Kicking and SCREAMING by Carter Smith
May 5, 2008
02:24 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
The social web seems to attract a lot of definitional redefining, whether by adding numbers after a term like Collaboration 2.0, Business 3.0, or Office 4.0, or by combining two previously independent words into one as we have with Socialutions. These attempts at redefining can be useful, but they have a tendency to confuse.
Collaboration intuitively has a place in Socialutions, but where exactly does it fit?
Socialutions, which is not yet listed in Dictionary.com, is defined as people,
communities and organizations leveraging technology to interact with
people for the purpose of solving problems; the act of working together
with others to create new solutions to old paradigms of communications
and interaction without boundaries and with limitless reach.
Collaboration, which does appear in Dictionary.com, is defined as the act or process of working, one with another; cooperating, colluding, joining, assisting, or abetting.
Collaboration then, fits with Socialutions in the implementation – when we are working together with others to create new solutions, we are collaborating!
Tapscott and Williams, in their book Wikinomics, identified four steps to developing a collaborative culture.
• Encourage and reward openness in networking for all members of the organization.
• Create peering environments that foster self-organizing human connections for collaboration and innovation.
• Allow radical sharing to expand markets and create new opportunities.
• Think and Act globally as an individual, team and organization.
To achieve Openness
means ensuring a culture of candor, flexibility, transparency and
access. How many of today’s workplaces can accurately be described by
these words?
Peering is also important in the establishment of a collaborative culture. Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization.
As any business model demonstrates, expanding markets create new opportunities. These opportunities are beneficial, and often require insight into the local business culture.
Thomas Friedman was right - The World Is Flat.
The only way that today’s companies will be able to maintain a healthy
balance sheet tomorrow is if they focus on staying globally
competitive. That means they need to devote time to monitoring
international developments. They will have to begin (or continue)
tapping the global talent pool. They will have to get to know the
world.
In Collaboration 2.0, Coleman & Levine (2008) identified 10 Principles of Resolutionary (note, they are not saying Revolutionary, though it is) Thinking (p. 176):
1. Abundance
2. Efficiently Creating and Sustaining Collaborations
3. Creativity
4. Fostering Resolution
5. Becoming Open
6. Long-Term Collaboration
7. Honoring Logic, Feelings & Intuition
8. Disclosing Information & Feelings
9. Learning
10. Becoming Response Able
Note that each of these fits with the Socialutions paradigm, in the furtherance of our engagement of The Relationship Economy.
Each of these contributes to a collaborate culture – even if the
principles are implemented in pockets of the organization. And each of
these principles can be learned, as long as the intended result is a
positive change in the corporate culture.
In
order to implement Socialutions, collaboration is essential. Today’s
individuals and organizations are ready for a change. The time is
right.
Ready, set . . . collaborate!
What do you think?
References:
Coleman, D. & Levine, S. (2008). Collaboration 2.0: Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World. Cupertino, CA: Happy About.
Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. New York: Portfolio
10:32 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Many of today’s companies recognize the urgency of converting to a
customer-centric, social web-based, operation. The excuses and faulty
logic brought on by global prosperity have been replaced by an honest
examination of internal operations and external market share. As the
various departments search for collaborative ways to maintain
profitability in uncertain economic times, we will see more and more
arrive at the duh! moment of realization that the customer comes first.
We haven’t exactly reached the Utopia that Adriana Lukas describes:
Imagine
having your customers share with you what they like, want and think of
you. . . Interaction with them is modular, intuitive and user-driven
freeing much of your resources spent on marketing and transaction cost.
. . . nor have we seen more than a few examples of big, giant companies who give more than lip service to the process Doc Searls detailed almost five years ago (and Eve Maler recently simplified for those who love simple graphics).
But
there are some unpredicted catalysts on the horizon, and in the spirit
of making right decisions, we see that adoption of a Socialutions
paradigm is going mainstream.
Our proposal for Socialutions involves problem solving and finding innovative solutions through social exchanges. We are suggesting
that organizations can capitalize on the relationships and relationship
connections of the people connected to them in some way, whether these
connections come from employees, vendors, customers, or wherever. But we maintain that the customer comes first. Not to the point of turning major strategic decisions over to crowdsourcing perhaps, but first nonetheless.
Tom Peters has a rather unique (not a shock if you know Tom Peters) perspective on where to put the customer. He says, “to put the marketplace customer first, I must put the person serving the customer "more first.”Peters (admittedly selfishly) proclaims:
To
give a high-impact, well-regarded, occasionally life-changing speech
"to customers" I first & second & third have to focus all my
restless energy on "satisfying" ... myself. I must be ... physically & emotionally & intellectually agitated & excited & desperate beyond measure
... to communicate & connect & compel & grab by the collar
& say my piece about a small number of things, often contentious
and not "crowd-pleasers," that, at the moment, are literally a matter
of personal ... life and death.
As Jay Deragon noted previously, the drive of tomorrow's successful organizations will be a new method and philosophy proclaiming "We the Peoples are all aimed at Socialutions"
that creates perpetual value. We the people are aimed in that
direction, but do the companies who serve us (even if we are after
their employees) get it yet?
Here are some Socialution suggestions for getting from where you are to where you need to be in a hurry:
1) Make the cluetrain manifesto (especially the 95 Theses) mandatory reading for all your employees
2) Have your company intranet feature a link to Cluetrain @ 10 (a revisiting and revising after ten years) and recent posts on the Clueship.
3) On your company-wide strategy wiki (get one if you don’t have one), start a “top ten clues” list and allow anonymous voting.
4)
Allow time off (5% of the workday would be a good start) for your
people (all of them, not just sales and HR) to Twitter, blog, Facebook
and MySpace for the company.
5) Run from
traditional (old school) marketing as a source of “what works.” If it
really worked, you would not have taken the time to read this.
And finally, if you click on this link, you can contribute to our efforts to get Socialutions into Dictionary.com.
What do you think?
09:52 am | 2 recommendations | 1 comment
We are, of course, social creatures, and many marketers understand that. Telecom companies have long encouraged us to connect with our
friends & family (or
Unity), call our network for free, and purchase family plans.
Starbucks has built a business around a unique mixture of offline connections accessing online content “together.” Many email newsletters have the “forward to a friend feature.” And, a growing number of communities are using a
mixed-use design that allows us to work, live and shop in one area.
We are naturally drawn to places where people we know congregate. As social networking sites have demonstrated, we go where our friends are, and we connect to people with whom we have something in common. So it’s pretty natural to think that managing an organization would include understanding the relationship dynamics of those who contribute in some way to the bottom line, right?
Not necessarily.
Many large organizations operate with a directed-association model. Departments are set up in hierarchical fashion, and we learn to work with or for people with whom we may never have come in contact but for our employment. Some enterprising organizations make attempts to capitalize on our personality styles, but how many try to capitalize on our networking styles? Do we examine the “fit” that new members to the team demonstrate in relation to those already established?
Not very often.
Caldwell, et. al., in studies of perceptions of “fit” found that as organizational change becomes the norm, adaptations by individuals is expected, though the ready embrace of change often eludes the observer. The change itself may be the variable, and many organizations are finding that change strategies should include possible reactions to change. So, if people initially deemed “a good fit” for the organization are suddenly experiencing major challenges, was the hiring process faulty?
Tomorrow’s employees are engaging in the social space now, and they are bringing this tradition to the workplace. They may adapt to the directed-association model, but they may also rebel. These are not members of the complacent generation(s) that took what they got and kept silent. These are the “kids” who have been asking why and what’s in it for me since they could talk.
So how do we incorporate them into our management strategies?
A recent example of the technology-enhanced ability to have everyone manage processes was described by
Denis Pombriant in his look at
Right90, which captures and tracks changes to the business forecast (all the things that can and should be forecasted in addition to revenue, so that a company can keep its supply chain informed of coming changes) in real time. With Right90, if a salesperson reports that a customer is doubling an order for 32-inch HDTVs, managers in sales and operations get alerted, and the full implications of the change in the forecast get thoroughly reviewed.
Pombriant observed that this kind of attention to detail gives every relevant person and department a seat at the table, and makes them accountable for bringing in the forecasted revenue in the forecasted product lines. Imagine this strategy being implemented in your organization!
Many small businesses have the idea of this kind of collaboration built in to their initial organizational cultures. Have you ever been to a diner where one person tells the other, “I’m going to the freezer, do you need anything?” The ensuing dialog is likely to result in an informal report of the number of a certain product remaining in stock, followed by a quickly calculated mental note by the person who orders these things. As the business grows, however, each position becomes more intense and focused, and it becomes decreasingly natural to see the operation as a system.
And that’s where the problem lies.
When all the participants in a system fail to see it as a system, each facet of the operation becomes disjointed. If not integrally connected, much additional effort is needed to catch up to at least temporarily unify the thought process for actions such as logistics, personnel, finance, and the like.
By implementing
Socialutions as a management strategy, organizations can capitalize on the relationships and relationship connections of the people connected to them in some way. This naturally includes the employees and the organization’s leadership, and should include customers, clients, vendors, and others served by and serving the organization. These people all represent the company in some way, so why not acknowledge and try to affect the way they represent? As we engage
The Relationship Economy, we need to find new ways to leverage technology to interact with people to solve real problems. Only those people, communities, and organizations who use this type of collaborative problem-solving model will emerge successfully. Those who choose to go it alone and use long-antiquated systems and applications will look back and wonder why they didn’t.
If these suggestions look familiar, perhaps you are seeing a similarity to team-building, which the social web appears to be well suited for. Team building in Asia has been part of the culture since long before W. Edwards Deming traveled to Japan to implement Quality (and plan-do-check-act) in the post-war rebuilding effort. Global team building has enjoyed mostly steady growth as organizations expand an a variety of travel opportunities contract. Socialutions as a management strategy requires using a group (team) of people (stakeholders) to be accountable for the process.
What do you think?
Caldwell, S.D., Herold, D.M. and Fedor, D. B. (2004). Toward an Understanding of the Relationships Among Organizational Change, Individual Differences, and Changes in Person-Environment Fit: A Cross-Level Study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 868. Available at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15506866
Pombriant, D. (2008, May 7). The Dawn of Social Networking 2.0., ECT News Network – Tech News World. Available at http://www.technewsworld.com/story/web20/62896.html?welcome=1210165490
02:37 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
The marketplace is buzzing with the new way of solving problems.
Though is hasn’t been posted at Dictionary.com or Webster.com (yet) “Socialutions” is defined as people,
communities and organizations leveraging technology to interact with
people for the purpose of solving problems; the act of working together
with others to create new solutions to old paradigms of communications
and interaction without boundaries and with limitless reach.
The
irony of starting with a definition lies in our use of contemporary
tools. In order to provide an easy way to use their product for more
searches, Google has a relatively simple code that allows us to type in
“define: the word you want to define.” So I typed in “define:
socialutions.” Though this may change by the time you read this, here’s what I got.
Note that Google, as they often do, tries to be helpful when they find nothing based on your typing . . . and they relate socialutions with associations!
So how is Associations defined? Dictionary.com
has a head start on this one, where they have the definition as: An
organized body of people who have an interest, activity, or purpose in
common. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what it
will take to implement solutions . . . an organized body who have
interests and purposes in common.
Does that define today’s organizations?
In the proposed definition, we identify the need for organizations working together with others to create new solutions. What could possibly stop this from happening?
Personal
agendas, political grievances, a lack of agreement . . . all wrapped up
in the culture of the organization, that’s what!
Why
is the culture a problem when it comes to implementing socialutions?
Inherent in the suggestion that a solution is in order is the
implication that there is a problem. Most of us, organizational
leadership included, want to hear anything but that. The existence of a
problem rarely means that everything has been
done well. It often means someone has missed something, and that
someone may be us or someone who works for us. Usually, problems mean
added costs, and that can’t be good.
But socialutions doesn’t need to indicate the existence of a problem. It can be used to define a paradigm. The suggested paradigm is one of problem solving and finding innovative solutions through social exchanges. Many leaders understand the problem solving part, it’s the innovation part there’s difficulty with. As has been noted already, the paradigm means: Engaging the
organization’s employees, customers and suppliers for innovation,
problem solving and breakthrough ideas, changing the marketing focus,
removing barriers, and leveraging technology and social media to
increase response time by listening and learning. The end result can only be a changed paradigm, with a cultural transformation where everyone is engaged.
