Archive for the ‘Society’ 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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Social brand curation: How are you doing yours?

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Injunctions, interventions and engagement

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Dialogue is authenticity

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

The best ideas come out in conversation.

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

It happens a lot, collectively and individually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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How distinctive are your social markings?

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Who are we? We’re the sum total of things that make an impressions on our lives.

Our natures don’t exist in a vacuum. Collectively and individually, we’re the things that make us – those formative experiences, the times of achievement and transcended challenges when new levels of experience were reached or we had memorable moments with others we can recall years later.

On a personal level, there’s huge value in the memories and the objects that remind us of these moments.

And on a corporate level too, it’s really no different.

For any organisation thinking about how to become more social, the key is becoming more collaborative. And for any organization thinking about their brand, an important question now is to what extent, and how, does its social identify reflect this?

Brand identities, as signifiers, are a combination of identification and communication. They’re the necessary redux needed to get a sense of something in one easy sitting.

The easy fix then would be to include people more obviously, much in the same way as brands added the word ‘Direct’ after their logos when online presences first appeared. That’s a crude and potentially short-sighted articulation of what being a social brand can be.

In the age of the factory, all one had to do was hang a sign over the door and people would come marching through it, ready to produce and consume, because there were few other choices on offer.

Things have changed, and brands have multiplied. Over time, competitive pressure has demanded that brands have embarked on a journey to develop an individual look and feel; to be more recognizable, distinctive and preferred.

Today it doesn’t matter where you’re a large corporate or a company of one, if you are actively social then it follows that you have a digital footprint, and it follows then that footprint should have some clear markings that create a trail, that leave a clue as to who you are as a distinctive species of value.

At Davos, Goldman Sachs was cited by Edelman as a company that aces social media. Goldman Sachs doesn’t have a great social reputation. It aces social media but it isn’t a social organization.

If you’re a valuable social brand, people will want to follow and participate in what you do, and you’ll let them. So if the biggest social compliment anyone can pay is they seek to include others, how is that being reflected in the unifying thought of your organization and your social identity?

As part of the possible answer to that question, thanks go to Johnnie Moore and Euan for pointing this out recently:

‘We are conditioned by what we eat, by the economic pressures, by the culture and society in which we live. We are that culture, we are that society.’

Our online social environment is often regarded as primarily a technical and digital phenomenon, but if you dig a little deeper what you’ll realize we connect with in social communities in actual fact are our authentic selves and each other’s native spirit.

Picture by Liddy Napanangka Walker ‘Wakirlpirri Jukurrpa’ (Dogwood Tree Dreaming).

It’s time to bring these to life as part of your social brand’s assets.

Data visualization and story telling are both very powerful ways to articulate social identity, and we should be looking at data visualizations that take data closer to art.

Novo Nordisk has done a great job of telling it’s story online in its integrated Annual Report, but it’s a shame that the great content isn’t brought to life with animated datasets, a visual story, interactivity and rich media that can be an essential part of communicating the social dynamic of a brand.

For food and FMCG brands, the opportunity is to tell useful data stories about food provenance and product journeys as part of being a sustainable brand.

Unfortunately the nature of datasets today is one where the ability to customize information so that it’s part of an organisation’s collective graphical, verbal and behavioural identity is missing. Tools are largely proprietary. This is something we’re seeking to address. The telling of the Microsoft journey below is a good step in the right direction, as are these about Foursquare and Old Spice.

Social brands communicate best when they have clear and recognizable cultural watermarks.

Picture by Quasimondo

They need their art to be seen as well as their output to be engaging. As data journalism comes more adopted, this is a big opportunity for future forward developers.

The challenge is on now to see who will tell the best stories for social organizations by blending data with visual art.

This opportunity to tell visceral stories is the way to develop more effective brand communication and social organization involvement, and if you have come across some powerful data visualizations about brands, please share them with us and we’ll add them to our Tumblr blog of them here.

As Steve Moore has described it, convening, curating and narrating the progress of the collectively smart social organization, and telling stories about ‘the net worth within the network’, and doing it your way, isn’t this all a part of who you are, if you are a social organization?

We’re looking for developers who can collaborate with us on developing powerful data stories for brands. We think that’s one way we can help the artistry of how social organizations develop. If you’re interested in being a part of it, we’d love to hear from you.

