Smarter business in the year 2012 – also on paper…

I have attended a fair share of conferences and event – some good, some bad. One thing that always makes me a little apprehensive is when the big vendors invite to the big annual events. It’s always a good chance to see all the new stuff in action but more often than not they roll out the red carpet and present a ‘Big Mac’ event. Big Mac in the sense that it’s beautifully presented but leaves few lasting impressions other than you are hungry again two hours later.

This morning I boarded the train from Aarhus at 05.42 with a slight apprehension and when I entered the beautiful venue 3½ hours later it was reinforced by the fact that it turned out to be a HUGE event. I don’t know what I had expected but a crowd of 1000+ delegates was certainly not it!

At the time of writing this I am on my way home from what ended up being one of the best events of its kind that I have attended for a long time. It would be a shame to say that my world was turned upside down but it was very refreshing to hear how IBM works with social business externally. Susan Emerick explained how everyone in IBM has the opportunity to participate on social platforms but also how they identify talent and resource people internally and make their participation an important part of their strategic go to market initiatives.

One of their very important conclusions was that the ‘digital engagement’ was 3 times more effective than the traditional digital marketing. I spoke to Susan afterwards where she reiterated this point – find an applicable area where you are likely to create new business opportunities – dedicate a portion of your budget to the new initiative – and compare…

The comparison obviously requires measurement. Measurement inevitably categorises content (and even people) as good or bad in terms of their digital efforts. In my opinion, this will become an inconvenient truth for many people in the social business. If you listen to many experts in this area they are advocating various pseudo-metrics related to how engaging you are but in the end it all boils down to what can be documented on the bottom line……or as Jerry McGuire would say – uhm, well, shout – SHOW ME THE MONEY!!

The Swedish Chef in action (photo by @unwiredchris)

However, the main topic for the social business track remained the challenges of creating an organization where the people and the culture embrace the value of sharing information and knowledge openly. Until this change is brought about it makes little sense to talk

about business opportunities in stead we need to focus our energy on getting the right mix of ingredients that make up a proper social business and this both begins and ends with cultural change – or to paraphrase ‘the Swedish chef’ Christian Carlsson who introduced the metaphor of social business components as ingredients in a bread:

“Culture is the yeast that makes a social business rise”

Enough about food….. What about the paper mentioned in the header? Well, I was not the only one who was surprised when all participants was reminded to fill out the evaluation form and hand it in before we left. I couldn’t help but to ask if that was what IBM defined as “smarter business” but as it turned out, they had learned that online forms were not nearly as effective for gathering feedback. Agree or disagree, if that’s the case then a piece of paper CAN be a smarter way – also in our hyper-connected world.

Relevance, Resonance, and the Digital Ninjas – Adobe Summit 2012

On my way from work today I heard a somewhat funny segment about how companies increasingly were looking for ‘ninjas’ when hiring new people. In fact the job ads mentioning ‘ninjas’ were up 2500% compared to last year – not to mention the jedis and rock stars who also seem to be in great demand.

I couldn’t help but related it to last week’s Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in London where I came face to face with the digital marketing world once again – a world which I have been a little out of sync with after moving into the intranet realm about 5 years ago. All the more interesting it allowed me to pinpoint some of the development that has happened for the digital marketing professionals and how online marketing has transformed from being very creative profession to become that of number crunchers and controller – maybe even Ninja-controllers…

This is a positive thing. It doesn’t only show that online marketing is reaching a new level of maturity but also that we are getting better and better at leveraging the true strength of online media: Everything can be measured! I posted a tweet about the fact that ‘big data’ was largely absent, but a reply made me realize that these guys don’t think about the concept of ‘big data’ – they are already using these vast amounts of data every day to track what we buy and what our friends recommend all to make sure that we get a tailored, personalized experience throughout the web – and hopefully we’ll buy some stuff along the way.

Honestly, I found some of the insights gained a little disturbing. Everything is about the personalized experience which is all well and good, but if everything is based on what my friends (and friend’s friends) do online are we then not running a risk of losing the individuality somewhere along the way? If you use the internet and social media to seek new inspiration about whatever and all you see is information based on what your friends have done, is it then really new inspiration or are we running around in a circle where we become more and more alike and a circle that becomes more and more tightly knit?

Arianna Huffington gave a very inspiring keynote which was closely related to the above. Like many others she made the point that the ubiquitous social networks makes us more disconnected to ourselves and that we need to remember to disconnect, but more interestingly she also talked about how companies focus heavily on relevance and not resonance. Relevance can be created based on actionable data because you then know what I want and like. Resonance is different: You need to provoke thoughts, challenge my opinions, even my view of the world. There’s no guaranteed sale in resonance, but if you succeed you can rest assured that you have something way more valuable than a mere customer.

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The conference? If conversion rates, lifetime customer value, repeat purchases, and those kinds of things are your game then it’s a great event and you should certainly go. If you, like me, focus on the digital workplace within companies and the disruption going on here, I believe that there are better choices for inspiration.

I got some good good input about data privacy, interesting sneak peeks, and – as already mentioned – a very inspiring keynote from Arianna Huffington but other than that it missed the mark for me.

The Engaging, Social Intranet

How do we *do* social? In our wiki? In the document management system? …or do we just buy Chatter/Yammer/SocialCast? These questions are being asked in many organisations – my own included – and the answer is not always easy. Truth is we *do* social where it makes sense. It’s not about the tool, it’s about the context.

What about the social intranet? Personally, I’m not too fond of the term as it indicates that we need something new. A new intranet. This may very well be the case, but I find it much more important to look at when, where, and most importantly why people should use the social features on your intranet.

Chris McGrath and Ephraim Freed from Canadian ThoughFarmer have written a very interesting white paper that dives a bit deeper into what a social intranet is and what it can do for your enterprise. Among other things, they advocate that HR need to take a lead role in making companies more social and the workforce more engaged. I agree that HR is a vital player due to the fact that they reach all corners of the enterprise  but your social initiatives should be carried out in a symbiosis between Comms, IT, and of course HR.

One of the conclusions from Jane McConnell’s Digital Workplace Trends 2012 is that the emergence of collaboration solutions in companies is re-creating corporate silos – the very thing that increased collaboration was supposed to break down – but the main difference is that by introducing a social layer, i.e. a social intranet, you can bridge the silos and the serendipity of social media is likely to make it easier to discover gems of knowledge.

According to a study by Gallup, presented in the white paper, the companies with the most engaged employees have seen much higher growth rates than those with less engaged employees. This fact alone ought to command at least some attention from management. It’s hard to disagree that a happy employee is more likely to be an engaged employee – it’s harder to agree on how you make people happy (and make more $$$ along the way).

I strongly believe in the intranet as the hub for the digital workplace but as I wrote earlier I’m not too sure whether it should be dubbed a social intranet. It’s a matter of words, agree, but I would like to see it as “The People Centric Intranet”. The most important task on intranets in numerous surveys is to find people. The consumerization of internal platforms creates an expressed need to connect and follow fellow employees and share updates with them but you still have a large proportion of your intranet that consist of documents, forms, etc. which is not very social.

One of the big questions is what benefits you will get from a social intranet. It depends on the resources that you put into it but also on the culture of your company. If informal communities are common place, I would venture a guess that you are much more likely to succeed than if you come from a more traditional culture. A cultural change is a big job and this is where HR – due to their wide reach – would be formidable change agents. You people who can act as ‘flight attendants’ on the journey. You need to get safely airborne but once you are in the air the attendants need to make sure that the passengers are happy and have a comfortable journey. Hopefully it’s going to be a long haul flight

One of the finishing comments in the whitepaper sums everything up very nicely:

“Successful social intranet become virtual places that employees inhabit rather than visit”

I personally believe that this should be the ultimate goal for all intranets – social or not.

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These were some of my thoughts after reading the whitepaper. I strongly recommend that you download a copy and put it on your Easter reading list – you can find it here: ThoughtFarmer – Social Intranets & Employee Engagement

E2.0 Summit Day 2 – Don’t change the process, change the execution

“Can business processes and social media co-exist?” – This was one of the first big questions on day 2 of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit asked by Bertrand Duperrin from Nextmodernity and that question lead to a very interesting discussion of the role of social tools in the world of Business Process Management (BPM) – something that links nicely back to the theme from day 1 of harnessing the conversations taking place in the organization. Traditional BPM lack a proper feedback loop to ensure proper organizational learning, but if you intelligently integrate social tools, this gap may be filled.

Another very valid point from the BPM conversation was that you need to focus on visibility of the social features. If you just add a social layer inside the processes, you may find yourself creating ‘social silos’ effectively working against the purpose you are trying to accomplish. One thing that struck me was that nobody seemed to have succeeded and although everyone agreed that we should start with the people using this, I was not left with the impression that this was happening at a large enough scale. If we are to succeed with more ‘social’ business processes, we simply MUST get out there and involve people – all people.

After Business Process Management, the next track focused on ROI – or rather how we should forget about the way we traditionally think about ROI. Alexander Richter from CSCM presented some very interesting thoughts on this topic arguing that we obviously need to measure the outcomes of social business initiatives, but you have to take many things, eg. organizational maturity, into consideration when setting your success criteria – you can see his slide deck here. Social media is inherently about WIIFM (What’s in it for me) but there is just no universal answer to that question – hence the M for ‘Me’.

Personally, I got a lot of inspiration from this – particularly from Peter Kim from Dachis Group who mentioned both social network analysis (SNA) and net promoter score (NPS) as measures that could be useful. We need simple metrics similar to the NPS but the challenge is that these metrics are subjective and flawed in many ways. HOWEVER this may not be such a big issue. You are measuring internal tools/services = the metrics must first and foremost be relevant for the company, so wouldn’t it be possible to reach internal consensus about interpretation and KPIs? I believe so. OK, You will not be able to benchmark against others, but if we the starting point is that every company is unique, why would you want to benchmark based on fixed KPIs? Surely it would result in nothing more than discussions on why ‘we’ are different from all the others….!

The closing keynote by Dion Hinchcliffe from Dachis Group was exactly as inspiring as I had hoped for. He provided lots of insights into the success factors for social business and some of the emerging trends. I think everything can be summarized nicely to say that it is all about organizational transformation and how we adapt to continuous and rapid change. The organisation of the 21st century will be about radical change, social engagement, ecosystems, and knowledge flows. A summary of the presentation would almost be a blog post on its own, so instead I encourage you to check it out on Slideshare.

To summarize two days in the frozen French capital: Good conference with lots of input, but the presentations and discussions also brought some underlying frustrations and questions to the surface. I see two ‘forces’ working in opposite directions: We stick to the arguments about how the value of social is very hard to measure, but at the same time we are reluctant to make decisions due to the lack of objective data. The bigdata trend will help here, but the above ‘conflict’ must be reconciled to get things moving. Right now we are in a position where we know that something needs to be done, but not quite how…

The final lesson from the conference comes from Fabian Seewald who explains Enterprise 2.0 in less than 2 minutes using some rather unusual means

Thank you to old and new friends for a couple of inspiring days in Paris and congratulations to the Kongress Media team with a very well executed event. If you are looking for more information, you can find links to presentations, etc. on this wikipage