In the past, I’ve written posts on: Improving collaboration, breaking down silos, and innovating better. What does that all mean?, Breaking down silos, what does that mean? and What does “Innovate better” really mean? in an effort to cut through some of the jargon. Today, I want to step it up a notch and crowdsource (buzzword) “ask people to contribute” in putting together the comprehensive list of Social Business Buzzwords.

Many thanks to people who have contributed so far:

• Hutch Carpenter
• Jeff Willinger
• John Woodworth
• John Tropea
• Matthew Ladin
• Robert Lavigne
• Ian Thorpe
• Alan Lepofsky
• Mark Oehlert
• Rawn Shaw
• Liz Chirstopher
• Kevin Crossman
• Ruchi Bhatia

The List ( will be updated as new contributions come in)

Let’s start by understanding what gamification is. Gamification.org defines gamification as the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. This translates that if you perform some pre-determined/desired task in a prescribed way that you will get a reward. This could be as simple as completing an on-line profile or be much more complicated requiring many steps to be completed. Usually the reward increases as the task complexity or difficulty increases.

Creatures of habit

When you start a new job, there are many new things to learn. At the beginning, this can be overwhelming as we try to learn all the things we need to do to be successful. In brain terms, this means that your cerebral cortex gets a lot of exercise as it tries to comprehend how things need to be done. Our cerebral cortex is a very limited resource that requires a lot of energy, so the brain shifts routine tasks to other parts of the brain so that it can focus on new things. After doing a prescribed task a few times, the task shifts to the basal ganglia where it becomes a habit. (This is a highly simplified version of the process).

In The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in live and business by Charles Duhigg the author breaks down habits into three components:

Cue -> Routine -> Reward

The cue is what causes us to take action. This could be a new e-mail in your inbox, a call from a customer for example.

The routine is the action we perform. We read the e-mail, pick up the phone, etc.

The reward is benefit that results from performing the routine. We check off a task on our list, get a new sales opportunity. These rewards trigger a release of dopamine, which is responsible for reward driven learning.

The more often you do the routine task, the deeper the habit gets ingrained in our basal ganglia. It’s because of this that changing habits is difficult. The author goes on to describe that by recognizing the queues that you can change the routine and still get the reward.

Tying it together

If we bring gamification back in, it interacts in the habit loop in two ways:

1. It encourages a routine to be done in a specific way to be rewarded.
2. It encourages you to do new things in order to get new rewards that you haven’t experienced before.

Gamification ties directly to the habit loop. This all works very well as described until you bring in another component to the equation: Incentives.

We are all incented to work. At the most basic level, you work so that you earn money to provide food and shelter. The habit loop in this case is to define objectives, achieve the objectives, get a paycheck/raise/bonus/promotion. So what happens if we use gamification as an incentive?

The Cobra Effect

A recent Freakonomics podcast called The Cobra Effect did a great job of describing what happens when you introduce incentives to solve a problem.

Vikas Mehrotra describes the cobra effect:

The episode goes on to describe many incentive schemes that ended in similar fashion. All of them relate to how clever people “gamed” the system for personal gain without solving the problem and in some cases making the problem worse.

Back to business

If we bring this back to the context of employees and how people are rewarded, we begin to see how gamification and incentives can have an undesirable impact on a company’s performance and even hurt the company culture.

It is almost inevitable that someone will want to measure and evaluate employee performance based on their rewards when deciding who to give a raise, who gets a bigger bonus or who to promote. Whether this is done formally through some Human Resources process or informally because the decision maker doesn’t have enough information to make the decision objectively and is looking for something to aid them. Once this happens, people will figure it out. Once they figure it out, this will become widely known throughout the organization through socialization. If it’s even remotely suspected that people achieved reward by gaming the system, it will create a divide inside of a company that is difficult to repair.

Let’s take collaboration for example. Many social business tools award points for performing various activities inside their platform. It’s not hard to then correlate (often incorrectly) that the people with the highest scores are the most collaborative. But, without context of solving business problems, it’s feasible for a person to get a high score by being active in a group that may be non-work related, or even just making noise by inserting their thoughts as a way to gain more points without providing value.

At one of my previous companies, there was one resourceful person who understood the theory of this and wrote an e-mail bot that contributed to a private group that he set up. After only a few days, his score for the system was higher than everyone else’s. In this particular instance, we were just starting off, and we were focused on this particular metric, but imagine what could happen where there are many gaming elements where it’s not so easy to spot someone who is gaming the system.

Summary

Gamification can be valuable, but also can be dangerous. A full understanding of what you are trying to accomplish is necessary and a critical analysis of the potential impacts must be performed before implementing these systems. As tempting as it may be to measure people by these rewards, as history has shown, the impacts of doing so will almost always lead to unexpected consequences. If you want to experiment with gamification, I would recommend you limit it to things that do not tie to incentives and actively dissuade people from using this to incent people.

Further reading

The Science and Psychology of Gamification

Your Brain at work by David Rock

To help social business emerge from hype to mainstream adoption, it is important to demystify how social business improves people’s jobs. One area that social business can benefit across a wide range of areas inside of companies is the Communications Plan. Today, communications plans have wide application across many areas of business:

• Projects
• Programs
• Change Management
• Marketing
• Organizational Change (re-orgs)
• Crisis Communications
• Product releases

What is a communications plan?

