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How To Create A Successful Social Business
Are you a social business? By this, I mean are you aligning your social strategy to business goals? In a new Altimeter Group Report, “The Evolution of Social Business“, my co-author Brian Solis and I found that this was not the case. Only 34% of businesses we surveyed felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes. Brian goes into detail about our findings in this post.
Our research found that organizations typically go through six stages of social business evolution. But this doesn’t mean that you have to wait until Stage 6 to realize business impact. Rather, it’s not only possible but crucial to focus on achieving business results right from the very beginning. The six stages are as follows (for a deeper dive into each, please download the report):
A great example of this from the report comes from Shell. They launched the Shell Facebook presence only in January 2012 and they mostly post content on the page and moderate comments. But they see tremendous benefit from this activity because their business goal is to understand and improve their reputation with customers and partners. They ask the question, “To what extent is Shell meeting customers’ energy needs in socially and environmentally responsible ways?” The key here is that this is not an effort isolated to Facebook — they measure reputation across ALL media channels so that they can see their activities impact reputation differently. Moreover, they measure this DAILY. Shell may be early in their social business journey, but they make sure that they see business impact from their efforts.
Creating Your Social Business Strategy
The focus on business goals is the key to having a coherent social business strategy, which we define as “the set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives”. That alignment and focus on business objectives forms the foundation for the strategy, no matter where the organization is on their evolution. Just 28% of respondents in our survey felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12% were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. And, perhaps most astonishing, only half of all companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”
But there is hope. we found a set of best practices common across all development stages. We call these the Success Factors of a Social Business:
- Define the overall business goal and align social media strategies against it.
- Establish the long-term vision for becoming a social business.
- Seek and earn key executive support and sponsorship based on the business case, not the trend.
- Beyond marketing and service campaigns, develop a list of prioritized initiatives that will demonstrate business value at the enterprise-level and in key functions/lines of business and plot them on a two-to-three year roadmap.
- Train and educate executives and employees not just how to use social media, but also how social media can impact business objectives and how to develop and run programs that do so continually.
- Get the right people involved at the right levels. An effective social business strategy takes a unified approach with cross-functional support. It’s a combination of social media savvy and business acumen.
- Invest in technology only after your vision and strategy are set. Technology and social media in general are only enablers to the overall mission and purpose you set forth.
Applying The Social Business Success Factors
From the research and from our work with clients, we have found that these success factors become especially important when the organization moves from one stage to the next. Some of the most common issues we’ve seen organizations face include:
- Getting executives to buy into the social strategy — and fund it. Factors #1 and #2 which use business goals and a common vision to align the organization, become crucial. Sometimes this can be accomplished with a short education session, but more often, it requires that social strategy be built into the very fabric of the executive’s work and priorities. This is done only by strongly linking social activities to the 3-5 strategic goals that executives care about. If social doesn’t help the executive accomplish their mission critical goals, then it won’t ever make it on to their radar.
- Creating a coherent strategy for social business. As crazy as it may sound, we’ve been working with clients to create three year roadmaps for their social business strategy. That’s not a typo, although it may seem impossible to do this in a fast-changing technology landscape. The key is to focus on the long-term strategic business goals of the organization and to make technology decisions ONLY after the vision and strategy are set.
- Establishing governance. This is the perennial question, “Who owns social media?” This isn’t a simple issue determined by company size, maturity, or industry. It’s base much more on how the organization sees social playing a role in the company in the future, and creating a roadmap to bridge the reality of today to the future. One organization we worked with envisioned a multiple hub-and-spoke model with product and country teams. But to get there, they realized they needed to be temporarily centralized first, move into a basic hub-and-spoke with defined responsibilities, and a migration path for governance to pass into the spokes in a few years after training ensures that the skills and capabilities are in place.
- Engaging and transforming the organization. This is perhaps the most challenging problem facing senior executives — they see the need to redesign and retool the organization for greater flexibility, adaptation to a changing landscape, and resilience in the face of increased competition. CEOs see social technologies as a way to harness and bring together employees, customers, and partners, but don’t have a roadmap to be able to do this.
