To Innovate with Social Networks and Media, Bring it Closer to Home

I was recently introduced by a long-time friend to a CEO of a local company, a man at the helm of the family corporation established by his father. One thing that struck me during our  conversation–and as an observation during my stay at the corporate premises–was that this man recognizes family strength and deeply believes in the benefits of innovation derived from learning and in adopting advancing technologies in the industry they vie in.

Jewish family working on garters in kitchen in tenement home, November 1912 (New York City). TRiver | Flickr | U.S. Library of Congress

From Offline to Online

I can sense that the business is something the CEO would defend at all cost from competitors’ slaying tactics and strategies. The business is his life. It would likely be so for his children and his family’s next generations. The corporation’s C-suite is composed of siblings or close family relatives. And the rest of the company–its employees–are treated as family members.

The company inculcates in its employees the values of the family–the company’s aspirations to continuously grow and progressively succeed.

The company is home-grown and regarded as among the leaders in its industry. It competes toe-to-toe with a multinational corporation, which is the acknowledged leader in the local market. And it is about to launch a wave of new offerings with an upgrade of equipment that are cutting-edge in the industry. For the CEO, that also means adopting the soft component of technologies to extend reach and engage with its b2b market–bringing the business through its bricks-and-mortar network online through social media.

The pathways to the decision to adopt social media wasn’t easy. In an initial round of conversations among company staff members, the dilemma was in identifying who should run the company’s online presence.

As most companies would do in starting to conduct business and engage customers online, the obvious choice is to tap function units in the organization with key employees who speak  the language of the trade at marketing and technical levels and are themselves, in their personal capacities, already online with their social or professional networks.

There are but two key staff members who they think are eligible.

I asked what the universe of the company’s networks are. At least 4,000 individuals and entities. Even with an ideal engagement ratio of 1:50–or 1:400 ratio in their case, with two key company staff members–that is going to be trying. But perhaps not for long if the company frames the fit for it to go social online.

The Prerequisites

One thing going for this company is that it listens. Listening is among the first steps toward adopting and innovating use of social media. The next and greater aspect to listening is being open and willing to experiment. And the third and greatest is an incessant drive to set standards no one else has–not even customers. This is a standard it sets onto itself.

In the course of the conversation, the CEO raised his concern about a 2% quality failure at their labs. He wanted to get the figure down. As an experiment, he “challenged” the production line staff to take on a wager that for a below 2% rejection rate sustained daily, he would put a part of his monthly salary to a pool of incentives that the staff can partake. This brings to fore the second point about listening: opening up opportunities and motivating people to innovate at shop-floor level.

But the 2% figure has remained to be so even after the challenge. So our CEO is moving on to a next experiment with a question:  What if we can go below 1%? This is now finding innovations in the company that would approximate zero-defect in his production labs. Compared to the closest multinational competitor’s quality failure of 10%, this is setting a gold quality standard in the industry.

Having listened well, having been open to learning and willing to experiment and seeking to establish a gold quality standard, our CEO and his company then deliver the incomparable advantage the competition will not and cannot ever provide the market, i.e., offering customers a replacement of damaged merchandise from its production lab errors. Competition, on the other hand, asks customers to sign a waiver of claims from damages.

Online to One’s Roots

Just how long would it be trying for this company to take on being social with its networks online? The answer lies in its ability to find the natural fit of its corporate values to use social media in any of its business processes–inside the company and outward toward its customers, whether in marketing or in the entire value chain of the business.

The foundation to succeed, to sustain success, and to be able to simultaneously innovate with adoption of social media is to practice it along deep company values and teach others in the company to do it in contexts that fit the corporate culture. A culture that then ripples out to its business networks–on- or offline.

In dealing with the social markets, a shared positive culture that reflects the company and one that goes beyond the walls of its offices have great potential for rewards.

Related readings:
Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business | Josh Bernoof & Ted Schadler
Control in an Age of Empowerment | Robert Simons
Sharing Leadership to Maximize Talent | Marshall Goldsmith
Why You Should Have a Hyperlocal Facebook Strategy | Jan Rezab
The Obvious But Uncomfortable Way Your Company Culture is Judged | Amber Naslund

A Golden Rule Going Social with Social Media

When asked what the business rules about Social Media are, I am stupefied. I tried high and low to search what there is about such “rules” and even attempted to define what such rules are by labeling them “always-never” business rules.

