Category Archives: Social Media

What Should the Role of Personal Branding be in Recruitment?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal branding, in part because several people have told me that I seem to do it pretty well, in spite of the fact that I would never call myself a personal branding expert or endeavor to make my living as a personal branding consultant.

While I think the personal branding topic is an interesting one, it is more because I am curious about:

The role of personal branding in helping organizations achieve innovation success
Whether or not organizations should be factoring in personal branding strength as part of their recruitment considerations

Now that we’ve hopefully made the case for the role of personal branding in helping organizations achieve innovation success in my previous post, let’s investigate whether or not organizations should be factoring in the strength of personal brand as part of their recruitment considerations.

Is the personal brand of an individual important to the brand of a collective and the brand equity that the organization is trying to build?

Well, look no further than organizations like Nike and Adidas that harness the personal brand equity of elite athletes like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Derrick Rose.

Look no further than organizations like Target that harness the personal brand equity of Michael Graves, Isaac Mizrahi, Mossimo Giannulli, Jason Wu, and Phillip Lim. Meanwhile Macy’s has the Martha Stewart Home Collection (but JC Penney, Sears and Kmart also have Martha Stewart collections). So, harnessing the personal brand of designers and celebrities is obviously seen as beneficial to the brand of the collective in the minds of these organizations.

But it doesn’t stop there, the University of Phoenix is attempting to harness the personal brands of Clayton M. Christensen, Jeff Dyer, and Hal Gregersen to try and save their accreditation, London Business School harnesses the personal brand equity of Gary Hamel, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management harnesses the personal brand equity of Philip Kotler, and several consultancies harness the personal brand equity of famous professors to lend credibility to their consulting brands.

So, if at the highest levels, the organization’s brand equity benefits from harnessing the strength of the personal brands of certain individuals, shouldn’t organizations be considering the personal brand strength of applicants in the hiring process?

Not just for the reasons detailed above in relation to the increasingly open and interconnected organization, but also as content marketing becomes an increasingly important way for organizations to tell their brand story, and as innovative organizations seek to do the value translation component of innovation, shouldn’t the strength of personal brand equity be a consideration?

Now I don’t want to make this about me, or to say that my personal brand is nearly as strong as any of the individuals referenced before, and so I’ve made this as generic as possible:

Wouldn’t a McKinsey, Booz & Co., Deloitte, PWC, Bain, BCG, Innosight, Strategyn, ?WhatIf!, IDEO, Frog, Idea Couture, Fahrenheit 212, Jump Associates, or other consulting firm be better off (all other things being close to equal) hiring a consultant that could not just do great client work, but also a public evangelist for the firm at conferences and events, and bring visibility to the firm in print in the various media outlets that their personal brand has given them access to?

Wouldn’t a university be better off bringing in a candidate into a PhD research effort that would not just create a purely academic piece of research, but benefit more by partnering with a candidate that has a pre-existing publishing track record, pre-existing public visibility to help promote it, and whose personal brand equity could also bring potentially greater visibility to the degree granting institution?

Wouldn’t a company (all other things being roughly equal) be better off bringing in someone to lead their innovation efforts who has a strong personal brand in the innovation and/or startup communities, than someone who might have great program management capabilities, but limited personal brand equity and visibility? I mean, if one of the goals of an innovation program is to gather more insight-driven dots than your competitors, shouldn’t you base part of your selection criteria on the insight capacity of the individual and the connections that their personal brand equity brings?

These are just three examples of where organizations (and HR professionals) should be factoring personal branding into their recruitment criteria, but there are many more.

I have to say that too much of the focus on personal branding these days is from a social media perspective and making sure that the individual is not damaging their personal brand with careless social media involvement, or is focused on encouraging people to gather as many ‘friends’ as possible, or on the clothes that someone should wear, as if these things by themselves create a personal brand.

I’ve already given my thoughts about what the organization should do with personal branding.

Now here are my personal branding recommendations for the individual:

Determine what your personal brand is. Start by thinking of the three words that define you. What do you want to be known for?

Once you determine what your personal brand stands for, then make sure that all of your online profiles and other kinds of digital and physical assets (including your appearance) reinforce it.

Create content for your online portfolio on the topics related to the three words that define you.

Join the communities that intersect with your personal brand and your passions.

Get out there and meet people. Look for those intersections of skills, abilities, talents, and passions that you have with others that are also consistent with your personal brand.

Look to pursue activities that will strengthen your personal brand, not weaken it.

Be authentic!

Have fun!

Let’s close with a few questions:

What would you add to this list?

What is your personal brand, how strong is it, and how are you going to leverage this to power your career success?

How is your organization viewing personal brand when it comes to its recruitment efforts?

Keep innovating!

Build a common language of innovation on your team

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What is the Role of Personal Branding in Achieving Innovation Success?

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal branding, in part because I’m about to begin a new commissioned white paper and so I’ve been re-visiting my popular white paper for Innocentive – Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation, and what I wrote about personal branding there:

“… the world continues to move away from being a place where employees expect to have jobs for life, and fight against any change to this paradigm, to a world where portfolios, personal branding, and project-based work will become more common in an increasing number of industries. The evolving world of work is becoming a world in which individuals will need to be really good at collaborating and playing well with others, while also honing their skills at standing out from the crowd. At the same time, the external perception of your network value will expand from a focus on internal connections to also include the talented minds you might know outside the organization that can be brought in on different projects or challenges.”

So, let’s dig in…

The power of the individual versus the power of the collective. This is a tension that has been around longer than the practice of human resources and talent management as an occupation. While the organization is concerned with achieving success for the collective, too often we forget that the collective is made up of a collection of unique individuals, and that each of these individuals have a collection of unique skills, talents, and abilities that may or not directly fulfill the needs of their role and the organization’s goals and brand promise:

“To build a brand, you must start a conversation with your customers. Your customers have to know that you stand for something and that they can count on you to deliver upon your brand promise.” (April 20, 2012)

While the role of the individual in helping to fulfill the organization’s brand promise is often not considered, it should be, at the same time that the organization considers whether its chosen individuals adequately fill the defined job requirements that the organization believes are necessary to fulfill the collective’s mission to achieve revenue and profits for its shareholders, value for its clients and donors, or benefits for its constituents (depending on whether you’re talking about a for-profit, non-profit or governmental organization).

If we look at each role in an organization as an attempt by management and human resources to find a perfect match for the job requirements that live within a certain circle, the fact is that for every role, the circle of the individual’s skills, talents, and abilities will never perfectly overlay the circle of the job requirements, it will always look like a Venn Diagram with a good candidate possessing a large amount of overlap, but with always some of their skills, abilities, and talents lying outside of their job requirements’ circle.

But most organizations (referred to as Typical Organizations in the graphic below) fail to harness the skills, abilities and talents of the individuals they have in their organization to achieve greater performance as a collective. In my mind this is painful, wasted human capital – painful for the organization (lost potential revenue and profitability) and painful for the individual (boredom, stress, and disappointment).

But, a handful of more progressive, innovative organizations are trying to do better to harness the passions AND the skills, abilities, and talents of their individuals to better achieve the collective’s ability to generate revenue and profits (or other appropriate benefits) by engaging their employees in the innovation efforts of the organization, and allowing their employees to take some of their skills, abilities and talents and apply them to help fulfill other job descriptions. This looks something more like this:

But in the most progressive organizations, they not only provide a way to better harness a more complete set of their employees’ skills, abilities and talents to more than one job description, but they also find a way to harness more of the skills, abilities, and talents that employees are currently realizing outside the organization in their hobbies, volunteer work, or other places.

And the successful organizations of the future will not stop there. They will also harness the connections their employees have outside the organization to increase the innovation capacity of the organization, and better engage not only partners in helping to fulfill the needs of different job descriptions, but they will also even engage their customers in achieving the work of the organization.

Where customer or partner skills, abilities and talents intersect with the job requirements, work can get done, and where customer or partner skills, abilities or talents intersect with employee skills, abilities or talents intersect, communities and connections have the chance to form and be nurtured. This is what organizations of the future will look like:

In this scenario, where innovative organizations begin to move beyond better harnessing the internal innovation capacity of their employees, to also harnessing the external capacity to work (and to innovate) of individuals outside of the organization (and to expand the scope of the collective), and to attract partners and customers to participate, organizations that allow and even encourage employees to develop a personal brand and greater external connections, will claim an outsized share of the potential benefits to both the mission of the organization and to its innovation efforts.

If your employees lack the external exposure, the external connections, and the external personal brand equity and awareness, how much harder will it be for your organization to:

Attract the best partners to your innovation efforts
Recruit the best customers to co-create with you
Build a strong pipeline of potential future internal talent

Through this lens you can see that in the future, innovation success will be determined not just by how strong the brand of your organization is (or the collective), but also will be shaped by the strength of the personal brands of the collective’s component individuals.

Does your organization recognize the value of your personal brand to the innovation success of the collective, and foster it, or attempt to prevent you from growing your personal brand equity?

What is your personal brand, how strong is it, and how are you going to leverage this to power innovation in your organization?

Keep innovating!

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Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – The Slideshare

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I’ve uploaded a sample chapter of my highly-rated popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons to Slideshare. Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is a great book focused on helping organizations identify and remove barriers to innovation, but also serves as a great innovation primer for organizations beginning their innovation journey and looking to establish a common innovation language across the organization.

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – Chapter 10 Slides from Braden Kelley

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is available on the various Amazon sites around the world and at other fine booksellers and public libraries.

You can buy the book in bulk here:

800-CEO-READ (USA) (for customized orders)
Hooks Books (an independent minority woman-owned bookseller)
Direct from Publisher – Select your country and search for “Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire”

You can download Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire in digital form here:

You can probably check out the book from your local library (or request it):

Or you can buy a traditional paper copy of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire here:

Thousands of people around the world have already purchased, downloaded, or checked out their copy of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and enjoyed the easy, but valuable read, and I hope you will too.

Keep innovating!

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Back End of Innovation Wrapup

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I had the opportunity to speak at the Back End of Innovation (BEI) Conference recently in Silicon Valley. There was a good roster of thought leader and innovation practitioner speakers and before my speech I attended several of the other sessions and captured some quotes and insights on Twitter. If you don’t follow me on twitter where I tweet as @innovate then you will have missed my thoughts on what some of the key innovation quotes and observations were from the three days of the event, so I’ll recollect them here the best that I can.

DAY ONE

Here is a recap of the first day of the Back End of Innovation (BEI) Conference in Silicon Valley.

The event began with Julie Anixter of Innovation Excellence and Ronald Jonash of IXL and a discussion of a new Global Innovation Certification and the need for innovation training and certification. A BETA of the innovation certification was announced and I will be providing eLearning for the Global Innovation Certification BETA beginning November 24, 2013.

We then heard about the importance of branding your technical innovations and rationalizing your portfolio from Dee Slattery of Ansell and then of cocreation with Thomas Finkle of Passenger.

Mick Simonelli (formerly of USAA) then walked us through an innovation practicum during which there were several key nuggets, including:

A show of hands indicated that most people in the room at #bei13 are building innovation capability, while only a few are at event level of maturity or the system level
“It’s sexy at the front end of innovation, but it’s the sweat & toil in middle & back end that makes it happen.”
“Innovation does not grow in a vacuum. You have to get your innovation approach into how people think about the way we do things around here.”
We had a very positive impact by moving legal input from the front end of innovation to the back end.
“We had five different innovation processes at USAA and different integration points for each one for best impact.”
“The HR people should be your best friends when it comes to infusing innovation into your performance management system.”

Then there was a great comment from a gentleman from Boeing that captured the insight about innovation success coming from idea quality not idea quantity – “Ideas of Merit.”

Ken Favaro of Booz & Co. focused on talking about why innovation doesn’t work and had a few interesting tidbits, including:

“To think outside the box, you must look into other boxes.” – Prof William Duggan of Columbia
For innovation success, involve people required for back end implementation in the front end – early buy-in & engagement

Mike Hess of Medtronic talked about how they balance between customer-led and economic-led innovation with tech-led innovation, and some of the logical traps organizations fall into, such as stealing resources from longer-term, higher-risk innovation projects to staff shorter-term, lower-risk ones.

Finally, the day closed with Dennis Hong of Virginia Tech (and soon UCLA) talking about the evolution of humanoid robots, and Vivek Wadhwa talking about women in innovation. Vivek Wadhwa talked about his women innovator’s book project and the controversy he stirred up by pointing out that Twitter has an all male management team and all male board. Meanwhile, Dennis Hong focused on his philosophy for why robots in the home should have humanoid form and that is because robots in the home need to adapt to human-centered designs. So instead of asking why do we need humanoid robots, we should ask what robotic tasks require a humanoid form? This is leading them to focus on robots for firefighting and other hazardous situations, to help save human lives.

If you were at the conference, what did you take away from Day One?

DAY TWO

The second day began with Vijay Govindarajan. Here are some Vijay’s key quotes and insights:

“Strategy = Innovation”
“If you want to lead in the future, you must do innovation”
“Strategy is not about competition for the present, it’s about competition for the future”
“Common sense is not necessarily common practice.”
“We say there is no innovation in education but none of the Top 10 universities in the world are in Top 10 today.”
Vijay talked about his box 1,2,3 thinking model. Personally, I think the error is tasking one person with success in all three boxes.
“Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation.”
My reaction – People hype business model innovation WAY too much. Most Business Model Innovation examples started with the innovation, not other way around.
My reaction – The business model canvas is a useful tool for innovation, but it is not by itself the source of it.
My reaction – Ugh. I am so tired of hearing about fail fast, success comes not from failing fast, it is about LEARNING fast.
“You can ask your performance engine to do MORE work, but not DIFFERENT work.”
“For Box 3 experiments you must create a dedicated team with permission to create its own culture”
“CEO must recognize that there will be tensions between performance engine & Box 3 experiments that they must manage”

I then attended a panel with Rachel Birney of Exxon Mobil, Jon Fredrickson of Innocentive, and Julie DiSandro and Kurt Scherer of Booz Allen Hamilton. Here are the most interesting things I came away with from this session:

“Innovation = change with impact” Simple. Powerful. Elegantly stated. – K Scherer
“Don’t communicate something about your innovation program until you have a real story to tell.” – J DiSandro
“When it comes to managing an innovation community, you must stimulate people with a variety of things to react to.” – J Fredrickson
“Recognize and fight the two antibodies that will kill innovation: corporate antibodies and personal antibodies” – Unknown

The third session I attended of the day, was with Maria B Thompson of Motorola Solutions and here are some of the key insights and quotes from that session:

People tend to come back from ride alongs not with problems, but solutions.
When people come back from ride alongs with solutions, you end up with incremental innovation instead of breakthroughs you seek
To get to innovation you need to get people to park in the problem space and refrain from jumping to solutions
When you are observing customers, look for the BUTs and the unexpected workarounds
Look for the important contradictions that customers seem to want “I want long battery life but low weight”
“Park in the problem space and force yourself to stay there and reframe it in multiple ways.” Yes!
“Engineers love questions”
Problemstorming or Provocation Sessions should have at least 8+ people, but she prefers 20+ people to get more dots to connect
Interesting that Maria B Thompson mentioned that she switched from going to FEI to BEI. I wonder if that might be a trend?
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change” – Albert Einstein
Interesting idea that for innovation, instead of brainstorming ideas, you should focus on assumptionstorming and problemstorming”
Directed Innovation model being discussed is a good example of peer-to-peer collaboration – Motorola Solutions & Medtronic
Maria gave a shoutout to Conceptual Blockbusting
You might be on to something if your engineers tell you you’re asking them to violate the laws of physics.
Rule #1 to ideation sessions, don’t give the lawyer the pen for the whiteboard!
Contribution from audience – for remote people trying to participate in assumption, problem, or idea storming – partner them up
Demise of Motorola Mobility? The success of the RAZR – People reassigned from smartphone work to RAZR work because of its success.
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” – Thomas Edison

The fourth session I attended of the day was with Michele R Westlander, Chief Technology Officer (Public Sector) and Innovation Evangelist from Google. The presentation was heavily skewed towards evangelism, but here were some of the interesting bits from my tweet stream:

Google doesn’t call it HR, they call it People Ops. “It’s all about the people, and the corporate culture.”
Google Corporate Philosophy – “If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.”
People ask us about expense of Google cafeterias, but think about expense of lost time & collaboration of people going off-campus.
Google’s offices have a Tech Stop for hands on computer issue repair. Time is money.
My question – Some people would say that Google is great at invention (Microsoft too), but not so good at innovation. What do you think?
My reaction – Google’s new collaboration model they are touting isn’t new though, this was whole Lotus Notes model available twenty years ago. Just saying.
“At Google, failure is expected, if you’re not failing you’re pushing hard enough or reaching far enough.”
Love that – “Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who can’t give you a ‘Yes’ in the first place.”
My reaction – Happy to see Google is the first one to talk about learning fast being more important than failing fast – my mantra
Three biggest barriers to innovation – culture (people) aka resistance to change, policy (business processes), and technology

The fifth session I attended of the day was with Steve Garguilo and Matt Kane of Johnson & Johnson. They spoke about their efforts to bring the TEDX model into the Salon events that they were helping to organize within J&J:

They wanted the Salon events to be very local and how they spread to Brazil and China and other J&J places
Their Salon format was based on TEDX format and had a goal for 75% internal and 25% external speakers
They told a story about how an employee created art out of styrofoam waste & how that evolved into an effort to reimagine waste at J&J
They talked about how powerful it can be to change people’s experience – used accordion & post-its under people’s chairs to make point
They focus not just on compelling content on main stage, but chances to connect & explore, and to experience something new
My reaction – I like what they are doing with their Salon experiences, ties in nicely with the first of the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation
My reaction – It’s becoming more common to have a Chief Innovation Officer, but do you have a Chief Inspiration Officer? Inspiration drives innovation…
They told a powerful story about how someone installed a “Before I die, I want to…” picture on the wall and how people engaged with it, and how it evolved into a “Before the end of 2013…” campaign within the company
They talked about how the TED library is being translated into other languages and how this can be leveraged for global event rollout
They started their events informally because they were passionate about it, and it has grown into a corporate funded event series.
We are not only ones doing TEDX kinds of events, Google, Disney, Intuit and others are doing too & can be learned from
They used a nomination process, required rehearsals, and had people who could help shape presentations & evaluate whether people were ready
Part of how we convinced people to conform to the TEDX style was to reinforce how they were going to help people look good
My reaction – Interesting to see how the TEDX format has spread from expanding to additional cities, and now expanding into inspiring employees
My reaction – Must say that by making employee inspiration investment in right way, you will not only increase innovation but employee engagement too
It is worthwhile work to contribute towards getting people to bring their authentic selves to work…
Their efforts were off the side of the desk of their full time jobs until it grew to a keep doing or stop doing moment…

The final session I attended was with Ken Perlman of Kotter International. Here are some of the key insights and quotes from that session:

“Too often we deprive people of something to take home to show that they matter.”
“We don’t have the time to work on the stuff that is truly important because we’re working on the things we have to do.”
“Leaders should lead with a question. Leaders should be asking WHO and WHY to drive innovation.” – Are you?
“Most people are good at self managing. Most people are focused on the WHEN, WHERE, and HOW. Leverage this!”
“Leaders ask people to take ownership.” – If nobody responds, then it is on you & your framing.
Our hierarchical approach to management is really all about risk management – Not built for speed.
“Employers are competing for employees’ time.”
“Simple is not equal to easy. Clarity creates speed.”
“It is human nature that when pushed, we push back.”
“Hierarchy needs the network to innovate.”
“Organizations become more hierarchical as they grow and networked organization shrinks.”
“We argue about the what when we should be focused on agreeing on the why.”

If you were at the conference, what did you take away from Day Two?

Coming up next, highlights from Day 3 of BEI…

P.S. Don’t forget to register for the FREE Beta of the Global Innovation Certification and the FREE Innovation eLearning BETA for the Global Innovation Certification BETA for Innovation Catalysts.

DAY THREE

The third day began with Lisa Marchese of The Cosmopolitan Hotel of Las Vegas. Here are some Lisa’s key quotes and insights:

When we created the Cosmopolitan brand we did so with the knowledge that most visitors came from LA, SF, NYC, etc.
“When we launched The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, room occupancy and room rates were low. This created a can’t lose environment.”
“We’ve out Belagio’d the Belagio. We’ve got the best view of the fountains.”
“We looked at ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ and we had a different insight – people want to take constraints of their normal life off”
“We arrived at the Curious Class ™ as a target – help curious, creative people leave with a story to tell.”
“We saw Vegas mystique slightly differently. People want to be constraint-free self and have memorable experience.”
“It is very difficult to keep a passionate, innovative culture where people feel that we are doing something different”
RT @virtualdavid – Innovators lose mojo over the years. It is hard to keep burning passion that we are doing something different going.
When innovation is in play, if people avoid conflict, the outcome is affected. It is not always a pleasant experience.
RT @RominaAK – Innovative Marketing – It’s emotive. It makes you want to learn more
“Look for friction, and push innovation focus all the way through to marketing. Even marketing people go back to what they know.”
We created something new with the Cosmopolitan, and then we had several other people competing in us in white space we created.
Lisa described how their team keeps creating innovation only to have other people knock us off, again and again, it’s exhausting
We innovate in creative and channel – We buy where they don’t buy – As soon as someone comes where we are, we leave
We don’t want to be seen as at parity with the competition
We know we are in a saturated market & we have less money to spend, so we try to own channels we use – figuratively or actually
Because we must maintain agility in our marketing and advertising & not appear in cluttered channels, we are running out of channels
Because we are running out of channels, now we have to start thinking about owning the channels
Flipping things on their head is how we stay fresh as a marketing-led organization
People who in the innovation industry are “openers” are not necessarily “operators” and a lot of the creators are leaving
It is a big challenge to keep things fresh, and we have had some cultural and service challenges, things haven’t been perfect
RT @virtualdavid – Mutation is progress. Correct is a mistake. Just right amount of wrong. From Cosmopolitan Hotel ad via Lisa Marchese
RT @thehealthmaven – Agility! When your competition zigs YOU zag.
When you get one win under your belt is helps you get future boundary pushing work approved.
We create a lot of content for our property and this all has to be curated in order to ensure the success of brand and hotel
“Trying to be like someone is not innovative, even if it’s Apple.”
If you want to create a great brand, you can’t live in the middle, you must firmly plant your feet on one side or the other.
It is okay to piss people off or not have them like you. A strong brand can’t be for everyone.
How do you keep people motivated in innovation? Have them look at more stuff. – Love it – Agrees with inspiration as center!

I then attended a session with Kenneth Klimpel of Colgate Palmolive. Here are the most interesting things I came away with from this session:

With the exception of pet nutrition, all our products are driven by four core technology innovation spaces
We can make exactly the same thing as anyone else for less because all of our plants are optimized for purpose
Amazing! A Colgate-Palmolive toothpaste plant can make 700 tubes of toothpaste – wait for it – PER MINUTE! That’s a lot of toothpaste
When we looked at electric toothbrushes we didn’t have the competencies to succeed there, but we wanted to do it, now what?
KK just showed an ad for the Colgate 1500 electric toothbrush via a partnership with Omrom – Looks like a smart toothbrush. Cool!
Colgate 1500 was outcome of Colgate looking at a mature market where they wanted to enter, but didn’t have competencies.

The third session I attended of the day, was with David Davidovic of PathForward (formerly Genentech) and Sara M. Roberts of Roberts Golden Consulting and here are some of the key insights and quotes from that session:

RT @Smartorginc – David Davidovic says you can’t understand a company’s innovative-ness by only looking at its products and services.
Volatility is the new normal – Must focus on the Volume, Velocity and Variety in your innovation efforts
RT @Smartorginc – Sara Roberts says we hire for diversity but incentivize conformity
Sara Roberts told story behind Blockbuster demise through the lens of a change in CEOs and switch from online to retail focus
My reaction – I would argue that Blockbuster was not innovative because their board was not innovative & ultimately they run show. With public companies, if a board lacks innovation vision, they can kill an otherwise innovative company. Be careful who you pick for your board!
Sara Roberts says we’ve been asking for ideas when we need to be asking for involvement – we must empower the crowd
Most nimble & innovative companies ask employees not just for ideas but also to drive business planning process with predictions

The fourth session I attended of the day was with Bill Demas of Turn. Here were some of the interesting bits from my tweet stream:

Bill Demas talked about their pivot from an ad network to a completely different business model
Talked about their employee recognition award of burning a plastic boat in their honor instead of an employee of the month
Bill Demas talking about their pivot from an ad network to a self-service platform and how they had to let people go and hire new ones
Bill Demas talked about how they really try to build in transparency into what they do in what was a very obfuscated market
Bill Demas talking about how the advertising market has become so much more fragmented across a plethora of channels and devices
@BillDemas talked about how their turn software creates a Bloomberg-like system for tracking advertising spend
He talked about how their new vision was moving forward and then suddenly Google bought their biggest competitor
“I kept reinforcing that smaller companies move slower than big companies, and so our advantage was speed.”
They started hiring software folks and teaching them digital advertising – We’re a SaaS company first
@BillDemas talked about their use of traditional forming, storming, norming, performing framework as they went through tech pivot
They have a one pager that they use to track their future strategy and the things that are important to management
Sorry, had to leave a bit earlier to set up for my speech…

The final session of the event was my talk on Building Effective Innovation Teams. I spoke about several different tools, techniques and understanding that are important when it comes to building better innovation teams. Some of this content can be found in FREE innovation eLearning available from Innovation Tutors, including in the two following BETA eLearning modules:

BETA – Global Innovation Certification for Innovation Catalysts

Contains content on how to effectively use the Six Thinking Styles (Thinking Hats)

Nine Innovation Roles 101

Contains content on how everyone has a role to play in innovation – more on http://9roles.com

If you were at the conference, what did you take away from Day Three?

P.S. Don’t forget to register for the FREE Beta of the Global Innovation Certification and the FREE Innovation eLearning BETA for the Global Innovation Certification BETA for Innovation Catalysts.

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Rise of the Social Business Architect

Download the Rise of the Social Business Architect PDF

The world is changing and needs Social Business Architects. Gone is the epoch of the passive consumer, now customers want a say. At the same time, the quest for survival and growth is causing companies to stop looking at suppliers as someone to squeeze on price and instead as partners in innovation. And, employers are realizing that to maximize their success they need to attract and engage the best talent not just into internal talent pools, but external ones as well.

It feels like you can’t go a day without hearing someone or some publication mention Facebook, Twitter or some other component of the social media universe. The fact is that social media has invaded the public consciousness and people are now more suspicious of someone who doesn’t have a social media presence than someone who does. People are starting to judge others based on their Facebook or LinkedIn profile they ever meet them, and expecting companies to answer the tweet they’ve sent them or the question they’ve posted on their Facebook wall within the day, the hour, the minute (believe me the expected pace of response is accelerating).

Social media has become so important and pervasive that it is beginning to co-opt the term ‘social business’ into its lexicon to describe an organization’s engagement with people outside of its borders across a variety of channels and for a variety of purposes. Social media is stealing the term ‘social business’ away from the social enterprise folks, and that’s okay – they can’t possibly use ‘social business’ and ‘social enterprise’ at the same time anyways.

The importance of ‘social business’ and social business design has grown as our technologies have matured from contact management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, from bulletin boards to discussion forums, from static to dynamic html, from social networks to social media, and from media consumer to media producer. Ultimately ‘social business’ is the science of optimizing the intersection of people, process, and technology. If we look at ‘social business’ as the discipline managing that intersection and helping an organization focusing on how it engages with others and maximizes the value of its relationships, I’ve been working in social business for more than 15 years as what I like to call a Social Business Architect.

In addition to facilitating and optimizing the group dynamics and interactions inside the organization, a Social Business Architect specializes in identifying the different parts of an organization that need to interact with groups of people outside the organization, how those parts of the organization should work together to communicate with people outside the organization, and helps to identify and implement communications solutions that connect the organization with the target groups so that a meaningful connection and conversation can be built, and then helps to manage the conversations and the information and learnings from their outcomes for the benefit of the organization.

A Social Business Architect keeps the organizations focused on the goals of its relationships with the outside, works with the organization’s technologists and other specialists in other departments to enable the necessary conversations to take place for the benefit of the organization.

From building Symantec’s first web-based multi-lingual technical support and customer service capabilities to working with the Windows Live team at Microsoft to building the world’s most popular innovation community centered around https://www.disruptorleague.com, I’ve seen the importance of finding the right intersection between primary connection points and sources of value for the community to establish itself, grow and thrive.

To build a successful community and attract talent to your organization you must try to identify as an organization what resources you already have (or could create) that will have some value to the community that you are trying to build. These sources of value to the community could be:

Financial
Informational
Educational
Social
Or come from another store of value

You must give people a reason to want to connect with you and to stay close – and yes, hopefully contribute over time.

In addition to identifying the value that you can bring to the community you must also identify which connection points will multiply the attractive power of the sources of value you choose to focus on. There are three primary connection points to consider:

1. Passion – One of the ways that you can attract people to your community is to leverage the power of passion. Seek to identify what people are passionate about when it comes to your company or your products. Passion can be extremely contagious. Is there a way that you can inject the passion that people may have for your company or products into your community?

2. Purpose – Another connection point to consider is to tap into the power of purpose. Not all organizations are committed to serving a larger social purpose, but all can consider introducing elements of public outreach or philanthropy that the community can engage with and feel good about contributing to. Are you building walls to keep people out? Or are you creating something that people can feel a part of?

3. Fun – And don’t forget the power of fun. One of the ways of connecting people to your community is to have something fun for people to do. Recognize people for their participation in your community in fun and different ways to keep them interested and engaged, and have some fun reinforcing the ethos of the community.

And when you bring the right sources of value together with the right connection points that is when the magic of attraction and engagement happens and a community starts to grow its membership and participation. But we are not just seeking to build a community; we are looking to activate it as well (to get people engaged, contributing, discussing, connecting, etc.).

This is where Social Business Architects prove their worth to the organization. They can use social media, digital communications, value analysis, and other collaborative tools to help organizations attract and engage customers, partners and employees to help the organization achieve its commercial goals. Whether the future direction of your social business architecture includes beginning collaborative innovation, increasing employee retention, building stronger partnerships, growing customer lifetime value, or another effort, be sure that you are involving the Social Business Architects in your organization to help set the right goals and find the right tools to ensure the effort’s success. Only then will you put your organization on the path it needs to be to transform itself from an internally focused product and service factory to a truly internally and externally focused and integrated social business capable of sustainable innovation, retention of the growing millennial work force, long-term customer relationships and loyalty, and true partnerships with its vendors and suppliers for mutual benefit.

Are you ready to architect a social business foundation under your organization?

Stay tuned for more on this topic in a white paper I am publishing with Innocentive very soon.

UPDATE: You can find all of my commissioned white papers here (including the Innocentive White Paper – “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”) or contact me to commission one for your company’s inbound or content marketing efforts here.

Download a PDF version of this article

Image credit: Ringling Bros.

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Embedding Innovation

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Distributing Innovation Knowledge for Innovation Success

Is innovation in your organization a project?

Or are you trying to embed innovation into your organization as a new core competency?

Is innovation part of the new business as usual you are trying to create for sustained growth?

If so, you must take real actions to not only create a culture of continuous innovation but to sustain it.

You must consciously and continuously manage two of the key tensions that often inhibit innovation:

Exploitation versus Exploration – Maximizing existing revenue possibilities while also creating new revenue opportunities
Executive Mindset versus Entrepreneurial Mindset – Unleashing your executives to create predictability and repeatability in the existing business while also unleashing intrapreneurs to create new businesses

To be successful in the long run, you must pursue operational excellence AND innovation excellence at the same time.

And you must provide your entire workforce with the tools and training to support continuous, sustainable innovation.

Ideally this would include:

Creating a common language of innovation in your organization

Communicating an innovation vision, strategy, and goals across the organization

Creating instructor-led and/or e-learning with Human-Centered Change & Innovation founder Braden Kelley to set a baseline understanding in your organization of your innovation process and the innovation tools available to help stimulate increased innovation in your organization

Give your employees a steady diet of innovation inspiration and education by embedding an RSS Feed (or feedburner) from Human-Centered Change & Innovation into your corporate portal or into your Idea Management System

Get involved with the Human-Centered Change & Innovation blog to showcase the fantastic innovation work you are doing and to be one of the first organizations to get an inside look at what others are doing

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Pull Marketing – Upside Down Social Web Design

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Picking up where my hugely popular article ‘Rise of the Social Business Architect‘ (PDF) leaves off, I thought I would examine the world of web design in a world where the tools of social media are becoming increasingly important and integrated into how business gets done (and even how searching and search results are done).

When it comes to putting up a web site, most entrepreneurs and marketers unfortunately look at it from their perspective (what do I want to say?) instead of from their potential customers’ perspective (what do they want or need to know?). This causes most entrepreneurs and marketers to start building web sites for their new product or service in the same basic way (a push marketing approach).

First, they go out and hire a web designer to build them a web site, only to have the web designer ask them three main questions:

1. What kind of visual design are you looking for? (…and what are your favorite web sites and why?)

2. Do you need the web site to run on any particular technology platform?

3. What kinds of content do you have? (…and what is your menu structure going to be?)

The third question often provokes a deer in the headlights kind of response – “Oh shoot, we have to write something” – and then after the entrepreneur or marketer recovers from the shock they think about what they want to say.

The entrepreneur or marketer hastily runs off and sketches out a set of pages that they want to have (or they use another site as a template) and then they write (or hire someone to write) copy for each page, and when the copy is written and the design is complete they have someone build the web site using the design and content as a guide.

The end result is a web site that stands alone as a new domain in the digital wilderness, disconnected from the rest of the digital world. This may be great for putting on business cards and email signatures, but the chances are low of someone finding the new web site and actually caring about the product or service.

Frustrated that nobody is coming to the new web site, maybe the marketer or entrepreneur creates a Facebook page or a Twitter account, but then those likely sit there – lacking a clear purpose or a point of conversation.

Still trying to provoke activity on their web site, maybe the marketer/entrepreneur starts to create deeper level content that their potential customers might actually care about, with the potential of moving them along the customer purchasing journey, and put it on the site. When few people find the new content that the marketer/entrepreneur created at great time and/or expense, maybe they buy some pay-per-click advertising (PPC) to drive people to it, wondering when the financial bleeding will stop.

Finally, maybe they place the content off-site in places where potential customers actually gather and might find it (and find the new web site as a result).

What would happen if you flipped the traditional push marketing web design paradigm around and used a pull marketing approach instead?

I would contend that is exactly what you should do if you want to build a social business, and to prove it, over the next couple of months I will flip the traditional web site design model on its and head and use an upside down social web design model for my new domain in the wilderness – http://b2bpull.com – which will be the home of a new digital agency focused on b2b pull marketing strategy and execution services.

So what does an upside down social web design approach look like?

Well, the first key is to keep the customer at the center of your plans, not the product or service you plan to offer. My current web site – https://bradenkelley.com – is all about me – my thinking, my services, my creations, etc. I am the product, and I sit at the center. The web site in this evolving case study – http://b2bpull.com – will be built with b2b marketing managers at the center, and now I’ll lay out what the steps in a pull marketing approach to social web site design should be.

Blackjack!

Here are the 21 steps to building an Upside Down Social Web Design:

While you are exploring what product or service to offer to potential customers, also explore how they shop for the kind of product or service you are going to offer. Seek to understand where their areas of confusion are, and what kinds of information they seek out to help them make the decisions about which companies to consider and which products or services they are interested in learning more about.

Create a simple landing page that tells people what is coming soon, and that contains a simple form asking people what they’d like to know more about. If you go to http://b2bpull.com now you will find not a web site, but a landing page asking people what they’d like to know about b2b pull marketing. So, please let me know what you’d like to know about using content to drive an increase in inbound sales leads, and I’ll work to build answers to share with the world.

Create a simple logo (you can change this later) that is a square image (this is for use as a profile photo in any profiles you create – i.e. Twitter/Facebook)

If your prospective customers are on Twitter, then create an account on Twitter – if they are not, then skip this step. At a minimum, populate your profile with a description of your product or service, a profile image, the URL of your landing page, and a background image to make your profile more visually engaging and distinctive. Send a tweet or two letting people know what you’re planning to do and inquiring what people would like to know more about (as it relates to your specialty area). Do research to find out who else tweets interesting things about your specialty and start following them. Retweet one or two interesting things that they share (every day) – be sure and use appropriate #hashtags in your re-tweets to help people find them.

If your prospective customers are on Facebook, then create a Facebook page and at a minimum populate it with a profile photo, a cover image, and an about us. If your prospective customers do not spend time on Facebook, then skip this step. Add links to the one or two interesting things that you find on Twitter each day that relate to your specialty area. That will start giving you some interesting content on your Facebook page (instead of it staying blank), feed it into your fans’ Facebook content streams, and give people an idea of what to expect in the future.

Look for interesting groups on Linkedin that focus on your specialty area and join them. Consider starting your own Linkedin group. See what people are sharing in the groups you join. Consider sharing some of what you find on Twitter in the discussions area of the groups that you join (or create) to add value.

Scour the web for sites and blogs in your specialty area that are ideally independent of any one company, publish interesting content, and have multiple contributing authors. Ask your friends and network connections in your specialty area for recommendations too. Use Alexa, Compete, and other tools to identify which of the sites get the most traffic.

Refer to your research in step #1 to identify which topics in your specialty area that customers look for information on the most to help them further their progress along their purchasing journey. Hopefully one or more of these topics you will have deep knowledge and expertise on. Commit to writing a white paper on one of these topics.

See if one or more of the sites in step #7 will allow you publish an article announcing your research effort for this white paper on their web site in order to build interest and hopefully participation in this effort.

Write the white paper (ideally with contributions from current or prospective customers), and when complete, create one or more articles for digital publication from each white paper.

Add another simple form to your landing page for people to fill out with name/company/title/email/phone in order to download the white paper (make phone optional) and ask their permission (with a check box) to send them information about an upcoming webinar to discuss its findings.

Create an electronic presentation to share the findings of the white paper you’ve created. Be sure to embed contact details in it and a link to your landing page (which will become your web site later).

Create accounts on presentation sharing sites like Slideshare and Scribd and share the presentation you’ve created. Be sure that you fill out your profile on these sites and include a link to your landing page as part of your profile if possible.

Inquire with the most promising sites identified in step #7 to find out if they accept article submissions and submit one or more of the articles you created from your white paper.

Identify short snippets from the white paper and articles that work well as quotes or insights and will fit into status updates on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, or other communities where it makes sense to share them. Be sure and include a shortened url (bit.ly, su.pr, ow.ly, etc.) to the article, presentation, or white paper.

Look for professional associations and complimentary vendors in your specialty area that conduct regular webinars and ask if they would be interested in doing a webinar with you to share the findings of your white paper with their members or current/prospective customers. If you do a webinar, be sure that they record the webinar and share the link with you to the recording (and hopefully the email list of attendees). Check to see if they can provide a recording of the webinar in a video format that you can share. If you can’t find someone to do a webinar with to share your findings, consider doing one yourself. While having a large number of people attend live is helpful, what is more important here is the recording (you can help potential customers find this 24/7/365).

Add the link to the webinar recording to your landing page.

Create an account on YouTube and possibly also on Vimeo and populate your profile in a similar manner to Twitter (not neglecting to link to relevant assets). Upload the video file from the webinar (if you were able to get one), plus add it to your Facebook page if you’ve created one. If you are comfortable in front of the camera, consider recording a separate video segment highlighting the key findings from your white paper to upload to your video channels.

Be sure and share links to the white paper, the webinar, the webinar recording, and any articles you created from the white paper through your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and any other communities linked to your subject matter.

Repeat as many times as necessary until you have enough content to build your web site.

Last but not least, design and build your web site, incorporating all of the content elements that you created. Not only will it be easier to build the web site because you have already built a lot of the content required to populate any design your web designer might come up with, but the quality of your web design may improve and be more social because the designer will have a clearer idea of what you are selling and the goals you are trying to achieve with your new web site.

The importance of social media in the internet ecosystem is only continuing to grow, and so it is time to design web sites in a different, more social way. The way that people buy things, especially more complicated products and services with longer cycles (particularly B2B products) is changing as well. This will make marketing organizations focus more on pull marketing and less on push marketing. This will force marketers and entrepreneurs to focus less on building beautiful, flash-driven web designs and more on building valuable, socially-driven, content-rich ecosystems (of which the web site is only a part).

In short, the future of marketing belongs to marketers who are good at creating social pull.

So, how strong is your social pull?

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Social Media is the Glue of Innovation

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Social media serves an incredibly important role in innovation. Social media functions as the glue to stick together incomplete knowledge, incomplete ideas, incomplete teams, and incomplete skillsets. Social media is not some mysterious magic box. Ultimately it is a tool that serves to connect people and information.

I’m reminded of a set of lyrics from U2’s “The Fly”:

“Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief”

Social media can help ideas grow and thrive that would otherwise wither and die under the boot of the perfectionist in all of us.

Do you remember the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”? Well, it takes a village to create an innovation from an idea as well, and social media helps to aggregate and mobilize the people and knowledge necessary to do just that.

But, that is social media working in the positive. We must remember that social media tools are just that – tools.

Just as easily as social media tools can be an accelerator for innovation, they can also be an inhibitor – if the participants or the presenters manage to make the less active majority feel that innovation is not something for them.

If you don’t want to be a fool with a tool, then you must be careful to make sure that the social media tools in your organization are fulfilling their role in a positive way and leveraging existing knowledge management and collaboration toolsets:

To make innovative ideas visible and accessible

To allow people to have conversations

To build community

To facilitate information exchange

To enable knowledge sharing

To assist with expert location

To power collaboration on idea evolution

To help people educate themselves

To connect people to others who share their passion

To surface the insights and strategy that people should be building ideas from

The better you become at the above, the stronger your organization’s innovation capability will become, the more engaged your employees will become, and the more ready you will become to engage successfully in open innovation.

For the most part, what I’ve been talking about is the role of social media in innovation inside the organization. When you leverage social media for innovation outside the organization, it gets a whole lot more complicated.

But, maybe that’s a conversation for another day.

In the meantime, please consider the ways in which social media in your organization might be able to strengthen inter-disciplinary cooperation, make the organization itself more adaptable, and how it could help to create an organization with the power to transform more ideas into innovations.

You might also enjoy these four FREE white papers:

Effective Conversational Marketing

Rise of the Social Business Architect

Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation

Broadcasting the Voice of the Customer

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Should I run for President again in 2012?

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My presidential campaign picked up a lot of steam in 2008, but of course I came up short.

Should I make another run for the presidency in 2012?

If you didn’t know I was a front-running presidential candidate in 2008, check out the video:

SORRY – THIS ISN’T AVAILABLE ANY MORE
(which is too bad because it was very cool)

Of course I am kidding, but I was rifling some through old posts and I came across this video. This campaign was one of my favorite pass along marketing campaigns of 2008. It allows you to embed your name or a friend’s name visually in the video in several spots and send the video to them. I thought it was a lot of fun, and probably money much better spent than if they had bought a commercial on the Super Bowl.

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