Archive for the ‘Human Relations’ Category

Tethering ourselves to the web

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

What are the next steps for social interaction, and what happens after the conversation’s been going on awhile? Do we stop pouring forth linkage and retweets, what Seth Godin calls, random pokes, and go out and make something?

What how does the social factory make value?

When thinking about where we are in social business at the moment, what comes to mind is the image of the child still on walking reins, trying to be let loose in a playground. Children who are held onto for safety by their parents.

We’re still in the infancy of the social revolution, but the dawning sense is one of spectacular change on the horizon – a new renaissance of the self.

Depending on the quality of our leadership it’s a change that can be an emergence or an emergency, as some people call it. We are at a crossroads.

It’s a change that for many means they are unanchored, like life is for the 250 million people, and counting, who are unemployed across Europe with the means to feed their futures.

Social business is us. As Danah Boyd has written, social business is what we will make it.

Right now in the evolutionary chain of our connected development, we’re all plankton, on our way to creating spectacular new life forms.

This TED talk is a six-minute metaphor of what we are capable of and a film that recognizes traits we’re all capable of, including the species that eat their kin.

The biological nature of social organization in business is based on the idea that affinity is stronger than structure.

When affinity is stronger than structure, social molecules collide and they find each other using social media. Instead of the ‘eat or be eaten’ karma of the primordial soup, enlightened and connected society can support and nurture one another as a healing and generative mesh in action. We have the means to create useful action out of shared interests. We can define the types of interaction and cultural collaboration that add and generate value. Using social technology and social crm we can create a contribution economy out of a return on involvement.

So the question becomes, how can we create sustainable, collaborative culture and move towards enlightened evolution this time around?

Well, it might have something to do with tethering.

Consider the hashtag as a digital maypole around which people converse, share ideas, and commune generally. The hashtag is an example of tethering.

In a social organization, contractual ties are looser, sufficiently loose to allow the kind of personal expression that supplements corporate reputation and personal reputation. That’s especially appropriate perhaps, given that the fixed contract relationship is increasingly being seen as an unnecessary overhead and people who are out of work want ways to contribute and prove their worth. That’s another kind of tethering.

These days most of the best people would not like to be employed, but they may choose to be tethered to a good organization and be part of it that way.

People with social leadership skills, the linchpins, are able to consider now who they tether themselves to, which raises the talent bar, saves costs and builds a better culture. When good people associate themselves with an organisation, it enables them to up their game.

Social organisations can help develop this sense of tethering, and platforms like Kaggle show how it can be done.

And finally, it’s worth that in the digital age, we all want to connect and release what we’re capable of as generative value which can be the better for society, as a new kind of cultural interaction, one where people choose what they associate to, because the web enables that.

For all organisations going social, consider the nature of the contract that underpins it. Tethering can be a good source of generative value because it works two ways, symbiotically, as we stretch our legs into a new social chapter of interaction.

 

 

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Social business, social fabric and the healing mesh

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

The business of social media engagement comes down ultimately to what we think, do and feel.  For social business practitioners in the business of doing things better, it’s easy to see the world as one big data problem. If we had complete and open data running through the corridors of corporations, including information about how we think, informed decision-making would be arguably so much easier.

Equally important to social business is how we feel and this is where the lines of engagement are being drawn. One of the best definitions of social business came from Chris Brogan a few years back when he said ‘social business is human business’. That one line captures something fundamental about the nature of social business, and the business strategies needed to adjust to it.

Working on developing quantified organisations means placing stock, as well as taking comfort, in the numbers. But what makes social business truly matter is how it can deliver more business health and performance than conventional methodologies.

Chiefly this comes down to the way social business can develop generative and organic value through people working collectively together. This post is about how social business does that and how, in doing so, it can help renew the fabric of torn and fragmented society. It’s a post, in particular, about the ‘healing mesh’. The mesh can be a distributed network, as Lisa Gansky’s described it. The healing mesh can be spun around a hashtag, or a virtual experience that people gather around like a digital maypole. It can be the wired and connected infrastructure that’s increasingly housing shared value and enabling collaborative consumption business models.

The healing mesh is an evolved step on from an industrialized scale focus on consumption at all costs to a focus on empowerment and on human relationships as an alternative source of value generation. As a means to driving business opportunity it’s hitting the mainstream, as signaled this week with the news that GM has signaled a commitment to car sharing as a part of its business model.

At a visceral level, the healing mesh is the product of interaction that’s stimulated to heal because of a neurological sympathetic response to conditions around it, whether business or personal. It’s a response to the dysfunctional workplaces that 30% of all US workers are now describing as psychologically unsafe and is created from the synapses of people calling out what can be better as a result of social business.

