Archive for the ‘Management’ Category

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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How will you make your mark in 2012?

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Picture credit http://bit.ly/vafRYw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The 4 P’s of Social Business

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 |

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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’?

 

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

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Being a Visceral Business and your Brand’s Eu IQ

Monday, June 20th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 |

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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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Dialogue is authenticity

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

The best ideas come out in conversation.

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

It happens a lot, collectively and individually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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The State of the Social Brand

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

Picture by the brilliant Paul Clarke for Headstream

Steve Sponder, Chris Buckley and the great team at Headstream have pulled together an index of Social Brands for the first time this year, the Social Brand 100.

They kindly invited me to be a part of the process and judging panel and discuss the findings to an invited audience on Friday and this post is a collection of reflections and observations from both the event and the report itself.

The Social Brands 100 was a crowd-sourced project in part, with nominations coming in from across the Twitterverse initially that were then assessed by the judging panel and researched by the Headstream team, with Brandwatch as monitoring partners.

It follows in the wake of some significant league tables, most notably Altimeter’s Engaged Brand Index and iCrossing’s Connected Brand Index. I think we’re still only taking the very first steps to where social brand assessment will ultimately lead and the opportunities for data curation and social performance are wide open given the scope for real-time reporting, destructured organization, storytelling and new parameters for value and business management.

As an addition to these resources and the latest statement on the state of the social brand, Headstream’s The Social Brands 100 Index makes for interesting reading for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it tends to suggest that for many social brands the emphasis is still primarily on social media rather than social business.

There are a few notable exceptions of course. Dell, the No 1 brand ranked on the list, took up the social brand mantle in earnest as a result of a public outage of poor customer service from Jeff Jarvis in a tweet in 2007. That moment created a successful turnaround of its business and of brand perceptions, the kind of turnaround Dell would have had to have previously spent a huge amount of advertising to buy, but that word of mouth has fueled instead.

Dell is a good example of social media success and deserves to be at No 1, because without network effects and a deep-level business reappraisal, Dell’s social brand reputation would not have been possible.

Giffgaff, the brand that CNET’s been quoted in the report as describing as ‘O2’s bonkers-barmy crowd-sourced network’, comes in at No4 because it’s reinventing the way a social business can run itself. Starbucks is worth another mention for the way it has been embedding incoming conversation and co-creation into its business model.

Having said that, the vast majority of brands on the list cannot yet be described as businesses that have integrated user partnerships into the way they structure and appraise how business performance is being developed.

Social media is still skin deep for many, and the big tussle at the moment is whether social media will be subsumed into the way things have always been done, (one panelist describes it as ‘just another channel’, for example) or will it be a pivot for the emergence of social business models that offer thicker value in the longer term?

So here’s a question or two: What’s the appropriate blend of transactions and relationships when it comes to doing business in the 21st Century, and how does that vary sector by sector?

One of the key audience moments of the launch event was when during the Q&A Virtuous Bread met MuddyBoots during a conversation exchange. It was a real-time demo of how people as brands are enjoying connecting with one another. So it’s worth considering to what extent is that kind of affinity going to create a world-wide mesh of collaborative business interests in the future and will automated non-friendly transactions still be done by people? Ted Hunt wisely raised the issue of ‘socialwash’ about how deep many brands will allow the impact of social media to be.

The next line of enquiry is how only one charity was mentioned in the Index, the brilliant netroots charity Child’s i Foundation of which I have to disclose I am a Trustee (shameless plug – if you aren’t aware of what we’re doing, please check us out.)

How could this be, that only one charity is nominated, when such a core part of a not-for-profit is its volunteering base? It’s puzzling that this is an entire sector dependant on social and philanthropic participation, yet none of the major charity brands seemed to be recognized as socially engaged ones. One possible explanation is that charity brands have to work that much harder at being recognized for raising the quality of engagement and performance using social media. In a way, there’s a similarity to the Big Society argument, the people involved have always participated. Perhaps this is something for not-for-profits to bear in mind, and public sector organizations; when it comes to being seen to be engaging with people, they themselves have to be the change.

Retail, FMCG and consumer product brands on the other hand (which between them made up 54% of the overall index) are more noticeable for stretching beyond their conventional, transactional ways of inter-acting when they become more social. The move away from broadcast is more palpable. This may be only a temporary state of affairs though, as notions of value shift beyond consumption and, economically speaking, this is highly likely. With no health or pharmaceutical brands in the Index at all, it certainly appears that social definitions of well-being may be changing.

What’s heartening about the Index is that, firstly, it shows that established brands with brand equity and a heritage built up over the years can sit equally well and side by side with young, digital and quintessentially ‘unstructured’ brands like giff gaff and Child’s I and be social brands. The objective for all brands then is how to make the transition as effectively and elegantly with as minimum an amount of operational disruption and as much reputational value as possible.

The second element of the Report worth highlighting is that inclusion within Headstream’s definition of a social brand is that a social brand has a ‘moral centre to its purpose’. By including a crowdsourced element within the nominations, this Index has looked at brands from the user’s perspective as well as from the brand’s point of view. For them, it’s not all about the money even though, when it comes to adopting social media, the CEO might like it to be. So this is an Index that illustrates how social brands require a set of operating objectives they can defend with ‘blatant integrity’ able to handle interest in them from all quarters in order to develop the kind of quality of engagement that makes them stand out for being social.

Of course this touches on the visceral issues of social brand fitness and the critical point of friction in social brand management, the one that every social brand must now incorporate: To what extent will social media start to shape the creation of strategic business opportunities and how social brands develop their business models?

Developing business from this perspective is going to be key in helping social media managers go beyond the channel management of social media into areas of organizational development in a way that brings enhanced value into each and every brand in this Index, and beyond.

Posted in Brand, Business performance, Charity, Corporate development, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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