A few months ago I blogged about Blog policy in "Does your company support employee blogging" - for some reason that post struck a cord and was picked up quite a bit by others.  As one of 3-4K Microsoft employee bloggers, I’m often asked about our blog policy and the road we’ve been on to transparency.  How’d we get management support?  How did we get employee interest?  How would I do it if I was trying to repeat the success in other companies?  This last question got me thinking, how would I implement a blog strategy in a company that didn’t have one in place already?

First off, let me say that individual blogs are GREAT and should be broadly supported for anyone who wants to go down that path - I’m an example and advocate for that as core to a blog policy/strategy.  Frankly, I think not embracing employee blogging in today’s world would make you an unattractive employer for anyone entering the workforce from Gen Y.

Having said that, what I haven’t seen as widely spread is a formal commitment to group blogs.  Individual blogs are often challenged by loss of interest by the blogger, change in role at a company, change of place of employment.  These churn issues clearly create risk in continuity.  There are plenty of group blog examples out there, but let me take this one level deeper.  What I’d really LOVE to see is group blogs where the bloggers crossed functional roles in their companies - someone from product, from marketing, from support, from sales, from professional services… This is the type of blog I’d like to read as a user.  Southwest Airlines does this where you see posts from a wide range of contributors in very different jobs at Southwest (Communications, Captains, Executives, flight attendants and mechanics).  It makes for a much more interesting read and as a non-tech company, creates a much easier model for participation for employees.  This approach mitigates the risks associated with churn, drives internal cross group communication and collaboration and better represents your customers end to end experience.

Of course, I still say it is critical to keep continuity in a few of your core bloggers on the site and allow their personalities to come through very clearly - this, after all, is part of what actually makes it a blog!

Am I the only one who loves this idea?  What do you think?

Sean

Popularity: 12% [?]

Feeling overwhelmed?

Unless social computing is your full time day job (and night job too) it’s virtually impossible to keep up with (and make sense of) all the new developments around web 2.0.  I regularly get links to interesting implementations that other companies have done as ideas we should consider … or more directly questioning when we are going to do that!  On a recent best practices sharing tour to large companies implementing web 2.0 services I ended the day getting this question:  "What is the most important web 2.0 feature we should be implementing next?"

What a great question.  It got me thinking about all the people I had talked to in recent months and the common challenges, regardless of industry, that I heard at conferences, in peer discussions and within my own company.  I’ll follow up this post soon with some summary points on what the biggest pain points seem to be, but my answer to this question will give you a pretty good idea.

So, what’s the answer?  Simple (simple to say, not do).  The answer is none of the above.  The most important feature to implement in your web 2.0 strategy is integration with existing systems and processes.  Sad, this isn’t the funnest answer.  It’s not roll out a blogging strategy or a product wiki or an influencer program or a feedback management system or forums or …

It turns out that Web 2.0 projects are really not that hard to implement - getting to market quickly with a new service isn’t all that difficult and in many organizations there is a premium placed on shipping things that are very visible.  What I’ve seen is that the premium on speed and visibility drives most companies to leverage vendor / outsourced solutions for deployment.  It’s faster and easier than working with IT.  There’s also a budget issue here, vendor dollars are easier in most places than incremental IT expense.  This means you quickly end up with multiple suppliers and multiple platforms for your web 2.0 projects - all of which are sitting both organizationally and operationally outside your existing systems, processes and infrastructure.  This is a problem in user experience, in driving organizational culture change, and in measuring business impact.  Community works because you get critical mass, it’s easy to use and there is social proof or evidence of shared value in participation.  Do you have multiple points of authentication as your users move across your communities?  Does your reputation/recognition model transfer across properties?  Do you capture differing depth of profile data?  Is it evident why?  Is the user experience jarring from one venue to the next?  Is there a clear workflow for how the various touch points integrate? How discoverable are the assets?  How obvious is your org chart based on your online experience (this would be a bad sign, not good)?  On and on.

Now, let’s say you have all the web experiences integrated.  If you have, send me the url!!! I’d love to see the best practice at scale - please don’t send me threadless.  I love them, they are doing cool stuff, but let’s see a fortune 1000 company example - who should be the envy of the market?  If you have the web experiences integrated, I’m impressed and I’d love to come visit!  The next question is have you integrated these systems with traditional systems and processes (Call management, market research, product quality systems, customer service, CRM, brand monitoring, etc.)?  If you’ve done this, I’m not impressed, I’m blown away! 

