Both sessions were lively, and some good discussion took place.

This is the slide deck from the sessions:

Our experience in working with many Human Resource (HR) departments over the years, is that most have a very “traditional”, non-innovative stance.  Most use policies and procedures which come from concepts developed shortly after World War II.

I wonder how many would be brave enough to attempt an approach we found south of the border.

The Shands Jacksonville Medical Center had a problem.  Employees, both health care and support staff, were out of shape.  The irony was not lost by this organization, since after all, they were there to help others become healthy.  But the employee population was “reflective of the general U.S. population in terms of obesity and chronic illness.”  The business problem? Direct impact on the bottom line: higher healthcare insurance premiums, higher absenteeism, lower productivity.

In January 2007, they introduced a program to encourage employees to live a healthier life and improve their own wellness.  The incentive? Air miles, specifically, Virgin HealthMiles.

The program introduced pedometers to track movement, kiosks to allow recording of weight, blood pressure, and body fat, and captured all this data in a personalized, secure web site called “LifeZone”.  This allowed employees to track personal progress and view wellness information.  The data was also available for the employer to understand the workforce progression towards wellness.

Real-world activities were obviously key to providing information and encouragement among the workforce.  The added value to the program was an online community were the shifts of workers providing 24/7 coverage could interact with other employees non-real time.  And with a workforce that is largely moving around the building during work hours and has limited access to computers during their shift (many had no computers at home), co-workers who had access enlisted to provide support to upload data and maintain online community membership.

The business outcome?  In approximately 18 months, a healthier workforce resulted in a $6 savings for every dollar invested in the program.  Not too shabby.

Read the full case study here:  Putting the “Health” Back In Healthcare. (PDF)

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The audiences’ biggest surprise, I think, was that in a crowded world of highly sophisticated automated tools, you might still have to actually talk to people.

It was humbling to stand in front of a in a sold-out room full of SoCal software giants talking about measuring Social Media in what is arguably the hot-bed of analytics in the United States.   There were more PhD’s in the room, than I’ve had hot meals.

OK.  Maybe not that many.  But you get the picture.

Nonetheless, the logical, common-sense, balanced approach to measuring Social Media rang true with the room.   The ‘revelation’ arrived when I discussed the” Community Vitality” quadrant.  Yes, the user, your community members, are the true source of the key information you need.

The last post introduced the Quadrants of the scorecard, and this post digs deeper into where the data comes from and how you collect it.

I used this model to discuss how to think about setting up a SM-BSC:

Social Health relies upon monitoring, or listening tools, configured to trawl the vast amount of blogs, discussion areas, and social networks to obtain conversational data pertaining to the objectives at hand.  This is the social commentary that exists outside the immediate world of an organization.  The type of information you are looking for usually falls into two categories: (1) sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral), and (2) volume (the amount of conversation, if any at all).

Community Vitality is the key to understanding Community Experience (CX) and is best understood by doing primary research with an organization’s community members using a survey tool.  The SM-BSC looks for Community Vitality using these indicator areas:
•    Sense of trust
•    Support from other members
•    Opportunity to contribute
•    Socialization between members
•    Sense of respect
•    Support from community owner(s)
•    Duration and frequency of visit

Integration examines the internal aspects of the program, and will collect data depending upon the objective(s).  For example, efficiency and productivity objectives will look for data using internal reporting, such as Time Management Systems.  But employee engagement and retention objectives will use survey data to provide measures.

Capital measures are always looking to track the financial and human investments of any Social Media program.  In the case where the objective(s) are related to the contribution of Social Media to financial gain, data from sales may also be examined.  Conversely, where Social Media is contributing to cost reductions, related measures may be tracked, such as call-center expenses.

This is the complete White Paper:

And it is also now available to download here (PDF).

Please digest, pass it on, discuss.  And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

I saw this hilarious article over at Chase Jarvis explaining the difference between advertising, marketing PR and branding.  We are always looking for was to tease these kindred cousins apart in projects, from now on I’m using this!  Original is here: Chase Jarvis Blog: Who Says Youre A Great Lover?.

They spoke of advances, directions, barriers and issues.  Interesting perspectives which occasionally outlined a future with no path to get there.  There was something missing.

The hour-long discussion repeatedly focused on ‘clouds’ and ‘networks’ and ‘mobile’, i.e.: infrastructure, and the individual projects each was working on to make the world a better place.  Certainly laudable, but I kept waiting for someone to start talking about social tools and their impact.  I was waiting for them to start talking about people. It was not until the moderator brought this up near the end of the talk that the topic came to light.  How odd.  Thinking about solving world problems and not thinking about people.

And that’s the problem.  These gentlemen, (curiously not a female on the panel) it seems, are making the world a better place from inside a bubble.  They proclaim the technologies are there, the future is here, and now “delivery systems” must change.

Systems that deliver to people.  Who are not part of the discussion.

This is classic old school: we envision, we decide, we build, they come.  End of discussion.  But if they are not consuming these readily-available solutions, and if there are still plenty of world issues for technology to solve, there’s a willingness issue.

Willingness comes from motivation, and in the social universe, motivation comes from including people as peers:

Adoption and growth will occur when both producer and consumer move from points of view to peer of view.  It’s a model that benefits all actors in the process:

• Producers get direct feedback and direction from consumers
• Producers can allow consumers to become part of creation, and support - removing costs and burdens from producers
• Consumers know their input directly affects the outcome
• Interim actors, required to facilitate a process between producer and consumer, also have the opportunity to fine tune a process

A collaborative, even crowd-sourced approach is the catalyst needed for greater benefit of technology for society.

And the debate is not whether Social Media can be of value, the question remains to be how much value?  A hint of not being able to measure is enough to stop most organizations from pursuing Social Media immediately.

I think the answer is looking to trusted methods to understand new information.

I’ve been invited to speak with members of the San Diego Software Industry Council next month, where I’ll be presenting the latest addition to our OASIS Social Media Best Practices: The Social Media Scorecard.

Here’s a peek.

I’ve done many strategic reviews and planning initiatives for clients over the years, and many times used the Kaplan-Norton Balanced Scorecard approach to implementing performance measurement.  It’s been around so long that it has gained very wide adoption as a key tool, and even for those who cannot adopt a complete measurement framework (it’s a lot of work), they at least understand the concepts and language.

There are many successful and widely used monitoring tools available to collect a ton of information, but they do not provide understanding.  The monitoring tools of today are a throwback to the several times I’ve been asked by clients to help them reduce mountains of monthly departmental status reports into something meaningful for senior management.  Too much data to sift through.

And monitoring tools today do not significantly (if at all) assist the interpretation of this data into understanding the achievement (or not) of measurable objectives, which is how organizations run.   Monitoring tools don’t talk C-level.

So, we’re developing a framework with clients that represents informationalized data in a familiar grid to organizations: the Balanced Scorecard.  Just as this approach can cascade into customized departmental scorecards in the organization, we’re using a custom scorecard developed for Social Media:

You can see the familiar quadrant approach immediately, as well as the central focus on objectives and measures.  The x-axis delineates the two important balanced perspectives of a scorecard, internal and external.

Each quadrant is seeking to determine an understanding in an area of focus.  Counter clockwise from the upper right quadrant:

• “Community Vitality” seeks to understand the mood and sentiment of the online relationships an organization nurtures with their community members.
• “Integration” examines the people, process, and programs in the organization and where/how Social Media is affecting the inside.
• “Capital” tracks the real resources (financial, human) an organization invests to establish and maintain the community.
• “Social Health” seeks to understand how the organization is perceived where no formal relationship exists, and what information can be determined (think Social Network Analysis) that may be important to the organization.

Where does this data come from? How do you collect, interpret, understand it?  That’s largely a customization effort, but for examples, you’ll either have to attend the session next month, or wait until I return and post it here.

Have you designed and/or implemented a comprehensive Social Media measurement system?  We’d love to hear about your approach.

She generously shares their goals and details the “scorecard” approach she uses to track return on the community.

The scorecard Miriam developed has 3 sections:

1. Traffic – using Google Analytics, she looks and general traffic trends, where the traffic comes from, and how other electronic marketing efforts like newsletters and webinars affects the site traffic.
2. Membership – community members who have identified themselves as “IT Buyers” (or recommenders) are the key audience IDC wants to reach, so increasing this number is a critical indicator.
3. Revenue – this is a little laborious, but Miriam manually matches IT Buyers from the community to their Salesforce.com CRM system.  This tells IDC a couple things:

• How many new prospects the community has attracted (60% of the community IT Buyers are new to IDC), and therefore, what new opportunities may lie with this group, and;
• How much new revenue all members of the community have brought to IDC: this process is more intuitive and subjective, since Miriam removes sales from things like repeat customer renewals and already-active customers.

IDC is actively trying to understand and measure the benefit from this community, which is sound business practice.  Miriam tells the interviewer they have been able to directly attribute $485,000 in new business as a result of the community.  Pretty impressive.

So, that’s the “R” of ROI, but what’s the “I”?  The blog entry and video interview do not reveal this number, which is unfortunate, because it makes the story incomplete.

It’s reasonable to assume the cost of establishing and maintaining the community was less than what seems to be a substantial return.  But that’s an assumption.  We were involved in project of this nature that had an 8-figure budget, so you can’t assume ROI without knowing both parts of the equation.

Which makes this a difficult ‘case study’ to repeat as an example of success since every decision-maker will always have ROI on their mind.

If I ever uncover the missing piece to this ROI story, I’ll update it here.

So you can set up the fanciest tools available, but it doesn’t replace, or as the ARF found, even reflect what is actually in most peoples’ minds.  Tools won’t give you “the answer”.

Any of us in social media have observed several ‘bubbles’ over the past few years, or the latest shiny object from industry pundits. Micro-blogging, popularity rankings, personal presence, ROI, etiquette, you-name-it have all become the must have/do’s at one time or another.  Of course, “the conversation” has been one of them, which in turn, spawned the condescending phrase “you have to join the conversation”.

