Leadership in a social environment

“The first step for leading in a social environment is admitting that you’re not a genius,” explained Jim Lavoie, CEO of Rite-Solutions in his talk, “The Five Social Competencies of Highly Effective Leaders” at the Conference Board Social Media MeetUp. “When you admit that you as CEO don’t have all the answers you can then begin to harvest and harness the intellectual bandwidth of your organization.

Having once been a command-and-control CEO, Lavoie has learned that there’s a different way to lead, focusing on meaningful, trusted relationships vs.the typical transactional approach where I pay you, you do the job.  The results: more innovative ideas, cost savings, retention of highly-skilled people, and a work environment that is, well, fun. People like coming to work and feel that they have a say and are relevant.

Using collaborative platforms in creative ways also helps to draw out the introverts. “If you don’t make innovation and collaboration and introvert sport, you’re leaving behind more than half of your intellectual bandwidth.  Introverts don’t respond to ‘why don’t you put a PowerPoint together to explain your idea.’  But they do want to provide input and advance ideas they believe in. It’s leadership’s role to find new ways to help people provide that input.”

(This New York Times article explains how Lavoie and his business partner Joe Marino  have done just that in his company.)

Lavoie says senior management has to play the first pieces of this new relationship puzzle, making people feel important and that they belong.  Here’s a summary graphic of Jim’s relationship-driven corporate culture puzzle.

Social leadership LavoieJPEG

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Now I get the online community thing

Beatles mobJPEG

I’m day seven into an online community of people I’ve never met. I don’t even know their real names. But I really like them and the sense of camaraderie and support that has developed so quickly. What gives?

People from companies are always asking me about online communities. “What makes them successful?  Why to people participate?  Can strangers really become ‘a community’ without any face to face contact?”

I always say people have to have a reason they want to come together, and there needs to be some sort of activity to involve people, and communities don’t have to last a long time to be deemed “successful.” But it’s difficult to really “get” communities until you’ve been part of one. Especially a good one.

So this community I’m enjoying so much is a group of people who receive a writing prompt each morning, then write for 12 minutes.  You can share your story on the community blog, or not. You can tell people what you like about their stories, or not. You can reveal your name, or go by a pseudonym.

As with all communities, there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the first few days. I mean, who are these people, I thought.  Then gradually people began posting some of their stories, and people began writing about what they liked about the stories.  Yesterday, day 6, there were 17 posts, while there were only three posts on day 3.  At the same time Josh, our sherpa guide and prompt man, gently nudges and encourages people every day when he emails us the writing prompt.

Dear Artists of the Most High,
We are moving along so well.  So love how everyone is showing up and sharing and being so supportive.  That kind of approach is so key – as that allows an open space for all to share.  That is a priceless gift – and it something that we are all co creating here. Thank you.

This community only lasts 27 days, then there’s an event in LA where folks can meet and share. That’s it.  By then the community will have done its job.

What I’ve learned from this experience about successful communities:

  • Communities need a concrete purpose.
  • If you ask members to do something, they are likely show up and do it. Be specific. And make it easy and a minimal time investment.
  • The community facilitator needs to really care and be involved.
  • It takes a while for trust and behaviors to form. You can’t rush that. But you can gently encourage.
  • Success isn’t number of people or how long the community runs; it’s whether it achieved its purpose and whether members feel it was a satisfying experience.
  • There’s a value of exclusivity; once the group started no one else was allowed in, helping us to get to know one another and establish a beat to our group. The trust builds with this exclusivity.
  • Get people hooked and they’ll pay. The first seven days of this journey were free; then people are asked to pay $27.  When people experience value, they’re willing to pay for it.  A community’s purpose  should be to provide value not to a company or organizer, but to the members.  If that happens, the company or organizer will benefit too.
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Putting social media to work: Publicity Club workshop

Here’s the presentation from last night’s workshop at the Publicity Club of New England in Boston. Great group and lots of fun doing conversational writing and community building workshops. Creativity is everywhere; we just have to ask new questions and collaborate in new ways to get at it.

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What's a talkable brand?

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has put out a request: What makes a brand talkable? Here’s my take.

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Renting eyeballs or owning the customer platform?

raisedhands

Seth Godin nails the big, big change in marketing in his post, “The platform vs. the eyeballs”: it’s not about renting customer “eyeballs” by advertising in media, whose purpose is aggregating a big volume of eyeballs. And where you might get a .5% conversion rate.

Value comes from owning your own platform, e.g., a communities, blogs, and filling it with people who people who want to hear from you, and maybe getting 90% conversion rates.

Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You’re not renting an audience, you’re building one. You’re not exhibiting at a trade show, you’re starting your own trade show.

If you still ask, “how much traffic is there,” or “what’s the CPM?” you’re not getting it. Are you buying momentary attention or are you investing in a long term asset?

The challenge we’re seeing is that marketers are measured by old metrics, so they don’t have the time or interest to build a platform of fans.  The measure of big volumes still dominates — we have  40,000 page views a month, we had 800 people register, we had 4,000 people watch the video.

But, as Godin points out, this is momentary attention. To build interest and affinity, marketers have to give to get, constantly providing value in new ways to customers and potential customers.  They have to be more interesting to get interest.  This new fan-based marketing is expensive and hard work. But those companies who do it will ultimately realize much greater ROI on their marketing investments.

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12 rules for bringing 'social' business

This week I met with a big global think tank that is evaluating social media strategy proposals. All the proposals focused on tactical items like creating a Facebook page and Twitter feed and none addressed high value opportunity areas that would provide additional value to the organization’s clients and/or create new business models.

Then I came across Dion Hinchliffe’s blog post where he also laments that people are missing the bigger opportunity for social business, where the greater value lies.  He also provides 12 excellent rules for taking your business social. Check out his post for details, but here are the 12:

  1. Social businesses are made of people.
  2. The right tools and infrastructure naturally enable good social business
  3. Foster conversations with your customers, partners, employees and everyone else that’s interested.
  4. Popular social channels and services are important but are the smaller part of the social business story.
  5. Put the community first.
  6. Add a social dimension to your business process.
  7. Rethink your views on intellectual property in a highly social world.
  8. You manage to what you measure; use a social yardstick.
  9. Do not use social channels for traditional push communications.
  10. Censorship kills participation.
  11. If you’re not sure where your organization ends and the network begins, you’re doing it right.
  12. Healthy social businesses explicitly extract value from the network.
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Talking on the bathroom stall

Getting people to talk to strangers and participate in online communities and social networks can be challenging. The number of communities that have failed is astounding.

There is no easy way to create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing and talking with new people, but a project that Nina Simon led with 13 grad students from from the University of Washington provides some lessons relevant to marketers and community managers.

The challenge to the students was to create a $300 museum exhibit within 10 weeks that would get strangers to talk to one another. A full report of the project can be found here at Nina’s wonderful Museum 2.0 blog.

Some relevant highlights:

1. Ask provocative starter questions and make it easy for people to respond. In the case of one of the museum exhibits, the grad students asked a few seed questions, like “how do you mend a broken heart,” and put them on signs behind glass. People passing by stopped and wrote replies on post-it notes, read other notes and created conversation chains and spin off questions. The lesson for business is that provocative, open ended questions that appeal to widely or deeply felt issues elicit responses and help to jump start participation. (We’ve seen too many business communities that are bland and boring. No wonder people don’t talk back!)

The whole exhibit modeled the potential for someone to respond to your query, and as it grew, the sense that you would be responded to and validated grew as well. We saw many people come back again and again to look at the post-its, point out new developments, laugh, and add their own advice.

2. Someone from the company doesn’t need to provide the advice: The team created an Advice booth and found that the best advice came from strangers helping strangers vs. staff helping strangers. (In fact, one eight year old liked being able to give advice so much that he came back the next day.) The students found that it was more beneficial for the facilitators to be “part of the experience vs. the focal point.” Good advice for companies in managing communities.

Because they were a part of the experience rather than the focal point, they could impart an air of friendliness and participation without making people feel that they had to participate. They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it.

3. Good things come from talking on the bathroom stall. An undirected part of the project was letting people write anything they wanted on a bathroom wall, which elicited many responses, none of them offensive.

But the bathroom wall turned out to be a brilliant exhibit element. It was a release valve that let people write crude things and draw silly pictures. The bathroom wall was “anything goes” by design. And while the content on it was not as directed and compelling as that on the post-its, it served a valuable purpose. There was not a SINGLE off-topic or inappropriate submission on the post-it walls.

The bathroom lessons for business:  people want to have fun and be able to be creative in unexpected ways. Mix up the ways they can participate.  (Like the story about the chair in the corporate lobby.)   Second, fears about people writing offensive or negative things are usually unfounded — even when you go so far as letting people write on the bathroom wall.

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Social media policies & guidelines

Here are some highlights on emerging best practices in social media guidelines and policies, based on research we’re completing with several major Fortune 500 corporations and social media monitoring technology providers. The full report will be released next week, but here are some common elements among companies’ social media guidelines.