So, look around your organization . . . envision a Corporate Solution!
What do you think?
April 4, 2008
08:35 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
It's been my experience that government and quasi-government agencies are always the last ones to figure out the technology that helps them accomplish their mission. For the most part, my impression has not changed, though more and more I am seeing a glimmer of hope.
There are police officers , emergency management personnel, homeland security employees, and firefighters on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and several of the other social networks, and more and more poised to enter The Relationship Economy.
From my time in the criminal justice field (and discipline), I have developed an outside the walls network of thousands of these folks (they are "connected" to me in the address book on my computer, and frequently post on my old-school wall known as an inbox while CCing others). I have seen a select few (and growing) number of folks over the past 15 or so years adopt (and adapt to) the various iterations (is that spelled right?) of communications technology and I am often impressed by their progress. In fact, the friend I mentioned in
4score and . . . how would Lincoln do on Twitter?, where I observed that the combination of my time working for the government and my legal training and my current focus on education was not a good breeding ground for brevity, works in this very field.
I don't know that the
@amberalerts on Twitter are from an official site, but the program is a
Department of Justice Initiative, and before now, I had only seen the
Transportation Safety Administration getting involved (other than covertly) in the social web. The only problem with this demonstration is that
@amberalerts hasn't seen a Twitterpost since three months ago. I suspect that's not reflective of the most recent Amber Alert . . . but it's the thought that counts, right? I did find that the
@Amber_Alert Twitter Feed is directly from the national website DM, so make sure you follow the right one!
What do you think?
08:23 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
. . . with possible improvement if COMmunication improves
Jay Deragon's post Can Comcast Reverse the Storm suggests that Comcast has the opportunity to be a leading brand that leverages the tools of the web for improvement of service and innovation of propositions to their customer base, both personal and business. He suggests that they could be customer service trend-setters and thought leaders, which would be a great improvement over their current ranking by a 2007 J.D.Power survey, that ranked Comcast second-to-last only to Charter in customer service for cable and satellite TX providers. Bob Fernandez, in article in The Seattle Times that Jay quotes, discussed this survey, and noted that in the February issue of Consumer Reports, Comcast ranked ninth of 10 big telecom companies. It was sandwiched between Time Warner Cable, at No. 8, and last-place Charter Communications.
I first got engaged with Comcastic customer service with a post by a (local to me) Nashvillian, named Mark Kerrigan, in a fabulous demonstration of the use of webtime by corporations. Mark was frustrated by the local
Comcast office's attempts at customer service, so he went to the best distribution channel he had available --
his blog. Mark had a follow-up appointment (after a three day wait) scheduled from 8-11 AM. He wrote,
the breakdown in communication became apparent when someone from Comcast called at 9:28 on the day of service to “remind” us that we were scheduled to have a service tech come out between the hours of 12 and three! I read that post and thought, "good for him, he's demonstrating the communication style needed in The Relationship Economy -- talking out in the open." And the next day, Mark blogged again, and it blew my mind (not that he's not that frequent, but what he was writing :-).
Mark reported a phone call from Frank Eliason,with Comcast Corporate. Mark explained how it felt to know he was speaking with someone who could actually do something about the service (or lack of service) provided.
Shortly before this, I had been working with Mike Orshan to start a series of initiatives called
The Conversation On . . ., on Facebook, and we had posted the first 50 or so companies from the Fortune 100 (and begun a
website, too) to try to organize "the good, the bad, the new, the old, the newsworthy and the hopes regarding the United States number 84 company in revenue." Seeing an opportunity for traction and momentum, we pushed the Comcast group to the front of the line for development. Check out the
Facebook Group for more -- if you join, you could be member number 440!
