Tag Archives: Social Business

Building a Global Sensing Network – Revisited

When I first wrote about Building a Global Sensing Network I wrote in the specific context of the war for innovation and the need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization — not inside.

We looked at how most organizations hire the most clever, educated, experienced and motivated people you could afford and then direct them to come up with the best customer solutions possible, organize and execute their production and marketing predictably and efficiently, and do their best to outmaneuver the competition.

In short, most organizations pursue success by building a fortress from which the organization can defend its intellectual property and its market position utilizing the human resources it can assemble within the castle walls. At the same time most organizations focus on achieving organizational success by achieving the greatest overlap possible between the skills, abilities and talents of each job applicant and the job description for each role.

But most organizations (referred to as Typical Organizations in the graphic below) fail to harness ALL of 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, successful innovation and change 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.

As the commercial battlefield continues to change, future business success will be built upon more fluid boundaries and the ability to leverage skills, abilities and talents of people and other organizations outside the company and also the ability to:

Utilize expert communities.

Identify and gather technology trend information, customer insights and local social mutations from around the globe.

Mobilize the organization in organic ways to utilize resources and information often beyond its control.

Still organize and execute production and marketing predictably and efficiently in the middle of all this complexity.

Market leaders in our evolving reality will be increasingly determined not by an organization’s ability to outmaneuver the competition in a known market, but by their ability to identify and solve for the key unknowns in markets that will continue to become more global and less defined. Future market leaders will be those organizations that build superior global sensing networks and do a better job at making sense of the inputs from these networks to select the optimal actionable insights to drive innovation and change.

By this point, hopefully you are asking yourself three questions:

1. How do I create more fluid boundaries in my organization?

2. What does a global sensing network look like?

3. How do I build one?

One View of a Global Sensing Network

The purpose of a global sensing network is to allow an organization to collect and connect the partial insights and ideas that will form the basis of the organization’s next generation of customer solutions. This involves collecting and connecting:

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

1. Customer Insights

Ethnography
Private Communities
Focus Groups
Surveys
Lead User Observation

2. Core Technology Trends

3. Adjacent Technology Trends

4. Distant technology trends

5. Local social mutations

Demographic trends
Sociological trends
Economic trends
Political trends (including regulation)
Behavioral trends

6. Expert Communities

University Research
Government Research
Corporate Research
Charitable Research
Hobbyists

To actually build a global sensing network you need to start from the inside out. You have to take a look around inside your organization and see what employees you have, what natural connections they have, and where they are currently located on the globe. At the same time you need to understand how employees in your organization naturally connect with each other and define what core, adjacent and distant technologies mean in the context of your organization. You must also look and see what tools you have inside the organization for managing insights, expertise and information within the organization, and what expert communities you may already have connections into.

I would recommend beginning to establish your global sensing network inside your organization before venturing to build it out completely with the resources and connections that you will naturally need outside your organization. This will enable you to get some really great feedback from employees on the connections that will be necessary to foster and manage outside of your organization and to prepare your information sharing systems and internal communications to enable increased sharing and improved innovation inputs and outputs.

It is likely that many organizations will already be gathering some level of customer insight information from ethnography, private communities, focus groups, surveys, lead user observation, etc. but not have a good infrastructure, policies or procedures in place for sharing this information. If you’re truly serious about creating a deep innovation capability and working to achieve innovation excellence in the same way that you pursue operational excellence, you should experiment with your systems by making customer information more available.

Next, you should leverage your employees and existing partnerships to reach outside the organization to organize and establish stronger communication channels with the relevant expert communities, including those focused on university research, government research, charitable research, corporate research (industry associations and competitors), and even to inventors or hobbyists.

And then finally from the connections you’ve built to this point, you should have identified where you have good people internally to provide information on local social mutations (local developments of interest spawned by local demographic, sociological, economic, political and behavioral trends), and where you have gaps. Hopefully by this point you may have also identified people outside your organization in countries around the world that you already have formal or informal connections to that can be leveraged to fill the gaps in your global sensing network footprint.

Conclusion

If you’re already involved in innovation and change, or have read a lot on the topic, it should be obvious to you why your organization needs a global sensing network.

Building a global sensing network helps organizations:

Accelerate their innovation efforts
Create more fluid organizational boundaries
Embrace a more open approach to innovation
Monitor emerging and evolving technologies
Track changes in customer behavior in the unending search for new insight-driven ideas

But the main that should jump out as you look at the download titled Building a Global Sensing Network is that innovation can come from anywhere, so you need to be listening everywhere.

The purpose for building a global sensing network is much like the purpose for having a SETI program. We know that there must be intelligent life outside the four walls of our organization, but to find it, we must be listening. And we must be listening so that we can amplify, combine and triangulate the weak signals that we might pick up so that we can find the next innovation and change that our organization is capable of delivering – before the competition. After all, there is a war for innovation and change out there. The only true unknown is who’s going to win.

I hope you’ll come join me on this journey to improve the pace and execution of innovation and change efforts in our organizations!

Click to access this framework as a scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

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Rise of the Social Business Architect

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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.

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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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Effective Conversational Marketing

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A few years ago I published a white paper on “Effective Conversational Marketing” and it is still relevant today as my service offering evolves to a B2B Pull Marketing focus.

Here is an excerpt:

“Introduction

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is relationship marketing for the social media age. Thinking about your marketing efforts in terms of a conversation changes the approach and better integrates social media. Relationships are something that are formed, but conversations are ongoing and evolving and require both sides to participate.

How Social Media Fits In

It seems like I can’t get through a day right now without hearing somebody in the media or on the street talking about social media. I think it is great that social media has captured people’s attention, but will having more communication channels improve conversational marketing?

Only if properly integrated into the conversations between consumers and companies.

To do this, social media must be established both as part of your on-going conversational marketing programs (on-boarding, loyalty, retention, etc.) and also integrated into your ad hoc or seasonal marketing campaigns.”

Download the complete “Effective Conversational Marketing” white paper in PDF form.

One thing is for sure. Effective conversational marketing is central to successful pull marketing strategy and your overall marketing investments.

Contact us if you’d like to hire me to create thought leadership for you to help increase your inbound sales leads, or to create a pull marketing strategy to increase your revenue.

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Who is in Your Social Media Band?