Business Insight Zone

[I'm writing this on February 4, reaching back in time to sneak this into the January archive. My goal is to have an easy thumbnail list at the top of each month's archive so it's easy for visitors -- or me, for that matter -- to see which posts were most popular for a given month.]

1. Using Twitter for Business: my presentation to HIMA.
2. Dale Carnegie and the Social Media.
3. Why would we Yammer? (Took off like a bullet even though it was posted on the last day of the month.)
4. Once again: Do Not Multitask.
5. What to do when your friends are laid off.

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Image by Kevin Dooley, used under a Creative Commons license.

Lately some of the folks here at Hoover’s HQ have been playing around with Yammer, a group messaging service that’s like Twitter, but confined to users within a single company.

As I was thinking about how to use Yammer as something more than a toy, I got to talking about it with my friend Aaron Strout. He’s a recent Boston-to-Austin transplant who is vice president of marketing at Powered, an Austin-based software company that creates product-based microsites. (Hoover’s record on Powered is here.)

Aaron had co-authored a big Mashable article on “enterprise microblogging” (read: “stuff like Yammer”), so I was interested in how his thinking could guide our use of it. Since Yammer isn’t the only player in this market, you should read “Yammer” as “Yammer and similar services” in the questions that follow — and check out that Mashable article for more information.

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Why should companies consider using Yammer? At a high level, what can they expect to get out of it?

I wrote a post on this a while back for Mashable. Ironically, I had only been using Yammer for a brief while with a small group of folks at work. Since then, Yammer has become a daily part of my life because EVERYONE at my new company, Powered, uses Yammer. The three reasons why Yammer has become irreplaceable for me are:

• It allows me to share information with the company in real time — information that in the past I may have e-mailed to 2-3 colleagues but probably would have benefited a much wider audience;
• It provides a way for me to get to know my co-workers better. As the new CMO of my company, I came into Powered a little bit blind. After just a few days, I could already start to see which employees were experts in which areas (both personal and professional);
• Its archive capabilities — not only can I look back at my history of information I “yammered,” I can also look at tagged content by topic (people tag topics in the stream using a “#” in front of the tag). Or, I can look back at individuals’ streams.

Now one might ask, can’t you do this on Twitter? The answer is “sort of.” The issue with Twitter — a tool I use regularly — is that it’s not private. With Yammer, you can share competitive information, ideas on how to approach a sales opportunity, or social information like “we’re having beers in the kitchen area.”

Should a company establish internal policies for using Yammer? Or is it good for users to just sign up and go? Are there risks?

It’s not a bad idea to establish guidelines up front, but to be honest, less guidance is more. The main barrier to Yammer being successful is adoption. Once people have adopted it, you don’t want to retard the free-flowing conversation with lots of rules and regulations. With that said, you also don’t want people sending around inappropriate messages (yes, this is common sense) or spending too much time having personal conversations. I did a training session for our company and basically told them that they should use Yammer freely and that I would ask folks to dial it back if it got too out of control. So far, we’ve had no problems.

What should users know about using Yammer well?

If users have used Twitter or the “status update” feature on social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, they will already have a sense of how to use Yammer. If not, there are a few simple rules to keep in mind:

1. Yammer is not a substitute for e-mail. It’s okay to reply to a co-worker’s tweet but anything more than 2-3 responses back and forth should be moved over to e-mail or IM. Otherwise, Yammer can get noisy for those listening in.
2. Try and keep your updates short and sweet. Unlike Twitter, there is no 140-character limit. However, I would highly encourage keeping updates to no more than 10-15 words. It makes it easier for others to digest.
3. If you want to include a URL, try using a URL shortening service like http://budurl.com or http://tinyurl.com. This will prevent longer URLs from wrapping and/or breaking.

We’ve used Yammer a little bit here at Hoover’s, but mostly for casual conversation — lunch invitations, alerts about someone bringing in doughnuts, that kind of thing. What are some practical steps we could take to enrich our use of it?

At Powered, we regularly share great blog posts, personal and professional social events, pats on the back for big and small team wins, and, most importantly, we use it to “crowdsource.” What I mean by this is that when we are preparing to speak to a prospective client, our sales folks will regularly ask if anyone has any experience with or knows anyone at the prospective client’s company. You’d be amazed by where some of our best sources of insights come from — in many cases, from places we never would have thought to look or ask.

Do you predict that services like this will become common in the business world? And how would you like to see them evolve?

Yes, absolutely. I see them evolving to be an embedded part of the desktop and will tie into other social and traditional tools from the corporate wiki to Excel and Powerpoint.

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Thanks to Aaron for taking the time to share his thoughts on my questions.

