Finding Balance in the Always-On World

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Paul

I picked up Erik Qualman’s Digital Leader expecting a very different experience from the one I got. Qualman is a thought leader on the transformative potential of social media whose 2010 bestseller, Socialnomics, is considered a textbook in its field. I expected Digital Leader would instruct me on how to further immerse myself in these tools of change.

But quite the opposite is true. While Digital Leader is unabashedly enthusiastic about technology, it is more about about restoring balance to your life, getting your priorities straight, learning to relax and even disconnecting from the grid on occasion. I’ve already made three or four changes to my daily routine as a result of insights I gained from this book, and that’s good enough to merit an enthusiastic endorsement.

Qualman (left) lays out his thesis in the book’s very first words: “Life is complex; those that simplify it win.” What follows is an engagingly uplifting read that focuses on making the most of your productive time so that you can maximize the value of your downtime.

The phenomenon Digital Leader addresses is familiar to many of us. Our world increasingly demands that we be constantly connected and always available. Our greatest challenge is no longer how to connect with others but to keep our digital lifelines from entangling us.

Qualman cites numerous examples of people who have found this balance. They range from Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, who refuses to check e-mail after he leaves the office every day, to football star Rosie Grier, who found relief from a pressurized career in needlepoint. Chapter 5, entitled “Simple = Success,” has many practical examples of how we can simplify daily tasks, and I’ve already put some of them into practice. For example:

Don’t be a prisoner to your inbox. The fact that someone sends you an unsolicited e-mail does not mean you are obliged to respond. Most e-mail messages that demand a reply can be dispatched with a delete key or a one-sentence response. Someone else’s needs are not necessarily your problem. This advice is already saving me time.

Focus on completing the tasks that matter. Multitasking actually makes us less productive. Set out two goals to accomplish each day and make them your first priority. Everything else can wait.

Follow your passion. Qualman is particularly taken with the examples of legendary innovators like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, who refused to accept the conventional wisdom that what they were doing was futile and who treated failure as a necessary step on the path to success. Innovators have big dreams.

Unplug occasionally. Qualman recommends completely shutting off e-mail, Twitter and the like once a week. I’m not there yet, but it’s a laudable goal.

Rest. Sleep deprivation and 17-hour workdays ultimately impair judgment and lead to bad decisions. Let your body, not your alarm clock, determine how much sleep you need. I heeded that advice and got an extra hour of sleep just this morning. People need a great mattress, you can get one from www.mattressnextday.co.uk. If you still can´t sleep you should find out how to sleep better.

Failure is a persistent theme in Digital Leader, but always in a positive sense. “I failed my way to success,” says Edison in a quotation leading a chapter that highlights the virtues of what Qualman calls “failing forward.” Veterans of the tech world will recognize this willingness to learn from one’s mistakes as a core ingredient in the success of Silicon Valley. Other parts of the world have tried to attract technology entrepreneurs with tax breaks and subsidies, but none has duplicated this essential trait.

Don’t interpret these examples to mean that Digital Leader is some kind of self-help tutorial. Substantial sections of the book are devoted to the stories of successful leaders, although not all of them are digital. The overarching message of this book, however, is that balance, passion and a willingness not to take oneself too seriously are qualities that many leaders share. Digital tools are a means to an end, but they shouldn’t be a lifestyle.

IBMer: ‘Social Selling’ Is a Sales Process in Itself

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Paul

It’s no secret that the factors that motivate salespeople to change the way they work have to be pretty simple: Help them spend more time selling and less time scrounging for information and telling managers what they’re doing.

So when IBM began to introduce the concept of “social selling,” it chose a test base of a few hundred salespeople and their managers to build a set of integrated systems that improved productivity and reduced administrative overhead. In a presentation to the SugarCRM SugarCon conference in San Francisco earlier this week, Gary Burnette, vice president of sales transformation at IBM, told how the implementation team at IBM succeeded in making social selling a coveted goal rather than another set of rules and reports.

“We didn’t think of it as social selling; we thought of it as improving sales productivity,” Burnette said of the pilot. “It was about returning value and time to our sales teams for their time invested.”

Familiarity Breeds Intent

The program began with the assumption that nearly every salesperson was already familiar with the value provided by Facebook and LinkedIn in their personal lives. The tools made it easy to find information and expertise by consulting friends. Those same capabilities could be useful as a formal part of the business process.

