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The Social Way

The Shift is Human Not Social

December 4, 2012 By

Prophecy - the future or your ride into the future?It is easy to be excited about social media. Almost singlehandedly, social media has made the web an accessible and usable space. You no longer need to be a programmer to create a website. You no longer need to be a photographer to create a gallery of stunning images. And you no longer need the support of a newsroom to publish your opinion and insight.

Public/private distinctions evaporate under pressure from disruptive trends

The massive shift that has taken place on the web is not about social. Or should I say, it’s not just about social – it’s a conflation of trends. And it’s not even something that has taken place on the web – it has lodged far deeper within us. What R “Ray” Wang calls the five pillars of enterprise disruption are playing out on a vast scale across every industry, product and service line, impacting not just how we work and how we live but our very behaviour. The five pillars are:

  1. Social
  2. Mobile
  3. Big data
  4. Cloud computing
  5. Unified communications

It is precisely because these trends are impacting our behaviours that the line between our professional and private lives is evaporating. Think about the following:

  • The social divide: We use our personal Facebook accounts to manage our work related brand pages. We post photos of ourselves on the web and check-in to work and business locations linking our physical location with our image and activity. With a few lines of code, aggregators (like Facebook) can connect the dots between our interests, passions, locations and needs. And in the rush to convenience, we may just click that link, buy that product and save 15 minutes of shopping in our busy day. We are – in effect – gleefully skipping over the boundaries of what was once called the work-life balance … all with the aid of technology and belief in our own actions
  • The personal brand and the private self: What happens when you have a bad day? What happens when something goes wrong? The brand must be “managed”, spun, and deliver on its promise. Sometimes your “friends” really are your Friends and sometimes they are of a lowercase variety. Judging by our behaviour across social networks, mobile platforms and in the cloud, we may signal a “bad day” but it’s still a brand communication. The private self remains resolutely isolated amidst a sea of vapid, well wishing tweets and inspirational quotes. We struggle to bridge the gap between what we perform and who we are and how we feel
  • I am where you are: The always-on, ambient intimacy afforded by social networks brings us not only closer – but into a psychic closed loop of interaction with our networks of connections. Every tweet, status update and item shared taps our deep need for community and interaction. On the receiving end, this low-demand connection can range from a warm feeling of connectedness to an panic-inducing sense of information abundance. The lines between stalker and acquaintance have never been so feint.

Technology disruption and the Social Way

In amongst this vast range of digital disruption, our challenge is to chart a path to a future worth living.

By understanding these trends and applying our creativity, we can harness disruption towards a positive outcome. This means:

  • Design thinking: Applying innovative approaches to problems and designing solutions with a human outcome. Don’t think technology, think behaviour
  • Change management: Rather than approaching challenges in your business as an advertising or communications challenge – think about it as a change management issue. Think through the elements that will produce a step-change in your customer’s behaviour and deliver them incrementally
  • Think purpose not goal: It’s easy (and impersonal) to set a goal. Think about and articulate your purpose. Make it personal and your customers will too.

Filed Under: Digital Strategy, Featured, Social Media, The Social Way

Are You Ready for Your Customers Social Christmas?

October 29, 2012 By

It’s that time of year. Marketers are turning their attention to the retail and sales rush that marks the last months of each year – hoping for that final boost that achieves targets, secures bonuses and ultimately signals a year well spent.

And while Stan Johnson feels that it’s a little too early to think of Christmas promotion, the Mastercard Spending Pulse report suggests that retailers are right to begin their preparations now. In 2011, consumer spending began to escalate on Saturdays through November – and this year, according to Shop.org, online retailers are moving to take advantage of this trend, with over 60% planning to begin their promotions by mid November.

And while retailers and consumers appear to be on a convergent path, there is a persistent perception gap between brands and their connected customers. IBM’s Social CRM report identified a gap between the expectations of consumers and what brands (and marketers) THINK consumers want – and this gap was confirmed locally in our Australian Social Business Report. But precious little has been done to bridge this gap.

  • Connected consumers are discovering, debating and deciding ahead of your marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is being overhauled – not by marketers but by your customers. Recent Google Retail research reinforces this view- indicating that the lines are blurring between offline and online shopping, with 80% of consumers researching online before making a purchase. Those retailers (ie almost all retailers) without a sophisticated multi-channel strategy incorporating social media, social judgement and influencer management will lose out to more nimble retailers who have invested in a comprehensive digital engagement strategy.
  • Retailers must act NOW to close the perception gap. With approximately eight weeks between now and the end of the year, retailers must act immediately to address gaps. Social media can be deployed surprisingly quickly once gaps have been identified. The first step is to baseline your current position.
  • Take our free social media fitness assessment. To quickly address these challenges, we have created a social media fitness assessment. Simply by answering some questions about your business, we can provide a benchmark and suggestions for improvement.

Test your social media fitness by entering your details below:


Filed Under: Digital Strategy, Featured, Retail, The Social Way

Enterprise Social Business Maturity Model

March 28, 2012 By

Almost every day there is another way that social media encroaches upon our businesses. It could be a new technology designed to help us reach new customers or something to help us target buyers more accurately. It could be a new device, some software or a must-have community building platform.

Similarly, in our so-called “personal lives”, we are seeing a blurring of the boundaries – between home and work, work and play, friends, colleagues, connections and family. For me, this is the real shift that is taking place – this is The Social Way.

But while many of us have been busily weaving social media into the fabric of our lives, most businesses are at the very beginning of this process. Their efforts are ad hoc, barely repeatable and hardly defined. There is confusion, miscommunication – and even misinformation.

So what then would be a model that enterprises – large scale businesses – could look to?

We would need a few core components:

  • Goals
  • Governance and commitment
  • Ability/capability
  • Measurement and metriccs
  • Scalability

Once we had these components, we’d then need to map these against a maturity model for optimisation. I had considered using a more circular model – such as the kind of best practice that works for continuous digital strategy – but enterprise process maturity is not achieved in short bursts – and may require years to achieve.

By mapping your organisation’s “current” and “desired” states in terms of social business maturity, you can begin to plot a path to improvement in the five key areas. And by tying these rigorously to a program of measurement you will be able to identify gaps and take corrective action at key milestones in your business/performance cycle.

Social Business Maturity Model

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0, Featured, Process Maturity, Social Business, The Social Way

Putting Value Into Your Professional Network

March 20, 2012 By

While Twitter and Facebook garner the attention of the media, that “other social network”, LinkedIn has been quietly continuing on its merry way, amassing members and connecting powerful, influential and capable professionals from all walks of life. Ok – let’s be honest, there’s plenty of incompetents in there too – social networks after all simply reflect the beautiful unevenness of our lives. The figures, however, speak for themselves. Take a look at this infographic from the folks at OnlineMBA.com … two billion people searches per year (yes, that’s someone looking for someone with YOUR skills and experience), three million members here in Australia and over 100 million worldwide.

But there is one thing that amazes me about LinkedIn. It’s the way that people – you and I – use LinkedIn. Rather than seeing it as a powerful inbound marketing channel, we simply post our resumes like a tawdry badge of honour.

Funnily enough we give a nod towards the inbound nature of LinkedIn when we specify that we can be contacted for “new opportunities”.

Yet, our profiles could be so much more. After all, LinkedIn has done the hard work of assembling a powerful, connected and layered community for us. We can choose how to participate, who to connect to and who to recommend. But we can also FIND and BE FOUND.

The question really is for US. Do we WANT to be found? Do we REALLY want to be contacted about “new opportunities” – and if so, how do our profiles shape up? Do you present yourself in such a way that prospective customers, clients or employers would WANT to connect with you?

Take FIVE minutes to look at your profile and think about it from an employer’s perspective. Maybe you need a makeover. And remember, to get value out of any social network you’ve got to put value INTO it. Maybe it’s time to get some perspective on the Outlook for Social Business in Australia. Are you part of the conversation or just watching from the sidelines?

Value-Of-Being-On-Linkedin

Filed Under: Featured, Inbound Marketing, Personal Branding, Social Business, Social Media, The Social Way

What is Continuous Digital Strategy

March 2, 2012 By

Strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisted across the lifecycle of any project. So, perhaps it is more of a spiral than a circle as shown above … but really the key point is that each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project. And the faster you cycle through, the more agile and responsive your work will be.

Let’s take a look at how it fits together.

Objectives

You have to have serious objectives. Your insight process will have delivered you a challenge, and out of that you or your client will have laid out some objectives which need to be met. They may be “fluffy” objectives like “awareness” or “reach” or they may be harder – like “increasing sales 20%” or “200 new customers”.

Audience

Once you know what the company or client expects, it’s time to turn your attention to the need states of your audience. What do they want? What do they expect? What do they aspire to? What is unmet? What do they look, smell and taste like? It’s time to get up close and personal with the folks who pay your bills!

Footprint

Now that you know your audiences in their pungent granularity, you now need to understand their behaviour. Where do they go? What do they do? Where to they spend time and why? This is about walking a mile or two in their shoes. But it also a chance to match the footprints of your brands/products. What overlaps? What doesn’t? Where are the opportunities. And where are the touchpoints that will become valuable as your project grows. You need to map out and understand the nuances of these as they will become launchpads for your conversations (or perhaps, as David Armano would say, they are the places where the skimming stones cause a ripple of influence).

Content

As you may have guessed, for me, this is storytime. Here you start to look at the structures of storytelling that will bridge the gaps you have identified in the earlier steps. What can you do to emotionally engage and entertain? How can you use P-L-A-Y to activate, surprise and delight your audiences?

Converse

This is where your strategy becomes one of amplification rather than shouting. In the two-way or polyphonic space of the web, your strategy needs to help you turn great content that YOU produce into great stories that others TELL on your behalf. This is the Auchterlonie Effect that I have discussed in other posts. It is where social capital (or what Tara Hunt calls whuffie) is both created and spent, accumulated and shared.

Commitment

Once we begin conversing – between the people behind the brand and those who consume it, a whole lot of human strangeness steps in. What happens if we like these people “over there” (on either side)? What are the rules of engagement? How do we get serious about progressing our relationship – moving from transactions to experience – and what does that take on both our parts to come to a mutual understanding?

Measurement

We often think that measurement is difficult. It’s not. What is hard is committing to the numbers and to the metrics. If we have done the hard work of aligning our project objectives with the overall strategic objectives of our businesses, then much of this falls in place. But we also need to follow this through each of the other steps. For example, which audiences are important (or are influential) for your brand/product? Measure it. How much time do they spend on the web and on which sites? Measure it. Which pieces of content will drive engagement (and which pieces need to change and evolve as your project grows)? Measure it. How far do your conversations echo across the web? Measure it. What are the intangibles – and what can be substantiated via research? Measure it.

Now, once you have an iteration complete, race through it all again. Pool your learnings from each stopping point and drive them back through the process. Make your brand better. Make your customer experience more profound. Refine, substantiate and evolve.

For me, this is what digital strategy is all about – not the technology – but getting to people. Making it messy. But making it real.

Filed Under: Digital Strategy, Featured, The Social Way, Thinking

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