Earlier I blogged about ROI and Web 2.0 as Business transformation.  I’m more convinced than ever that these are the critical issues to be addressed.  I’m curious what you think and hungry for great examples.

Reality check.  Utilizing 3rd party solutions, despite none of them having the full solution is still the right way to go.  Addressing process and systems integration issues is easier once you have data flowing - so I’d still advocate some deployment first (if you haven’t yet).  But, choose your vendors carefully.  Best in class silo solutions may not be as good as pretty good breadth of functionality solutions.  Professional services capacity is critical.

Love to know what you think.

Sean

Popularity: 18% [?]

Take a look at this post on the Netflix blog.  It’s a great example of transparency and direct conversation from the developers/product planners for the Netflix site to their users.  I don’t regularly follow the blog, but I take this as a response to some criticism they were taking on the speed of innovation/change on the site.  Makes for a good read - also read the comments in response which lean fairly strongly positive.

Thanks to Bokardo blogger Josh for getting me to take a regular look at what Netflix is doing.

Well done.

Sean

Popularity: 15% [?]

I’m too slow getting back to this…

In May, Bill Johnston blogged a response to an article in Information week and suggested they should have talked to me as well - thanks for the compliment Bill.  I put this on my "to-blog" list and just didn’t get back to it.  Here’s the original article in IW, titled "Online Influencers: How The New Opinion Leaders Drive Buzz On The Web." 

I had forgotten about the article.  The irony is when I did go back to it, I re-discovered that the story quoted (among others), Dave Balter, Ed Keller, and Ben McConnell - all of whom I’ve had the chance to talk to and learn from the past month.  It also brings in some research by Duncan Watts, published in HBR, that concludes:

Understanding that trends in public opinion are driven not by a few influentials influencing everyone else but by many easily influenced people influencing one another should change how companies incorporate social influence into their marketing campaigns. Because the ultimate impact of any individual–highly influential or not–depends on decisions made by people one, two, or more steps away from her or him, word-of-mouth marketing strategies shouldn’t focus on finding supposed influentials. Rather, marketing dollars might better be directed toward helping large numbers of ordinary people–possibly with Web-based social networking tools–to reach and influence others just like them.

The article introduces debate on the true influence of influencers or opinion leaders in the blogosphere.  I think this is actually quite a good article that gets at some of the real issues underlying successful influencer program development.  Way to much thought leadership on the topic of online influencers is focused on the value proposition of marketing and/or buzz generation.  As I introduced in my post about community ROI, companies should invest in community and influentials not just for marketing benefit, but because it can change how you support and how you build products and services.  In fact, I believe it can be detrimental to a brand to overly focus on just the marketing/viral side of the story.  These initiatives need to work in concert as part of a business transformation, not stand on their own. 

There are two generic methods of generating positive buzz / Word of Mouth.  First off is a combination of serendipity and trial & error.  The second is as a by-product of systematically supporting, listening to and engaging with your users through communities.  Both are valid strategies I would endorse, but #1 takes some patience and an acceptance that batting averages are never 1.000.  The second method takes a more persistent, long term view of transforming how you connect and engage with your users.  It requires changes in business processes.  It may require changes in policies.  That said, done in a consistent, systematic and long term fashion it is a near guarantee.  Where you may be disappointed is that all your competitors are either doing this already or will do it as well.  You may have some advantage to be a first / fast mover, but in the end, I’d argue not doing this is a going-out-of-business model in the new media era. 

oh…and obviously, if you can hit on both #1 and #2, they are catalysts for each other.

Had I responded to this article a few months ago, I think my view would be different than it is today as I was rigid (and too simplistic) in my support of the two-step flow of communication.  The reality today is that those who are raving fans of the influencer effect and those that are dissenters of the model, are both wrong (and both right).  Taken in one dimension (marketing), the evidence of the revenue effect of influencer driven models is easier to disprove than prove (I’m with Duncan).  It’s only in taking a more holistic view of the influencer effect on a company (across support, product feedback/research, and marketing/buzz) can you truly evaluate the impacts of the influencer model.  I haven’t seen that study done yet, but my own experience running an influencer program that impacts all 3 pillars suggests that this is a very different way to evaluate the model.  None of this runs counter to the wisdom of Word of Mouth, it just means that in practice, things get a little more complex if you want to think about the opportunity end to end.