By keeping in mind where you are in your social business evolution AND using the success factors, you’ll be able to start tackling some of these tricky issues. We’ve seen firsthand that this is not an easy journey, but it is one that you can successfully navigate. I’d love to hear how your journey is going — what stages are you in and have you encountered similar challenges? If so, how has our organization managed to move forward? Add your comments below or send me an email with details — we’re always looking for more case studies!
If you’d like to learn more about how Altimeter can help your organization move quickly and efficiently through the social business journey, please get in touch with us at sales@altimetergroup.com.
Obama vs Romney in Social Media: Who’s Using It Best?
[crosslinked from LinkedIn]
As someone steeped in social media, I’ve been watching each of the presidential campaigns closely to see how they are using social media well – or not. [Disclosure: I worked on Obama’s campaign in 2008 and have donated to it this election season. I also went to the same high school and business school as Romney. To the extent possible, I’ve tried to be objective in my analysis, but inevitable, my biases will come through.] Here are some observations, as well as opportunities for the future:
- It’s Not About the Numbers. I’ve seen many commenters point to the overwhelmingly higher numbers of Likes and Followers that Obama has over Romney on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. It’s easy to get lured by those numbers, but they are highly misleading because Obama has had four years as candidate and President to gather his followers. What will matter in this election is how engaged these followers are, in not only amplifying their candidates’ message, but whether they can get people they know to vote.
- Each Campaign Plays to their Strengths. My colleague, Susan Etlinger, who researches social media analytics, cautioned that looking at the stats alone don’t tell the full story. As an example, she pointed me to recent data from Pew that shows Democrats and liberals as being more engaged politically than Republicans. Her advice: Look at each of the respective campaigns from the perspective of where they are starting from. With Republicans less likely to energize their base via social networking sites, they are more likely to focus on awareness and outreach to Independents, whereas Democrats will be keen to get an disengaged base fired up to get out the vote of intended Democratic voters.
- Romney Makes Smart Use of Facebook Marketing. Romney has made good Facebook ad buys, especially with Sponsored Results where Romney ads started showing up next to search terms such as “democrat” and even “obama”. The results have been significant – Romney has been gaining Facebook Likes at twice the rate of Obama.
- But Romney Misses the Opportunity to Be Personal. While his campaign has mastered social media marketing, Romney hasn’t capitalized on social media’s ability to be personal and be direct. The tweets are annoyingly in the first person when it’s clear that Romney is not writing them. My hope is that the new-found, more personal Romney that is currently on the campaign trail – telling his personal story directly rather than through surrogates – will also make an appearance via social media. While Romney himself may not feel that comfortable engaging in the back and forth of social media, even a video of him speaking directly to people in social media, would be a bonus.
- Obama Appears On Uber-Cool Reddit – But Dodges Tough Questions. Obama appeared on social news site Reddit, where he engaged in thirty minutes of “Ask Me Anything” (AMA). While Obama gained serious social media cred with his appearance, answering 10 questions and saying that the Reddit experiences was “not bad”, he also avoided by several tough and popular questions such as the legalization/regulation of marijuana dispensaries, aliens (!) and lobbying. While the Reddit session may be called “Ask Me Anything”, it could be more correctly characterized as “Ask, but I may not Tell”.
- Obama’s Social Media Team: Masters of The Moment. The Obama campaign tweets between 10-20 times a day. That’s usually 3-4 times more frequently than the Romney campaign. The result: Obama’s team has a lot more practice and better sense of what resonates and gets spread. This culminated in the picture-perfect moment during the Republican National Convention when Obama’s Twitter account sent out a picture of the President sitting in his chair, a response to Clint Eastwood’s discussion with a the invisible Obama. What the Obama campaign did was leverage what Hamish McKenzie so eloquently described as the emotion of the moment and created the most tweeted post for the entire Republic convention.
