Business Insight Zone

Without question, I’m spoiled by my working environment. Hoover’s is one of those rare companies where virtually everyone is nice, to the point that crabby or Machiavellian people never last here. (There’s a reason we rate so high in “best places to work” polls.) So no doubt my perspective is skewed when I consider the tale of “Bob” in this Chris Brogan post:

Shut Up — You’re Helping the Customer!

The basic issue: “Bob” was using social media to talk to his company’s customers online. Despite enthusiastic engagement from the customers, some managers within Bob’s company didn’t like this online interaction and told him to shut it down. But Bob’s enthusiasm for engaging with customers — or else his unwisdom in disobeying direct orders — kept him from obeying.

Now Bob’s job is at risk. But should it be?

Especially because of the complex responses that Chris’s post have drawn, my Saturday-morning thoughts on this issue have grown long, so I’ll leave the rest of the post after the jump. Join me, won’t you? Read more

I’m working on a long post about Twitter. As I was writing it, I almost put in a disclaimer at the top: “If you’re not interested in Twitter, you might want to skip this one.”

But that’s true of the whole Internet, isn’t it? It’s certainly true of the whole blogosphere, and I invite you to take it as your guide to this blog: take what you like, don’t worry about the rest.

Just know this: I respect your time, and I always try to write things you might find interesting. But even the best buffet will have dishes you don’t prefer. So I’ll do my best to make sure there’s something on the buffet that you like.

By all means, feel free to comment on the menu at any time.

~

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

The skepticism aimed at social-media use within companies would be more aptly directed toward e-mail use, a source of far more wasted time for workers, and one that has become as invisible as oxygen for most of us.

This BBC article — “Bosses ’should embrace Facebook’” – quotes a sensible study that argues for open-minded views toward the use of social media in the workplace:

“In today’s difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional command-and-control techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity.

“Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counter-intuitive, but it appears to create businesses more capable of maintaining stability.”

As I’ve argued before, command-and-control is dying a well-deserved death in the enlightened workplace, and certainly in the realm of social media.

But given my thoughts — and especially Dan Markovitz’s thoughts — on how e-mail so pervasively corrupts the typical office environment, it’s worthwhile to shine the same kind of spotlight on e-mail as well.

Consider this series of quotations from the BBC article, applying each to e-mail instead of social media:

Social networking can encourage employees to build relationships with colleagues across a firm, it added. . . . Firms are increasingly using networking software to share documents and collaborate in ideas, the research found.

When e-mail came into broad use in the early 1990s, smart companies quickly found out the same thing.

“Banning Facebook and the like goes against the grain of how people want to interact. Often people are friends with colleagues through these networks and it is how some develop their relationships.”

Using technology to build closer links with ex-employees and potential customers could also boost productivity, innovation and create a more democratic working environment, Mr Bradwell added.

It took a while for this insight to penetrate some corners of the working world, and indeed there are still older executives (Henry Paulson, Donald Trump, and Richard Branson come to mind) who never use e-mail. But for the most part, its merits for collaboration and productivity are clear.

But he argued the use of networking sites “must be tied to a business goal”.

And here we come to the crux: many businesses have rushed to block access to Facebook, LinkedIn, et al., without stopping to think that their people are already wasting much more time on e-mail.

The report’s authors said that clear guidelines needed to be set out about appropriate use of social networking.

And there should be no hesitation in telling employees who spent “unreasonable” amounts of time using technology for non-work related activity that their behaviour must change, they added.

Here’s the kicker: it’s obvious enough that someone is wasting the company’s time if they’re playing Scrabble with their friends via Facebook. But the lost productivity of fruitless e-mail — especially e-mail that’s ostensibly meant to propel work projects — goes totally unnoticed in many organizations.

Worse, in many organizations people face penalties if they use e-mail the smart way — that is, if they turn it off for long stretches of the day so that they can get their work done.

“But it is also good for companies to be aware of the tensions and look at deploying practical guidelines which will protect the positive impact of networks, not hamper it.”

Well said, and smart companies are already figuring out sensible guidelines for spending time on Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and so during work hours. But they need to remember that the most pervasive social medium in the workplace is e-mail.

Get e-mail right, and you can probably afford to let your folks play a game of Scrabble when they want.

~

Related posts:

• Social media breaches barriers.
• Information overload: the best of the best take pains to avoid it.
• 7 Good Reads to Boost Your Productivity

~

(Hat tip: Jeremiah Owyang.)

Not like he doesn’t do it regularly enough on his blog . . . but he does it especially well in this video clip, while speaking to an audience of entrepreneurs at an American Express event:

What matters is, where are the real relationships? Now, I have real relationships with thousands of people around the world. There are people I’ve never met, who I could e-mail in New Zealand, who would let me sleep in their living room for three days if I was in town. Because we’ve done stuff for each other, because we’ve exchanged worthwhile ideas, because people have been connected by real things, not just a couple bits lining up. . . . Networking is always important when it’s real, and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake. What the Internet has allowed is an enormous amount of fake networking to take place . . .

What translates is, are there people out there who I would go out of my way for, and who would go out of their way for me? That’s what you need to keep track of. And the way that you get there is by going out of your way for them, and by earning the privilege of one day having that connection be worthwhile.

(Watch the video here. Links to more video tidbits from this post on Seth’s blog.)

What Seth says here is absolutely right, and rightly explodes the old myth that equates friends “in real life” — i.e. those you’ve met face-to-face — with “real” friends. I ran into this myth back in January, when one of my co-panelists at a conference insisted on this distinction. As though there aren’t plenty of examples of people making friends, forming business partnerships, or even falling in love online.

Things online can be just as “real” as the things we can reach out and touch, depending on the context — the human context, not the technological context.

~

(Thanks to Chris Brogan for the encouragement to watch these video clips. He’s right — they’re well worth the time.)

To paraphrase Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money will be.”

Vast pools of digital ink-equivalent have been expended over the past couple of years describing (or just wondering) how to calculate the return-on-investment of money spent on corporate social media initiatives.

Some of this work has been very good, and certainly the implementation of it calls for grownup business conversations, not just echo-chamber evangelism of the “Social media is awesome!” variety.

But two trends seem clear to me:

1. By its social nature, when it’s done right, social media can bypass some of the reflexes of the modern consumer. Not for nothing does each of us cultivate anti-marketing or anti-advertising reflexes in our own roles as consumers. To put it another way, there’s a reason why so many people from all walks of life hate-hate-HATE to be interrupted by a telemarketer during dinner. But social media offers the chance to form some sort of not-purely-commercial human connection between a company and its customer. I’ve made this argument before in describing how “Social media makes merchants of us all.”

2. Money is fleeing traditional media outlets in droves. At the moment, a lot of would-have-been advertising dollars (and euros, pounds, etc.) simply aren’t being spent because of harsh economic conditions. But many other still-being-spent ad dollars are simply moving online as newspapers, network television, and other traditional advertising outlets stagnate.

So, the various types of social media give businesses new opportunities to talk with customers, at the same time that those customers are moving away from traditional media outlets. Even better, businesses can genuinely talk with customers, not just at them as in traditional advertising. I’m saying what a thousand others have said before me, but it bears repeating in the current climate of economic uncertainty.

It’s early days yet for social media. When I was talking with Brian Haven yesterday, he and I agreed that we’re at the Model T stage — if not earlier — for social media as a whole. And the world’s current macroeconomic conditions cast all kinds of doubt on where things are headed, whether we’re talking about old-school advertising, online spending, investment in social-media platforms, or whatever. No one said divining the future was easy.

But, best I can tell, investing in social media takes advantage of major trends that don’t look like changing anytime soon.

What do you think?

~

Addendum, Wednesday afternoon – These two items seem highly germane to this discussion:

• Jeremiah Owyang: Four Social Media Questions You Must Answer During an Economic Downturn
• Scott Monty: Please, Sir, May I Have Some More (Budget)?

~

(Photo by covilha.)

This morning I got to attend my second — and Austin’s third — Social Media Breakfast. (See more about last month’s Breakfast here.) These SMBs have been put together by recent Boston-to-Austin transplant and all-around good guy Bryan Person. [Addendum: this one was held on the back porch of Rudy's BBQ -- lovely breakfast tacos! -- on a gorgeous fall morning.]

Today’s speaker was Peter Kim, formerly of Forrester Research and now of The Startup With No Name, which is headquartered here but has staff members — including Peter — in Boston. Continuing the Boston-and-Austin theme, Peter was joined by Boston-based colleague Brian Haven (another Forrester alum) and Austin-based colleague Kate Niederhoffer.

Peter’s theme, which led to all sorts of friendly-but-pointed debate, was “Does Social Marketing Matter?” Peter works firmly in the social-media space and has been a marketer throughout his career, so he has lots of thoughts in this vein. To open his talk, he brought up some of the notorious social-media disasters of 2006 . . . none of which had any discernible effect on the companies they befell.

My basic answer to Peter’s guiding question is “Not yet,” which seemed to resonate well with one of his closing observations about social media as a whole: “It’s early.” During the course of the talk, a lot of the smart folks in the audience shared their ideas about what social media is and isn’t doing for now, and how it might be used going forward. To be honest, the session had a chaotic feel to it — my notes are a mess — but (a) that might be expected, given the protean nature of corporate social media at this point, and (b) it’s all right with me, since it reveals how much opportunity remains to grow and clarify (and, no doubt, re-complicate) our ideas about social media.

At any event like this, some of the highlights are always the conversations you have before and after with old friends and new. This time, I got to talk with:

• Havens (about whose writing I blogged last week, having no idea I would meet him this week);
• Niederhoffer (from whom I hope to learn much more about psychology’s impact on business);
• Dell blogger Amie Paxton;
• my old pal Jon Lebkowsky;
• Karen Kreps (who, among other things, writes for The Good Life, where I used to have a column); and
  . . . drum roll, please . . .
• Gary Hoover, the founder of Hoover’s!

If you attended today’s Breakfast, feel free to chime in with your own thoughts. If you’re interested in attending future Breakfasts, you should get in touch with Bryan Person.

~

Addendum, Wednesday morning – Here are more takes on the session:

• Jon Lebkowsky: Social media for breakfast
• Bryan Person: A conversation with Peter Kim about social media marketing (includes an audio interview with Kim)

~

(Photo graciously supplied by Mr. Person — used with permission.)

Having some grasp on the history of the mass media enables us to think through the implications and complications of social media in more productive — and potentially more lucrative — ways.

In his most recent post, Brian Haven offers some high-level thoughts on how the social media are like all previous media, and the key ways in which they — or rather, the ways we use them — differ:

All Media Is Social

[I]n reality, none of these behaviors are new. If you think about all of the social tools and behaviors happening today, in almost every case there is an equivalent comparison to activities in the past.

The piece is well worth two minutes of your time. I’m glad that Brian has expressed these ideas in such a pithy post. His thoughts reflect (wordier!) ones of my own, including two posts here . . .

Social media: the right tool for the job.

. . . As time goes on, we’ll continue to use Twitter and other social media tools in ways that overlap with older communications media, but we’ll also come to rely on them for the unique problem-solving properties that arise from the way they are structured. . . .

~

Western Union and record labels.

. . . Once upon a time, Western Union was your go-to source for the fastest possible communication. Need to let somebody know something now? Run down to Western Union and send a telegram. Problem solved. Boom. Huge market. Iconic company.

Over time, of course, that advantage eroded, thanks to technological advances ranging from the Telex machine to self-dialed long-distance telephone calls to fax machines and on to e-mails and ubiquitous cell phones. By the time all this came into play, your new go-to source for the fastest possible communication was . . . well, take your pick.

. . . and two comments that I’ve made recently on Chris Brogan’s blog:

Social Media Tools Are Like Phones

. . . As with these other media, the challenges arise when we’re figuring out what to *do* with them. Few people cared about radio when it existed only in the realm of engineers and hard-bitten enthusiasts, but today most of us interact with radio in one form or another without needing to think *about* the medium — we just use it.

Workflow - Social Media Pastor

Throughout the history of Christian evangelism, preachers have used the best available technology it spread their message. By no means is it an accident that the first movable-type book printed in Europe was a Bible, and by no means was it an accident that Martin Luther used the then-cutting-edge technology of pamphlet printing to spread his message of reform through the German-speaking lands. . . .