Interesting how research is often confined in the same ways that organizational structures are - hey marketing, go talk to support! (vice verse - and while your at it, invite product planning!)

Sean

Popularity: 17% [?]

I thought that statement in-and-of-itself worthy of a blog post…I played quite a lot with Facebook today (adding friends, trying out apps, joining groups, etc).  I have to say, I’m impressed.  Opening up FB to developers has created a wealth of apps (a few quality issues not withstanding) that are interesting from a social connections and commerce standpoint.  My favorite of the day:  iLike.  There also seems to be a huge # of what look like pretty useless apps, but the long tail is emerging and it’s fairly easy to let democracy (and your friends) before you help you find the better apps.

Get with it…if you aren’t using it already, now’s a good time to give it a try.

sean

Popularity: 8% [?]

In an earlier post on Corporate Transparency, I talked about 3 drivers of the push for transparency.  The first I highlighted was "Gen Y" (there is debate about the naming…but generally it is those born from 1981-1999).  In a later post I talked about Gen Y, Social Media and the workforce of the future and how this generation’s work style will alter the face of the workforce as evidenced by a number of reported examples.  At one point, I questioned whether I, at 37 and part of Gen X, was more rapidly becoming a dinosaur than those that proceeded me and that the burden is really on me as a leader to understand and embrace this emerging work style rather than hopelessly try to "covert" it to "old school."

One of my readers forwarded to me an interview in cnet with Cal State psychology professor Larry Rosen called:  Net Generation comes of age.  I thought it a very worthwhile and supporting bit of evidence of some of the same points regarding this emerging generation entering the workforce.  I’ll let you read the interview for Larry’s insights, but I particularly appreciated his input to these questions:

Will they (net gen) take those experiences to the "real world" and use them?

Baby boomers seem to have problems managing the Net generation, but they were in fact the ones who brought them up. How does that connect?

How do you keep the Net generation youngsters in a company?

Are companies aware of the needs of the Net generation?

How can employers benefit from different generations?

Larry is working on a book called "Me, MySpace and I" - I look forward to reading it.

Sean

Popularity: 23% [?]

First steps first, how am I defining Business transformation?  Wikipedia defines business transformation as:

"an executive management initiative that attempts to align People, Process and Technology initiatives  with the company’s business strategy and vision to support and help innovate new business strategies."

This definition works reasonably well for me, though I would add that the impact of business transformations are typically measured in cost savings, revenue growth and/or customer satisfaction (ie business results…not just completed activities or initiatives).

So, the question at hand was…"Checkin’ the box?"      þ …or business transformation?

þ Blog Policy

þ Discussion Forums

þ Product feedback/suggestion system

þ RSS feeds

o Brand monitoring

o Influencer program

o Viral marketing campaign (as if it is that easy…)

o Product Wiki and/or podcasting

Well, I think the answer in most cases is "checkin’ the box."  In fairness, it’s a reasonable and even responsible place to start as community can manifest itself in very different ways across industries and between companies - starting small just makes good sense and can be helpful in determining next steps (and I’m not claiming any higher starting point as part of the work we’ve done).  Hot topics at conferences are around ROI and organization alignment (where should the community team sit) - both indicators that the pressure is mounting to defend the business value of web 2.0.  As you probe for the business case, you are still likely to find yourself in a conversation about the technologies rather than top level business challenges.  There is a sense of "me too," and even an obligation to do "something" to be a part of the buzz around transparency.  As you look at web 2.0 projects in organizations, they are still largely in pilot form and or sit within their own silos.  Depending on the size of the organization, you may have multiple projects underway with limited to no relationship between them.  In fact, it is interesting (at least to me) that when you attend conferences in this space, it is not immediately obvious the functional responsibilities of everyone else in the room…you are as likely to have someone from a product development role as a marketing role as a support role in the same sessions.

Here’s a simple test for checking the box: 

• Could you pick up your web 2.0 project/initiative and re-plant it in another group/division in your company (with the same resources) and continue along largely unaffected? (Hint, a yes answer to this is not good.) 
• Is Finance attending the meeting or did your project get funded without a finance scrub? (Hint, no finance presence feels good, but isn’t in the long run.)
• Is the funding for this incremental or a mix shift from other priorities? (more on this in moment)
• Is success measured in project status or scorecard metrics?