The key for Romney in these closing days of the campaign is to tap into his loyal base on sites like Facebook and Twitter to share with their undecided friends the Mitt that they know and believe in. But socialgraphics – the social behavior of key audience groups – are stacked against him. According to Pew, only 25% of Republicans are likely to recruit people to get involved with political issues that matter to them, as opposed to 35% for Democrats. But even worse, social networking site (SNS) users (84% of SNS-using Republicans and 79% of SNS-using Democrats) say little or nothing of their recent posts have anything to do with politics.
My takeaway from this analysis is that while the campaigns are using social media in creative ways, they both still miss more opportunities than they capture. The biggest is that neither has created a culture of sharing with their followers. Activity is still focused on messaging, and a predictable call-and-response routine of asking for donations and the cash register singing.
In the end, votes win elections. With a dismal 58% of the US eligible voters actually voting in the 2008 election, the campaigns could be doing so much more to engage people in a dialog, encouraging us to share our views not on politics but the issues we care about. But in the polite company of our friends, we do just the opposite and hide our political leanings from each other. My hope is that in the waning days of this election cycle that more of us will be inspired to engage in civil discourse directly with each other, in the social channels that we inhabit.
Beyond the IPO: Ten Implications of a Public Facebook
By Susan Etlinger, Charlene Li and Rebecca Lieb
The run-up to Facebook’s IPO reminds me a bit of a wedding: everyone’s attention is on the big day (expected to be Friday May 18), without much regard for the weeks, months and years afterward. Charlene Li, Rebecca Lieb, and I sat down to discuss some of the implications of a newly public Facebook: on shareholders, business and Facebook itself. — SE (Cross-posted from altimetergroup.com.)
Whether or not Facebook’s IPO ends up being one of the world’s largest (this Washington Post article places it 6th, between AT&T Wireless and Kraft Foods), it will certainly earn a respectable position in the history of the public markets, a lofty spot for an eight-year-old company in a relatively unproven business.
We identified ten areas where we are watching Facebook closely, as an indication of its success in the future. We picked these topics because they intrigue us, because they provoke discussion and, ultimately, because we believe they are the issues most central to Facebook’s future.
#1. Leadership
In a media frenzy in which anything (such as, for example, wearing a hoodie on a road show) can spark a news cycle, it’s to be expected that Mark Zuckerberg would have kept the lowest possible profile during Facebook’s quiet period. But now during the roadshow, on the first day of trading, and afterwards, he’ll need to step out, step up and set the tone for how he will lead this company into its next major phase. Can he pull it off?
The decision Zuckerberg must make, as a CEO who’s famous for his a “go away; we’re working on it” attitude, is whether he will use this milestone as an opportunity to cultivate his newest constituency: investors. As CEO, Zuckerberg needs to be accountable to his shareholders–not to a stock price per se, but to their faith in him. We will start to see clues to this decision during the first earnings call (a trial by fire for any CEO of any newly public company).
Of course, it’s all fun and games until there is a major hit to the stock price. We know, generally speaking, what the triggers will be: a new, poorly received product, a privacy issue, slowing user growth–the registration statement is full of examples. When this happens, Zuckerberg will have to demonstrate a completely new level of leadership. He’s chosen his executive team wisely in that both COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman are strong, respected executives who have been through this process before. And, despite his youth, Zuckerberg has learned from previous missteps like member revolts, privacy, and Beacon. If you still wonder if Zuckerberg is ready for prime time, imagine how you’d react if a major, highly unflattering motion picture had been made about you while you were still in your twenties. The issue isn’t if he can avoid controversy, but how well he can quell the concerns of skittish investors.
#2. Innovation
Facebook has a hacker culture; its development mantra, “done is better than perfect,” is at the root of both its growth and its biggest failures. Given the massive number of monthly active users (901 million according to the latest released numbers) the strategy has been to release product to the market and learn as it goes.
But as a public company, Facebook will need to choose whether it will continue to release products the way it has in the past or take a more cautious approach. How will it behave when it’s not just the pundits on Twitter, but the shareholders who react?
Although they’d hate the comparison, there’s a strong role model in Google, which, even as a public company has managed to maintain its agile development strategy. Granted, there’s always the risk of a Buzz (Google) or Beacon (Facebook), but Facebook has demonstrated considerably more focus from the start than Google. Furthermore, the company sent a strong signal in its last quarterly statement that it will continue to make investments for long-term growth, even at the cost of short-term profits. It’s setting expectations that it’s investing for the future, not just for the quarter.
#3. Brands
Will brands buy what Facebook’s selling? Facebook is, after all, a media company, and while it has other sources of income through partnerships, brand dollars are what will ultimately make not only the IPO, but the company itself, succeed or fail. With close to a billion users, Facebook is the biggest media company that’s ever existed, in any medium, ever. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are, which is Facebook’s undisputed advantage. After that, it gets a bit trickier.
Facebook is at the vanguard of developing products that merge and conflate advertising and marketing, that blend content, conversation, paid, earned and owned media with media buys. Advertising is media buying, but those other aspects: owned media (premium brand pages) and earned media (the conversations and comments and interactions brands have with their fans, users and yes, detractors) are part and parcel of what Facebook is working to monetize. It’s still experimental. Brands are still testing the waters and are far from establishing best practices or firm models in a “brand” new environment.
#4. Data
Facebook is also in a position, thanks to its staggering user base, to possess and be able to leverage data on a scale we’ve never before seen. Likes, affinities, social graphs, recent behaviors – it’s all there, together with the basic demographic information. Again, the ability to package, parse, productize, make understandable and actionable this vast quantity of data is as formidable a challenge for Facebook as it will be for the media agencies who buy against these very new models. Facebook’s potential as a marketing data juggernaut is very real, and can potentially take advertising to new levels, if the company succeeds in making that data useful.
#5. Mobile
Most of the coverage around mobile has been focused on Facebook’s “lousy” mobile applications. But we believe this is a red herring – the core issue revolves around the slow development of mobile advertising and marketing. The S-1 says it best in the section on risks related to advertising:
§ “…increased user access to and engagement with Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently directly generate meaningful revenue, particularly to the extent that mobile engagement is substituted for engagement with Facebook on personal computers where we monetize usage by displaying ads and other commercial content…”
But with 85% of revenue coming from advertising as of the end of 2011, the more effective Facebook is at appealing to its mobile users, the more it risks shifting revenues from the Web platform where it can monetize users, to the mobile one where it can’t — at least not immediately. So the real question becomes how Facebook will balance creating mobile user value against driving shareholder value.
Facebook can’t risk waiting too long before moving aggressively into the mobile space, but also needs to buy time to help mobile advertising develop. Given this significant risk, the purchase of Instagram represents $1B of earnest money that Facebook is focused on the long term. With the war chest Facebook will have accumulated post-IPO, building a great iPad app and upgrading the smartphone experience is a foregone conclusion. The bigger issue to watch is how well Facebook can develop the mobile advertising market with that experience, in a similar way that it created social media marketing.
#6. Investors
The first earning call is always rough for a first time CEO, and Facebook will likely not be any exception. But what we are watching closely is if Facebook will develop a different kind of relationship with its shareholders. The company is, at its essence, about sharing: will a newly public Facebook use its own platform to share more information with investors? Facebook has an unprecedented opportunity to change the way that it handles investor relations. Will it take this opportunity, or will it stick with the tried and true? We’d love to see Facebook use its own platform as a way to engage with and provide greater transparency to its newest stakeholders: the public markets.
#7. Mergers & Acquisitions
Thanks to Instagram, every venture-backed start-up has dreams of meeting with Facebook’s M&A team. Will Facebook focus on smaller acquisitions to acquire talent or smart ideas, or will it make major deals to really move the ball forward?
One of the more interesting areas of speculation lately is what would happen if Facebook were to buy Bing from Microsoft. With Google arguably its most formidable competitor, the addition of search would give Facebook advertisers a direct response medium they could not get before on Facebook. Google is, at its essence, a search company that has struggled with social. Facebook is a social company that needs search. A Bing acquisition would up the ante in a significant way between Facebook and Google.
