Trust… let’s talk about that for a minute. The social technology industry has come up with an entire array of words that ultimately convey the notion of trust between an institution and constituent, or person to person. These words include the ever popular “authentic” but also words like “transparent”, “open”, and “honest”. Whatever you name you give it, it is TRUST that we are talking about and the ultimate objective for companies using social technologies to engage the world around them should be using trust as a currency for influence.

The night before the event, the speakers had a little dinner and over the course of the meal, I learned a lot about the audience, the market, and my fellow speakers. After dinner and the next morning I put my deck together and assembled my thoughts into speaking points. I began my presentation by sharing this chain of events and then started with:

“Why did I tell you that at 11:00 last night and 6am this morning I put my deck together for you? Well it’s because I want you to trust me and know that what I am saying to you isn’t boilerplate, scripted, or slickly presented, because if nothing else I say makes an impression upon you let it be this, brands are lies, half truths and good intentions.”

Why are brands lies, half truths and good intentions? Keep in mind that I don’t subscribe to the notion that companies are inherently untrustworthy or that the people in a company, any company, are dishonest… I am part of a company, you probably are as well. The reason why brand statements are untrustworthy is that they reflect what a company, specifically those in the leadership of a company, want to believe about their organization, not what the customers of that institution reflect back to them as their values.

50 years of broadcast advertising has conditioned people to not believe what companies tell them is the truth, which is why Edelman’s trust barometer regularly ranks “people like me” as more trustworthy than any institution. As a society we have a generalized trust issue with institutions of all kinds and yes it should concern you as much as it does me because institutions of government, private enterprise, and everything in between form the backbone of society, and the demise of institutions has historically been a leading indicator for the demise of a society.

I have been thinking a lot about the notion of brands lately, but what I have been focusing on is how the communications revolution we have been participating in, also known as social media technology, is thrusting forward a notion that companies and customers need a better way of talking to each other.

Let’s not call them consumers… please, they are people and people have an inherent desire to be treated as individuals. The construct of consumer is something that companies created to group customers together because they lacked the ability to address each customer individually. Today we can reach customers as individual people so why do we need things like focus groups, demographics, and behavioral segmentation?

Well they do serve a valuable purpose, which is to roll up things which are best addressed in the aggregate, like product definitions and advertising strategy but when it comes to customer service and a collection of marketing functions we need to drill down to the individual level and treat customers as individual people.

Another aspect of this that I find particularly fascinating is that customer are behaving in a very different way that in generations past, not only do they have needs that have to be met with products and services but they also want companies to intersect them on the basis of values. In generations past, we cared a lot about what the brand symbolized, the fashion appeal of it, but today we care about the values of the people that make up the company. Wow.

Couple this with another observation I have, which is that brand loyalty is easy to achieve but hard to hold… a direct inverse of what was the case even just a few years ago when brand loyalty was hard to achieve but very durable once acquired. We quickly embrace companies and products with a profound advocacy but one slip and a company quickly gets black listed. From heros to zeros in no time flat…. just ask the Komen Foundation.

So what does all this have to do with the idea that brands are lies? Well, it all came together for me with something that Dion Hinchcliffe passed around on Twitter yesterday titled “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch“. You should read this in it’s entirety but let me quote this one passage for you.

[...in successful companies] employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Just as we need to recalibrate our thinking about customers as people rather than consumers, we need to appreciate that in successful businesses today, and tomorrow’s leaders, the organization exists as a unified body of individuals acting with single minded purpose and empowered with the ability to carry forward on the basis of what is right and wrong for the organization. Wow.

I recently discovered how they are presenting their product roadmap, which is directly linked to community topics that are relevant, and I love it. In a nutshell what they are doing is presenting their roadmap as a collection of headlines, a summary, and a status with each discrete item linked to a topic in their community that is also synced with the status of the item.

I love it because it directly connects community activity with the development process and this is not trivial. We have long held that each topic type in our core platform – Question, Problem, Idea, and Praise – has a distinct lifecycle and outcome as well as “touching” a different part of a company; for ideas submitted in the community what the community expects is a proactive stance on the idea, even if it is that it is not being considered, and the product management and engineering organizations are primary constituents within the company.

Of all the topic types the Idea topic is the most challenging in my opinion because the outcome has, potentially, the longest timeline to conclusion. This is not particularly surprising for people who are engineering centric, even if in the same breath they acknowledge that Ideas are high value content in a community because what it does, when implemented holistically, is shorten the product cycle while also delivering a better product as a result.

Gradle has very neatly connected community and product roadmap in a visible way that, at the same time, connects people in the community with the product management process for the product they are advocates of. Gradle’s approach is one that any company can use and I would encourage you to look at it (as we will!).

Monday’s big event: GetSat co-founder and Chief Community Officer Amy Muller, will be joining a cadre of community management experts on a Google Hangout sponsored by Dell. Click here for full details on Facebook or on Dell’s Google+ page.

Track today’s festivities on Twitter using hashtag #cmad.

Stay connected throughout the year with the Community Manager, Advocate and Evangelist group on Facebook.

Join our community manager training course that starts in February, led by Robbin Tippins, author of Community 101. Full details…

Our annual survey: We also take a look inside the minds of some of the top community managers in the industry to see what trends they see on the horizon, their greatest challenges and their biggest victories of the past year. We cooked that down into our 2012 Community Manager Insights.

You can see the insights in a Facebook photo album, on our Google+ page, Slideshare or just browse below:

Keep reading…

The audience greeted the young entrepreneur with a hero’s welcome. He walked out onto the stage of the conference hall and looked out into the audience. The applause was deafening.

It was the fall of 2005, the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Sergey Brin, the 32-year-old cofounder of Google, was making a surprise on-stage appearance with John Battelle, the conference host.

The audience quickly fell silent as Brin sat down. What would he say? What secrets would he reveal? What would he explain to the audience that would help them emulate or understand his unbelievable achievement?

Battelle’s first question cut straight to the heart of the matter: “What,” he asked Brin, “do you attribute Google’s incredible success to?”

Brin responded confidently, as if this was just a run-of-the-mill engineering question. “The number one factor that contributed to our success was luck.”

Silence from the audience. Was that really his answer? Could that possibly be true? He and Page had just blindly stumbled into their fortune? That didn’t make any sense. Surely it must have been their superior intellect, their foresight, their dedication and perseverance that led to their success.

Realizing that his answer begged for an explanation, Brin continued: “We followed our hearts in terms of research areas, and eventually found we had something pretty useful, and wanted to make an impact with it.”

This was a strange kind of luck. He wasn’t talking about random interventions or being at the right place at the right time. No, he was talking about motivation, instinct, accidental discoveries, and passion. How was this luck?

If anybody in the audience was disappointed by that answer, they shouldn’t have been. Brin was not just being humble. He was sharing a crucial insight: that for something to succeed with the kind of scale and speed that Google did, it requires more to happen than any one person, or even a team of people, can ever fully take responsibility for. This insight was central to how Google’s founding team built the company.

By crediting his fortunes (and his fortune) to good luck, Brin wasn’t abdicating responsibility for his success. He was acknowledging the creative tension between his personal goals and a world utterly out of his control. Miraculously, Google seemed to have turned this tension into an actual business practice. A practice that changed the world.

Good Luck is Hard Work

Let’s be honest, though: for most of us harnessing luck sounds as bizarre as strategy planning with Tarot cards and palm reading. Yet what we’ve found is that the ability to harness the unexpected is not just an actual practice; it is rather the essential practice for building a business in a time of accelerating, vertigo-inducing change. Making ventures work in a world as interconnected, complex, and unpredictable as ours requires engaging with the full scope of that complexity even though we can’t see, model, or even imagine all that much of it. No matter how smart we are, or how big our idea, the world is always bigger. No matter how many of the possibilities we can see, there will always be factors outside our sight and beyond our control.

Many of us live with a daily background terror. We see industries failing, jobs disappearing, populations shifting, governments falling, currencies collapsing. This can’t help but sow confusion and self-doubt, and the idea of putting our fate in the hands of chance may seem like the worst idea for calming jittery nerves and setting ourselves up for success.

The good news is that what worked for the Google founders—that combination of hard work, personal vision, and unplanned good fortune—can work for you, too. Luck, it turns out, doesn’t just happen by chance. Rather, the best kind of luck—serendipity, the art of making an unsought finding—is the luck that we attract to ourselves. Because even if we can’t predict it, we can court it and prepare for it, so that we know what to do with it when it shows up. And when it does, with the help of our new book, Get Lucky, you will know what to do.

Much of our insight came to us courtesy of the online service we founded with two other partners in 2007, Get Satisfaction, which has helped almost sixty five thousand organizations increase the role of happy accidents and unplanned information in their everyday operations. From a simple idea—getting people inside and outside of an organization to talk to each other like human beings—organizations today are letting go of much of the control they have traditionally hoarded in order to gain the huge benefits that can arise through chance interactions with their customers. Our goal in founding Get Satisfaction was precisely to help organizations make the transition into a new business environment filled with less certainty but more opportunity.

Bringing Lucky Back

What we’ve found is that small company or large, it doesn’t matter: there is a set of discrete skills you can develop to re-introduce serendipity into your work life.

We call our approach “planned serendipity.” It’s a set of concrete, attainable business skills that cultivate the conditions for chance encounters to generate new opportunities. Planned serendipity also provides you with the ability to recognize and put these opportunities to good use by showing you how to create and maintain the kinds of work environments, cultural attitudes, and business relationships that value and reward serendipitous occurrences.

Taken literally, planned serendipity is a contradiction, of course. It is impossible to plan something that, by definition, is unplannable. Yet organizations are planning machines. The only way for them to embrace the unexpected is to find a space for it within these plans. Our approach opens up a middle path, so that we no longer have to choose between lame predictability and chaos.

Planned serendipity gives you and your business a way to actively, methodically engage the unknown.

To explain how planned serendipity works, we need to start with our own simple definition of serendipity: serendipity is chance interacting with creativity.

Here’s what it means: although we all recognize that chance is, by definition, inherently unpredictable, our actions—which embody our creativity, our ability to create something new and valuable that didn’t exist before—can have a massive impact on what’s possible. Chance is highly sensitive to the actions we take.

In our book, and in the excerpts we’ll be presenting on this blog over the coming weeks, we’ll introduce you to eight such skills, each of which represents a different facet of how luck works. Each skill will contribute to making your life luckier, and taken together they bring new meaning to the phrase ”You lucky bastard.”

• Motion: To shake things up, break out of your routine, find consistent ways to meet new people and run into new ideas.
• Preparation: To link together seemingly unconnected events, information, and people.
• Divergence: To recognize and explore alternative paths spurred by chance encounters, some of which may challenge our current thinking.
• Commitment: To choose, from among the ever-widening set of options in front of us, the right ones to focus on.
• Activation: To develop new constraints that release people from their rote behaviors.
• Connection: To optimize the number and quality of connections with others.
• Permeability: To replace the organization’s rigid walls with something more like semi-permeable membrane.
• Attraction: To project their purpose out into the world in a way guaranteed to draw the best and most valuable events

If we want to succeed in today’s frantically paced business environment, none of us has any choice but to face up to the uncertainties that lurk around every corner. And while we stand on the shoulders of giants in our endeavor to unlock the mechanics of chance—renowned businessmen, philosophers, scientists, inventors, and artists all make appearances on the pages of our book—it is more than anything a product of the hyper-accelerated Internet-era marketplace that surrounds us. In a world that changes as quickly as ours now does, where the pace of this change only seems to increase and where so much of what we need is as unknown and unpredictable as it is critical to our success, luck is the best ally we have.

Pre-order the book today

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Let’s say you go into a department store and ask, “could you ring up my purchases?” The response is often, “no problem”. Well of course, it’s not a problem, you are being paid to be here and the customer is spending money that they labored for in order to achieve the goal of purchasing your merchandise. Why would customer service ever be a problem? Seriously, does the customer ask the person to go wax their car while they shop? In that instance, using “no problem” might have been justified.

What I want to hear is something like, “my pleasure”, “right away”, or “you bet”. Growing up in Texas, I heard “you bet” often. It’s like we’re old friends and the person is a half-step ahead of my service needs. “Right away” informs me that my needs are a priority. When I hear “right away”, it feels fast too. But my favorite is, “my pleasure”, it signals to me that we’re in the flow, all is well and this person truly cares about my customer experience.

Using two negative words cancelling each other out to describe what is supposed to be a positive response makes little sense. Neither word supports the feeling of “yes” and that is a customer experience problem.

John Ryan is a speaker, experienced marketing executive and author of the book Buyer Steps who resides in the New York City area. He likes working with companies to address their revenue challenges through content, relationships and technology. He is a former board member at Webtrends and marketing VP at IBM/Tivoli and Siemens. John has deep experience in inbound marketing, outbound marketing and sales. John has performed stand-up comedy in NYC and has a 2nd degree black belt in Hapkido. He cannot beat you or your children at golf. Follow him on Twitter @buyersteps and learn more at www.johnwryan.com.

1. The Business of Social Networks: We have seen a coalescing of business models form around social networks and not surprisingly the vast majority of them are evolutions of advertising models. This will work but as companies demand more (see next prediction) the ad driven model will evolve in ways not previously seen. What that will be I do not have a clue but sponsored tweets and ad campaigns simply cannot be anything more than a starting point.
2. Brand Marketing Meets PPC: In most companies marketing exists in two forms, brand management and promotional marketing. On the latter we have seen a revolution in how companies advertise, increasingly around the notion of pay-per-click (PPC) that provides immediate and detailed performance metrics upon which ROI can be calculated. This level of performance management has not existed on the brand side but it’s coming because brands have an inherent desire to manage brand metrics to the degree that they measure online campaigns, and social factors into brand benchmarks as much as campaign objectives.
3. Social as a Service: If you are a SaaS application there is an increasingly portfolio of services that you can plug into your application to bring social capabilities as a layered service. There is another very nuanced view of this that speaks to the increasing sophistication of analytics services that measure social activities that contribute to application success in the market.
4. 3 Mobile Form Factors: If you follow the mobile space you have no doubt paid attention to the rise of the super-size smart phone with 4.3″ and larger displays. For app developers there will have to be a standardization around template sizes and simply saying “tablets and smartphones” isn’t adequate. My view is that 10″ tablets, 4.3″ smartphones to 7″ tablets, and sub 4″ smartphones will co-exist as separate UX development paths.
5. Integration Layers Matter: When it comes to social and SaaS applications a big challenge for consumers and developers alike is integration of activity streams and social services across platforms. Somebody will figure this out and deliver, to developers first, a service layer that normalizes and routes social activities across services based on rules and contexts.
6. Customer Support is (increasingly) the New Marketing: Okay, this one is self-serving but dovetails nicely with some widely held views about how company-to-customer engagement is driving more than just customer sat but also revenue. Leaders in every business segment are figuring out that competitive leadership is directly linked with how they sell more stuff to the customers they already have.
7. Loyalty Programs and Virtual Currencies: Everyone is familiar with the concept of loyalty programs, and their shortcomings. Virtual currencies are gaining in awareness and consumption inside games but there is a convergence happening with loyalty programs whereby points exist as just another currency with an exchange mechanism.
8. SoLoMo: Social Local Mobile is on for 2012. The proliferation of location aware mobile devices and a service layer that enables mobile apps to take advantage of these capabilities is creating an entirely new technology segment that valuable companies will arise from.
9. Messaging Explosion Continues Unabated: With Facebook giving companies a private messaging capability to reach fans we see yet another vehicle through which people-to-people and company-to-people communication will take place. If nothing else what this suggests is that people like talking on a phone less than ever.
10. People Will Buy Stuff Through Facebook: Actually this prediction speaks very broadly about how retail is moving outside of a purely web experience. Facebook commerce is going to be a big deal, and mobile already is so there is no reason to expect that retail channels will consolidate… the opposite is more likely, multi-channel retail will become mega-multichannel.

I tend to follow these markets and research like this is interesting to me. I don’t have issues with the methodology that Henry Dewing used, it is appropriate for the problem he is attracted to, which is quantifying and defining the evolution of web 2.0 technology in the enterprise… but it’s still wrong because the problem is being defined too narrowly.

By a wide margin the most interesting macro trend in enterprise software is what is actually happening to the definition of enterprise software. For decades the market has labored to deliver software that employees of a company used to facilitate business processes, in fact the very essence of business software as a category is intrinsically rooted in business process automation. In recent years the focus has shifted from exclusively being driven by the business processes that a company uses to facilitate business objectives to how employees work with each other and how network technology can achieve employee-to-employee collaboration objectives that also delivers benefits to the company in the form of innovation, productivity improvements, better informed employees, and ultimately business process efficiencies as a result of all the collaboration soft benefits.

One thing has not changed as a result of all this great collaboration technology permeating the enterprise, which is that the employee is still the center point for the technology. Businesses buy the technology and employees use it, rarely, if ever, does a customer enter the equation.

It has taken a generation of social technologies available to employees in their role as consumer to bring about a more fundamental shift in the enterprise software market. Often referred to as “consumerization of the enterprise” this is phrase is as old as web 2.0 and misses the point it’s not about how people in a business will procure technology and what their expectation of business software is from a user experience standpoint; it’s much more fundamental than that and goes to the nature of how employees and customers interact together to facilitate shared objectives.

This is what Get Satisfaction was founded on, a notion that customer have a vested interest in a company they care about succeeding and when presented with an opportunity to support other customers, or tell the company how their products and services can be better, or when the company does something good that they should do more of that… customers will do exactly that.

Enterprise social software is not exclusively about how employees and companies interact, it’s also about how customers are brought into the conversation. Today’s enterprise social software market is merely scratching the surface of what is possible and previous generations of CRM and enterprise collaboration systems can be updated and instrumented with customer facing technologies to deliver far more ROI than is possibly if the focus is centered exclusively on an employee.