Archive for December, 2010
by Rob Paterson
December 30, 2010 at 7:44 am · Filed under
Adoption, Air Travel, Business 2.0, Business Intelligence, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Customer Service, Emergency, Enterprise 2.0, Organizational Design, Twitter, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds
Millions of travellers have been stuck this holiday season. The question is what can you as a traveler and what can you as a supplier do about this kind of event.?
The lesson taken from this Christmas is surely larger than travel but also applies to any bad event – such as Skype’s system failure. You can imagine what your equivalent might be in your organization.
I can see that part of the answer is to be found in social media. Here is how the NYT ran their version of the story today:
While the airlines’ reservation lines required hours of waiting — if people could get through at all — savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.
Since Monday, nine Delta Air Linesagents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.
But not all travelers, of course. People who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel — being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.
For those in the digital fast lane, however, the online help was a godsend.
Danielle Heming spent five hours Wednesday waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., back home to New York. Finally, it was canceled.
Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.
She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.
“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”
Although airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travelers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 percent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies the social impact of the Internet.
“This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Mr. Rainie said.
Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.
I recently posted about Trust and how important it is. Being silent is THE worst position. Even when you cannot offer a fix, offering an ear and the truth helps. Skype kept a running commentary about their problem and now that they have fixed it have shared the post mortem on their blog. Please look at the comments on the Skype blog – a lesson for us all.
I had been critical of Air Canada until this Christmas - but even they have upped their efforts on Twitter to work with clients and to offer sympathy when they could not help.
They still do promotion as you can see but look at the other tweets – Air Canada are starting to get how this can help their Trust levels.
Now Twitter is still an elite tool for the elite. But all new things start this way. I am thinking of all those who were in the information dark looking over their shoulder at those who were in contact and can see that it will not take long for Twitter and Social media to become the normal for how we find our way around problems. Here is a brief summary of my own travel hell. Where I reach out on Twitter and my friends help me.
This illustrates for me the next phase of using social media to navigate crisis. Right now an airline or your organization can use social media to communicate from your own perspective. But what if you could harness, as I did, the collective wisdom of the network?
In my case I could not be sure of what the roads were like in the last 4 hours of a 13 hour trip. I asked my pals for their opinion and in minutes got enough “TRUSTED” advice to make the call to stop. My pals may have saved my life. So what if an airline could use its followers to help each other look at local weather – hotel rooms – alternative routes etc – even put each other up? What would it take to have a real community of customers? For if you did – they could do this.
Again this demands a new relationship with your customer. A customer is no longer a person out there but a node in here. If you can build up trust with an inner group, you can partner with this group in all sorts of ways.
- Marketing
- Crisis Management
- Problem Solving
Let’s play with this in later posts.
by Bill Ives
December 29, 2010 at 3:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, KM
A new article in the Sloan Review by Hind Benbya and Marshall Van Alstyne, How to Find Answers Within Your Company, covered the rise of internal knowledge markets. They define these markets as “protected environments where users trade their knowledge via price mechanisms.” They note that “while these markets have existed in different forms for years, their use to facilitate knowledge transfer inside organizations is relatively new.” Early adopters include: Infosys, Siemens, McKinsey & Co. and Eli Lilly. These firms appear to have demonstrated an increased value for internal knowledge markets for managing information flows over traditional top-down centralized knowledge-management solutions.
Market forces can differ when regulating knowledge. This article provides guidelines on how to design, launch and sustain internal knowledge markets. An internal knowledge market is further defined as a forum within an organization that matches knowledge seekers with knowledge sources. This system is more dynamic and provides just-in-time guidance rather than the centralized codification of best practices.
I can see this but then I always found these centralized knowledge management repositories to be ineffective. The only old school (pre-enterprise 2.) knowledge management efforts that I found to be effective were more nimble process-aligned systems. In these case both guidance and expertise was aligned with process steps. This was more fluid and better matched to business value.
These internal knowledge markets represent a third approach. The authors note that they are not for everyone and require organizational scale to be effective. They more explicitly build in incentives to participate. They quote David Ritter, CTO of InnoCentive, a supplier of knowledge markets – incentives need to take three forms — spendable currency, recognition for expertise and the opportunity to have a positive impact. However, if you do not set the pricing mechanism right you can flood the market with poor quality content as HP and Siemens found out.
I wish that my former firms had such systems, as I really like to share knowledge, even when there is little reward. The authors raised another point that I saw first hand. When colleagues are also competitors, individuals may hoard information for personal advantage. This was especially true when employees were ranked against each other in performance reviews. Instead rewards based on quality of contribution can promote information sharing. In this case anyone who passes a certain milestone is rewarded. Coworkers can help each other so collaborative knowledge trading helps teams succeed. I like this approach much better.
Knowledge markets appear to require a lot of economic fine tuning but they are rewarding positive behavior. If they are done right I think these markets can have a positive impact on organizational culture, in general. However, there is risk and participants can manipulate markets to their own ends leading to a negative impact on culture. This is where the fine tuning comes in to avoid gaming the system. I think there is a lot of potential here but it will not be easy.
by Bill Ives
December 27, 2010 at 3:04 am · Filed under
Twitter
There seems to be another consulting industry on the rise, consulting on business uses of Twitter. Well, Twitter has provided its own business guide. As reported in thenextweb, the new version of business.twitter.com provides Twitter success stores, ideas, tips, tools and resources. It starts by defining what Twitter is and what it can do fro business. “As a business, you can use Twitter to quickly share information, gather market intelligence and insights, and build relationships with people who care about your company.” I would agree.
There are some interesting stats: 370,000 new sign-ups daily, 95,000,000 Tweets per day, 175,000,000 registered users.
One of the tutorials offers Twitter Best Practices. It includes rules for both individual and large companies; share, listen, ask, respond, reward, demonstrate wider leadership & know-how, champion your stakeholders and establish the right voice. More specifically it says to give a glimpse of developing projects and events and reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business. Be a good citizen and retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers. Listen and respond to compliments and feedback in real time. Sounds good. They even have a tweeter feed on the topic – @TwitterBusiness.
The site offers case studies: Best Buy, Etsy, JetBliue, and Moxsie. The latter is a fashion company and it allows followers to get a peak at new trends and can gauge their reactions to these new ideas. Best Buy uses tweeter to support its customer service. It empowered its Geek Squad tech support service and corporate employees to staff their @twelpforce account on Twitter. Any Best Buy employee, working on company time, can provide answers using an @reply to the customer. In both cases it is about engagement and empowerment. With Moxsie it is engaging customers and with Best Buy, it is employees who, in turn, better engage customers.
There is much more including information for developers on its API and advertisers on the analytics it offers them. I like Twitter’s business guide because it is accessible and clear. They are not the first software company to do this but they serve as a model for others.
by Rob Paterson
December 20, 2010 at 9:57 am · Filed under
Adoption, Trust, Trusted Space
My dear colleagues at FFB have brought you the research to show you that 2011 promises to be the Tipping Point for 2.0. Mckinsey shows that at last the performance is there. The tools are there. Employee advocates are a great way forward.
But what really makes the difference? I think that it is in CEO’s accepting the shift in polarity from telling to listening. It is their behavior that sets the culture anyway and it is this Copernican shift from push to pull that is the real bifurcation - not the tools – nor the acceleration of processes time.
To listen and to be human is the key. Why? Because if you tell listen – if you tell the truth – and if you engage – you win Trust. And Trust is the way to value today.
Some examples of the 2.0 CEO’s different kind of listening and more human information environment might look like this:
A Customer Listening review – summary daily – discussion weekly
- This happens at Boingo – Dave Hagen sits feet away from Baochi who ensures that he sees everything that she hears on Twitter and Facebook that might be meaningful and has a weekly review with him and the senior team about what she has heard – Dave Hagen has his customer feedback in real time – customers get heard in real time too – a perfect match. Here is what happens when you have a problem and tweet for help. A human being gets back to you. Bad things happen. How you hear about them and then deal with them is helped immensely by making this ability to listen and respond human.
- Got to be able to be reached and talkes with – you 800# is not good enough! Travel is a big thing right now - Air Canada has no way of listening and conversing with its passengers in a human way – Its Mobile App is quite good for data but not right now with Europe shut down for uncertainty – Their Help number is overloaded - here is a plea! No one can have a conversation on human terms with anyone at Air Canada right now. Even if they don’t know or cannot know – a human acknowledgement will help. No one has any trust in Air Canada. It’s not their fault that the weather is bad but it is their fault that they cannot be trusted. They will pay for this.
Westjet are not perfect but here they are holding the hand of a passenger that has lost their luggage. Westjet have problems. they have customers that don’t like them – but they work hard to keep trust. By being Human!
As all men who have been married a while know – sometimes you cannot fix the problem but hearing the problem out is key
See what I mean? Your customer people have to be able to listen and to converse and in a HUMAN way. This is the challenge culturally.
Truth trumps brand puffery! In this age of real transparency - if you have a problem – as Air Canada does with its customer service - then it will be found out and widely broadcast. Your brand is not in your control anymore. You have to get real about you really stand for. Here is the best example that I know. Having your period is not a fun thing – but all advertising for tampons and pads had taken this line. Kotex pre-empts questions and asks the hard ones for you about the reality of why you use a tampon – no more “Twirling” but being human. The truth is that having your period is not the best time of the month for you and is also a time filled with doubt for many girls and younger women. If you don’t tell the truth – how can you be trusted?
Want to find out how your employees are and how your key processes are doing – really – then listen in to all that is going on as happens at Zappos.
A CEO that listens can have his/her finger on the pulse all the time.
With Trust, happy clients now become your best advertising and brand enhancers
For me – this is the breakthrough – not that you have shaved time off a process. Not that you have cut meeting times. All this is good but not going to put you ahead of the pack.
Trust is the scarcest thing in the world right now.
By being truthful, listening and engaging with your customers and your staff – you create trust – with Trust comes value.
So – Good for you if the tools are getting accepted. That is the easy part of 2.0.
The hard part is to use them to build trust – trust inside and out. So what are you doing?
by Bill Ives
December 20, 2010 at 3:16 am · Filed under
Culture, Customer Service, Social Media
In the world of the social Web, product recommendations by individuals seems to be gaining more credibility that those by the product producers. But do employees tend to recommend the products that their company produces? This is a question that Matt Brown asks in the Forrester report, Do Your Employees Advocate For Your Company? It would seem that this should be in their best interest.
However, Matt found that 49% of information workers are detractors, and only 27% were promoters, however in North America, workers are three times as likely to advocate as European workers. We could speculate about the reasons for this geographic variation. Canada had the best scores in our survey, France the worst. I wonder what the French Canadians do?
There was another interesting finding that relates more to the focus of this blog. Forrester found that, “advocacy correlates with work technology attitudes and behaviors in North America. This means employees who are optimistic about technology and well-equipped with information and communications technology (ICT) are more likely to be net advocates than those who are not.”
So what can companies do to improve their employees’ advocacy? Josh Bernoff addresses this in his post, How many of your employees love your products? (And why it matters). He suggests that you could empower people. In fact workers who use social media are among the most positive. 48% would strongly recommend a company’s products and services and only 22% were detractors, for a net score of 26% — among the highest of the groups they surveyed.
So get employees engaged in social media both on the Web and within the enterprise. This encouragement to be engaged in product discussions should have a positive impact on what employees will say. It shows that the company trusts them. Part of this is providing the technology that enables these discussions and the policy that permits the use of this technology in an open way. Restrictions will only promote resentment. I was pleased to receive a review copy of this report and there is much more within it to help formulate policies to promote employee advocacy.
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