Looks good on paper, but acquiring Bing would also be a huge distraction and a departure from Facebook and Zuckerberg’s legendary ability to focus on social sharing. A more likely scenario is that Facebook and Microsoft continue their long-term strategic partnership, integrating Bing deeply into the Facebook search experience.
Regardless of whether it buys Bing or another organization, few companies do the “merger” part of M&A well. We expect that Facebook will focus on smaller acquisitions that it can absorb and leverage quickly, while any large acquisitions like Instagram will be kept running separately, in much the way that Google ran YouTube as a separate entity for years. Again, a focus on the long term gives Facebook the ability to look at M&A in a very different way than traditional companies who much justify every single penny spent on a company.
#8. Culture
Facebook is a private company in many respects (one of which is about to change dramatically), but the internal culture has always been very open. It has invested heavily to create this open culture, and it has slowly but surely been reducing the amount of information shared internally in the run-up to the IPO.
This will only increase, as the company will now be beholden to even more securities industry regulations intended to protect investors from selective disclosure. So again the balancing act, this time between employees (and openness) and shareholders (and fiduciary responsibility). Which leads us to…
#9. Talent
Once it goes public, how will Facebook retain talent, especially top talent? Expect to see the usual exodus as people wait to vest, then cash out (the Bay Area housing market is already bracing for impact). But, again like Google, Facebook will retain its cachet for some time to come, and some will be motivated by the opportunity to change the world from within Facebook rather than from without. Where else can you find a platform of 900M people to try out your next great idea?
#10. Privacy
Zuckerberg has said that increased sharing is core to Facebook’s growth. But with greater sharing also come increased pressures on and threats to user privacy.
Over the past eight years, Facebook has mastered the art of trial and error when it comes to privacy. There have been huge missteps (Beacon), significant improvements (to privacy settings) and escalating tensions as the company has continually pushed its users to share more, and more often, frequently beyond their comfort zones. The company has accumulated a great deal of resilience along the way, and has tried to balance giving people a granular degree of control (at the risk of confusing them) with offering a simplified experience (at the risk of alienating them).
The addition of Timeline, and the emergence of “passive sharing,” raise the bar yet again. A few months ago I installed the Washington Post Social Reader on my Timeline. Now I know that it involves social sharing, but one day when I was in need of a little “mental floss,” I clicked on a story about Snooki’s recent weight loss. I didn’t think anything of it until a bunch of friends and work colleagues started teasing me. There it was, along with comments: “Susan Etlinger read an article: “Snooki Finally Reaches Goal Weight of 98 Pounds – But Has She Gone Too Far?” I was, frankly, mortified. I’d forgotten I was “in public,” and I am someone who is supposed to know better.
Wherever your stance on Facebook’s privacy record, privacy will continue to be a litmus test issue for Facebook. User outrage is one thing; shareholder outrage is quite another. We will watch to see how Facebook balances continued innovation against privacy. Where will Facebook stand when and if privacy issues affect the stock price — will they pull back or forge ahead?
As always, we’d love your thoughts on these issues. What are you watching as Facebook heads into its IPO?
Jerry Yang’s departure signals a New Day for Yahoo!, the passing of an era for Tech
My first reaction to the news that Jerry Yang is leaving Yahoo! was that this was the passing of an era. I first met Jerry in 1994 when he was still a PhD student at Stanford, before he and David Filo left to run Yahoo! full time. Through bubbles and two economic downturns, Jerry has always been omnipresent in Silicon Valley.
But all good things come to pass. With the arrival of Scott Thompson as the new CEO of Yahoo!, it makes sense that Scott be given a clean slate upon which to write the future of Yahoo!. This is very much the norm for incoming CEOs, where founders are asked to take a diminished role or expected to leave the company completely.
This is the case with Jerry all the more so, as he was (is?) a vehement supporter of Yahoo! remaining independent. Regardless of Jerry’s real or perceived position toward independence or selling off assets such as Alibaba or Yahoo! Japan, it’s still all baggage hanging on from a previous era. Scott and Yahoo! need the freedom to set the vision and strategy for Yahoo!, unencumbered by the past. The last thing Scott needed was the ghost of Yahoo! Past — embodied in the very real, very smart, founder and former CEO of Yahoo! — sitting at the boardroom table.
