The Need for a Chief Community Officer (CCO)

You may have noticed a small trend that appears to be growing within the corridors of corporations small and large.  Companies are worried about how their brand is falling into the hands of complete strangers.  The reality is that a community is being built around you whether you are one of the architects or not. 

Image by aj82 via Flickr

Let’s face it, the conventional public relations model is becoming outdated.  Social media is starting to replace traditional methods of communicating with customers and doing it more effectively.  Corporations need to participate in the conversations about their brand and not outsource it to a third party.   

Each of us has hired PR agencies to help gain access to traditional media. With social media that need is not as important.  You can confidently reach and target thousands of the right people by joining the right communities and becoming an influential voice.  Why outsource a source of competitive advantage?

There are many advantages of hiring a CCO especially with all of the rapid changes occurring in the social media space.  CCO’s that create internal “digital agencies” with external communication integration as a primary objective will find a high ROI over a relatively short amount of time.  And, justification for the position is becoming less and less difficult.  A knowledgeable CCO is as or more important that a Chief Marketing Officer, and with easier metrics to gauge ROI. 

Yet before you hire a CCO a careful examination and development of the job description and corporate goals are necessary. According to Impact Interactions; “…you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.”

Additionally CCO’s must be understand that; “success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc.”

Until now finding ROI for community building was difficult.  Enter Forrester analyst Natalie Petouhoff who recently developed a data-driven framework that systematically measures business-oriented ROI in collaboration communities. In Natalie’s report, The ROI of Online Customer Service Communities, she presents an ROI model, discusses the business value and benefits, offers concrete examples, and raises a host of implementation obstacles and success factors.

When asked about the benefits of community building and social media to transform relationships with customers, Natalie responded;

“Not only does social media provide the necessary information to transform customer service, it is the first tool/application that I’ve seen in all my years of being in the business world that -instantly melts away the resistance, the politics and the lack of interdepartmental collaboration required to transform the whole company. Not only do I see social media as a major business transformation tool, but it brings out the very best in human nature.”

Now that ROI models for community building are emerging from reputable sources, companies can no longer use college interns to fill the role of community manager.  The role is too important. 

For a CCO’s social media group, I break the resources needed into three groups. Customer facing Community Managers (CM), Product or service focused Community Managers (see Best Buy IdeaX example), and Exec/Strategy. The Customer CM develops customer acquisition communities and educates prospects on the company product/solution. I’m personally hiring an A-Player for this role now.  The Product or Service oriented CM helps the company connect with customers to develop new products, make existing products better and customer service related issues.   Finally, Exec/Strategy is responsible for setting objectives, positioning the brand and message, and strategically executing the plan. 

It’s time companies take a serious look at replacing their PR agencies with internal community building teams. You may not be ready to ditch the PR team now and hire a CCO now, but sooner or later you’ll find that you control less and less of your brand because you didn’t have a community advocate.  It is vital to remember how quickly even a single event can go viral in social media. People value honesty, being upfront, and listening to others, but if your voice is absent you lose.  If that happens, someone usually loses their job. 

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Technorati Tags: Chief Community Officer,Brand,Forrester,Petouhoff,IdeaX,Strategy,CCOs,conversations,goals

Is Shareflow the Google Wave of the Enterprise?

ZenBe has released a new product called Shareflow, which appears to be messaging similarly to Google Wave.  The concept is sound, and the Shareflow product ran smoothly in my tests.  It appears to be a more robust cc:betty – certainly a better interface.  Zenbe frames the problem and their solution well with this diagram below:

 

 

It’s a Google Wave light that is more Instant Messaging meets structured Wiki.  The tool is practical and will help users collaborate around issues.  The conversations are also organized and allows you to sort by user.   

Now allow me to put my CIO hat on (disclosure: I’ve never been a CIO or worn a hat with CIO stitched on it), and discuss the tool as I see it. 

The Good  

• Shareflow is easy to use and fairly easy to understand.
• It’s available today!
• The very good out of box experience with a clean intuitive interface will have you up and running in seconds.
• The mobile component is excellent and appears to be vetted out through various use cases they’ve conducted.
• If you are an existing Zenbe email user, you should be able to integrate Shareflow easily.  
• Zenbe uses Shareflow internally, so they understand the benefits, issues and can build those into future releases.  (you’d be surprised how many companies don’t use their own products or services)

The Not so Good or Needs Improvement

• Don’t use Lord of the Rings characters in your demo video, most IT decision makers in the Global 3000 won’t take the tool seriously.  I am willing to bet a developer conceived this demo and not someone in marketing.  Hey I liked the trilogy too! I just wouldn’t use it if I am trying to attract corporate users.  
• No reporting or dashboard views that provide aggregate views of all the flows.  Imagine trying to manage 1000+ flows on a regular basis.  Also, most enterprises will want to learn from these flows and adjust workflow strategies accordingly.  
• It doesn’t integrate with a popular Enterprise email system like Outlook.  Hence the adoption will be much lower than Zenbe is anticipating.
• Develop and add case studies to the website so that prospective users understand how they can use the application.  

Summary and Suggestions

Shareflow doesn’t eliminate email and that’s the real challenge for Zenbe.  From the Zenbe blog:

“I still check my email first thing in the morning. We still email each other at Zenbe, mostly for one-on-one conversations. A lot of times I’ll get a useful email from someone and post it to Shareflow. From within Zenbe Mail it’s just two clicks, or if I’m using another email service I can forward the email to a Shareflow-specific address.”

It may be good for the smaller organizations who don’t have SharePoint, MindTouch or some other enterprise collaborative solution, but it won’t really crack the Global 3000 until there is integration with Outlook. 

If I were advising the company, I’d look to beach head the application in a small team or division in a prospective company then build case study examples for use enterprise-wide.  Maybe kick off a Shareflow trial in the R&D department to collaborate with manufacturing and engineering on the next product release. Next, if Zenbe won’t integrate with Outlook, I’d find a way to enhance Outlook in the enterprise with a long term objective of replacing it.          

Zenbe offers a starter plan, check them out.

 

Technorati Tags: Shareflow,Google Wave,Enterprise,ZenBe,dashboard,Outlook,SharePoint,Suggestions

This Enterprise Use Case Makes Sense to Me

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Whenever I flush out an idea for a new software product or solution I always look for a use case to focus my thinking.  I recently ran across a blog post by Mike Gotta of Collaborative Thinking on corporate identities.  Mike builds a fictitious scenario around a call center employee named Mary that is proactively trying to help the company by maintaining a best practices wiki.  Her attempts to join other communities within the enterprise are initially rebuked:

• When Mary attempts to join a marketing community (via a discussion forum), her efforts to establish her social footing are rebuked. Marketing does not consider customer service and call center agents as having any type of standing when it comes to marketing-related discussions.
• When Mary attempts to join a product development community however, her efforts are more welcome. Product development teams often have formal processes defined between the two groups to solicit feedback and to handle escalation issues related to product tickets.

The scenario detailed above is so common someone should coin a term for it.  Before Enterprise 2.0 tools, this person would be ostracized and labeled a trouble maker.  The employee either continues to annoy other departments and thus reducing her own political capital or begins to tune out and stops trying to help the company. 

Since the company had Wiki’s, Blogs and Forums, the employee was able to win over the Marketing department who initially thought she had no expertise.  

I don’t like Gotta’s portrayal of a Facebook for Enterprise example, but what’s he is describing is a semi-collaborative environment that allows the workforce to follow each other in a social manner.   

Blogs, Wiki’s and Forums are separate silos that don’t effectively measure employee performance because they only measure number of words, posts, or possibly ratings on each post.  But collectively, there is not an overall picture of the contributor (or an incomplete one) and certainly not how well they perform against business objectives.   

Instead, as I have written before, a collaborative network is a better answer which would have exposed Mary to the enterprise through her documented accomplishments.Marketing may still have rejected Mary initially, but as her prominence grew, soon enough she would have been hard to ignore. 

The key here is that collaborative networks expose experts who otherwise are hidden.  The result is a strong ROI that is difficult to quantify but very real.  It’s time corporations recognize the hidden talents of their employees.  The solutions are available, it’s time they are implemented. 

Technorati Tags: Collaborative Networks,Enterprise,Mike,Gotta,forum,Wiki,Blogs,Facebook,Forums

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Review: Adobe Acrobat Collaboration

Image via CrunchBase

 

Just tried using the ‘collaboration’ feature in Adobe Reader I have a free version and not the commercial. It took me a while to find it because it was hidden under the File Menu.   If you want to read on please do, but I can summarize this review with just a short sentence.  It was a disaster.  The product is not user friendly nor intuitive and Buzzword doesn’t work with PDF files!

Here’s my experience and please feel free to share your own:

1. After selecting collaborate from the file menu, the program asked me for my Username and Password.  Since I had an account it found me, but said I needed to update my information.
2. The program then went to a screen that didn’t load properly and I had to do the process again.  Finally it sent me to an Adobe website URL where I updated my information.
3. Supposedly the file had been uploaded at this point.  Yet after I updated my information the document had disappeared.
4. I then used the Acrobat collaboration site to upload it from my hard drive. It was a very slow process. 
5. Once uploaded, I didn’t know what to do with the document.  It certainly wasn’t collaboration.  I could zoom in and out, scroll, but no redlining, comments or anything collaborative. 
6. I then thought to click the New Buzzword button which simply opened a blank document screen.  I thought OK, here is the collaborative aspect of the program.   
7. However, Buzzword would not upload my PDF file (this is Adobe isn’t it?). Alas, they only accept Word Documents.  How crazy is that?

Review Summary

I liked the flash interface, but the collaboration functionality is non-existent.  It’s basically a PDF repository where you can share the document with your friends.  They should have one-click upload collaboration with an “out of box” experience that gets you working on the document with your work associates.  They should wait until after you complete work on the document for updated info.  Asking me to update it prior to uploading it disrupted my process and caused me to want to quit. 

I’d pass on this “collaborative” tool until they work out the kinks and user experience.  Adobe’s claim of it being collaborative is a big stretch.  

Technorati Tags: adobe reader,buzzword

What would Einstein’s Intranet look like?

Image via Wikipedia

 

If you are a marketing executive or like to think of yourself as one (as I attempt to do on occasion), the I recommend the blog Branding Strategy Insider.  Today, when reading about his latest post, I came across the following which prompted the creation of this article: When asked what single event was most helpful to him in developing the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein is reported to have answered: ‘‘Figuring out how to think about the problem.’’

When I think about the problems that Collaborative Networks solve it begins with connecting people to content in meaningful, contextual ways.  For example, if I want to create a new cost cutting initiative; I want all of the relevant enterprise content at my finger tips to create goals and tasks, learn about my current suppliers, understand the cost structure of each, and appreciate the consequences of switching to a lower total cost supplier. 

Yet we still haven’t reached the core issue in this example.  I’ve identified the problem, but haven’t quite figured out how to frame it in a meaningful way so that it’s remembered.  So let’s attempt to break down the problem then rebuild it so that it clicks in our minds (or at least mine :)

1. People create and use content with many different applications.  This content is not stored centrally or contextually it’s spread out across unconnected applications like email, instant messaging, blogs, wiki’s, databases, office documents and video sites.  Meanwhile the content is very difficult to find and resides in disparate locations, it’s not similarly structured, and worse it’s not current in time relative to one another (e.g. 2008 content versus 2009). 
2. Having all of the most up to date content at the right time to make decisions is a game changer is not being done today.  It’s an extremely difficult challenge because content is stored in many different places, and it’s not self-organizing.  If it was, the content could organize around key concepts and become more contextual and relevant. 

   For example, if my Word document about Sharepoint 2010 strategy knew that my PowerPoint about SharePoint strategy was about a similar subject, then it could self update the content (or at least link to it).  Instead, the content is disconnected, unorganized and stored in multiple, isolated locations.

   3. Today we make important decisions by considering all of the criteria involved in making a determination.  We then prioritize and weight the criteria according to our own experiences.  We also consider alternative solutions and how they compare to one another.  We may ask friends or work associates for their advice especially if they are an expert.  Finally, we let our emotions and feelings affect the decision.

   4. Having access to all of the Enterprise content is a difficult proposition by itself, yet we still need the ability to measure all of the activity to see how it’s being utilized.  We need reports on content that measures usage, importance and relevance. We need to capture organized content (e.g. content in a project) and ensure that it’s repeatable for future employees.  We need to measure the results of organized content so that we know if a project is worth doing again. 

So how can a Collaborative Intranet facilitate this process?

• It must be connected to all relevant Enterprise data in contextual ways.
• It must give me all of the most current content from around the Enterprise.
• It must measure and monitor the data so that I have an appreciation of trends, hot topics, revenue gains or losses, cost increases or external changes related to my industry or supply chain.
• It must organize content so that my team or I can make optimal decisions.  The goal being to increase my decision making batting average.
• It must allow for easy connections (sharing) with other people in order to collaborate.  It must either suggest or easily find experts in the Enterprise to help me solve a business need

So for me, thinking about the problem involved breaking it down into bite size chunks. I then theoretically tried to conceptualize the needs of each chunk.  Now I must attempt to frame it in a memorable manner. 

“The problem of Enterprise collaboration is that we don’t have easy access to all of the current and relevant information we need to make important decisions without laboriously tracking it down across several people, databases and documents.”  

So if Einstein were alive today and he architected an intranet what would it look like?  I contend it would be theoretical and full of black holes.  Seriously though, I’m confident he’d discover a more efficient method of connecting people to content and permit us to build out his models.

Technorati Tags: mark fidelman,intranet 2.0,collaborative networks,sharepoint 2010

 

SharePoint 2010: Will it Improve Productivity in the Enterprise?

 

Today I watched the SharePoint 2010 demo and was pleasantly surprised by the functionality and potential to help increase productivity within the corporation.  The SharePoint team seems to be messaging similarly to Aaron Fulkerson and his views on Collaborative Networks, rapid application development, and data connectivity.  There are some very good new features and updates to SharePoint that I’ll cover below. 

The Good

• Bi-Directional Data Connectivity looks promising and easier to use.  Yet any database coordinator will tell you how difficult it is to truly do this well.  One bad query can bring the entire system down.  Yet the SharePoint team was messaging around business users having the data read/write capability so the challenge is even more daunting.  
•  Composites are a welcome addition to SharePoint.  Essentially, composites are web parts and tools to help build custom applications on SharePoint.  It’s had some of them in the past, but they appear to be more streamlined and easier to create.  
• Modifying Team Sites appears to be much easier to edit and create.  Adding pictures, text and altering them seemed easy and intuitive which will increase their adoption among business users who want to create their own team pages.
• Skinning SharePoint was very impressive.  They showed an example where they used a PowerPoint template to skin SharePoint with just a few clicks.  This will add some creativity to an otherwise bland SharePoint site.  The creative types within the enterprise will enjoy this new feature and utilize it a lot – thus an increase in adoption. 

 

 

The Bad:

I don’t buy the supply chain example given in the demo.  Most companies are not going to entrust their extremely complex supply chains to a Visio document with a connection to a SQL database.   It’s much too simplistic and cheapens the demo some what.

Microsoft also tends to build applications that only work with other Microsoft products.  At least they work better with other Microsoft products.  They messaged around being browser agnostic, but I doubt SharePoint will easily work with other non-Microsoft products.  

 

In Summary:

The product showed well during the demo.  Who knows how much of it is real and how much of it still needs to be developed.  Tom Rizzo, Senior Director on the SharePoint team did a good job of giving the overview.  It was just enough to keep me interested, yet gave some good information to get his viewers excited about SharePoint 2010.  Hopefully more details emerge in the fall, but for now it looks promising. 

Finally, there’s nothing truly innovative here like Google Wave but it will make using SharePoint easier and provide a higher ROI due to the increased adoption and the visibility into Enterprise data.   

Questions: What do you think of SharePoint 2010?  Is it a game changer in the Enterprise? 

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Enterprise,Aaron,Fulkerson,Collaborative,Tom Rizzo,Google Wave

Dynamic Signals in the Enterprise

Image via CrunchBase

I recently read an innovative article on Dynamic Signals by David Armano. There's a bigger issue here that David has touched on. How do we discern the signals and add context around them to decode them properly? The signals are large and small messages emanating from individuals. David introduced the concept, but didn’t go a step further and develop a business reason for decoding them and applying them to solve business objectives.

I’d like to take a stab at it.  First, signals can become noise and thus useless if not channeled properly.  Think of it as trying to communicate in the middle of Grand Central Station at rush hour.  You’re not going to effectively communicate. 

Yet tools that can parse all the noise and direct them to you are valuable because they educate you on current customers, prospects, competitors and even fellow employees.  Once channeled properly, the trick is to provide proper context around the signals.  How do we know what all the signals mean in a given context?  How do we know if our best customer is really happy with us or searching for an alternative product or service? 

I’ll submit the answer is to leverage technology to channel the signals then analyze the signals with human intelligence.  Until there is an effective artificial intelligence system, we can’t possibly decipher the signals without human intervention.  A service like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provides inexpensive human intelligence to analyze the signals and provide proper context.  Better, large corporations should task employees with  aggregating and providing context about their customer’s signals.  The compiled information is potentially priceless.  It’s like a real time customer service survey. 

Want to steal customers from your competitors?  Analyze the signals and change your sales messaging to address competitor shortcomings.  If you’re an Executive and want to find out how effective your direct reports, and reports of your direct reports are managing projects; then analyze the signals and contextualize them.  Instead of noise, you’ll get direct communication from the front lines without filters. 

del.icio.us Tags: seek omega,mark fidelman,enterprise 2.0,dynamic signals

Those examples above are valuable and that is why Armano’s idea should be codified and a solution developed.    

What will Google Wave Look Like in the Enterprise

A few weeks ago I wrote about why Google Wave won’t be adopted by most Enterprise users at launch. If Google Wave did work in the Enterprise they would have to begin with Outlook integration. Why? Because Outlook has a 60% share of the corporate email client market and an overall 40% share for all email users. They can’t possible get corporations to switch en masse without an Outlook beach head strategy.

In order for a Wave type system to work in the enterprise it will need the following characteristics:

1. First and most importantly, it must be about solving problems related to the corporation. CIO’s are not interested in planning a weekend camping trip with your buddies in upstairs in marketing. The Wave needs to be centered on projects and issues – essentially a hub of activity where all related teams, documents, and data connections are made. I’ll expand on Data connections next.
2. Data connections to Oracle, SAP, CRM, knowledge base, etc are an important ingredient not mentioned by Google because they don’t exist yet. Let’s for example say that I launch a Wave around a major customer service issue. The enterprise customer has a system failure on a mission critical application. I get all the relevant departments involved through the Wave in solving the customer issue, but since they don’t have access to the CRM or accounting systems they don’t have a 360 degree picture of the issue. Even if they did have access, they wouldn’t know how to find the information relevant to the customer.

Had the data from the CRM and accounting systems been integrated into the Wave, they would have discovered the software they were running is an unsupported version and that they are 120 days late on payment on their last invoice. If a connection with the knowledge base were made, the issue could have been solved in the Wave because the query to the Knowledge Base would have found a solution since the issue has surfaced before.

3. Governance and Security need to be addressed. You can’t as referenced in the Google Wave demo go posting Wave’s around the internet especially when they contain sensitive information. You’ll need a governance system that understands who each user is and how much access to the Wave they are given. Facebook is tackling this issue now but more importantly it needs to be addressed in an enterprise version of Wave.
4. Wave’s need to be tracked and monitored. A Second underlying value of an Enterprise Wave is the ability to learn from the result. What’s the point of solving individual issues or completing projects if you can’t reuse that information? Waves need to be stored in a knowledge management system that also serves to track the number of open and closed Waves. They must also be easily searchable, categorized and tagged (the latter 2 automatically) so that the organization can quickly access the retained knowledge. Enterprise users want the ability to re-launch a marketing project that was successful in Europe. Why recreate the wheel if the Wave contains the data (including the results since it links in the CRM data – see #2)?

The Future of Wave in the Enterprise

Since most Corporations still use Outlook as their work portal, any Wave system must start there. Switching day 1 will be a nearly impossible task unless Microsoft evolves Outlook to some form of Google Wave. It’s not happening in Office 2010, so don’t look for Microsoft to do it anytime soon. It will take an enterprising start-up to make the connection – any takers?

The Anti-WOW CostCo Experience

On the heels of one of the best customer experiences I’ve ever had is one of the worst.   So it is with our luck these days as one can’t expect a good thing to last.  The culprit is CostCo.  The recipient of one of the worst customer experiences: my wife and mother-in-law. 

They both have been big fans of CostCo up until this experience.  They regularly shop at the warehouse to stock up on food and supplies.  This week was different.     After doing their shopping they stood in a long line to checkout.  Normally the wait is around 20 minutes so they were content to kill time catching up on each other’s activities. 

Soon after they got up to the cashier however, the Anti-WOW forces crept in.   In turns out my wife’s CostCo card had expired days earlier and her mother forgot her card back at the house.  After verifying that she was a current member, the cashier unpleasantly said they’d have to sign up for a temporary card which meant standing in another 30 minute line.  The cashier should have been able to process the order right on the spot (WOW) but either company policy or the cashier decided a 30 minute wait for a temporary card was the customer service answer (Anti-WOW) .

My wife and mother-in-law then stood in line for a temporary card.  Meanwhile, the frozen food was thawing and the temperatures of the two women were rising.  They finally got their temporary card and stood back in the cashier’s line to pay for the food.  When my wife attempted to pay for the food with her credit card and her mother’s CostCo card, low and behold, CostCo has a rule against such schemes (Anti-WOW).  Apparently, the owner of the card must pay for the food (even if it’s a spouse I might add). 

After a few words with the cashier’s manager and still no luck, the two walked out of the store in frustration sans food.   I remember a famous rule about customer service where a customer will tell 3 people about good customer service and 20 people about bad customer service.  I think the latter number was low in this instance. 

CostCo may want to consider taking a digital page out of the Apple handbook.