According to Hieran Publishing a communications plan contains the following:

• What you want to accomplish with your communications (your objectives),
• Ways in which those objectives can be accomplished (your goals or program of work),
• To whom your communications will be addressed (your audiences),
• How you will accomplish your objectives (the tools and timetable)
•  How you will measure the results of your program (evaluation).

A well-executed plan gets everyone rowing in the same direction. It is when we look at the “how” that social business solutions come into play. In today’s business, getting your message out can be a challenge. This is because the existing communication channels no longer meet the needs of the corporation or its workers. Platforms such as e-mail are overused causing messages to be ignored. Intranets have become complex making it is hard for people to locate information that is relevant to them. Finally, things like banners or flyers in the cafeteria no longer are effective because many companies are globally dispersed or support teleworkers leaving few people to see the message.

Ensuring that your message is reaching the right audience is a challenge. Due to the complexity of organizations today, reaching all of your stakeholders is difficult. It is possible to have stakeholders that you did not even know existed.

Social business solutions can address these challenges, improving the effectiveness of your communication plans.

What are social business solutions?

Many things make social business solutions different from earlier approaches for communicating. I have captured three that I think make social business particularly valuable to business professionals:

Open – Social business solutions are designed to be open communications platforms. They are searchable and discoverable by people when they need the information. For example, “What were the objectives of last year’s supply chain efficiency program?” This allows people to determine what is important to them even if it is outside their core business function or becomes a priority in the future. Dion Hinchcliffe has done a good job of capturing this in his article on stored collaboration.

2-way – By allowing a two-way dialog, you enable conversations to happen around projects, strategies and issues that happen every day inside of companies. For example, “If we change this slightly, we can satisfy a requirement our customers have been asking for.” People can ask questions, make suggestions, identify previously unknown impacts and share experiences. This shared dialog leads to a common understanding and helps everyone align with your objectives.

Serendipity – Finding answers to questions from unexpected places helps give people a reason to participate in social business solutions. By having these open/2-way conversations, it allows tacit knowledge to be exposed, leading to better outcomes and new opportunities.

Let’s compare social business solutions to traditional enterprise communications platforms used to communicate with various audiences:

E-mail (closed, 2-way) – E-mail is a closed system. This means that its content is only available between the sender and whomever the sender includes on the To: or Cc: field. People may be added or removed when they reply creating an uncertainty, that everyone sees the whole story. Knowing that e-mail can be forwarded to anyone also causes some participants to respond politically instead of openly. E-mail is useful for information that needs to be kept between a known group (2 or more), such as job performance or when the audience is mixed between people inside and outside the company.

Portals (open/closed, 1-way) – Portals are usually the basis for many company’s intranets and extranets where the communications organization pushes down information that they feel should be important to you. They may be open, or they may be private. They may also provide a feedback mechanism that people can interact or ask questions. Because the portal is not where people do their work, it was difficult to engage in meaningful conversations or 2-way dialog.

Audience challenges

In corporations, there are many concurrent activities and priorities. Knowing the activities that are important, of interest or potentially impacting peoples’ objectives is a challenge. Staying current requires people spend time in their day actively looking for this information or relying on others to notify them. This extra work can be exhausting and often results in missing or simply not comprehending these impacts on their work. In many cases, the information continues to be unknown until it creates a roadblock that jeopardizes their work. Usually this happens when the conflict arises on the critical path. Because of time constraints, this leads to sub-optimal resolution.

A better way

Social business solutions can make your communications plan more effective and more impactful. By sharing information via a social network, there is a higher chance of reaching your audience. Once you reach your audience, they can readily contribute information, ideas and issues to improve the related initiative.

Open communication also enables people to find information when they need it, even long after the work is complete because the collaborations are stored as part of the social business solution.   This avoids corporate amnesia, which is prevalent after a corporate re-organization or project completion.

The open/2-way communications that social business enables is a key to minimizing project failures. By engaging in a 2-way dialog, you allow people to ask questions, clarify any misunderstandings, identify issues or competing efforts and offer support. A well-executed plan will help people not only understand what you are doing by why you are doing it.

Note that not every communication can or should be open. There are situations inside of an organization where communications must be closed. Mergers and acquisitions is an example where tight control must be maintained on information access.

From talk to action

Now that we have identified how social business solutions can improve a communications plan, let’s illustrate where to use it. The examples below suggest when you might want to exploit a social business solution:

If your stakeholders are used to consuming this information via traditional channels, lead them to the social business solution in channels they are familiar with. For example, provide a link to the social business solution in an e-mail along with a reason they should read it.

Summary

Social business solutions can make your communication plans more effective. By leveraging open/2-way communications channels, you identify unknown stakeholders, uncover issues early, build broader support for your work and ensure that people can find information about your work when they need it.

Differentiating between Facebook & Twitter

The first thing that I wanted to answer was how did G+ differentiate itself from Facebook and Twitter. This was hard at first because many of the contributions to my stream were people who thought sharing links endlessly was the best way to leverage Google+. That made G+ very noisy and difficult to follow.  As I started to evaluate who those users were, I started un-circling the broadcasters (people who share a lot of links, but don’t provide any commentary or context). I will say that this instantly made the content in my stream more interesting. I was left with 3 types of contributions:

Beautiful photos

Google plus has become a very popular photo-sharing site.  This is mainly because G+ is a very visual experience.  As a result of that, many professional photographers have shared their work here and I will say that some of it is stunning. I can follow the photographers that I like without having to be their “friend”, or having to click on a link to actually see the picture.

*Shared by David Pond

Curated Links

Shared links with people providing context as to why they shared it are especially poignant. If for example, sharing a 4 minute video, letting me know that the interesting part is at 0:44 saves me time and makes me more likely to invest a few seconds to check it out.

Conversations

People were engaged in deep conversations here and sharing real thoughts and issues. What I loved was that people could express complete thoughts and have the opportunity to make their points without being limited to 140 characters. This was why Google+ was interesting. Even on day 1 of my evaluation, I was involved in a conversation about the experiment itself that had 32 replies. Unlike Twitter, I was not left to fill in the blanks left by shorthand, I had real exchange of thought.

Circles

After getting rid of a bunch of noise, I knew the next step was to get a better handle around circles. This was one of my earlier criticisms and wanted to make sure that I correctly understood how to use them. I searched for information about circle management and came across this: Managing Google+ Circles : 7 Essential Tips. This clued me into something that I was missing. Circles should be used to target groups you share content with. Armed with this information, I instantly went and thought about the topics I share information about and went on to re-do my circles. Aside from the default circles, I added these:

I then went through my initial circles and moved them into this new structure. But, there was still something that was bothering me. We are lousy at classifying things others find relevant, so I feel like I’m building structure at the cost of serendipity. When I asked people on G+ about this, most said that they shared everything as “Public”, and used circles as a way to filter streams and content. I felt like I just went full circle (pardon the pun) and have realized that this is a big obstacle that Google still has to figure out.

Google’s delay in supporting Google Apps also led to many users having multiple accounts. If you browse to their profiles, they are listed as “Obsolete” and “Do not use”, when you are doing circle management, you have no way to know which is which without clicking through to their profiles.

I would ultimately like to be able to identify topics of interest and have people target their content to me if their topic aligns to my interest. But this is just a cursory view of what I think might make it better. I’m sure there are downsides to this approach. Bottom line is that circles confuse people and until they are made much clearer and simpler to individuals, this will be the single biggest barrier to adoption.

Filtering

Filtering is another area that I think needs more work. You have the ability to come in and mute posts, but that requires clicking and muting individual posts. It’s adequate for the 1-off posts that get noisy, but for more pervasive posts it’s weak.

It’s political season here in the US and don’t really care to be bombarded by content relating to the upcoming presidential election, but I have no way to automatically filter content on a topic without removing people from my circles. This is a shame because the person could have good content on a number of different subjects, but the fact that I now have to choose to manually mute posts or eliminate the user leaves me disappointed. I’d love a filter that says:

 Filter all posts about politics from all users

 This way I can follow people who speak about topics that  I am interested and block the subjects that I’m not interested in without additional effort.

Streams

I like the streams concept and think auto-updating scrolling is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you always have the latest information on your screen. On the other hand, if you are trying to read or edit something, having the content scroll can be annoying.

When viewing other streams that are busy (such as “apple maps”), keeping up with the flowing stream is challenging, much like on twitter. I would appreciate if Google would consolidate some of the shares and re-shares. Once nice feature is that If you want to pause the stream, all you need to do is scroll down which is fairly easy.

I also especially appreciate the fact that I can go in and edit posts. In other networks, if I make a mistake, I’d have to go and delete the post and re-create it.

Finding information

Due to the robustness of contributions in Google+, finding information is easier. Of course this being Google, you would expect it to be. But, even in writing this blog post and wanting to go back and find my contributions I’ve referenced, I was able to quickly find the content. There is room for improvement, as I’d like to be able to find my posts with more than 3 replies for example, but even today it’s better than what’s available elsewhere.

Mobility

Google has done a fair job at providing mobile clients. I can only attest to iOS, but on both the iPhone and iPad, they’ve created an environment where I feel I can browse my stream easily when I’m not home. The “instant upload” feature on the iOS platform is interesting, but I haven’t really had time to fully understand the implications of the service. I can only assume that Google’s Android client is as good if not better than the iOS apps.

Sharing Content

Sharing content to your G+ Stream is possibly the biggest challenge that I’ve found with Google+.  While applications like Flipboard have started to Integrate G+ via mobile, the process takes way too many steps and is far too rare. Not many mobile apps have G+ sharing. Even on the computer I expect it to be much easier to share content. I shouldn’t have to rely on 3^rd party add-ons to provide this capability. I also don’t think tab switching is an acceptable answer to cut and paste links. The +1 social widget on many websites does help, but the lack of consistency on content I consume leaves me wanting more.

Enterprise Social Network?

In my previous post, I called out that G+ in my opinion was not an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). Since that post, Google has started to position G+ as an ESN, which when tied together with Google Apps gives you a sharing context to keep the visibility limited within the context of your Google Apps domain. This is scary stuff. It is very easy to miss-share information and if I were any business, I’d avoid it at all cost.

Scalability

This is one question that remains an unknown. Can Google help us help ourselves from over subscribing? If you look at your other networks, you probably have an action item to “review friends” or “review followers” but never get to it. This in part is because it requires a great deal of time and energy to keep our social flows at a rate that we can handle without it becoming noise. If you add in how rapidly our priorities change, having social networks that can switch context that quickly remain illusive.  The fact that Google+ alienated many people the first time around, actually helps people ramp up more slowly. Currently, Google claims 400m+ users, but I would venture that number of users that actually use Google+ are far fewer than that.

Other areas

After a week, I don’t feel like I could sufficiently address all the capabilities of G+.  Some areas that I didn’t get to because of time are still on the list for evaluation.

• Games
• Pages
• Hangouts
• Local
• Events

All but hangouts are new features since the last time I checked out G+, but hangouts now offer more capabilities than they did when first released, so will need to check them out more closely.

Recommendations

In order to get the most out of G+, I think the things that helped me best are:

• Develop a better understanding of circles (pick a use, sharing or consuming. Don’t use it for both)
• Un-circle broadcasters that don’t curate and provide context
• Start small and don’t go crazy adding people to circles
• Engage in conversations involving topics that you are interested in
• Share complete, rich thoughts. Don’t limit to 140 characters.
• Add Google’s +1 share button to your site where you own content if you haven’t already
• Evaluate your own experience and make your own judgment on G+

Summary

Google+ has come a long way since it was first introduced. Now that the platform is over a year old it has been enhanced to overcome many of the problems identified during launch.  I still believe the circle paradigm is difficult to understand and that there still is confusion how to use circles, even among the active user base.

I feel that Google has really dropped the ball on helping people understand the differentiators between G+ and other social networks. Instead, they leave it up to individuals to figure that out on their own.

If you overlook these issue, I found that the platform has matured and if you filter out the people who see this is as another broadcasting platform, there is really good content being shared here. I would encourage you to re-evaluate Google+ and see where it fits for you.

Ever since Google started with social networks, I’ve been skeptical.  But Google+ seems to have more staying power than any of the previous attempts (e.g. dodgeball, wave, buzz). By taking an agile development approach, it allowed Google to release a product that was far from complete, but had enough functionality to make the product usable. This approach is called Minimum Viable Product. The challenge with this approach is that people came, saw, evaluated and left. Many of these people never looked back. I think Alan Lepofsky captured it well when he tweeted:

I tried to capture the frustration and issues with the platform in a couple of different blog posts. Why Google+ is a -1 for me and Why Google+ is not an Enterprise Social Network. I was among those people who decided that Google+ didn’t really fit into my already over crowded social landscape and turned my back on it. This was only amplified due to their delay in supporting Google Apps which I’ve been using for many years.

Giving Google+ another shot

It was this summer that I finally discovered a reason to re-think my Google+ strategy. It had to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I was attending Chuck Hall’s conference in Doylestown, PA SoMeBizLife where Lynette Young was talking about Google+. She was talking about rel=author and that’s when it clicked.

As a blog writer, one of the hardest things to do is to get your content read and discovered. By linking your blog content to you Google+ Profile, your profile picture would be displayed next to your content and that actually influences Google’s ranking in search results.

Very few people use search engines other than Google, so having your content be found there is important. The fact that very few people actually click “next” on Google means that page ranking is important. I won’t pretend to understand Google’s SEO model, but I feel confident that many of the social dynamics of Google+ play a part in that ranking.

Time for action

In the grand scheme of things, there are a couple of important things going on in the Social Networking world that were bothering me. As a result, I went back and tried to figure out what they were, and how could I take steps to maximize my investment of time on social networks.

The issues (my top 5)

• Facebook’s business model and complexity of privacy will cause me to lose my ability to have control of MY information (either through user confusion or questionable marketing tactics)

• Twitter’s desire to “own it all” by limiting 3rd party access

• Lack of ability to have deep conversations on Twitter

• Soccer Mom syndrome (where people don’t really share unless it paints some wonderful picture that may or may not exist)

• Signal to noise ratio is so low that it’s difficult to find relevant info that is interesting.

With that in mind, I started to wonder if Google+ might actually help me resolve some of these issues and provide something that I felt was missing. I also thought it would be a good opportunity to re-evaluate the platform and determine where it is today vs. what it was around the time it launched. Last week, I took a break from Twitter and Facebook. I devoted much of my social media focus toward Google+. In my next post, I’ll share with you my impressions.

Here is: The Goolge+ Experiement (Part 2)

In the social business arena, many strategists and practitioners have learned to dance very well. Usually they do their best moves when asked, “What’s the ROI of Social Business?” From industry experts, to vendors, to practitioners you hear lots of soft benefits from people when asked this question. Often, you hear some broad sweeping general statement such as Find experts faster or Improve innovation. I’ve written in previous posts that these terms are mostly jargon that must be demystified to be understood.

Another approach to estimating ROI is to look at the social media tool in use and suggest the value is people are logging on and participating. Another area of confusion is the topic of “engagement“. This term has been used for years to describe workers who are “fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work.” But somewhere along the way it’s been repurposed to mean “contributor” by the social business crowd. These definitions are completely different and can cause great confusions inside of companies.