So what does the future bring for Yahoo!? While many people have written off Yahoo! but I’m less inclined to do so for the following reasons:
- Loyal users. It’s amazing to me that Yahoo! attracts 700 million unique and very loyal users each month. That’s somewhat less than Facebook’s 800 million users, but it’s huge by any standard. Through thick and thin, they have stuck with Yahoo!, despite having a plethora of other options available to them. But how there continues to be continued erosion so Yahoo! will have to invest in it’s “front doors” of Mail, MyYahoo!, and Home Page, as well as new offerings around it’s user engagement vision. As my colleague Rebecca Lieb commented in this article, “”Yahoo is a very vaguely defined company strategically,” Lieb said. “It has a million or zero identities. It’s everything and nothing.”
- Access to implicit social and interest graphs. The emails and address books of those 700 million users create an implicit social graph, similar to the one that Google is trying to tap via Google+. Front page content reading leads to tremendous data about what those 700 million people are interested in. This is gold for future targeted advertising, but Yahoo! has done little to develop or market these capabilities.
- Advertisers wanting to reach those users. Yahoo! will generate about $5 billion in revenue this year, most of it from advertisers with whom it has a direct relationship. But those revenues are declining as other options are growing.
- Technology chops. Yahoo! has had the ability to be ahead of the market, from purchasing Flickr and Delicious to starting an early form of a social network in Yahoo! 360 back in 2005. I continue to admire and use Yahoo! Pipes and it’s developer APIs remain excellent. What it’s lacked is a clear vision of how those investments tie into a coherent vision and strategy for Yahoo’s relationships with users and advertisers.
Predictions Social Business in 2012, Part III: Transforming Your Organization
This is the last of three posts I’m writing on predictions and priorities for Social Business in 2012. You can read the first and second prediction posts for more context.
Prediction #3: Connected leaders and employees will create sustained competitive advantages through a culture of sharing. This year will see some companies pull ahead of others because they are able to collaborate, innovate and execute better and faster thanks to an ingrained culture of sharing.
This is the year that companies get serious about investing in their internal social business capabilities, simply because it helps create and sustain a fast-moving, innovative and collaborative culture. It’s one thing to have a Facebook or Twitter presence run by a small social media team in your organization. It’s a totally different ball game that truly social businesses are playing when thousands of employees are connected externally as well as internally.
Culture is often dismissed as the “soft” underbelly of business. But as business leaders like Jack Welch (GE), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), and Herb Kelleher (Southwest) have written, culture is what creates and sustains a great company. And while a company can be successful with a “command and control” culture, I believe that companies that embrace openness (see my book “Open Leadership” for details) and encourage a culture of sharing will be much better positioned in the long run.
There are two ways I see culture changing because of increased sharing enabled by social technologies. The first revolves around connecting your biggest advocates – your employees — with your customers. The second is connecting your employees with each other.
Empowering Your Employees To Connect With Customers
No matter how many people you have on your social media team, it won’t be enough to meet the groundswell of customer interaction demand. To do that, you have to create your own internal groundswell, embodied in your employees.
Let’s go back to Dell. In my first prediction, we saw Dell dealing with flaming notebooks in the summer of 2006. Since that time, Dell has made it a mission to get closer to customers. One way they’ve done this is to train employees on how to use social media on Dell’s behalf. To date, over 5,400 Dell employees have taken one or more social media certification class and more than 2,000 have taken the full 8+ hours of classes to become fully “social media certified”.
According to Altimeter’s benchmarking surveys, advanced social businesses have roughly 20 people working on their social media efforts. That means that Dell effectively has 100 times more people engaged in social media than the most advanced social businesses.
This means that Dell understands customer needs at 100 times more points throughout the organizations, and has 100 times more people poised to jump in and support customers. It’s also 100 times more people looking at ways to improve and innovate the business on multiple fronts.
Many organizations will look at the immense costs (and risks) of training even a significant minority of employees and take a pass. It’s beyond their ability to comprehend so many people freely speaking on behalf of the company, beyond the grasp and control of corporate communications.
But look at the huge benefit to companies that do make that investment. Dell is building a competitive advantage deep into the organization that will difficult for competitors to emulate. It doesn’t replace great products but in the long run, 2,000 points of connection will give Dell a better way to facilitate faster agile design processes.
What’s the actual cost/benefit of social media training and empowerment? Here’s a back of the envelope calculation. Let’s assume that those 2,000 Dell employees had 8 hours of training at the opportunity cost of $50/hour. Add in trainer time and being generous, it’s roughly $1 million or about $500 per employee. I’m pretty sure Dell is realizing at least $500 in value just this year from the engagement of those connected employees.
And what if you are worried about something going wrong? Two ways to get your mind around this. First, your employees already interact each and every day with your customers – and you train and trust them to do the right thing and exercise good judgement. Second, things always and inevitably go wrong. To my first prediction about practicing every day transparency, you have to be able to feel comfortable with this new level of openness in order to have the confidence to empower your employees.
Connecting Employees Throughout The Organization
A hot trend right now is the adoption of “enterprise social networking” (ESN) where a company uses software to connect employees socially within the enterprise. This can be either as a standalone service (like Yammer or Socialcast) or integrated into a collaboration platform or suite (like Salesforce.com’s Chatter, IBM Connections, or Sharepoint with Newsgator). Think of it as Facebook-like status updates behind the firewall.
I’m finishing up a report that looks at these ESNs and one of the most interesting findings is that it’s increasingly the leaders of the organization that are behind the adoption of these technologies. The reason: They see it as a way to transform their organizations, simply by creating the opportunity for people to share.
The result of sharing is that barriers between departments fall. Silos get broken down and the power distance between leaders/managers and front line employees becomes smaller. And it also creates opportunity for new leaders to emerge, where they are defined not by their title or how much budget they control, but seen as a leaders simply because they have amassed followers.
In the end, culture is defined simply the by the values, norms, and practices of how we get work done each and every day. The intractable nature of some cultures means that in order for culture transformations to happen – and to happen quickly – the new norms and mindsets not only have to established and trained, but also reinforced over and over again. Here are just a few ways that a culture of sharing can help achieve real business results:
- Share information about a project to reduce duplication.
- Find experts who have solved a similar problem before.
- Solve problems together, faster.
- Streamline processes in real time.
- Identify innovations, big and especially small. And just as importantly, execute them quickly.
- Gain confidence in distributed decision making because of greater information sharing and transparency.
These benefits as well as action plans will be included in the ESN report (sign up to be notified about the report when it is published).
The crucial action for leaders in 2012 is to make the commitment to these ESNs and to participate by simply sharing *how* you achieving your business goals. The practice of leadership requires constant focus on the important while addressing the urgent. Culture is important and can’t become a sidecar to the pursuit of hard goals. It’s just the other way around – culture becomes the foundation through which you will achieve those crucial goals today and in the long run.
So if you have these tools in house, share something every single day to support and grow your culture of sharing. And if you don’t have an ESN yet, look into how you can quickly get one in place
Your Social Business Journey
That’s it for my 2012 predictions and priorities. To summarize:
Prediction #1: Consumers will reward transparent companies with their loyalty. Companies must get courageous with transparency and make it an every day occurrence. Or they will face the wrath of outraged customers.
Prediction #2: Your customers want to be known. Your customers don’t merely want you to understand their needs or pain points. They want you to know them as individuals anywhere and anytime they engage with you.
Prediction #3: Connected leaders and employees will create sustained competitive advantages through a culture of sharing. This year will see some companies pull ahead of others because they are able to collaborate, innovate and execute better and faster thanks to an ingrained culture of sharing.
One thing I hope you see is that becoming a success social business has at its core being a successful business, period. The tactics and etiquette of social business may be unique, but the foundations are rooted in solid business strategy and practice.
All the best to you in 2012 and be sure to share examples of how you are doing on your social business journey. We will all benefit from your generosity and insight.
Digital Marketing Partner:
