It seems the IT techno-scanners in my friend’s office discovered one employee sent 348 instant messages one day last week. Someone (or maybe the sniffing software itself?) determined 348 IM’s equaled an investment of about 5 hours, 50 minutes of time. The department works an 8-hour day. The incident has social media stupidity written all over it.

Social media time suck and so much more

At a loaded cost of $63 per hour (salary and benefits), this employee cost the company around $365 in direct expenses in a single day. Consider if IM’ing were a daily habit for her. For even a handful of others in the 148-person company.

Think about downstream effects like reductions in service delivery to internal teams. Mathematical and procedural errors due to lack of focus or delays caused by sense of urgency (she’s in the accounting department). Damage to team dynamics and increased resentment by others aware of her behavior. Some reports suggest employees are only productive 5 to 6 hours a day at best; what affect will social media have on our office behavior in the future? What changes will there be?

What’s the big deal?

I imagine the employee meant no harm. She might even be surprised to find out the exact number of instant messages she sent in one sitting. She probably considers herself capable of multi-tasking and staying on top of the most urgent work. Most certainly she considers parts of her job rote enough that the she could easily do it error-free without a lot of concentration. But these are just rationalizations, yes?

She put aside good judgment and moved beyond a sense of duty to her employer and team members to openly, deeply indulge in personal interests on time that wasn’t her own. This is not a scenario of a quick Facebook photo update over lunch about the best gyro she ever eaten at Momma Grita’s.

The lesson here is that we’re never an island. The choices we make – even when we’re not consciously aware our natural behavior is a choice – affect others, their outlooks and their outputs. When we indulge ourselves then justify our actions, we force others to make hard decisions. Just because we stopped following the rules doesn’t mean they should, and it may be unfair to ask for exception.

The tighter the grip, the more that slips through the grasp

Few companies survive when there’s an iron grip around employee expectations and accepted behaviors. Fear only germinates desperate, weak gardens. An open culture of trust supports the kind of free thinking leading to innovation and high output. Smart businesses will look for ways to walk the razor-thin line between the two environments with operational frameworks permitting some measure of personal latitude.

Take care so that one employee doesn’t tarnish what’s being built – and appreciated – by many others. Do what’s necessary to ensure the fractional minority of disgruntled or system-gaming customers don’t sully (online or IRL) what others find so rewarding and valuable about your business. Are crackdowns the answer? Maybe, maybe not. Social media doesn’t cause either situation, but it does add another element to the mix.

Perfection isn’t possible in human relationships, regardless of the value exchange or implied obligation or contract. Technology and an increasingly socialized culture will undoubtedly affect the way business is organized. I’m hopeful we advanced mammals can rise to the challenge.

The information group consisted of two staff librarians and one support person. In retrospect, their roles may have seen a little extravagant (very “agency” like–you’ve read the rants about inflated professional rates) to some.  But my firsthand experience with the knowledgeable Jo Pearson all those years ago leads me to know otherwise. The work the librarian did was as much a tactical necessity as it was fundamental
knowledge development. And I think today’s social media managers and content planners/developers need to take lessons from yesterday’s staff librarians.

image courtesy IGN

Library science is an interdisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology and education. It focuses on the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information resources, and the political economy of information. May also include how information resources are organized to serve the needs of select user groups.—Wikipedia

Jo saved my keister more than once when our big mobile phone client wanted detailed information about a market (she often worked in tandem with the staff media planners who helped create segments and profiles of customers). She also made sure we regularly fed our minds so that we could add insight to deliver greater value to our clients.

Sometimes that meant sending over an enlightening article from an obscure publication (the old-school version of the Share This button). Other times it meant culling data from several subscription-only databases to validate a proposed idea and “sell it in.” As an eager young account manager, it also meant getting smarter about business concepts and sharpening my competitive edge by checking out book after book at Jo’s recommendation.

The information caretaker

As the role of social media manager evolves, I think information – the acquisition, cataloging, funneling, and sharing of it – will play a more central role in the job, maybe looking something like this:

I imagine some social media managers, like community managers, are already doing some of the things outlined in the right hand column. But I suspect results would be stronger if methods were codified and people from cross-functional teams helped identify challenges, issues, and needs that often exist in pockets within an organization.

What do you think about this idea of an “information backbone” to the social media manager role? Does it exist already? Am I making it more complicated than it needs to be? Holla.

• Are you giving love and praise unconditionally?
• Are you generously sharing the bounty of your talents so that others might learn and grow?
• Are you holding fast to the promises your brand makes to its customers?
• Are you committed to doing more, even when no one is looking, even when no one specifically asked?

Such things will be the measurement of our lives. They’ll determine the course of our businesses.

As Danny Brown demonstrated, the degree to which a company serves its customers isn’t limited by the constraints of contracts or terms of service. Those boundaries represent obligations, and as such define minimum expected behaviors. We give you this tool, you pay us x dollars. It’s what’s required. Leaves you feeling a bit cold, yes? Maybe even of transitional (read: subjective) importance, good while it lasts.

While transactions form the elemental basis of commerce, it doesn’t define the relationship. Not the trusted relationship between seller and buyer, nor the fragile one between teams and leaders developing the goods for sale.

Definitely not the relationships that social media – the mindset, the channel, and its tools – can enable among users hoping to add value, experience more, and receive knowledge.

Yes, the overused R word

Relationships are a balance between vested parties that can transcend market flux, a tactical bungle, or a CMO guard change. Relationships make things happen. A relationship sometimes means saying “I’m sorry,” or “That was a bad idea” and mustering forward with a healthy self-awareness and mutual respect. Relationships stick. They flex and adapt, and take on the shape of their environment. And I’m convinced they can’t be measured. There’s no time box or scale.

Relationships can’t be measured, not in the terms of social voting as a factor establishing some meaningless position of social rank.

Some measuring sticks deserve to be broken, to splinter apart like dry kindling. These sticks harm like emotional weapons when they were wielded during tender high school years.  Yet we can’t escape the measuring stick of popularity, the golden gloss daintily painted on the “in” crowd even as adults.  The stick is smuggled into the hiring process and baked into our Twitter “follow back” criteria, and serves only to distance people, to maintain a proper spacing between the elite and the (as yet) unrecognized.

Those measuring sticks are superficial, narrow-minded, and misleading at best. At worst they create a caste system that has nothing to do with talents and skills or work product. Let alone aptitude or commitment.

Hook a developer up with an eager entrepreneur-type anxious make a TechCrunch and you’ve got one more way to measure social influence. Or so some say.

Me? I say tools like this one – and use the term loosely – do us all a disservice. They plant the seed of separation and a hierarchy that has nothing to do with true worth.

Nothing to do with the measuring sticks that matter.

Vanity parlor tricks

Someone I’m connected with on LinkedIn triggered the invitation to join Mixtent. The language was ambiguous and I wanted to see just what it was I’d been voted on. Amazingly, this tool pits one person in your network against another (“Who would you prefer to work with, A or B?”). Your choices help determine rank and suck you in to try to advance your own position. It evokes a sense of competition through a leader board. It gamifies personal endorsements, circumventing a lot of critical areas. And it’s horse pucky.

No sour grapes, I’ll tell you straight up that my score was low. And I’m entirely OK with that, so far as Mixtent’s scoring system goes.

It has nothing to do with the measuring sticks that matter.

It makes little difference how you keep your list, because I bet we’re all the same in how we tackle the things on them.

We start with the easy stuff. And it will be our undoing.Whether you start each work week with a carefully plotted, organized list broken into “important” and “necessary” subsections (to which I yell “Overachiever!”), or you randomly trip through the week mostly reacting to the things that pop up like a kid playing Whack-A-Mole, you know I speak the truth. We go with what’s easy because we love that warm, slow-spreading satisfaction we get when we can cross something off. The quicker we do a few things and see some strikeouts , the sooner we validate a few little distractions (Twitter, anyone?). After all, look at all we got done already, and it’s only Tuesday morning!

You there. The one who stayed up ’til 12:30am responding to emails or writing a conference report. Don’t fool yourself. You’re still doing the easy stuff too, and late nights don’t necessarily mean you’re any more effective or dedicated than the next guy. And the truth is, no one really cares you decided to forgo sleep for the perfectly punctuated and bulleted email to all.

So why are we still starting with the easy stuff?

Doing good work – the right work – has nothing to do with tackling errant and outlying tasks. The clock doesn’t start ticking, nor the marketplace moving, once you tidy things up or finally get a a week with a light meeting [travel] schedule.

In marketing, good work is about purposefully, methodically deconstructing the messy, complex, confusing, potentially career-threatening crap that’s sitting Right There, plain as day, on our list. The crap that calls into question years of indoctrinated processes, use of existing systems and software, unquestioned and grandfathered procedures, and the whims of the blow hards in some other department who won’t give up the data. Good work requires doing something uncomfortable, often making painfully slow, incremental progress, through informed trial and error. Sometimes very publicly, with a rickety support system.

Good work – especially in social media – means convincing others that building a more socially oriented business is worth the time, resources, and financial investment. But that case isn’t built upon the crossed-off lists full of easy stuff.

Read this new report from Marketing Sherpa and Vocus to understand what I mean. The easy stuff may be the visible stuff, that which is more easily implemented. A Share button, a Twitter account.  But the good stuff? Well that’s gonna take some more work.

Social media priorities

• CMOs want more concrete results from their social media marketing investment. Affinity and awareness no doubt still play important roles in the brand equity-customer dance, however executives are in search of more definitive, clear results from social media spend. This goes back to the indoctrinated/existing/unquestioned status quo mentioned above – whether or not yesteryear’s advertising (or marketing, for that matter) was tracked and measured has little bearing. The bloom is off the social media rose, and the chiefs want proof that this fuzzy, friendly social stuff is really amounting to something instead of giving some Millenial an excuse to read and comment on blogs all day long. Friends and fans are nice, but are they actually buying anything? And how much does that tweeter guy cost, anyway? Better get your social media priorities in order.

Social media tactics

• In-the-trenches marketers still concentrate a lot of their energies in “fast and easy” tactics. Blogger relations (guest posting, link building, promotions, sponsored posts, etc.) isn’t easy, nor is it fast. It requires research, patience, persuasiveness, empathy, and a willingness to cede control. It’s an investment a brand makes for the right to participate in an existing community outside of their own network. Risks of being misunderstood and rejected are very real. But the rewards of acceptance, genuine, relevant feedback and positive word of mouth make blogger relations very valuable to a company with a strong position and customer-centric mind set. Figure out the social media tactics most critical to the success of your marketing plan and get focused already.

So you see, your boss really does care about the tough, sticky stuff you may have been avoiding. One day soon, you’re going to find yourself with 45.7 seconds of his/her time in the hall or elevator, and you’re going to be asked the question you’ve been dreading with the cold prickly fear of a snarling, 3-headed Cerberus. Will you have a good answer? You will if you do the tough stuff first.

What needs to happen is a crossing of communication streams (a la Ghostbusters) to produce a more powerful solution, one that informs customer service departments, product teams, and the monitoring arm of the marketing department. Can Talkwheel do that?

About four years ago I was with a software development company. We had around 50 employees spread over two floors of a sprawling office building. As busy tech-y people will do, we used several software platforms to keep the myriad of project managers, developers, product owners, and designers running in synch. We were the original App Store, I tell you. Some client info resided with our proprietary time tracking system. Other info lived within our project management system. There was also company email and IM. Near the end of my tenure some of us adopted Yammer, but it didn’t really take off. Social media was still scary stuff (for my boss).

Fast forward through the mainstreaming of social media to Twitter and Facebook, the white-hot YouTube explosion, and the mercurial mayorships of the Foursquare ilk. We’ve experienced information overload in our personal and professional lives. You want info, you got terrabytes of it. Mostly in disparate places, though.  Messages – standard internal email, customer service form submittals, press inquiries, vendor solicitations, logistics updates – abound, richocheting around the four corners of the office, warehouse, retail store, and outside salesman’s Avis budget rental.  Tablets and rugged handhelds are surfacing as yet additional tools enabling the creation even more information, delivered faster.

All this knowledge only serves to tangle us up if the proper information systems, taxonomy and accessibility isn’t baked in.

Spokes Without a Hub

Separate lines of communication can be hard to maintain, and harder to scale. By function of the channels, they remain independent (email serves one purpose, Twitter another), not part of a collective body of resources. No way to clearly see downstream connections or dissemination. In real-time business, communication silos (which often happen to be data silos, as part of a larger CRM) can cripple. Breakdowns can lead to loss of time, reputation, and money.

Today some enterprise-level solutions exist in Yammer (different from the version I trialed way back when) and Salesforce.  While I haven’t used either in their current release form (and cannot speak to pros or cons), a new alternative has emerged with San Francisco-based startup Talkwheel.  Talkwheel (group discussion platform) team member Patrick Randolph gave me a high-level overview earlier this week, and I was definitely intrigued.

Conversation Visualization

Visual learner that I am, the notion of using images to express complex relationships and ideas gets two thumbs up, right off the bat. And as I understand from Patrick, the premise of Talkwheel is to map messages (conversations) from disparate internal and external systems into categorized groups, permit the application of filters (like permissions, workflows), and centralize the information along with related documents (PDFs, spreadsheets, etc.). Voila! Enterprise users then have a command center with threaded messages, RSS feeds, tweets, and the like. Future iterations of the software are supposed to have sentiment analysis and intense analytics. With this kind of information display, there are fewer chances for the “squeaky wheel” to drown out a valid albeit possibly less vociferous customer inquiry.

Contiguous Conversation Flow

I look forward to learning more about Talkwheel as the platform matures. Their spanking-new partnership with ZeroDesktop (content unification in the cloud) could up the ante. As for my firsthand knowledge of the platform, I think the demo could have been a little more fluid, and I would have liked to have seen (or played with) a functioning working model over the partially built-out model containing mock conversations. But I think I’ll have a chance to create an account in the next few days and try things out.  There’s great potential there, although I think the road is steep in terms of mass adoption.

From a marketer’s perspective, I long for simple, clear infographic-based sales support to create a compelling case for adopting the platform (we all know new tools can sometimes take an act of Congress for the bespeckled guys in IT to allow under the firewall).  This is a case for “Show me” not “Tell me.”  Talkwheel’s “Why use” page has some good support language, but I think the visitor has to work too hard to connect the dots and translate benefits to their real-world communications problems. After all, we kind of just accept the fact that corporate email is separate from twitter mentions. Talkwheel needs to help prospects understand how the platform can actually enable faster, more informed discussions and knowledge-sharing.

Have you tried  Yammer, Salesforce or Talkwheel? What do you think? Do any of the platforms reframe the way your company receives, shares, and stores critical messages? Or do you see this as another unnecessary social media tool?

Several high-profile brands gained attention recently as a result of social media snafus. The interwebs buzzed about Red Cross and Chrysler; the former serving as a good example of what to do when a certain type of crisis hits. In contrast, the latter spawned much negative discussion over the actions of the iconic auto maker, the agency managing its social media participation, and the person assigned to operate the Twitter account.

The Red Cross incident got us laughing. A new phrase (“getting slizzard”) was coined to describe relaxing and having an adult beverage (or two) with friends.  Handled with aplomb, grace, and self-deprecating humor, dare I say the venerable institution suffered no longer than a nanosecond in social media years due to the errant tweet.  The incident even took a positive route when citizens began donating blood to carry on the hashtag meme.

But the Chrysler debacle raised several issues for some folk:

1. Chrysler’s decision to use an external agency to tweet on behalf of the auto maker
2. The flavor of the off-brand tweet itself
3. The creator of the unfortunate tweet possibly skirting responsibility for his unfortunate actions
4. The agency’s decision to terminate the twitterer
5. A glaring paradox. Elements of the tweet (use of profanity and rude attitude to Detroit) suggest the person tweeting was unfit for the social media role and as such, poor representation of the Chrysler brand. Yet Eminem, celebrity endorser for Chrysler’s recent “Imported From Detroit” campaign, built a multi-platinum career on his misogynist attitude and profane lyrics. It might seem the commercialized,  immoral potty mouth you know is more acceptable than the blind-tweeting, angry potty mouth you don’t.

Then there are the conversations that started in the wake of these snafus which pontificated where social media should live – in marketing, corporate communications, or  shared organizational ownership – as though some other arrangement would have precluded the gaffes. As though a different nexus of control would have provided a cushiony buffer from blunders and placed its members beyond reproach.

I Fail, You Fail

I call B.S. Here’s the thing I think almost everyone’s forgetting – we all make mistakes. And sometimes we even have inadvertent help in our failings. Those T-Rex size errors can cause significant damage to timelines, relationships, or budgets.  And as damaging as they may be, I think what we should be doing is looking at root cause, not last-man attribution.  So yeah, the youngling made a really stupid tweet. He exercised poor judgement, probably fresh from a frustrating ride into work. But did anyone stop to look at how the pivotal moment when he clicked the “tweet” button came to be? Until those steps are examined, this type of snafu will continue to happen. Social media governance will only get stronger when we bake learings from these “a ha!” moments into our guidelines.

Brand Immersion

I don’t know anything about Chrysler’s social media policy, New Media Labs’ training protocols, or the tools and methods employed with their client accounts. That said, I’m betting that hands-on employees (like the 25-year old who made the career-altering tweet about Detroit) receive little by way of brand immersion when they’re handed the keys to the accounts. At best, they may get some type of dry brand standards manual that does little to help them inculcate and absorb key brand values.  We remember best that which we experience with all of our senses – these people should be touring factories, examining auto spec sheets, reading customer survey feedback, test driving vehicles, interviewing sales people, and anything else necessary to successfully represent the brand online.

I wonder what information may have been shared with the rank-and-file with regard to Chrysler’s “Imported From Detroit” campaign. Did they see the final polished spot on the big screen, same as the rest of us? To someone unfamiliar with the fundamentals of brand positioning and core messaging, the long-term strategic objective, that commercial may have simply been a hot ad. In the absence of knowledge about what made Eminem so significant (to Chrysler), someone might have mistaken the celebrity endorsement as tacit permission to carve a more raw edge with tweets and updates.  See what I mean about having  inadvertent help when we fail?

Everyone Needs The Knowledge

Bottom line? If a branding idea is important enough to warrant a series of briefs and months of creative development, then consider the ways the idea will touch every employee and agency partner. Better yet, develop agency partnerships built on mutual respect, trust, and a shared set of objectives. Invest in the relationship with 360 degree brand immersion. Have the frickin’ conversation about what it means to represent your brand!

Remember ~ Brand stewards don’t always carry employee badges; sometimes they sign the visitors log.

What’s your opinion – did the right thing happen when the young man was fired? Was it enough? Too much? What could or should have happened differently?

Work the room

Last week I attended a networking event coordinated by the Technology Association of Iowa.  Dubbed Pitch and Grow and well attended by University of Iowa types, the event centered around entreprenurship in tech fields and featured a discussion panel followed by groups of concurrent presentation sessions.  The sessions gave startups and early-growth companies an opportunity to present a pitch to seasoned serial entrepreneurs. Some pitches were of the does-this-idea-have-legs variety while others were more if-I-were-asking-you-to-invest-would-you-buy-it type.  While all sessions were mock – not actual requests for support – they gave the presenters opportunities to get their sea legs when presenting to a crowd as well as test their preparedness to describe their business idea and its viability. It was also a great time to network and gain new ideas to twist and apply to our own businesses.

Thumbs up; thumbs down

I attended two vastly different pitch sessions.  Session B was presented by a software development company and was superb, top down.  Well planned, well rehearsed, and the content covered all of the fundamentals (market overview/the product/why its unique and needed/delivery models/revenue streams/needs assessment/etc.).  The speaker was very comfortable speaking with the group; I walked out wanting a piece of that, big-time (and aren’t those involved with start-ups the wild-eyed, big-hairy-idea-minded kind? mavericks?).  That fledgling company is really on to something; they described a market, its opportunities, inroads plowed to date, and their nuts-and-bolts work to solve a real-world problem as well as their earnings potential.  In a word, wow.

Session A was…well, precisely the opposite.  I can discount the presenter’s nerves (been there). I can be generous and even discount the quality of the actual slides (although maybe I shouldn’t; much has been written about building and delivering presentations that work and potential investors would surely yawn at it).  But I’m having a hard time understanding why this person had a stage with the audience at all.  I fear the company will perpetuate every misconception and malignment ever grumbled or groused about social media’s value for business.

Lipstick on a pig

Near as I can tell, the speakers’ company started as an IT consulting business. Someone then saw an opportunity ($$) to layer on tactical elements of social media marketing for SMB’s. Sure, because *that* makes sense (?!). What these guys are really doing is setting up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for local businesses.  Maybe slapping on a poorly Photoshopped background or avatar outside of any kind of brand planning. Unless I misunderstood, the company will help local businesses acquire fans/followers, too – the mass “Will you like this new client of ours on FB?” kind of pandering.

The presentation spoke of plans to develop social media marketing strategies and a proprietary process along with software tools to “implement social media messaging and collect/analyze SM feedback using data and text mining.”  I say hooey.  Fancy words. No projected time frame. And that stuff already exists, too. Until those wish-fors become part of an actual product release – will settle for alpha – there’s nothing there for clients to latch onto. Seriously, social media account setup is not a long term viable business model in and of itself. And by the time the value-add stuff got latched on (assuming it was), the train will have long left the station. We’d be in the next stage of evolution and adoption.  I began to wonder if the company was plying snake oil. The question was, did they even know it? They mouthed some of the right key phrases but then talked about Will It Blend views on YouTube. From 18 months ago. Binkety-blink.

When the time came for Q&A I had a notepad of questions.  No, I didn’t want to skewer anybody – it wasn’t a popularity contest and I’m not into finger pointing.  But I really hoped I missed some vital parts of the preso during my autonomic blinking process (or the search for gum in my purse). I wanted to understand just what these guys hoped to bring to market. I was anxious to dig into some  social business concepts. Eager to learn more, I asked a few ground ball-type questions:

• How do you help clients tie social media activity to their business goals? Map out a social media strategy? Do you also coach them through integration?  Just what are some of your clients’ goals?
• So you perform keyword research? How do you interpret and use findings? How do the findings bring about change? Got any case studies?
• The content you say you’ll help clients share via SM tools – describe the development and curation process and your best practice recommendations. Is that managed internally?
• How does reputation management fit into your service model? That’s what I think of when I hear “analyze SM feedback.”
• How will your as-yet-developed social software differ from existing products like Radian6, Techrigy, Scout Labs, Social Mention. Or any other SaaS priced more competitively for a SMB?

Next!

Suffice to say the responses offered to me were vague and incomplete.  He spoke of numbers of fans; I wanted to hear about shares, interactions, traffic changes, time on site and new customer inquiries/referrals (more, please!).  Maybe that’s a whole layer of “Why are we doing this?” that his clients to date hadn’t gotten to yet.  If that’s the case, which is the worse offense – that the clients didn’t grasp how social media could affect their business in direct, tangible, measurable ways? Or that the consultant hadn’t educated (nay, considered how) his clients about what what social media strategy and execution  could deliver?

What’s the most tragic example of social media convolution you’ve run across?  How do you propose we turn the tide?

That is, unless you win a free book (and I have one to offer some lucky duck). But you’ll probably want multiple copies, so you still need that shiny green card. Share the knowledge wealth.

Once you dive into Jay and Amber’s book, you’ll be flooded with warmth.  The clouds will part, and someone, somewhere will sing.  You may even be bathed in golden light if you’re sitting near a south-facing window.

Euphoria will bloom because you will have found the social business book you’ve been waiting for. The one you hope your boss reads. And takes to heart.

The authors deliver an incredibly readable discussion (we expected no less) about the state of business today and the radical changes – mindsets, tools, policies, channels, expectations, and procedures – ahead, the likes of which we’ve only glimpsed the past 3ish years (is that all its been?).

This isn’t a book about how to get more followers or friends, or design the snazziest background or custom tab.  It’s a holistic look at the reorganization of business operations, the restructuring of process, and the re-engineering of attitudes, assets, and strategies.  It’s a frank acknowledgement that the world we operate in, the place where we manage people and their activities, is evolving in response to and along side of a rush of enabling technology and shifting consumer expectations.  We can’t mistake what’s happening as a passing fad or fancy, or chalk it up to something our 16 year-old niece does when forced to attend family functions.  This isn’t about Facebook, people. You’ll miss the point and be left holding steadfast to a rapidly shrinking market.  Perhaps still surviving, but certainly not thriving.

The duo’s book, titled The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to make your business faster, smarter, and more social is one every executive,manager, and rank-and-file should read.  If you’ve spent much time in the workforce, then you’ve likely seen the changes technology has brought about in the way people communicate, collaborate, solve problems and nurture new ideas.  Beneath a tweet or a status update, check in or sticker, a fabric of information, accessibility, and reach is being woven.  This new connectedness unites peers and friends; it also influences service delivery, marketing dynamics, internal culture (which translates out to brand identity and position, and shapes offerings) accepted doctrine and so much more.  Toss out the old business plan template, there’s a new game in town.

The arrival of personal computers, email, fax machines, web sites and PDF files was straight out of Wyle E. Coyote; the boulder tipped over the edge and began to gather steam downhill before anyone  computed its path, distance, force or trajectory. In the 90’s, we thought we gained a few fancy machines and a new kind of Rolodex, but it was really so much more.

Businesses gradually purchased or instituted those newfangled means, but it took longer before their widespread use and implications fully filtered through all the layers of people and remixed indoctrinated processes.

Social business is kind of like the same story all over again, but with new twists and flavors. And you eat it family-style, along with everyone else.

Consumers will change how you operate your business

The book covers the implications consumer adoption of the tools – where lines run deep behind forerunners Facebook and Twitter – will have on how business enterprise is organized, roles and responsibilities are defined and dispersed, and the manner and speed in which digital communication enables and empowers. Are these internal shifts in response to external drivers?  Or is the changing business environment fueling further market innovation as well as consumer expectations? Both, I think.  The marketplace isn’t a vacuum, although enterprise may resist the cries for change based on fear, lack of understanding or appreciation for the opportunity brought by their publics.  Resistance or rejection is futile, a path that only leads to obsolescence.

But I’m out of control here.  You should read the book and think about how you’re going to help reshape the company you own or the place you work.

How to win a free copy of The Now Revolution

If the book is so good, you might ask, why am I giving it away?  Because I snagged a spot on the book review team.  Nanner, nanner.  Don’t fret, though. You could share in the goodness, too.  I have a copy to give away! Many thanks to Jay and Amber for sharing with me.

Head on over to the Insights & Ingenuity Facebook page and click ye ole LIKE button.  I promise we share good content links. While  you’re there, post a message on the wall covering these two things:

• Describe the biggest business challenge you face today.
• Tell us what you’re doing to change it.

Zuckerberg doesn’t give you a lot of room to post on the wall before the message gets truncated, so parse it carefully.  Bonus points to anyone who can cover both items in 140 characters or less.

You have through end of day Friday, February 25 to “like” the page and post your message.  I’ll choose the best answer and make the announcement, then get that book over to the winner pronto.

Good luck!  My next book review will be Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki.  Keep an eye out on your RSS feed so you do’t miss out! What? Not yet an RSS subscriber yet?  Better get on that!

Over on the Social Media Explorer blog I recently wrote about the role of social media in achieving customer satisfaction.  Part technical tool review, part examination of socially-enabled communications, the post took a look at Groubal ( the “complaint as a petition” platform) but begged a deeper look at brand image, customer relationship-building and new business imperatives in our digital marketing era.

Creating and maintaining customer satisfaction

While preparing that post, I had the great fortune to interview PR pro Arik Hanson and market research expert Frank Martin.  Both gentlemen are business owners and recognized within their respective industries.  I looked to these guys to add some dimension to this new reality of customers using online channels and social tools to share personal stories and experiences with others about brands.  We talked about:

Public relations -
What risks do brands now face in this hyper-connected, always-on, volatile environment?  How can a brand lessen the impact caused by negative sentiment expressed online?  What options do brands have for getting in front of potentially contentious topics in order to participate if not steer the course of current discussion?  How can we save a carefully built brand image from getting tarnished?

Market research -
What means does a brand have for better understanding consumer perception?  How might those learnings be used to gain insight into operational inefficiencies, ambiguous communication or under performing products?  How does online reputation monitoring and sentiment analysis fit with other, more traditional research methods?

I worked my thoughts up into a 9-page opinion paper titled:  The Rant Heard ‘Round the World:  Can We Find Satisfaction on the Internet?  You can also read it below.

In writing the paper, I learned a little about what it must feel like to write and publish a full-on book.  I could have added more depth to the topic areas or branch out into important related tangents, but I tried to stay focused on the central idea of customer satisfaction – creating it, maintaining it, and maturing a business along with it.  Inside the paper there are lots of links to great material written by others, so be sure to check those out too.

As always, your thoughts and opinions are encouraged.  What did I miss?  Where am I right?  Again my thanks go out to the very patient and generous Arik and Frank.  Any errors are my own.

Rant Heard Round the World.heather Rast

We might add other subjective filters like “Will this be a ‘me-too’ RT?”  Sometimes you can really like something for its own merit but don’t want to be caught up in a wave of adoring fans.  A direct message might have more meaning.

Mark W. Schaefer, with his friend Dr. Hanna, added another layer to being effective on Twitter.  Dr. Hanna gathered statistical data about achieving optimal effectiveness with tweet volume, time of day and even tweet format.

Both of these interesting posts got me thinking about why we choose to follow certain people.  When I gain a new follower, I take a look at their profile description and tweets.  Do they sound like someone I could sit next to on a plane?  Are their tweets one-sided or robot-like?  What kind of stuff are they into and does it interest me?  Do their links help me discover something new?

Do you follow me?

To help make some sense out of the “To follow or not to follow” question, I offer this simple graphic.  Starting at the top, what we share/do comprises our Twitter profile.  From that activity (tweets/content), someone can figure out why you’re there. That leads to the pieces written about in Mark’s post before branching off to general personal characteristics (which probably apply as much offline as on, further demonstrating our online life is merely an extension of who we are IRL).

Why do you follow those you follow?  A sense of obligation?  A desire to be in the midst of things?  Education?