As a result, techniques and tools now flood the market to fill the monitoring need.  But interpretation of this online “ocean of opinion”, as Advertising Age puts it, has some, but limited value.

According to “The Influentials” from the Kellar Fay Group, about 90% of the conversation and opinion, or word-of-mouth, concerning any brand is offline.  And, the correlation difficulty is that of that remaining 10%, 66% of offline opinions and online opinions just don’t match up.

The second problem, of course, is any tool’s ability to accurately determine sentiment.  The best any tool can do is roughly 50% accuracy.  Flip a coin and you’ll be just as accurate as any monitoring software.

Tools do have a place in the online monitoring world, especially as early-warning systems, and also perhaps for internal functions such as legal and HR.  But tools, Advertising Age reports, cannot replace talking to people directly through such old-fashioned methods like surveys.

Imagine that.  You still have to talk to people.

The lesson here is that there are still no short cuts.  The tools are good at what they do, but they cannot, (yet) do the work for you.  They provide data, and in some cases, information.

Knowledge is still your job.

Our OASIS methodology

OASIS, like Forrester’s POST methodology, is just an expression of a process to guide what you need to do when getting into social media.  We licence OASIS under Creative Commons for free, because we suspect you will hire folks like Social Media 404 to help you with the how; how to use this type of method for organizational results.

Next week, Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, and Jeremiah Owyang from The Alitmeter Group will be hosting a free webinar, which I understand from the promotional material, will focus on the why.  I strongly suspect it will be worth the time invested.

You can find information regarding the webinar here, on Jeremiah’s blog.

Note: we are in no way affiliated with The Altimeter Group, or their principals. We are, however, not shy to point out information that is worthwhile from other service providers who share the same perspective we do: always use a measured and business-based approach to integrating social media into your organization.  Remarkably, there are not many of us out there saying that.

We, at Social Media 404, cannot place enough emphasis on the criticality of this step.  Knowledge obtained from understanding audience is the initial primary driver for strategic directions in your overall social media plan.  On more than one occasion over the past year, this type of understanding has uncovered surprising realities, and really challenged what our clients initially thought would be successful approaches.

Engage your audience, where they are, and in a way they are comfortable and capable.  That’s a cornerstone of success.

We’ve been speaking with a number of organizations over the past several years, and doing some pretty cool work with some who “get” why being socially connected is good for business.  But there are far more, who find an excuse to do nothing.

Entering 2010, we’ve rounded up the Top 7 Barriers we’ve found to social media adoption.

Authoritarian
This organization is characterized by one word:  “no”.  It may be an “I’m the boss and you’re not” type of situation, indicated by gun-shy managers and high productivity problems, or it could be a particular department (IT, HR, Communications) who can rattle off endless reasons why something should not be done, and rarely (if ever), find a reason to do anything.

Apathy
Many organizations, surprisingly, simply ‘punch the clock’.  It could be because of reasons like “it’s not my job”, or “I only have x years to retirement”, or “it’s too much work”.  Conversely, the argument can be “we’re already highly successful”.  That may be true, but have you ever come across an organization that could not improve in some way?

Transparency
A good number of organizations fear letting anyone know what they are doing.  The excuse is privacy, secrecy, and in some cases, they think it’s best not to communicate or participate for fear of overloading someone with their content and/or messages.  The more accurate reality, is they fear exposing what they are not doing.

Myopia
Closely related to Apathy, you can hear the lack of organizational vision in “We’ve always done it this way”.  These are people who thought spreadsheets or email were just ‘fads’.

ROI Inertia
“Social media case study” consistently ranks in the top 5 search terms that brings visitors to our site, and we have found that this is the most common barrier of all when we talk to people. These organizations find any change whatsoever to be too risky, unless there is previous evidence from an organization exactly like theirs to unequivocally justify taking action.  Luckily for these organizations, there are endless amounts of reports available on the internet to examine.  Unfortunately for the organization however, the conflicting percentages and bar charts can keep an army of studiers busy for years.

Control
This organization wants absolute charge of their brand/message/IT/you-name-it.  An admirable and logical principle for any organization to stand by.  However, it is unrealistic and therefore, unattainable.  No matter how careful you are, how powerful you are, how much you try, you cannot completely control other humans, and what they may or may not, say or do.  Social media may exacerbate the situation, a la the Domino’s Pizza fiasco, but all you can really control, is how you react.

Failure
Success is what we all strive for, but it does not come without understanding how to improve.  And failing is the best way of all to learn.  There are countless successful people (Henry Ford, Walt Disney, H.J. Heinz, even Abraham Lincoln) who were bankrupt before they made it.  I don’t suggest you go that far, and truly wish 2010 and beyond brings you great success, but please don’t stop moving because you may fall down and scratch your knee.

So what frame of mind should you be in to avoid being just another brick in the wall?  Here’s a fabulous post from Amber Naslund, Director of Community at Radian6 to get you started.  It addresses a few of these barriers.

Does your organization face any of these barriers?