In the early morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving through downtown Los Angeles, shocked at what I was hearing on the radio, and awestruck by the police and military helicopters circling and protectively watching over the City of Angels skyline.

Like many of you, as that day progressed, I watched the news intermittently, contemplating what these events might mean for the world, our country, friends and loved ones in New York City, and my new bride and me (We had just purchased our first house the night before).

What I didn’t know until just a few days ago , is that while I was somberly working at a client site, comfortably detached from the horror of the collapsed skyscrapers, hundreds of thousands had fled away from the burning twin towers and found themselves trapped on the South side of Manhattan. In the chaos that ensued, bridges, tunnels, roads, and other public transportation were shut down. There was no way off one of the world’s most densely populated islands.

It was in those circumstances that the largest maritime evacuation in all of history took place without any previous planning, infrastructure, or dedicated staff.

Yes, this was larger than the Dunkirk evacuation (commonly known as the Miracle of Dunkirk) in WWII where 339,000 Allied soldiers (British, French, and Belgian) were rescued over the course of 9 days. In this case, over half a million people were evacuated in less than 9 hours – without any previous planning, processes, leadership, infrastructure, or dedicated staff. .

I’ve embedded the video at the bottom of this post. It is a remarkable story narrated by Tom Hanks and well worth the 11 minutes to watch it. It is a tremendous story of heroism, and the triumph of the human spirit.

I believe it also provides a powerful metaphor for the promise of social business in the context of an increasingly connected, complex, and intelligent world.

A Powerful Social Business Metaphor

While the daily triggers and challenges in most of our business lives aren’t remotely as dramatic as what happened to the twin towers that day, we DO live in a business (government, education, NGO, Ministry) climate where cycle times are increasingly compressed, and never explored frontiers of opportunity are literally emerging every few years, instead of every few decades or centuries.

It will come as no surprise that global CEOs (in the 2010 IBM Global CEO study), say that the business environment is increasingly more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and structurally different than it was before.

This is not a temporary phase, but the pace of change is accelerating.

We see the meteoric rise (and falls) of companies like Borders, MySpace, RIM (makers of Blackberry), and Nokia – companies that dominated and then were dominated their respective domains. We witness companies like Pinterest, Facebook, Groupon and Twitter emerge from nowhere to gain multi-billion dollar valuations nearly overnight.

We watch huge organizations like Proctor & Gamble and IBM morph and change much quicker than their competitors as they harness talent from within and outside organizational boundaries.

Describing the experience

The following quotes were taken from mariners who participated in the 9/11 boatlift. I can’t help but draw the analogies between these quotes and what is increasingly the case in the corporate world.

“You couldn’t have planned nuthin’, to happen that fast, that quick”

“No training. This was just people doing what they had to do that day.”

“You forget all about what you’re supposed to do – what they teach you at school…”

“Average people. They stepped up when they needed to”

Quickly organizing around a “job to be done”

In the case of the boatlift story, someone recognized a “job to be done” , and they quickly expressed a need to an anonymous group of sailors. The initiators quickly and creatively came up with an idea, shared a need, and a brief and urgent “call to action”. They had no idea who would respond, how they would respond, or what would happen next. There were probably dozens of unanswered questions.

How many can we take?
Where will they go?
How many need to leave the island?
Is there enough fuel?
How will traffic navigate the harbour?
What will happen after debarkation?

The list could go on and on with unknowns.

What was known was that there was a common need. That need was shared amongst those with a common interest (boating), in a common geography. Quickly, a critical mass of talent, passion and availability was assembled. Hundreds of available and previously unknown and disconnected resources worked together to solve a problem. And they did it with unprecedented speed.

The technology in this case was a Marine Radio. The emerging publicly available and enterprise class tools, applications and devices now allow common connections and information sharing with the whole world… or pre-defined, mutually agreed upon segments. Increasingly, these connections transcend our legacy institutional boundaries.

On a smaller scale, scenarios like what’s described above are playing out daily across geographies and other institutional boundaries.

I wrote along this exact theme in a post two years ago titled “Circles” .

The speed at which this astounding feat was pulled off would have arguably taken years to organize if abiding by traditional planning means. Conflicting schedules, conflicting priorities, political factions, process inefficiencies, human and capital resource constraints, etc.

• What if the rules/laws prevented it?
• What if all of the logistics jurisdictions needed to coordinate and meet?
• What if licenses needed to be checked and earned?
• Hard enough to coordinate across departments within one organization, what about cross-departmental collaboration?

These are the same boundaries preventing progress in organizations today.

What this story illustrates is that the facilitation and alignment of motivation, ability, and passion in the context of a self organizing community around an emergent need can be VERY POWERFUL.

Key Takeaway

First movers who can construct, facilitate, and/or nurture environments where creative resources can work quickly to harness complexity will enjoy an early advantage in the next era.

Peering further into the future, these capabilities will be table stakes for institutions of all types and sizes, in order to succeed in their respective domain for any sustained period of time.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

Last weekend I had the pleasure of introducing a movie for the first time to my 5 year old son – a movie that incidentally, I first saw when I was 5 years old.

In it, an iconic message was communicated via a channel that hasn’t quite been brought to the mainstream yet (though it seems we’re getting close).

The clip is below.

Considering the explosion of channels we have available to us now, I began to wonder “How would things have played out differently if she would have sent an email, a text, placed an intergalactic phone call, did a quick video conference, or simply waited to communicate in person?”

How would things have been different if she simply posted this message on her facebook page?
Would the response have been different on facebook if it was a video vs. text?

We could stop there, and simply consider the options, and their effect on the plot of the movie, but in the interest of time, let’s move on.

The multifaceted spectrum of human interaction

As technology advances, and communication channels expand, decision makers continue to wrestle not only with how to best leverage each channel, respectively, but how to optimize communications with their customers and prospects across an ever complicated blend of channels.

In a world where an increasing array of richer channels will become available, how will we optimize the exchange of information for the proper channel, taking into consideration the stage of the buying process, the preferences of the individual, and the desired intent, complexity, and nature of the content?

While many of us still gain comfort by placing confidence in the traditional marketing funnel, tell our sales reps to stick to the “sales process”, and check a box in our CRM system for our contact’s preferred method of communication, the reality is that human dynamics are far from linear and static. Technological advancements towards real time access to information and individuals across synchronous and asynchronous channels continue to complicate the matter even further. The line also continues to blur between our personal and professional interactions and habits.

From Joseph Walther in “The Handbook of Interpersonal Communication”

“Lore aside, technology sequences and their relational significance deserve an update: If a man takes an interest in a woman he sees in a class, he may want to scan the Web for information about her. If that search suggests potential reward, he may talk to her to establish a minimal basis of familiarity so that he can request access to her social network profile and be able to see how many friends she has, what they look like, what their comments have to say about her, and how she interacts with them in turn. If results are encouraging, a face-to-face conversation may come next, followed by a reinforcing e-mail or social network posting. Do increases in channel access signify relational escalation? Do we meet new partners’ Flickr family photo collection before we meet the parents, and why? Rather than resign ourselves to undifferentiated, massive multimodality, future research may begin to contemplate the strategic and interpersonal signification possibilities it presents as its users exploit the vast relational potentials of CMC (Computer Mediated Communication).”

This multi-channel, non-linear journey mimics how consumers and business buyers also court vendors today. What actions and interactions can be perceived as buying signals? Loyalty signals? Advocate signals? Detractor signals?

Below is a representation of a customer who makes two appliance purchases over four years, and twice shares content about it:

Image Source: MarketingProfs

While many organizations are venturing into the world of defining their customer journey and optimizing the experience by providing the relevant content for the appropriate stage, I believe these efforts can be further enhanced by beginning to overlay channel preference data across each stage in the customer journey, personalized for each recipient.

Savvy companies will be able to optimize interactions not only by providing the right content, but providing it in the most appropriate context and channel of choice for the intended audience. In other words, if fully optimized, the same content might be published to differentiated audience segments across multiple channels for optimized reach.

Make no mistake, the research and analytics to undertake such an effort would be significant. However, an unmatched customer experience leads to armies of customer advocates. Benefits associated with this type of loyalty and advocacy experience amplifier effects in a networked world.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

Wayne Gretzky is by most accounts the greatest hockey player ever. His father gave him a piece of advice that has been almost immortalized in business circles over the past several years.

“Go to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

So, where will the puck be 8 years from now? I’d be foolish if I thought I could tell you exactly, but there are an ever increasing number of data points that we can leverage to collectively map our corporate strategies. Highlights from one such data point is below.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, in a study sponsored by RICOH, surveyed 567 senior executives across industries in late 2011 on their expectations of the impact that technology will have on business between now and 2020.

The survey results highlight the reality that the general consensus amongst senior business leaders is that our future is more uncertain and up for grabs than it has been for most of the last century.

Not only do 37% of leaders surveyed believe that they won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change, but 1/3 of IT industry leaders believe their business will actually disappear in the next 8 years.

Flattening and Widening

62% of Business Leaders expect decentralization of key business functions, and most expect that customers will be the primary source of new product and service ideas, switching relatively rapidly from today’s R&D departments.

The digitization of everything is flattening out organizational structures, even beyond corporate walls. More participants are contributing to corporate efforts than ever before in roles that are still in the process of being defined, or haven’t quite yet been invented.

All images above were taken from the “How will you work in the future?” infographic.

The concepts of open innovation, crowdsourcing, and collective intelligence are growing as businesses try and leverage the collective wisdom of the crowd to compete in ever shortening business cycles.

Instead of the heavy investment in developing and retaining capabilities, a networked world provides the ability to tap “capabilities on demand” from individuals and partners. The construction of new ecosystems, networks, and flows for information, goods, and services marks the biggest challenge for business leaders for this next decade.

Perhaps one of the most interesting predictions of the study is that Mid-Size companies will be less common in 2020. From the Executive Summary:

“Mid-size companies will be less common in 2020, not least as micro-entrepreneurs proliferate. Technology advances will support a rise in micro-entrepreneurs in the decade ahead, and will enable these tiny businesses to act like far larger ones. This has direct implications for mid-size companies, which will increasingly need to choose whether to become larger to compete on scale, or smaller to compete on speed. Many will face this decision in the years ahead.”

While I generally agree with the assessment, I believe that yet a third opportunity exists, and that is for mid-size companies to potentially morph into integrated networks of smaller companies. Whether these smaller companies are separated at the entity level or not, evolving into platforms that enable integrated and dynamic value chains may be a compelling third option for today’s mid-sized organizations.

Smaller units will increasingly have the ability to leverage units of capability from complimentary goods and service providers and create value for their stakeholders accordingly.

Questions to consider

Given your vantage point, do you agree with the executives surveyed for the study?

What steps are you taking to adjust to a world where innovation cycles are shorter and more dynamic, customers are more empowered, and more of our (corporate and individual) actions are digitized and measured?

How will you balance the pressurs of executing to meet today’s requirements while preparing for an environment that might look significantly different than today’s?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Corporation.

Non-Profit.

Community.

Business.

Cause.

Platform.

Government.

The clearly defined borders that have traditionally enveloped the institutions above are blurring and we’re trying to make sense of it all. The music industry is still trying to figure out what happened. Broadcast media, newspapers, and publishing are in the midst of a dramatic reshuffling. Governments are trying to figure out what organizations like WikiLeaks really mean, and how to deal with them. Groupon and ZipCar and countless manifestations of various crowdsourcing and sharing models are flipping previously well defined economic models on their head. Chief Marketing Officers are coming to grips with the fact that their brand is truly in the hands of the market. I’ve seen projections of Facebook becoming the equivalent of its own nation in 5-7 years. There are at least two experiments of new countries; one is developing off the coast of California, and a there is a floating island making its way around Europe. Occupy Wall Street has morphed into a global distributed movement dissatisfied with the status quo.

We like definitions because they help us make sense of the world. But we’re seeing a rise in new constructs and entities and they don’t quite fit into the boxes and definitions that have helped us manage and make sense of the world around us for decades. Debates cascade and echo across multiple domains, all sounding strangely similar as leaders and industry analysts in their respective verticals try their best to accurately frame the issues upon us.

Is this simply evolution as it has always been? Is this a paradigm shift? Is this the modern version of the Dutch Tulips mania, or just a new flavor of new and improved snake oil?

Ultimately, IS THIS (whatever this is) WORTH OUR TIME AND ATTENTION?

As I watch and interact with people across different domains of my life, I see lots of different responses to what’s happening right now. Some are oblivious. Check that, many are oblivious. Some are panicked. Some don’t care. Some are focused on one narrow aspect of the bigger picture. Some are simply trying to put food on the table, pay their mortgage, and get their kids to soccer practice on time. Amongst the digerati, there are plenty waving pom-poms, singing social kumbaya, and congratulating themselves with digital ego metrics and accolades.

But, perhaps the most common scenario is that many of us have a hint of what’s happening, trying to make sense of newsbyte fragments flying past in the activity stream, but aren’t quite sure what to do, how to respond, or ultimately what any of this means for us, and the generations behind us.

What’s really going on?

Institutions are, in fact, being rewired before our very eyes. Industries and niches within them are being born, and/or being recast. While it’s easy (and important) to discuss the financial crisis of 2008, the de-leveraging of excessive debt, and high unemployment, set against the backdrop of a rapidly emerging environment of social, mobile, and cloud technologies, it’s equally or more important to recognize the additional and perhaps more foundational long terms shifts happening beneath the surface.

A team of folks at Deloitte Center for the Edge in their 2011 Shift Index highlight the sobering fact that:

“...asset profitability (Return On Assets) has shown a downward trend over the past four decades; a trend illustrating a steady decline in firm performance that not many have even noticed, much less investigated. Indeed, there continues to be a profound cognitive dissonance around this point: on one hand, we all acknowledge experiencing increasing stress as performance pressures mount; on the other hand, we seem unwilling to accept that all of our efforts continue to produce deteriorating results…

…we expect, over time, that performance will improve as firms begin to figure out how to participate in and harness knowledge flows. Doing so will require significant institutional innovations, not just changes in practices, resulting in value creation through increasing returns performance improvement.”

NY Times Columnist Thomas L. Friedman stated something similar in 2010:

We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows”

Reconsidering what we thought we knew

Not only are institutions being redefined, but even age old terms like Employee, Profit, Currency, and Capital are being reconsidered, revised, and expanded.

The digitization of everything, increased connectedness, and media innovations, by which ideas are communicated, challenged, and iterated upon are changing the fabric of our world, and how it works. Some of these changes are incremental. Some are dramatically disruptive and will change our world in ways we can’t yet comprehend.

The factors above are also paving the way for new methods of measurement. Triple bottom line measurement continues to gain traction, where corporate success is measured not just on economic profit, but also on ecological and societal impact. The switch from accountability and focus on short term shareholder profit to long term stakeholder benefit will likely continue to also reshape the “mashup institutions” of our future. A new entity type, representative of these shifts, has recently been created. B Corporations use “the power of business to solve social and environmental problems”.

Answering the pressing questions

While senior executive teams wrestle with the present mandates and realities of operating in a slowly fading industrial economy, there are a number of questions that leaders should be asking to guide existing organizations, and/or create new relevant organizations for the future.

I’ve started the list below – what else would you add?

- Who are the stakeholders who we can and do impact (in addition to shareholders)?
- How do we (co-)create value for each stakeholder group?
- What value can we realize in exchange for the value “we” create?
- What are the (new) mechanics and measurements associated with these value exchange scenarios?
- How do we gain access to new information, human, and capital resources?
- How do we harness these new resources, in combination with our existing resources to further create value for our various stakeholder groups?
- How do we structure our organization to be more adaptive and responsive to market needs in (near) real time?
- How would we perform if we were to evaluate ourselves based on Triple Bottom Line Measurement?

I suspect that for some organizations, the end result of a deep series of questions may ultimately result in the strategic creation of a new hybrid organization that straddles the boundaries of industrial age institutions…and they won’t be alone on their journey. The scope of implications on the mid-market are not different than the enterprise or small businesses. The societal changes described and the pressing questions above are equally relevant to organizations of all sizes.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

“Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust” – Peter Drucker

“Technique and technology are important, but adding trust is the issue of the decade” – Tom Peters

“Mistrust doubles the cost of doing business” – Professor John Whitney, Columbia Business School

“As you go to work, your top responsibility should be to build trust” – Robert Eckert, CEO, Mattel

“Transcendant values like trust and integrity literally translate into revenue, profits and prosperity” – Patricia Aburdene, Author of Megatrends 2010

————————————————————-

The quotes above were pulled from the book “The Speed of Trust: The One thing that changes everything”.

In the book, Steven M.R. Covey makes the argument with significant validation that establishing trust is the quickest path to success.

The economics of trust are simple

“Trust always affects two outcomes – speed and cost. When trust goes down, speed will also go down and costs will go up. When trust goes up, speed will also go up and costs will go down.”

Ponder that for a minute. In any relationship, personal or business, progress ultimately hinges on this one simple thing. When the presentation is over, when the proposal is offered, when all the due diligence and negotiations have been performed, doesn’t it ultimately rest on whether each side trusts each other to honor their stated obligations?

One could make a strong argument that the maturing customer revolt; the change in customer behavior that is driving the emergence and growth of Social CRM and Social Business has been birthed out of a general distrust of organizations, and institutions in general, for that matter.

Who the world trusts

Since the customer has lost trust in what marketers and sales people say, and since they can’t trust customer service to actually help them in a meaningful and timely way, they have moved instead to solicit 3rd party opinions about the organizations that may have a solution for them. They look to industry experts and peers for opinions, insights, and answers they can trust. This trend is expanding quickly. According to a study from Shopper Sciences, in association with Google “the average shopper used 10.4 sources of information to make a (purchasing) decision, up from just 5.3 sources in 2010.”

Edelman, one of the world’s largest and well recognized global PR firms has produced something called the “Edelman Trust Barometer” for the last several years.

In the 2012 edition, released this week, we see who the general population views as credible spokespeople – people they can trust. We see that ‘Academic or Expert’, ‘Technical expert in the company’, and ‘A person like yourself’ are bunched together in the Top 3. You’ll notice that CEOs and government officials absorbed significant hits to their collective reputation this year.

Another key finding is that social media grew significantly as a trusted information source, gaining ground on traditional media sources.

And in general, customer expectations are woefully short of being met. You’ll see in the graphic below a huge gap between what customers consider as important and how companies are performing in areas like:

• Listens to Customer Needs and Feedback
• Offers High Quality Products or Services
• Places Customers ahead of Profits
• Takes Responsible Actions to Address an Issue or Crisis

Where do we go from here?

The quick take is that TRUST MATTERS. It matters more than we think. As executives, as marketers, as sales people, as customer experience architects, and as customer service personnel, at the core of our job to create trust. Trust is the lubricant that speeds relationships and success, with people, and with organizations.

The key observations are:

- There is a significant trust void between customers and organizations
- People primarily trust experts and people like them
- People solicit lots of different opinions and tap lots of different sources when considering vendors

In the graphic below, survey participants have given us clues on how we can continue to build and deepen trust with our prospects and customers.

How do we do this?

The good folks at 1to1 Media summed it up with this tweet yesterday.

Is it just that simple?

There are a myriad of ways that organizations can respond to create trust. Content marketing, coupled with listening to and engaging customers through social channels are certainly a start. Organizations who do a great job of positioning themselves (and their employees) as experts in their field, and deeply embedding themselves within their respective communities and consistently adding value stand a great chance to do well in this shifting market.

Hiring the right folks, while establishing and nurturing a customer focused culture, and evolving internal and external communication channels and structures are all part of the equation.

The widening customer expectation gap and the pervasiveness of distrust presents a GREAT opportunity for those organizations who are able to respond in a way that resonates with their audience, as they will truly standout.

More resources

(1) Here’s a recent article by Don Peppers titled “The Only Lasting Competitive Advantage is Extreme Trust”

(2) Embedded below is the full 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer Slide Deck

Speaking at an event hosted by SugarCRM and IBM Social Business this week, I informally polled the audience.

“How many of you are NOT on facebook?” No hands were raised.
“How many of you have a twitter account?” Most of the room raised their hands.
“LinkedIn?” Most of the room again raised their hands.

I repeated the same questions, referencing the people in the room’s businesses, and a slightly smaller number of folks raised their hands, but more than half still did.

I then asked – “How many of you know what to do with them?” Giggles. Laughter. Very few hands.

This is where we collectively find ourselves. It’s representative of a number of organizations that I have the opportunity to work with and speak to.

I didn’t even think of asking if any organizations in the room had created a tactical plan to listen and engage with customers and create a seamless (and amazing) experience across multiple channels and domains. Most companies are still trying to get the fundamentals right (as Filiberto Selvas pointed out here)

It’s easy to join a social network. It’s harder to engage. What should I say? What will they think? Do I have permission?

It’s even harder to engage with a coordinated strategy and accurately measure the results of your efforts. Blend activities on the social web with what’s happening in the rest of the organization…across departments…across silos?

If we’re not even on the same page internally, how can we communicate a unified message to the world that hasn’t been careful crafted by our marketing team and the agencies that they work with?

My anecdotal observation is that many companies get here and then acknowledge that it’s just too big of a challenge to tackle…at least for now.

“If you’ve got to start somewhere, why not here? If you got to start sometime, why not now?” – Toby Mac

New landscape.
New customer.
New roles.
New communication mediums.
New expectations.
New corporate culture.
New Focus.
New Critical Success Factors.

It’s quite a bit to digest when people are trying to keep their jobs and help keep the company profitable, when they’ve already just absorbed the jobs of 1-2 people who were laid off over the past few years. However, only focusing simply on the here and now is the path to extinction.

Those who understand how these new changes are affecting their marketplace (which in most cases is larger, more complicated, and more diverse than it was just a few years ago) will be hyper-rewarded. Those who fail to admit, understand, and adjust to these rapidly evolving new realities will be destroyed, or more likely die a long, slow, painful death.

Below are a few highlights from the presentation.

FOUR THINGS TO FOCUS ON NOW

While there’s no notes or audio to the full deck, I’ve provided it below. Hopefully it provides value, and helps to stimulate some interesting conversations on the social web and for you in your respective organization(s). Interestingly, Mike Fauscette touched on many of the same themes in his blog post “Customer Service – the new Marketing in the era of the Social Customer”. It’s definitely worth a read.

One other final fascinating tidbit from the event was that I met and had a good chat with a Director of Marketing from a Silicon Valley startup. I meet and talk with plenty of Directors of Marketing. What was interesting about this one was that she said that she was actually a social anthropologist. My ears perked up. Seems like someone is paying attention. While the roles of social anthropologist and Director of Marketing may seem to be world’s apart, they’re not. Here’s a link to an article I wrote highlighting why it might be the perfect fit.

It’s fun to be part of the greatest transformation since the industrial revolution? Are you in?

Last week, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Blog World Expo appeared in its fifth incarnation.  I spent a couple of days watching, listening, and engaging with a dense concentration of experienced and enthusiastic new media evangelists.

The keynotes were well done. Peter Shankman is hilarious and gifted. Amber Naslund shared passionately and enthusiastically her observation and exaltations to the digerati to change the future of business.

However, the keynote address that arguably provided the most valuable insights and takeawys was provided by Shani Higgins, CEO of Technorati as she shared findings from Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” report.

Keynotes: Shani Higgings – State of the Blogosphere

I’ve pulled out some of the most interesting slides:

Passion, networking, and sharing are primary drivers behind what bloggers are doing, as evidenced in the slide above. One of the most interesting findings is that consumers prefer blogs for nearly every reason over news websites and mainstream media (see below). Overall, the passion and genuine pursuit of the interests of bloggers creates more trust and is the first place consumers go to learn about what interests them.

However, instead of becoming more genuine and passionate themselves, brands seem to still be operating in a 1.0 world seeing bloggers as individuals to be leveraged for the distribution of the brand message (see below). It will be very interesting to see if the social web genuinely evolves as the platform of the empowered customer, or if the major brands once again seek to control the channel for branded information distribution – an interesting mega theme for the next decade.

 For an answer to the megatheme question asked above, you might find a clue by finding what some brands recognize “that there really is no such thing as message control”. One respondent envisions a world where “social media will act as a campaign leader, rather than a supporter”, and greater fragmentation will continue to emerge as a challenge for brands and advertisers.

The fact that only 4% of bloggers use blogging as their primary income and the average salary amongst full time bloggers is $24,000 may give pause to anyone looking to make the full time jump. However, for those who are interested in improving their blogging efforts and results, Darren Rowse offered some sage advice from one of the leaders in the blogging business.

If you’re interested in the full deck, you can find it here

Blogging from the Heart and Blogging Smart

Darren Rowse is known to many as ProBlogger. During his session, he shared a great blend of stories from personal experience, coupled with sage advice and best practices as how success in a blogger’s world comes from a perfect blend of blogging from the heart (fuel and find your passion), while also being smart enough to generate revenue and make it worth the time and effort involved.

The core theme of his presentation was that if you want to blog, or improve your blog, be passionate. He underscored his point by sharing a short anecdote from Robert Frost:

***********************

No Tears in the Writer
No Tears in the Reader

No Surprise in the Writer
No Surprise in the Reader

- Robert Frost

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The more passionate you are, the more passionate your audience will be. However, a focus on engagement, monetization, and revenue will help sustain you over the long run, as countless hours of pouring your heart, soul, and mind into anything without any tangible return inevitably leads to burnout and disillusionment.

If you treat it like a business; set goals, know your readers, build your brand, create hooks, create great products, market effectively, and continually experiment, test and tweak your approach, then there is a place for you on the widening road filled with the next generation of citizen journalists, and the barriers to entry are virtually non-existant.

“Google+ is to Facebook what Macintosh is to Windows.” – Guy Kawasaki

Bestselling authors and entrepreneurs, Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki riffed for a bit on Google+ and whether businesses and brands should spend any time there. Ironically, today (November 7) Google+ made pages available to brands for the first time. Quickly after their announcement, pages from Burberry, Dell, and The New York Times hit the network, and thousands more are springing up as you read this.

Guy Kawasaki highlighted several reasons why he believes in the future of the newest social network, and he’s placing a big bet with his time.

He highlighted one striking difference between Google+ and Facebook: While Facebook is about connecting and sharing with those you know, Google+ is for discovering those you don’t quite know yet around topics of interest and passion. When Kawasaki got 50 intelligent comments on his first post, he nearly abandoned Twitter and has been putting in several hours each day manually reading, commenting, and sharing new stuff on Google+. His overarching view on the network currently is that it is a landgrab. He’s paying the price now to build his tribe. In return, to date, he has nearly 300,000 followers, partially do to the fact that he is a recommended user for those just signing up for the first time on Google+.

Chris Brogan largely agreed, and has actually already written a book on the subject.

He likened Google+ today to Twitter in 2006, and Chris likes leveraging Circles functionality for segmenting those he is following. Circles gives the ability for users to narrow the stream based on topics and segmentation of users, whether you’re mutually connected with them or not. He also likes to push messages to certain circles. From my perspective, it’s a mechanism of targeted messaging, instead of blasting everything to everyone.

Another major consideration that both Brogan and Kawasaki mentioned is that Google search indexes Google+ content right away, while it does not index Twitter or Facebook posts. Brogan shared that his biggest piece of advice was to go back to your Google+ About page and work on your profile, as it will help you connect with others that are looking for what you can offer.

From my perspective, Google+ is early in its adoption. Today, it IS mostly filled with tech pundits, authors, speakers, and personalities. The masses aren’t on it yet, and don’t see a reason to be.

For those who understand the power of networks – connectors, marketers, and those that have or are trying to build strong personal brands, spending time on Google+ is a calculated bet that the company that intends to organize the world’s information will be able to layer Google+ on top and within a growing suite of ubiquitous tools and capabilities that reach deep into our lives (Google Apps, GMail, Android, etc.) The bet holds significant promise (as well as some risk) as the potential payoff will largely come down the road, if at all.

Giving Substance to Online Influence

One of my favorite sessions of the conference was led by Matt Ridings and Chuck Hemann and focused on the subject of influence. It’s a topic I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought to, over the past couple of years, and even more so recently, as shared in my recent post: “In search of: A meaningful measure of Influence” .

Online influence and reputation are two concepts that will become central to the way the world works over the next decade. Their session triggered some additional thoughts, which I’ll publish in a follow up to this post.

In summary

My observations and research indicate that there is plenty of confusion in the marketplace about what these new mediums mean for business. Most execs are interested in learning more about how trends in human communication are shifting, what it means at the macro scale, and ultimately what it means for their companies, and respective customer and prospect communities.

Today, most executives are swimming in a sea of noise and data, trying to grasp what these new realities really mean, how much weight and attention to give them, and how it should impact how they communicate within their organization and to their customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

The tectonic shifts under way not only require organizations to shift to listen to what their customers are saying, but also will allow those who truly understand how to leverage new media to gain market share by leveraging network effects that social channels provide.

Sadly, however, there appears to still be a significant gap between the evangelism taking place amongst the digerati and the understanding and support of executives. The conference had its share of valuable insights to be learned, but was also rich with hyperbole and ephemeral euphemisms that have no tangible connection to the core practicalities of business leaders today.

We are largely in an experimental phase, with some success stories emerging, but most case studies highlighting some very successful individual outliers, or celebrated measurements sitting on the fringe of significant tangible impact to the enterprise. We will begin to see this shift dramatically over the next 2-5 years.

While many business leaders seek to understand the new media and communication frontiers, many of the digerati who understand the channel and tools well, still struggle with connecting the dots to meaningful business value. Those that understand both and can bridge the gap between the two will be in high demand now and into the foreseeable future.

Influence. It’s a captivating word. It’s an alluring word.

We all want it, and we want to know others who have it.

In high school, if you could get the “cool kids” to the party, the rest would follow.

If the most famous and glamorous people in the world use it, like it, and talk about it, it must be great.

INFLUENCE: THE DEFINITION

But is that influence? From our good friend, Webster, Influence is:

1. A power affecting a person, thing, or course of events, especially one that operates without any direct or apparent effort:
2. Power to sway or affect based on prestige, wealth, ability, or position

WHO, THEN, ARE THE INFLUENCERS?

As part of a thought exercise, I asked myself two questions:

(1) Who are the most influential folks in history?

Names like Jesus, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler, FDR, Mohandas Ghandi, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs come to mind.

(2) Who have been the most influential people in my life?

My wife, my parents, a former NBC Universal Executive, a business man turned global missionary, the most successful enterprise sales executive I know, a Navy Seal turned pastor and non-profit Executive Director, and select football and basketball coaches throughout my athletic career.

The irony is that many or most of the most influential people in my life literally have no or limited presence on Social Networks (yet). There are dozens of others who influence my thinking as circles cascade outwards, and as contexts become more detailed and narrowly defined, but these are the ones who have spoken into my life, and who have the most influence on my decisions. Their actions and influence on my behavior is for all intents and purposes, not measurable.

THE “INFLUENCE” OF NETWORKS ON THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER

But I am also a social customer. I read reviews. I ask, comment, and interact in public social networks and forums, and these interactions and the things I learn and observe do influence my buying decisions.

WOMMA put together the following infographic about what fuels our collective purchasing decisions. These are the things that have marketers so excited and quite frankly, confused.

LEVERAGE AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF INFLUENCE

As the restricted and proprietary ivory towers of media, global communication, and information flow have given way to citizen journalists, we have witnessed the great democratization of media, celebrity status, and, in turn, the democratization of influence itself. Or have we? Has anything really changed?

In the end, business is all about leverage. It’s about maximizing the return on available time, talents, and resources. The social web, ubiquitous connectedness, and the ongoing digitization of everything finds marketers both forced and opportunistically looking to leverage the new influencers (their reach, their networks, and the trust that they’ve established in their tribe) for their respective interests.

Watch this short clip from a fascinating talk by Deb Roy and you’ll see a fantastic example of how an action by one can truly effect the actions of tens, or hundreds, or potentially thousands of others.

So, then, as marketers, the next obvious questions are:

How do we find the influencers?

And, ultimately, how do we provide these influencers with a message that they can carry to their audience(s) that benefit our brand, our company, our products, and ultimately our interests?

FINDING THE INFLUENCERS

Who do we reach out to?
This first question is where most people start. Who are the influencers in our marketplace? The answer to that question, in and of itself, may be tougher than it initially seems. The unaware may start with their offline network, and extend their research by finding those with the highest number of Twitter followers. But studies have shown that there is little correlation to numbers of Twitter followers, facebook fans, or similar social network as measures of real influence.

For more reading on this, check out On Twitter, Followers Don’t Equal Influence and Celebrities’ Twitter Followers Have Zero Influence

Some online services have begun to tackle this problem by attempting to measure influence in a more scientific way. By now, you may have undoubtedly heard of Klout, or PeerIndex, or Traackr, or several other upstart influence measurement tools.

• Are these valid?
• Should they be used? And if so, how?
• Does it help me identify the influencers who can allow me the greatest amount of leverage for distributing my message, and more importantly, help make a measurable impact for my organization?

THE EMERGENCE OF INFLUENCE MEASUREMENT SCORES

Klout, the most widely recognized service, recently stirred a sea of controversy when they changed their algorithm score. Perusing through the comments, it was apparent that some had so deeply embraced these influence scores, that they were literally upset that they might lose their jobs, their clients, and for a moment, I was concerned that many of them might even lose their lives.

While Klout’s messaging spun this as a “More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score”, I have to wonder. They’ve never been very transparent about the mechanics of what makes up the Klout score. While Klout started with Twitter, it has since expanded to Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and a host of other social sharing sites. At first glance, it appears that facebook, in particular, has taken on a far more significant weighting in their recent shift.

When trying to understand the motivations behind actions, I often start with the looking at the money trail. It’s important to know that Klout is a for-profit corporation with venture capital funding. It’s also important to know that they are monetizing their service by providing social data to large consumer brands. Alignment with the world’s most popular and mainstream social network probably makes sense and may contain the most valuable unstructured data for what has emerged as Klout’s primary paying customers, the world’s largest consumer brands. To their credit. it seems that Klout has perhaps taken a big step towards alignment with their customers in providing relevance. Perhaps I’ll no longer be the ideal candidate for pre-screening and behind the scenes previews for new release movies and TV shows, which I’ve received numerous Klout Perk offers for, ignoring all of them.

Watch the editorial video below from the Wall St. Journalas it gives deeper insight into Klout and its effect on many participating in digital media today.

THE STATE OF INFLUENCE MEASUREMENT

Is this really a measure of influence, and if so, in what context, for whom? Or is this simply a service that major brands can leverage to gain access to more targeted recipients of their ads?

How does this concept of influence measurement apply to the billions who choose to make significant changes in their communities, in their businesses, with their customers, and behind the walls of their organizations without doing so on public social networks? How will Klout or something like it really measure actions and communications that truly inspire change and affect thoughts, behaviors, and actions of others?

There is a long way to go. These fledgling measurement scores are valid experiments and I firmly believe the precursors to something more meaningful, more relevant, and more useful, but there is only so much they can measure today. Couple that with the extreme potential and propensity for inaccuracy and fraud, and the system’s reliability breaks down.

Ironically, Klout specifically has suffered quite the backlash on social channels. Recent alarms have sounded over privacy concerns and the inability to remove one’s self from Klout. (Though you can do that now.)

In closing, there are several challenges that the world of influence measurement must overcome before being truly valuable for organizations and brands. I’ll start with a few and let others weigh in.

(1) Klout (and other measurement tools) will act in their best interest. As long as their interests are aligned with profit, their is opportunity for corruption. Witness recent allegations against the major ratings agencies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis for an example. (To be clear, I have no problem with Klout specifically, nor is this in any way any allegation against them)

Only a small percentage of most of our actions happen in the digital world today. Though, this is changing rapidly , digital influence measurement systems can only evaluate a very small percentage of what’s happening in the real world.

THE REST IS UP TO YOU

I’m sure I’ve missed a ton so I’ll leave the rest to you.

What are some other challenges / gaps you see in today’s “influence measurement” scores? How would you improve them?

Or, maybe you can surprise me, what are some ways that you have used one of the emerging influence measurement systems to measurably impact the bottom line of your organization?

And if you still want more on the topic of influence, my friend Dr. Michael Wu has written quite a bit on the subject, especially as it pertains to social networks.

According to HootSuite, in the first 6 months of 2011, people clicked on links I shared on Twitter over 5,000 times. I have no idea how many links I shared. Below were the 9 most popular links (curious that the number one spot is from a blog post I wrote in early 2010)

The State of Social CRM: 6 Takeaways from #SCRMSummit « Brian Vellmure’s CRM Strategies Blog February 12, 2010 by brianvellmure One of the worst snowstorms in the history of our Nation’s capital, the most flight cancellations since 9/11 (almost 6,000), and the closure and inaccessibility of a pre-booked venue were the circumstances surrounding BPT Partner’s Social CRM Certification Training, better known to the Twittersphere as #scrmsummit.

Focus Social CRM Roundtable: What the Salesforce.com/ Radian6 Deal Really Means This event has already occurred. Please review the following post-event resources: Please join us for a roundtable teleconference on Friday, April 1, 2011 at 10am PT/ 1pm ET as we address the recent acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com.

The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer – Paul Hagen – Harvard Business Review Paul Hagen is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, where he serves customer experience professionals. 8:03 AM Monday April 18, 2011 by Paul Hagen | Comments () [This post is part of Creating a Customer-Centered Organization.] The customer’s voice has a new champion sitting at the highest levels of power in companies.

The 2011 Most Innovative Companies An artificial heart and its lightweight power drive. A better airline for Brazil. Chocolate from Madagascar and a soccer shirt made of plastic water bottles. A fashion leader escaping its pattern, a smelter, and that little coupon startup in Chicago that’s suddenly worth billions. All this from one simple word: innovation.

Do Campaign Failures, High-Profile Firings Signal the End of Social Media? The latest news involving social-media pioneers isn’t good. Pepsi has fallen to third place behind Diet Coke in spite of its widely heralded switch from Super Bowl ads to a huge social charity program called Refresh Project. Burger King has grilled through a couple of CMOs and fired agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky after producing Facebook campaigns and viral videos that got lots of attention while the business witnessed six consecutive quarters of declining sales.

Survey of 10,000 Yammer Users Reveals Benefits of Enterprise Social Networking | Yammer Blog Recently, we surveyed our users to better understand the effect Yammer is having on organizations. 10,000 users participated in the survey, and the vast majority of respondents found that Yammer helps people collaborate more easily and better engage with their coworkers.

Is Social CRM for Real? An Update from the Radian6 Conference Paul Greenberg, an expert on CRM, took time out to keynote the Radian6 user conference, Social 2011 (where I get my turn to speak this afternoon). After writing 800 pages on Social CRM, Greenberg’s not yet sure if it’s for real, which is similar to my far less informed perception.

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won’t, of course, because they’ll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I’ll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco.

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This week, I’ve had the privilege to participate in the Sales 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 conferences in Boston, MA.

It’s been good to see old friends, meet new ones, and/or insert a handshake or hug into a previously only virtual relationship. The conference(s) also provided a great chance to check on the pulse of the industry, hear new stories, and generally get a broader and better sense for what’s going on the in the marketplace. 

Like a room full of toddlers, the industry is learning to walk. There have been starts, stops, over compensations, disparity amongst players in general understanding and development, and in some cases, the harsh realization that we’re just not quite ready to do what we want to do.

1. Society, and therefore, the workplace is (still) evolving
This statement could have been (and was) written 5 years ago, but we’re early enough in the evolution that it’s still worth noting. The growth of a new wave of human communication, empowerment, and progress continues to move on. The pervasiveness of mobile and social technologies continues to expand geographically, and also more deeply penetrate individuals work lives in a continually blurred kaleidoscope of contexts.

2. Visions are still being cast, and re-cast

From my vantage point, the key tenets of social business benefits have been flushed out. While collectively most of us understand that a more efficient, more collaborative, more distributed way of living is coming, organizations and vendors alike continue to wrestle with what exactly that vision looks like in a tangible way. Tactical plans, and even organizational vision seems to be in a stage of frequent recalibration as more information emerges from the marketplace.

This, in and of itself, is one of the benefits of the realized benefits of a more collaborative culture. The shorter the feedback loop, the more opportunity for recalibration and alignment with stakeholder needs.

A major challenge facing operators on both the vendor and practitioner sides, respectively, is what feedback to take into consideration, and how to weight it appropriately. A similar dilemma faces stock traders; what is a meaningful movement versus what are short term fluctuations and what meanings and importance should be applied to myriad of elements flowing through the industry and customer firehose.

3. What’s the value?

Like any change initiative, WIIFMs are required. This is not different than any other technology powered advancement. While the broad based benefits of sentiment analysis, knowledge sharing, real time collaboration, and big data analytics are understood, the tangible benefit of social technologies will vary significanly for each organization, and quite frankly, each individual that interacts within its ecosystem.

Identifying the organizational goals, and coupling that with the perceived benefits of a wide audience of stakeholders is key to setting strategy, and establishing the corresponding tactical approach.

Questions like:

What’s the problem?
Who’s the customer (can be internal or external)?
What are they trying to accomplish, collectively and individually?
How do they do it now?
How can we make it better?
…and a host of other questions associated with the value creation process

…all still carry the same weight. I see the same high risk potential with the implementation and/or deployment of social technologies that we’ve seen with the introduction of ERP, CRM, Knowledge Management, E-Commerce, etc.

Business cases and value propositions are still necessary. ROI analysis may or may not be.

4. The customer is rising in importance and focus

One key thing that is encouraging is that conversations about the customer are gaining more prominence. Enterprise 2.0 had an entire track dedicated to sales and marketing that had good attendance. Kudos to Sameer Patel for putting the track together.

5. Enough thought leadership. It’s time to get to work.

Very few new ideas have emerged. New spins, new takes, new anecdotes are being spun, but very few epiphany inspiring ideas are being spread. As noted earlier, the key tenets of the next half decade have already been flushed out.Pioneers in the space are now beginning to have lessons learned stories to tell. Case studies warn of pitfalls and show how and where success has been realized.

In general, there is a growing sentiment of “there’s nothing left to say”.

6. Sales as a litmus test.

Sales has been the laggard in the adoption of social tools. In the front office, the two other musketeers, marketing and customer service, have more often capitalized on the use of social media, social networking, social crm, and social blah, blah, blah.  While some may point to the sales guys and being technically less competent than some of the other workers in the organization, I point to another possible reason why the uptake has been slower to catch on.

No one else in the organization is as tightly tied to “pay for performance” than the sales team. Their butt is on the line daily. No one will be more resistant to employ useless strategies, tactics, and technologies than the ones whose compensation is as tightly aligned to their quarterly performance. If something is not helping them sell more, they are not using it. Their time is too valuable to work on non value-added toys. The end of the month is always just a few days away.

That said, more and more stories are emerging about global sales teams collaborating through Enterprise 2.0 tools, and/or individuals and teams from companies of all sizes using products like InsideView or OneSource to quickly access sales intelligence, partially leveraging data from the social web for this.

7. Empowering Human Movements
Whether we’re talking about political revolution, crowds self-aggregating for discounts, community members helping each other solve problems, or crowd sourced innovation, the common thread is that social technologies help to empower human movements. Social provides a platform where information and people can be searched for, identified, and harnessed for a specific purpose faster than any other time in history.

I expressed my views of social in “Circles”, and a more simplified version in “Social Business: May I try and simplify this?”

Social technologies help to empower human movements to achieve jobs of varying degrees; as small as responding to a question asked on LinkedIn, or as large as creating a hyper growth startup or overthrowing a government.  

Summary
The mesh of Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 philosophies, process and technology innovations continue to gain momentum, and are becoming more tightly entwined as the journey towards the pervasive emergence of the “social business”.  At varying points of the journey, however, organizations with a strong established trajectory are realizing that success is elusive for those that do not have the fundamentals in place (collaborative culture, functional systems of record, solid change management practices).