money to me by buying my stuff or supporting my cause, or if I pay you for your time, another investment has been made. The one we’re most familiar with, the money economy. The master/slave economy.

The social web is not based on master/slave relationships, it’s based on target moments, not target audiences.

So if, as an employer, that contract ends for some reason? Well, it’s more in my interest than ever that I maintain some kind of social contract with you; after all, we’re connected on LinkedIn.

As a consumer, I might not need you today, but if you create target moments and I like them I might just hook back in again with you sometime in the future.

All these kinds of relationships become valuable. This is the power of weak ties. Weak ties allow for the possibility of many different kinds of social economic contribution to be made, contributions that can support your reputation far better than pure monetary gain, plus they can indemnify you to be able to deliver again and again over time.

Child’s i Foundation, the netroots charity run by Lucy Buck that I am a trustee of, has been grown on recognizing social worth of others and everyone’s contribution.

That combination of giving time, money and love is one that’s very important to us, and something we really focus on recognising. Just recently, our first babies home, Malaika babies home, had its first birthday. The value that went into creating this milestone is enormous and wonderful to see.

It means a great deal to us that David Tait, our chairman, is walking up Everest and is such a big part of what we’re doing at a personal level instead of just running a meeting.

We accept and depend on donations, but Child’s i shows it’s cool to be involved via love, and time and attention as well. That what makes everyone involved in Child’s i matter to one another and propels us.

Network law and these emerging senses of social worth mean that weak ties tell us more about our investment opportunities and whether what I’m doing has value or not. My Empire Avenue metrics tell me in what ways I’m contributing and creating value.

That’s a significant step towards looking at the reputation of brands in a whole new way.

One day, employers will look at it this way. They’ll look at how much money than can saved by not having disconnected players, how much brand traction can be created by finding the people that care about what they do and by bringing them deep inside the business, and in recognizing much the people dimension does affect their stock in trade.

This is an operating environment that some may consider to be a lawless networked wilderness that must be controlled and contained. The reality is that it’s an evolutionary environment in which free will, choice and relationships are increasingly augmenting utilitarian marketing and transactions where everyone creates the brand. I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that the investment darling of the social network world this week has turned out to be LinkedIn, the network for professionals that contains the biggest asset base in the world for personal worth. Scammed for profit or not, what people ultimately won’t budge on is their own sense of self-certified integrity as vouched for by others.

The social web is out of control. The law that’s emerging is a networked one. Because what matters are what friends think, your weak ties, the way your reputation is something crafted online. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Tags: Law
Posted in Authenticity, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Marketing, Society |

2 Comments

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 |

1 Comment

Older Blog Posts

Archive for the ‘Business performance’ Category