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Social media expose: the passion problem

March 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Supergirl

Social media is exposing a problem in business: many, many employees and customers don’t care much about the business; they’re not flocking to  join Facebook fan pages, participate in employee communities, add comments to blogs.

Take a look around and you’ll find the evidence everywhere.  After all the worries about what employees might post,  working for months with legal to get guidelines in place, and putting that corporate blog and Facebook page in place,  there’s a thunderous echo of nothingness.

The reason? Most people are just not that into their companies.  Sure, their companies may be good places to work, opportunities for professional advancement may be decent, and the company is probably a responsible corporate citizen.  But the passion is missing.

Social media is exposing a significant business problem: bland corporate cultures.  I would suggest that we should be spending far more time on the culture problem than on social media. Of course, the more you spend on the latter, the more vivid you’re likely to see the cultural issues.

In most corporations processes, rules, and values, e.g., integrity and  truthfulness, are clear and understood, but people don’t care about  the company with their head and their hearts.  (Do companies even use the word “love” or talk about feelings?)  The primary reason for this lack of passion is because companies’ purpose beyond making money is unclear.  There’s no meaningful cause or purpose that everyone in the company is together aspiring to achieve.

Pick your study or expert and you’ll see the quantifiable value of a strong corporate culture.

  • Financial growth/profitability: Companies with strong cultures returned 1,026 percent for investors over 10 years compared to a 122 percent for the S&P, according to the business school authors of  Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit From Passion and Purpose.
  • Speeding change, adopting new strategies: “You must create a culture  that motivates people to execute the strategy — not to the letter but to the spirit. People’s minds and hearts must align with the new strategy so that at the level of the individual, people embrace it of their own accord and willingly go beyond compulsory execution to voluntary cooperation in carrying it out.” Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. (Notice the head and heart term again?)
  • Bringing humanity to work: “What we need is not an economy of hands or heads, but an economy of hearts. Evert employee should feel that he or she is contributing to something that will actually make  a genuine and positive difference in the lives of customers and colleagues. For too many employees, the return on emotional equity is close to zero. They have nothing to commit to other than the success of their own career. To succeed today a company must give its members a reason to bring all of their humanity to work.” Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution.

We’ve heard so much about the potential of social media and enterprise 2.0 to bring  people together in new ways to brainstorm, collaborate, build deeper relationships, eliminate barriers, bring new ideas to market faster.

But if people don’t love your company, don’t expect to reap the big benefits of social media.

The good news, however, is that most companies have a bigger reason for being, a purpose more significant  than simply growing financially.  Someone just has to step up and lead the charge to uncover that purpose and focus the organization around it.

It could just be the most rewarding challenge of your career.

Filed Under: Activating change, Innovation, Leadership, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , , , , ,

12 rules for bringing 'social' business

July 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Communities, Innovation, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Campaign 2.008

August 20, 2008 By 1 Comment

“Campaign 2.008: Politicians Have Yet to Realize the Full Potential of New Media,” featured in the current issue of The Public Relations Strategist, offers some diverse perspectives on how social marketing is effecting the U.S. Presidential campaign. Written by former political reporter Ed Cafasso, managing director of MS&L, the article includes views from:

  • Randy Kluver, communications professor, Texas A&M University
  • Bill Rice, president, Web Marketing Association
  • J. Barbush, associate creating director at at ad agency RPA
  • And yours truly, Lois Kelly

Unfortunately the magazine, published by the Public Relations Society of America, isn’t available online, but if you click here and scroll down to Articles you can get a PDF.