If you take the benefits above, you may be able to convince certain executives they should invest in social business. But, there’s one executive who will raise his/her eyebrow and ask, “What’s the measurable ROI of this?” or “How do I prioritize this over <pick your favorite ERP project> which will save the company $1m year-over-year?” These are the questions you need to be ready to answer.

What’s important to the business?

To get started, we need to understand what businesses care about. In my experience, this can be broken down into 4 areas:

• Increase Revenue – e.g. Grow sales, acquire new customers, develop new products
• Reduce Cost – e.g. Shorten project completion time, reduce inventory, improve process efficiency
• Improve satisfaction – e.g. Provide customers better information/services/products, improve morale, reduce attrition
• Reduce Risk – e.g. Avoid fines, reduce intellectual property loss, Increase security awareness

If we further analyze these, we can see they break down into 2 general categories:

Quantitative value is value which can be measured using quantities such as Net Sales, Qualitative value deals with items around quality which are highly subjective such as Customer Satisfaction.

There are times when the qualitative benefits have quantitative values (such as avoiding the risk of non-compliance to prevent a potential fine), I’ve found these qualitative breakdowns to be a good starting point when working with business value.

Quantitative Value

If we look at the quantitative side of the table, these values are fairly straight forward. If you’ve implement a social business solution and it increased your sales by 15%, it’s easy to tie this to business impact. In some cases this may be all you need, but to be credible you must be able to prove you accomplished what you promised. Now you must establish a baseline and measure the delta over a period of time:

Baseline -> Change -> Result

Sales for 2011: $1,000,000 -> Implement social business -> Sales for 2012: $1,150,000

But business is rarely this simple. More often than not there are many changes implemented simultaneously, so tying value back to a specific component is difficult. In this case, you can use a series of interviews to build qualitative data to support the quantifiable values.

“In speaking to the sales team, 35% of the sales team felt the social business tool enabled them to shorten their sales cycle by 4 days or more, while 38% felt they saved 3 days , enabling them to spend more time closing new deals”

Qualitative Value

Working with qualitative value is much harder than quantitative value for many reasons. First, you are asking for opinions and feelings. These are highly subjective and usually collected by either surveys or interviews. There is a risk of people misunderstanding the question as well as not wanting to share things that may paint them or anyone in a negative light. Another risk is not actually capturing a representative sample leading to false findings. Finally, there’s the question about whether this the problem that matters to your company. If you work for a company where employee morale is already high, improving morale may not be a priority.

One area that is especially difficult is around productivity. When saying that something improves productivity, many people will question this with statements like, “Does this mean my employees can now leave early?”. It’s best to focus on what is now possible that wasn’t before. For example:

The help desk has increased productivity as a result of their utilization of the enterprise social network, resulting in them closing 20% more tickets in a day.

Those tricky metrics

Metrics can be elusive. In almost every company I’ve worked for, the metrics are far less mature than you need. Often, even the most rudimentary metrics are missing or not captured accurately or consistently. People say they don’t have time or the metrics aren’t important or they’ll just “know” if there’s an improvement.

The last thing you want to do is be critical of the people and or groups who aren’t capturing the proper metrics. Instead, be consultative and work with teams to see what they actually have and what you can use. Identify how they judge themselves and help them work to mature metrics and see how the group can benefit from the effort. I usually deploy a “Good, better, best” roadmap when working with teams so we can show how each step in metrics maturity will deliver more concrete information (see: Case Studies for more information).

Let’s look back at the sales cycle discussed above. Perhaps the sales team doesn’t have a sales automation tool, but with the business growing, they know it’s time to start to considering one. The metrics roadmap could look something like this:

Good: VP of Sales view of the average sales cycle length <- Qualitative value that can be used as a baseline

Better: Having Sales Associates track their cycle length <- Shift from qualitative to quantitative

Best: Integrated with Sales Automation tool tracking Lead to Order days <- Automated

Being more specific about jargon

In previous posts, I’ve tried to explain what businesses and leadership wants when they say things like Improving Collaboration, Break down silos, Innovate better. Usually it’s just a matter of getting more specific. For example; “Finding experts“ inside a company can be valuable, but we do ourselves a disservice by generalizing and not calling out what’s actually going on. There are many different types of expertise that is needed inside of companies. It’s best to document them all so that people understand this.

By leveraging our enterprise social network, our sales teams have access to product experts and can find answers to customer’s questions faster, resulting in a shortened sales cycle and improving the customer’s satisfaction.

In many cases, it’s not that people are looking for experts, they are looking for answers. When you focus on what having those answers enables for your business, you start to have the basis for a solid social business case, focused on answers.

By having process owners engaged on the enterprise social network, we can remove the delays which occur when something breaks an existing process. This becomes clear when you see something like:

By having the accounting department actively monitoring the sales group, they were able to clear up a system error on a big customer in minutes that would have taken days in the past and potentially lost the $10m sale.

Summary

These are the basics for uncovering and proving “hard”  business value within your organization. This information is based on the assumption that you are already experimenting and have implemented a social business solution. In my next post, I will share how to align your social business case to the company strategy and how to leverage “Conservative Guesstimation” to make your business solid in predicting value within your organization.

As always, I’m interested to hear your feedback. Let us know how you are building your social business cases inside of your company.

• Focus on other’s success, not your own - This isn’t about you. Your key objective should be to make the people who can benefit from social successful. You can do this by offering possible solutions to their business challenges without being preachy. Establish a good reputation inside the company as a person who will help you be successful. One way to facilitate this would be to share your goals & objectives publicly so that others can see what your motivations are. (see:  http://greg2dot0.com/2012/06/21/transparent_goals/)

• People will act in self-interest - Despite what may be good for the company, people have repeatedly shown that they will do things that are in their own best interest, even if it negatively impacts others (or the company). This is mainly due to “uninternalized externalities” (Meaning we don’t feel the pain that our actions cause others.) This is usually because we are incented to be successful as an individual for a raise or promotion. Working to help define objectives that promote cooperation and collaboration is a way to shift what a person’s self-interest is to reflect company success over the individual’s.

• Make it easy for people to do the right thing - If the process for doing something is complicated and has a lot of steps, chances are people will shortcut the system. Really understand that most people want to do the right thing. The challenge is of course to make the right thing the easiest thing to do.

• Think holistic, not top-down or bottom-up - Since the beginning, many strategists thought that you needed to be bottoms up (Groundswell) and then to get Executive buy-in. While this can be successful, you will not get a lot of support from middle management if they don’t see how they can leverage social for success. This is because their role changes the most in the social enterprise. (see:  http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2012/05/enterprise-social-networks-exactly-what-has-changed.html)

• Business users have too many tools - The average business user is laden with many tools, and social can just be seen as another one, two or many. Finding a solution that reduces the tools that the average business user needs can be seen by many as the single biggest benefit to social. Enterprise Social tools need to be a place where people get work done, not simply another destination that people have to go to every day.

• There will always be new users - In companies, you will always have new users. Even if your company is downsizing, there will be attrition and hopefully new hires. Keep in mind that the fundamentals of a social network change as it grows & matures. You want to create an environment where new people can feel comfortable and get up to speed without being overwhelmed regardless of the maturity of your network (see:  http://greg2dot0.com/2011/02/28/on-boarding/)

• Trust is an imperative - Sharing requires trust. If people feel that their words will be used against them (either now or in the future), they will not participate. You need to create an environment of trust to help everyone feel comfortable sharing things that might show weakness, ignorance or unpopular information.

• More doesn’t always equal better - It’s not imperative to have 100% of a company collaborating to be social. Each new participant in a social network adds to the noise. It’s really important to help people understand how to reduce the noise and use social for areas where there’s success. I’ve often taken the approach that if 2 people collaborate and generate $1m in value that it’s better than having 100 people collaborate to generate $1k in value.

• Align to business strategy - Enterprise social enables you to solve many issues inside a company, but the best chance of success is to align your solution to the company’s challenges that really matter. This alone is not enough. You need to do this while making peoples’ jobs easier or helping get it done faster then they can do it using traditional tools.

• E-mail is not the enemy - Lots of social vendors have painted e-mail as the enemy and something that needs to be eradicated from our lives, but the truth is that e-mail is a very valuable system for most of us. The trick is to remove the stuff that doesn’t belong in e-mail, such as non-private conversations, or conversations with many participants so that we can consider our time spent in e-mail to be valuable.

• Employees should be good collaborators before exposing customers, partners or suppliers - Part of any good social strategy is to be collaborative not just behind the firewall, but outside the company as well. By first implementing social inside the company allows you to make mistakes and mitigate your weaknesses without looking stupid to your customers. (see: http://greg2dot0.com/2010/08/02/ford-socialcrm)

• Social Doesn’t solve everything - You lose credibility inside of organizations when you “evangelize” anything, social is no different. There are legitimate reasons why people don’t use social and there are some problems that social can’t solve. By listening, you will get more support than if you are preaching. It’s OK to say that something isn’t a good fit for social business.

This list is far from exhaustive, but captures what I believe to be the most important principles to practice when dealing with change inside organizations. I’d love to make this comprehensive and encourage you to share any principles that you believe are needed to drive success in social business.

When dealing with new people inside a large company, it is common to question why people are acting the way they are and be suspicious of motives. This is often because people don’t understand what your role is inside the company and as a result, that lack of understanding and trust can make getting things done challenging.

Making objectives transparent

When I was at Alcatel-Lucent, one of my colleagues started a conversation on our Engage (Jive) platform trying to determine who we should ask to get permission to publish our objectives. After getting frustrated with the community around asking for permission, I decided to take a chance. I published my job description, my objectives and my accomplishments on my blog. The reaction was mixed, some people thought this was great, some were thinking I was going to get reprimanded and some thought I was showing off. In the end, it turned out to be highly rewarding. First, it gave people insight into why I was doing what I was doing. If there were any other people in the company that had similar objectives, it was a great way for us to connect and collaborate on a common goal and eliminate competing initiatives (or at least be aware that they existed). Second, it helped me make my objectives crisper. Since this was posted as a blog and comments were encouraged, people had the ability to provide feedback, ask questions and make suggestions. Lastly, it showed the community that you could do something that might not be directly blessed and bad things won’t happen.

By sharing this information, it can quickly help people and organizations align better and provide a good base for better collaboration inside your organization. I included a link to this blog when I introduced myself to new people as part of my e-mail signature and had lots of good feedback as a result.

Here is the post that I made (comments omitted and customers removed since I do not own that material), Please keep in mind that this was 2010/2011 and things have changed a bit since then.

Thinking Outside the Cube: What I do (and plan on doing in 2011) in Alcatel-Lucent

Posted by Greg LOWE Jan 19, 2011

Social Media Business Strategist

This position will serve as an evangelist for social media, social networking, and collaboration at Alcatel-Lucent.

Responsible for the definition of a social media, social networking, and collaboration strategy at Alcatel-Lucent, taking into account the various needs of the business and assessing the existing Web 2.0 environment to select best-in-class solutions for rapid social media adoption.

Responsible to interface with both internal and external technical partners for the deployment and adoption of the selected social media strategy and tool throughout the various organizations at Alcatel-Lucent/ Will partner with multiple organizations throughout Alcatel-Lucent for the phased deployment and creation of social networking communities for usage.

Skills:

• Strong social media and Web 2.0 skills. Familiarity with existing and evolving solution sets and challenges.
• Clear understanding of the challenges facing web, enterprise, and mobile application developers.
• Understanding of social media promotion strategies.
• Ability to build credibility throughout Alcatel-Lucent’s organizations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Goal-oriented with a strong attention to detail

Career Goals

To drive a Social Business initiatives from inception to implementation to adoption. This includes Employee engagement as well as extranet solutions with Customers, Partners & Suppliers using Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 tools to drive new ways of working to achieve business success.

2010 Accomplishments

• Delivered “Engage” community platform and social network based on Jive S.B.S by focusing on adoption and success. 38,000 (50%) of the employees have signed up in the first 8 months.
• Presented our Engage solution to Ben Verwaayen (CEO) securing his support and endorsement of the platform and the Engage Team as the new way of working in Alcatel-Lucent resulting in better collaboration and communication across organizational boundaries. <URL to the presentation was removed>
• Selected as a finalist for the Internal Evangelist of the Year award (2009 & 2010) by The 2.0 Adoption Council for my efforts to bring Enterprise 2.0 technologies, practices and behaviors to Alcatel-Lucent
• Invited to present at a series of conferences and webinars sharing the Alcatel-lucent accomplishments in Enterprise 2.0/Social Business with outside organizations, demonstrating our leadership in this space. This resulted in customers engaging our sales teams to speak to us about our leadership in this space. Most Notably: <customer omitted>
• Article: quoted in The Economist for our work with Microblogging
• Presented our experiences and demonstrated our leadership in Social Business to <customer omitted> who reached out to our Enterprise Sales Teams as a result of our leadership in the Social Business Space
• Article: Written highlighting Alcatel-Lucent’s accomplishments in Enterprise 2.0: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179169/Alcatel_Lucent_gets_social_with_company_communication
• Over 800 Twitter followers including Alcatel-Lucent analysts, Customers and other Social Media Strategists
• Over 3,000 followers on Yammer & Engage that look to me for thought leadership in the Social Business space.

My 2011 planned activities (Objectives)

• Blog inside and outside of Alcatel-Lucent highlighting our accomplishments in Social Business
• Lead the existing Engage community by encouraging growth through conversation and comments on the Engage platform
• Research Adoption strategies and work with the Enterprise Community Manager to raise contribution levels
• Work with Rutgers University to deliver a Social Business Survey to select ALU employees to help qualify the value of Social Business tools
• Define the metrics necessary to measure the effectiveness of our key Social Business objectives
• Break down silos (Ugh, I wish I never put this in writing see: Breaking down silos, what does that mean?)
• Reduce duplication of effort
• Foster innovation
• Consult with other areas of Marketing, Strategy & Communications on developing External Collaboration presence

In many companies, the relationship between the business and IT is strained at best, but even in companies where the relationship is good, it’s unclear that IT has the expertise or capability to drive social adoption within a company. This is for many reasons:

• Engineers and Technologists generally don’t understand business priorities
  
• The project becomes the focus, not the business objective
  
• Lack of talent coming into IT due to out-sourcing and off-shoring
  
• Isolation from the business
  
• Operational focus on efficiency (cost)
  

Additionally, IT has not been the role model for adopting the changes that social implies. IT is already dealing with numerous challenges that prevents them from being an effective force for adoption:

• Fear of the cloud (Job security/control)
  
• Loss of influence/control by IT Executives (Klout)
  
• Consumerization (keeping pace with end user expectations)
  
• Architectures vs. productivity (Usability)
  

As people who know and follow me already understand, I’m very optimistic about the social business space. Social has the potential to connect the lot of pieces in Microsoft’s offering and finally make social business mainstream, but the one big mistake that can be made is that this is thought of as just a piece of “infrastructure” (like e-mail). To be successful, organizations not only need to focus on the technology, but more importantly the culture, behaviors and change inside the organization. It’s not about doing social, it’s understanding the changes that your want or need to make in your business and how social enables it and then, most importantly, making it happen.

I don’t believe the greatest challenge for Microsoft will be its customers or the market; I believe the biggest challenge for Microsoft will be Microsoft. Will the company who originated the term “Eating your own dog food” be able to successfully implement an internal social network that leads to change inside the company? By most accounts, the culture inside Microsoft is secretive and asocial. Will they be able to embrace the openness of a social platform internally? Perhaps this in part is why OfficeTalk never saw the light of day. Having personally seen the challenges of introducing change inside a large technology organization (Alcatel-Lucent), I expect that there’s going to be quite a battle internally between the people who want change and the people who don’t. It will take some very talented and tenacious people who understand social and the change behind it to help drive this shift internally with the right support for this stand a chance.

It’s too early to predict what’s going to happen, but like its solutions, it’s not over once it’s deployed (or acquired in this case). The real challenge only begins after the deal is done.

When we talk about innovation, we’re really talking about doing things differently to achieve better outcomes. Dictionary.com defines innovate as “to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.” This sounds great and it makes it clear why leadership wants their companies to innovate better, but it’s never as easy as it sounds. There are many challenges and personal behaviors that need to be addressed to be truly innovative and be successful at having your employees innovate better.

It starts with the idea

To better understand innovation, let’s look at the core, the idea. Ideas are very personal. Why? Because they are ours. When you come up with an idea, you’ve invested your time and energy into thinking about something and processing and in the end you have an idea. This investment in the idea makes it very fragile, sort of like a baby.  At this point, you’ve probably reviewed the idea a few times; looking for flaws, but this self-validation of the idea is only the first step. The next step requires courage, it requires you tell someone else your idea. At that point, the other person is now judging your idea and in many cases you. This process doesn’t only happen once, it happens many times. At some point, your idea may not just be judged by an individual, but a committee leading to a whole new social dynamic. Each step in the process improves your confidence in your ideas as you get validation, but the stakes also increase as ideas tend to work their way up the decision chain, increasing the risk and potential disappointment.

To be fair, most of our ideas are far weaker than we believe them to be, not necessarily because the idea is bad, but because we don’t understand all the constraints and are unable to effectively communicate the vision of the idea and don’t have any clue on how to make them happen.

Innovation requires work

It’s one thing to be the “idea guy” and throw your idea out for others to act upon, but don’t be surprised when nobody does. The main reason that is has to do with the other part of ideas…change. People who are comfortable with the status quo put a lot of work into fighting off change. Your challenge now is not only to have a great idea, but also avoid the landmines that it takes to get it implemented.

In most cases, ideas alone are not enough; it requires vision, tenacity and drive. Thomas Edison suggested that genius is 1% inspiration (idea) and 99% perspiration (work), yet most of us are content to take our ideas and throw them over the wall thinking someone else will make them happen and in return for our great idea, we’ll get lauded as the hero.

Genius: 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration – Thomas Edison

To be blunt, leadership doesn’t have the time to babysit. They need people who can navigate the waters to get ideas implemented. In many large companies, it’s easy to talk about problems and how to solve them, but it’s really difficult to act upon those ideas and implement change. It requires thick skin, the ability to handle rejection, the resourcefulness to work around roadblocks and the tenacity to not give up.

So, what does leadership want?

I believe leadership really wants innovators who not only can come up with good ideas, but can actually execute them (the quicker the better).

Think – Come up with ideas that will improve the core values and the priorities for the company

Act – Take the good ideas and make them happen

Recently, I saw a post from David Armano, Move Over Entrepreneurs, Here Come The Intrapreneurs. An intrapreneur is defined as: “An employee within a large company who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable new product, service, business, etc., often instead of leaving to start their own company”, according to the Cambridge dictionary. This ultimately is what many business leaders want. But many leaders don’t understand why there aren’t more inside their company. Ultimately this comes down to the appetite for risk inside the company and existing commitments. Many large companies are so risk averse (a whole other blog post) that they won’t support anything that isn’t guaranteed to be a unilateral success. Additionally, many of the people who would be equipped to execute effectively may already be over committed.

When we look at innovation inside a large company, everyone is to blame why it doesn’t work. Leadership doesn’t necessarily have the visibility into the difficult landscape inside the company to get something done, and employees tend to become risk averse and/or overcommitted.

Challenging the jargon

• What exactly do you expect when you say “Improve Innovation”?
• Is it about ideas or execution (or both)?
• How are ideas priorities and vetted today?
• What happens to ideas that aren’t bad, but just aren’t right?
• What resources exist for good ideas to become reality?

One way to improve the probability of innovation inside a company is to have a program designed to teach people not only to have ideas, but also to act on them, how to become Intrapreneurs. But that alone is not enough. Not everyone who has a product idea want to become a product manager. This is one area where an Enterprise Social Network can provide tremendous value inside your company. By opening ideas to a larger audience, it can remove some of the ownership bias that may kill really good ideas before their time. But, it still will take time and demonstrated success to show people that ideas are both wanted and actionable to give them the courage it takes to put their ideas out in public. It will also require that people see how bad ideas are handled in this public forum to ensure that they won’t be embarrassed or worse.

Hopefully you have enjoyed my series on jargon in the Social Business/Enterprise 2.0 space. If you have more jargon, I’d love to hear it. If I get good ones, I’ll address them in upcoming blog posts.