CollaborativEye

Here is a blog post constructed exclusively from 10 tweets on Twitter. If you are a Twitter user, follow me! 

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I am working my way through a book I haven't read in literally a decade - Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. If you have never read this book, stop what you are doing, go to the nearest bookstore, buy it, and READ IT! I'm not going to give a book review, but if you promise to read it, I'll give you a two sentence summary: High tech products follow a Technology Adoption Curve with distinct customer segments comprised of Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. There are gaps between these segments, but a large chasm from Early Adopters to the mainstream Early Majority segment. How to cross that chasm is the subject of the book.

Why rehash this today? Aside from the fact that the Technology Adoption Curve still holds, I believe the social media/social networking phenomenon has a huge roll to play in helping products cross the chasm. The book was written in 1991, when "social" was more closely associated with Karl Marx or ice cream than technology.  A key to getting the Early Majority segment to adopt your product is to appeal to the pragmatic bent of these types of consumers. They don't care about the technology, but want to know how it can improve what they are doing, today, right now. They want to know other people's experiences, and would rather hear from them than a slick sales person or a flashy vendor demo. In the past, this meant putting together a case study or "success story" on whatever meager evidence was available and leaving it behind in the hopes that it would be enough to push the prospect to a "yes". Fast forward to today... connect your prospects in an online community with existing customers. Let them ask questions, or read posts on real customer experiences. Scary? Yes, but oh so much more believable and relevant.

Many companies have  implemented customer communities, but these are typically private and isolated. Who do you know that is breaking the mold and opening up these conversations to prospects and other "outsiders?" Let me know and I'll summarize.

Not another book on the power of social networking. Pleeeaaase. But I went ahead and bought a copy of Groundswell anyways. I would characterize this as an "evidence and endorsement" book for social and collaborative technologies, rather than a visionary or revolutionary book. But that can be a good thing. Li and Bernoff base the book on case studies, practical advice, and even ROI CALCULATIONS. These calculations alone (actually the methodology behind the calculations) make this a highly recommended book. Yes you can determine ROI numbers for social networking applications!

The POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) planning process described in the book is a very usable, and smart approach. Among the various insights that derive from this , I believe two stand out:

1) Solve your customers' problem, not yours.  How many times have you been in a planning session where the situation analysis focused on the challenges and strategic objectives of the company? Of course the customer needs are incorporated LATER into the process. Be honest -- you've probably led a few of these sessions yourself.  Li and Bernoff challenge us to start with the customer -- what would they get out of a community, for example? How can a blog help your customers or prospects? This advice is wise, obvious, and usually ignored. Added benefit: it can also be applied to business decisions far beyond social technologies.

2) Start small, build successes one at a time. This is not about technology. It is about culture change. It is about re-visioning your relationships with customers. It is about getting buy-in from all levels of an organization. These things take time. Li and Bernoff describe several cases where companies built successful social-based strategies over a period of years, usually starting with something that was very focused, and didn't require corporate-wide endorsement. This advice may seem overly simplistic, but it is easy to fall into the "got to hit a home run, NOW" trap, especially if you feel pressure to catch up with everybody else.

Near the end of the book, Li and Bernoff touch on the issue of short-term, reactionary behavior verses long-term strategies. Some (not the authors) may view the hyper-responsive, close-in contact with individuals that social networking enables, as at odds with long term planning. Some believe, erroneously in my opinion, that with social technologies, products and services will just design themselves. Yes there is a place for customer involvement in the design and development process, and yes many companies have isolated this process from the customer. But there is still a need for product road maps, requirements gathering and synthesis, forecasting, and other long-term planning exercises. Truly connecting to the "groundswell" will enable you to react quickly, and to feel your customers' pain and understand their goals and desires -- things that have always been necessary to run a successful, long-term business.

Why aren't there any books on how to ride a bike? (OK -- I found one on Amazon, but work with me...) You can read and learn from books on molecular biology, cost accounting, and computer programming, so why not something as simple as learning to ride a bicycle? The truth is, you don't really KNOW how to ride a bike, until you've been on it, fallen off a few times, and become personally engaged with the bike. Philosopher Michael Polanyi called this "Personal Knowledge" in his ground breaking book of the same title back in 1958. Fast forward 50 years to several McKinsey studies in which three types of knowledge interactions as posited: transformational, transactional, and tacit. Transformational interactions change raw materials into finished goods; transactional interactions involve knowledge which can be codified and explained as a process or set of steps (e.g closing the books for the month, or entering sales data into a CRM system). Tacit interactions, on the other hand, are much more complex, ambiguous, and involve what Polanyi called personal knowledge. Tacit knowledge requires judgement, context, and interaction with others to determine the best solution. For example, how should you respond to an irate customer? What features should be included in the next release of product X? Which logo treatment is best? What investment fund is most appropriate for this customer?

McKinsey research indicates that 70% of all jobs created since 1998 involve tacit knowledge interactions as their primary component. However, only 24% of software spending is aimed at improving tacit knowledge interactions! No wonder we feel that we are getting further behind even though we have more and more technology at our disposal!

The implications of tacit knowledge on business cannot be overstated. Organizations which successfully improve the productivity and effectiveness of their tacit knowledge workers will be able to build competitive advantage which will be difficult for others to copy. There will be no "play book" to copy -- rather the competitive advantage is built into the tacit interactions between employees, customers, partners and the ability to innovate and come to the right solution to a problem more quickly.  How can business leaders improve their organization's tacit knowledge effectiveness?

1) By providing the tools where interactions and collective knowledge are encouraged and preserved.  Technology examples include collaboration platforms such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, knowledge management platforms, etc. The goal is to make collaboration  so simple and pain free that it increases meaningful, shared communication dramatically. And no, email is obviously not the answer.

2) Exploring communication platforms that can capture experience, context, and nuanced judgement more successfully than stand-alone text. For example, listening to a set of successful conversations between a customer service rep and an irate customer may be much more effective than reading a 10 page paper on customer service protocol. Or another example, providing tutorials on the use of a CRM system which show exactly how to perform an operation, complete with screen recordings, and audio narration discussing possible exceptions, alternate approaches, and considerations.   

3) Clear the decks for more tacit knowledge interaction by reducing the burden of transactional interactions. Very little time should be spent learning how to fill out an expense form or learning how to run a monthly report in the ERP system. Companies must provide focused, on-demand learning that provides employees with transactional knowledge when and where they need it.

It is exciting to see concrete examples of radical collaboration in business ventures, particularly new ones that have a chance to make a big splash. GoLife Mobile , a startup venture headquartered in Portland, OR, yesterday announced their collaborative framework for developers of mobile applications (or widgets). Rather than taking on the impossible task of producing all of the applications themselves, they are enlisting a potentially vast pool of developers who are interested in mobile platforms, and who don't mind making a buck or two for their efforts. Developers are encouraged to share widgets, and build upon the work of others. The nifty thing is that whenever your widget gets used (either as the primary application, or a component in an application), the author of the widget gets a piece of the advertising revenue that the GoLife Mobile platform will produce.

Not only will this collaborative development eco-system reduce the time to produce applications, it promises to spur innovation as well. Developers are incentivized to create compelling, reusable widgets in the hopes that other developers will incorporate them into their own applications. I particularly like the way that GoLife Mobile is combining collaboration with good old fashioned capitalism. James Whitley, the CEO of GoLife Mobile, shared with me at their developer briefing that he's a died-in-the-wool, Central Oregon capitalist, while his president of technology Mounir Shita is from "socialist Norway" -- obviously a great mixture that promises to produce some interesting results!