#1 What would you like to achieve with your Social Media program? (choose top 5 and rank in order of importance):
#2 Community engagement: Choose the top 3 and rank importance for how you would like to engage with your community:
#3 List top 10 keywords/phrases that your audience would be interested in
#4 Who are the top 5 thought leaders and influencers your audience respects?
#5 What web sites, magazines, and blogs does your audience interact with?
Thinking about and answering these questions will give you a solid footing on which to build a social media strategy for your business.
]]>Myth #2: Twitter offers too much information. This is a common argument against the use of Twitter: "Who wants to hear about what you are having for lunch or if you are having a bad hair day." True. But nobody that I follow (for long) offers this type of information, and neither should you. Much has been made of a recent study that found 40% of Tweets are meaningless babble. I expect this will change over time as people learn how to better use Twitter, and as people find that nobody is listening to their meaningless babble.
Myth #3: It takes too much time. OK, I sort of agree with this one, so maybe calling it a myth is not quite right. However, as with anything in business, you have to invest in order to get a return. The important thing with Twitter is to not enter aimlessly, and then be frustrated that you aren't seeing a return on your time investment. This means a strategic review and assessment should be done BEFORE you start using Twitter, to determine what your business's overall goals are and how Twitter can possibly meet those goals. Also, there are methods to automate some of the tasks involved in using Twitter (automated feeds from your blog or other interesting news sources, for example). Finally, some Twitter outsourcing services are popping up where you can pay somebody to manage your Twitter activity for you.
Myth #4: 140 characters is not enough to be meaningful. This one is SO WRONG. The beauty of Twitter is that it forces you to be succinct. Also, the most valuable Tweets are actually summaries and pointers to additional information on a blog or other website. If you have more to say than can be captured in 140 characters, then write a blog entry and use Twitter to capture interest and exposure for your blog entry.
Bottom line? Twitter is a tool, and like all tools, it can be used successfully, and unsuccessfully. Also, it is an emerging business tool, so we can expect some false starts (like the 40% babble) that will likely soon get corrected. Start with an assessment of your objectives, and then start using Twitter. Don't let myths like those I've exposed above get in your way.
]]>Twitter small business myth #1: "'People just want to buy things from you."
OK sure, when I go to the local drug store for antacid, I want to buy it and leave. But I can buy that antacid anywhere -- I have no loyalty to one place or another. If you want to build loyalty, you need to provide people more than a transaction. Maybe it is a smile, or extra help getting stuff to your car, or your small business's involvement in the local community. These are the things that create loyalty. How can Twitter build loyal customers? There are many possibilities, and many are still emerging. For example, let's say you run a local bakery (which Steve would probably say is not a candidate for Twitter usage). Why not build a following of people who are interested in baking tips? Things you've learned through the school of hard knocks. Share ideas for recipes, special ingredients, or tricks. Maybe even give out some of your recipes (gasp!) People who love baked goods will look forward to your Tweets. And you can be sure they will be thinking of you when they crave a luscious cinnamon roll!
Another example is a local coffee shop (another business Steve says is not a candidate for Twitter). WRONG! People who go to coffee shops, wait for it, LOVE coffee. I can identify with this one. I like to learn about different types of coffee, tips on brewing, trivia on coffee, etc. I would love to follow a coffee shop that gives out tweets like these. You don't need to be a marketing whiz to figure out that if somebody is exposed to your business brand often, they are more likely to visit and purchase something from it.
Next: more small business twitter myths including Too much information, Too much time, and 140 chars is not enough.
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Luntz's Words That Work. Ignore the partisanship: powerful stuff on effective communication. His 10 rules are gems (I break them often).
| Rule 1. Simplicity: Use Small Words. How about "wrong name" instead of "misnomer" |
Rule 2: Use Short Sentences. Instead of overly complex and wordy constructions, stick with simpler, easier to understand sentences, thereby
Rule 3: Credibility is as Important as Philosophy. These tweets will change your life, and make you a superior communicator like I.
| Rule 4: Consistency Matters. Consistency Matters. Consistency Matters. Consistency Matters. Consistency Matters. |
| Rule 5: Novelty - Offer Something New. Tell me something I don't know. Like these 10 rules
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| Rule 8: Visualize. Imagine a crowd of 1500 giving a standing ovation to your next presentation. |
| Rule 9: Ask a Question. What will you do to become a better communicato |
Rule 10: Provide Context and Explain Relevance. We have all been misunderstood. Now let's take control of our communication!
