John Hagel (The Power of Pull and Co-Chairman, Center for the Edge – Deloitte & Touche)
- Does social software really matter? Let’s use metrics that matter. Those varies depending on how you are sitting in the organization shifting from business, to operations, front-line metrics. One of the challenges is how to frame the deployment opportunity in terms that matter to the entire org
- The best way is starting from financial metrics going doing to operational metrics and front line ones. Starting from the business, from the business pains and major costs trying to improve how the business operates. This journey can change the view about social software from a marketing issue to significantly affect performance
- How to deploy? Fairly common trajectory starting from relatively narrow transactions (small time and effort to participate with a quick feedback on the value of participation because connected to day by day in the workplace) than using that to build reputation, giving recognition to most valuable users and pulling others based on common interests. Relationships start to form and you see people coming together on more sustained collaboration during the time.
- SAP Netweaver has been accompanied by an online collaboration platform for 3rd party developers where meeting and discussing coding problems to find answers. Over time it became 2M software developers and one of the reasons is that problems are resolved in 17 minutes in average! It is a productivity tool. SAP thought about to assign reputation around expertise. One by product is software developers recruiters looking for talent not because people are claiming expertise but because they are showing expertise. One of the most significant activities is teams coming together based on expertise to build new products.
- To get engagement you don’t need ton of money. You have to address meaningful needs
- In the gaming environment (WoW), challenges become harder and harder giving motivation to keep participating. When you talk about passion to executives they look puzzled. One common element in those environments is passion. If you are interested in performance you must be interested in passion! It has to do with question disposition (how you react to unexpected challenges) and connecting disposition (constantly seeking others to collaborate in quests they are working on) among employees
- Problem is that measuring passion.. only 20% are really passionated and level of passion is inversely related to the size of the enterprise
- Deployment of social software has interesting secondary effects: catalyzing and fostering passion, getting people engaged and showing the value of contribution, stimulating people to connect in order to address harder and harder tasks
- The big shift measures an ongoing trend about how companies work: all US public companies in the last 40 yrs the ROE dropped 75% and not leveling off. One cause is mounting performance pressure. Red Queen metaphor: going faster and faster and staying in the same place. We need to find ways to catalyze and foster passion among employees. That’s the only path to sustained increased performance
- Social Software can help with that!
Mike Rhodin (Senior Vice President, IBM Software Solutions Group)
- Social business is about infusing intelligence into the way people interact among customers, employees, partners, competitors. Those actors are in the same network talking to each other (i.e IBM DeveloperNetworks)
- Some examples are about the transformation of traditional processes: marketing (from push to trusted relationships and brand advocacy), R&D (from new ideas invented internally and tested on the market to shared insights coming from the market to generate break-throughs for the market), from email, phone and knowledge silos to networked knowledge harvested to create value
- To improve marketing effectiveness: you can use analytics and social networks to discover sentiment analysis and analyze new intelligence gathered directly from consumers
- To improve product and service information: a social content system with Q&A enables data to find data
- To improve HR: analytics enable hr teams to understand and predict things like attention
- [IBM pitching the product..]
John Stepper (Managing Director, Deutsche Bank)
- What problem are you trying to solve?
- Sharing, connecting, etc is not business value. Executives cannot understanding this language. We need to solve real problems and provide real benefits at how we work
- 3 steps that gave them traction and credibility with measurable value.
- “Help me get better at key roles”. Helping particular profiles to embrace standards. The did it by launching communities of practice, advancing the practice in a measurable way. In 1 yr they created 20 of them reaching concrete value, improving proficiency for specific roles. 5K users learned how to step out the org chart and contribute across silos. They institutionalized communities, with community managers plus 5 divisions preparing to launch and 30 more communities on HR, compliance, communication. They have built an internal council to introduce a new way of working
- DB Social Media Council to share best practices and shape central services for the business and compliance
- An enterprise platform + center of excellence + collaboration community of practice
- Before needing a social software you need to understand how to improve they way people work everyday. Solve real problems
- Now they have 1 portal, 20 communities, 100 teams, 1000 answers
- Results: Saved $10+ million, 1K man days, 25% email / meetings, 50% service calls
- Goals: employee engagement, role proficiency, business examples
- Don’t retweet other people revolutions. Change the work
Sameer Patel (Founder and Partner Sovos Group)
- Gartner says we are going to spend $13.3B on CRM. In 2010 CRM spending was growing 9%
- What are we doing with CRM? Where are these customers that we want to have relationships with?
- CRM is a one giant contact management and reporting tool. Forecasts, leads, contacts, opportunities, wins. Where is the customer relationship in all this? This is a system of records
- Customers today have had enough! 200M americans get unwanted calls and 91% of email users have unsubscribed from a company email they previously opted in. You can keep talking but they are not listening. This is happening in every industry
- Even for those industries without strong social media use, search engines are now providing access to social in common searches
- What do these prospects and customers expects from us? 70% are talking to friends and families, 43% sharing opinions and only 25% wants to interact with brands. Customers are expecting 4 things: engagement not data, expert answers, minimal latency, global competency and local relevancy
- The kind of detail the customer expects from us is in our systems but across the programs we have been running managed by partners, suppliers
- The customer expectation of CRM is cRM. It’s about identified expertise and purpose fulfillment
- We have to move beyond tactical programmatic metrics (engagement, participation, etc). Look at traditional existing metrics inside organizations and start to understand how social affects those metrics. How those metrics even change: cost per lead, win rates, conversion, retention, time to close, qualified leads, lead volumes
Andrew McAfee (Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management)
- He published his seminal paper 5 years ago. Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business are now mainstream phenomenons with a proved value for most companies
- Why has E20 succeeded? This is not a group of technology searching for a need but one addressing key business issues. “If only we knew what we know, we’d be 3 times more productive ” (Leo Platt, former CEO HP). It helps people find expertise, reach out to each other and capitalize collective intelligence
- But it also gives people the way to express themselves and have a voice, status, reputation in a very human and social way
- And people behave when receiving this kind of tools. It looks an unstoppable trend
- If we look ahead there are two aspects to be addressed:
- Old-fashioned bosses (in US? let’s not talking about Italy!!!). Their vision for how work should happen in the enterprise is still stucked at Taylor or Ford in a very hierarchical way. Social software is freeform, not hierarchical, etc..
- New fangled computers. Humans playing against computers. Computers today help us connecting and reaching knowledge. Is the future about more powerful computer or is it more about the questions computers are still lousy at: what do our customers want next, why has our growth slowed, what new markets should we enter. We need to use passion, creativity, etc
- “The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers” Sydnet J.Harris. The biggest danger is old bosses, not new computers acting a bit more like humans
Selling Enterprise Sales Collaboration Up the Chain (Kristen Demarest Sanders, Director, Global Sales Operations, Sales Enablement – Yahoo!)
- How to leverage collaboration for selling?
- The Solution? F+ Y! + sS ^(R)t = $$$ (Formal content management + Yahoo! framework + Social = Selling at the speed of Social)
- They used Chatter to support collaboration
- Bringing together marketing, sales across markets and regions changing behaviors
- Conception of “The Source”: requirements gathering and building the case, technology & vendor selection, requirements validation, design. It was 25% technology and 75% change management. Sales lead requirements. It is solve for global, engage globally, validate globally, design and implement globally.
- 3 areas of focus
- formal (traditional content management, top down approach, organized asset taxonomy, managed access, contributor / author certification, strong governance model)
- social collaboration (field contributed content + formal content, a catalyst for dialogue around information, organized groups by topic, closed loop feedback, closer to the pulse of the business)
- the yahoo way (organized content hubs, content assets aggregated by subject matter, user consumes all content around an area)
- Guiding principles: be agile to decrease the timeline, functionality first and UI second, 100% adoption is crucial so you have to work for that, enlist sales leaders asap (grass roots efforts not enough), you need mobile integration, change management is key and be prepared training users, listening to your audience, being inclusive and solving global problems.
- Takeaways: global business operations lead but IT supported, select a technology that allows you to move at the speed of social (innovate & evolving platform)
Online Communities – A Strategic Imperative (Rachel Happe, The Community Roundtable)
- Community: a group of people with unique shared values, behaviors and artifacts
- They are opt-in and people participate because they get more out of it than what they put in
- You can create a business where value is generated and distributed through communities
- Social business cannot be done without communities
- Strategy: to make orgs more human, adaptive and resilient in order to increase revenue through relevance and reduce costs through crowdsourcing
- Process: socializing a process means that it becomes interactive and iterative and more dependent on collaborative contribute
- Community management is a declination of general management
- Community management is a bit like a little child full of potential but still learning and generating some mess
- But.. we may be on a collision course: change is happening faster than organization can keep up with. You could lose control and crash
- Social media is mainstream. 50%+ adoption in core use cases (the state of community management 2011) especially in marketing, collaboration, innovation, support, development, recruiting
- Opportunities: trusted networks increase the speed of information, perfect information = better negotiating advantages, companies are increasing the speed & productivity of operations
- But adoption creates congestion. Technology will help going faster but people sooner or later are going to break up
- So people are increasingly the weakest link. The quality of the decision making of people involved in social efforts is critical
- Faster has decreasing rates of return for people for example the quicker you go the worse you produce
- On the other side good relationships are the answer because they endure. If you are doing social and your not rethinking how you create relationships you are just wasting a big opportunity
- Technology, information, market access are getting more and more commoditized. You also get reduced advantages out from products, service, process but if you have relevance, meaning, connection, empathy with you employees, customers, partners this is a competitive advantage
- (Jessica Jackley) Money is not enough, you have to add relevance, meaning, value, connection, empathy. This is how you are doing to win. People will be loyal and provide value back to you when you don’t expect it
- Communities one of the few ways to scale relationships. Relationships take time & resources and there are many types of them: encounter, recognition, development (explore compatibility), friendship (contextual trust, loyalty, advocacy), intimacy (intellectual crushes and connections). Many business are not getting to the last extreme
- Social media (content based) engagement is cheap and fast but will only get you so far
- Community (relationship based) engagement will extend your relationships for you. Not cheaper like social media but cheaper than taking a plane every time like with direct engagement
- All communities are not created equal: deep relationships are influential, dunbar’s number may be still actual, 90-9-1 rule is contextual, the percentage of men and women (Thomas Malone latest research and Connected book). You can build the community in a way that is helpful to reach your goals. Businesseses should recognize and associate dollar value to the relationships their customers are involved into
- The Community Maturity Model
- Just have a look at the 2011 State of Community Management report
- TakeAways:
- you won’t win just by going faster (look at American Airlines and Comcast after Frank Eliason left)
- relationships & culture are the new competitive advantages (community building not social software or social media brings an advantage)
- community building is strategic & urgent (large first mover advantage, people have limited key relationships)
Engaging and Servicing B2B Customers (Michael Fauscette, Laurie Buczek, Mark Wallace)
- For IDC, Social Businesses are organizations applying emerging technologies like web 2.0 accompanied by org, cult and process changes to improve business performance
- The idea is building networks across customers, partners, suppliers and employees. The levers are content and communities to drive business value (revenue, margins, innovation, customer satisfaction)
- 41% implemented social business solutions, while 59% have not. Rapidly increasing
- Social business maturity: experimentation, compartmentation, integration, operationalization, optimization
- Laurie in 2007 launched first external B2B community for Intel then moved to internal Enterprise 2.0 and now integrated digital experiences into a unified social media strategy, reflecting about the marketing mix and how to reach customers in this domain
- Question: is social really viable in B2B? There is a lot of value because customers are not looking to be marketed any longer, they want to understand some key topic and communities can provide answers especially in the technology work to pass over and work together on ideas. Improving customer satisfaction but also gains in web traffic by letting conversations take place, creating trust and openness.
- How to engage B2B customers in a community? Define what you want to accomplish, involve internal stakeholders to avoid getting blocked along the way, start small, report wins back to the organization. Understand what you are customers are expecting, look at the entire sales funnel and decide when you want to provide help, invest in a listening engine to bring conversations back or extend conversations outside from your site, join communities where customers are already. Choose a technology that fits with the proficiency of your customers.
- B2B vs B2C. Audience is totally different, difference channels, different expectations, willingness to collaborate with thought leadership on the entire sales funnel not just awareness. Users are interacting on behalf of their companies and that changes behaviors.
- How do you treat influencers? Do you recognize them? More active people are recognized across different communities
- Social is no longer a different thing, it is integrated if not from a technical perspective at least from a content strategy and marketing perspective. This has changed dramatically in the last few years. Also the integration with social profiles is becoming pervasive.
- Make sure your communities fulfill a need
- It’s important to understand and mitigate real risks by engaging employees and legal. At the end horror stories are quite rare
- The biggest risk is the ROI question. Clarify business objectives. Be careful to apply a measurement approach that doesn’t work for the rest of marketing activities.