Regular readers may recall that I’m halfway through a Ph.D. in history at my beloved alma mater. I well understand why many people rate history as one of their least favorite courses in school (it’s often taught poorly), but it’s important that we have some regard for what’s come before, simply to help us understand what we’re getting now.

What do you think?

~

(Picture by … jc …, used under a CC-ND license.)

After toying with the idea for a while, I’ve taken the advice of several friends (heh) and joined Friendfeed. This means that all of my Facebook, Delicious, and Twitter updates — along with an RSS feed of this blog will feed into my account there, where other Friendfeed members can comment on them.

If you use Friendfeed, you can find me by following this link, then talk to your heart’s content on anything I say. Of course, you can also use the plain ol’ comments below, or talk to me on Twitter or by e-mail. (By the way and for future reference, you can always find my e-mail address and other online contact info via the author page of the blog.)

How will I use Friendfeed? Dunno. But to find out, I’ll be turning to the inestimable Chris Brogan, Knower of All Manner of Social Media Knowledge and all-around good guy, who has written several useful-looking posts about Friendfeed on his blog:

• How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool
• How Do I Add FriendFeed Comments to My Blog
• Alert Thingy Helps Make FriendFeed Indispensible

If YOU have used Friendfeed and can offer advice on how I could best use it to (a) spread the ideas I talk about here, (b) make myself more available to answer questions about the business world, (c) find like-minded or otherwise stimulating folks with whom to talk, (d) promote worldwide harmony and other Good Things, (e) et cetera — if you can help me with these things, please don’t hesitate to raise a shout. I’ll be grateful for the guidance.

Word-of-mouth marketing guru Andy Sernovitz offers an excellent piece of advice (and an example of how it works) in this short post:

Share your roadmap

If you want to keep fans engaged, let them know where you’re going.

Nothing is more frustrating than being dependent on a product and never knowing when they are going to make it better. We’ve abandoned more than one vendor because “that feature will be out someday” just isn’t good enough. I can’t run my business based on your secret plans. [. . .]

What Andy says makes me wonder how many companies looked at Twitter, thought that something like it would be useful in an enterprise/intranet setting, but laughed off the concept of using Twitter itself because of its history of downtime and the opacity of its roadmap.

Enter Yammer and its white-label counterparts.

Andy talks about the beneficial effects of sharing your roadmap in terms of how your fans will react. (Read his full post for details.) But I would add another benefit of sharing your roadmap, one focused on your own enterprise: When you share the roadmap, you commit yourself to hitting certain stops on the itinerary on certain dates.

Bands on tour don’t say “We’ll be in Texas at some point,” not if they want to reward their fans and keep themselves on schedule. They set dates — Houston on the 10th, Austin on the 11th, Dallas on the 12th — and push out posters (like the one above), postcards, MySpace pages, and anything else they can to get the word out.

Foresight in business isn’t perfect, and it’s not as simple to launch a new operating system or a open a new restaurant as it is to get in the bus and drive to the gig in Brighton. But it’s worthwhile to give your fans / customers / users / evangelists an idea of where you’ll be and when you’ll be there. By telling them you’ll be telling yourself.

~

Related posts:

• Good reads for your weekend (See the item about Yammer.)
• What happens when you can’t keep up with your popularity?
• May the best product win?

~

(Image by Tom Harman.)

A while back, I went on a binge of commenting on other blogs. This week I did it again. It’s a good exercise for at least three reasons:

1. It fosters dialogue, which is exactly what I want to promote here.
2. As a blogger, I get a kick out of choice comments — even in dissent — so I like to give that little gift anytime I can.
3. By appealing to friends, Twitter followers, etc. for their suggestions on what to comment about, I get exposed to many new blogs and many new thoughts.

Here, then, are some of the most interesting posts that I commented on this week. Whether you agree with my comments or not, I recommend reading the posts themselves.

~ ~ ~

Adele McAlear at Marketing Monster: Yammer Wins TechCrunch 50 with Twitter-like Enterprise Service

Yammer is like Twitter, but intended to be used within the walls of a single company for communication and collaboration. Adele has a great write-up of the service, which could overcome Twitter’s biggest advantage. (I discussed that advantage in this post.) Here’s part of what I wrote in my comment:

[A]t a strategic level, Yammer has neatly side-stepped Twitter’s greatest advantage, which is its entrenchment in the lives of its users. In other words, no one wants to have to convince all their Twitter friends to migrate with them to some other service. But in the corporate setting, you *expect* to set up a new social graph limited to your workmates. Nifty.

One of my buddies has kicked off a Yammer group internal to Hoover’s, so I’ll tell you more about how it works after I’ve had a chance to play with it.

BONUS: read the comment thread in this post by Chris Brogan — and especially Damon Cortesi’s exchanges — for more thoughts on how Yammer might work (or might not be the best choice) within the enterprise IT environment.

~ ~ ~

David Valentino at FG SQUARED: Corporate Evaluations of Social Media

David offers a sober-minded and straightforward account of how social media is adopted in enterprises, not by enthusiasts, but by the senior decision makers in IT and other departments. I said, in part:

I think that a lot of social-media devotees would nod their heads at this and say, “Okay, but what’s new about any of this?” But these early/avid adopters (I’m one of them) are like early radio enthusiasts, or the people who bought Altair computers in the mid-1970s: their passion is great, but social media won’t “grow up” until it percolates across the broader culture — and particularly the broader business culture.

This ties back into a point I’ve harped on before (more than once): like other truly groundbreaking media, the social media offer entirely new ways of doing certain things. But we can also look to the history of the other mainstream media (print, radio, television, etc.) to get an idea of how these new media may be adopted, and especially within traditionally go-srow corporate environments.

~ ~ ~

Tom Raftery at Greenmonk: What are your top tips for helping RedMonk/GreenMonk become carbon neutral?

When you’re in the analyst business, you do a lot of air travel. So for all the other steps you take to attain carbon neutrality, you still run up against what seems like a carboniferous brick wall. In his post, Tom wrote, “I know that in my own case, my travel footprint will likely far exceed all my other activities and unfortunately, this is not travel which can be avoided.” I tried to (gently) chip away at this with my comment:

I know that your business is built on trust with & thorough understanding of clients, and on networking your way to new clients. But I would still challenge you to take an engineer’s approach to the problem, with targets to reduce the number of flights and the number of flight miles within a certain timeframe — e.g. by 10% of each over the next six months in comparison to the past six months.

This may, by the way, offer you a better chance to educate your clients: you reinforce the importance of bit-miles versus human-travel-miles by, for example, always charging the client for travel including offsets, and by charging extra fo physical trips taken above a certain threshold.

In terms of work philosophy, this may lead you to a sort of mega-batch-processing over the course of the year. That is, you each spend longer continuous periods working from your home bases, then longer, more intense periods traveling, with more client engagements per mile traveled. (In fact, that could give you another metric to ponder: hours of client/networking facetime per air-mile traveled. Seek to improve the ratio my meaningful amounts during each half-year.)

By no means do I think that this nut will be easy to crack. But for a green-minded company — and especially for a green consultancy like Greenmonk — I’ll bet that the effort will be worth it.

~ ~ ~

Tom Peters: Spontaneous Discovery: F.A. Hayek, U.S. Grant, Herb Kelleher, and I

Tom uses this post to harp on one of his favorite ideas, which is to minimize the importance of systems thinking in favor of the philosophy of “Action! Now!” One of his heroes in this vein is Herb Kelleher, who built Southwest Airlines. I commented, in part:

Kelleher had enough “strategy” to get started when he had the napkin sketch of the triangular routes between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Supplement with the strategic idea that Southwest wouldn’t fly loss-making routes for the sake of “footprint.” Build everything around people giddy at the opportunity to work at such a fun place. And then just do things do things do things do things.

That “strategy” beats the heck out of many a 200-page document, with more devoid-of-substance bullet points than anyone could ever digest.

What I’m really getting at, now that I’ve had more time to digest, is that you need a simple set of “algorithms” — centered on relentless forward progress via trial-and-error action — that take the place of overly fancy strategies. It’s too easy for a strategy to be treated as an individual project, rather than as the fundamental operating system of the company. The success of Southwest, Google, Toyota, GE, Berkshire Hathaway, and other “algorithm” companies suggests that the algorithm approach is a better way to go.

~

(Photo by art_es_anna.)