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.
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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.
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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.
]]>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!
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Interestingly, as far as I know, all the books extolling the virtues of Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, and your-favorite-term-here-2.0, were written by one or two authors rather than hundreds or thousands. These authors created a position, gathered support, did the research, created drafts, and pushed the writing project through. We are Smarter than Me tried to break this pattern and use the concepts that the authors write about in the creation of the book. But they concede that part-way through the project "...we found the actual text of the book, the flow of the topics, and the graphical design had to be produced in the conventional way, rather than relying on the crowd to perform these functions." (pg. xiv) I applaud Barry Liebert and Jon Spector for their candor. Why the breakdown?
Before we answer, the same book provides another example of "collective intelligence gone wild". TheBusinessExperiment.com (TBE) was created to harness collective intelligence for the incubation and creation of businesses. Interaction was good during the idea creation and refinement stage, but when an actual project was chosen to work on, the wheels fell off. Most people lost interest, and getting any real work done was difficult to impossible. A "traditional" leadership was created, with a CEO who quickly drove the project forward. Again, why the breakdown?
I think these examples provide important reminders that collaboration and collective intelligence still require leadership, albeit leadership of a different kind. The role of such leadership?
1) From Jim Collins of Good to Great fame: Get the right people on the bus (and correspondingly get the wrong people off the bus). TBE founder Rob May noted that inviting people to vote on ideas attracted people who liked to discuss ideas rather than people interested in the actual idea itself. In application, this means that leadership needs to chose a specific direction or plan (hopefully applying collaborative principles in the idea creation, vetting, and refinement process), and then amass the right team to make the initiative a reality. The actual implementation, once passionate people are on board, can again utilize collective intelligence.
2) "2.0" leadership still requires the hard work of translating an idea into a plan. Leadership must create a vision around the plan, sell that vision, and set goals. That plan must include some type of work-breakdown-structure to give concrete things for people who are "on the bus" to sink their teeth into. The size of tasks is important: too big and the task is too open-ended to realistically develop in a collaborative, distributed manner. On the other hand, the task cannot be too small or progress will grind to a halt.
My goal in this post is not to say that collaboration doesn't work. Far from it. As we evolve in collaboration maturity, we will see failed experiments from which we must learn. Understanding the limitations in a concept is crucial to appropriate and most effective application of that concept. Collaborative leadership understands these limitations and knows how to strike the right balance between top-down decision making and collaborative wisdom. Further, collaborative leadership must be willing to explore where that balance is.
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1) Enlarge the shadow of the future - make future interactions more frequent and likely and important
2) Change the payoffs - give incentives to value cooperation more than non-cooperation.
3) Teach people to care about each other
4) Teach reciprocity
5) Improve recognition abilities
We will focus on several of these as ways to foster cooperative and collaborative environments.
Enlarge the Shadow of the Future
Collaboration thrives in environments where current behavior is heavily weighted by future prospects of interaction. Keeping units small (see the"magic" of the number 150 in a previous post) is key to encouraging frequent and repeat interactions between individuals. Social networking software can also aid in bringing people together more frequently because the costs of interaction are reduced, and it is also easier t find the "right people" to maximize the benefit of the interaction.
Change the Payoffs
Can leaders make it more attractive to collaborate than to not? Certainly, and we are not talking about monetary awards for "most wiki entries" or "most prolific blogger." Rather, ingrain collaboration in the culture by sharing stories of effective collaboration, giving public recognition, and promoting known collaborators into positions of leadership. Again, social networking software can aid in sharing the story of the power of collaboration and increase the implicit value of these types of interactions.
Improve Recognition Capabilities
In game theory, cooperation is predicated on the ability of the "players" to recognize each other between "games" (iterations), and see and understand their behavior so that they can react to it appropriately at the next iteration. Transparency and reputation management from social networking systems can aid tremendously in this vein by reducing uncertainty about the past behavior of individuals. And coming full circle, reputation management also serves to enlarge the shadow of the future by increasing the "durability" of interactions, i.e capturing the behaviors in a system that is open for others to see.
The bottom line is that collaborative environments can be created and nurtured through attention to factors such as those outlined above. And such factors as enlarging the shadow of the future, changing the payoffs, and improving recognition capabilities can be enhanced through the judicious application of social networking capabilities.
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