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September 2010
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Celebrating six years of blogging and sharing
Six years ago, I wrote my first blog post, “Blogging as a state of mind“. Forrester was supportive of my research efforts into the nascent subject of social media and saw the logic of my having a blog if I was going to be advising clients on how to have one! I am forever grateful for that leap of faith.
I remember how nervous I was writing that first post. After rewriting it several times, I finally closed my eyes and clicked on the “Publish” button.
I hold on to that memory because it’s a powerful reminder of what many people new to social media go through, that sense of being out of control. While I’d been publishing research at Forrester for five years by then, blogging was just me — unpolished thinking, typos, and all.
What I didn’t realize with that first post was how addictive it would all become. The same thing that drove me then — to share my thoughts and research with people — is what drives me to share today. And today, anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account can quickly and easily share and feel the same sense of power.
In that first post, I wrote, “I believe that blogs as they are today are more a state of mind than a technology or a publishing tool.” As an example, I pointed out that Forrester’s CEO George Colony would occasionally write a column. He’s now a frequent blogger and Twitter user.
This is what many executives fail to grasp – that social media isn’t about blogging or Facebook or Twitter. It’s about sharing as a state of mind.
Executives are shockingly bad a sharing publicly, so I encourage them to take small steps, sharing simple observations with a small team of people. Many start doing this by email.
One recent example: The CEO of General Electric Jeffrey Immelt was asked to give the commencement address at Boston College last spring. In the course of writing his speech, he reached out to 270 Boston College grads at GE via email, asking them to share what advice they would give to new grads. It’s small steps toward greater sharing, but it is steps.
I’d love to hear from you what your first experiences were like, when you ventured into this brave new world of sharing and social media. Were you anxious, exhilarated? What have you learned since you started? Share so that we can relive those early days with you — they are worthy of reflection.
Webinar Series: Leadership & Social Media
Join me for a series of five free Webinars that will feature frank, intimate, and unscripted conversations between me and eight thought leaders in the social media and leadership space. Each session will feature a different topic and perspective, as detailed below. We’ll also open up the conversation to questions from the audience.
As a special note, you’ll be automatically entered into winning a free one-hour call with Charlene Li, to be selected randomly from attendees at each of the Webinars.
Recordings of past Webinars appear below.
Past Webinars And Recordings
Guy Kawasaki and Charlene Li on “Today’s New Mandate: Enchanting and Open Leadership”
Tuesday, September 28, 2010 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT
Recording now available at http://vimeo.com/15487743 and also as an embed below.
Guy Kawasaki & Charlene Li On Enchanting & Open Leadership from Charlene Li on Vimeo.
Guy has been a long-standing advisor to companies and entrepreneurs, and doing so with wit and wisdom. I got to know Guy when we spent 24 hours on the USS Nimitz, which is featured in Open Leadership”. Guy is working on a new book, “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions” so I’m looking forward to discussing with Guy his take on what it takes to be a leader today. As a prolific blogger and Twitter user, Guy will also give his honest opinion of what makes it takes to be an enchanting leader with hundreds of thousands of followers online. Some questions we’ll be discussing:
- What exactly does it mean to be “enchanting” and how does being open help?
- What are the behaviors of today’s most successful leaders?
- And what are the new rules for leaders? Followers? Organizations?
Speakers:
- Guy Kawasaki, Author of Reality Check, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures, Co-founder of Alltop, @guykawasaki on Twitter
- Charlene Li, Author of Open Leadership, Co-author of Groundswell, and Founder of Altimeter Group, @charleneli on Twitter
Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, and Charlene Li on “Your New “Failure” Imperative“
Friday, October 1, 2010 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT
Recording now available at http://vimeo.com/15490116 and also as an embed below.
Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, & Charlene Li on “The New Failure Imperative” from Charlene Li on Vimeo.
Chris and Brian have long written and talked about the importance of engaging and how this develops trust with customers. But one big barrier to organizations being open is business’s systemic aversion to failure. Yet with social media, things will go wrong (even with the best planning). We’ll be discussing how you must master failure as much as you master success, and how organizations can recover successfully from failure to build stronger trust. We’ll discuss:
- What are the new rules for failure in organizations?
- As an Open Leader, how can you create a culture of trust?
- And how do you build an action plan for the worst possible scenario?
Speakers:
- Chris Brogan, Co-author of Trust Agents, President of New Marketing Labs, @chrisbrogan on Twitter
- Brian Solis, Author of Engage!, Principal, FutureWorks, @briansolis on Twitter
- Charlene Li, Author of Open Leadership, Co-author of Groundswell, and Founder of Altimeter Group
Steve Rubel, Maggie Fox, and Charlene Li on “The Upside of Giving Up Control on Today’s Stage”
Recording now available at http://vimeo.com/15804364 and also as an embed below.
Steve Rubel, Maggie Fox, & Charlene Li on “The Upside of Giving Up Control” from Charlene Li on Vimeo.
Friday, October 8, 2010 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT
Steve Rubel and Maggie Fox work closely with some of the biggest businesses in the world, where they frequently counsel leaders who are afraid to give up control. We’ll discuss how they broach this subject with their clients and how they show the value and upside of embracing being open. Some questions we’ll discuss include:
- How do you convince executives that giving up control is inevitable?
- How to quantify the value of giving up control?
- What are the best ways to bring reluctant leaders into the social space?
- And how can you help your organization embrace the new openness?
Speakers:
- Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights, Edleman Digital, @steverubel on Twitter
- Maggie Fox, CEO, Social Media Group, @maggiefox on Twitter
- Charlene Li, Author of Open Leadership, Co-author of Groundswell, and Founder of Altimeter Group, @charleneli on Twitter
Jeff Hayzlett, Pete Blackshaw, and Charlene Li on “How to Craft Your Open Strategy“
Recording now available at http://vimeo.com/15854559 and also as an embed below.
Jeff Hayzlett, Pete Blackshaw, and Charlene Li on “How to Craft Your Open Strategy“ from Charlene Li on Vimeo.
Thursday, October 14, 2010 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT
Jeff Hayzlett and Pete Blackshaw are two experienced business leaders who have created open strategies, Jeff most recently at Kodak and Pete through his work with Nielson Online and serial entrepreneurship. We’ll discuss what it takes to create an open strategy for a business, and the challenges leaders can expect to encounter. We’ll also discuss some practical ways to move companies through that strategy building process. Some questions we’ll discuss include:
- How do you go about creating an open strategy?
- Who should “own” your open strategy?
- What obstacles can you expect to encounter – and how do you overcome them?
Speakers:
- Jeff Hayzlett, Author of The Mirror Test, former CMO of Kodak
- Pete Blackshaw, Executive VP Nielsen Online, Author of Satisfied Customer Tell Three Friends
- Charlene Li, Author of Open Leadership, Co-author of Groundswell, and Founder of Altimeter Group, @charleneli on Twitter
Jim Kouzes and Charlene Li on Redefining Leadership.
Fri. Oct. 22nd 10am PDT
Jim Kouzes, along with his co-author Barry Posner, has been a long-time authority on leadership and I’m honored to be sharing this time with him. His latest book is “The Truth About Leadership” and we’ll be discussing how leadership has been changed by social technologies – and how the traits that make a great leader have stayed essentially the same. Some questions we’ll be addressing include:
- What are the mindsets of today’s successful “open” leaders?
- What aspects of leadership remain unchanged, or even are enhanced by social technologies?
- What are examples of great leadership that will stand the test of time?
Speakers:
- Jim Kouzes, Co-author of The Truth About Leadership and The Leadership Challenge, @Jim_Kouzes on Twitter
- Charlene Li, Author of Open Leadership, Co-author of Groundswell, and Founder of Altimeter Group, @charlenelion Twitter
Open Leadership Awards Update
I’m very excited to announce that we have selected the winners for our first annual Open Leadership awards. We’ll be announcing the winners at our Rise of Social Commerce event on October 6 at 5pm Pacific, so stay tuned! You’ll be able tofollow the award ceremony and conference online at UStream.
All entrants have now been notified, so if you have not yet heard from us, we encourage you to submit again next year; we’re sure that there will be some incredible innovations and progress to report between now and then.
While we originally intended to organize awards by industry category, in the end it made more sense to categorize them based on the award criteria: Innovation and Execution; Leadership; Creating Impact; and Overcoming Barriers. While we received some extremely impressive submissions, we ultimately selected the ones that jumped out at us as most unique and powerful in these areas. The winners were case studies that made us sit back and say “Wow.”
Please direct any questions to openleadership (at) altimetergroup (dot) com.
The Rise Of Social Commerce
There’s a battle waging in the world of commerce, where newly empowered customers are demanding a better, seamless shopping experience. Social commerce is the outcome, but companies don’t understand that this is more than simply putting up a Facebook page. It’s about the impact that social commerce will have on your organization. It requires a fundamental rethink of the relationship with customers and partners, and it impacts at the core how companies organize and operate.
This is such a major shift that Altimeter is basing its first event on this topic. At “The Rise Of Social Commerce”, taking place October 6-7th at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto, we’ll hear about best practices from expert practitioners like Best Buy, Dell, Hallmark, Nielsen, Newell Rubbermaid, Virgin America, and Zynga, amongst others. This is an intimate event, limited to only 100 attendees so that we can have deep, meaningful conversations that will provoke breakthrough thinking.
I’m going to discuss the event in two blog posts. The first one today is about the framework for understanding how social commerce will arise. The next post will be about how we’ve structured the event to be a unique experience.
The event is organized around the four phrases that we believe organizations will evolve through as they engage in social commerce (see the agenda). This will be detailed in a report that Lora Cecere will release just prior to the conference, but I thought I’d give you a sneak peak at some of those ideas with the hope that it will encourage you to come to the event to learn more.
We believe that social commerce at companies will develop through these four phases:
1) Social For The Sake Of Social. At this step in the journey, companies learn how to listen, and build a dialogue with their communities. The goal is typically to build a fan base and to extend brand reach, with the result being that social efforts centered on the marketing and communication functions. But companies are quickly finding that this is not sufficient because your fans want more. The question soon becomes, “What is the ROI? And, how do we encourage our fans to buy?” As companies struggle to answer these questions, the effort no longer is social for the sake of being social, but gives rise to horizontal processes that extend beyond marketing to drive social commerce.
2) Enlightened Engagement. In this phase, social processes extend horizontally across the organization to spawn new outside-in processes. Companies learn how to listen, test and learn and then respond. Tactics include integrating social into a Web site, changing customer service to include social listening, and using community feedback in the design of products and services.
But in the evolution of integrating social processes, companies find that listening and learning is not enough. Fans want companies to respond in a more meaningful way. They want to have input into which products that they buy and the way that they buy these products. This gives rise to the third phase of social commerce evolution.
3) Store Of The Community. As product development organizations learn that they can trust the voice of the community, open innovation processes accelerate and your customers, suppliers, and partners all help to determine the four Ps of marketing. Which Products/services are delivered, what Price is paid, how it’s Promoted, and finally, how you Position within existing and new channels to maximize presence. In the process, the heightened needs of that community—especially their use of new technologies.
As shoppers give input into the four Ps of marketing, companies realize that they can use new technologies—mobile applications, geo-location shopping, 2-D tagging, social gaming, social couponing, smart shelves—coupled with social technologies, loyalty programs and point of sale data to redesign the shopping experience.
4) Frictionless Commerce. This leads to the fourth phase, where there is a redesign of the shopping experience to improve the commerce experience. These new technologies and relationships allow companies to build customer intimacy in new and more meaningful ways. Friends can buy with friends, new services can be delivered, checkout becomes more automated, and channels become more seamless.
Traditional push-based processes will give way to the momentum of community pull. Those that quickly test and learn and adopt will define new brands, deepen customer loyalty and repeat purchases and accelerate time to market for new products. Those that don’t will struggle in the evolving market.
As you can see from the four phases, this it no longer about being social for the sake of social. It is about a new way of doing business where real and meaningful relationships evolve in new ways to extend all the way to the store shelf.
The race is on. Are you equipped? We want to help. Join me at The Rise of Social Commerce event to learn. To sign up, go to www.riseofsocialcommerce.com. Use the code “RSC1” to get a $100 discount.
If you have any questions about this event, or have thoughts about the rise of social commerce, please email me at charlene (at) altimetergroup (dot) com. Hope to see you in October!
Last chance to enter the Open Leadership Awards (plus a bonus)
A final reminder that the Open Leadership Awards submission process is drawing to a close. There were some problems with the Web site and submission details, so we are extending the deadline to Monday, September 13th at 6pm Pacific Time for submissions.
And I’m offering a special bonus to the first three organizations to submit an entry — a free one-hour call with me. So don’t wait until the last minute –take advantage of the opportunity to connect with me one-on-one and submit ASAP!
Entering a case study is easy – go to the Open Leadership Awards site where you can get detailed information and submit a case study. You’ll be asked to register and provide basic contact information before you see the submission page.
The case study submission has four required essays:
1. Long description (500 words or less). Describe an example of open leadership where the organization enabled better, more open relationships with either customers and/or employees. Include specific examples of the use of social technology enabled more open information sharing and/or decision making.*
2. Leadership (500 words or less). Describe how a person(s) affected the outcome of this program. This can be an individual’s initiative, a supportive executive, or person on the front lines.
3. Impact (500 words or less). How did this program add value to the organization? Impact can be quantitative or qualitative, but there needs to be proven impact. Example: % of employees engaging with customers increased from x to y over the last six months.
4. What have you learned (500 word or less). Describe the journey the organization took, especially how you overcame the obstacles and failures along the way.
In addition, there is a Short Description (100 words or less). This is a summary of your submission. You will also be able to include a URL as well as upload materials such as photos, videos or presentations.
Any questions? Send an email to openleadership (at) altimetergroup (dot) com.
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