Tuhoe Isaac by Ashley Daws. The face of an individual and his identity, honest, unique, full of integrity.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Corporate development, Data, Identity, Marketing, Social business design, Society |

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Getting nudged and getting visceral

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Photo by Paula Bailey

The economics of happiness has come into sharp focus, courtesy of David Cameron.

It rode, cavalry-style, over the horizon last week; offsetting a general retreat on financial returns and the near-on collapse of Ireland’s economy and potentially Portugal, Spain, and the Euro. Some might call it emotional rescue.

An attribute of the post-bureaucratic age that’s emerging, and part of the essential nature of what we call ‘visceral’ business, is that organisations know how to value, develop and play to collective free will.

With that free will comes the irrepressible, autonomous and authentic instincts in all their diversity that lie at the core of human nature.

These are the characteristics that propel how we learn and develop, both as individuals and collectively as a species. Psychologists have agreed for over fifty years that this self-actualisation is an essential, if not the ultimate, happiness component.

The virtual world of the world wide web is now established. It’s highly valued as an intangible asset. So it could be argued that its equally intangible counterparts – quality of life and the value of well-being – have been late in coming to the party; they should be on the radar, equally recognized.

Because when people are connected globally online, where we are doesn’t matter as much as how we feel. This simple point is having a big impact, altering previous terms of reference, impacting upon traditional measured of states of value and motivation as well as changing the fundamental nature of many conventional social, commercial and political contracts.

‘Human universals’ make previously crucial boundaries less interesting and less important, others more significant and influential than ever before. Happiness is, after all, a worldwide measure, the global Holy Grail.

This map illustrates the extent to which leading digital global brands are now capable of occupying as much share of mind or wallet as the territories we’ve traditionally thought of as our ways and means of government in the everyday lives of millions. Citizenship today, as well as value, can come in many forms and contexts.

Brand value has arguably lead the way when it comes developing an approach to an intangible economy over the last two decades. It’s the most common means of evaluating and measuring qualitative and quantitative value and tangible and intangible reward.

That said, the challenge is that a large expanse of marketing thinking is as misconstrued and as close to obsolescence as the economic platforms of wealth generation running so close to the buffers at the moment. In fact, it could be argued that ‘Nudge’ thinking, that’s at the core of the thinking within the Behavioural Insights Unit looking at the National Index for Well-Being scopes out a race to the bottom as much as factory models of capitalist value generation have done.

When we look back, ‘nudge’ thinking may well turn out to be as clumsy and awkward as the first mobile phone in the hands here of its proud inventor, Martin Cooper, and here’s why:

It makes virtually nothing out of the things that move people at a deeper and more visceral level. It’s the clunky solution to going wireless.

Devoid of connection with gut-level, instinctive, intelligences and visceral stimuli and instead reliant on conditioning, ‘nudge’ management and marketing is a slow, mechanical means of leadership.

Nudge thinking is symptomatic of an abject lack of ability to inspire people at a leadership level, with all the potential loss of creativity, and therefore innovation and growth, that’s implied.

Interesting stories come from asynchronous not synchronous events, the ones you can’t make-up, the ones that fascinate because they don’t fall outside the known model, the ones beyond the obvious. They’re the ‘fact that is stranger than fiction’ and they ask for leaders with some imagination, enough to cultivate the social growth opportunities they contain.

But nudge thinking and mechanical leadership doesn’t accommodate this. Nor does it accommodate the excitement or the thrill of the new, the unexpected or the mindblowing. Nudge thinking works on the basis of incremental benefit. It doesn’t account for opposable views, nor encourages the energy and dynamism that comes out of freely expressed ideas and opinion.

A necessary ingredient of your brand idea, or your successful leadership of a social organisation, is the capacity to cope with and contain the inherent friction of truly dynamic, ‘visceral’ business.

By comparison, many organizations and individuals handle objections poorly and see them as a threat to defend against; acting ‘off-script’ is seen by ‘nudge’ thinking as being unwelcome and unhelpful, but is precisely what releases the prospective value many organisations need. Social organisations and movements can thrive by upskilling and recognising its constituents’ creativity, their ability to innovate and solutions and growth opportunities as propellants for national progress and collective well-being.

By taking techniques like gamification and putting it into the behavioural economic pot, the essential qualities of enjoyment and play move to an absurd mechanical domain with inherently limiting implications, as some of the smarter designers are now suggesting.

