It’s dark-thirty and you’re at your bathroom counter hastily going through your morning routine, getting ready for the day. You grab a tube, squeeze out a line of gel and start brushing your teeth. You gag as it hits you that the tube on your counter is NOT toothpaste. The right product, applied the wrong way has tainted your day before it even got started. Congratulations if you don’t have any memories of an experience similar to the one here. B … Read More

via LifePoint

This inscription, painted on a truck parked nearby my office, reads “for coffee lovers… Sophistication of best brands – Elegance of service”. And I couldn’t help sharing it with you…

You will agree that “sophistication” is nowadays no more relevant for brands, as it refers to a groundless claim. But what is a brand, if not a dual set of promises and associated services? What is the brand value, once it relies on third-party services like the company who owns this truck is aimed to deliver? Is such intermediation sustainable, as it merely commoditizes the brands it uses?

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I am doing a program for ISPS Charlotte, NC in a couple weeks.  Someone from there just called to ask a few questions so that he can properly introduce me at the event.  And the answers I gave surprised me.  Before I get to that, I have to say that yet again I am blown away by the power of questions.  We work and we do.  But how often do we let others question us as an exercise for introspective purposes?  Slow down.  Ask questions. You, too may be surprised at your answers.

Now, back to our regular programming.

What put me in the right frame of mind was Luis Suarez’s on-the-spot post, “Forget Social Strategy, Think Social Philosophy: Hippie 2.0” and the questions I was asked on the phone.

And here is my realization:  We are taking the natural first step by trying to figure out how all this social stuff fits in to the way we work.  It is a perfectly logical thing to do, and we will be thinking about this for some time.  Our answers will be (and have been) good.

But there is another step very few have started to take and which holds so much more promise than the 1st step that we would do well just to skip it and move on to this one: How do we change the way we work, organize, manage, communicate, reach our goals now that we have the capabilities we have?  Therein lies the golden nugget.

I have a sign in my office that reads, “Redefine Engagement.” I don’t remember where I heard that first, but it is the KEY to the second step, the step that holds the real value and the future of what we will see.  Don’t just do things with new tools – redefine how we work now that we have the capability to go so much further than what we are used to.  Don’t fit it in current traditions / processes / organizational constructs, make new ones.

To quote Luis, “having the same mind set about social networking inside the corporate world, as the one we have been having for decades is not going to get us very far! Quite the opposite!

If we don’t make this leap, nothing will really change.  We will be doing the same old things in a slightly new way with new tools with the same ineffective and inefficient processes toward sub par goals.

When the possibilities are so much better, why settle?  It is time to create the new.

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I am honored to beincluded in a list oftop thinkers in project management today created by on-demand project management tools vendor, LiquidPlanner.

The discipline of project management is changing rapidly, from static focus on Gannt charts and resource numbers torecognitionthat success depends on collaboration, communication, and smooth information flows across organizational boundaries.

Although any such list is incomplete, these folks are paving the way toward a new, and more sophisticated, understanding of project success.

Here’s the LiquidPlanner list of top thinkers in project management today:

Steve McConnell, founder ofConstrux and author of several groundbreakingbooks on software development and task estimation. Steves estimation book was hugely influential to the design of LiquidPlanner in terms of our approach of using ranged estimates. Steve is one of the foremost thinkers today on the topic of software engineering and how the latest methodologies are bringing new efficiencies to light, enabling development teams to iterate faster and improve overall quality.

Bas de Baar. Based in the Netherlands, Bas is the man behind the popularProject Shrink blog which looks at project management through a humanistic lens. Bas understands that individual team members trump process and his blog digs deep into issues such as team dynamics, project leadership, and management techniques. His article,25 Sure Fire Ways to Motivate Your Team Members should be required reading for anyone who manages a team.

Michael Krigsman. Michael is the author of theIT Project Failures blog, which as the name implies catalogs how and investigates why so many IT projects fall flat on their face. IT projects are unique from other projects in that they tend to have their own unique complexities (distributed teams, firm deadlines, etc.). His blog reminds me of that demotivation poster that depicts a ship sinking behind a setting sun with the caption: Mistakes. It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others. By chronicling these IT failures, we too can (hopefully) learn from the mistakes of others.

Elizabeth Harrin. Ive had the pleasure of speaking to Elizabeth a few times since starting LiquidPlanner. Her blog, A Girls Guide to Project Management, is a well rounded composition on virtually every facet related to project management. She also recently authored a well-reviewed book entitledProject Management in the Real Worldwhich includes more than 50 case studies drawn from a variety of industries. Her perspective as a woman in the project management discipline also informs much of her writing and provides some practical advice on how women in the field can better advance their careers.

