Posts Tagged ‘social media’
July 7th, 2010 by Jane
Following my last post a few folk asked me to expand on how to enable two-way comms.
To cut a long story short, if you’re a big company with loads of people wanting to talk, the only way to get scale is to empower your staff to talk to customers. Companies who’ve been around for a long time often can’t see a way to make this happen – or it’s already happening in pockets under the radar and they don’t know how to control it. The important point to remember is the same mentality and methods that’ll lead to success on the outside are those you need to apply internally first. The rest will follow.
Begin by asking yourself whether your staff are able to connect with one-another really easily. Can they find and converse with colleagues in different countries, offices, departments, at all levels? Or is communication and messaging top-down and one-way? Top-down one-way communications are distinctly unreliable. One weak link in the chain and the message gets lost; and no feedback means no improvement.
Multi-directional networked communications, on the other hand – enabled via enterprise social networking platforms, forums, wikis or other collaboration tools – equip you with armies of influencers to spread the word on your behalf.
If you fail to empower your internal advocates, you’re making life very hard and expensive for yourself.
What’s more, there are so many brains in big organisations that the knowledge, ideas and answers are always in there somewhere. The challenge is joining them up – making connections and finding ways to bring more transparency – so inspiration, participation and new behaviours spread all the way through, with newfound velocity.
As well as repairing weak, unproductive cultures and removing barriers to forward motion, the key reason it’s vital to harness collective intelligence nowadays is the quickening pace of change in the outside world. Big bureaucratic structures make sense when no radical change is taking place, but it stands to reason that a fast-changing environment calls for greater agility. Likewise, hierarchy becomes inefficient when we need more info, more interaction, quicker decision-making and rapid action.
So help your teams talk to one-another in all directions. That’s it. Those who understand the ‘markets are conversations’ mantra and how to leverage networked communications will be in there somewhere and they’ll spread their understanding like wildfire.
Universal, embedded understanding renders (expensive) control measures (and blind panic) completely unnecessary.
July 4th, 2010 by Jane
Despite the old ‘markets are conversations’ mantra being so well used nowadays, many organisations (particularly big ones) are still struggling to get to grips with its true meaning and what they should actually do about it.
The long and short of it is that at any given time there will be a bunch of customers out there who want to talk to you and about you. Sometimes they’ll want to complain that the product they bought was the wrong size, wrong colour, broke after a day’s use… sometimes they’ll want to praise you and thank you for such incredible service. Sometimes they just want to know when their package will arrive or when the next software release is due out.
The obvious change in recent years impacting the frequency of conversations is the ease with which anyone can share their thoughts via social channels (today it’s YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs… tomorrow something else). Reducing barriers to conversation has set the advocates free. Now everyone can share what they care about. The downside for those with something to hide is the fact the same tools have set the detractors free too.
Now that people have a platform through which their voice can be amplified, success in enabling advocates and pacifying detractors hinges on two key principles.
1. Your biggest influencers are early adopters, so focus on them relentlessly. The rest of the curve is really good at ignoring you, so don’t waste your resources. Instead listen to and converse with the early adopter crowd and they’ll market to the rest on your behalf, at no extra cost.
2. If your product or service is crap, the detractor conversations will be happening right now whether you like it or not. Priority one is to fix your product/service and priority two is to join in the conversations. Or you can flip this and start talking to the outside world openly about how exactly to fix your product/service (but you better be prepared when the floodgates open). It’s vital to tell the truth. Given it’s out there anyway, you can build trust by ‘fessing up; or destroy it by ignoring the obvious or by pumping out generic PR.
So when we say ‘markets are conversations’, if you interpret that as ‘a bunch of people want to talk to us and we should enable that’, you’ll be on the right track.
May 31st, 2010 by Jane
March 30th, 2010 by Jane
Yesterday I was invited to speak about Scramblr at a workshop on innovation and cross-border collaboration. I listened to the group talk through reasons why loads of online efforts to work together fizzle out. You know the drill… that sinking ‘not another social network’ feeling… tumbleweed rolling through empty forums and neglected profiles. All the great intentions in the world don’t give you more hours in the day to check a dozen different sites. Nobody can be arsed to overcome a lost password, let alone contribute; and it isn’t there fault.
There are loads of reasons for this… some inherent in design, but the one that’s really stark and matches my experience is the fact you need a purpose. It sounds pretty obvious that community productivity requires you to have a point – yet loads of efforts spring up that lack a fundamental role. For action to happen, it is absolutely essential to have a producer / facilitator steering, shaping, pushing, inspiring action. Without a Producer, you just get a bunch of enthusiastic, talented people with good intentions waiting for something to happen. And people don’t wait long these days before moving on.
When I was ranting relentlessly last year – (here, here, here, here) etc etc – a tribe of likeminds leaped out the woodwork and joined in. We got together and started making stuff. We made a dozen video ads for good causes in a matter of weeks. Sometimes they only took 4 hours, from concept to release. They came together from lyrics written in the US, coupled with music composed in Israel, and a splash of Canadian animation. All that happened because of the role of Producer. The Producers are rare, but when they emerge, things happen. Not just ideas, but execution, fast and lots of it. Without the Producer, nothing happens.
That’s why Scramblr starts with the Producer – whomever / whatever they may be. Empowering Producers is fundamental to making change happen. It’s vital in order for anything to come out the other end when you’re feeding in passion and talent.
Producer + tools + resources = PRODUCTIVITY.
March 1st, 2010 by Jane
Many companies still hold a deep-seated fear of two-way conversations with their customers. The idea of enabling direction interaction with individuals seems like a massive can of worms. How can we trust our employees to speak on behalf of the company? Aren’t we inviting trouble? Couldn’t it damage our reputation? How can we control the conversations? How can we eradicate the negatives? Do we really need to be taking this risk anyway? Is it worth it?
The answer is yes. It is worth it. In fact you don’t have a choice, unless you want to drift progressively further from your customers. What’s more, the conversations are already happening and there’s nothing you can do about it. 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know and 70% trust opinions of unknown users, so either stick your fingers in your ears shouting ‘la la la’ while your revenues dwindle; or join in and embrace the chatter as an unprecedented opportunity for growth – a platform for gaining revelatory insight and feedback in real time and for amplifying the voice of an army of promoters… your most effective and cost-efficient salesforce.
At the end of the day, it’s basic common sense that any business needs to be where its customers are. In the UK, a 2008 Nielsen survey showed 97% of the UK’s population were shopping online (Japan 97%, Germany 97%, USA 94%, South Korea 99%). As for mobile… well, eBay just did $500m through their mobile app.
Protecting reputation and retaining control isn’t what’s important. What’s important is driving profitability through innovation. Success is achievable by relinquishing control in the confidence that you have the infrastructure, strategy and toolkit in place to listen and respond to the conversation. None of those things are hard to come by [email me if you'd like to discuss: jane@resonanceblog.com].
February 12th, 2010 by Jane
I’ve noticed that many of the business folk I meet fall broadly into two distinct categories: those who are trying to do something and those who are trying to be something. Truth be told, I don’t have much time for the latter. The former, on the other hand – those who are trying to do something – don’t need to try to be anything… they just are. And I love them.
There’s something sparkly about people who are trying to do something – instigating change – like entrepreneurs who are the masters of ‘creative destruction’… a term Joseph Schumpeter popularised when he outlined his vision of capitalism, around innovative entry by entrepreneurs as the force that sustains long-term economic growth, even as it destroys the value of established monopoly companies.
The difference between those trying to do something and those trying to be something is more stark than ever in our current social media frenzy. If you’re trying to do something, media isn’t the point, technology isn’t the point – the objectives are what’s important… and the ability to question… why are we spending time and money on this? Is it in line with what we’re trying to do? Is it what our customers want? Are they getting value from it?
Meanwhile those who are trying to be something are focused on being… cool. And everyone knows there’s nothing less cool than trying to be cool 
If you’ve ever been in a meeting and had the same feeling in your guts as when you’ve watched your dad dancing, it’s time to refocus on what you want to DO. All else will follow.
Those who are trying to be something can keep their shuffling boardroom butlers, loud bar talk and tie-tweaking long-winded background intros… but we’ll take the tea and biscuits. Just don’t expect us not to roll our eyes.
February 11th, 2010 by Jane
This article by planning director Richard Madden from Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw brings up an excellent example of social media in action, circa 1900 – that of the Michelin brothers Édouard and André and their quest to build their car and bicycle tyre brand… by recognising that people were more passionate about food than tyres (shock horror).
As Richard says, ‘[The Michelin Guide] was genuinely useful, it invited participation, it was given away free at petrol stations, and readers were invited to provide corrections and suggestions. They were even encouraged to leave the guide in view when visiting restaurants to guarantee good service.’
One of the post comments states another good example: The Tour de France – a bike race started by a newspaper to get people talking and generate content.
Citing great pre-internet social media feats serves as a reminder that our toolkits – currently equipped with Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, YouTube and rest – are not the point. They’re simply transient vehicles for a timeless human desire to converse about interesting stuff.
Too often our social media strategies – or the token pinch in the mix that proves you’re ‘doing social media’ – starts with a menu of tools first and thoughts on what you could say second. This is sort of missing the point.
Albeit a cliche these days, the point of social media is to have conversations – or more accurately to remove barriers to having conversations. The great thing about the tools is that they enable participation in a two-way exchange, on a micro level. Two-way involves listening; and not just for the sake of it, but to build a network of influential promoters – your most (cost) effective sales team.
The challenge is as it has always been. It’s something the Michelins cracked and it’s very very simple:
Be useful and interesting.
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