Discussing the healing mesh with Anne-Marie McEwan (@smartco) recently, we reflected on how social business can weave, repair and create a lucrative social fabric by recognizing, as Yves Michaud’s suggests, that creativity emerges in the context of dereliction and decline. In so doing, the synaptic responses that arise out of that awareness can create the action potential to produce fibrinogens as the mesh that form the healing wound of a grazed knee at an individual level, or a broken society at a collective one.

A key element of sustainable businesses in the future, including the nature of the networked organisation and quality of life in the workplace, is going to be whether there is a shared point of intention. Intention will run like a thread through social organization. The battle currently is for people’s minds, but the opportunity can also be about connecting with people’s hearts and by creating choice as part of a lucrative gestalt.

Anne-Marie and I had lunch recently at Petersham Nurseries, tucked away by the river near Richmond.

It’s a modern Avalon, a restaurant within a gardening centre and nursery with the glorious combination of a Michelin star and a hard dirt floor. Full of beautiful things, good food and rusty tables, it is a place with good husbandry and a love of nature at its heart, where decay and growth run comfortably hand in hand.

It was the perfect setting for a conversation about the nature of the networked organisation today and social fabric in the 21st century and this concept of the ‘healing mesh’.

During lunch our attention turned to the health of networks, what organic beauty and value is in them at a systemic level, what makes them attractive, genuine, raw, appealing, and capable of fostering cultures that can flourish.

In social business the net worth, as we say, is the network. What that suggests is it’s very much the act of coming together and the connectivity between individuals, as much as the individuals themselves, that makes a difference to the health, vitality and performance of distributed organisations. Organisations can benefit a great deal today by relearning and redefining how they ‘do interaction’ and it is curious how much of this act of choosing to come together marketing effort actually focuses on side-stepping.

Letting things happen is so often not a marketing objective. The battleground for business and marketing power is often intent on developing brokerage as a means of cultivating dependency and seeking control over people’s minds, using direct or indirect commands to ‘like us!’ and the ease and convenience of zombification strategies designed to nudge and dilute free will. Decode marketing speak and very often consumer choice often is the elephant in the room, the thing that technology applied to marketing and advertising can obliterate because it’s too random. With so much invested in the way we do things, marketers often assume it’s easier to change the nature of the consumer than the nature of the business model.

Yet the skill and the insight involved in letting things happen is like that of a good sailor with their hand on the tiller, and the metaphor for social businesses as a means of cocreated and generative value can be a boat where people are in it together. Social businesses where people connect because they want to are essentially an odyssey towards value created out of a common purpose, need or desire. It puts problem solving, not profiteering, at the heart of the corporate intention. That kind of interaction between people is the warp and the weft of healthy social fabric for a distributed, networked age.

Contrast that with what we are seeing revealed as ‘wounded people and wounded organisations’, as Anne-Marie put it over lunch. We’re seeing networked opportunities blocked by obedient gatekeepers only trying to do their job and organisations stuck in vicious repeat loops confined by their own protocols. When the risk of breaking out of ‘the way we do things around here’ is regarded as culturally and operationally too disruptive, what happens it that emergence becomes emergency and business models become calcified.

We say at Visceral Business that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’ because the accessible connectivity of the web enables people to do the things they want to, not just what they have to do. But what we have in the here and now as reality at many levels is a failure of the systems of leadership to enable that.

The healing mesh of social business is what happens when you put skin into the game. A fantastic advantage of the social web is that people can reach out to one another, and do, which creates the opportunity for a new kind of social fabric, woven together out of connected intention. That kind of co-operation can be the fabric for an emergent civilization.

The intangible values that bind us also drive the tangible benefits that can be experienced as part of an open access economy. As Anne-Marie put it, ‘People are eager to go above and beyond what is expected in their work – but leaders are failing to provide systems and performance environments that let people find meaning in their work. People find meaning in their relationships with work and with each other. They need to be given opportunities to learn, to contribute, to be listened to, to be appreciated, trusted, to be socially included and to feel safe. In fact, to be treated as human beings.’

Social organizations can be the conduit for that kind of activity and effective high tech and high touch strategies can enable new kinds of interaction across social, mobile and local touchpoints, on and offline. As a terrific article by Mary Joyce put it recently, the more we understand about innovation, the more we understand that it is a social process.

So the healing mesh is essentially the intention of people coming together in a certain way with specific value beliefs attached to that way.

Out of that thought, myself and Anne-Marie have come up with a project we’re calling ‘the Petersham project’ as a homage to the source of the thought and a line of enquiry to explore the question, what’s the kind of cultural code needed to enable a healing mesh, and how can it be realized?

There are several people we’ve thought about inviting into this project, and if you’re interested in becoming part of it please find either me or Anne-Marie on Twitter. We’re looking to manifest this healing mesh by creating a forum for people who share the fact that they are all sympathetic and attuned the potential of the social web. We’re aiming to develop an exciting piece of learning, helping organisations, groups and communities to determine for themselves how they can perpetuate a healing mesh culture, in the same way as our understanding of ‘flow’ is so powerful as a set of insights.

Anne-Marie characterized the need by saying ‘there are too many dysfunctional workplaces and there is no excuse for that. We know what healthy workplaces can look like and there is an opportunity for us to conceive of them, driven by values that can now come together in a powerful way. Some of us see the opportunity beginning to be squandered. The Petersham Project, as we see it, is a way of declaring specific values and beliefs.’

We both think by opening up our sense to this question the fun will be in seeing how these emerge. We think the healing mesh is here already. It is emerging, area by area, city by city, and hashtag by hashtag, as a mesh of the committed. It is a mesh of those who seek to heal by leaning in to the questions looking for answers, the issues that need solving and the needs that are being asked to be met.

Social business ask questions about how open access, interactive organization and sustainable business can be most lucrative and how people can commune together to meet needs and solve problems. As organisations become more dispersed, there’s a paradox in this development. The social fabric and cultures of connected enterprises are increasingly going be dependent on the ties of the healing mesh and the way in which the committed bind together as a social fabric, with the ability to drive the strength and viability of a vibrant networked economy that can be taken forward. We would love to hear your thoughts on it.

 

 

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Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business model, Business science, Corporate development, Curation, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Social business design, Society |

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The rise of the expressive web

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Human/Need/Desire. Bruce Nauman, 1983
 

As a living thing powered by billions of people, the web is constantly evolving and currently one thing above all others is emerging. It’s a trend we’ve been talking about with clients for a while, it’s the rise of what we’re calling the expressive web.

According to Techcrunch, Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. It is one of the top 10 social media sites in the world.

Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Foodspotting are challenging original titans of the web like Flickr and Youtube. They’re offering an altogether more sensual and collaborative type of social platform and providing people with a greater opportunity to express themselves, in new ways, that is proving highly attractive.

Four main drivers are powering this shift.

1. The expressive web creates extra value
We’ve laid the basic groundwork of the web, so what now? Reveling in the sensuality of rich, interactive content feeds into a basic Maslow-style desire for advanced self-expression. Increasingly people are finding their voice. That voice is creative, it wants to be expressed.

Smart brands will enable this and make it part of their culture. This is happening as a shift towards co-creation, too. As the web becomes more democratic, users also want to become more compelling by seeking out and adopting content platforms that are built on co-created expression, around them and their desires.

2. Masses of data makes socially powered curation attractive
Two years ago when we were saying to brand managers that brands of the future will need to be good at curation, many of them didn’t understand what we were saying. Now, reputations can be rapidly built and brand associations can be recast by good curation skills. Curation as a sense-making skill is only going to increase in demand. Platforms like Pinterest, Scoop.it and Storify that make curation easy are becoming big winners because of this.

3. Rich content contains more information
Ever since the logo was identified as a cool shorthand, a body of scientific evidence’s been amassed about how much information is conveyed by ‘the pretties’. Analytic types may gasp, but a good image contains substantially more information than the equivalent in words or numbers (up to 20 times more information in fact) which goes some way to explaining the popularity of the infographic.

Interactive features, responsive web design, sound effects, they all create what we’d call a ‘visceral’ reaction. A moment of interactivity that fires synpases has engagement potential and is also expressive.

So while words will always be around, the web’s giving us a whole new way of communicating in cool shorthands and it has big implications for information architects and content managers.

4. Doing a job is harder these days, being expressive’s an antidote
In fact, 225m people in Europe don’t have a job at all. Those that do have full plates and can be pretty stressed out. It’s a sideways issue perhaps, but the expressive web is providing an alternative to traditional spoon-fed entertainment that enables escapism and self-discovery in ways which are just as highly accessible but where the user is in control.

The expressive web is therapy. It generates ideas and sparks the imagination. Another reason that explains people are taking to it in such numbers.

For marketers this is a very big deal. It’s a signal that, thanks to the social web, the essential nature of communication is taking a turn and it’s demonstrating how the quality of the co-created user-experiences becoming key performance indicators.

IBM’s Global CMO Study shows around 70% of chief marketing officers are unprepared for the explosion in data and the social web that the expressive web intersects. Many of them are in organizations with legacy structures finding it hard to turn around the way they do things.

As sites like Pinterest show, the expressive web has just ramped up the communication challenge a notch. It’s making it even more important that communication isn’t being seen as boring or difficult to use. It’s asking marketers to think about the way they define and serve up content in a fundamentally different way.

The expressive, artistic, web is the high touch equal-and-opposite to high tech functionality. It was never not going to happen. Are we prepared to make the most of it?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Curation, Data, Human Relations, Neuroscience, Self development, Social business design |

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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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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 |

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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’?

 

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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.

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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 |

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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?

 

 

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Posted in Authenticity, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Marketing, 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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Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Public sector, Self development, Society |

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