I work with a team of people around the world to support our social business adoption efforts among our sales reps, who are being asked to engage in new behaviors using collaborative technologies, digital tools and social networking practices to use in the sales process.

I’ve had the fortune to explore the status of our change journey with many of our first line sales managers and Social Selling Champions in recent training sessions and workshops I’ve delivered.

In these workshops, I shared a few “money” charts from our Better Change for IBM Methodology™. The two charts I love to use are the Change Curve (an individual’s emotional response to change) and a related view, the Change Journey, outlining the stages of adoption from Awareness, Understanding to Commitment. (For background on Change Curve, review my earlier blog post).

We discussed where they think we are as an organization along the Change Curve and why some reps are having a hard time changing. Some of the sales reps suggested that their peers may not have the personal understanding or be able to articulate the “What’s In It for Me?”  in order to engage in the desired behaviors.

The more interesting conversations occurred when we brainstormed on how to move people along the Change Curve from having a personal understanding of the change to taking the desired actions and engaging in the right behaviors.

When we got to this point, I asked them “How many people believe that exercise is important to your good health?” And everyone raises their hand.

Then I asked: “How many of you exercise every day?” and very few hands go up.

So the important question to ask next is: “Why not? Where’s the disconnect?”

The same thing applies to sales reps and FLMs who know social selling can help them in the sales process, but they don’t take the necessary steps to build the skills, use the tools, or interact with clients in the “new” way.

My hypothesis around the source of this disconnect is that these folks are not engaging their left brain and right brain fully. They’re stuck on the right side – in an emotional state of resistance. While many researchers have debunked the left brain vs. right brain theory as myth, I still think that colorful images such as this one are helpful when illustrating the point for discussion.

This point of inaction is the source of a lot of resistance, excuses and most importantly, an opportunity for learning.

By probing more deeply on “Why are you/ they not taking action?” we uncover the real truth. There can be a variety of responses and it’s our job as change agents to read between the lines, and uncover the underlying causes of resistance. Here are examples that you may discover:

• Fear
• Lack of skills
• Not wanting to put in the effort required
• Feeling overwhelmed with current responsibilities
• Conflicting messages
• Already feeling overwhelmed with daily activities
• Misaligned incentives
• It’s not fun, I don’t like it

We all have examples of this in our life. For me, it’s exercising and budgeting. For others, it’s updating their LinkedIn status updates or Twitter posts daily, paying bills, or cleaning.

What’s important here is to help your Change Champions, FLMs, leaders, and others, have compassion for the people who are resistant and not judge them too harshly. Having compassion helps us listen more effectively, understand the sources of resistance, validate fears, and then come up with action plans to help active resistors along the change curve towards Adoption.

And of course we can deploy other strategies, such as positive peer pressure, aligning incentives, recognizing and highlighting role models.

For more ideas on influencing people during an organizational transformation, check out this great article, “How to Have Influence” from MIT Sloan.

Here is the most exciting part: Unlike expensive and episodic market research, online community comments are both free and continuous.  But sadly, companies allow this customer feedback to fall through the cracks because they don’t have plans and processes to deal with the input.

From our experience as online community strategists, we believe the main reason why so few companies act on their digitally shared customer insights is because they either don’t know how to leverage so much unstructured data or haven’t considered its operational value.  Only a few B2B online communities like SAP, Autodesk, and LexisNexis have developed repeatable processes for leveraging online customer insights in research and development, sales, product development, marketing and other functions. These communities also happen to be the most successful ones.

Why aren’t more companies following suit? One reason is that community managers are often not well integrated into the core business functions.  Even when community managers see customer input shared online, they are typically not empowered to do more than simply acknowledge such comments; they are not permitted to act.

How do you make sure your online community isn’t one of these? Answering the following questions will reveal a lot:

• Who does the community manager need to inform about relevant customer feedback?  Who is on the triage team and what are their responsibilities?
• Is the feedback welcome (or at least expected) by R&D, product development, sales, and any other department that could benefit from it?
• Who is responsible for evaluating the idea or suggestion? What is the standard process for handling customer insights?
• Who will let the customer know about the outcome of his idea?  While not all ideas, complaints or insights are viable, when a customer takes the time to offer his perspective, isn’t it appropriate to respond?
•  And most importantly, who is in charge of shepherding this process from cradle to grave?

These are big questions that organizations need to answer to turn their online customer community into more than just an occasional listening post and feel-good platform.  When we help companies create the operational processes for their online community, our focus quickly turns to developing processes and performance indicators that directly affect the company’s ability to get products and services to market better, faster and more accurately because they reflect customer needs and identify market trends.  It is essential to align community objectives and outcomes with the overall organizational strategy.

Ignoring online customers is even more detrimental to customer satisfaction than disregarding their input in offline channels. Online comments are forever captured for the entire world to see.

There is a better way. The next time your company plans the next market research study, in–person customer event, executive briefing center program or social media listening platform launch to get closer to the customer, you should first explore how your customers are being treated in the online community. A wellspring of customer insights might already be there for the taking.

From boycotts, protests, lawsuits and occupations to extortion, hacks, sabotage and misconduct, the volume, severity and complexity of risks and threats facing corporations has dramatically increased with the exponential growth of social networks and open-source channels.

Today, major corporations across a wide array of industries like food and beverage, media, consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals are using advanced social threat detection to identify a wide variety of daily threats to their operations and organizations in real-time.

Widespread Threats

Leading corporations are under fire on a variety of fronts, from isolated incidents to well-organized initiatives. Threats arise on a regular basis from consumers, prospects, influencers and even competitors on a myriad of levels. Some of the more common social threats facing businesses include:

Employee Misconduct (Human Resources): Whether illegal activities or violations of corporate policy, this is an area that many Human Resource Departments are tracking to mitigate liability and protect reputation.

Product Incidents (Risk / Legal): Factual or not, many companies face online posts from consumers claiming quality issues or defects with a product, often with significant damage claims. These can escalate to extortion attempts against the organization.

Reputational Risk (Corporate Communications): This covers a massive area and with hundreds of millions of individuals broadcasting online, there are countless ways to impact the reputation of an organization, which many smart organizations are tracking on a daily basis.

Legal Threats (Legal): Whether civil or class action, smart Legal Departments are using social threat detection technology to identify potential legal threats against the organization whether from consumers or counselors.

Industry Issues (Corporate Communications): Whether regulatory, investment or compliance in nature, many social crises can arise from employees, executives, analysts or journalists, some of which may be intentional while others inadvertent.

The multidimensional threats facing an organization are not always isolated incidents. An increasing amount of serious corporate risk is being generated from activists, ax-grinders and even authorities that are targeting businesses and industries with organized campaigns across sophisticated, yet unapparent, social networks. These social networks provide a catalyst to expand the reach, enhance the efficacy and increase the influence of these campaigns, ultimately increasing pressure on the corporation.

Corporations are tracking a wide array of serious risks against their business. Among the organized social risks corporations are facing are:

Facility Security (Security / Human Resources): The Occupy Movement was a wake-up call to many corporations realizing they require intelligence to identify organized facility threats to protect their employees and property.

System Breaches (Technology): Many organizations are targeted with various levels of hacking against their systems and platforms which can wreak havoc on their organization, employees and customers.

Executive Safety (Security): Varying types of threats against executives and board members are serious issue that Security Teams are increasingly tracking with advanced social intelligence.

Competitive Threats (Marketing / Product): Companies are also keeping close tabs on the real-time activities of their competitors to identify threats and opportunities for their brands within the market.

Immediate Threat Identification

To effectively identify and report real-time threats across social and open-source media, corporations need an advanced social detection solution that delivers:

Streaming Big Data Processing: With billions upon billions of daily social comments, small samples of posts are not adequate to monitor the entire open social universe to find relevant threats in seconds. Businesses are turning to powerful streaming big data processing at over one billion operations per second to collect, filter and classify relevant threats and keep pace with social’s exponential growth.

Complex Concept Models: Traditional Boolean keyword strings will find some examples if the company knows what they are looking for. However, with risks and threats coming from all directions in all shapes and sizes concept models are required to identify the thousands of ways risks present themselves.

Deep Intelligence Expertise: Many leading companies are now relying on dedicated Social Intelligence Centers from expert analysts who strategically serve as a ‘round-the-clock’ extension of the corporation’s internal team for extended threat detection and expert risk analysis.

Unveiling the Threats

Let’s look at an example, below is an influencer map of activists currently targeting the beverage industry with a variety of campaigns focusing on issues ranging from soda tax to decreased portion size to sweeteners.

Many in the beverage industry believe that these activists and influencers are independent and isolated in their initiatives, working on their own to promote their individual causes. However, with ‘big data’ advanced social intelligence these influencers can not only be identified but also connected, revealing a complex, veiled network of relationships between these influencers and activists displaying a sophisticated initiative strategically targeting the beverage industry.

In this example, the influencers span the media, government, entertainment, academic and industrial realms.

This type of insight, along with advanced social threat detection, empowers corporations to immediately understand both the established and emerging threats allowing the organization to strategically plan, coordinate and engage appropriately to mitigate risks across the enterprise. This approach not only empowers the corporation with clear visibility of the complex risks facing their business, but also enables it to protect and grow the business.

Never before have leading corporations faced the volume or complexity of the threats social media is facilitating against their businesses. Gaining the insight and visibility into these risks on a complete and real-time basis is now critical to allow organizations to strategically respond like never before to mitigate risks, diffuse threats and overall protect the enterprise.

Until recently, it has all been about social media – Twitter, Facebook and the like.

Those early adopters such as myself (on Twitter since 2007, using LinkedIn and blogging since 2004) find themselves completely comfortable sharing their every thought and movements, to the bemusement of those that find this a totally foreign practice.

External vs Internal Influence

The online influence industry, while still in its infancy is dominated by platforms such as Kred (where I am CEO), and Klout. As well as finding real online influencers, a culture of those who try and game these platforms and become “more influential” has also sprung up. I wrote recently about how to spot a social media faker. In my role, I see first-hand those who think they are influential try and convince brands of the same. Only when you have actually become an influencer (accidentally in my case) can you really understand how online influence actually works. While platforms such as Kred can help you find people to connect with and promote your product or service, we may be missing a trick.

Your greatest asset is your people

Inside every organisation is an army of influencers, subject matter experts and “go to” people all waiting to be found, that can help us with our day-day jobs, and in turn provide better experiences for our customers. I remember when I worked at the largest telecommunications company in Australia, Telstra in the late 90s, there were over 54,000 staff (now around 36,000). The internal directory did not list the expertise of staff members, so it was always a case of being well networked internally to get your job done and find the right people. Amazingly, when I was working on an online portal opportunity for small businesses at the telco, I discovered through my networks that there were 6 such initiatives being run at the same time. Needless to say I was quick to convene a meeting (in a small room with no chairs so we all had to stand), where those assembled agreed to work on just one small business portal. Had I been able to use a tool to find all of the small business people in the organisation, I could have saved weeks of effort.

Becoming a social business

Social business takes over from social media when we use the same techniques and technologies used in a very public way, and bring those inside an organisation. Where publicly I tweet, internally I might use Yammer, Chatter, or a product from IBM called Connections. These internal social networks are secure in that you cannot see what is being said outside the organisation.

The question is how do we get people to use them when they are not natural users of social media?

Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM gave a presentation recently to the Council on Foreign Relations where described how in the future, IBM might pay a bonus based on how well you share information with your co-workers, and how your customers and partners rate you as well. At the same event, she also talked about how today’s workers now have a secret weapon, to be used in conjunction with the “big data” that everyone talks about. Today’s workers now have access to each other.

In the video, she says, ”You might have forgotten this: Peter Drucker coined the word “knowledge worker.” It was actually 1959 – 1959, so I was a little toddler at this time. Now, non-routine work – but what’s changed? Obviously, I said tons of data. The tools are different today than they were then. Billions of different interfaces. But today’s knowledge workers have access to something around the clock: The have access to each other.

That’s what’s different. And in a social enterprise, I will also assert that your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share. And that is a very different paradigm. Ginni has really hit on one of the key benefits of social business – allowing those inside an enterprise to use the same tools and techniques we use when networking socially, to network internally.

Putting the social back into social business

At a recent conference in London, I was speaking on a panel about the next stage of social media. A question from the audience asked what metrics can be used to look at the adoption of social media inside an organisation. My response, shown below explained how Ogilvy in London used gamification techniques to encourage their staff to get more involved with social. In summary – make social inside an organisation fun and inclusive and then people are more likely to use it.

Isn’t this just spying on our employees?

Those more concerned about data sharing and privacy may not be entirely comfortable with the notion of sharing at work. I see it differently though. Imagine there has been a safety issue identified at your company that makes children’s toys. Instantly, horrified mummy bloggers hit social media condemning your company for selling unsafe toys and demanding that your CEO resigns. Just as quickly, your internal networks swing into action, and those from R&D through to customer service and even HR chime in with what they are hearing, along with possible solutions from subject matter experts, and then the facts emerge quickly that it is a minor fault that can be easily fixed thanks to the collaboration happening in real-time with people from across the company. As a result of the great feedback, the product development department work on a solution, and then share exactly what is being done to fix the fault, and everyone is kept informed.

In this scenario, those people managing the company’s Twitter and Facebook pages as well as those on the end of the phone to outraged mothers are able to quickly distribute the facts, and a crisis is averted. What happens next is those mummy bloggers turn from being outraged, into strong advocates because your company dealt with this issue in real time, were transparent and got the message out quickly.

In the same scenario, applied to the way many companies operate today, the whole company might be waiting for the PR department to release a statement, and those within the company able to provide specialist advice might be overlooked as the situation unfolds.

So in the future, when we talk about influencers, don’t forget those in your own organisation, which if armed with the same tools that help make ordinary people into influencers online, could be your greatest asset inside your organisation.

You can download the report, and I have provided a brief summary below. This is a concise report and it packs a powerful punch in the fight to move the “social media” discussion away from the marketing and communications teams and into areas of the business such as internal expertise identification, product development, internal communications and HR for recruitment. They provide another great definition of “social business” and also expand on why this is relevant to companies of any size.

A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value.

The report goes on to say:

“Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders. When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability.”

The report introduces the concept of Social Business Patterns.

IBM defines Social Business Patterns are similar in concept to business process flows, in that each represents a repeatable, proven set of value-producing actions. The report contains 6 social business patterns, and here I will look at 4 that that can be applied to any business.

Social Business Pattern 1 – finding expertise

The “value producers” as IBM terns them for this pattern include

• quickly locate the right people, or published content containing, the expertise needed to solve a problem
• connect the best possible resources to effectively respond to customer needs
• document and share reusable solutions to common issues
• create highly-engaged and productive employees

Social Business Pattern 2 – gaining external customer insights

• quickly learn customers’ opinions and preferences related to existing and potential products and services
• identify and connect with key customer influencers to aid marketing efforts

Social Business Pattern 3 – increasing knowledge sharing

• more efficiently and effectively capture, share and access knowledge
• increase innovation through wider reach of ideas
• reduce excessive, unproductive time spent searching and exchanging information

Social Business Pattern 4 – improving recruiting and on-boarding

• collaboratively find and connect the right candidate to the right position
• streamline assessment and hiring processes
• better connect, engage and retain new hires
• contextually recommend expertise to increase new hires’ productivity

Rather than quoting the report extensively, I recommend you download the report and see exactly how social business can be used to provide real value in these parts of your business.

The report also contains vignettes of client case studies.

At under 10 pages, it is an easy, yet powerful read – something that can be used to start an internal dialogue to help get social of the marketing department and have it embedded into existing business processes across the organisation.

As you’re reading this at Social Business News, it’s probable that you might believe there to be a better way of doing things.  You might believe that social tools do a great job of allowing senior managers to engage with employees from throughout the company, thus enabling the company strategy to be formulated collectively, with this collective input making dissemination of the new direction considerably easier.

You know all of that I’m sure, but it’s always nice to have some research to back up your beliefs isn’t it? Step forward Professor Charles Galunic from INSEAD.  He’s produced a new paper on how strategy is best disseminated throughout an organisation.  There’s an interview with him at the end of this post, so if video is your thing feel free to head there.

The paper found that the most important people in the strategy process were the senior managers.  The traditional cascade approach relies upon middle and line managers sharing and selling the strategy to their teams.  The research found however that middle managers were useless at this (more of which later), and that senior managers held the key to the success.  What’s more, he found that the best strategy for senior managers to adopt was to engage with staff regularly about strategy so that they’re involved in the process.

“Nobody has as much symbolic power as the general manager, as the head of that business unit. We humans are, in many ways, hierarchical. That lead figure has a lot of symbolic influence. So when that lead figure – he or she – when they come down and when they engage with employees and talk about strategy, I think it’s more likely to be believed and hopefully accepted.”  Galunic said

The role of middle managers

So if middle managers are not much use in disseminating strategy, what can they help with?  Well Galunic found that their primary role was very much that of the servant leader.  Their best use was in providing their teams with the kind of environments within which they can best deliver on the strategy in an enjoying and fulfilling way.

“Job conditions play a large role, as you might imagine. ‘Is my task clearly specified? Do I have the resources I need to do my job?’ When people like their jobs, often they like it because it makes sense in the greater scheme of things, or the teamwork, or certainly the development and training opportunities. We found that when people are positive about these things, they’re much more likely to be embedded in the strategy, which makes sense.” Galunic said.

Obviously IBM have led the way in using social tools to engage their entire workforce in strategic decision making, but hopefully with more research like this, more companies will be encouraged to follow a similar path.