Commonalities among corporate social media guidelines

  • Employees must follow existing company policies, e.g., code of conduct, privacy policies.
  • Employees are responsible for their own views.
  • If writing about the company, the employee must disclose his/her name and role at the company, and, again, reiterate the views are theirs, not the company’s.
  • When expressing views not related to the company, the employee does not need to mention employment relationship.
  • Guidelines on what information should never be discussed, e.g., financials.
  • The requirement that hourly workers should not participate in work-related social media efforts when off the clock.
  • The requirement that employees be truthful, respectful and professional.
  • A disclaimer that even within the guidelines there remains a degree of risk for the employee.
  • The need for tone and content of guidelines to be aligned with company’s values.

What varies

Policies vary on whether an employee should use a personal email address or company email address as their primary means of identification. Some think that since the views expressed are the employee’s, not the company’s, they should not be identified in any way with the company.

Others believe that employee participation in professionally-related social media conversations enhances the company’s reputation as people are able to “see” the knowledge, integrity, and helpfulness of employees, with their company email address.  Emerging best practice companies say that the stronger an organization’s corporate values, the more comfortable a company should be with allowing employees to use company email addresses.

Beyond content

The more plainly and clearly the guidelines are written, the greater the likelihood that employees will read and understand them. The more “legalese” they become, the greater the chance that they will be ignored or misunderstood. Best Buy and Sun Microsystems’ guidelines are good examples of writing simply and clearly while covering pertinent legal issues.

Some companies are incorporating social media guidelines into employees’ Conduct of Conduct or Employee Agreements, which employees are required to review and sign every year.

Lastly, companies stress that they are at greater risk at NOT having social media guidelines in place for their employees, as employees are participating in blogs, communities, Twitter, etc. with or without a company policy in place. Better to educate and help employees understand both the risk and how to succeed than leave it up to chance.

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Verizon's customer service secret: community super users

What motivates people to help other people in online communities?  Personal satisfaction, recognition, peer respect, and being treated as “insiders.”

Yesterday’s New York Times has a good article about Justin McMurry who volunteers 20 hours a week in Verizon’s online community, helping customers with technical questions. (“Customer Serivice? Ask a Volunteer”)

The secret to success, says Verizon’s director of e-commerce Mark Studness, is creating an online environment that attracts the “super-users” who are the people who so actively post and help other people, answering thousands of questions that Verizon would otherwise have to pay its people to answer. The right environment, says Studness, “is where the magic happens.”

Lyle Fong, founder of Lithium Technologies, a community technology platform, believes that super-users  in customer communities are like online gamers. This is why Lithium offers rating systems for the contributors with rankings, badges and ‘kudo counts.’

“That alone is addictive,” said Fong. “They are revered by their peers.”

In addition to reducing call center costs Verizon has found that the online customer communities have providing new product and service ideas and created a large searchable knowledge base.

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Community of Sweden

Here’s a great example of a online community that delivers on its business objectives.  I just got back from Scandinavia (Denmark) and want to go back after joining CommunityofSweden.com, the community that is part of VisitSweden, the official Swedish tourism site.  Community of Sweden,  developed by Tommy Sollen, does several things right:

Co-creation: First, Tommy co-created the community with people.  He started out with a development blog asking people to share stories and pictures about Sweden — as well as for their ideas on the design of the community.

Design reflects brand: The community was designed to be clean, tidy, bright, positive, warm and friendly — the same feeling people say they get when they visit Sweden.

Photos! The purpose of the community is to inspire people to travel to Sweden. There’s no better way to inspire travel like great photos. The community makes it easy for people to upload and tag photos. I especially like the map feature where you can click on a location and up comes photos tagged with that location. (As well as stories from that area.) The tagging feature also minimizes the back end administrative work.

Board of directors’ fears unfounded: Tommy said that the board’s biggest concern was that people would post negative or inappropriate comments. Since its launch in Nov. 2007 there have been no issues.

Empowered users: the community’s easy-to-use tools allow users to be in control. They can rate content, take down content they might feel is inappropriate or misplace, create profiles, start discussion threads.  Everything is published immediately, furthering inspiring trust. And members can create widgets to put on their own blogs and social networks. In other words, the community belongs more to the community than the tourism organization.

Integrated into the tourism Web site: the community is now also part of the official VistSweden Web site, embedding social intelligence into a marketing web site.  Embedded reviews and recommendations soon will become a fundamental feature of all web sites. Sweden is ahead.

One interesting factoid about the community: Italians are the most active members.

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