It’s not that any of these things are inherently bad, but adding community/interactivity to your online properties isn’t the goal.  Odds are, you are not in the community business.  Now’s a good time for a refresher on that previous post regarding community ROI and its division into the following 3 categories:  Support, Sales & Marketing, and Product & program development.

Odds are, you are not investing in web 2.0 to do something your company doesn’t do already.  You do market research, you do marketing/PR, you do recruiting, you respond to support and how to questions, you do customer service, you gather feedback, you develop content, etc.  I assume your web 2.0 projects are designed to do one of these things - aren’t they?  These are all functions in support of either growing revenue, lowering costs and/or increasing customer satisfaction. This takes us back to the question of whether the funding for this is incremental or mix shift?  It’s a critical question (I think).  It’s likely you have to sink some cost up front to get this up and running, but the question should be:  When will this project result in reducing spend in other areas designed to deliver against the same objectives.    

So, now that we are all checking the box, how are we articulating and integrating our Web 2.0 projects as part of core business functions designed to "align people, process and technology with business strategy to drive innovation resulting in lower operating costs, increased revenue opportunity, improved customer satisfaction or all three?"

For me, this started with re-positioning what business I’m in.  As a repeat from that earlier ROI post, it was a recognition that I’m not in the community business, I’m in the answers (online) and product feedback business - web 2.0 provides new, high value venues in which to deliver these fundamental business results, but web 2.0 isn’t a goal in and of itself.

Sean

Popularity: 16% [?]

Ok…maybe not.  But as a distraction, I picked up the latest National Geographic (July2007) and sat back for a read and behold, the article that jumps out at me is "The Genius of Swarms:  Ants, bees, and birds teach us how to cope with a complex world." 

Wow…what a great alternative way to describe the value of mass collaboration.

One method of describing community never works for everyone, so whenever I can add to my portfolio some great new examples that tell the story, I take note.  In fact, it’s not unusual for part of the resistance to this emerging trend to be some form of "it’s not natural."  It’s not hierarchical like a normal businesses, so how can these apparently leaderless communities accomplish anything, much less do so efficiently.

Well, thank you National Geographic.  The article explores how collective behaviors in nature have enabled many species to survive, thrive and solve seemingly impossible problems.  For years, scientists have been mapping, studying and simulating these swarm tactics in an effort to both understand it and to apply it to business problems.  Overall, the article asks a very important question…THE question: "How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group?"

A few of my favorite parts of the article:

Deborah Gordon (Stanford biologist):  "If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you’ll be impressed with how inept it is.  Ants aren’t smart.  Ant colonies are."  …as colonies they respond quickly and efficiently to their environment.  (swarm intelligence).

I love this term…"Swarm intelligence" -  Though I think it would be a mistake to assume "swarm idiocy" also doesn’t exist - though this may be unique to human swarms:)

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one’s in charge.  No generals command ant warriors.  No managers boss ant workers.  The queen plays no role but to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all - at least none that we would recognize.  It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb.  Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

I describe such a system as an online community. Simple rules of thumb are the code of conduct (written or unwritten norms) in a community.  Yes, ok, many communities benefit from some moderation/leadership in some form, but these are not leaders in a hierarchical sense - in fact, they are able to lead precisely because it is not a hierarchy, and if they leave others fill the space.

The bees rules for decision-making - seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices.

Nice job Dell…lovin’ Ideastorm.

That’s the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence.  Whether we’re talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior - decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb - add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

…an important truth about collective intelligence.  Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions.  A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do.  When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys it relies on its members to do their own part.  For those of us who sometimes wonder if it’s really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don’t see how.

Beyond the obvious intersection with communities, there’s a broader message here I like as well about the additive impact of individual actions…There’s plenty more to love about this article including a couple of great business examples and input from James Surowiecki.

Hope you love the story as much as I do!  What do you think?

Sean

Popularity: 16% [?]

Well, I’ve blown the relevance of the web metrics on my blog for the foreseeable future.   I thought I’d share a few observations from this weeks T-mobile blog post gone wild.

