The Social Organization

20 Years of the Web - My Take

2010-01-27T19:27:08-05:00

EMC did a great compilation of perspectives of the Web at 20 in their latest edition of ON Magazine. Len Davanna shared his thoughts and threw the gauntlet to me. It is an interesting milestone to consider because it essentially spans my adult life. In that regard I have been incredibly fortunate to sit at the cusp of a world altering technology change. It's a little like that game 'what did you grow up without'. For me, I didn't even have a TV growing up, let alone what we currently call 'devices'. My father did use a reel-to-reel recorder to capture some of my more precious childhood sayings like 'durch fried dicken' and 'I amn't' but that is really the extent to which technology seemed to evade my early life. Going back one generation, my mother grew up in a farm house in Indiana with no running water or centralized heat. I digress a bit but the technical change that I've witnessed in my lifetime and the lifetime of close relatives is astounding. Mind-boggling even. Gives me pause.

I first started using the Web (although I started using computers in the early 80s) in college to send text-based emails to a friend who was in Russia for a post-graduate year. I didn't have email access in my first job out of college but by the time I had joined a consulting firm in the mid-90s we had email and a remote connection so I learned early what it meant to work virtually, albeit on dial-up at hotel rates that would make one tear up today. It was there that I managed a section of the intranet and developed some very shoddy HTML skills. From there on out, I caught the internet software/services bug working at both an enterprise software company that built one of the new breed of online applications and at a web start-up in Silicon Valley under the tutelage of Guy Kawasaki, among others. The Web has been both good and bad for me professionally - it's opened up diverse opportunities for me and it's taken me on a roller coaster that definitely also has gone down. The experience however, has given me vast access to how the consumer and business world is being affected. Social technologies have now exposed and supercharged the fundamental architectural benefits of the Web and made those benefits available to the common person. The people of the world are now accessible to each other via a click.

But to answer more specific questions:

How has the web changed my life?

I've used it to find jobs, apartments, cars, bookclubs, used furniture, sports teams, and yes - even my husband. That's pretty much the important stuff in life, right?
The majority of my career has been in jobs or companies that could not have existed before I graduated from high school (so much for being Secretary of State)
The new business dynamic has enabled me to start a business where I don't feel like I have to rely on push marketing and sales, which I have always been a bit uncomfortable with because I feel like a good product or service should be the bedrock of a company, not the ability to coercively convince customers.

So I'm a fan.

How has the Web changed business and society?

Society and organizations function based on what they understand about themselves and what they understand about their environments. The Web has changed dramatically the speed of information flow, the reach of each individual, and the individual trust that often accompanies the information. The results are:

The ability to understand much more deeply what the environment thinks of you and of other entities.
The ability to make very quick decisions if you have a network of information suppliers whom you trust. The better you trust your network, the faster the decision making cycle.
The ability to maintain lots of weak, persistent linkages whether between friends or business partners.

You can see where this might affect businesses. The older businesses that have entrenched cultures and processes to aggregate information and make decisions are at an increasing disadvantage to those that can quickly adjust and adapt to changing conditions - whether because their employees are actually loosely tied contractors or because they can meet the changing needs of a customer base before their competitors know there is a change afoot. I termed this Information Arbitrage in an early post but Tammy Erickson also wrote an interesting post for Harvard Business Review recently called The Moment Social Media Becomes Serious Business.

I think we'll spend the next decade or more adjusting our organizations to this new information environment and those that adjust faster will win market share.

What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years?

This is always a dicey question - if I had a clue about the potential of human creativity and innovation... well, I'm not sure I'd be sitting here blogging but... I'll take a whack at this. I think the web will consist of:

Cloud-based access to almost all data, business logic, and applications.
Personalized web interfaces that account for an individual's learning style, content/data needs, workflow needs (for home & work), privacy requirements, style preferences and it will proactively deliver 'smart' content, triggers, and connections relevant to our current activity.
A wide range of smart things (furnaces, cars, retail stores, etc) that deliver data, at appropriate times and contexts, to our current interface (PC, phone, tablet, car, fridge, etc.).
Smart filtering controls that allow us to manage the flow in a way that gives us our sanity back if we want it.
Individual publishing engines that share various information automatically with others in our network, based on rules and privacy structures we define.
Organizations that feed data/content but who rely less and less on customer interfaces/websites.
A vast digital divide that causes further political rifts between those with access and those without - and the resulting, amorphic anger that goes with being disadvantaged.

It's going to be a wild ride. I'm ready!

The New Diplomats: Community Managers

2010-01-25T16:09:15-05:00

My degree is in politics and international relations. I found the power dynamics and relationships between countries fascinating and ever-changing. While I pursued a career in international relationship and government, my career path took a turn when I realized that I found working in the bowels of bureaucracy (as well as the bowels of the Pentagon) to be maddeningly inefficient and slow. But that early training in politics and power structures has been hugely helpful in understanding all types of organizations and how individuals interact - perhaps better than any other degree could have. Working with community managers has been no exception and it got me thinking recently that the emerging role of the community manager was really quite similar to that of a diplomat. Like diplomats, community managers must be skilled at:

Understanding without immediately drawing conclusions or offering solutions (i.e. excellent listening skills)
Finding resources for others
Understanding culture
Communicating often subtle concerns and issues between two or more groups
Gathering information and developing measured analysis
Influencing outcomes
Confronting situations in a constructive, non-defensive way

This thought in turn led to thinking about whether organizations other than governments should have the equivalent of the State Department. I recently caught up with John Reaves and Claudia Putnam who were also interested in this topic and we had an interesting conversation about how companies might incorporate community management more formally and whether there is a business case for something like a state department. After the conversation, I took a moment to look at the mission of the U.S. State Department. To me they are fundamentally responsible for the following:

Creating a worldwide environment in which the U.S. can prosper, through relationships and alliances
Reducing threats to the U.S., through alliances, intelligence gathering, and communication
Collaborating with others to solve externalities that cannot be addressed by one nation alone
Helping individual citizens navigate other countries

For organizations then, this mission might include:

Creating an environment whereby the organization can best prosper, through relationships and alliances
Reducing threats to the organization's growth through partnerships, intelligence gathering, and communication
Collaborating with others to build standards that reduce negative externalities
Helping employees interact appropriately with various communities

A few opportunities and issues came up when discussing this analogy:

Can the benefits of having a major community management functional group be understood and tracked enough to justify it?
How, particularly in this climate, do you convince management to fund innovative business deliver approaches like this?
Community management would need to operate at both the transactional level - helping individuals navigate various other communities and at the strategic level - building high level awareness for the organization and feeding back intelligence.
Without demarcated communities (nation-states), how would you go about defining these communities for an organization?
Having a network of embassies/ambassadors and consulates with a focus on a specific constituent group could be a good model for community management. What if each also had some responsibility for marketing, support, sales, product, and service delivery to that community? Centralized roles (similar to country desks at the State Dept.) would support other functional groups and channel back issues and directives to the embassies while embassy staff would be 'embedded' in the community to which they were assigned.
How do you convince companies to care about the history of a relationship with a constituent group and would community management own that history? It mostly gets lost today but is there a way to demonstrate its importance?
Is it important to have deep analysis and research done on each community - how do you communicate the value of that and how do you share it in a way that is accessible to those who need it?
How does community management interact with the rest of the organization? Who uses it as a resource? What specific activities and outcomes does it own? Does it have seat at the cabinet/management team level?

While the State Department model may not translate directly to business, it does give one pause. Diplomacy has been seen as an important and valuable tool for hundreds of years. Does government recognize something that business organizations do not? Or is diplomacy dead, in favor of the more transactional and measurable means of power and control - military force? Traditionally force has only been used once international situations escalate beyond the scope of diplomacy because military force has been very costly. Does this suggest perhaps that traditional sales or support models should only be used when community management fails?

Is this a model that works for you? Is it useful to consider or are there too many differences?

Inability to track ROI Does Not Absolve You from Measuring

2010-01-13T09:38:08-05:00

David Meerman Scott had an Epic ROI Rant and because he threw in some chatter about putting on pants in the morning and paying your lawn service, I feel like a lot of people missed a bigger point that he was making. Some people in the comments section of David's post were very eager to jump in and agree wholeheartedly that calculating the ROI of social marketing was like putting pants on in the morning. Mm... OK. But here's the thing - just because you can't calculate ROI is DOES NOT absolve you of the responsibility to measure your performance and try to improve it.

We measure what we do in life for a lot of reasons. We measure our children's height at regular intervals to track their progress and often compare that with their doctors' charts to make sure there is nothing wrong. We measure our weight to make sure we didn't overdue ourselves during the holidays. We track our investments to make sure we don't live in poverty later in life. We score games so we know who has won - what fun would a football game be if there weren't goals?!? It would just be a bunch of heavy guys running around in a lot of padding, beating each other up. Measurement is used for a variety of purposes - to:

Understand
Experiment
Align expectations
Improve
Track progress
Assess fit
Compare
Win

If we don't measure - we are just a bunch of football players without a way to score... running about aimlessly. And while that may be fun for a bit, it leaves us a bit dissatisfied over time. In organizations it is disastrous because measurement is used to communicate what we are striving toward, understand when we've succeeded, and ensure we are making progress - collectively.

There are all sorts of measurements that are not financial that can be used to track progress and performance but the enduring fact of business and life also remains: we cannot spend more than we make over a period of time so... financial measurements must be part of the mix. How you track financial measures and over what period depends on how direct or indirect you expect the results of your business initiative are.