But webtime wasn't over yet with the Facebook group addition . . . the Comcastic
Twitter initiative had just launched. Two Comcastians, known as
@wscottw3 and
@ComcastCares (
Scott Westerman and Frank Eliason) started responding to Twitterposts by Comcustomers (who were "venting" about Comcast) like they were personal account managers. I saw a variety of high and low-profile technology folks being helped, and even saw some Twittered follow up posts. Take a peek at how messages are passed on
Twitter by
@mjlambie, @chrisbrogan, @bloggersblog, and
@jowyang. if you aren't familiar with this technology. You can see more at
The Comcast Tweet Scan. Scott and Frank are doing so well in addressing the issues that they are getting referrals for both
customer service and
strategy!
So yes, Jay, I think Comcast can reverse the storm.
They were #84 on Fortune's list (
they are #79 now)and they have one heckuvan Internet presence, too!
Alexa.com Site Stats for comcast.net show Comcast.net has a
traffic rank of: 123 (wow - they were 223 on March 20), and they have been online Since: 25-Sep-1997. But it would take a transition, no, a company-wide transformation, to relationship-based customer serving. As we noted in a
previous post, relationship building for businesses seems almost counterintuitive. Back in the day, Customer Relationship Management was the practice of leaving the house, stopping for a cup of coffee at the local diner on the way to work, taking a break to visit with your neighbors who happened to be long-time customers, and generally engaging others in conversations about anything and everything. And that, in webtime, is what it will take to divert this storm.
So how do you engage your customers in webtime? You can use simple tools, like this mini-mashup I got from
Steve Rubel to check customer service posts for
Comcast (or
the company of your choice). You can also search the blogosphere . . . Technorati has
541 blogs listed in a search for Comcast in their aggregated blogs, alone. Now, many of them could be spammer sites, but they all tagged their main blog with Comcast, and at the time this was written, there were individually
2,864 posts tagged with Comcast on Technorati (this should make it # 2,866 if Jay tags his).
But searching these sites, whether manually or automatically, is not the solution. There must be something better!
Imagine a public access portal set up strictly for Comcast communications. In that portal is a live blog collector and a live Twitter stream (among other cool tools). The posts are searchable, sortable by keywords, and threadable. A potentially disgruntled Comcustomer finds the portal (shouldn't be too hard with the search tool of choice) and searches for their specific issue (no service, delay in responding, blocked file transfer, late technician, etc.). They locate an ongoing thread, and see that others, perhaps others in their area, are experiencing the same problem. In this example, the threads will serve as a FAQ section that is updated in real time. Instead of making a new call or sending another email, the Comcustomer can say "me too" by tagging the post or thread with their location or adding a simple comment.
If you really want to kick your imagination into high gear, envision a webcam of the technician speeding to your location . . . That's the webtime way!
Disclaimer: The author is not a subscriber to any cable or satellite TV provider, and has not been one since 1990. Though this may indicate that he does not know much about these providers, it does not indicate that he's unable to know a storm when he sees one. And this, my friends, is a storm!
comcastcares
07:35 pm | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment
I received a call today from a friend who asked for assistance in brainstorming a two-and-a-half hour presentation on a topic she was very familiar with. She doubted that she could keep the attendees' attention for that long, though she knew the material.
My first suggestion was "engage them."
So how's that done? First, you have to get their attention. Next, you have to have something they are interested in. Finally, you have to find the intersection of what they know and what they are comfortable talking about in public. Combine all this with getting them to talk more than you, and you have a winning formula for interactivity!
As long as you keep it brief.
I'm not a natural at this. Many of my colleagues (see either my LinkedIn profile or my Hotlist for some examples) will tell you that the combination of time working for the government combined with my legal training and my current focus on education is not a good breeding ground for brevity. As an introvert, I don't necessarily enjoy the time where I am the only one talking, but I do know how to tell you everything I know about (your topic here) in 3 hours or less. But I recognize that brevity is good in this fast-paced, attention deficient world.
Can you feel my my pain?
I learned from Brian Solis, that technology and thought leader extraordinare Stowe Boyd has begun training others on brevity. Stowe told the world that he is posting a schedule of the times that he will make available for meetings with companies at the Web 2.0 Expo, and he is not going to accept email-based proposals to meet, only Twitpitches.
Twitpitches? That means 14o characters or less to get his attention? Is that possible? The title of this post is over half that long! Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb credits Stowe as the inventor of Twipitches . . . so who is going to start the training program?
Brian says he knows that it’s a huge amount of work to shift from a blast mentality to a one-on-one pitch regiment. . . it’s time to change things up. Make the time to invest in relationships with those who can help you tell your story.
Wow! So in order to build relationships with some people, we have to take less of their time? That sounds a lot like a digital elevator speech.
So I got to thinking, how would Abraham Lincoln have pitched the Gettysburg address on Twitter? (the original is here -- it's 271 words -- I'm not counting all the characters)
Here goes:
87 yrs ago we sed all menR equal-Now weR fighting. Lets honor the dead so this nation under God is free & govt of by & 4 people won’t perish
What do you think?
03:35 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
. . . and, I'll bet more Twitterers have a LinkedIn than Facebook and more Facebook than a MySpace (or at least they talk about LinkedIn and Facebook more).
Is that relevant?
I think it is when you look at the March 2008 statistics, that show MySpace has or is reaching the saturation poinnt and Facebook is doubling year-to-year (no, I didn't plot this out month-by-month). According to
MarketingCharts.com, MySpace is up 8%, while Facebook is up 98%. LinkedIn managed a 319% increase in the same period.
To confuse these results even more, see what we, the users, reported to be the 100 best Web 2.0 applications. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to select these Webware 100 winners in the Social space:
What did we miss? Perhaps the OpenSocial initiative is working better as a marketing strategy than an implementation plan? :-)
What do you think?
09:24 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
In an earlier post we saw that a few police departments had
begun experimenting with Twitter . . . And now we see the fire departments
Twitter, too!
Thanks to Grant Griffiths for his post in the Twitterverse! Grant runs one of the best blogs
out there for those who do freelance work. Others covered it
previously, but I wasn’t connected to them, so I didn’t get the message (there’s a message
there).
In Governing/December 2007, : Ellen Perlman’s (Tech Talk)
writes “For the department, twittering is an easy, free way to get important
information out to the public. If, in the aftermath of, say, an earthquake, Los
Angeles wanted to send out a boil water alert, one message could alert millions
of people instantly. ‘It’s even better than the Goodyear blimp flying around,’
says Humphrey, who also serves as the department’s public information
officer.”
I can see the value for fire departments. Apparently, though, me and the
LAFD
and perhaps Ellen are the only ones who can.
In a search of Twitter
for subscribers describing themselves as “fire department,” the LAFD was “Results
1 - 1 of 1.” Now it’s possible that there are departments out there who just
haven’t listed themselves the right way (it’s all public access, so like the
yellow pages “fire department” would be the most logical).
There are plenty of users with the word “fire” in their name or description,
like @SilverFire, @theCOLORofFIRE, @FireAngel, @StrangeFire, @iFire, and
@Nuclear_Fire, but the majority haven’t posted an update (indicating a lack of
participation) in several months. There was one for California Fire
News (@CalFireNews), but they appear to be just getting started, so
if you would like to follow them that might help get them motivated!
Here’s just a sample of the LAFD Twitter posts. Can you see the value
in getting these on your mobile phone?
*Greater Alarm Structure Fire* 15222 W. Stagg St.; TG 531-H3; FS 90,
1
story commercial warehou… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/4wupzj
*UPDATE: 4630 N. Cerro Verde Pl.* Small fire starting in a pool
house,
spread into approx. 1/4 … Read more at http://tinyurl.com/53sz73
*Brush Fire* 4630 N. Cerro Verde Pl.; TG 560-H4; FS 93, Small amount
of
brush burning behind a … Read more at http://tinyurl.com/423gx7
*UPDATE: 120 E. 8th St.* Incident possibly caused by small fire
in
electrical vault. DWP on sc… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/47arxg
Granted there are a lot of leading edge tech-aware folks in the Los Angeles
area, but how ’bout some of the other large (and relatively progressive in a
technology sort of way) metropolitan fire departments? Off the top of my head,
given what LAFD learned, I would say New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston
would be prime candidates. Personally, I would think Nashville would also jump
into the mix, but . . .
So you can check how many are participating long after this has posted, here
are a couple of self-updating links. These will identify mentions of the quoted
words on Twitter.
What do you think?
