The Summer Olympics are very special. Every four years, for over two weeks, people all over the world (even those who are not normally sports fans) spend hours every day engrossed in the innermost details of dozens of sports—at home, at work, at school and at play.

However, in 2012 the IOC had opportunities never seen in any prior Summer Olympics…

This year was not just the first Summer Olympics since social media, multi-media mobile phones, and smart phone (and tablet) apps have become the ubiquitous means that over a billion people use to find and share information, opinion, photos and video globally—and instantly. It was also the first Summer Olympics since the rise in use of Open Data Platforms and Apps Competitions to tap the innovation of thousands of people to create better ways to access information (without adding the cost and complexity of hiring thousands of designers, developers and testers).

The IOC could have taken advantage of this by doing four things:

• Creating of an open data platform for access to all data (back to 1896) on events, medals, schedules, athletes, scores, etc. along the likes of NYC Open Data, Data.gov, the German Open Data Set and San Francisco Open Data
• Establishing deals with traditional media to make metadata-tagged, embeddable video and audio available for widely and easily use in Apps
• Writing a social media policy that advocated (rather than limited) sharing on-the-spot comments, updates, photos and videos—promoting event, sport, country and perhaps even athlete hashtags to make social media data easier to find and use
• Launching an Olympic App Competition along the likes of NYC Big Apps, Apps for Development, Apps for Climate Change, Apps4Africa and so many others.

If the IOC had done this they could have created the biggest, most exciting Open Data and App competition we have ever seen. Not only would this have tapped into the innovation of tens of thousands of developers, it would have harnessed competition between teams who wanted to highlight the technology strength of their countries, their love of their country’s history and culture, and their passion for the athletes representing them in their favorite sports.

Imagine what kind of Apps this global technology could have created:

• Apps written by ex-gymnasts that combined athlete bios and explanations of events and rules with (official and fan) video of preliminary rounds and the World Championships. Apps that even let the audience score what they saw in real-time.
• Apps combining location-based data with captured photos and video along the entire 26-mile, 385-year course of the marathon, letting you play back key parts of the race, see every part of the course at once, and cheer on runners via Facebook and Twitter
• Fantasy Olympic Team apps that let you assemble your own dream team for events and compete with your friends—or globally in the Olympic spirit
• Training gamification apps that let you record and visually display your running and swimming times (like Nike’s training apps) to understand in new ways the tremendous the speed, strength and endurance of Olympians

AT&T’s Rethink Possible Ad: Imagine if the swimmer did not have to write down the new record (and instead an App logged his times and showed them again every record Olympic Record—and every qualifying round—back to 1896)

Apps like these would have made these Olympics more interactive and participatory than any in history. While we did not get this in 2012, I am keeping my fingers crossed for a 2014 Sochi Winter Apps Competition, and perhaps an even 2016 Rio Summer Apps competition.

Last week Paul Berry, former CTO of the Huffington Post, launched his new Rebel Mouse social aggregation service. My first reaction was, “Oh great! Just what I need, another social media service.” However, as I like to keep abreast on new technologies and platforms can change how we work and live, I thought I would check it out.

I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

A Bit of an Epiphany

I wasn’t surprised by Rebel Mouse’s feature set (although it is quite rich: not only can you aggregate social streams, you can add posts, invite contributors, and analyze all of your traffic—giving you a new blogging and publication option beyond Tumbr, WordPress and SquareSpace). What I was surprised by was a more visceral reaction:

Rebel Mouse took my social media stream and made it much easier to grok.

One Dimension Is No Longer Enough

Twitter greatest strength, its simplicity, is also a weakness. Twitter’s one-dimensional, time-based streams tend to get overwhelmed by noise-of-the-day. Step back through someone’s Twitter stream and you will see clusters of Tweets about Yammer, then Tweets about the Facebook IPO, then Tweets about Instagram, etc. Even worse, the stream consists almost entirely of fonts of single size (only using color to differentiate hyperlinks).

Facebook’s Timelines improve on this by adding inline photos and videos, expanding upon the amount of text you have, etc. However, it is still a one-dimensional (time-based) stream. Tumblr is the same (albeit prettier).

These approaches present information in a way that requires a lot of conscious effort to consume. This was fine when social media services were small. However, it not scalable to size of social networks today.

Rebel Mouse: Moving Beyond One Dimension

Rebel Mouse, does not just aggregate your content; it presents it in way that makes it easy for others to subconsciously consume. This is not only achieved by its use of the Masonry layout (now better known as the “Pinterest-style UI”). Rebel Mouse adds some clever UI design elements that let you easily—and instantly—understand the topic of the post, see what you added social content, and differentiate this from comments, shared source material, etc.:

This takes what the best of what people love about Twitter (simplicity) with Pinterest (visual browsing) and Tumblr and WordPress (blogging and analytics) and puts them together in a single package. This looks simple, but it is BIG accomplishment. The value is clear: If I wanted someone to rapidly and easily get a perspective on what interests me, I would recommend they first go to the my Rebel Mouse page (rather than my other of my social media pages):

What Comes Next

In the “Post-Facebook IPO World” it is now more important than ever to ask what comes next (and how this creates business value). An obvious way Rebel Mouse can make money is charge users for value-add services: vanity domains for individuals, pages for corporations, expanded analytics, eCommerce integration, etc. It looks like most of these are already on Rebel Mouse’s (publicly-disclosed) radar.

However, the foundation Rebel Mouse has achieved (i.e., subconsciously consumption of mass content from multiple streams) opens two additional doors.

1. It could create a fantastic Discovery Service. Imagine an easy-to-consume Rebel Mouse page aggregating content on a specific business topic (e.g., mobile), products, or even personalities. I am pretty sure I would subscribe to and read many such pages, many times each day to discover new information.
2. It could create an exchange to deliver incredibly relevant ads. Furthermore, these ads would be more valuable than other socially driven ads as you are much more likely to be in a purchasing mindset if viewing a business topic, product or personality page, than your are if you are just checking in on your friends.

It will be great to see these and other services come to fruition. Until then, I recommend requesting a page and grabbing your name—before someone else does.

If you have not heard, Facebook’s Timeline for brand pages has arrived. If you are managing a brand page, you can already setup a Timeline-based page, previewing and editing it as much as you want before pushing it out “live” for the rest of the world to see. (If you have not started to do this yet, you might want to soon, as Facebook will automatically convert all brand pages to Timeline-based pages on March 30.)

Some brands are complaining about this change (just look at the comments on any article writing about this change). However, others have already embraced the new format. One that has really stood out (to a “news junkie” like me) is the new Facebook page of NBC’s Meet The Press. It lets visitors visually browse a 60-year timeline of the major news events that have defined three generations of US history—letting them delve deeper into items of interest by viewing, sharing and commenting on videos and read stories.

What struck me most while perusing Meet The Press’s new page is that the Facebook Timeline is a great format to connect to others by telling an interactive story. It combines elements of Facebook, Blogs, Twitter and Tumblr. You can scan across time, dive down into areas that attract your interest, watch videos, read stories, share information with others—and exchange comments with a community of 800+ million members—all without leaving a single “infinite” page This is very different exploring a traditional website, disruptively different

So, what should you do over the next three weeks if you have not figured out how you want to convert your brand page to the new Timeline format? Use the Timeline to tell your brand’s story. This is fantastic is you are a non-profit: it lets you tell how you have achieved your mission so far—and what more there is to do. It is just as good for personalities: entertainers can share the evolution of their work—and the resulting accolades of their fans—over time. It is great for larger brands, letting you show how their products have been part of our lives for decades—take a look at Coca Cola’s page for a great example. It even works for small businesses and startups—we often hear from news organizations advice those who want to gain coverage, “Don’t give us a press release, tell us a story”—the Facebook Timeline lets startups and SMEs tell their stories.

It will be quite interesting to see what new brand pages emerge over the next few weeks and months as the Facebook Timeline rolls our worldwide. It will be even more interesting to look back in ten years and see how these pages have captured moving snapshots of our society with Likes and comments: just imagine what it would have been like to explore a Rolling Stones Timeline page from the 1960s to today.

PS – At Oulixeus, we aim to practice what we advocate. We invite you to explore (and Like) our new Oulixeus Facebook Timeline page

Facebook has the potential to become the “marketing platform of the decade” used by all types of organizations (e.g., small business, enterprise, non-profits) to engage their customers:

1. At over 800 million members, it has the widest reach of any network in history (i.e., nearly all of your customers are on Facebook). Facebook Connect lets you tap this network in one click.
2. Just as important, Facebook has become ubiquitous in people’s lives. Uses spend more time on Facebook than the next four most popular domains combined (i.e., Facebook is the fastest way to share a message with your customers).
3. Best of all, the network effect of Facebook incentivizes people to use true information for identification (i.e., Facebook combines the accuracy of “traditional” paid subscription direct marketing data with the timeliness of online interaction.)
4. Finally, Facebook provides organizations easy-to-use tools to set up pages, access customer data, and analyze trends (tools good enough to potentially displace many enterprise solutions for campaign management and CRM analytics).

The One Feature Holding Back Marketing Platform Dominance

This four-way combination should make Facebook the dominant marketing platform – for small businesses, large enterprises, and non-profits alike. However, Facebook lacks one critical feature to achieve this: providing business customers the ability to geographically target (“geo-target”) ‘Wall’ content (news, videos, status updates, etc.). As a result, businesses using Facebook Pages to reach customers are forced to select from three Hobson’s Choices: 1) spam customers with irrelevant content, 2) reduce content to the least common denominator or 3) fragment their membership across multiple pages. Let’s look at three examples:

1) Large Business Example: International High-end Grocery Chain

A particular high-end grocery chain (I frequent almost daily) makes extensive use of Facebook for customer outreach. However, their stores have different inter-regional needs (based on climate and culture) and intra-regional needs (based on inventory). To manage this, this company uses dozens of different Facebook Pages: one at each country level and one for each individual store. This significantly fragments their reach as their customers are forced to locate and ‘Like’ many different pages (something annoying at best and unlikely to occur at worst).

2) Small Business Example: Specialty Recruiting Firm

A colleague of mine runs a small specialty recruiting firm for the software industry that connects companies and candidates at two levels: he shares job postings to attract candidates and he shares candidate credentials to attract companies. He does this nationally, across many metropolitan markets. To manage this in Facebook, he has to share all information with all fans, forcing him to span customers with data that more often-than-not does not interest them. As a result, many of his fans have ‘hidden’ his feeds, making Facebook less useful to his business and his customers.

3) Non-Profit Example: Nationwide Animal Rescue Organization

I used to be a ‘Fan’ of a nation-wide animal rescue group that uses social media to call animal-lovers to help animals in desperate need. However, nearly all of this assistance is local (e.g., can someone foster this cute dog in ‘City X’ before in the next 48 hours before it is put to sleep?) As a non-profit, the organization does not have the resources to manage separate Facebook Pages for each metro area. As a result, they send appeals to help for every animal in every location to every Fan. This presents Fans the choice of being bombarded with animals they cannot help (incredibly disheartening) or hiding the feed (inhibiting the organization’s mission).

Geo-targeting is the Answer

Allowing Business Pages to geo-target Wall posts would solve the problems all three of these organizations are facing:

• Customers of the high-end grocery chain would be able access to global, regional, and local information (for every nearby store) by just following one page.
• The owner of the recruiting firm could target candidates and job offers by geography, something of growing importance in today’s harder relocation market.
• The non-profit would be able to offer those who animals the ability to provide urgent help without feeling “guilty” about circumstances they are powerless to change.

The changes enabled by geo-targeting are not trivial; they are transformational. They turn a flood of mostly-irrelevant noise into tailored stream of highly pertinent information. Customers are more likely to read updates (instead of ‘Hiding’ them), leading to higher engagement (and sales). Even better, the benefits of geo-targeting grow as more organizations use them: customers are bombarded with less noise from each page, making them both happier and more likely to read the Wall Posts of many Business Pages. (It is not surprising that the use of Geo-targeting on social networks creates positive externalities, thanks to network effects.)

This may sound like hyperbole, but there is a precedent for it: Internet advertising. Before the rise of context-targeted advertising, Internet companies bombarded users with display, popup and pop-under adverts to drive as much display inventory revenue as possible. It took companies like Google to show that reducing how much you showed customers (based on location and behavior) would actually increase engagement (and revenue). Facebook has the opportunity to take this to an entirely new level, leveraging their power of their Wall and their real-time access to highly accurate demographic and location data.

Why? The endorsements of friends mean more

Granted, no one had built yet technology that lets you smell and hear what your friends are doing. However, social media—especially Facebook and Twitter—have come up with widely used ways to see what your friends share online. This is really important for commerce because of a particular fact: you are 9x more likely to buy, view or using something recommended by a friend than you are something recommended by a reviewer you do not know (even a professional reviewer). Seeing a friend Tweet, Like or Recommend something he or she just bought online is more likely to cause you to take a look than any advertisement. This is why social media, when used correct, can generate so much ROI.

How? Reward generosity with generosity

Social media brings new power to an old-fashioned value: generosity. It rewards those who are generous and penalizes those who are greedy. If you keep this in mind, you can design a really nice experience that encourages your customers to share the fact they bought your product with their friends:

Step 1: Make the buying experience a good one

If you want people to endorse their experience buying your product, make the experience a good one. If you don’t, not only will your customers not endorse you, the also will complain about you (e.g., “your name” followed by “#fail”).

Make the buying experience intuitive, fast, reliable and safe. Take a look at Apple, Amazon and Zappos for examples.

Step 2: Ask your customers (politely) to endorse you

When you customers are checking out, offer a box that asks them if would please share with their friends (on Twitter or Facebook) that they bought your product. Yes, actually ask, and, yes, use the word “please.” People are much more likely to be generous if you are polite to them; they are much more likely to help if you ask and indicate how much you will appreciate it.

Step 3: Offer to be generous back

If you are going ask your customers to be generous to you, you should offer the same. In addition to indicating how much their endorsement will mean to you, offer to do something for them. Ask your customers if they would like you to Mention them (in a Twitter or Facebook post) or Follow/Friend them in return for their endorsement. This achieves two things: 1) it rewards them and 2) it connects you to them to enabling all the benefits of Social CRM. This type of offer will likely attract those who use social media the most—in a way that they like.

Step 4: Make this really easy

Don’t complicate things by making people pick from a huge list of social media widgets, share their user name and password, etc. Let people ‘click’ if they want to “Login with Facebook” or “Login to Twitter” to endorse you. This usually takes one or two clicks at most and is familiar and proven. Yes, this ignores all those other networks. However, concentrating on Facebook and Twitter gives you 80+% of the social media benefit with <20% of the work and complexity.

Step 5: Don’t abuse this

If you got this far, you have won a loyal customer. Reward this loyalty with the occasional promotion that includes special discounts. Don’t reward it with spam or hard sells.  If you don’t follow Step 5 you will regret it (your most social media vocal customers will let you know this).

Will this become the norm?

1. Your members must easily see more value from maintaining connection on your network than the time and effort required
2. Your company must be able to realize higher revenue from these connections than it costs to operationally support them

If you achieve the first point, your network will organically grow quickly through word-of-mouth. If you achieve the second, you will realize value from this growth. When you combine both together you tap Metcalf’s Law to generate valuations that grow geometrically, becoming a Social Networking King.

Applying this to today’s Social Networking Kings

Looking at today’s leading social networks through the lens of Net Connection Value explains why they are so large and valuable:

Twitter

Many have questioned the value of Twitter: some love it; others simple do not “get” it. Regardless of how you feel about it, Twitter is the King of Low Cost Networking. It currently has an estimated value of almost $7 billon.

From the member’s perspective, connecting with others (and maintaining these connections) requires the minimum amount of effort possible (i.e., one click). As such, the value I obtain from perusing a Twitter stream, even if it is minimal, comes at no cost to me. This has fuelled explosive growth.

From Twitter’s perspective, the cost to maintain each member’s simple profile and the sharing of 140-character messages is also about as low as one can get (just compare it to the cost of hosting and sharing videos on YouTube). The trick is focusing on extracting revenue from this low cost—something Twitter is doing more of these days.

Facebook

Everyone focuses on Facebook’s sheer size. However, Facebook is the King of Personal Connections. It is the most valuable social network in the world, valued at up to $70 billion on the secondary market.

When you ask people why they are on Facebook, they talk about how much it does for them: it makes it easy to keep in touch with friends, share pictures, etc. Thanks to the Social Graph, it is just easy to use Facebook to share things of interest you find on the Internet with your friends. To most, the value of Facebook greatly exceeds the effort required (and associated privacy risks). This is why it is so big.

This size is critical to Facebook’s success. The cost of maintaining so many images, posts, etc. is not cheap. However, Facebook is now so large that it is sitting on one of the most valuable—and exploitable—demographic data sets in the world. This provides enormous selling power for advertising and eCommerce. As Facebook continues to grow, its profits will grow geometrically (a simple expression of Metcalf’s Law). However, if it shrinks one day…

LinkedIN

LinkedIN is the King of Professional Connections. Three years ago it became my primary Rolodex. It has filed for an upcoming $170-million IPO, which would give it a $2 billion valuation.

People join LinkedIN because it gives them immediate value at virtually no risk. With minimal effort they get low-level advertising of their professional background (and can maintain low cost connections with colleagues they meet). Increasing their activity brings higher rewards, from outreach by headhunters to demonstration of “thought leadership” on professional groups.

LinkedIN’s has taken great proactive steps to extract as much value for cost from its members and their connections. Its data is highly structured, enabling very targeted searches. This is good for advertisers, recruiters, sales professionals and anyone seeking a job. This has given LinkedIN pricing power to charge for higher-fidelity searches, targeted advertising and job postings.

Groupon

Groupon is the King of Social Commerce. More specifically, it uses social networking to make real-life shopping networks easier and more efficient for all. It has been valued as high as $15 billion.

Consumers join Groupon to save money. They recruit their friends to save more money (and have fun shopping together to save). Businesses join Groupon to sell more of their existing inventory (if they have excess inventory, they have a clear reason to join; if not, they have no need). The value of Groupon to members is as clear as it gets: it’s all about money.

The cost mechanics of Groupon’s technology infrastructure more closely matches that of a commerce platform than a social network (i.e., the revenue it obtains from each transactions is far, far greater than its cost). It simply needs to get large enough (something it has already done) for this revenue to pay for its underlying capital investments. This is a very clear financial model for investors.

What is interesting about Groupon is its human network: it relies on thousands of employees to find sellers and close deals. On the negative side, this is labor-driven cost; on the positive it is a huge barrier to competitors (and a proven financial model). Again, Groupon’s size wins out (due to Metcalf’s law). Of course, the way to beat this is to add social networking to an existing sales network with existing connections…that is another post.

And the Social Networks Who Would Be King

Similarly the Net Connection Value concept explains why other social networks have failed to create similar value:

MySpace. MySpace is Facebook “gone wrong.” It targeted the wrong demographic, leading most to question the value of joining it. This led to smaller size and lower ability to extract value from connections between its members. It is now selling for 15 cents on the dollar.

YouTube. YouTube is an interesting idea. However current technology infrastructure costs are enormous. So far, it is still struggling to achieve profitability. However, I would bet that Google is the company who can eventually make costs low enough to extract search value from its content.

Flickr. I use Flickr so I can share pictures beyond my circle of Facebook friends. However, to most people Flickr is a specialist provider of a service Facebook already provides—without the need to sign up for an administer yet another login. Many are asking if Yahoo! will eventually disband Flickr.

Delicious. I was an early Delicious user. However, I have not added a bookmark in over a year. It too, is a specialist service that Facebook already provides—with one-click—through the Social Graph. Yes, Delicious provides better organization. However, to the average user the effort is not worth the benefit. The future of Delicious is also in play.

White Label Social Networks. Since 2005, many companies have strived to create their “own Facebooks, YouTubes and Twitters” for their employees, partners or customers. Their small size and focus makes them victims of Metcalf’s Law—when it was free, the average Ning network had less than 10 people. To combat this, they need to focus their perceived value as high as possible—and to relentless focus on business returns that outweigh their costs. Some have done this; others have not.

How did a company like Groupon create 100x the investor value so quickly? It was not simply second-mover advantage (i.e., building a better network). Instead it focuses on social networks as a “means” to creating value, not an “end” in itself.

Moving social networks from an ‘end’ to a ‘means’ of doing business

When talking about social networking, social media, Web 2.0, etc., a lot of people fall into the trap of citing Metcalfe’s Law, that the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of connected members. Under this assumption, a social network with 42 million active monthly users (e.g., MySpace) would be roughly 7x more valuable than one with 16 million (e.g., Groupon).

Obviously, this assumption does not hold. The reason why is simple: the value of all network connections is not the same. On the top line, a connection that drives commerce purchases generates much more revenue than one that simply increases advertising click-thrus. On the bottom line, a connection that only communicates 140 text characters costs much less to deliver than one that streams video.

Thinking about this from the start

This provides a valuable lesson when using social media to create value:

1. Don’t just focus on the number of members (or connections between them)
2. Instead, focus on maximizing the net value of the connection between members: not just your revenue minus cost, but also the value your members perceive of the connection vs. the effort required to maintain it
3. If you do this, your members (and partners) will organically grow (because they value your network)

Combined, “large numbers of connections” X “large value per connection” = “large network value”.

This is why Groupon created so much value so quickly. It is also a lesson to those who will take through social media the next stage of the technology adoption life cycle: focus on using social media as a means to connect and create value, not just an end in itself.

GeoCities let people develop and publish pages about themselves. It developed many of the technologies intrinsic two Web 2.0. It was one of the Top 5 destinations on the Internet. Its users were deeply loyal to its online community…

My first Facebook Page (1995)

So could it have become what Facebook has become—a decade (i.e., five software generations) earlier? No, it could not.

The reason has nothing to do with technology. (While Facebook is leveraging many new web and mobile advances to grow like mad, the core technologies required for online social networking were available in the 1980s.) The reason has nothing to do with the management team at GeoCities. (They were brilliant and forward thinking.) The reason has nothing to do with the idea of a “Facebook” either. (For decades, Harvard has been printing these to let people network when they arrive on campus.) The reason is entirely societal.

Social networks are about connecting people (they have been around forever). The rise of online social networks over the past N years (where N is: five, if you count the first billion-dollar valuations; three if you count analyst coverage; and one, if you count making a movie about it) could not have occurred until two elements about how society uses and views the Internet were firmly in place…

First, Internet access had to become truly ubiquitous

In 1999, the Internet was still considered a new technology to non-techies (even though it had been around for decades). For most people it was an extremely complicated activity; one that was slow and prone to failure. (Remember this horrible sound?)

It took an additional 5-10 years (depending on where you lived) for Internet access by millions of everyday people (i.e., techies and their aunts and grandparents) to become as easy as using the television or telephone. Until the Internet became a dependable, always-on utility for everyday people, the online social explosion could not have occurred.

Second, everyday use of the Internet had to become pervasive across generations

In 1999, most people did not dial-up and log in to the Internet daily, let alone several times each day to seek or share information (except techies). For most people, accessing the Internet was still considered a special activity, not an everyday one.

Now every generation uses the Internet (most several times every day). People under age 25 do not even remember life without it. Grandparents share vacation photos with their grand kids. Churches use the Internet to coordinate activities and fund-raising. Until seeking and sharing information on the Internet became pervasive to the everyday lives of all generations, online social media would never have explored beyond early adopters.

The Great Social Media Die-Out (Credit meish.org)

This takes nothing away from the achievements of today’s social media leaders

While the time is finally right for social media, it does not mean creating a successful online social network is easy. Many have tried and failed. Only a few leaders have become the social media equivalents of ABC, NBC and CBS (or Coke and Pepsi, or Ford, GM and Chrysler).

Even with a range of products this broad, I have repeatedly found seven attributes that separate winning collaboration products (i.e., products people choose – or even demand – to use) from also-rans:

1. Intuitive: Pass the “no instructions needed” test

To foster collaboration a product needs to be truly intuitive. The best way to measure this is with the “no instructions needed” test: if you can put the product in front of any intended user (i.e., your target market) and they can understand enough to explore and use it on your own, you have passed. If not, you have failed: over time people will say your product is too hard to use (and will use it only when forced to do so).

2. Easy: Complete key activities in three clicks or fewer

Collaboration and convenience go “hand in hand.” If your product takes too much effort to use, people will not use it to collaborate. Based on lots of user feedback the hurdle for convenience is three clicks. If something takes more than three clicks to do, it is too complicated. If you can get to what you need in three clicks or less, you have a winner. If your product cannot, one of your competitors will find a way to do and take your market.

3. Convenient: Eliminate work; do not add to it

This is one I am seeing many people forget lately. To make work easier, and drive organic demand, your product needs to eliminate work. It needs to align with the work activities people do as part of their everyday job and remove time, activities and/or systems. If it just “adds another system people have to use (and cut-and-paste from)” it is adding work and will (at best) be a passing fad that will fall out of use.

4. Fast: Pass the “Two x 95-p” test

One of the things that the Internet and broadband have done is raise expectations for speed and response. Watch a person click a button (a browser, a smart phone, a TV electronic programming guide, etc): if response does not take less than two seconds (95% of the time or more), the product will be considered slow and exasperating. This is even truer for enterprise systems that people are required to use to perform their job. You need to be fast—and consistently fast.

5. Ubiquitous: Operate everywhere and anywhere

The whole reason to use a collaboration product is to let people who are not sitting right next to each other collaborate with ease. This means your product must work everywhere and anywhere—passing both the “no instructions needed” and “two by 95p” tests. This is not a trivial demand. However, it is essential. If you do not believe me go to one your international offices or mobile team members and try to collaborate using main office-oriented products.

6. Timely: Collaborate from the same data, at the same point in time

There is an old joke about asking six blindfolded people to touch different parts of an elephant and tell you what it is: one thinks it is a tree trunk, one a fire hose, etc. The same is true for collaboration products: if you are working from out-of-date data you are wasting your time. (If you don’t believe me, think about the last time you responded to an email in a chain only to find out minutes later that your response was out-of-date or irrelevant). Winning collaboration products let everyone work from the same data, at the same point in time.

7. Trusted: Provide utility-class reliability

Collaboration occurs all the time (often at unpredictable times). Collaboration is not “down for maintenance.” If people cannot count on a collaboration product to be there, they will not use it (because they cannot trust it). They will find other tools: saving documents to local disk, writing things down on paper to enter them later, sending them via email, etc. Winning collaboration products are “always-on.” Always-on does not equal 99% reliability; it requires 99.99% reliability or more (Would you use your credit card in public if it failed one percent of the time?)

Why did I pick seven attributes (and not ten)? Ten would be artificial. These truly are the attributes I have seen over and over trip up otherwise good collaboration products and set the winners apart from others (regardless of market or industry).

As a result, when people opened their new PCs on Christmas Day, they could get online and begin communicating with their friends and family in a single click. (We called this OOBE, pronounced oo-bee; short for Out-of-box Experience.) At peak, this produced 90,000 new registrations in a single day (back when registrations included collection of payment information and real-time authorization of ongoing payment streams of $19.95 per month.)*

I wonder, with the advent of free services that do not benefit as much from affiliate bundling, if the same will be true this year for Social Media. Will Facebook and Twitter see spikes of registrations and activity on Christmas (with many messages withing friends and loved ones a happy holiday)? Or will most people spend the day in real-world social networking: spending face-to-face time (and speaking the telephone) with friends and loved ones?