Filed Under: Political communications, Social media strategy Tagged With: ,

New online community study: what's working, what's in the way, advice from trenches

July 16, 2008 By 3 Comments

Today my firm, Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research released highlights of an online communities study among 140 organizations which create and maintain communities. Some of the highlights, more of which can be found here:

Greatest value of communities:

  • increasing word of mouth (35%)
  • increasing brand awareness (28%)
  • bringing new ideas into the organization faster (24%)
  • increasing customer loyalty (24%)

Greatest obstacles

  • getting people involved in the community (51%)
  • finding enough time to manage the community (45%)
  • attracting people to the community (34%)

What contributes most to effectiveness:

• ability for community members to connect with other like-minded people: 54%
• ability for members to help others: 43%
• focusing community  around a hot topic or issue: 41%
• quality of the community manager/community management team: 33%

Advice for others

When asked what their most important piece of advice is for others creating communities, survey participants’ advice focused around these eight areas:

1.    Start with the end in mind: “Start with a business strategy, defining carefully what you want to accomplish through the community.”

2.    Focus on the value to the members:  “Make sure you deliver real, special, unique, obvious value to the core group you’re hoping to attract.”

3.    Don’t start with the technology: “Too often people get drunk with Web 2.0 tool excitement and then try to push their business and customer goals into the wrong tool.”

4.    Keep it simple and intuitive:  “Focus on the least common denominator first. Keep it easy to navigate with simple tools to use.”

5.    Keep it fresh and active:  “Keep activity levels up, constantly add new content.”

6.    Have dynamic community leaders: “Make sure you devote enough time to managing the community; letting it fester is worse than not having it in the first place.”

7.    Think through who to involve – or not. “Get Legal and PR to buy-in and help on design, but keep them out of active management.”

8.    Get a passionate core of participants active before launching:  “Make sure you have a committed core of passionate users before you launch.”
Many thanks to everyone who took the time to take the survey and talk to us as part of the qualitative surveys. The complete results are on their way to you this morning.

Filed Under: Communities, Research, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , , ,

Social media and the 2008 Presidential Campaign

May 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I was recently invited to share my views on the effect of social media on the 2008 Presidential Campaign for an upcoming feature article in the Public Relations Strategist.

Here are a few highlights:

Is the use of social media mainly tactical or strategic?

  • If a goal of the candidates has been to convey a message of change, the use of social media represents a clear change from traditional ways of reaching out to and engaging voters.
  • If a goal has been to engage with young voters, the use of digital has been a hugely successful strategy. According to Rock the Vote and CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement), voter turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds has doubled and tripled in almost every state primary and caucus. These young voters’ preferred way of learning about candidates and participating in the campaigns is through social media and word of mouth marketing. According to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study that looked at voter behavior, two-thirds of Web users under 30 use social networking sites, and only 25 percent watch television news for campaign news.
  • If a goal has been to manage positive and negative feelings about the candidate – and help people connect with candidates’ personal characteristics — social media has been strategic for Obama, but far less so for Clinton or McCain. Obama has shared more about himself- and social media is about people wanting to connect and share with people. He has also used a relaxed conversational communications style vs. speaking in “message points” during interviews and in videos. Clinton and McCain have used social media more as a channel, filling it with traditional “produced” videos and ads. Clinton and McCain haven’t adjusted their content or communications style for the new medium nearly as well as Obama, although Clinton has done a better job than McCain.

How has social media changed the game of the campaign so far?

The three biggest impacts of social media on the 2008 campaign:

1. Fund raising: Changed the game on how candidates raise money, putting more power with the everyday people than in any previous race. In March alone Obama raised $40 million, largely from the campaign’s 1.5 million Internet donors. According to Clinton’s campaign she raised $2.5 million after winning Pennsylvania primary and asking people to go to her site and donate. According to the most recent Federal Election data, 43% of contributions to Obama’s campaign have come from donors of $200 or less, compared to 27% for Clinton and 20% for McCain.

2. Traditional media: Changed the influence and role of traditional media, with more and more people going direct to hear and read about the candidates – viewing speeches on YouTube vs. TV, and going direct to sources vs. reading journalists’ coverage and analysis. For example, after Obama’s speech on race in March, the transcript of the speech “ranked consistently higher on the most emailed list than the articles written about the speech,” according to The New York Times (“Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On.” )

3. Advertising: Showed the diminishing effectiveness of “packaged” TV advertising. Leading up to the Florida primary Mitt Romney spent $29 million on 34,821 ads, more than three and a half times as much as John McCain who spent $8 million on 10,830 ads, according to analysis of data through Jan 27 by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project. The effect of the big advertising spend? No lift for Romney who soon pulled out of the race.