Scott Berkun. While Scott doesnt write about project management exclusively, the core themes that he regularly touches on are wholly relevant. Having spent nine years as a program manager at Microsoft, he knows a thing or two about innovation and deadlines. Scott is author of several best-selling books (includingMaking Things Happen), and his highly-opinionated style shows that he isnt afraid to ruffle a few feathers. If you havent had a chance to see him speak, you should. Check out his classic lecture onThe Myths of Innovation delivered at Carnegie Mellon.

Rick Freedman. Rick is the founder and principal consultant atConsulting Strategies. If that werent enough, Rick is a prolific writer who contributes regular, highly insightful columns toTechRepublic andCIO Update and has also authored several books onIT consulting best practices. Rick has made a name for himself these past few years writing about agile methodologies. Hispost from the beginning of this year provides some great, practical tips for transitioning to an agile methodology.

Jim Highsmith. One of the coauthors of the Agile manifesto, Jim is another leading thinker on the topic of agile project management (in fact, thats precisely the title of his2005 book). If anyone understands the concept of uncertainty in IT planning, its Jim. He recognizes that software development is a constantly moving target and that in order for traditional project management practices to succeed, they have to be highly adaptive.

Glen Alleman. In addition to serving as a Vice President for consulting firmLewis & Fowler, Glen also authors theHerding Cats blog, which looks at project management from a variety of perspectives. As the name of his blog implies, large and complex projects often have multiple points of failure. From the mechanics of decision making and evaluating risk to estimation and scheduling, Glen brings the perspective of an experienced practitioner to bear on the quantitative aspects of project management.

Pawel Brodzinski. Pawel is another practitioner who shares his insights from the front line of software project management on the unambiguously namedSoftware Project Management blog. Like Bas de Baar, Pawel writes mostly about the dynamics of successful teams, the qualities found in effective managers, and practical tips for software teams to build better software. Best of all, Pawel has a very candid and often funny style which makes a sometimes dry subject very entertaining.

Johanna Rothman. Johanna is the founder ofRothman Consulting Group and author of both theManaging Product Development and theHiring Technical People blogs (as well as severalbooks on these and other related subjects). As a consultant, Johanna also has a great deal of experience with implementing Agile methodologies and holds a number of different workshops aimed towards helping teams realize their agile ambitions.

^{[Amazing photo of creative thinking from Peter Terren, who creates interesting experiments with Tesla coils, magnets, and similar objects of geek affection.]}

Sometimes, however, it really helps to boil things down to a simple checklist, keeping it simple to execute and simple to understand.  I was really excited when I saw Andrew Wilson, Web and New Media at Federal Government – HHS – SAMHSA, post a really good checklist for getting started with Social Media.  I immediately reached out to Andrew to see if I could build off of his checklist to give something to help people within The Social Ecosystem and he was nice enough to agree (Thanks Andrew).

Before we construct the checklist it is important to keep in mind that you must always define your goals up front.  No checklist is perfect on its own.  While it is a great guideline, it is only that, it needs to be modified  to meet the goals you have set forth.

The target audience for this checklist is individuals, groups, or organizations that have no real social media presence and who are seeking to get started.  This is a great starting point for this audience because it focuses on no cost tools and minimal time investment while seeking to maximize your return.  Now, it is true that you get what you pay for and that, as  you progress within The Social Ecosystem you will outgrow this checklist and the tools we discuss.  However, since we are including measurement and goal setting you will be able to decide when you are growing out of this framework and need to move into the Advanced Checklist

Goal Setting

• What are you trying to do?  Are  you just trying to learn about the platforms or is this part of an individual or organization effort.
• What does success look like a month from now?  What does failure look like a month from now?
  • At the beginning focus on simple measures like # of retweets, number of followers, number of fans.  Do not focus on lead generation in month one, you will fail.
• Check out the Social Media Guidelines put together on Mass.gov as the State of Massachusetts has done a nice job providing toolkits for various social media accounts, for security, and for legal guidance.

Setup

To minimize daily execution time you want your social media channels and monitoring setup at the beginning.  I urge you to set up the following channels and, if possible, use the same account name, logos, and profile descriptions throughout. Each channel is simply a way for you to interact with your audience, your customers, your citizens, and they expect a consistent experience.

• Create an account on Twitter.  Andrew notes “The Government Social Media Subcouncil Wiki has links to many good guidance docs, including EPA’s Twitter guidance which can be found at http://govsocmed.pbworks.com/EPA-Social-Media-Guidance-Documents“
• Create an account and page on Facebook. If you are a B2C Organization or a Local Government this is a must have in my opinion.  Others can skip this.
• Create a YouTube account.  Check out the great Youtube toolkit put together by Mass.gov. If your organization is not yet ready to deliver content on YouTube skip this setup.  Most organizations at this stage are not ready so do not feel bad if you fall into this category.
• Create a Slideshare account. Andrew’s post does a great job of leveraging Slideshare for sharing a Word document. You can leverage Slideshare for PowerPoints and other content as well.
• Create a Foursquare and Gowalla account.  If you are a B2C Organization or a Local Government this is a must have in my opinion.  Others can skip this.

Andrew nails it when he discusses setting up free monitoring solutions.  Simply copying what he has already proposed for completeness:

• Google Reader: Set up a Google Reader account for your organization (http://www.google.com/reader).   This will be used as the hub to monitor social media activity
• Twitter Search: Search on three terms relevant to your organization & add to Google Reader (http://search.twitter.com/). 
  • These terms could be the name of your organization, its acronym, issues relevant to your mission or issues that are of particular relevance or importance. Multiple word searches should use quotes. Click the “Feed for this Query” icon at the top right to add each of these to your Google Reader account.
• Google Alerts: Search on three terms relevant to your organization & add to Google Reader (http://www.google.com/alerts).These could be the same words as for the Twitter search but it alternate terms can be used. Relevant settings should be: Type: Everything – this will catch news, blogs, video, etc.Deliver to: Feed

Personally, I still rely on Google Reader as I have set up feeds for dozens of my favorite blogs and scan this at least twice daily.

Execution

Minimize execution time, that is part of the focus of this checklist.  Andrew proposed a 20 minute daily process which is perfect for starting out.  As you begin to see results you will want to double this, spending 20 minutes just before, or just after, lunch and 20 minutes at the end of the day.

• Monitor (10 min): As Andrew suggests, “Read through feed items in Google Reader.   If you don’t get through everything, mark the remainder as read. Watch for and note individuals that are getting significant attention or appear to be either strong advocates or critics of your organization or work.”
• Post (5 min): As Andrew notes post at least once daily on the accounts you have set up (most likely just Twitter).
  • If you found an article in Google Reader that is relevant to your audience share it.
  • If your organization is already blogging and has posted something new, share it.
  • DO NOT tell your audience what you had for lunch everyday either.  In time you want to personalize your efforts but when starting out focus on adding value in terms of sharing great content.
• Engage (5 min): I agree completely with Andrew when he notes “Find ways to interact and begin building community.  Example could Retweeting (RT) other accounts, finding new accounts to follow, thanking new followers, thanking people for mentioning your organization or your work.”
  • If you find other news sources that you should monitor add them back to your Google Reader feed.

Measurement

At the beginning of this process  we discussed the need to define your goals, define what success and failure looks like.  Every month, take 30 minutes to review:

• Are you executing as planned?  If you are going over the suggested time,  or not executing daily, than you are failing.  Correct this immediately. 
• Review what success and failure is supposed to look like, in terms of real numbers, at this point.  Set your targets for next month.
  • For the first three months only focus on simple measures, only focus on following the checklist above.

Every three months step back and have a longer review session and ask yourself:

• Is this effort worthwhile?   In the majority of cases the answer will be Yes.  However, the answer is not YES for every individual and every organization so answer this question.
• Are you ready to become truly strategic in your approach?  In the beginning of this process you are not truly strategic in the sense that you have not yet mapped  your efforts to higher level individual or organizational goals.

Some will never need to go beyond this level of investment.  However, through goal setting and measurement/review you will be able to make an informed decision if, and when, it is time to take this to another level.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

SaaS is a good option for small companies or testing with small groups. You just need an account and you can start. Bigger companies will switch to the server installation, when they will start running social messaging with the all employees.

I made the experience on my workshops that’s much better to show something than explain the features. SaaS can also be used to start with your group and present the result to your management afterwards. Especially, if you use an open source solution like ESME or if it’s a free offer for small groups available like bluekiwi, Communote and Flowr provides.

All solution provides several options to do status updates. I like especially the option to create polls offered by bluekiwi and Flowr. It’s a nice way to ask colleagues about their opinion.

Tagging is a very important function to organize the content. It’s needed for any Enterprise 2.0 application. All four solutions provide tagging for status updates. A useful function is auto suggestion related to tags like offered by bluekiwi, Flowr and Communote.

API and other interfaces as input for status updates are available by all solutions. So it will be easy to connect other systems. Communote provides a XMPP interface to connect messaging solutions like ICQ or Windows Live Messenger. So it’s easy to integrate chat which is used nowadays in a lot of companies.

I am looking forward to read the next input from other vendors. You will be able to read more details when the study will be ready in September.

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• Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research, @zephoria
• Scott Golder, Cornell / Microsoft Research, @redlog
• Gilad Lota, Microsoft, @gilgul

The research is particularly interesting to me as the Twitter retweet is one of the most important ways to achieve value on Twitter and is often poorly used.  While there are a number of reasons that people retweet, the ones that are most important:

• While not specifically noted via their research, you should share great information as a way of helping your community while promoting your knowledge and awareness of certain topics.
• Making your presence known to others. These people could be potential customers, business partners, or mentors.
• As an act of friendship. You cannot succeed without the help of “friends”, help others, good Karma does exist in this world.

As part of their analysis they reviewed a random sample of 203,371 retweets from 107,116 unique users. They observed the following (these results quoted directly from their paper):

• 18% of retweets contain a hashtag
• 52% of retweets contain a URL
• 11% of retweets contain an encapsulated retweet (RT @user1 RT @user2 …message..)
• 9% of retweets contain an @reply that refers to the person retweeting the post Compared to the random sample of tweets, hashtag usage and linking areoverrepresented in retweets.

From a practical perspective I favor defining communication standards for your organization in regards to the use of retweets. Following a format like this has worked very well for me:

[Optional Kudos]   RT [USER1] [USER2] … [Content] [Hashtags] | [Your thoughts]

• Remove extraneous words and punctuation as needed, but never change the meaning of the original message.
• Always give credit where credit is due. If the author of the content is  missing from the original tweet try to add it to your retweet.  I use the beginning of the retweet,the [Optional Kudos] piece, to give a shout-out to the author.
• While hashtags are far from perfect use them. They help keep your message alive longer.
• If useful, I try to add my comments to the end of the message, always following a pipe symbol (|).  I insert this symbol to show the end of the original content and help readers understand my take on the content.
• If possible, keep your retweet short so that others can retweet  your message.  

Standards are a great way of ensuring that your content supports your goals and that your community understands why you have chosen to share a piece of content with them. Help your community and help them help you. Everyone will win and that is key to everyone’s success.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

It was 2006, the first Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and I just met Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian. I had followed the company for a while (OK, I admit, had been a fan), met Mike, but this was the first time with Jeffrey, so we took our box lunch to a cozy little place away from the crowd and started to chat. Within minutes a VC Partner joined us, and so the usual “what are you doing” conversation started.  Well, it wasn’t a conversation: Jeffrey talked, the VC listened.  And in 5 minutes he was ready pull out the checkbook (sort of), when Jeffrey dropped the bomb:

We’re actually not seeking funding.  We’re fully funded.  By customer revenues.

Seeing the VC’s face was priceless.  After all, the cliche for startup success was to take funding.   Which Atlassian did – 4 years later.  But they do nothing by halves.  $60 million or nothing!    But I am running ahead.  Back to the early days.

I got to know Atlassian as the Wiki Company – having compared the few early business wikis, I came to the Conclusion that Confluence was the most robust, complete one.  I’m probably not the most pleasant reviewer when I don’t like what I see – but I could simply not find anything to criticize with Confluence – it became the de facto industry standard for others to follow.  That said Atlassian is /was about more then Confluence: their roots are in supporting developers, having started with a powerful bug tracker Jira, and growing to eight (?) products organically and through acquisitions.  Not being a techie, I don’t even understand most of these products – so the root cause of my infatuation with Atlassian was really their business model.

There is nothing wrong with taking VC Funding, but risking everything to your last penny is what Entrepreneurship was originally all about, so it is simply refreshing to see a company to have made it solely on bootstrapping, beating the odds. Add to it great software that’s easy to buy, learn, use, sprinkle it with a good dose of transparency and great service,  and you get a startup worth admiring. I’ve had lots of fun covering their early success and also learned a lot watching them:

• Atlassian taking in the world
• Atlassian Founders Become Australian Entrepreneur of the Year
• Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle ( I badly need to revisit this subject)
• Choosing Your Customers: Smart Business or Arrogance?
• Software Startups: How to Sell to Enterprise in a Recession

Oh, and they gave me some of my funnier titles:

• Sell Software – Ship T-Shirts (how come I don’t have them?)
• Atlassian Hiring Chief Heineken-taster
• Business Models and Right-brained Geeks

…’cause they like having fun, and I guess it’s contageous.  But amidst all that fun they can sometimes be dangerous:-)

I tried to help them fill The Dream Job (no, I wanted that job:-)), help with their charitable promotion – hey, even put my http://www.cloudave.com/link/helping-atlassian-stimulus-package-towards-the-finish-line“>money where my mouth was.  Then I had to write the most difficult post in my life, saying goodbye to Jeffrey, Atlassian President, musician, amazing person and fellow Enterprise Irregular.

And today they taught me another lesson: don’t ever sit on a story.  It expires.  My unwritten story that I’ve been contemplating for a while was about two bootstrapped startups, both in software, amazingly successful that have sailed into IPO zone almost unnoticed.  The second one is Zoho, which I consider to be approaching IPO-readiness, but I seriously doubt they would chose to go that way.  But Zoho is our Sponsor, talking too much about them would look like ***ing up, so I’ll stop here.  The day will come.  But today is Atlassian’s day.

Why would a company that has profitably grown for 8 years need funding now? They want to grow more agressively, both in terms of geography and product coverage. That means acquisitions.  They  want to accelerate growth to above $100M revenue, which is what’s considered “IPO ready” nowadays.

But what drove me to the conclusion they were on the IPO-track even before the funding was deep in their culture.

Atlassian is always hiring, yet it’s difficult to get in. They are picky. It’s a “work-hard-play-hard” culture.  Employees are well paid and  the company spends lavishly on team fun. No wonder their revenue per employee ratio is high.  But the team lives in Sydney and San Francisco, where there is an expectation that after a few years in a red-hot startup you get rich…  The Founders probably no longer live frugally, but how to share the wealth with all employees without an exit?  Funding accelerates the path to exit and my even bring interim liquidity critical to keep the team around. I agree with Ben in that respect.

$60 million is a lot of money, in fact Accel Partners claim it is the largest investment they’ve ever made in the software business.  But there’s a whole world of difference in picking it up as a mature, profitable company or a fledgling startup.  Some of Atlassian’s competitors picked up a third of this amount at early stages and probably had to give up three times as much equity as Atlassian did.  Bootstrapping has paid off, after all.

Oh, about that $60M T-shirt – you really have to read it over @ Atlassian. After all, this is a SFW blog:-)

Update:  I’m speechless.  What’s this? Sour grapes?

^{(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)}

Corporate culture shifts

Intuit has a history of a fairly open culture and  believes that failure is ok as long as you learn from it and the failure is fast and fairly low cost.  For the Brainstorm platform that was developed and deployed Intuit did not have to invest too much money into education as the tool already fit within the innovation program that they were trying to deploy.  However, Intuit still needed to help employees answer the question, “what is this and why should I care?”  People had to be convinced and shown that Brainstorm was worth while.  Social media as a whole was changing the corporate environment and shifting things to becoming more open.  Every quarter that CEO goes onto Intuit tv (an internal video platform) and answers questions live from employees instead of emailing them.  This allows the employees to actually participate in real time.  Employees now have the ability to comment on anything that’s going on within Intuit, including things that the CEO says.  The biggest mindset change was a shift from picking and investing in ideas to rapidly developing and validating ideas as well as celebrating behavior changes and valuing speed instead of size and revenue.  Intuit realized that it makes more sense to invest in ideas that it does to always invest in something proven.

Organizational structure shifts

One of the interesting things that happened as a result of Intuit developing Brainstorm is that they were able to sell and deploy this solution within other organizations such as Vistaprint.  This means that a team was created to support this selling and deployment, but that’s on the external side.  Intuit realized that they are just as likely to drive value from sustaining innovation as they are from disruptive innovation.  As a result, there is now someone in every business unit that is being tasked with innovation; an innovation leader.  This innovation leader participates in a company wide community sharing insights and accelerating the migration of best practices but they don’t actually own the innovation within the business units.  One of the great things that made this innovation process fairly streamlined is that employees don’t actually have to “go into Brainstorm” to keep up with relevant information.  Brainstorm was designed so that information is pushed out to employees based on the business areas, ideas, topics, or people they want to follow.  Beyond those leaders there are also now review teams that go into Brainstorm and look at ideas that are relevant to them and see what they want to do about adopting them and pushing them into their pipeline.  Instead of creating an additional role, Intuit distributed that “role” to specific areas of expertise or authority for various business units; this became a distributed task.

It’s very important to point out that the tools are enabling business outcomes but they are not ends in and of themselves.  These innovation leaders existed before the Brainstorm platform was developed they just had different ways of getting ideas in the past.  However a new role, VP of innovation, was created and filled by Roy (mentioned in part 1 of this series).  Once Brainstorm established itself as a useful resource of information it then got attention from leadership.  Intuit realized that these tools function best when there is an internal champion or perhaps a community of champions that are pushing the organization to extract value from the tools.

Business leaders adopted and changed the way they were operating.  They were now taking a portfolio approach of small teams moving quickly as opposed to focusing on a centralized project with a larger team.  The founder (Scott Cook) was also introducing approaches like design thinking (good problem definition preceding divergent thinking and frequent iteration) and the lean startup (rapid validation before investing too much time or money in a direction).   The New Business Initiative (NBI) team was developed for helping to turn ideas into actions/outcomes.  A lot of everything had to do with obstacle identification and removal.  At Intuit (and within most organizations) there was an infinite list of obstacles of where people were getting stuck during projects/process.  This helped set the agenda for Roy as innovation leader.  Roy had to create and change how projects were prioritized.  Automation and inner circle panels (meaning departments could quickly test projects with customers that were brought behind the firewall) were used so that teams can quickly engage customers.

Next time we will cover technology adoption and ways to encourage E2.0 use within Intuit.

Key takeaways

• Intuit has a fairly open culture that was made MORE open as a result of E2.0
• Investing in ideas instead of proven concepts makes sense
• The internal tool that was developed was also sold to other companies
• Innovation leaders managed the ideas
• Instead of creating multiple new roles Intuit distributed to the tasks to existing employees
• A portfolio approach worked better than a centralized approach to new projects and ideas
• Celebrating and encouraging desired behaviors was important for adoption

Q. William May and I discussed the approaches used in engaging with citizens and discussed that South Africans are often technological ahead of many others on the African continent. How do you use mobile solutions, like Mxit, to engage?

A. MXit is a chat platform for cellular phones which allows users to converse using affordable text messaging and is popular with urban youth due to its pricing compared to regular text messaging. Users can also view portals, which can roughly be compared to websites, using a text-based menu. Our MXit presence currently consists of such a portal called “American Beatbox”. Information on the portal includes background and bio’s on President Obama & family, PEPFAR, World Cup 2010 and information on Embassy services such as the libraries etc. We also provide downloadable content such as wallpaper images, screensavers, ringtones and short movie clips.

Our portal opened in December 2009. As of the end of May 2010:

• Dedicated subscribers totaled over 31000 – we’ve reached over 2.5 million users directly.
• 62% of users fall into the 18-25 year old group
• 25% of users fall into the 15-17 year old group

During May, we engaged in a ‘Splash Campaign’ in the run up to the 2010 World Cup. Here we provided art, imagery and text which were used in ‘splash screens’: targeted advertising which pops up as a user logs into MXit. The user can click-through to our portal upon seeing the advert. This campaign ran for 30 days up until the opening of the World Cup and we saw drastic increases in the number of users during this time.

MXit is a strong tool for reaching a young urban audience as it uses an existing popular medium among the youth and appeals to the demographic with concise information and a variety of colorful downloadable content.

Q. How big of a role does social media play in your overall communication strategy?

A. Social media plays a huge role in our communication strategy. We spend a lot of time updating our pages with pictures, quotes, and articles, and have even held competitions all in effort to connect with our target audience, the South African people. Our dedication has yielded positive results, as we have over 14000 people who like our page on Facebook and almost 3000 followers on Twitter. The various social media outlets available provide us the space to engage with South African on a level once unimaginable before the inception of these platforms. We have enjoyed being able to post our happenings in real-time and communicate one-on-one with ordinary South Africans. I believe this gives us a certain legitimacy and authenticity that changes the way our followers view us and what we represent.

Q. What are the major social media platforms used in South Africa?

A. South Africans are very active on Facebook. MXit, the phone application, is also widely used. We utilize these mediums to promote our message to South Africa, especially its youth, who are almost the sole users of this technology. We see it as influencing the leaders of tomorrow. By consistently communicating our message today through new age mediums, we hope to be a part of the consciousness of those making change for years to come.

Q. From a cultural perspective, are their major differences in communication strategies or tactics in a country like South Africa vs. other places in the world?

A. Communicating with South Africans is just like communicating with Americans. Like Americans, South Africans are a diverse sort ethnically, racially, religiously, etc. So when we post a hot issue we usually get a number of differing perspectives, which motivates us to post more. In places that are more homogenous, we might not get the same level of engagement and diversity of opinion as we get here in South Africa.

The name of the game is staying relevant. Maintaining South Africans interest isn’t that difficult because their interests are broad. As South Africa is the leader on the continent in many ways, its citizens have interest that include happenings in South Africa, Africa generally, and beyond. In less developed places, the scope of their citizen’s interest isn’t as broad to due to the socioeconomic handcuffs that apprehend their ability to see beyond their reality. As South Africa positions itself not only as an African leader, but a leader globally, its citizens have internalized this emergence, guiding their interest beyond the borders of South Africa and the coasts of Africa, generally.

Q. Any great stories of how social media has helped you bridge divides, accomplish goals, in ways that you would not have been able to do without it’s use?

A. Our social media presence during the World Cup is a perfect example of how we were able to bridge divides and accomplish goals using social media. Our Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr accounts constantly updated our followers as to all of our endeavors around South Africa. We could post original blog pieces, pictures, and competitions to make following the page more worthwhile. While people do enjoy just getting news updates, we also discovered by the numerous responses to our photos and competitions that people like interaction and seeing an original perspective rather than a globally published story. Without Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr we could not have possibly reached the same size audience, especially not with the same sense of personal touch.

If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Knowledge work is aimed at turning information into something decisionable and actionable; too often reports, presentations, survey results are mistaken for such.  While they are a key part of the decision equation, they are not enough.  They don’t provide insight.  The only thing they’re good for on their own is filling repositories.

Knowledge, unlike the data and information contained in reports, is a living & breathing thing.  It can’t be put in your enterprise content management system.  It exists in the heads of employees (often referred to as ‘tacit’ knowledge), constantly being shaped by different stimuli: articles, blog posts, pictures, models, books, conversations with colleagues, etc…  Communication is the process by which this constantly evolving knowledge is applied on data and information to a decisionable end.  This process will generate insights on how to take advantage of the information you have gathered.  Unless the reports, presentations and survey results are subjected to scrutiny and analysis through communication, no insights are created and decisions are delayed or malinformed.

Communication is more than just a block of time on your calendar.  It’s an opportunity to  share knowledge, gain insight, make better decisions and create for your company a competitive advantage.

What does communication look like where you work?  Is it enabling the application of knowledge to data and information?  Where do your company’s insights come from?

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Gartner specified “six rights and one responsibility of service customers that will help providers and consumers establish and maintain successful business relationships:”

The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data - Service consumers should retain ownership of, and the rights to use, their own data.

The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes - All computing services - including cloud services - suffer slowdowns and failures. However, cloud services providers seldom commit to recovery times, specify the forms of remediation or spell out the procedures they will follow.

The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes - Every service provider will need to take down its systems, interrupt its services or make other changes in order to increase capacity and otherwise ensure that its infrastructure will serve consumers adequately in the long term. Protecting the consumer’s business processes entails providing advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and granting the consumer some control over when it makes the switch.

The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front - Most service providers do not fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations so that after consumers have committed to a cloud service, they run the risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment.

The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates - If the cloud provider stores or transports the consumer’s data in or through a foreign country, the service consumer becomes subject to laws and regulations it may not know anything about.

The right to know what security processes the provider follows - With cloud computing, security breaches can happen at multiple levels of technology and use. Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not subvert security at another level (such as the network).

The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements - Providers and consumers must come to an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured.

Readers interested in this topic should also see enterprise analyst, Ray Wang’s, Software as a Service (SaaS) Customer’s Bill of Rights. That document describes a set of practices to ensure consumer protections across the entire SaaS lifecycle, as indicated in the following diagram:

My take. For cloud computing to achieve sustained success and adoption, the industry must find ways to simplify and align expectations between users and vendors. Gartner’s comments and the SaaS Bill of Rights are worthy steps toward that goal.

_{Originally posted on Edelman Digital}

Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked with several clients to plan and implement employee- and customer-facing social business initiatives. I’ve found it ironic that, while many enterprises decide to implement social business software and encourage social business behaviors in an effort to break down silos between employees and employees, employees and customers, and employees and the social Web, they approach their implementations from a very silo’ed perspective. For example, employee-focused pilots tend to take root in a business unit, then IT and/or Employee Communications teams take over when it grows into a strategic initiative. And in the mean time, Marketing and Corporate Communications are leading a completely separate customer- and social Web-facing social business initiative. The left and right hands often don’t meet until their procurement office gets the purchase orders.

From Silos > To Strategic Focus

However, if you can somehow remove these organizational-chart blinders sooner rather than later, the big picture becomes clearer. You can focus on the full business processes you’re trying to evolve, and all of the people who need to participate in social business transformation – employees, prospects, customers, and partners. You’ll then have a better chance of identifying the “from” you wish to leave behind, and the “to” you want to become.

In my new role as Communities Program Manager at Jive, I’m responsible for infusing existing business practices with social business behaviors (among other tasks). So, we focus first on the process and who enacts it before we figure out where social business software can improve or innovate how we do business.

Here are a few business practices we’ve evolved into social business practices, categorized by how most companies are measured:

REVENUE GROWTH

Attracting Leads: From Static Website Content > To Interactive Thought Leadership

To attract more leads, we’ve augmented our static website content – case studies, whitepapers, customer webcasts, etc. – with content from influential and, well, pretty damn smart employees, customers and partners in our customer-facing Jive Community. Most of these mavens and connectors are part of our newly launched Jive Champions program. But, while the content is great, it’s the willingness of these Champions to interact that puts the zing in this particular sauce.

We routinely market this thought leadership content in the social Web. We, of course, “FaceTweetIn” it, but we also use social media monitoring to listen for and then engage folks who are interested in our or our competitors’ products and services. My colleague, Mike Fraietta, listens to 100% of the Twitter stream, plus everything else out there, ready to share our community’s thought leadership when appropriate (he’s one of our Jive Champions, so he dispenses advice and shares his experiences along the way).

I also make sure to market this content and its resulting discussions to our employees in our internal social networking software environment. Sales, Support, Services, Product Management, and our executive staff are very much plugged into our prospects and customers, which means they can propagate our thought leaders’ content in a very targeted fashion to progress a sales opportunity, or increase customer penetration.

We have another social business practice focused specifically on progressing a sales opportunity that includes integration between Salesforce.com, our employee-facing Jive SBS instance, and our customer-facing Jive SBS instance. That’s another blog post, however.

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Crisis Management: From Not Knowing > To Proactive Engagement

Before we had social media monitoring capabilities, the only way we’d know about a brand-related crisis was if someone accidently stumbled across a blog post, Facebook group, or tweet. We’ve evolved that practice into listening to the social Web, and proactively engaging our prospects and customers before sentiments get too out of hand. Now, when our brand starts to take hits in the social Web or in our customer-facing community, we post the negative items in our employee community so that we can get the right eyeballs and actions on it immediately.  And, we join the negative conversation as soon as possible, offering to listen and take their feedback back to our colleagues.

I think my favorite part about this scenario, however, is that our customers have come to our rescue on our behalf, both in our customer community and in the social Web. Many of these customers are now part of our Jive Champions program.

INNOVATION

Developing Products: From Bug Tracking > To Interactive Ideation

We’ve always loved hearing from our customers about what our products need to become to make their work lives better. But, collecting their feedback through support cases, then submitting it into feature/bug tracking software where nobody but our engineers saw it didn’t leverage the collective innovation our customers could produce. We evolved this process into one that promotes interactive ideation. Customers now submit, comment, and vote on product ideas in our customer community, playing off one another’s ideas to refine what they really want. Our product managers join these discussions to ask for more clarity, run initial product plans by our customers, and learn at a glance what the top ideas – i.e., the most wanted ideas – are. They sometimes bridge specific discussions into our employee community so they can collaborate with product engineers “behind the scenes” before responding to customers.

And, just to make sure our customers know they’re being heard, our product managers periodically blog in the customer community about the status of specific ideas and how they relate to our roadmap, which I then FaceTweetIn, naturally.

None of these From > To’s would have happened if we hadn’t gained buy-in from executives, mid-level managers, and most importantly, the people enacting the practices. Here’s the engagement plan framework we used to identify, incent, empower, and engage key actors in these processes.

My next big task is to measure how all this social business activity correlates to any changes in key business metrics. That, too, is another blog post.

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