It will be curious to look at Alexa stats for Facebook and Twitter next month to see how they do tomorrow:

If they do badly, it may be time for them to setup affiliate marketing programs to help people who buy PCs (and Macs) connect with Social Media as soon as they boot up.

Enterprises routinely start with a top-down approach

Enterprises traditionally employ top-down approaches when defining standards, policies and procedures. This is natural and unsurprising as the majority of enterprises are hierarchical entities.

Top-down approaches are great at driving compliance

Top-down approaches are very effective when the goal is to prevent outliers and discrepancies. Their use is ideal when you want to drive adherence to things like plans and regulatory compliance.

However, top-down approaches are counter-productive to encouraging creativity

Creativity is not something you can drive on demand, from the top downward. Have you ever tried to order a team to be creative according to a plan? If so, did this produce the results you desired? Likely not. Creativity needs to be encouraged, not driven.

Social media requires a bottom-up approach

Social media is inherently non-hierarchical. It creates a “flat” network that enables all members to participate in the same way, regardless of level, time or location.

Social media results develop along embryonic lines

Social media-based creativity follows a rather organic approach.  Members initially join social media networks and share information about topics of personal concern or interest. Members with similar interests then link together to collaboratively develop initial thoughts into fleshed-out Ideas. These more complete Ideas then compete with the Ideas of others for attention and support. Those that “rise to the top” attract increased interest and collaboration, resulting in fully-vetted solutions to problems or unmet needs. While the social media community has coined worlds like “crowdsourcing” and “wikification” to describe this process, it is essentially embryology at work (albeit embryology of Ideas).

Embryology works from the bottom-up, following local rules

Embryology forms rich, complex works from simple beginnings by following a bottom-up process. Richard Dawkins, elegantly described the power of this on page 220 of his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth:

Dawkin’s major point is that you will obtain richer, more robust results by defining bottom-up, local rules for the evolution of Ideas (instead of driving them top-down from a master plan or policy).

Many examples of this exist throughout the technology world

Bottom-up self-assembly of robust, complex systems through use of local rules is not simply confined to the biological world. Some of the most successful expansions of technological change were built on the same approach. Just take a look at everything from Internet routing and open source technologies to Google’s Page Rank algorithm and Apple’s iPhone application development model.

Creating a social media policy based on bottom-up principles

Using bottom-up, locally followed rules to develop a Social Media Policy looks very different in structure than a traditional top-down policy.

Below is an outline of sample rules (and how they would locally execute throughout a social media ideation process) that I would initially consider to develop an effective Social Media Policy. For simplicity’s sake my unit is an Idea. An Idea could be a plan, policy, design, rule, product or anything else you can imagine.

A) Define the stages of ideation

Define what stages a collaborative idea should pass through from a root concept to completion. This is the skeleton for all other local rules. An example:

1. Brainstorming of Ideas to consider
2. Competition of Ideas to see which should be elaborate upon
3. Elaboration of Winning Ideas into a critical level of detail
4. Editing of Elaborated Ideas to a Released State

Once Ideas are Releases they become subject for further Brainstorming efforts to adapt them to changing business conditions (evolution at work).

B) Define the allowed actions at each stage

Define what staff can do to an Idea at each Stage. For example, staff can—

• Create or delete Ideas during Brainstorming
• Vote, share (internally) or comment on them during Competition
• Add or remove whole Idea Components during Elaboration
• Refine existing Idea Components (only) during Editing

Limiting what can be done at each stage provides just enough organization to reduce chaos and encourage productive collaboration. Brainstorming is all done in one place. You do not waste time fleshing out Ideas until they proceed through the Competition Stage. Similarly you focus on Elaborating upon and Editing late-stage Ideas (instead of chaotically replacing them with an unexplored, pre-Brainstormed half-Idea).

C) Define the transitions between each stage

Define what conditions triggers movement of an Idea from one stage to another (forward or backward). By defining the conditions you let the network act without requiring extensive oversight. Samples for movement out of Competition could include the following:

• When an Idea gets enough votes it moves into Elaboration
• When an Idea gets flagged as offensive or disruptive enough times it moves back to Brainstorming

D) Define who can see what at each stage

For example, only I would be able to see my Idea until I advance it for Competition. Once this occurs, only My Organization would be able to see and vote on it until it reaches a particular threshold (or is approved by the Organization Leader)

This type of rule set encourages two things. First, it enables edge-condition “long tail” idea creators to participate. Second, it makes department heads feel safer encouraging their employees to ideate and collaborate.

E) Define who can do what to an idea at each stage

For example—

• Only I may be able to edit my Idea in Brainstorming
• Only my department Colleagues (i.e., my friends) may be able to add or remove Components of an Idea in Elaboration
• While everyone can refine Idea Components in Editing

The first rule protects the individual and encourages Ideation. The second protects the Department, encouraging the Department Head to allow social media-based Ideation. The third protects the mission or the enterprise (and can even ensure regulatory compliance).

These rules are just a brainstorm to start

These Rules are only Ideas at the Brainstorming stage. They require a full cycle of collaboration to see which win out and which do not. (After all, defining these as the rules for social media and collaboration would be Top-Down thinking.)

Don’t Leave Your Community Detached

As I stated on the first post in this series, you business community is one of many channels within which you will interact with your customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders. If you do not recognize this fact and simply create a standalone community, you will only create a place where your stakeholders socialize. While this is nice, it will not create a large return on your investment (more often than not, it will not provide any return).

If you want to maximize the return on investment in your business community, you need to embed it into the your entire enterprise.

Start With Your Core

I am a big fan of modular architecture. This model advocates that you can achieve the better results, in a more flexible manner, by picking the best technology for each problem on hand instead of trying to find one perfect system that does everything.

I recommend starting with the following core of three modules to build a “best of breed” architecture ideally positioned to exploit value from your business community:

Module 1 is Your Business Community. Its purpose is to serve as channel to attract customer interest and drive engagement. It is essentially a virtual storefront to capture the ideas, preferences and experiences of your customers in a measurable, data-driven format.

Module 2 is Your Data Warehouse. The Data Warehouse extracts the wealth of interaction and engagement from your business community and merges it with all of your other business data (e.g., customer lists, sales, supply chain data, etc.) in a format ideal for business analysis. This enables you to detect patterns and make discoveries from your community that you can use to create value.

Module 3 is Your Primary Back Office Management System. Depending on you business this could be an enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation (SFA), billing and merchandising (B&M) or even content management systems (CMS). This is where you automate your data warehouse discoveries in the format of rules for advertising, promotions, offers, sales, customer care, shipping, billing and credit.

Note: For more information, you can click here to listen to my online Webinar on Social CRM for more information as to about why this modular architecture model is better than trying do everything from a single, all-in-one platform.

Then Build Out to the Rest of Your Enterprise

Now that you have your business community integrated into your core, you easily add on every other part of your enterprise to leverage even more value from the discoveries you are making by engaging with your community members. In many cases, the much of your enterprise is already integrated with your primary back office system and data warehouse, making this extension far less daunting than it initially appears.

Here is how it works:

1. You put a Fan Page up on Facebook and a User Name up on Twitter to attract customers
2. Through these mainstream consumer networks, you redirect customers to your business community
3. Customers can view what you have to offer here freely, maximizing the number of Spectators you have
4. When Spectators want to add to the community, they can easily become Joiners (and log in) by re-using their Facebook or Twitter IDs. All of their actions as Critics and Creators of content are automatically attributed to these accounts (which already have established contact and profile information)
5. All of this (Critic and Creator) interaction is pulled into your data warehouse and joined with the rest of your enterprise data
6. Your Marketing and Business Analysts mine this data and find new opportunities to present better offers, package better products or simply explain what you do (and its benefit) in clearer terms
7. They work with your Business System teams to publish these findings in the forms of rules and workflows in your ERP, CRM, SFA , B&M and CM systems
8. These new rules and workflows automatically drive changes in your Static Web Site, Business Community, Direct Response Campaigns, Contact Centers and Sales force
9. You can capture customer feedback through all of these channels and combined it in you data warehouse with results from the your ERP, CRM, SFA and B&M systems to measure the value you have created

This creates an entire system that facilitates continuous improvement, generating over time growing understanding of your customers, employees and partners and using this to create growing value and ROI.

Smart Enterprises Have Already Shown How This Creates Enormous Returns

Tying all this together is not some imaginary view of success. Many smart enterprises have already down this. Three are highlighted below:

DELL

Dell tied a set of open communities to their every aspect of their operation. This has generating ideas for new products and product configurations, improved customer satisfaction and increased online sales.

Men’s Health

Men’s Health has fully embedded their Belly Off Community into their online content and print magazine. This has boosted online advertising revenue, increased customer loyalty and boosted magazine sales.

American Express OPEN Forum

American Express has tied their new OPEN Forum community into core entire enterprise and advertising network (even including affiliate marketing programs such as their join Shine-A-Light campaign with NBC Universal). This has created a clear value proposition for their customers leading to everything from increased card transactions to added OPEN card applications.

You Can Do This Too

This entire blog series lays out the steps to do this. If you follow it, you too can create effective communities that drive business value.