iMediaWorksConnect by @iMediaMichelle

The Journey to Social Business: Lessons from the Trenches

For the past five years, media and marketers alike have been star struck by the rise of macro social community platforms such as MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter and now FourSquare and Gowalla.  But to focus solely on the individual platforms misses the bigger cultural transformation taking place thanks to the real-time mobile Web.  We now need to shift the conversation to understanding the new business models that will result from a social business driven marketplace.

 

Yesterday, I kicked off my South by Southwest Interactive (#SXSWi) week by spending the day with corporate pioneers, leading practitioners and industry thought leaders at the Social Business Summit 2010 (#SBS2010), hosted by The Dachis Group.  Jeff Dachis, Peter Kim and team did a superb job of assembling a wide variety of perspectives on key topics such as: open leadership, operationalization, cultural change, integration, user experience and business metrics.  The presentations contained rich insights for approaching and adopting a healthy internal as well as external social ecosystem.  Summarizing the takeaways was no small task – thanks to Liz Philips (@iizliz) for helping me walk through my notes and #SBS2010 tweetstream in order to pull out a few key takeaways below:

 

PASSION

(@samdecker) Sam Decker – Create customer oxygen by building a continual chain of participation inside and outside the organization – a little peacocking and woodpecking goes a LONG way.

(@jahagel) John Hagel – Go to the edges of your organization to find passion and less predictability – the best way to create new knowledge is with a little friction.

(@karenmcgrane) Karen McGrane – Find out your users’ deep down motivation for using social media and help them jump the chasm by keeping things simple.

PEOPLE

(@rushkoff) Doug Rushkoff – The pendulum is swinging back to a peer to peer economy, where people are at the center – create a culture of expertise.

(@katenieder) Kate Niederhoffer - We all say we want to be social but then we go back to our desks and don’t talk to anyone - need to make people aware of their anti-social behavior; too easy to talk the talk.

(@jackiehuba) Jackie Huba – the 1%ers are your best friends – make sure you find them, give them something to join and let them help you refine and improve along the way.

(@ttaxchristine) Christine Morrison – your customers are your best advocates - activate the community to connect with their friends and find meaningful product reviews

(@leebryant) Lee Bryant – Foster a culture of getting things done together; sharing must be a by product of an individual’s everyday work.

 

OPENESS

(@charleneli) Charlene Li – Change mindset - letting go will yield more results. Start with the organization’s goals, and then pick an area where social can have real impact.

(@jpunishill) Jamie Punishill - Stop social media control freaks with process overload. Everybody understands the need to be open and organic eventually.

 

SERENDIPITY

(@dhinchcliffe) Dion Hinchcliffe – Unintended consequences of sharing can lead to interesting and often better results.

(@monstro) Lane Becker – Less hierarchy, more improvisation is needed in the organization.  Product development moves from the waterfall to the washing machine.

 

INTEGRATION

(@comcastcares) Frank Eliason – Don’t lose sight that there is a customer who needs help and that customer doesn’t just live in Twitter; forums, blogs and message boards count too.

(@KFC_Colonel) Rick Maynard – Make social media part of all marketing plans with a major focus on building know-how across the organization.

 

3 Lessons from the Corporate Trenches:

1. Evangelize Constantly – Don’t underestimate the time you need to spend on this (at least 25%).  Speak in terms your management will understand (think P&L) and continuously share snapshots of success at every aspect of the business.

2. Establish Command, Not Control – Every group has to staff, no one person or group can do it alone.  But also expect to do everyone else’s job (at least in the beginning) until your fellow colleagues get up to speed.  Lift existing processes, make a social version of them and keep updating the manual.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail – Build in the capability to recover when failure appears.  Go to the places where your customers are online, apologize and follow-up to resolve the issue. 

 

If you’re looking for the perfect moment or place to jump into social, you’ll never find it.  Social business is a journey, not a race.  Get started now or you’ll miss where your customers, partners and competition are already going.

 

For additional insights and links to presentation content, check out Adam Cohen’s (@adamcohen) #SBS2010 archive tweetstream here http://bit.ly/ccYqHN

Has Your Social Media Turned the Corner?

Social media adoption continues its meteoric rise not just with individuals, but also with brands.  Last year, over 300 of the Fortune 500 joined either Facebook and/or Twitter.  While 2009 was the year of Facebook Fan Page friending campaigns and Twitter following contests, for a few it was the beginning of their transformation towards social business

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Social business is the permeation of social culture and technologies throughout the corporate enterprise that lead to an open, intuitive and integrated means of conducting and transacting business in the marketplace.  It is in this unique environment that we experience the core aspects of a company: the brand, the products/services, the customer service and the loyalty in an entirely new way.

 

 

Brand 2.0: Rather than flat, 2-dimensional transmissions of messaging, brand experiences become 3-dimensional, real-time exchanges amongst employees, brand advocates, consumers and partners.  The brand emerges as a tribal identity that is lived out and shared with others.  Community feedback and ideas are the norm, not the exception.  A great example of this shift in thinking is Ford Motor Company’s Brand 2.0 approach to introducing the new Ford Fiesta to the U.S.  Phase 1 of the Ford Fiesta Movement generated more than 6.2 million YouTube views, more than 750,000 Flickr views and nearly 4 million Twitter impressions according to their blog.  The Fiesta Movement also set a Guinness World Record for the most attendees at a tweetup by bringing together 1,149 Fiesta Movement agents and Twitter friends.

 

Product 2.0: Consumers are seeking products and services that are tailored to fit their personal needs.  The social web offers tremendous opportunities for sourcing product/service ideas directly from customers.  Several brands have started to realize the benefits of this Product 2.0 approach such as Starbucks My Idea community, which attracted 70,000 submissions from consumers in its first year of inception and Virgin America’s Twitter call for suggestions on how to best stock their in flight bar.  Going further, brands will have tremendous opportunities to leverage contextuality of the marketplace to deliver adaptive product and service offerings that satisfy real-time need states and desires.  More on this in upcoming blog posts.

 

Customer Service 2.0: It goes without saying that customer service is the brand.  However, the adage it takes a “village to raise a child” can now be applied to the world of Customer Service 2.0.  Call centers, public relations, sales, marketing along with a corporation’s key strategic partners should all be wearing the customer service jersey through social channels.  Brands such as Best Buy’s Twelpforce, ComcastCares, UPS, JetBlue and many others have successfully demonstrated the value in taking an integrated team approach to capturing, acknowledging and responding to customer inquiries on Twitter.  But the employees alone are not enough – consumers now are active, rather than passive participants in customer service.  In the coming Social Business age, consumers will continue to help one another and collaborate with brands to pass on critical alerts and resolve breaking service issues.

 

Loyalty 2.0: Loyalty in the Social Business world will be rewarded more on overall contribution to the brand ecosystem, than just product usage.  In the travel industry, traditionally loyalty programs have been based on the number of miles/segments or stays a traveler makes.  But what about the consumer who stays “off the road”, but still shares valuable information with his/her fellow members and provides insightful, constructive feedback to help employees and staff?  In the Loyalty 2.0 world, an individual’s status would also be influenced by the community’s perception of the value that individual contributes.  I think there is a huge opportunity to activate this through location-based networks and applications.  It will be interesting to see which brands begin to make moves in this area.

 

For social media to evolve into social business, brands will need to stop viewing it as the shiny new object, something to be treated as an afterthought or experimental portion of their company.  Rather, it must become the central part of a company’s DNA – where brand, product, customer service and loyalty are born and nurtured within the larger social community.

This week I am attending the Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit in Austin, Texas, where leading thinkers on social business design are coming together to explore the external and internal drivers on customer engagement, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization required for brands to succeed in this journey.  I’ll be posting highlights and welcome your comments on this blog and via Twitter.  Join in the conversation with us at #SBS2010.