The risk is that what emerges out of nudge is sludge, where the edges of both technical capability and human connectivity are blurred and blunted, where the opportunities for resonant,relevant, instinctive and visceral experiences are sidelined, defeated by the very model that’s supposed to develop them. This has profound implications for what we might term well-being overall.

The spread of nudge thinking as a management and marketing ideology is fashionable right now, but it does ask us to consider fundamental questions about the ways governmental and organizational momentum play into it. It presupposes that people can be conditioned, it’s arguably the GM equivalent to spontaneous growth and diversity, grown in the petri dish of the boardroom when it can be informed in real time by a biofeedback loop as an alternative.

Every organisation that aspires to be a social brand might want to give this behavioural and economic equation some thought. What constitutes socio-economic well-being for a social organisation exactly? How can it be differentiated by a culture that stands out, that’s distinctive from the bottom-up, not just modelled from the top-down?

As John Hagel puts it ‘we need the productive friction that comes from bringing together passion and wisdom’. If organisations want to galvanise, mobilize and develop options for growth is nudging them the answer?  Or should they be visceral? You decide.

Photo by Christopher Schmid

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business performance, Corporate development, Economics, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Public sector, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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Social leadership and the Gutenberg conundrum

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

There’s an aspect of social leadership for businesses and brands, and how it develops, that could be called the Gutenberg conundrum.

Up until now, opinion formers have most often relied on forms of leadership that have been derived from the structures they’ve operated within.

In organizations, that flow of influence has been the pipes of the corporate system and the hierarchy of the organogram. In brands it’s been the channels of the marketing mix. In society at large it’s been pundits within the media.

But in the face of social networks and what they’re capable of achieving, one person to another, those corporate pipes can seem slow and rusty; those media channels abstract and intrusive; those pundits often un-nuanced and uninformed.

Social media has been compared by Clay Shirky as being the single greatest revolutionary change in communications since the invention of the Gutenberg Press, and when looking at social networks in that context today’s forms of influence run the risk of being as obsolete as the tools of the monks of old during the invention of movable type.

That was 1439… and now, as then, the answer to how to develop social leadership is not to do ‘more of the same’, or even more of the same in new ways.

It was tough for the monks nearly 600 years ago; they had to give up the thought of their quills as being able to influence the known universe. But they gained a niche within a far bigger society as a result of doing so, and this is the essence of the Gutenberg condundrum.

Because for social influencers today, contrary to accepted belief, it is possible to be in control and open. Social leadership involves having a personality. It commands a following because the ones doing it are more fascinating than they are perfect; social leadership is human business; it is generous.

All of which adds up to how value in the 21st century comes increasingly from a combination of passion and performance as John Hagel describes it, the people who care, whether they are inside or outside the organization, and people on the fringes of thinking we ourselves feel comfortable with.

It asks that we acquire new skills. The need for this skill set is often dangerously underemphasized in how organizations and brands adopt and use social media when it comes to making the most of what it is capable of achieving.

Just as with the invention of the Gutenberg press, social media requires as much new capability as those who held books in their hands for the first time in 1439. We have reading and writing under our belts now, sure, but we haven’t had much need for connecting openly through digital means on global networks, any more than hardbacks were a part of everyday life before printing was invented.

In terms of its true value, there’s a parrallel to be drawn; social media without social leadership skill is worth little more than a book when someone does not know how to read and write.

So what are social leadership skills? Well, they include having a congruent sense of one’s identity, a definable set of values capable of being consistently expressed in a multitude of different ways, not all of them predictable; a willingness to participate in open space and to express oneself; the skill to embrace opposing forces and be creative with them, the desire to inspire others, to contain catharsis; in short, agility in thinking, resilience in doing, authenticity in being.

Brands fail socially when they play the numbers and try to penetrate a market more than connect where there is receptivity. To improve business performance, social organisations and brands require permission to operate in their community more than their competitors and to stimulate enquiring minds. This is something social leaders understand. It’s a different kind of impression.

When people come together to share ideas creatively there is an ‘unmanagement’ at work. Social leaders create the space in which that can happen, the results of which can move people dramatically and be exceedingly powerful. Quite literally, they can exceed expectations.

Going ‘off-script’ is a disaster scenario for many organizations, and yet the compound effects of many voices is that quintessential representation of leadership that so many seek. It’s also a path to progress of unparalleled potency. People love mind blowing experiences.

Rest assured, when the masses went ‘off parchment’ it was thought of as a disaster too, mind blown. But at that moment and when the Gutenberg press led to astonishing levels of social and commercial opportunity and growth, things changed for the better.