Download Gary Burnette’s Social Selling Presentation here

A key goal was to simplify reporting, an already distasteful task that becomes more intrusive as the end of the quarter nears. Management has a constant need for information about the status of different sales opportunities, and as a result “We’ve had sales people called out of client meetings to answer questions from upline sales execs,” Burnette said. Much of this information was locked up in Excel spreadsheets owned by individual reps. The only person who could answer a question was the representative on the account.

IBM built a sales force automation system based on SugarCRM, Websphere and Lotus Connections to enable collaboration and streamline visibility into the sales cycle. Cognos and SPSS analytics were applied to better qualify opportunities and improve forecasting. As a result, salespeople now know more about their prospects and managers have better visibility into progress against goals.

Opportunity reports were replaced with an “activity stream” approach similar to the Facebook timeline that enables salespeople to document the status of each opportunity on an ongoing basis. Management can peek into the status of opportunities at any point in the process and get the latest information. As a result, lag times have been cut from five days to almost nothing and report preparation has been significantly reduced because everyone has access to the same information.

“I don’t think most senior sales executives have any idea how many people are behind the scenes creating reports and forecasts,” Burnette said. “If managers are in collaboration with their teams the information is more accurate and less filtered.”

All members of the team can now apply social tools like tagging and profiling to identify and recommend experts who can help solve customer problems and closed deals. “The management team is helping the seller sell instead of asking why they aren’t selling,” Burnette said.

Critical Success Factors

A project this ambitious can’t succeed without support at three levels: top management, brand managers and the reps on the street. The fact that new IBM CEO Ginni Rometty had endorsed the project before she even became CEO was a godsend, Burnette said. Also critical was involving users in the development of the dashboard. Nearly 800 sales reps gave feedback at every step. Brand leaders helped in strategic direction so that the most important information would be the easiest to find.

Social selling is now being woven into the mainstream of IBM’s business process, but adoption was never a sure thing.

“Becoming a social business is a transformational journey,” Burnette said. “The onus has been on us to translate these systems into something that has clear business value.” As word-of-mouth has grown, the new social selling process has taken on a life of its own. “It started with us deliberately selecting the people to participate, but now it’s ballooned to the point where people are saying, ‘I want to be a part of this.’”

This is one in a series of posts sponsored by IBM Midsize Business that explore people and technologies that enable midsize companies to innovate. In some cases, the topics are requested by IBM; however, the words and opinions are entirely my own.

Anatomy of a Facebook Timeline

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Paul

This was submitted by the folks at Wishpond, a maker of social marketing tools with specific emphasis on Facebook. It’s a pretty good anatomy of the new Facebook timeline. Click to enlarge.

IBM’s Beck: Social Business is About Enablement, Not Control

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Paul

Social business isn’t about tools and promises. It’s about giving people at every stage in the sales cycle the incentive to adopt tools that make their jobs easier and contribute to customer satisfaction.

Photo via NigelBeck.com

IBM started with that simple premise when it tackled the task of convincing its sales and marketing people to adopt a new way of doing business. Traditional tactics involved too much interruption and intimidation, which ultimately made sales people less successful than they could be, said Nigel Beck, IBM’s VP of Business Development for IBM Collaboration Solutions & Social Business in a speech to the SugarCRM SugarCon conference in San Francisco this morning. The challenge was to make social business a win for the people doing the selling.

IBM has been a leading adopter of social business principles, which Beck defined as “the application of social tools and culture to business processes and outcomes. It’s basically using social stuff to do work stuff,” he said. A key value of social networks to our daily lives is that they make it easier to find people who can help us get answers and save time, so why not apply those same goals to sales?

The social business initiative was organized around three key tasks:

Customer care and insight;
Workforce optimization; and
Product and service innovation.

The first goal was addressed by rethinking the traditional marketing process, which Beck characterized as “pushing messages down customers’ throats and then flogging the salespeople to pursue leads.” This approach leads to an over-emphasis on reporting, which distracts salespeople from understanding their customers so that they can keep higher-ups apprised of how the sales process is proceeding.

In contrast, a social business approach has marketing organizations getting to know customers. “They hang out where customers hang out, build relationships and help them become part of our family,” he said. “The tools help build trusted relationships.”

Sales people are empowered with tools that help them quickly identify resources within the organization that can help customers solve problems. When all those customer touches are documented, “the reports and graphs are generated in the background.” The pitch to salespeople is that they can spend more time making customers successful and less time doing paperwork.

