Business Insight Zone

Time to take a long soak. (Though not, sad to say, in a Japanese hot spring like this one.)

If you’re like, oh, virtually everyone I know, things tend to get more hectic rather than less. You tend to take on more rather than less — or have it heaped on you by others. You try to do ten things at once, carry out 17 “priorities” at once. Even though that never works.

Shut it off. Head for the mountains, at least in your own mind. Find that hot spring where you should be marinating.

Topics in which you might want to marinate yourself:

• Your company’s value proposition.
• The real purpose and direction of your career.
• A skill (forthrightness? public speaking? programming in Lisp? self-organization? finance?) that you know will take your work to a higher level.
• The costs on your balance sheet.
• Your department’s biggest problem.
• What a restructured economy could mean for your industry and your enterprise.

Or, here’s a crazy thought,

• Your customers’ biggest problem.

Find the right spring to soak in. Bathe yourself in it. Swim around in it. Get to know its every nook and cranny. And don’t come back until you’ve been changed — and have started doing something profoundly different — because of the process.

What problem should you marinate yourself in?

~

Photo by Noriko Puffy, used under a Creative Commons license.

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On April 24th, I gave a presentation titled “CI in a Web 2.0 World” at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. The audience seemed to like the talk, and I came away with a much better idea of the opportunities that await CI professionals as they become more familiar with the social media and the information that can be gleaned from them.

Here is the slide deck I used for the presentation:

(Click here if the embedded version doesn’t work for you.)

As time permits, I’ll come back and expand this post with an outline of what I told the SCIP audience.

Slide-by-slide annotations follow:

Slide 1: It couldn’t be helped, but as it happens the title of the session was set before I took the assignment to give the talk. See Slide 4 for more on my view of “Web 2.0.”

Slide 2: The folks in my audience were CI professionals making inroads into social media; I’m a social-media professional making inroads into CI. My hope — which was fulfilled as the session unfolded, was that we would learn from each other. In any event, I felt like I was bringing coals to Newcastle (thus the pictures) by telling CI pros how to do CI.

Slide 3: In my talks recently I’ve been using a slide like this to remind me to tell the audience where we’re headed during the session. In my experience, audiences are pleasantly surprised when you tell them that up to half of the session will be given over to discussion . . . and then you deliver on that promise.

Slide 4: I explained that these definitions are subjective, but offered basic explanations for Web 1.0 (static, interlinked pages), Web 2.0 (social elements, network-as-platform), and Web 3.0 (semantic, intelligent apps). Then I borrowed from an old post here and joked that we might as well just label the Web with the current date. Bigger point: Web users are diverse, and they’ll continue to use various generations of technology based on their own needs and preferences.

Slide 5: To reinforce the previous point, I talked about the many different types of vehicles we see if we stand on the street corner — different sizes, ages, functions, power plants, etc.

Slide 6: Examples of the social media covered in the talk, especially social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, but also socially-enabled platforms like blogs, Flickr, wikis, and even old-fashioned e-mail listservs — which is where I got some of my earliest experience in social media, way back in the 1990s.

Slide 7: Time to poll the crowd on their personal and professional use of LinkedIn (fairly high), Facebook (much lower), and Twitter (lower still). A few audience members had their own blogs, almost all of them read relevant blogs in their fields. A finding that surprised me: only a few of the people in the room used RSS feeds much. This surprised me because RSS feeds are my primary tool for doing CI work.

Slide 8: One size does not fit all when it comes to companies’ use of social media, which makes sense when we consider the dimensions shown here — type of customers, breadth of niche, and age of company or industry. In the talk I listed several more dimensions: level of government regulation, level of capital intensity, number of competitors, et cetera.

Slide 9: Sadly, collection of CI from social-media sources is not as straightforward as harvesting grain.

Slide 10: Technorati is pretty good for finding relevant blogs, and CI pros know how to use Google’s various flavors of search inside and out, but the search engines of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all leave something to be desired from the standpoint of CI.

Slide 11: My sermonette of the virtues of RSS for CI work.

Slide 12: Suggested first steps in doing CI via social media. The key to the first step listed is that you have to do enough planning to have a good idea of what you’re looking for, but then — given the rapid evolution of social-media tools from week to week — you have to go out and get your hands dirty by exploring the social media directly.

Slide 13: Once you’ve collected CI data from the social media, you have to process it.

Slide 14: The classic mode of CI is formal and analytic. The data you turn up are often quantitative, or at least grounded in empirical, objective observation.

Slide 15: Social-media channels tend to turn up CI findings that are informal and emotive. This isn’t a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a difference that you should be prepared for when you begin your social-media CI work.

Slide 16: From the emotive Social Web you can learn all sorts of things about how your audiences — customers, users, vendors, employees, onlookers — regard your company and its offerings. This includes things like brand awareness and brand sentiment, but more than that it allows you to extend your analysis into new areas. If traditional CI is analytic in the mode of the social sciences, social-media CI tends to be narrative in the mode of the humanities.

Slide 17: Dress it up like you want, the social media are really just new ways to listen to people talking — as in a hallway conversation. This can be a boon for the CI professional because you may overhear the sort of comments — not secret per se, but unguarded — that you would in the hallways of a conference.

Slide 18: We considered some of the specific things you might hear about in these unguarded conversations.

Slide 19: What your findings might imply for your company.

Slide 20: Plenty of what you overhear via the social media is unfounded opinion, hearsay, or the like, and so you need to work even harder to validate or corroborate it. Let the listener beware.

Slide 21: The spread of social-media practice through the various parts of many companies may offer CI professionals new opportunities to partner with people across their firms to collect and analyze CI data.

Slide 22: When it’s handled right, social-media CI fits into the broader contexts of your other CI efforts.

Slide 23: We could think of social-media CI as a new type of game, or as putting new types of pieces on the old game-board . . .

Slide 24: . . . but I prefer to think of all of CI as an evolving ecosystem. The social media are spreading through that entire ecosystem, like vines in a jungle.

Slide 25: It’s very important to me to credit pictures correctly, so you’ll note that these labels link to the original sources of pictures used in this deck.

What can I elaborate on here? What’s not clear?

~

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The other day I got to give a presentation (twice, actually) to the Launch Pad Job Club here in Austin. After it was over, some of the job seekers in the audience stuck around to talk to me. One of them was Zack Metzner, who has used his temporary unemployment as an opportunity to build something for his fellow job seekers — the JoblessJoe site.

Zack knows from experience that being unemployed can be isolating and lonely, so he’s using JoblessJoe — which is part blog, part social network — as a way to let jobless folks know that they’re not alone. The site offers advice and forums that emphasize positive action and problem-solving.

I’ve barely started exploring the site, but already I see that Jeff Johannigman, an old friend who was a colleague of mine in the earliest days of my career, is offering job coaching there. (This tells me that Zack is definitely onto something.)

If it’s relevant to you or someone you know, give JoblessJoe a look. And kudos to Zack for taking adversity and turning it into opportunity.

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People in my line of work could quote Seth Godin all day every day. But that would be lazy, and the essence of Seth’s work is to be industrious. In this case, though, he’s worth a quote — and then some:

You’re nuts if you believe me

. . . My job is provoke you into asking hard questions. Ask those questions to your boss and your co-workers and yourself. It’s easy to show that self-aware decisions and thoughtful strategies outperform blind stumbling. . . .

Everything he says there, I intend here. My job is to ask you some tough questions and suggest some possible answers . . . then get out of your way so you can do the hard part.

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