I realized I cannot know what the Social Media business rules are.

There are numerous guides, experiences, recommendations, and great stories about successful ventures using Social Media. But it seems to me, after searching, there are no rules. What there is are practices that have worked in particular fields of industries that have advanced faster in the use of it.

One such field is media marketing, akin to advertising which is in essence marketing communication.

However, Social Media do not comprise all of the Social Web and its technologies alone.  It denotes three general areas of the social sphere of the Web: relevancy (by strict definition, usefulness); networks (people); and last, the media as the communication vehicle of people to exchange or share objects that are meaningful among people–at a certain space of time at a certain location.

Digital strategist Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Consulting depicts the social media as the tactic and mere tip of the Social Media Iceberg. He has combined the aspects of business, people, and efficacy of social media into a strategy framework–a balanced scorecard that stacks up a range of activities in the entire social media value chain.

Social media tactics are merely the tip of the iceberg | Mark Smiciklas | Intersection Consulting

What lies underneath the use of  social media are strategic components to make the media work: how it really can work with people and how people must work it up.

Organizations that adopt social media may employ the best and brightest people. A lot has done it. And many businesses have deployed good social media marketing efforts.  But in many other organizations, people and strategy may be hamstrung by their own organizational inertia, multilayered hierarchies, cumbersome decision processes, lack of focus, setting off-tangent or mis-aligned goals, or simply having little perspective to tackle the complexities to take on a culture that promotes successful use of Social Media: being open or cutting across function silos.

Social media marketing efforts succeed because they are driven by marketers. That has always been the way advertising works. At a future state of maturity of Social Media in business,  however, gatekeepers of product or brand management may become at a certain point the bottleneck in catapulting the true potential of Social Media.

Book author David Vinjamuri, president of  ThirdWay Brandtrainers, states in his article “Want to Open a Dialogue with Consumers? Start from Within” that the challenge for many organizations is that in the last decade, digital and interactive media [social media in today’s guise], was often “greenhoused”–assigned to a small group with an independent budget.

Acting like media networks, with marketing akin to it, groups within companies who “own the media networks” come flat without real great block-timer shows to put up. There are always the social media actuators but with few social media actors.

Following the traditional media network mind set: while there might be producers of  ” shows” on social media, the shows must have a good concept, a compelling script, a campaign-able story line, and the most important component of all to have great actors who will portray the heart and soul of the story.

An audience to such great shows attach themselves to the actors–seldom with the backstage or production people–even with the show’s directors or producers.

The big difference though between media network shows and a social media “show” is in social media story, producer, writer, director and actor can be one and the same–whether they be people within an organization, or corporations, or individuals like you and me.

In his book Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands, David Vinjamuri underscores the singularity of  brands’ stories as told by its creators. Such moving stories create new meanings as stories are passed from one audience to another. Audience becomes storyteller themselves. And on and on can stories ripple out to people who will build upon these brands’ new contexts and relevance.

In all so far that I have observed, nameless people are the true actors, our storytellers and audience at the same time, on Social Media–in their own contexts of space, time, and with their own things or stories to share.

There is not one shoe that fits. People are the Golden Rule of Social Media.

My appreciation to Mark Smiciklas for allowing me to use his Social Media Iceberg. And to David Vinjamuri who has inspired  me via his book and insights about Social Media in marketing.

Organizations, the Social Web Begs. Break the Silos.

In an ActionLab® on Web content modelling, I asked the participants to form themselves into groups following their organizational chart. It was easy for the participants to come together structured as function units in the organization.

Once each participant was settled into his/her respective group, I posed a question: If we are to engage our Web users or customers in one topic that the organization holds dear and that which captivates our users’ or customers’ minds, who among you then are in for the engagement?

A third of the participants stood up and I asked them to step forward.

After being asked what they would bring into the engagement, in this case relevant information they can share that builds on the topic, five scenarios had emerged from this group:

• 70% claimed they have information to share;
• 10% pointed to those who remained seated as the source of the information they need to have to engage customers and users,
• 2% cannot promptly say what they could share or where the source of information they need to share would have to come from,
• 18% gave no reply, and;
• 100% said nothing about any person in the group being a source of relevant information to bring into the topic.

Such is the framing in organizations, the way most of them are, now. Structured into compartments according to function, people’s interactions are silo-bound. And they ascribe their sources of  information as emanating from within their function silos. The interactions are vertical, up-down, not at all times horizontal across functions.

Lost in Organization*: no truer can be seen in how organizations are graplling with the Social Web.

The function of a unit reflected in a chart becomes the  framework for the way people engage people–in and out of the organization.In adopting the Social Web, have dialogs within the organization first. Breaking down  silos would be the first step toward the rewards of social-led innovations in the organization.

* Much thanks to Mike Colibraro of Think Brownstone Inc. for the image in Phil Charron’s think blog post “Why Don’t You Publish Your Org Charts?”

“Always-Never” Business Rules of Social Media [Marketing]

We need more taxi drivers for social media | Flickr | Morten Gade

Using social media is like running a taxi company. Far an analogy it may seem, understanding how bus companies operate will define why businesses and organizations today may not be getting the desired return on the investments they made or about to make with social media marketing.

Stephan H. Haeckel’s book, Adaptive Enterprise, outlines how bus companies are make-and-sell businesses. Based on commuter volume, buses run day after day along the same thoroughfares and pick up passengers on the same stops. Company dispatchers decide what routes the buses will take, instruct drivers where to stop, how long a stop will take, and schedule the bus runs for the day.

Bus drivers do not even need to know where their passengers are going. In fact, they do not need passengers at all to do their jobs well. They merely have to drive the bus on time safely along the same route every day.

An efficient taxi company shares the characteristics of a business that uses social media. Taxi drivers go where they can pick up passengers, bring them to their destinations, and likely take the fastest route skirting traffic to get to where he is instructed by the passenger to go.

A taxi company dispatches its drivers to customer-moving capabilities. The drivers then respond to customer requests thus they are empowered to fulfill those requests.

Unlike bus drivers, taxi drivers need to know information about what the passenger need—the “I need to be at the central business district in half an hour for a meeting”—then only will the driver put his knowledge about the fastest route to take and practice his driving skills to be able to meet the customer’s need.

Possibly during the 30-minute ride, passenger and driver may even strike a conversation about what matters to both of them. The taxi driver and his taxi company then operate as a sense-and-respond entity—not only meeting the particular customer need but also starting a relationship with the passenger.

Day after tomorrow the same passenger might likely call on the same taxi company, even request for the same taxi driver.

Where do the bus and taxi companies and their drivers point us to?

Business paradigms and processes need to shift with use of social media.

In the early days of the Web, it was—as it still is now with some organizations—seen as a medium where once printed materials such as books were digitized, they were good to deliver online to an audience who would read the materials in a browser. It was literally transposing leafing through book pages with a hyperlink. Or uploading a digital copy of a book to an online  retail bookstore, placed on a shelf where the book will wait to be viewed and checked out by a customer.

Publishers, writers, editors, book designers, art and print production people, and all the way to the entire value chain of distribution and marketing still practice the same analog workflow and do not adopt business processes that will offer them improvements and desired outcomes going digital and online and social.

The same is true with television as a broadcast medium. When the first regularly scheduled television service in the U.S. began in 1928, there was but one channel. Several TV broadcast experiments were simultaneously being done toward the end of that decade. Most of these programs were voice-oriented radio broadcasts or showing of motion picture films that mimicked theater plays.

No more can be gleaned from how we are using social media in its infantile stages today. In a previous post RVBello postulated that media marketing dominates the channels of communication and forgets about all that matters about using social technologies.

The Social Media Business Rules

What then should we always and never repeat from our history of using communication and information technologies?

“Always-Never” Business Rule #1: Social media is a marketer’s activity. Findings from the 2011 Digital Marketing Outlook Survey conducted in late 2010 by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) and AnswerLab show that we are at first instance enamored with tools, outlets, and platforms to use. None, if not few of the respondents, placed a premium on any other aspect of business but marketing communication and technology.

In this one survey question about use of social media tools, the most important aspect of going social–investments in people, our taxi drivers, and business processes with aid of technologies, our taxi units–were not on the radar screens of brand marketers, agencies, and technologists.

People within business companies or organizations are the key driving force in employing social media.

What gives? Are we to see a pathway for social media where while we talk social, we factor less our taxi drivers?

The next “always-never” business rules in succeeding posts.