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Related:

• Aaron Strout and Joe Cascio at Mashable: Is the Enterprise Ready for Microblogging Tools like Twitter?
• Aaron Strout at Citizen Marketer 2.1: How Yammer Helps New Employees

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Good companies should be restructuring themselves all the time — whether or not they call it “restructuring.” The best companies, in fact, can usually avoid large-scale, make-an-announcement restructuring because they’re constantly reshaping and retooling every aspect of their business for the better.

But whether a company is great or mediocre or poor, the harsh measures adopted in hard times shouldn’t be applied across the board.

Partly I’m following the lead of Steve Yastrow from the Tom Peters blog:

If your company declares, “We are cutting all salespeople’s travel by 25 percent,” or “Every department will cut staff by ten percent,” lift your eyebrows superciliously, and say, “That’s pretty stupid.”

Making across the board cuts is like going to the bank and asking for five inches of money. A ten dollar bill and a one dollar bill take up the same amount of space, but their value is not equal. Your company does many things, and making across the board cuts ignores that each of these things has its own value.

And partly I’m thinking about an exchange from this morning on Twitter. (It’s in reverse order.)

If you’re the CEO and you’ve been running a company for five years, it’s unseemly to take a bonus in the same year you lay off lots of people. Doesn’t matter if you’ve earned it — much less if you think you’ve earned it — it still looks bad, and sets a bad tone for your employees, your customers, and your shareholders.

But if you’re a sales VP reviewing the work of your #1 sales manager, or a CTO reviewing the work of your #1 lab director, don’t get stingy with the bonuses or other perks just because times are tough. That sales manager — if they’re really that good — is easily worth the performance bonus, and you’d be cutting off your nose to spite your face to short them on it. Ditto with the lab director who’s driving your company’s future direction by pumping out world-class R&D.

So why do I have a picture of a salad here?

If your doctor tells you that you need to lose weight and control your cholesterol, you don’t reduce your intake of foods across the board. You get smart about it. You might reduce your intake of pastries by 95% while increasing your intake of salad by 50%.

Not the world’s most groundbreaking analogy, I grant you — but for a concept this simple, it’s amazing how many companies don’t get it.

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Photo by catsper.

Sometimes I get an idea for what I think would be a good blog post, but then come across someone else’s great post or article that has already done all the work for me. (Since I’m sometimes lazier than I should be when it comes to research, this is a good thing in my book.)

Case in point: the historian in me considered writing something about the business fortunes that have been launched during hard times . . . and then I came across this November 2008 Daniel Roth article from Wired:

Back to the Garage: How Economic Turmoil Breeds Innovation

. . . [F]or the bravest inventors and entrepreneurs, conditions are ideal to pounce on a business opportunity. . . .

The most memorable crucible in modern history is, of course, the Great Depression. During that era, several firms made huge bets that changed their fortunes and those of the country: Du Pont told one of its star scientists, Wallace Carothers, to set aside basic research and pursue potentially profitable innovation. What he came up with was nylon, the first synthetic fabric, revolutionizing the way Americans parachuted, carpeted, and panty-hosed. As IBM’s rivals cut R&D, founder Thomas Watson built a new research center. Douglas Aircraft debuted the DC-3, which within four years was carrying 90 percent of commercial airline passengers. A slew of competing inventors created television. . . .

This doesn’t mean that big new ideas emerge because of turmoil—in fact, the data shows no relationship between major breakthroughs and economic conditions. But the benefit of a global money drought is that competition tends to vaporize. And for some, the stress of tough times has an amazing way of concentrating the mind on the way forward.

The whole thing is well worth reading, especially if (a) you’re working for a company that has some resources but has been sitting on the sidelines out of fear, or (b) you just need some cheering up about where the commercial world might be headed once the dust settles from the current recession.

For a while now I’ve been tagging interesting business stories on my Delicious account, which is what feeds the headlines in the “Worth Reading” section of the sidebar.

Now I’ve also started tagging images that might be of use to me or other bloggers. If you want to rummage around in these images, just follow this link.

Note that, like just about every picture on this blog, these are photos from Flickr that are licensed for adaptation and commercial re-use under Creative Commons.

I hope you find them useful!

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Photo by Ben Newton.

This suggestion applies primarily to Twitter, but it works in just about any social medium:

When you’re getting started on a new social-media platform — Twitter, a blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever — put up something that lets the world know you’re a real person.

Simple, eh? Lately the @hoovers Twitter account has been drawing a fair number of new followers (last week’s coverage in Mashable didn’t hurt), for which we’re definitely grateful.

What’s amazing to me is that, when I check out each new follower to consider following them back, some of them have nothing to see on their Twitter accounts. No picture, no real name, no URL to visit, no biography, and worst of all, no messages.