In addition, millions of people are tuning into candidates via video vs. TV ads – on their campaign sites and on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Obama’s speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” has been viewed by almost 4.5 million people on YouTube since March.

Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Conversational Marketing, Leadership, Political communications Tagged With: , , ,

Pope embraces social media: will it help?

May 7, 2008 By 3 Comments

[photopress:Pope_Benedict.jpg,thumb,pp_image] Pope Benedict plans to text thousands of young Catholics during World Youth Day in Sydney in July; the church plans to also set up a Catholic social networking site and use digital prayer walls. The goal: make the Catholic church more relevant to younger churchgoers.

Good for the rather conservative Catholics to use new ways to connect — especially in view of the declining number of members of the Catholic Church in many Western countries like the United States and Belgium. According to a recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study:

Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.

The question for the Pope, as it is for all marketers,  is whether using social media tools can help  attract and keep members without also changing the message and experience.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Leadership, Musings Tagged With: , ,

Burn down the obstacles

February 28, 2008 By 3 Comments

There’s one big thing holding companies back from innovation, growth, attracting and keeping amazing talent, realizing the possibilities of emerging trends like social media: obstacles. (aka fears)

Reflecting on some recent experiences I see it everywhere.

  • I spoke with a small group of Fortune 500 executives about social media and they zeroed in on what don’t like about social media: losing control.
  • A group of brilliant IP attorneys got really involved in a session about conversational marketing, but suggested I spend much more time on one particular slide: overcoming obstacles.
  • A workshop for a Fortune 50 company resulted in a powerful point of view that management, sales and marketing collaboratively created –and loved– but a then decided to stay with a safe, bland message platform. Why? The official reason was “internal politics;” the real reason was fear to have a point of view so different and evocative from the industry norms.
  • A pharmaceutical company hired actors to pose as customers because they feared what real customers might say to their employees.

Going to fear school

Every year I do one big thing for my own professional development. There’s only one criteria: it needs to scare me, shake me out of my comfort zone so I really learn something.

This week I’m taking a workshop on how to design and develop transformational workshops at Kripalu. I’m the only business person among medical professors and educational activists, healers and shamans, ministers and coaches. Dropping into this touchy-feely environment where people chant in the morning instead of firing up PowerPoint made me feel very, very uncomfortable — so much so initially that I wondered whether I could learn anything at all. My own obstacles and judgments kept whispering in my ear, “Get in the car and get out of Yogi Dodge.”

Then in a session called “Going Beyond What Usually Stops Us,” David Silberkleit led us through an exercise where we had to articulate those obstacles (and the fears lurking behind them) that stop us from pushing forward to accomplish more, reach higher, take risks. Unarticulated fears/obstacles are what usually stops people. Acknowledge the obstacles, then you can go forward faster. (And David should know; he acknowledged his professional obstacles and walked away a sizable family business and inheritance — Archie Comics.)

During the program I thought about how thrilling social media is, opening up new business models, changing product development, innovation, customers service, CRM, marketing, public relations and leadership communications. Yet for so many companies and people the first step in realizing the possibilities will be acknowledging the very real obstacles of social media: eliminating job types and functions, reallocating budgets, losing control, lacking new skills, feeling irrelevant. I’m sure you can add more as there are many.

Mindset vs. toolset, human change vs. program change

Just as social media is a mind set as much as a tool set, success will require human change as much as functional and program change.

Just as we marketers know strategy and creativity, so we will need to learn how to guide our organizations through tremendous behavioral change.

So for my final project tomorrow morning I’m trying out a new workshop: “Burn Down the Obstacles.”

Oh yeah.

PS — warmest thanks to teachers Ken Nelson and Lesli Lang and my brilliant fellow workshop participants for teaching more in a week than I’d learn in a year of business conferences.

Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Conversational Marketing, Innovation, Leadership, Musings, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , , , , ,