Dominos – Crosssing the Rubicon for Corporates in Social Media

April 17, 2009 at 9:02 am · Filed under 2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Barriers, Change, Clayton Christenson, Dead Paradigms, Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, Innovation, Innovator's Dilemma, Marketing, Ning, QuickTax, Social Media, Trusted Space, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, YouTube, Zombies

The Dominos “YouTube Adventure” last week  – when a couple made a disgusting video of what they did in making a Dominos Sub – is I think a “Rubicon” moment.  Not just for Dominos, who had already put their toe into the river of Social Media but for every enterprise. (Excellent revue here  by Frederic Lardinois from Read Write Web on what happened + Stats + Dominos response + an analysis)

All your customers, voters, members, suppliers – the public are now linked. Newsworthy events that are good and bad will spread like wildfire. Look at the “Good” event of Susan Boyle – as of this date 20 million views in less than a week!

The Rubicon is that – whether you like it or not – the public are now linked so well, that anything said about you will now spread everywhere and very quickly. This linkage, and hence the speed and immediacy of the spread, can only get wider and faster. Maybe, in a few months, events that affect you will spread instantly to everyone. What will spread the fastest of course will be the bad things.

So the new reality is that it is what others say that will matter not what you say. So your reputation – your brand – the trust you have – is now not longer easily or directly controlled by you.

You have to be swimming in this river to have any chance of protecting your name.

As with Dominos – using the new social media tools is not enough. You will have to understand and become a master of how to live and do well in thus new world.

Compared to many today, Dominos were somewhat ready. But even then – I think because they had only installed the tools but not the culture – they were awkward. They were late in catching their problem. Late in a their response. Stilted in their response – they did not understand that a scripted response is not going to help much.

They were still operating the new tools with the old culture.

They gave their CEO a script. He read from the prompter and did not make emotional contact with the audience. But Dominos still did well compared maybe to you! For do you even have the tools?

But of course it is not just about the tools. The issue is that you can no longer control. So their new plan is of course the old plan – “let’s control the store”. Their key response is to ban video cameras from their stores! This means a ban on cell phones really and how practical can that be?

The only effective response will be to get into the river with everyone else and get really good at how to behave in this new river. It will be to become so engaged that the conversation can be affected or shaped. You have to be a trusted part of the conversation to do this. You cannot just barge in.

Dominos and you will have to unlearn and put away all of what made old PR work. For all of PR up to now has used “Message” – a tightly controlled and scripted response where the text is key. Now you have to use “Presence” – an emotional message where the authenticity of the humanity of the “speaker” carries the point. Volts versus Amps.

This River will soon operate at the speed of light. To protect your name, you have to be a major presence in the river now. You have to merge with the river so that your nervous system is acutely attuned to the slightest hint of trouble. The leverage is Trust. Only a trusted player in the river will have any chance of settling down the ripples.

To have the Trust, you need to be known. To be known, you have to be a person and not an institution.The people that represent you in this river have to be free people who can be trusted. They have to have won the trust of the river. If trouble occurs, they have to respond immediately without a script. They have to be empathic and not controlled.

This role is foreign to institutions who are all about control. The answer are not the tools but the culture.

The error is to see your participation in Social Media as having the right Tools. “We use Twitter!” is a meaningless statement. Hey you can give me all the tools I would need to fix a car and I still will not be able to fix a car. Worse you can give me an airplane to fly and I will crash every time. The people who work for you in this field have to be the real deal. You would not hire a CFO who did not know her stuff?

Why simply tell your existing PR folks who know nothing about this – in fact who hate it – to take over? All of how PR, Research and Marketing has been done until now will have to be unlearned. Traditional PR, Research and Marketing folks will feel very uncomfortable and will do what all prior paradigm leaders do when confronted with the real future. They will undermine and fight it. They have to. For this is their nemesis.

The context for this decision is that the old world is dying. Here is how Coke is responding:

ATLANTA: Coca-Cola has created a new office of digital communications and social media within its public affairs and communications department. Clyde Tuggle, SVP of corporate affairs and productivity at Coke, noted “mass media is declining in importance,” when introducing the new department in a memo to staff, which the beverage manufacturer shared with PRWeek.

“Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our Company all around the world, one person at a time,” Tuggle wrote. “Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”

The new unit will work in collaboration with global interactive marketing, IT, and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.

Adam Brown, digital communications director, and Anne Carelli, digital communications manager, will have oversight of corporate digital and social media communications efforts. Both Brown and Carelli will continue ongoing training programs, such as “Training Byte” online videos, in addition to “more robust” programs through its new PAC Institute.

The ideas in the new world that will have to be learned anew include these:

• Listen before you Speak – The New Tools allow you to hear the slightest tremor. Last week I Tweeted that I had done my taxes and that I had used QuickTax. Within minutes QuickTax had responded with a thank you. A week earlier I Tweeted that I had had a problem with accessing Ning. Within minutes a customer service person from Ning contacted me and worked over the weekend to solve my problem. If you cannot do this – you are not in the game. In future, most of your research will operate in real time without you having to ask any questions. Your new job will be to listen minute by minute and to have tools and people that can make sense of the stream. Not only to make sense of what you hear but also to shape the stream. QuickTax is responding to every mention good or bad. An early and a personal response, can settle a problem that could become a crisis. Such a strategy dramatically reduces your costs in research and brand management. Such a strategy dramatically increases your effectiveness and reduces your risks. More for less.

• Participate not Pontificate – To be heard, you have to participate. To speak, you have to lose your corporate voice. You have to lose the official tone of voice. You have to regain a human voice. This can only be done if you allow your social media staff to be themselves. They cannot be the highly controlled drones that are the standard in the corporate or bureaucratic world – many people in your organization will not be able to lose this voice. They even use it at home. Simply training old staff will not be enough. For how can you have trained people in the Shetl to be Americans?  You have to live in the New World to become a citizen. To have the new voice is to be a native of the new culture that is the very opposite of the norms of the old country. As with immigrants, it will be the kids who will get it first and they will train the others. But the Bubbies will never get it. This aspect of having the new strategy work or not is the most challenging part of all of this. In the end it means, that the old culture has to die too. Maybe in the interim, you set your unit up apart from the rest and have it report to the CEO for protection. Clayton Christenson has a lot to say about this problem. For to respond to this new reality demands that you disrupt your culture. The most difficult of all acts for a leader.

• Importance – Life or Death: This is not an add on or a side show as Newspapers found – This is all about whether you are going to live or die – As the Coke folks say but more gently than I – Mass Media is dying. So then is the entire Mass Media approach to PR and Broadcast – the God-like Voice and Moses with the Text of God from on high does not work. So how important is your reputation? How important is your business or enterprise? Adopting this new way is one of the most important decisions you will make. So also having the RIGHT PEOPLE to do this for you is the second decision you will make after deciding to cross the River. Ideally you have to have them report to the CEO. Ideally the CEO needs to become immersed as well. If I can do this, aged 59 and having spent most of my working life in institutions. Then so can you. The only issue is will. Do you have the will as a CEO to move into the future?

Caesar made the call by crossing the Rubicon to end the Republic and to begin the Empire. He had the will to stake it all. There was then no going back.

Actually it is society that has crossed the Rubicon. The new interactive and participative world is now here.

Will you cross too? This is a life or death decision for you. It’s also a winning choice. Many will not be able to make this choice. Their own culture will be too powerful. If you can, you have the advantage. The earlier you move, the better you will get at this.

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Post-inauguration thoughts about social media

January 21, 2009 at 8:36 am · Filed under Enterprise Software, Obama, TV, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Services, Whitehouse.Gov

First of all – WOW!!!!!

Here in point form are some thoughts about what I think has also happened in the social media context:

• Twitter was huge and held together – was this not Twitter’s Performance Waterloo? – I found it a wonderful adjunct to my TV and my web watching. I limited my stream to those people that I knew and cared for and it was as if I was there side by side with them. This amplified the whole experience. Some were on the ground in Washington – their collective Tweets were like a composite eye – in aggregate they gave me a sense of being there.

So – if you wish to add more “experience” to your event and hence make it more “sticky” having a Twitter stream will do that.

If you claim to be a new organization and you do not use Twitter thoughtfully – then you are no longer in the game

• Streaming – I was joined by millions who wanted to make their computer the centre of their experience. I wanted this because I could add more layers to what was going on. I cannot do this with TV where all I can do is shift channels. I could use Twitter – I could have several streams open at the same time – I could chat – the list goes on. I think that this also was the Tipping Point for TV delivery – this is what the Tsunami was for blogging. This was the event that shifted the web as a delivery platform from being nice to being the most important. Of course it did not work as well as it was hoped. But the flaws in execution and in load management does not change the new reality. The Web is where TV will be seen. CNN’s excellent partnership with Facebook was a ramp up of this idea. I found it such fun to have the feed AND my peeps online on the same page. I started to think of BSG and a Twitter/Facebook combo. Not just news but more importantly to be able to watch whatever I wanted with my friends – a concert, a theatrical show, a documentary, a lecture content shared with friends is better than content watched alone. TV Web Stream PLUS my friends looks like a killer combination

So if you produce content for TV and you have not made up your mind that the web will be your primary arena you are no longer in the game.

Adding conversation with friends and enabling filtering of this group is the icing on the web TV cake

• Making this easy is very important. On the one hand we have the CBC who use a very tricky stream delivery and who clearly want to pull you back to the TV offering – on the other hand we have CNN and Facebook – their set up was exceptionally well done. Now the stream overloaded but that is solvable. CNN also offered multiple views – there was not only one stream but 3. I was struck by that. I can see down the road the value of offering many many views – I then become the editor of my own view of the event. Now I have control. What a shift in power! One of the views that is worth having is the C – Span view by that I mean one without any commentary – with my peeps we can do that too.

So – It is clear to me that CNN have crossed the Rubicon – they have senior folks who no longer see the web as good or interesting but as the primary way forward

• There is a new Media company out there. The White House is going to become a media powerhouse of its own. The Obama administration is going to do for social media what Teddy Roosevelt did for the Press and FDR did for radio but more so. The Roosevelts gave the new media worlds of their time a boost. But the press/media organizations were still always outside the Whitehouse. As the President showed us in the campaign, he is a master of being the media organization of the future – the White House will have massive conversations directly with the people – an not just the people of the US but with the people of the world. The 44th President is a master of the Cluetrain. Politics are all about Biological Markets.

So,  just as he will show up all other elected leaders by his agenda so I think he will show up all others in mastery of how to use social media to do the great work of our time – how to engage people so that they no longer sit passively waiting to be saved but that they are brought into the conversation that encourages them to take responsibility for their own lives and their own communities.

This for me is my biggest aha – that our own conversation will soon move away from “cool” from the “Tech” to what this is all about. It is surely all about an awakening from the deep sleep, the passivity, the numbness, the dumbness – of the traditional mass media.

This where where responsibility replaces passivity. This is the great change and revolution of our time. The social use of media will wake us up and connect us to our real work.

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Issues that Cloud the Cloud Computing Promise

April 15, 2008 at 8:14 pm · Filed under Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Google, Web Services, Zombies

I’ve been getting quite a bit of interesting reactions to a post over at my ZDNet SOA site, “Is Cloud Computing Too Good to Be True?” In the post, I discussed Google’s latest entree into the infrastructure-as-a-service space, Google App Engine, and how it competes with Amazon Web Services.

Both vendors offer storage, messaging, queuing, and back-end server scalability that can conceivably offer an alternative to buying and managing onsite software and hardware.

Amazingly enough, access to Google App Engine will be offered for free, versus Amazon’s incremental pricing plans. However, Amazon’s services are priced so low that free versus a couple of hundred dollars per month may not be an issue for enterprises. (Individual consumers, however, will more likely be drawn to the no-cost Google model.)

However, what may be an issue for enterprises are things such as governance, security, privacy, and control — all issues that cloud the Cloud computing space.

In an online poll I am conducting with the post, sentiments are running against Cloud computing for the enterprise: at the time of this writing, 62% said Cloud computing is still too risky of a bet for enterprises, versus 32% saying it is enterprise-capable.

Readers of this blogsite may have already seen my arguments in favor of moving to the Cloud — not having to deal with software maintenance and upgrades, and paying for only what you need. However, there are arguments against enterprise-scale Cloud computing, which include the following:

• Cloud computing may create a dependence on the provider (Google, Amazon) and may make it difficult to move to another platform.
• Google itself admits that Google App Engine is targeted at consumer applications, not businesses.
• Enterprises leveraging Cloud computing may become homogenized — and lose the competitive advantage that may come from custom-built systems.
• There’s always the risk that the Cloud provider may change business models or even go out of business.

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Size Matters – When Small is Big

March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Barriers, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, Metadata, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted – he wanted to be a retailer – but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields – not the least in Social Media – tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there – how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of – who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site – it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care – Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web – he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is – an open and vulnerable man – is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist – this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision – the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is – the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is – the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

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For All Those Who Have Said Blogging Was Just A Fad …

March 9, 2008 at 11:51 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Business Model, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Messy World, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds

I remember literally scores of conversations over the past five years with smart people in various areas of business and the professions … almost all of whom were over approximately 35 years old … in which they were dismissive of blogging, for one or other of the various now-well-known reasons that blogging is often portrayed as demonstrative of human foibles, warts and the fact that not everyone is a well-read, thoughtful and considerate person when expressing themselves.

Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread.  We know that many mainstream online publications have adopted many of the features, and worked at increasing interactivity with readers, and I suggest here that this is but a harbinger of things yet to come.

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The world’s 50 most powerful blogs

From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.

Here are the 50 best reasons to log on.

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The spread of the use of wikis and blogs into the world of enterprises began being considered not long after the rise of blogging as a sociological phenomenon, and made clear the different dynamics and structural impediments that would be encountered as the tools and services spread into the organizational environment.  Humans spend a lot of their time communicating with each other … always have done, and always will do so.  And wikis and blogs make it easier to do so in an interlinked environment in which humans use integrated information systems, keyboards and computer screens and software to enable their communications.

I know I am stating the obvious here, but the concepts of knowledge work and knowledge workers take on additional meaning, I  think, when one considers that much of the products we purchase and use are manufactured elsewhere, such that much of business and the activity of many organizations consists of exchanging information in the pursuit of product design and development, marketing, sales and customer service.

Email is still in many cases the "killer app" for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives.  That’s a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites  they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.

It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of "Making Knowledge Work – the arrival of Web 2.0".  I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting.  I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.

In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group.  His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that "yes, there was that aspect to it", but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.

Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics.  In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said  "OK, you win" and challenged me to add the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of "Making Knowledge Work" which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.

It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside … although it may be that the lines between "inside" and ‘outside" continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.

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