Maybe you really are just dipping a toe in the water. No sweat: we’re all beginners sometime, and not all of us are as comfortable in a given medium. But you can put up something engaging and non-threatening — to you and your audience both — that will humanize you.

The Business Version

If you’re starting an account for your business, do at least these things when you set up your account:

• Use a version of your corporate logo as your avatar. You want something that looks good at the size of a postage stamp. (This is why we use a stylized “H” rather than our whole “Hoover’s” logo.)
• Put your company’s URL in your profile.
• List your company’s headquarters location in your profile. Or, if you want to get clever, you could put something like “Anywhere you need us.”
• Put in a brief descriptor in the biography section: “Changing the way the world thinks about prescriptions by mail” or “The ISP of choice for California’s Central Valley” or “The recruiter you need when you’re looking for top coders in the UK.”
• Write a first tweet. Do it at the same time you set up the account. Keep it simple and not too sales-y, something like: “Hello, everybody. Checking out Twitter to see how it can help us connect with our users.”

After that, figure out some way that you can put in a tweet or two regularly. Ideally, you should have this worked out before you ever set up a Twitter account (or Facebook page, etc.), but in any case, social-media accounts wither if they’re not watered.

Maybe your CEO isn’t as loquacious as Tony Hsieh of Zappos — it’s okay. You could succeed anyway by posting a few links per week to interesting items: news that’s relevant to your industry or your hometown, events your company is hosting, interesting discussions from the top blogs in your industry, etc.

The point, again: show your audience that there’s a real human intelligence behind the account.

The Personal Version

What if you’re using Twitter just for yourself? In general, you could follow the bullet points of advice above, but you can make it more personal or whimsical if you want. Whatever you choose, here’s a suggested first tweet:

“Hello, world. Trying to figure out what all the Twitter hype is about.”

If you find that Twitter is a toy you play with once in a while rather than a staple of your day, you could later say this:

“Twitter seems fun, but I can’t spend too much time on it regularly. I’ll be stopping in from time to time.”

If you figure out you’re going to use Twitter for listening more than talking, here’s a suggested follow-up:

“Note to the world: I’m just a listener when it comes toTwitter, but I enjoy reading what others have to say. Keep talking!”

As in the business version of this advice, if you want to build more of a Twitter presence but you’re shy about holding conversations there, you can just post interesting links — to news stories, blog posts, videos, pictures, music, et cetera ad infinitum. You don’t have to turn it into a tell-all memoir.

Oh, and if you don’t want to put up a picture of yourself, that’s fine. But put up a picture of your cat or Steve McQueen or the Eiffel Tower or something — anything to replace the default avatar and show the world that an actual person is using the account.

Show You’re Human

Social media is about connecting people, but of course there are lame-brain spammers and snake-oil sellers out there who try to use Twitter (and Facebook and the rest) to spread their lameness to the rest of the world. Plus there are plenty of people who sign on to a social-media platform one time only and then forget about it, such that many accounts really are dead.

If you intend to use a social-media platform, even passively, show that you don’t fit into one of those categories. You need not say much, but you can at least show that you’re a real human who’s taking an interest.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple “Hello, world!”

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Related:

• Using Twitter for Business: my presentation to HIMA.

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Since last week’s post, “Dale Carnegie and the Social Media,” it’s like I’m seeing Dale Carnegie everwhere I look. (But not literally — that would be ghoulish.)

First, in the comment thread of the post, Daniel Riveong pointed me to his own 2006 article about Social Media Optimization:

If the Social Media is about “Engaging People” and “Conversation” why are we reading still reading just the Cluetrain Manifesto? We should be reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” as well. Read up on it. Can you see how it applies online?

(Mark Drapeau of Mashable also pointed to his article “HOW TO: Win Friends and Twinfluence People,” though it might be disqualified on a technicality since, beyond the wordplay in the title, it doesn’t reference Carnegie directly. It does talk good sense in the Carnegie style, though.)

Then, I came across “Why Dale Carnegie Would Be an Awesome Blogger” at the Schipul.com Blog:

What I am saying is if Carnegie was still around, I would invite him to come have a beer, watch a Dallas Cowboys football game, and discuss his latest blog on why “a man without a smiling face must not open a shop.”

The Schipul blogger goes on to give five excellent reasons why Carnegie would have made a good blogger.

Finally, law blogger Kevin O’Keefe riffed on my own post and applied Carnegie’s “Six Ways to Make People Like You” to attracting Twitter followers and blog readers:

Blogging and Twittering is all about the other guy, not you. Talk about others’ problems, not yourself. Provide helpful answers, insight, and resources to help others solve their problems.

Kevin knows what he’s talking about — he has 2,500 Twitter followers.

Carnegie’s book is timeless because it talks about the timeless interests and motivations of human beings, whether they’re meeting face-to-face, over the phone, via the Internet, or any other way. You can make yourself more likeable, doing so is good for business, and the social media give you more ways to do this than ever before.

Long live Dale Carnegie!

“When innovation is used to disguise risk, as it often has been of late, it really can have disastrous consequences.”

Read this l-o-n-g and good-humored Atlantic interview of Michael Lewis, if only so that you will at last understand the true mechanism of credit-default swaps and the perverse incentives that made some Wall Streeters get buried so deeply in them.

Two more choice tidbits about the financial markets and the regulation thereof:

“Goldman and Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers: their returns were increasingly generated by these smart traders making complicated gambles. But that’s ended. The complicated gambles require, one, people to trust them, and two, the ability to borrow large sums of money to make the gambles. And both those things have ended.”

“What’s the risk that the backlash will go too far? Well, everything overshoots, so you can be sure that whatever the reaction is, it will be excessive.”

And one more on the future of long-form journalism — in which field, as will be clear by now, Michael Lewis is one of my heroes:

“[M]y sense is, there’ll always be a hunger for long-form journalism, and that it’s just a question of how it’s packaged. And that people will always figure out how to make it sort of viable. It’s never going to be a hugely profitable business: it’s more like the movie business or the car business in that there are all sorts of good non-economic reasons to be involved in it. The economic returns will always probably be driven down by too many people wanting to be in it.”

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Related:

• Must-read: Michael Lewis on the Meltdown
• A Subprime Primer

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Clear language and clear thought go together.

This argument has been made many times (most notably by a certain Mr. Orwell), so I won’t belabor the principle. But I will offer this one practical tip on making your language clearer:

When you’re writing, the “Find” function is your friend.

This morning I was working on a long document and I found myself reaching for the word “circuitously.” Not a bad word, not overly fancy, and the right word for the sentence it was in . . . but a bad word to overuse, because it’s the kind of 30-cent word that will clang in the reader’s ear on the second go-round. I thought I might have used it somewhere else in the document, but the thing is over a hundred pages long, and I’ve been making lots of changes throughout those pages.

Fortunately, in this age of word-processing, the solution is trivial: a few seconds with the Ctrl-F function saved me from using a plethora of “circuitously”s. (The search feature on this blog reveals zero uses of “plethora,” so maybe I’m safe with that one.)

Attention, Marketers!

Now, take this a step further and check out the list of business jargon (and the related links) on this page, and especially the chart of marketing jargon on this page.

My challenge to you is to use the “Find” function to root out all of these words across all of your marketing materials. Just get rid of them. Although many of these words once carried a noble amount of freight in a good sentence, they’ve been so overused in marketing-speak that they’ve all broken down. Your readers can’t even hear these words anymore — or, if they hear them, they can’t help but roll their eyes at them.

So, please, constrain yourselves from using these words. Find fresh avenues of expression. It all starts with [Ctrl]-F.

What’s YOUR most annoying marketing buzzword?

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(A personal coda: when I came to Hoover’s eight years ago, the house style — which adamantly opposes jargon — made sense to me right away. Though I’m a wordy cuss when I’m talking out loud, and though I’ve been known to reach for 10-dollar words sometimes, I benefited from a string of good writing teachers in high school and college who drilled the tendency for jargon out of me. When I got here, I felt right at home.)

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Further reading:

• Raven’s Brain: Decipher and/or Generate Business Jargon
• David Meerman Scott at MarketingProfs: Cutting-Edge, Mission-Critical Analysis: Steps to Avoiding Overused Gobbledygook
• Yours truly: Memo to American Airlines: Watch your language!
• From Karl Geiger of USC: a business buzzword bingo card generator
  

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Yesterday I quoted this question from a post by Matthew May:

“What is it that our competitors would struggle with if we were to cease?”

Today a colleague and I were talking about this question, and he wondered if I could supply an example of this phenomenon. After some false starts, we settled on one.

A few years ago, Intel bowed out of its long-running “gigahertz war” with AMD. In other words, it stopped marketing its processors based on their top speed. Instead, it began marketing its wares, especially the Centrino package, by emphasizing a combination of powerful capabilities and power-saving design — a ploy which helped to make the Centrino a big winner in laptops.

Although (1) AMD eventually found its footing, and (2) both companies did keep making some improvements to their chips’ top speeds, Intel’s move left AMD in the lurch for a while; the smaller company was forced to adjust its marketing. The “gigglehertz” wars were over, and the old rhetoric of “mine is faster than yours” no longer had traction.

What examples can you offer? When has Company A created problems for Company B by stopping doing something.

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Photo by Christine H., used under a CC-Share Alike license.