In no particular order:

• Page views vs comments:  Less than .05% of all readers (I should say pageviews) commented on the blog post.  This seems pretty typical for blog posts (communities) in general, but it was interesting to see it applied to a post that had over 20K pageviews. 
• The Digg Effect: About 1 in 20 viewers, "Dugg" it - this became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  It became clear very quickly that users who use Digg, Digg.  It’s difficult from the metrics I have to peel this back further, but my rough estimate would be that Digg readers Digg with 4-5 times the promiscuity of other readers.  This makes sense, but is an odd sort of swarming.
• Digg’s impact on traffic:  Digg is largely a non-issue in terms of views until you’ve crossed 50 or so Diggs, from there it curved quickly.  This post took about 14 hrs to get to that point….14 hrs after that, it was at 1000 Diggs.
• Good news vs Bad news:  Like regular news, everyone cares about bad news, no one cares about the follow-up (follow up post closing the loop is tracking to about 1/50 the Pageviews of the original).
• Digg is a social network.  I never really thought of Digg as a social network, but it seems clear to me that there are prolific Diggers/commenter’s who have loose tie connections.  If you follow the comments, many commenter’s "know" each other and frequently swarm together.  I’m not sure what this says about Digg as a news source, but this changed how I think about Digg.  If I was a PR agency, I’d crawl Digg on behalf of my clients and look for opportunities for response (for good or bad stories). 
• Thick/Thin community contributors:  I once blogged here about thick vs thin community contributors.  Digg proved their example from the previous post.  Prolific "Diggers" are the kind of "thin" contributors I wrote about.  It takes little effort to Digg, but the effort can drive dramatic influence on the visibility of a topic.
• Tone & manner.  This might be the most important lesson.  Most blogs start with readers who actually know you on some level and blog traffic grows gradually, not exponentially.  Those who know you (follow you), know your writing style and generally know something about your personality.  With gradual growth to your blog, this stays normalized.  When you suddenly introduce large volumes of new users who don’t know you or your writing style, the reactions can be very different.  The example in this case were a handful of commenter’s (and maybe other readers) who thought, based on my post, that I was "yelling" at the CS agent at T-Mobile.  Re-reading my post with this in mind, I guess I can understand the misconception, but those who know me probably can’t remember me raising my voice about anything (except maybe trying to get my Dog not to run in our creek).  It simply isn’t in my character to yell at anyone about anything.
• Comments moderation:  I have never turned on comment moderation on my blog.  At about comment 125 on the thread I did as I started getting some comments that were truly inappropriate.  In general, I don’t think moderation is good, but you’ve got to have your own standard for this.  I approved all comments except those with really outrageous profanity. 

Overall, the influence and reach of the citizen blogger was amazing, even disturbing.  I’ve read stories and followed other events, but this one was closer to home.  It certainly has me thinking through the importance of using brand management tools/services for trending community conversations on the web as a part of a customer listening system.  The problem isn’t that customers will complain about you (that’s ok and likely they have good reasons), the issue is how quickly you see it and how effective you are at engaging in and responding to the complaint.  I hope I can influence this in my own company.

Sean

Popularity: 23% [?]

A former Dell employee posted an article June 14th that got a lot of play:  22 confessions of a former Dell Sales Manager.  Lots of traffic and 1500+ votes on Digg.  In the article, the author goes on to expose a lot of "tricks" on how to work the online system at dell.com.  Nothing in this post was particularly anti-Dell, but there are a number of items that it’s obvious if you were Dell you might prefer weren’t posted.

June 15th, the same author/site posted again:  Dell Demands Takedown of our "22 confessions of a former Dell Sales Manager".  This posting racked up 3500 Diggs!!  In it, the Consumerist posts the text of a communication (a few back and forth conversations) from a Dell Attorney requesting that the post be removed.

Ugh…Not a good scene.  Big companies have challenges in working through response management in the web 2.0 world - where you pretty much have to assume transparency.

June 16th, the Dell Community team (responsible for Direct2Dell) steps up with a direct response:  Dell’s 23 Confessions.

Let me say, good recovery Dell.  Yes, it would have been better for this not to happen at all, but in reality, it does. The judge of your commitment to community is in the quality of your response.  Here’s what I liked:

• The opener:  "Now’s not the time to mince words, so let me just say it… we blew it."
• Acknowledging other bloggers posts on the topic (Jeff Jarvis) - this says they did some homework.
• It’s personal, I don’t know who Lionel is, but the post is an "I" post vs "we" - good tone.
• Tied in a relevant discussion happening in Ideastorm.  More homework here and including real customers in the discussion.
• Point to point discussion - not negating the feedback or challenging it, just presenting their point of view and links to help.

Sean

Popularity: 28% [?]