The lessons of the past ask the leaders of today to solve this Gutenberg-style conundrum as part of their social strategy and their operating model, that they appreciate what makes social media work is embedding social leadership skill into the future development of their brand and their organisation.

What do you think? It’d be great to hear your thoughts on it.

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

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The biological organization

Monday, August 9th, 2010

When Tim Berners-Lee first talked about the semantic web back in 2001, he was describing the coming methods and technologies that would be able to understand the meaning, or semantics, of information on the internet.

This was in the days before Google (sidenote: can anyone remember them?) and times have changed. Today we expect our searches to intelligently be able to serve up what we’re looking for. Our social connections form a highly sophisticated and networked group, a supersized mind, at our disposal, day and night.

With some irony I find myself writing about the semantics of the word semantics. There’s a reason, because today it seems to me the definition that’s most apt is Alfred Korzybski’s, he of ‘the map is not the territory’.  The most ironic thing is that the web world’s sense of the semantic might just be the thing that ends up allowing the full potential of the internet to elude its grasp, if we cling onto it.

Alfred Korzybski’s definition of semantic is ‘a system for looking at the semantic reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event, symbolic or otherwise’.

We’re in the middle of a semantic revolution in that sense, and the power that enables it is not ultimately technical but biological. Technology is creating the smarts for human evolution to take place and scale with a whole host of commercial implications.

When people connect through the web, they connect to Alfred Korzybski’s definition of semantic, they connect to ‘a system for looking at the reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event, symbolic or otherwise’. They look for meaning in this way, they look to be moved.

Yet, according to Forrester Customer Experience Research conducted in June, 67% of all customers find their online experiences an emotional void. Roughly two-thirds of shoppers now scour customer online review sites before making a purchase, and 57% of customers weigh up and trust the suggestions, tips, endorsements and criticisms of their fellow customers before deciding to buy. User-generated reviews are more trusted than any form of advertising in the purchase-decision process. All that adds up to a big unsatisfied gap and a big business case that argues for doing something about it.

The smart money’s gone out of search as we’ve known it and into understanding the anthropology of the online communities of interest we now occupy, whether they’re organizations, brands, platforms or networks. These are biological organisations, cultures with their own recognizable way of doing things, they own identifiable digital footprint, and they’re online.

The TEDxPennQuarter talk in Washington I did recently talked about this and reinventing organization, with a new metaphor to understand how we organize, the framing of our organizations and brands as biological species.

Social and anthropological observation shows us there are a huge number of ways of we can organize and that organization comes in very fluid, fascinating, diverse and dynamic forms.

We’re a lot more sophisticated than we were when the commercial organization was first invented. We understand, both commercially and socially, that every organization is unique, and needs to be, in order to provide a differentiating advantage. So it’s worth thinking about organizations as biological entities because DNA is competitive advantage and considering that we might be on the cusp of creating an exciting new genetic code for how we can do business.

New technologies and the amount of data at our fingertips are enabling us to do this. The question is, are organisations really developing strategies that can make the most of their social diversity and liberate the social value that’s on offer to help them sustainably flourish and thrive?

We know that social ties boost survival. The next step is to engender cultural, communal strength of purpose and belonging, something that some brands still shy away from. Social media for many’s a tool best to be kept at arm’s length, in keeping with the way media’s always been managed. This is a mechanical mindset and a damaging one.

The biological organisation, by comparison, is one you can, quite literally, tell by its markings. It’s out to make a social impact. It gets to be the leader of the pack by doing what it does in its own unique way. This is next generation Darwinianism, when it’s distinctive and inclusive social leadership that leads to the survival of the fittest.

In essence organizational development hasn’t changed Darwin’s thesis was published and Eadward Muybridge made the first stuttering images of man in motion, even though technology, and our levels of insight and understanding about our world around us, has changed dramatically since then.

The fluid and iterative ways people are organizing themselves around real needs and in real time are making way for an information-led evolution. Creating connected, collaborative, dynamic, participatory and engaged business asks us to shift from being mechanics to biologists.

Maybe it’s time to re-examine the genetic identity of organizations in more detail and gain a deeper understanding of sustainable metabolic rates and lifecycles, and the commercial opportunities on offer, based on how we gather information and how we connect to people.

Posted in Authenticity, Business performance, Identity, Management, Social business design, Society |

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