The other part of the equation is supporting customers better. Beck wryly described traditional customer support as “the process of torturing customers to death. They need to find the right department and fill out the correct form and if they fill out the wrong form we delete it.” By stressing the role of sales as problem-solver – and by involving the community of customers in solving each other’s problems – support frustration is reduced.

Beck pointed to examples of customers that are adopting social business tactics in their own markets. Amadori is an Italian food processor specializing in poultry that created a network of micro sites that combine company and public information to answer common questions.

Omron is a global maker of industrial and consumer sensing and control technology whose European operation created a social portal to help people find answers or people who can help them.

From a management perspective, the key to social business change is to reverse the standard mindset, Beck said. “We’re making the transformation from managing the seller to enabling the seller.”

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in Plain English

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Paul

I prepared summaries for my upcoming Search & Social Double Whammy seminar on May 2 in Burlington, MA describing the “big three” social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. My goal was to describe in plain English the way these networks provide value to their users and the metaphors they use for interaction. Perhaps you’ll find these basic explanations useful in some context. And if I’ve missed or misstated anything, I’d appreciate your corrections.

Facebook & LinkedIn

The two most popular social networks – Facebook and LinkedIn – use similar tools and metaphors to provide strikingly different utility.

Both are based upon a foundation of personal profiles and “friends,” which LinkedIn calls “connections.” Profiles are online identities that define members’ backgrounds and interests and reflect their activities and contributions to the community. The more active members are in the community, the greater their influence and the richer the interactions with other members.

Friends and connections are persistent relationships between members that require mutual consent to create. Friends can see information about each other that others can’t, and because connections are maintained by the social network rather than by individual members, they outlast job changes, relocations, relationship changes and other disruptions that often cause us to lose contact with others.

The most powerful force created by social networks is the “Power of 130.” The name is derived from the fact that the average Facebook member has 130 Facebook friends. That means that every member’s actions within the community can potentially be communicated to 130 other people through the every-flowing timeline called the “activity stream.”

Marketers can think of these communications as a Web 2.0 version of the classic impression, but social network interactions are potentially much more important because members can comment upon, endorse and share other members’ activities with their own networks. This means that a compelling message can be spread far and wide by the members themselves without investment or active involvement by the person or organization creating the message. Good content sells itself.

Facebook is the overwhelming favorite of business-to-consumer companies because the action is free-wheeling and fun. Good Facebook marketers provide a constant stream of information that provokes conversation and interaction among members. Contests, polls and games work particularly well there.

LinkedIn is a favorite of B2B marketers because its members go there mainly to discuss professional interests. LinkedIn’s roots are in networking for job-seekers, but the service’s active professional discussion groups and useful Answers section have become favorite places for people to gather and share information about their work. LinkedIn also enables members to identify shared connections and to form relationships with others through friends-in-common. This makes LinkedIn a compelling new tool for professional networking and lead generation.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn permit brands to create their own pages to communicate with advocates, build awareness and create persistent relationships. Facebook fan pages focus on conversation with followers while LinkedIn stresses information about the companies. Both services provide great value for brands in very different ways

Understanding Twitter

Twitter is still a mystery to many people. How can rich conversations form when people can only speak 140 characters at a time? It turns out you can say more in 140 characters than you may think, and Twitter’s forced brevity actually encourages people to share information they wouldn’t communicate through long-form media like blogs or even e-mail.

The core feature of Twitter is the activity stream. It’s an endless flow of news, recommendations and observations that create endless opportunities for connection. You can find and engage with people on Twitter whom you could never reach by any other means, and it is arguably the world’s best source of breaking news. It is also a valuable extension of any company’s online presence.

Twitter is a loose-knit social network in which members subscribe to each other’s activity streams in a relationship known as “following.” Unlike Facebook’s friends or LinkedIn’s connections, following does not require the consent of both parties. Anyone can follow anyone else unless explicitly blocked by the person being followed (a rare occurrence).

As members amass more followers, the value they give and take from the network increases. People or brands with large followings can reach a large number of people directly because their messages appear in followers’ activity streams. While the percentage of people who see any individual message may be small, the ease with which messages can be forwarded – or “retweeted” – to others provides ample opportunity for amplification. In fact, a study by ShareThis found that the average retweeted message is shared 18 times.

While the volume of messages on Twitter may seem overwhelming and unmanageable, there are a variety of useful ways for people to organize and discover interesting topics. Members can filter the entire Twitter stream by keywords or “hash tags,” which are category labels members attach to their tweets to associate them with popular topics. Twitter also notifies members by default when their username has been mentioned by another member in a tweet. This notification feature makes Twitter an extraordinarily useful way to find people who may be difficult to reach by e-mail, phone or other media.

Twitter is proving to be particularly valuable for organizing and promoting online and real-world events. Hundreds of virtual chats take place each week around Twitter hash tags in fields ranging from medicine to marketing to aviation. Organizers of physical events frequently ask attendees to use specific hash tags when sharing information about the conference, giving the rest of the world a glimpse into the conversations going on at the live event and promoting it to future attendees. “Tweetups” are physical meetings organized on Twitter using hash tags, and anyone is invited to come. Tweetups can be used for anything from attracting fans to a concert to promoting a book-signing or store opening.

Twitter is evidence of the power of simplicity. Users have adapted and modified this relatively simple publish-and-subscribe service in thousands of creative ways, making Twitter one of the best tools for finding out what’s going on now in a wide range of professional activities and leisure interests.

More Influence Hocus-Pocus

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Paul

A Chicago company called Unmetric has just raised $3.2 million so it can develop yet another secret metric that purports to measure online influence.

Unmetric monitors brands, not people, but it has the same shortcomings as Klout, PeerIndex and the others: Its methodology is a mystery. The distinguishing feature of its website is a leader board that shows the relative Unmetric scores of various brands in different industries. From this we can discover that the Bellagio Las Vegas was the most “socially engaged” hospitality brand in March, or that IMDB was twice as engaged as Yahoo! Finance in the online media category.

Great, so now what? What do you do if you’re a pathetic also-ran like Davidoff Hot Water, which places dead last in the North American personal care category? Unmetric doesn’t offer a whole lotta help. “There are a number of ways you can increase your Unmetric score such as increasing your engagement on Facebook or responding to queries quicker on Twitter,” the sidebar helpfully suggests. Be sure to get right on that, Davidoff. You wouldn’t want to disappoint the folks at Unmetric or at Nexus Venture Partners, which led the series A financing.

Nexus’s Jishnu Bhattacharjee tells why his firm is funding this hocus-pocus. “Its technology platform uniquely mines the much-needed benchmarks from the deluge of social media data to provide firms with actionable insights on how they are performing against their competitors.”

Much-needed benchmarks like what? The company isn’t any more specific than to call them a “blend of 24 quantitative and qualitative social media metrics” that are normalized to a 0-to-100 scale to provide a relative measure of competitive performance. And what are the “actionable insights” we gain from this? I suppose you’ll have to sign up for the service to find out, since “responding to queries quicker on Twitter” probably isn’t going to satisfy the CFO.

My opinion of black-box influence metrics has been consistent all along: They oversimplify a complex issue. The insight they yield is actionable only if it moves toward a business goal, and having a higher Unmetric score than your competition isn’t sufficient, in my opinion. Publicity stunts like the leader board may attract VCs, but they won’t fool the corporate communicators who are supposedly the target market for this stuff.

How to Run a Great Dinner Meeting

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Paul

I had the pleasure of being invited to a dinner last night with some local technology luminaries and guest of honor Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and already a Silicon Valley legend at the age of 44. The meeting was hosted by Larry Weber, a local PR legend and founder of the company that became Weber Shandwick.

It was a great evening on several dimensions, but I particularly want to compliment Larry Weber (right) on the masterful way he ran the dinner. I’ve attended many a business dinner over the years and few have been as adroitly handled as this one. Consider his lessons next time you arrange a networking event for a few of your colleagues.

Get a round table. Rectangular tables force people to break off into small groups or spend the evening talking just to the people who happen to be nearby, which can be a drag if you don’t have a lot in common. Round tables avoid this. Everyone can see and interactive with everyone else. If you can’t get round, try for oval, which is what this particular restaurant had. Anything to improve lines of sight between diners.

Personalize introductions. Rather than asking guests to introduce themselves, Larry went around the table clockwise – beginning to Hoffman’s left so that the guest of honor would go last – and said a few words about everyone in attendance. He then asked each person to share one little-known fact about himself or herself. That last trick was a great way to make the rich and famous in the room a little more approachable. For example, I knew Joi Ito was head of the MIT Media Lab, but knowing that he is also a licensed lobster diver made him appear to be more of a regular guy.

