The Appeal of B2B Social Networks

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Paul

Following is an excerpt from Social Marketing to the Business Customer, which is due to be published in January, 2011 by John B. Wiley & Sons:

Online communities are a bit of a paradox. They are both the oldest form of social media and also the newest. Forums and discussion groups date back to the late 1960s and have been a staple of customer support operations at technology companies for 30 years. Internet newsgroups, CompuServe, The Well and other early communities had membership in the hundreds of thousands a decade before anyone had heard of a Web browser.

Those early online outposts looked little like the Facebooks and LinkedIns of today, though. The modern features that have made social networks the fastest-growing consumer phenomenon in history have created all kinds of new use scenarios, including some compelling B2B examples. Communities are the convention centers of social media. They are flexible gathering halls that can fill a wide variety of purposes ranging from product development to lead generation. The key is to get members to want to participate.

Friends and Fame

The great innovation in online communities came in 1998, when Classmates.com introduced the concept of personal profiles and friends. Those metaphors are now a staple of every social network and provide a powerful incentive for participation. Profiles are a member’s personal homepage. Everything the member contributes, from establishing contacts with others to joining groups to posting status updates, is captured in the profile. The more active the member is, the higher his visibility and the greater the value of the network to his personal success.

Friends are a virtual version of their real-world equivalent. When people create friend relationships, they exchange information that is not visible to others and they form persistent connections based upon trust. That’s actually how it works in real life, too. At their simplest level, friends connections are an efficient way to stay in touch. Members can always learn each other’s current address or job situation by searching within the network. In B2B communities, personal profiles are a way to register areas of expertise that others may find useful. Activity

is also a validation point. It’s one thing for someone to say he is an expert in direct marketing, but it’s more powerful when he can to prove it by solving the problems of other direct marketers. That proof is stored in the person’s profile.

Online friendships also translate fluidly into real-world connections. “Community isn’t just about discussing products but about getting to know each other and making friendships,” says Nicholas Tolstoshev, a Spiceworks community manager. Online friends in B2B communities frequently arrange meet ups at trade shows and events. Successful community managers we spoke to invariably augmented their online worlds with physical events to meet and thank their most active members.

Prior to the introduction of personal profiles, it was difficult for participants in online networks to build visibility. Recent experience has shown that visibility is the single most powerful driver of participation. Many communities use a recognition system that ties a member’s status to contributions. A few, like SAP, celebrate their most active members at physical events.

Spiceworks awards points to members who post well-regarded answers to other members’ questions. Valued members of the community are invited to participate in conference calls with Spiceworks developers. Their contributions are rewarded with low-cost swag like T-shirts but more importantly with inside information. Community managers also publish occasional interviews with featured members, highlighting their contributions and career accomplishments. “Online status drives a huge amount of activity without our sending money out the door,” says Tolstoshev.

FohBoh.com, a social network for food service professionals, highlights new contributions by its members on its home page and invites others to congratulate them on their celebrity. TopCoder, a contract software developer that hosts programming competitions and licenses the best solutions to commercial customers, applies an elaborate algorithm to the code submitted by its members to compute the quality of their work. Leader boards are maintained for the major competitions and quality ratings are reflected back to individual profiles. Top coders win money and also visibility that leads to jobs and lucrative contracts.

The most prolific contributor to LinkedIn’s “Answers” forum is Dave Maskin, a New York-based event marketing specialist who has answered an incredible 25,000 questions. Maskin refers to himself as “Mr. Lead Generator,” indicating that the value he provides to the community is good for his business.

Weinberger Wisdom

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Paul

My definition of a good speech is one in which the speaker tells you something you already know in a way that you’ve never considered before. That’s why David Weinberger is one of my favorite speakers.

Here are my notes from David’s presentation this morning to the Mass. Tech Leadership Council’s Social Media Summit. These are adapted from my tweets from the event, but hopefully are self-explanatory. They’ve been cleaned up and expanded for clarity:

The Web has always been social. The only difference with Web 2.0 is that it’s easier to build a presence.
The page-centered Web paradigm has yielded to a people-centered one.
Apple is about art. Google is about scale. We don’t know yet what Facebook is about. That’s unsettling, because Facebook is to the social Web what Google is to the Web.
Media is frequently mis-characterized as publishing. The definition of media is that which mediates between parties. Media isn’t content.
We are the media. We recommend knowledge to each other. New media transforms as it moves, unlike traditional fixed media like TV. Telegraphs are a fixed medium for sending messages. The Internet sends messages but it isn’t fixed. It changes every second.
We take on properties of our media and our behavior comes to reflect the media we use. For example: The phone is intermittent, interuptive communications driven by a reason to make a call. The Web is rolling sets of instantaneous, always changing fragmented networks. These networks may be transient or last a lifetime. This is a completely different model than traditional media.
Network sociality is more like a party than a phone call. Telephones are interruptive; the Internet is distractive. People interact with the medium differently.
In the days of broadcast, markets were abstractions created by advertising. Now they are real and social.
Transparency is now an imperative. For example, on Wikipedia you can always find out why an item of information is there. The entire process is open. More businesses will operate like this.
We are getting comfortable with fallibility. The most popular stuff on YouTube is about humans screwing up. This doesn’t embarrass us as much as it used to. This acceptance of our own weaknesses will change the way organizations operate.
People don’t buy drills or holes. They buy a nice place to hang towels to impress their relatives. Abstract to the level of basic human needs in order to understand behavior. This also works in marketing, BTW.
There are four types of transparency critical to Social Media: sources, self, humanity, interest.
Newspapers traditionally provided a curated mix of content reflecting a professionally derived combination of what we wanted to know and what we needed to know. News about Sudan is an “eat your broccoli” story. We don’t like it, but we need to know it. It’s not clear where we will get that kind of information in the future.
The social media generation now expects important information to find them. That’s a dangerous attitude.
Diversity is important but uncomfortable. Without shared interests, it’s hard to converse. When you have a truly diverse group, you get smalltalk because people don’t have a common platform for conversation. Nevertheless, diversity is important. We must fight the tendency to stick with people like us. Diversity requires conscious discomfort. We want to interact with like-minded people.
Media is increasingly an echo chamber in which we choose to listen to people who share our views. Echo chambers are bad for democracy and culture, but marketers like them because they say what marketers want to hear. Echo chambers aren’t necessarily bad, but if that’s the only place you ever talk, you’ll never hear other points of view.

Great Events This Week

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Paul

There are a couple of events coming up in the Boston area this week that I hope you’ll attend.

On Thursday, June 3, the Mass. Technology Leadership Council is hosting its second annual Social Media Summit. We’re bringing together a lot of smart practitioners from the area who are putting social marketing to work in real business scenarios.

David Weinberger (right) kicks it all off as our keynote speaker. If you’ve never heard David speak, don’t miss this opportunity. He’s sharp-witted, insightful, and about five years ahead of the rest of the world. I can’t wait to hear about his next book.

Alan Belniak of PTC will be there showing the great suite of tools he uses to listen to conversations;

David Crosbie and Amy Black will talk about overcoming resistance, which is still a huge topic;

Novell’s Frank Days and others will look ahead to what we do next now that everybody is on Facebook;

I’m pairing up with Kip Bodnar to cover lead generation;

If you’re in financial services, health care or another regulated industry, you’ll want to hear what David Harlow and Michael Weissmann have to say about using social media there.

The evening before MassTLC is the 7^th Annual MITX Technology Awards. This worthwhile program spotlights technology innovators in New England and gets them the visibility they need to acquire capital and customers. Here’s a list of past winners.

New England’s high-tech community is a perpetual also-ran to Silicon Valley despite our concentration of great educational institutions and a record of IT innovation that stretches back to Jay Forrester. MITX has done a lot to nurture New England technology talent and get entrepreneurs the recognition they deserve. Supporting the MITX awards is casting a vote for this region.

The Power of B2B Communities

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Paul

Here are the first 1,100 words of the chapter on B2B social communities from my forthcoming book, co-authored with Eric Schwartzman, entitled Social Marketing to the Business Customer. The rest of the chapter will go into the various kinds of social communities and how to use them, with examples from the HR, food service, medical and construction industries. I’d appreciate any feedback on this opening passage, in particular:

Is this information useful to you?

Does it set the stage for a deeper discussion of social communities?

Is it appropriate to a B2B setting?

All comments are appreciated!

Spiceworks does a very good job of managing B2B communities. It has to; they’re critical to its business.

Spiceworks is a technology company that acts like a media company. Its namesake product is a sophisticated systems management suite for small and medium businesses (SMB) that it gives away for free. The SMB market is coveted by technology firms, and many of them pay Spiceworks for the chance to interact with the audience of over one million IT professionals for activities ranging from market research to product design.

Spiceworks sells advertising space on the software console its members use to monitor their networks. IT pros swap tips and tricks, review products and upload video tutorials. As the community grows, so does the value of the resource to all involved. Members have posted more than 15,000 product reviews and created hundreds of discussion groups. Their technical questions are now routinely answered within minutes.

Spiceworks builds the community into every facet of its operations, even asking members to vote on proposed new features. More than 400 people recently formed a buyer’s group to get better deals on backup software.

The Spiceworks community spreads beyond the website. As of this writing, nearly 20 user groups called “SpiceCorps” have sprung up around the North America and are spreading internationally. An annual user conference attracts thousands. Conversations long ago expanded beyond troubleshooting and now encompass product reviews, career advice and swap meets for software utilities. There’s even a long-running thread called “What Is the Funniest Thing A User Has Asked You?” It started in October, 2008 and had attracted more than 700 contributions 18 months later.

Essential Utility

Spiceworks represents the best of what B2B communities can accomplish. The social network is so essential to the company’s business that user generated content overflows onto the corporate homepage. Spiceworks staffers have a vested interest in optimizing member engagement because the company profits from it. In the process, it has learned much about what makes communities work.

It has learned, for example, that personal prestige is a huge motivator for community participation and that members will give generously of their time with no promise of reward other than helping a peer. It has also learned about the “1:9:90” rule: the vast majority of its content is generated by about 1% of its members, with another 9% kicking in occasional additions. Nine in 10 visitors contribute nothing but that’s OK. They get value from the submissions of the active few.

Online communities are a bit of a paradox. They are both the oldest form of social media and also the newest. Forums and discussion groups date back to the late 1960s and have been a staple of customer support for technology companies for 30 years. Internet newsgroups, CompuServe, The Well and other early communities had membership in the hundreds of thousands a decade before anyone had heard of a web browser.

Those early outposts looked little like the Facebooks and LinkedIns of today, though. The modern features that have made social networks the fastest-growing consumer phenomenon in history have created all kinds of new use scenarios, including some compelling B2B examples. Communities are the convention centers of social media. They are flexible gathering halls that can fill a wide variety of purposes ranging from product development to lead generation. The key is to get members to want to participate.

B2B Value

Discussion was the first “killer app” of B2B communities. Forums are particularly useful in B2B scenarios because they enable customers to solve often pressing problems quickly. Text-based discussion performs well in search results and active communities can save considerable customer support costs. In their 2008 book Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff cite the example of one unpaid Dell Computer customer who saves the company an estimated $1 million per year by answering technical questions that would otherwise require Dell resources. The most prolific contributor to LinkedIn’s “Answers” forum is Dave Maskin, a New York-based event marketing specialist who has answered an incredible 25,000 questions. Maskin refers to himself as “Mr. Lead Generator,” indicating that generosity is part of his business strategy.

The great innovation in online communities came in 1998, when Classmates.com introduced the concept of personal profiles and friends. Those metaphors are now a staple of every social network and provide a powerful incentive for participation. Profiles are a member’s personal homepage. Everything the member contributes, from establishing contacts with others to joining groups to posting status updates, is captured in the profile. The more active the member, the higher his visibility and the greater his perceived value to the community as a whole.

Friends are an online version of their real-world equivalent. When people create friend relationships, they exchange information that is not visible to others and they form persistent connections based upon trust. That’s actually how it works in real life, too. At their simplest level, friends connections are an efficient way to stay in touch. Members can always learn each other’s current address or job situation by searching within the network. In B2B communities, personal profiles are a way to register areas of expertise that others may find useful. Activities are a validation point. It’s one thing for someone to say he is an expert in direct marketing. It’s a more powerful message if he can to prove it by answering questions from other direct marketers. That proof is evident in the person’s profile.

Friends connections don’t necessarily have a professional component. “Community isn’t just about discussing products but about getting to know each other and making friendships,” says Nicholas Tolstoshev, a Spiceworks community manager. Online friends frequently become real ones when they arrange meet ups at trade shows and events.

Prior to the introduction of personal profiles, it was difficult for participants in online networks to build visibility. Recent experience has now demonstrated that visibility is the most powerful driver of participation. Most of the successful community organizers we spoke to use a recognition system that ties status ability to contributions. A few, like SAP, celebrate their most active members at physical events.

Spiceworks awards points to members who post well-regarded answers to other members’ questions. Valued members of the community are invited to participate in conference calls with Spiceworks developers. Their contributions are rewarded with low-cost swag like T-shirts. Community managers also publish occasional interviews with featured members, highlighting their contributions and career accomplishments. “Online status drives a huge amount of activity without our sending money out the door,” says Tolstoshev.

FohBoh.com, a social network for food service professionals, highlights new contributions by its members on its home page and invites others to congratulate them on their celebrity. TopCoder, a contract software developer that hosts programming competitions and licenses the best submissions to commercial customers, applies an elaborate algorithm to the code submitted by its members to compute the quality of their work. Leader boards are maintained for the major competitions and quality ratings are reflected back to individual profiles. Top coders win money and also visibility that leads to jobs and lucrative contracts.

B2B Blogging Excellence

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Paul

I was privileged to moderate the BtoB magazine Social Media Awards Breakfast in New York this week. There I got a chance to meet some remarkable people who took chances on social marketing before it was fashionable and won. I first noticed Jim Cahill’s blog four years ago, so it was a particular pleasure to meet him and hear his story.

It took two years for Jim Cahill and Deb Franke to convince the management at Emerson Process Management that a blog was a good idea. Their reticence was understandable. It was 2005, and blogs were widely perceived to be the domain of teenage diarists and scandal-mongers. Why would anyone want to get mixed up with that? And why would they want to read about equipment that manages large industrial plants?

They persevered. Some technology copies were creeping into the blogosphere at the time and clearly enjoying good results. Cahill and Franke eventually overcame objections by arguing that, as communications people, they understood the pitfalls and how to manage them. Emerson Process Experts was born.

Four years and a more than 500 entries later, Cahill is enjoying a new job as head of social media at Emerson Process Management. Process Experts was named Best Corporate Blog by BtoB magazine in 2010 and Cahill is now leading the company’s charge into Twitter and Facebook while institutionalizing best practices among all the Emerson Process Management divisions.

The blog has brought numerous business opportunities into Emerson, including an invitation to bid on a large, new plant that could total hundreds of millions of dollars. “I have the e-mail from that company on my wall next to a sign that asks ‘Is there any value in blogging?’” he laughs.

Even after four years, Emerson Process Experts remains an enigma in a heavy industry that has done little with social media. Topics like “Sensing Liquid Levels with Vibrating Fork Technology” may cause the average visitor’s eyes to cross, but the elite engineers who run giant process control systems can’t get enough of this kind of technical wisdom.

And for a blog this specialized, the traffic is pretty impressive. About 2,000 visitors stop by on an average business day and 15 to 20 messages land in Cahill’s inbox every week. While most are routine, a few gems inquire about business opportunities. After replying with a thank you message, Cahill forwards them on to the sales team.

Search Engine Magic

One reason is the search engine magic that blogs deliver. Search on “process control” or “process management” and Emerson ranks in the top five results. Even rarely used terms like “compressor surge control” deliver Emerson on Google’s first page. The secret is the lack of competition. As an established presence in a community with few other bloggers, Cahill is a big fish in a small pond. And as we know, Google loves blogs.

Cahill approaches his job with a reporter’s eye. He isn’t an engineer, but with more than 20 years at the company, he understands the lingo and is able to write in the customer’s language. “When I pass people in the hall, I’ll ask if they had any recent customer interactions that were interesting,” he says. “I’ll dig into those stories and use the language that the experts used to solve the problem. Those stories are rich in the keywords that customers use.”

His advice to prospective b-to-b bloggers: “Be prepared to stick with it for a while; it takes a couple of years to build up your presence. Listening is a key skill. Blogging isn’t just pushing out information, it’s responding to the interests of your market.”

Thanks, also, to my other panelists: Kirsten Watson of Kinaxis, Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly of American Express OPEN and Petra Neiger, whose team at Cisco Systems created the wonderful My PlanNet simulation game for network managers.

Seven Questions to Ask About Your Website

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Paul

People usually call me for help setting up and optimizing their social marketing programs. But in the early stages of our engagement the conversation almost always takes another turn.

In about two out of three cases, in fact, we start by focusing on the web hosting in the UK because so many basic issues still need attention.
Clients are sometimes frustrated by this. After all, they want to get started with the cool new tools and usher new business in the door. But if the most important source of new business – the website – isn’t doing the job for them, the new tools are a waste of time. After all, why would you want to bring new visitors to a site that does a poor job of telling your story?

Websites are developed by people who work at the company and who are very knowledgeable about the business. It’s natural for them to assume more knowledge on the part of the visitor than the typical visitor actually has. Messages are often focused on selling a solution rather than solving a problem, but people don’t care about your product; they care about what’s troubling them right now. That’s a fine distinction, but it’s critical to conveying an effective message.

A well-crafted message communicates understanding of the visitor’s needs and frames the solution in the context of relieving pain or creating opportunity. Focus on results rather than process.
Here are some questions that can help you determine whether your website is hitting the mark:

Is the message clear and succinct? Ask a few people who are familiar with your industry but not with your company to spend exactly one minute on your website. That’s about the amount of time an average visitor will grant you. Then ask them to tell you what your company does, what problems you address and who the target customer is. If they can’t answer those three questions after one minute, then your message isn’t clear enough.

Are you optimized for search? Navigate through your website and look at the page titles at the top of your browser. Do they include the keywords that customers use to find you? Do some of your pages have generic titles such as “About” or “Services?” How about PDF documents? Are the titles and meta-tags clear or do they still have gibberish file names that machines generate? Are your images and videos tagged? These are simple things that mean a lot to search engines.

Does your message communicate understanding of the visitor’s problem? Put yourself in the shoes of a typical prospect visiting your website. Think about the problem that person is trying to solve. Does your message demonstrate that your solution was designed with that problem in mind? Or are you selling aspirin when you should be selling headache relief? Does your choice of words show that you’re committed to easing the visitor’s pain?

Are you using all the available tools? Many business websites are heavy on text, which may have been all that was available when the site was built. But 65% of people are classified as visual learners. If you’re not using all the media you can, you’re under-serving your audience. I’m not talking about stock photography but rather about illustrations that clarify and explain. Today it’s cheap and easy to point a camera at a product manager or engineer and ask the person to explain a product. Voice-annotated screen shows or PowerPoint slidecasts are also inexpensive ways to illustrate complex concepts.

Is it easy to join your list? Every page of your website should have an invitation for visitors to become prospects. These can be in the form of newsletter sign-ups, white paper downloads, requests for more information or invitations to view a webcast. Why would you want to miss any chance to turn an interested passerby into a lead?

Are your pages easy to share? Every page should also have embedded widgets that make it easy for visitors to e-mail, bookmark, tweet or otherwise share your content. In most cases, these are easy to add to a template and there’s no downside to having them.

Do you humanize your company? This is particularly important for b-to-b companies, which establish long-term relationships with their customers. Does your site include faces, biographies and personal messages? What do you do to create personal connections that increase a visitor’s comfort level with the people behind the product? Does your website have personality or does it read like a research paper? If you’re interested in social marketing, start with the social part. Let your people go.

I’m sure I’ve missed some things, so let me know your own thoughts in the comments section.

A Quick Fix for the Latest WordPress Virus

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Paul

I spent several frustrating hours this weekend trying to recover from a nasty virus that has hit WordPress installations on Network Solutions and Go Daddy, which is my hosting service. After wasting many hours fiddling with wp-config files and backing up and restoring databases, I hit upon a simple solution this morning that appears to have restored my three blogs to their former glory. Maybe it will help you.

This virus is characterized by the insertion of a long string of seemingly random characters at the beginning of PHP files like the one depicted below. These files are scattered all over your WordPress directories and there’s no telling how many have been infected. You need to remove the malicious code from every PHP file to restore your system, and there could be hundreds of files.

First, the disclaimers: I’m not a programmer and I can’t guarantee that this solution will eradicate the virus once and for all. It’s possible that the creeps who developed it have hidden code somewhere to resurrect it at a later point, so I will post an update few days from now. Also, you should back up your database before attempting any recovery. It’s probably also a good idea to back up the infected files to a safe directory on your computer in case something goes wrong.

That said, here goes. This fix is for Windows, but the Mac version should be pretty similar:

1. You’ll need to download and install two open-source programs –Filezilla and Notepad++ – before you get started.

2. Open Filezilla and connect to the FTP server where your WordPress installation is located.

3. Now you’re going to create a filter in FileZilla to download and upload only PHP files. This will save you a lot of time because you won’t be sending large image and audio files back and forth. Go to “View –> Filename filters..” and choose “Edit filter rules…” Create a new rule called “PHP” or whatever you want. In the “Filter conditions:” drop-down menu, select “Filter out items matching none of the following.” In the space below that, choose the drop-down menus “Filename” “contains” and type “php” into the box. See screen grab below.

4. Then – and this is important – uncheck the box that says “Filter applies to: Directories.” If you don’t uncheck this box, FileZilla will only download files in the root folder and miss all the sub-folders. Click OK.

5. Back in the “Directory listing filters” dialog box, check the boxes next to your new PHP filter name in both the “Local filters” and “Remote filters” columns. Click OK. Your file transfer filter is ready.

6. In the “Local site:” window on FileZilla, create an empty directory on your computer where you can store the PHP files you download. In the “Remote site:” window, navigate to the directory containing your blog. This will be the one with the folders called wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes. You actually won’t see those folders at the moment because your filter is on. If you want to check, temporarily disable the PHP filter to be sure you’re in the right directory.

7. In the “Remote site:” window, select all files (CTRL-A), right-click and choose “Download.” The PHP files will start downloading into the new directory you created, preserving the file structure of the server. This should be pretty fast, because you’re only downloading text files.

8. Once the download is complete, open an Explorer window and navigate to the directory on your computer where the PHP files are located. Right click and choose “Open with…” and then navigate to the Notepad++ directory and choose the file called “notepad++”. Select this as the default for opening all PHP files.

Notepad++will open with all the files you’ve selected in separate windows. Flip through the windows until you find one containing the rogue code at the top.

9. Select all the characters between the first two occurrences of the “<?php” characters. Include trailing spaces.
In Notepad++, choose “Search –> Find in files…” The dialog box that pops up will look like the one below. The text you selected should already be inserted into the “Find what :” field. Delete anything in the “Replace with :” field. Then choose the navigation button to the right of the “Directory :” field and navigate to the folder containing your PHP files. Click OK. The program will respond with the challenge of “Are you sure you want to replace all occurrances [sic] of…” Click OK. Notepad++ will churn away for a few seconds and then show you how many files it has changed. The number may astound you.

10. If all has gone well, you should still see part of the rogue code in the window in front of you. This is because Notepad++’s “Find what :” field can’t hold all the characters you need to replace. So you’re going to have to run another find and replace. Simply select the remaining bad code and repeat the previous step to find and replace all incidents in the files. If all has gone well now, the file in front of you should be clear of all bad code. Save that file and any files that are open in other windows and exit Notepad++.

11. Go back to FileZilla and upload all the PHP files, being careful to choose the same directory from which you downloaded them originally. When the challenge box pops up, specify “Overwrite” and “Always use this action.”

Try to open your site again. It should be back to normal. If it isn’t, upload the bad files you had stored in a separate directory and try something else, because this obviously wasn’t the bug you had!

If the fix works, be sure to change your database and WordPress passwords. And let me know either way whether this did the trick!

Gain Control By Giving It Up

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Paul

Charlene Li’s new book will be out in a few weeks, and if you’re interested in how social media is transforming the way business gets done, you’ll want to pick up a copy.

The book is called Open Leadership, and I would classify it as the first of the post-social media books. By that I mean that it looks at the consequences of democratized communications rather than at the media itself. Expect to see a wave of similar books in the coming years. This is a very good first entry.

Open Leadership will make a lot of people uncomfortable because it proposes that the only way to govern effectively in a transparent business world is to give up control and trust people to do the right thing. Li makes a persuasive case by citing numerous examples of companies that have successfully done exactly that.

Li is a former Forrester Research analyst, founder of Altimeter Group and co-author of Groundswell, the breakthrough 2008 book that provided the first demographic profiles of social media users as well as a rigorous methodology for evaluating the ROI of social programs. In this book, she builds on some of the economic models first presented in Groundswell, but Open Leadership is more of a call to action than a financial exercise.

The premise is encapsulated in the title of Chapter 1: “Why Giving up Control Is Inevitable.” Li asserts that today’s business world is too complex and competitive to permit organizations to continue to manage the way they have since the Industrial Revolution. That top-down philosophy assumes that people are idiots who can’t accomplish tasks without instructions, rigid rules and constant oversight. That worked okay when companies had some control over their environment, but today too many factors are out of their hands. So one man’s story of how an airline broke his guitar and refused to fix it becomes a cultural sensation while the airline stands by helplessly and fumes. The most startling part is that no one questioned whether the owner of the guitar had used a protective housing in the first place!

Li (left) asserts that the only way to gain any level of control over today’s turbo-charged business environment is to give up as much control as possible. New business leaders set examples, demonstrate confidence and create cultures that tolerate intelligent, well-intentioned failure. And guess what? It turns out that when smart people are given the latitude to make decisions, they tend to make better ones than if someone else makes decisions for them.

Open Leadership provides some refreshing new examples of how this new management philosophy is working:

Meetup.com replaced a top-down approach to project management with one that requires stakeholders to persuade engineers to spend time on their projects. Productivity exploded;

BestBuy outlasted competitors in the brutal electronics retailing business in part by developing a culture that lets its employees guide customers toward the best decision, even if that means buying from a competitor;

Electronics distributor Premier Farnell distributed low-cost digital video cameras to every employee in the company so that they could document their best practices and share them on an internal network. Employees are more empowered and the quality of information is better.

Li is particularly inspired by John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, which has undertaken a massive program to drive decision-making down to local levels. Chambers says the idea unnerved him at first but that Cisco is now a faster, more responsive and more innovative company as a result. And he’s working fewer hours. Chambers provides critical support for the concepts outlined in Open Leadership: He has the unwavering support of Cisco’s board of directors, which enables him to talk honestly about his own reservations and the mistakes he has made.

It is on the issue of mistakes that the author is most emphatic. Li stresses that businesses can only be innovative if they learn to accept the fact that failure is a necessary by-product of risk-taking, but if you really aren´t sure what to do then don´t just do whatever. Make sure you´re relaxed when taking desicions, a great way to clear your mind is by applying auto suggestions to subconscious mind. Companies that successfully practice open leadership evaluate decisions based upon the thought that goes into them rather than the results. Failure is an opportunity to learn and try again and the only unpardonable sin is making the same mistake twice.

Most businesses do a lousy job of this. They publicly declare a commitment to innovation, but privately punish employees whose ideas don’t succeed. Tolerance for failure is sometimes cited as the most important reason that Silicon Valley has outclassed every other region of the US in technology innovation. Reading Open Leadership, I get the impression that such tolerance is the only option for businesses that hope to lead in uncertain markets.

Facebook Grows Up

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Paul

The race to socialize the Web got more intense this week with a major new announcement from Facebook that plays to its strengths at Google’s expense. This is shaping up to be an epic battle and the good news is that users stand to benefit regardless of who wins.

On the surface, Facebook’s move to make its famous “Like” button a fixture on many other websites seems unremarkable. But it’s really the tip of the iceberg for future services that Facebook calls “Open Graph” and which will strengthen its position as the power broker of the social Web. Moreover, the way Facebook is approaching its strategy is a notable evolution from its past behavior. This company is growing up fast and Google had better be on its toes.

What does it mean to “socialize the Web?” As I’ve written in the past, the next great evolution of the Internet will be to move beyond static websites and toward services that travel with the user. The most important of these will be persistent connections to the members of one’s social circle. Basically, the experiences and advice of the people we trust will become part of our information-gathering experience, influencing and guiding us whenever we choose to consult them.

Facebook’s new features are an important first step. Visitors to a partner website will now be able to register their recommendations by pressing the famous blue button and having that endorsement added to their Facebook profile as well as to the destination website. Their friends will then be able to see that opinion when they visit the parter site or check the person’s profile or news feed on Facebook.

Services that choose to partner with Facebook will benefit from immediately adding content from Facebook’s 400 million-plus members with minimal effort. They’ll also enjoy easier cross-enrollment with the social network. Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn have all been nibbling around the integration issue with features like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, which enable people to log onto one social network using credentials from another. Now Facebook is making this cross-registration so easy that it says it will discontinue Facebook Connect entirely.

Services like the consumer review site Yelp, which is one of Facebook’s early partners, are positively bubbly about these new developments. Yelp believes that the addition of Facebook friend recommendations will deepen the quality of its reviews and juice its membership. Yelp members will benefit from having their friends’ advice appear next to that of the strangers who now contribute most of the site’s content. Another partner, CNN, stands to gain from having Facebook members recommend stories and drive traffic to its website without any additional promotion of CNN’s part. Meanwhile, Facebook made it clear in its announcement that the “Like” button is just the first of many possible extensions of its service to other partners.

Good Citizen

One aspect of this week’s announcement that particularly impressed me was Facebook’s decision to work with partners. CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) declared that “In the first 24 hours alone we’re going to serve one billion ‘Like’ buttons on the Web,” meaning that Facebook has done its homework to enlist partners that will give its strategy instant legitimacy. This is an impressive evolution for a company that has a history of being arrogant and difficult to deal with. It also demonstrates that Facebook is aware of the need to add value to other services instead of trying to steamroll them.

Contrast that with Google, which has appeared positively inept in some of its recent web socialization attempts. Google Buzz has none. Google Wave, which sounded good in theory, has been a flop in practice. I don’t know anyone who uses it. Knol, which was once seen as a competitor to Wikipedia, is all but invisible. Sidewiki attempts to add integrate friends’ recommendations into the Web browsing experience, but implementation is awkward and website owners may see it as more of a threat than a benefit.

In short, Google’s reputation as a good partner seems to be giving way to the kind of go-it-alone approach that’s typical of market dominators. This is happening just as Facebook is learning the value of collaboration. All in all, this is not a good omen for Google. While a company with 70% of the search market is in no immediate trouble, history has shown that even dominant companies can fall fast when the rules change. Facebook is trying to change the rules.

Why is Facebook’s initiative good for Joe and Jane Web user? Because it continues to move the value equation toward quality content. The more that online success is tied to peer endorsements, the more incumbent it is upon content providers to deliver value that others can recommend. The influence of marketing dollars continues to ebb while the influence of good information grows. What could possibly be bad about that?

How to Conduct a Great Interview, Part 2

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Paul

Last week I talked about the art of the interview, an essential skill in creating content that generates traffic and visibility. (Be sure to read the advice of others who contributed comments to the blog entry). The first part of this two-part entry talked about preparing for an interview. Now let’s look at what to do when you sit down with your subject or begin the phone call.

Be Conscious Of Time – I almost always ask interview subjects how much time they have. This helps me plan the pace of the questions and also makes sure that I get to the critical ones. If you’re expecting an hour and your subject has only 15 minutes, you need to adjust quickly. If you need extra time, ask for it up front. If the subject turns you down, ask again later in the interview when he or she is hopefully more invigorated about the conversation.

Ask About the Subject’s Background – People like to talk about themselves, so indulge them with a question that they are happy to answer. I’ve found that the simple question, “Tell me about yourself” is a great conversation-starter.

Avoid Yes/No Answers – Instead of asking, “Are you satisfied with your progress this year?” use “Tell me how your progress this year compares to your expectations.” Avoid questions beginning with “do,” “will,” “are,” “and “should,” and instead use questions beginning with “what,” “how,” “why” and “describe.” Asking someone to “Tell me about…” gives them no choice but to share an experience.

Invite Stories – I once heard former Wall Street Journal feature writer Bill Blundell give advice I’ll never forget: “Write in pictures.” In other words, tell stories that readers can visualize in their minds. Storytelling is the most powerful form of human expression. Stories turn abstract ideas into useful examples. Ask the subject to make the topic real by citing examples or personal experiences.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask The Same Question Twice – This is particularly true in an interview that concerns a controversial subject. Executives are media-trained to answer the questions they want to answer rather than the questions they’re asked. If your subject is evasive, ask the same question a different way. Sometimes you can coax someone into answering a difficult question by feigning ignorance: “I’m sorry, I didn’t follow that. Can you dumb it down a bit for someone like me?”

Control the Interview– You need to dictate the pace and topic of the interview. If the subject rambles or goes off course, cut her off gently whenever you can get a word in. Even if you back off a bit to let her finish the thought, you’ve sent a subtle message that it’s time to move on.

Be Empathetic – Chances are your subject is pretty passionate about the topic you’re discussing. Let your behavior reflect that interest. Smile when she smiles and shake your head when she relates a tale of woe. This isn’t misleading; it’s simply reflecting back a person’s feelings in a way that helps to draw them out. People like to talk to responsive listeners.

Ask For Closing Thoughts – The longer people talk, the more comfortable they are. This is why the best quotes often come at the end of the interview. When you finish your questions, give your subject a chance to summarize her thoughts or restate an important point. One good tactic is simply to ask, “Is there anything I missed?”

Here are thoughts on a few common questions:

Should You Use A Tape Recorder? These days, the answer is increasingly yes because you want the latitude to publish the interview as a video or audio podcast. That said, recording devices can put a damper on a conversation. Once you start recording, put the gadget aside and don’t look at it. You want your subject to forget about it as quickly as possible. Also, most states require that a person audibly consent to be recorded. Be sure you get that permission on tape.

Should You Go Off the Record? This question is complicated by the fact that “off the record” means different things to different people. Technically, “off the record” means the information can’t be used under any circumstances, which makes it of little value to you. However, people often use this term when they really mean “not for attribution.” I rarely agree to off-the-record terms but I will go on background if the information is important. It often turns out that you can negotiate the use of background comments if you paraphrase them appropriately.

Approvals – Many people ask to approve an article before it’s published. I let the context be my guide. Very often, both interviewer and subject have the common goal of making the speaker look good. In that case, I see no problem with letting someone review their comments for accuracy. However, if the topic is controversial or if the speaker is a celebrity or public official, no way. Those people know the rules. In any circumstance, I advise against giving full editing access. Confine the subject’s revisions to statements of fact.

Those are some of my best practices. What are yours? Post your advice as a comment.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

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