Attributes of the Social Organization (Part 2)

As you may recall, in part one of defining the Social Organization we discussed a few reasons why we need a new view of the world.  We also took time to define The Social Organization in very simple terms:

The Social Organization will use standard approaches that make it easy for customers/citizens to find and buy products and services while enabling the organization to meet their goals.

This easy to understand definition enables us to begin to define the attributes of the Social Organization:

• Social Organizations use standard approaches.  They follow a well-defined framework for successfully achieving their goals. We will define this framework as we go, but understand that 75-80% of the framework applies across all types of organizations in The Social Ecosystem.  The remaining percentage takes into account the uniqueness of your organization.
• Social Organizations focus on delivering value in an equitable way.  We do not live in a utopian world, we live in a world where services are delivered in a way where, ideally, customers feel they have received value while allowing organizations to meet their goals (for businesses, making money).  For example:
  • When a customer buys an iPhone they are not focused on the amount of profit made by Apple, they are only concerned with the value received for their money.  If they feel they received the value expected they are happy.  If Apple, as the Social Organization in this example, is able to meet its goals as well, both sides have “won”, equity is achieved.

While less clear from our simple definition, these are the other key attributes of the Social Organization:

• Social Organizations are focused strategically, not tactically.  Social Organizations understand the need for a goal-oriented strategy and use them to make sure that the greatest value is achieved.  While grass-root efforts can help raise initial awareness of  social media tools, these efforts will not meet broad organizational success unless they become part of the overall organizational strategy.
• Social Organizations understand that they are part of The Social Ecosystem and deliver value internally and externally.  Value is created everywhere in the organization and this value must be delivered to the right people at the right time.   This includes examples such as:
  • Ensuring the right people in the organization are working with customers on sales and marketing efforts.
  • Bringing the right internal (and possibly external partner) resources together to solve customer reported issues.
  • Ensuring that knowledge held by one member of the organization is delivered to other members of the organization, and other organizations as well, when needed. 
• Analytical.  The Social Organization uses metrics to decide if they are on track to meet their goals and use this information to adjust strategies and tactics as needed.

You may have noted that I once again left out the word transparent.  The Social Organization does not have to be transparent to engage with its market and to meet its goals.  Even those that choose to be transparent must choose the level of transparency required, the amount of transparency that is acceptable, and balance as  needed.

John

Local government hero shout out

In my opinion you can never have too much shameless promotion, especially when it is for someone other than yourself. 

Chris Moore

The concepts of Government 2.0 are picking up momentum and, as I have noted, will fit neatly within the concepts of the Social Ecosystem (note shameless plug for The Social Ecosystem :-) ).  No place are these gains more clear than in Edmonton, Canada, where Chris Moore has driven change as the city’s Chief Information Officer.  It was great to see Chris honored as one of Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People.  Congratulations Chris!

Greg Tracy

I recently learned about a project in Madison,Wisconsin, to help make bus schedule information more easily available to the citizens of Madison.  The project, named SMSMyBus, uses less-than-open transportation data to deliver an SMS-based application.  Unlike Boston, where open data sets are provided by the Department of  Transportation, Greg has been unable to convince local government officials of the need to open the data.  Budgets are tight and they cannot prioritize this project.  So, what has Greg done?

• He discovered that the bus schedule information he needed was available on the web already.  By manipulating URLs he could access all the information he needed.
• Using this information he created an application that manipulates web pages, “scraping” data from the pages as needed.
• Using the Twillio service, sends and receives SMS messages (6 cents per message). While the local government in Madison could benefit from case studies and education to understand the ROI associated with opening these data sets, they have been supportive of these efforts.

Kudos Greg, great job!

John

Hours per week on Social Media

As you may remember, I started a survey in early June but, as often happens, I became busy with more projects than I should have signed up for at once.   I guess we all have that failing at times.

I wanted to share the early results with you based upon the responses by just over 40 people and to once again ask people to take time out of their day to respond.  I’ll be posting this on several blogging sites to increase responses.

For those of you that have not yet taken the survey, please click here to take the survey now.

Thanks everyone,

Full results will  come in the next couple of weeks.

John

7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing (via )

Jeff Ogden is one of those bloggers constantly delivering great content.  When I came across this post I wanted to make sure you read it.   While the link to the full post follows, note these key statistics that Jeff shares in this post.

• Sales lead expert, Mac McIntosh, found that six months after inquiring, 23% of the surveyed subjects had bought the product or service, from the promoter or from a competitor. An additional 67% indicated that they still intended to buy but they were not ready.
• According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost per lead.
• According to CSO Insights, companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps make quota, and enjoy a 10% shorter ramp up time for new reps.
• According to DemandGen Report, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.

(If you’d like to download a PDF of this article, please visit Lead Nurturing at Find New Customers) We invite you to check out our new and improved Lead Generation Assessment service too. According to noted lead generation expert, Brian Carroll, as many as 9 out of 10 visitors to your website are not ready to buy now. This means you need to find a way to stay in touch with that 9 and build trust – so that when they’re ready to buy, they buy from … Read More

via

Attributes of the Social Organization (Part 1)

Before we explore the attributes of the Social Organization it is important to first answer why we need a new model…  Why don’t solutions like Social CRM, Government 2.0, Social Relationship Management, Enterprise 2.0, Healthcare 2.0, Education 2.0, and others suffice?

While all of these strategic systems have much to offer they all fall short.  The new view, the new system, must recognize the commonalities across organization types, organization sizes, and across geographies.  There are too many silos forming within these so-called open systems that the opportunity for us to build a common language, a core set of strategies, becomes impossible.  For example:

• Social CRM looks externally and is a system focused on businesses, mostly enterprise-level.
• Enterprise 2.0 looks internally and is a system focused on businesses, mostly enterprise-level.
• Government 2.0 is not as well-defined but does look both internally and externally.  It focuses on the public sector only.

The Social Organization recognizes that:

• A large percentage of the strategies, processes, policies, and tools are common across organizational types, organizational sizes, and geographies.
• That there is a great deal of lost productivity that results from organizations and industries attempting to define what others have already defined.
• Social Media has affected how customers in some sectors buy products/services and in some sectors has already affected how the customer conversation is taking place. 
• In other sectors and geographies that Social Media has had no impact and may not have an impact for many years.

Lets be honest.  All organizations are social in the sense that they interact with customers to some degree. Your town government delivers law enforcement services, restaurants sell food, my blog delivers content.    In the simplest of terms:

The Social Organization will use standard approaches that make it easy for customers/citizens to find and buy products and services while enabling the organization to meet their goals.

Simple, right?  When we return we’ll begin exploring the attributes of the Social Organization, more soon.

John

Guest post: A student’s view, Social Media at Stanford University

Corinna Wallace, a student at Stanford University, for an internship with Swimfish. While I am not yet sure if we will be able to work with Corinna I wanted to share with you a great post that she wrote about Stanford University and Social Media. If you like what you read, or are looking for an intern, you should send her an email.

“Located in Silicon Valley, it is no wonder that Stanford University consistently holds a position as one of the leaders of new technologies. Stanford students and faculty alike pride themselves on being involved in the world’s most cutting edge technological advancements. With that being said, it is impossible to ignore the current surge in use of social media all over the world, and Stanford has shown no hesitation in becoming involved.

To begin, students, with their tendency to be the most technologically savvy, use social media to the greatest extent. With about 90% of the Stanford student body having Facebook accounts and about 50% of the population using iPhones, these are the two most popular social media outlets on campus. However, any college has students that use Facebook or iPhone apps (or any social media for that matter). What really sets Stanford apart, however, is the way that students not only use social media, but they create social media. I can think of at least 5 of my peers who have interned at various companies, from Twitter, to Facebook, associated with social media. In such internships they do everything from coding to helping companies revamp their policies. More notable, however, are the students who create social media themselves. Stanford is known for having students with drive and creativity (think: the founders of Google), and as a current student it is hard not to recognize the talent of my peers. As social media gains popularity many of my fellow students are creating new forms, from iPhone and Facebook apps to their own independent social media networks. Just last year, the RA in my dorm created a program that linked the iPhone to Google Earth. With this program users could take and upload pictures that would be linked to their exact location. Additionally, some Stanford students created ZimRide, a Facebook app where students who need rides can link up and organize car pools. Though I have yet to experience the designs of students on other campuses, I find it hard to believe that there are many campuses, that can match the technological innovation of Stanford students, or who show as much promise in the world of social media.

Similar to students, various institutional departments at Stanford utilize many of the social media outlets available. Various Stanford departments uses social media to keep people updated on new events, as well as to showcase the work of students and faculty alike. Again, however, anyone can use social media. What sets Stanford, as an institution, apart from other universities is the way it promotes the creation of social media. The method I find most impressive is a class offered by the CS department that teaches students how to make basic iPhone applications. Here Stanford is giving its students the tools needed to develop applications in a field that is constantly increasing in popularity. Additionally, this class was formerly about making Facebook applications and was only recently changed. Not only is Stanford helping students gain skills, it is also recognizing what the most prominent and profitable social media outlets are, ensuring that its students are prepared to tackle them. In addition to actual training in the world of computer science, Stanford also offers support of research in the form of grants, as well as alumni and faculty connections. Students, especially poor college students, are hardly ever capable of scrounging up the type of money and networking necessary for really launching their own inventions, so without the faculty, alumni, and monetary support that Stanford provides, many of these inventions would never be more than just ideas.

While Stanford is clearly on the forefront of social media technology there are always ways to improve. From a student’s point of view, I would argue that Stanford lacks most in marketing and promotion, particularly in the inventions of its own students. Though Stanford does provide students with the ability to network with various companies and alumni, it lacks a means to market products to the general public. This goes for both student created applications as well as Stanford’s own social media creations. Until recently, I had little idea of what the iStanford iPhone application did. I had originally thought it was just a phonebook of all of the Stanford community until a friend of mine told me that it could be used for everything from grade checking to schedule making. If Stanford is that poor in marketing its own products, one can only imagine how poorly it markets the products of its students. It is too much to ask of students to do school work, invent applications, and somehow find the time to market them. There are various ways that Stanford could help, even slightly. Something like an online listing of all of the current projects, or recent inventions, of Stanford students would be a start. Additionally, different departments could send out monthly newsletters highlighting the recent accomplishments and inventions of students. Departments could even reserve funding specifically for creating advertisements for student creations. Imagine what a difference it would make if every month the CS department bought a Facebook ad space and advertised one of its student’s programs. The audience that would see such an advertisement would be immense, exposing these Stanford inventions not only to potential users, but also to potential investors or companies who could help to get such inventions out of the beginning stages.

Overall, it is evident that both Stanford students and the University itself understand the uses and influences of social media. What sets Stanford apart, however, is the way that the University and its students not only use social media to their benefit, but also create social media that will one day benefit and entertain others. While it seems that Stanford has the technological skills required to create successfully, it is lacking significantly in the marketing of such creations. An improved marketing scheme would give Stanford and its students immeasurable exposure and power in the community of new technologies, showcasing for the rest of the world the intelligence and ingenuity of the Stanford population.”

Attributes of the Social Ecosystem

The Social Ecosystem*.   The Social Ecosystem provides a structure within which all types of organizations live and interact.  This ecosystem is open and inclusive of both public and private organizations and remains independent of geography and language.

You and I are in a great place.  We are in a virtual room, looking at an empty whiteboard, a whiteboard upon which we can share thoughts, fleshing out The Social Ecosystem for our benefit, and for the benefit of all those that follow.  Before we can get to the case studies, best practices, the strategies,and the tactics, we need to spend time ensuring we share a common understanding.  This may feel academic but this common understanding, this common language, should make the rest of the concepts easier to understand and much more powerful.

Lets take a moment and break down our definition.

• “provides a structure”.

 The Social Ecosystem is not the primary reason for this writing. It is important, however, to define and to understand.  Within this structure the magic takes place.

• “inclusive of both public and private organizations”

This  point is critical to understand.  The Social Ecosystem supports all kinds of organizations.  All types of Social Organizations, including individual proprietorships, small and medium businesses, enterprises, local governments, federal agencies, and political campaigns fit within this structure.

Why is this important?  Many of the policies, procedures, and tools that are used at companies like HP and Best Buy will work just as well for the Department of Transportation in Massachusetts or a Presidential political campaign.   The goals differ but the paths to success overlap.

• “independent of geography and language”

At the tactical level there are clearly cultural differences in terms of norms.  However, the Social Ecosystem recognizes that Social Organizations must focus on delivering value across these boundaries, across geographies and across languages.

We are fortunate that translation tools like Google and Bing translate do a good job translating content on the fly.  While not perfect, these translations make it possible for value created in one place to be transferred to another place with a reasonably high level of fidelity.

The Social Ecosystem has two other attributes we must cover:

• Focuses on the delivery of value.

While many people talk about “content being king”, content is never king, value is what matters.  Value can be in the form of products, services, content, or influence.  The value is defined by the Social Consumer, the market, dynamically.  For example, one piece of content may be considered useless by 90% of the Social Ecosystem, providing no value.  However, 10% of Social Consumers find the content relevant, to them it provides value, value.

We will explore this much further when we discuss social currency later in this series.

• Is channel-neutral.

Social Organizations are focused on delivering value throughout the Ecosystem.  Reaching the Social Consumer where they are at any given moment in the manner that is most convenient is all that matters.  For example, when the State Department wanted to provide information to citizens in Ghana, prior a visit by President Obama, they chose SMS.   Why?  In Ghana approximately 3% of the population has internet access, a problem common in many parts of the world.  Mobile, which is in use by roughly 80% of the population, provided a better channel. 

While many people will throw around words like transparency and engagement, understand that these words are unimportant at the Social Ecosystem level.  Don’t misunderstand, we will discuss these concepts as we drill into the Social Organization and the Social Unit, just not now.

John

*  Bob Thompson, the genius behind CustomerThink, suggested that we consider The SocialSystem vs. the Social Ecosystem.  Bob is, in my opinion, a really bright guy and I will keep this in mind as we flesh this out.

Monopolies, Gov 2.0 and Community. (via IdeaGov)

Alan’s post, combined with a great collection of comments, make this post worth your time to check out.

Can large companies add immense value to The Social Ecosystem, and specifically to components like Government 2.0? Yes, they can. Is there risk that they will corrupt the core values in their drive to create value for themselves and their stockholders? Of course.

In my opinion the public sector must fully embrace solutions from the private sector and not attempt to go it alone.  However, especially in the public sector transparency is key.  It is wrong for public agencies to promote private companies (by including their logos on their sites) and it is wrong to not be crystal clear about the role private companies are playing in their overall strategy.   Note, I am not assuming any foul play on anyone’s part,  just being clear about my expectations for any public organization.

What is your take?

It starts. I have been writing about fear driving much of the reactive decision making around the Government 2.0 and “Gov 2.0″ movement for a while now. Fear is most evidenced when the biggest players make monopolistic moves just because, well they can. They are afraid of the crowd at the gates with the apps, the platforms, the ideas and the innovations. This fear has been bubbling around the surface of the Gov 2.0 movement, yet rarely mentioned … Read More

via IdeaGov

Chatting with Carol Spencer, Web Manager for Morris County, New Jersey

This past weekend I was listening to Government 2.0 Radio and the guest was Carol Spencer, Web Manager for Morris County, New Jersey.  Carol brings some truly unique insights to this role based upon her past roles as an elected official and multiple years spent in Marketing at IBM. I followed up with Carol after the show and here is what I learned.

Q. What is your  role in local government?
A. I am currently the Web Manager for Morris County NJ. This position is located in the Information Technology Division of the Department of Information Services (DIS). Our Public Information office is also part of DIS so there is a significant interaction / cooperation between the PIO and me.

I served in elected office for 10 years, having been elected to the Town Council in Denville NJ twice and also to a four-year term as Mayor. Prior to that, I was a Marketing Representative with IBM for 11 years.

Q. How did you convince your local government to move forward with social media? Did you make a business case?
A. I’ve learned from experience on both sides of the table that when an opportunity arises to make your case to elected officials, it’s important to be fully prepared. So, I studied social media. I set up Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts for myself so I would understand each application. I read about various tools and tried them out on my own accounts, evaluating which worked for me and which would work best for the county.

And, I took the initiative to set up a Morris County Facebook page without publishing it. I set up YouTube, Flickr, Scribd and Twitter accounts but didn’t populate them with any content. My office designed backgrounds and branded everything before formal launch. This accomplished two things. We were able to capture MorrisCountyNJ as our name in all social media and we were to launch immediately (literally within an hour) as soon as we got the nod from the governing body.

New technologies need to be sold to elected officials, so an effective business case was crucial to getting a positive response. Social media statistics were a big part of that case. Pew Research and other evaluative studies show that government is reaching fewer and fewer constituents with traditional media while use of social media is skyrocketing. I had monitored other government FB pages for examples of interactions to dispel fears of ‘government bashing’. Most importantly, though, I compared the comment / response timeline of an angry constituent writing a letter to the editor in a local weekly paper with an angry constituent writing a comment on Facebook. I reminded them that, in a newspaper, some would see the letter but not the response the next week, leaving people with a bad impression of the elected official. Some would see the response and not understand it because they hadn’t seen the original letter. BUT, on social media, everyone sees the original comment AND the elected official response, PLUS the response is immediate, not a week later. And, I asked “Wouldn’t you rather know what people are saying about you and have the opportunity to respond than to know they’re talking about you around their dinner table where you do NOT have the opportunity to respond?”

They understood the positive benefit presented by social media to increase their awareness of public opinion / commentary, to immediately respond to an issue, and to have that response connected with the original comment / complaint.
When selling, it’s important to make a long list of benefits and then select the benefits you anticipate will match the concerns of the buyer. My buyers were originally my direct management and then the elected officials. Immediate response, broad demographic reach, and low cost communication were the three benefits I chose when presenting my business case. While I used a PowerPoint presentation rather than a written document, I had really thought through what I wanted to present and the points I wanted to make when given the opportunity. And, of course, I fell back on that great IBM sales training of ‘feature – benefit – reaction’, followed by addressing objections and asking for the order.

Q. What processes did you put in place to enable going social?
A. We only have two people in our web group so adding social media to our repertoire was going to be difficult unless we found a way to automate it. After evaluating various tools, I went to the white board in our office and drew how I wanted it to work. It took some trial and error, but we’re now poised to update other social networks easily through our use of ping.fm. (I’ve attached a diagram of our process. It looks more complicated than it is. When I do presentations on our “automation”, I break it down piece by piece.)

Q. How did you go about tool selection? What tools are you using?
A. We currently use Blogger, RSS (Feedburner), Hootsuite (for scheduling tweets and allowing multiple twitterers for one stream), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Scribd, and Flickr.

• MorrisCountyNJ.gov (web)
• Facebook.com/MorrisCountyNJ
• Twitter.com/MorrisCountyNJ
• YouTube.com/MorrisCountyNJ & YouTube.com/MorrisProsecutor
• Flickr.com/photos/MorrisCountyNJ
• Scribd.com/MorrisCountyNJ

We have created a page “Social Media We Use”.

We have created a “Learning 2.0” website.

Q. What social communication policies have you put in place?
A. Morris County has very recently established a Web Advisory Committee. The Policy subcommittee is currently reviewing draft social media policies. I had written policies last year that were not formally adopted. With a WAC now in place, it will review those policies and provide recommendations to the governing body. We’re creating both policies and guidelines.

NAGW has participated in conference calls with NASCIO (National Association of State CIOs) so that we’re involved in the work being led by that organization with respect to Social Media vendor Terms & Conditions. Changes were made by several vendors for the Feds, but not for State and Local users. This is an important, but as yet unresolved, issue for all local and state government social media users.

Q. What level of participation do you have from local employees and local politicians?
A. We’ve been meeting with departments and agencies, teaching them about social media as well as exploring the types of information they should consider publishing via social media. We have departments send information to us, at this point, and we write the tweets. Our Office of Health Management, Morris County Library, and Municipal Utilities Authority currently write their own tweets. We retweet from those agencies as well as the Morris County Visitors Bureau and TransOptions (traffic advisories).

Our “politicians” are very pleased with our social media use, and we’re looking at other ways to use it. We are in the process of designing a system where municipalities can enter emergency road closures and similar information via Hootsuite that will be aggregated into one feed on the Morris County website.

I’ve also presented to Morris County municipalities and school districts at a “Shared Services” forum to help educate Morris County local governments in social media use.

Q. Do you measure ROI today? If yes, how? What have been the early results?
A. We do not measure ROI in dollars. We measure twitter followers, FB fans and Scribd subscribers. Our Twitter followers have grown faster than FB fans. We’re well over 800 Twitter followers and have just shy of 350 FB fans in just over a year. We were surprised at the number of Scribd subscribers (more than 70) since this is a broad-based document publishing repository.

One of the problems in engaging conversation on our FB page is the lack of a back up solution. By posting the same thing on FB that we post via Twitter, we can comply with records retention laws by backing up Twitter. Once there is an effective FB ‘Fan Page’ backup solution that grabs entire threads, we’ll begin creating more ‘community’ and engaging citizens in more conversation.

Q. Any great stories from the real world to share?
A. We received a DM just prior to the November 2009 general election asking us to include GPS addresses for each of the polling places. GREAT idea and we did so, publicly thanking the twitterer for the suggestion.
NAGW is clearly focused on providing local government employees with information necessary to successfully communicate via the web and social media platforms.

Q. In your experience where are people most often confused when delivering social media solutions?
A. The greatest confusion lies in understanding how social media works. The greatest barrier is fear of privacy. The caveat on both of those is that my opinions are from interactions with peers in the 40 to 60 year old age group. And, they tend to learn one application and stick with it, not grasping that the use methodology is the same from one to another. I also don’t find as many folks in my peer group using YouTube or Twitter. I’m always surprised that they’ve never heard of Hulu.com! Facebook seems to be the jumping-in point. I suspect that will change as more of my peers get used to using these tools and figure out that they can apply the concept of one to many others.

Noteworthy: Zuora and the Subscription Economy (via Beagle Research Group, LLC)

Denis Pombriant is someone who consistently provides great information and insights. When I saw this post about the subscription economy I felt that it was worth sharing as this is a direction we are clearly headed.

Let me know what you think.

Zuora is touting a new idea called the subscription economy.  It’s not radical and others might have had the idea before but I was not aware of it.  The subscription economy is just what it sounds like and it reiterates the reality we see all around us.  Today, the company announced the release of its flagship product, Z-Commerce for the Cloud, at GigaOM’s Structure 2010 event in San Francisco. Z-Commerce for the Cloud targets the growing market … Read More

via Beagle Research Group, LLC