Keep the conversation moving. When the discussion got stuck on a topic for too long, Larry would introduce a new one as a sort of game. For example, he called out the names of notable tech companies and asked people to free-associate a single word with each one. This kicked off a bunch of different avenues for further discussion as people revealed often starkly different opinions.

Know when to end. One of the worst parts about many business dinners is that they drag on for hours and no one wants to be the first person to stand up and say goodbye. Larry was obviously aware of this, so as 10:30 approached he announced that it was time to wrap up and then presented his final challenge of the evening: Everyone was to imagine waking up four years from now and describe how the world had changed in the interim. The challenge gave everyone at the table one final chance to speak and share some laughs. No one felt self-conscious about getting up to go and most still managed to get a good night’s sleep.

Yes, There Really Are a Lot More Pitchers Today

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Paul

Sports Illustrated has a great profile of Albert Pujols in this week’s issue. It includes a line that dramatizes just how much the game has changed since the days of Ted Williams:

Williams, for example, played until he was 42. He retired having played 544 night games, and faced 268 pitchers on seven teams in 11 ballparks, none west of Kansas City. Pujols has already played 1,110 night games and faced 978 pitchers on 29 teams in 34 ballparks across four time zones.

Night games are more taxing than day games for a variety of reasons. What really stuck out to me, though, was the number of pitchers Pujols has faced in 11 years compared to the number Williams faced in 19. The better a hitter knows a pitcher, the better he’ll hit against him. How can any player size up an average of 90 new pitchers each year? This is one big reason we’re unlikely to see many long-standing single-season hitting records broken. The momentum has shifted to the pitchers.

IDC: US Tech Firms Underestimate Emerging Market Opportunity

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Paul

Outdated perceptions about emerging markets blind North American technology companies to the substantial IT investments being made there, according to a top International Data Corp. researcher.

Latin America, Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa (CEMA) and Asia Pacific economies are will spend nearly as much on IT as the US in 2012, said Sandra Ng, Group Vice President of the Information & Communications Technology Market Group at IDC in an address to the research company’s Directions 2012 conference this morning. By 2018, those countries will outstrip the US on IT spending by nearly $100 billion.

These “green field” markets are building IT infrastructures around mobile technologies, adopting social media for content distribution and investing in “smart cities” at a faster rate than mature markets, Ng said. However, most North American tech companies do less than one-third of their business in these growing economies, believing them to be less lucrative than their home markets.

Download Sandra Ng’s slides here

Many US vendors assume that success in emerging markets is a matter of selling their North American products at a lower price, but this ignores the different ways in which IT is evolving in these growing economies, Ng said. She listed five common misperceptions and realities.

Misperception: Emerging markets are extremely cost-sensitive.

Reality: A wide range of customer needs exist. For example, China’s wealthy class has made Louis Vuitton’s outlets in that country the most profitable in the world. There is a growing appreciation of value and the importance of high-quality service in Asia/Pacific in particular, Ng said.

Misperception: The principal appeal of emerging markets is growth.

Reality: Businesses should plan for “smart growth,” with some segments growing much more quickly than in North America and others lagging. Manging the business as a portfolio is important.

Misperception: Emerging markets have large and low-cost labor forces.

Reality: “We have a lot of people but we don’t have a lot of talent,” Ng said. There is demand for the expertise that western companies can bring.

Misperception: Customers want itemized prices and mix and match the cheapest offerings.

Reality: Increasingly sophisticated customers understand that packaged pricing is often a better deal.

Misperception: You need strong relationships to do business in emerging markets.

Reality: “There’s increasing appreciation for transactional as well as engagement models.”

With 20 of the world’s largest 27 cities and a growing population of young people, emerging markets present attractive growth possibilities, Ng said, but their technology needs aren’t the same as those of western economies.

IDC Forecast

For example, mobile platforms are the dominant platform for consumer services. Chinese consumers, for example, will spend $160 million on online books this year, but they expect delivery in a format that fits on a mobile phone. Many people don’t have bank accounts and so expect to pay for services in advance. Cloud-based applications are more appealing than on-premise software for businesses that lack large IT infrastructures.

Governments in many of these countries are keen on pursuing the concept of “smart cities” and many have designated “innovation scouts” to look for cloud apps in that area. “There’s lots of opportunity in IPv6 and machine-to-machine communications,” Ng said.

North American vendors who tune their offerings to those characteristics can tap into a huge amount of pent-up investment, she said.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise