Conversations | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Signals instead of conversations ?

November 15, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : enterprises will have to enter the world of conversations. Everything will become conversations between enterprises, employees and customers. Such a concept, when not introduced the right way, is scary for lots of businesses because it overlooks the need to make conversations actionable. Most of all, employees are very uncomfortable with the conversation attitude at work. A matter of attitude but also a matter of sense, organization, time, tools…and a human matter full stop. The business world is more in need of signals contributing to ambient awareness than of conversations. Conversations can follow the signals but are not indispensable. In the current state of maturity, employees are more comfortable with factual signal logics that may lead to conversations than with conversations as a direct model. As a matter of fact, even if ”markets are conversation” , it’s time to realize that organizations are not market (for the moment ?). And customers seem to prefer results and factual interactions than social conversations.

Tomorrow, everything will be conversations. The web will all be made of conversations between businesses and customers and intranets will be nothing more conversations between employees. Business need to join the world of conversations and facilitate conversations between and with anyone. Of course, in the small world of initiated people, everybody understands what hides behind this simplistic shortcut (although…). But, when held in front of “real” large businesses and decision makers, this discourses often sounds irrelevant.

Of course, we can argue the these businesses rely on old frames of reference and did not get the new world that’s emerging. This is true, even partly, but does not explain everything and should not be the easy pretext that prevents from having a critical look at the content of some concepts and the way they’re introduced.

Let’s take a few minutes to put ourselves in any executive’s shoes. Imagine a business world where everyone would spend his time having conversations. The first thing that comes to you mind is : lower productivity, people loosing time chatting. Of course…such a thinking shows the person do not understand the “new world”…but, in some ways, it’s not totally wrong. Engagement and conversations share the same problem : they’re worth if actionable. In other words :

- they are part of concrete frameworks (marketing, innovation, customer service, problem solving….) and not a plan saying “converse, converse…and maybe, sometimes, we’ll manager to leverage it for business purposes”/

- they relate to an empowerment approach : conversations expose involved employees to an external stimulus that should, in most of cases, be followed by an action. If the employee is not able to take any action following the conversation, the conversation is useless and may even be deceptive for those who participated. Even if the only benefit of the conversation is related to knowledge acquisition, employees need to be able to use this knowledge in their work in the future and not be locked into logics focused on strict use of previously validated and official knowledge.

But this is not all. Conversations means a series of exchanges overtime, the willing to exchange with or without predefined purpose. So businesses started to focus on one goal : stimulating conversation. They need to make people talk the one with the other. This job usually falls to the community manager. Now let’s see this with a little distance to realize how absurd it is : if we want people to have conversations and they don’t do, do you think, even a second, that, with all the tools they already have, an internal social network (for employees) or external communities (for customers), animated by a community manager who’s mission is to make people talk will change anything ? If conversations have neither sense nor interest, the best tools and community managers won’t change anything. The problem is elsewhere.

Engaging is not delivering

November 7, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : tomorrow’s enterprises will be conversational and will need engagement from employees and customers. But engagement useless if not turned into concrete actions, if customers are note made actionable as parts of new social processes. Building engagement and conversations logics out of processes allowing to make the most of what is nothing more than an intention will lead to nothing except flashes in the pan.

Engagement has become a very trendy word. Either employees or customers should be engaged. But why ? Without engagement, what makes people feeling more concerned by enterprise or brand-focused collective challenges and dynamics, beyond their own assignments and objectives, it’s hard to find the fuel sustaining value co-creation systems that are the founding of tomorrow’s organizations.

So, everything is done to engage and the social tools universe plays its part in the movement. In fact, the social world is pretty much ahead because he’s one of the reason why engagement came back on the front scene these last years. On the employees’ side, I’ve already shared what I thought about it : no one should think that the use of any social platform by employees will replace a voluntaristic HR policy. It can be a part of it but nothing more.

So, let’s talk about the customer. Today’s tools make some things much more easier than they were in the pas. It’s easy to track signals and conversations about the enterprise, become proactive, join and response. That’s true that there’s no conversation without engagement, but customers can be engaged even if the enterprise chose not to invest this field : exemplarity in behaviors and product quality make it possible…social only being a substitute.

A second myth is also around. The one according to which, once the message has ben tracked, the sentiment analyzed and the conversation engaged…the job is done. I can’t count how many offers rely on this assumption : listen to your communities, engage…and it’s done. That’s a fallacy for at least two reasons. The first is that it’s not about communities but individual cases (even if gathered in community spaces…the nature of the container does not change the nature of the content) but since I’ve already dealt with this issue in previous posts there’s no time to waste on that. The second reason relates to the belief everything can be solved this way.

First, engaging the customer in a conversation does not mean engaging the customer with the brand. Facing a lamentable level of quality, conversation can make things less painful but some situations can’t be saved. And there’s no reason to blame the community manager : “if your product sucks, social media can’t change anything about it. Second, even when engaged, what is rather about a state of mind, internauts are useless for the enterprise. I used the word internaut in purpose because :

- “community member ” seldom is the reality

- customer ? nothing tells the people involved in the conversations are customers. Most of times they are not.

- prospect ? any internaut is a potential prospect but they can help the enterprise without becoming customers (crowdsourcing, social marketing).

The internaut has to be activated within a process of any kind (marketing, r&d, services, sales…) to make engagement drive value. Having conversation without solving a problem is useless. Having conversations without trying to guess for what purposes the internaut can be actioned is useless. Having conversations that don’t help to “score” the internaut and don’t come with social processes related to innovation, customer service, marketing et… is useless because it does not turn the social potential into tangible business value.

Some may retort that value is not all, that image and reputation matter, that it’s all about soft things. Ok. But give me only one reason to improve one’s image or reputation if not leverage it for more “concrete” purposes.

In the logic of moving from CRM to Social CRM, there’s a point that’s often overlooked : the concept of customer management that disappeared behind conversations while the latter come to complete it, not to replace it. Moreover, to do things well, it would be better to forget the concept of customer and talk about Social Stakeholder Management because in such “value chain 2.0″ approaches it’s possible to contribute to value creation without being a customer. In fact, it sounds reasonable to say that at least 50% that may jump in the wagon are not customers. What does not prevent them from being stakeholders.

So it’s essential to go back to basics and put conversations and engagement in the wider perspective of new value creation models, of value chain. If not the risk of endless chatting without value is real.

PS : I advise you to read this post by Marc Fidelman on social CRM with similar conclusions.

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: business process, Communities, conversations, crm, customer, Customer Relationship & Marketing, customer service, engagement, social stakeholders management, stakeholders, value, value creation

blueKiwi : the good use of conversations

February 19, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The last “Virtual Enterpise 2.0 conference” was a good opportunity to visit some vendor’s booth to know what to expect from them in 2010. I finally had a look at blueKiwi to see what was new at our European leader.

[Disclaimer..: I joined blueKiwi at the versy beginning of the company and left in last décember. I don't have any kind of stake in the company anymore]

Since of my most important rules is “never trust a sales guy” I quickly left the tchat to start a skype conversation with CEO Carlos Diaz (sometimes being an alumni helps…). A good way to know more about the news, share some thoughts and try to guess what was not offically announced.

• New positionning

You may rember my last post about conversations, their potential and their limits in a business context. Carlos intuitively got the distinction and aligned his strategy with the product’s DNA : conversations and communities.

If I had to define the “new blueKiwi” I’d say it’s a “space for engagement and sourcing”. It addresses the need to get the most of what employees can give beyond their assignments and, most of all, the need to gather an ecosystem that includes clients either in B2B or B2C. A space that’s not dedicated to execution activities but to conversations that makes tomorrow’s proudcts and business models emerge while strengthening the relationship between the enterprise and the ecosystem for a long term value creation.

This distinction is more than words. In my opinion there’s no “one and only enterprise 2.0″, each need, each business line may need a specific approach in terms of tools, methodology in order to harness the full potential of the ecosystem. And a clear positionning is needed to achieve that.

So let’s check how the discourse impacts the facts.

The conversational enterprise : opportunity or dead end ?

February 16, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

If we listen to what’s being said here and there, the future of business is conversation. A concept that’s not so easy to get for many organizations for two reasons :

• Intuitively, conversation makes think of chat…what means waste of time

• In the management ideology, there are those who talk and those who do. So, having conversations is the opposite of doing.

That’s not so hard to understand. Let’s imagine what imagining his whole team having conversations all day long would make any manager react. And, even when he can intuitively get the value, it’s hard for him to explain how it may improve his team performance because it is his main focus. As for the staff, they may wonder what to converse about…and, most of time, they don’t want any of their conversations to be heard by their hierarchy.

SO, buying the concept is very difficult.

But even so that’s a dimension that organization have to develop in a near future. For instance, in a Social CRM approach (which as a very clear and understandable value proposal), conversations are essential to create the needed engagement. Globally speaking, there are known things that have to be reached and the ability to seize opportunities that are, by definition, unknown at the start. In this second situation, everything starts from these famous conversation that have, most often, a topic but no purpose for participants, and that are essential to make purposes emerge. Conversations are the fertile grount where action grows up.

Even at this point many managers say “that’s nice…but that’s not for me”. And they’re right.

Enterprise 2.0′s weakness ? Decision

December 29, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

Let’s assume that, through a mix a community management and socio-collaborative management, businesses manage to make information and people for identifiable and accessible in order to facilitate and accelerate workaday execution, solve problems and invent tomorow’s products and operating models. Even if that sounds seducing, there’s something wrong in the reasonning.

All these dynamics and informations don’t create any value by themselves. That’s one of the reasons why, even if the value of such things is admitted by nearly everybody, there’s still something in decision-maker’s heads that prevent them from seing the tangible value behind.

All these things, this informal, organizational, human capital etc.. create nothing but a potential. A hudge potential though, but only a potential. This brings us back to what I wrote about strategy maps. All this things does not bring anything if not reused in structured and formalized operations. There are some ways to do so :

• Social routine that brings information reuse on the flow.

• Decision : that makes possible that something new is used or started.

I’d like to focus on this last point. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks Tagged With: autonomy, conversations, decision, decision-making, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, organization, practices, processes, social software 2.0, social-software, workflows

Will you know how to export your conversations and focus on transactions ?

December 7, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

The world of communication and marketing is worried because of the consecration of digital medias, an highbrow word used to talk about the web by people who are suddently feeling out of date.

For many people, the revolution brought by the web is the so-called new “power” that’s in internauts’ hands. According to me this power, that has to be relativized because old rules still apply and only 1% internauts really use this power, is only one side of a global shift of the point of contact between a business and its environment.

People didn’t wait for web 2.0 or social media to talk about companies and products in their back. Over a cup of coffee, in real life, first, then on forums and, after, on social medias. It changes many things and made them more complicated for businesses is that discussions are scattered all around the web what makes it hard to take an inventory of them and follow them. This scattering is not a bad thing when one know of to take the most of it but causes headaches to people who consider corporate communication as a centralized thing.

Scattering can be an opportinity. The (few) companies that “buzzed” wisely are a good example. Those who crowdsource too even if they could do much better. As a matter of fact, what’s sure is that internauts don’t want to be pulled toward a corporate site anymore. On the other hands they are opened to the messages and to discussions provided the subject is relevant and the discussion takes place on their own ground. Now the only way to adress the audience is to do it on Facebook, Linkedin or any social network of this kind (even blogs but it needs some targetting), most of all if rather than delivering a message the purpose is to start a discussion to get opinions, advices, to ask for participation.

When a business decides to follow the internaut on his ground, there is something to be aware of and an answer to find. Be aware that no one can prevent a discussion from happening and an issue to be discussed. The question is to know how, among all these discussions, some of them will be about something the enterprise wants to be discussed, even questions it would like the audience to answer.

Does enterprise (2.0) need a pilot ?

October 16, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

It started with this provocative post from Michael Idinopulos. His message is quite claire : assuming that enterprise 2.0 relies on networked interactions, that these interations need a critical mass of users not only because of Metcalf law but also because, by definition, it’s impsossible to know at the beginning who will be needed in the future, he concludes that in a enterprise 2.0 perspective the usual pilots makes no sense and does not allow do demonstrate anything.

His take led to many reactions, even if no clear answer emerged (read Steven Walling’s post, the comments and the results of his poll). At the end, it seems that even if a discovery or learning phase is important, not everybody agree on how it should happen. Said differently, everybody agrees on the big picture but opinions diverge on details or on the meaning of things.

What’s a pilot ?

What’s a pilot ? It’s a project which goal is to test in a riskless context and a small scope the key points of something that is expected to be deployed on a wider scale in the future. I’d rather say that that’s how people generalized the content of a pilot. If we focus on the real and primary goal it’s about validating something new, learning to master it, understanding its potential, the risks, the limits. Regarding to many things that happened in the pas, this definition was relevant because the only thing that differenciates the pilot from the full deployment is the scale. In a system relying on transactions, if a system, a processus, works for 10 people it will work for 100, 10 000 or 100 000, the only thing to do being to scale the infrastructure.

Conversational or transactional ? Two different logics

What’s new in enterprise 2.0 projects, if we consider the IT side, its the human dimension, not mutch transactional, not foreseeable, and the fact it relies on a people network. In other words, that’s not because something works with 10 or 100 people that it will work with 10 000. And the most frequent situation : something that does not work with 10 or 100 people may perfectly work with 10 000. If the web had only 1000 users, the social networks as we know them may not exist, the probability for a given personne to find his own network, people who share the same concerns being very low.

There’s also another point that is far from being trivial : a transactional application can be tested with blanks, injecting datas and looking at what happens. A conversational application can’t be tested in a sterilized room, disconnected from the operational reality. Isolated from the day to day concerns in order not to impact anything, it can’t provide with any clue or certainty about its future use or efficiency.

Il existe également un autre point qui est loin d’être anecdotique : on peut tester une application transactionnelle “à blanc”, en lui injectant des données et voyant ce qu’il en sort. Une application plus “conversationnelle” ne peut être ainsi mise en salle blanche, déconnectée de la réalité opérationnelle. Isolée des préoccupations quotidiennes de manière à ne rien impacter, elle ne peut donner aucune preuve ni piste quant à son utilité et son efficacité future.

So the goal of a pilot applies to enterprise 2.0 (at least to its software component) but the method should certainly be changed to fit the specificity of 2.0 applications, most of all in terms of scale and positioning toward day to day business issued.

A good synthesis of what a pilot should be in such a context can be found in Claire Flanagan’s comment. A comment that gains a special dimension when you know the results of the pilot she’s currently leading.

A pilot is not an explorer

A pilot aims at validating, refining the understanding of a problematic and improve the tools to…pilot things once the project will become mainstream. In our context it means that there is a critical mass of users and that the pilot is not isolated from the real work. It implies that people already have a quite clear understanding of what the project is about, what it will be used for, what are the preliminary changes to undertake and those who will follow.

When a pilot is restricted to a few people and is help apart the real life, it’s often because people don’t know what they are doing, what tools do and don’t do, what will be their impact, what they help to change and what changes they need. It’s a discovery phase of tools and concepts, without anything operational, that won’t help to prove anything. Such a project is not a pilot but rather an explorer, and its purpose is to do the spadework on the subject. Its a key element of the necessary (and too often forgotten) strategic thinking phase but it’s not a pilot in any way. And when you expect from an “explorer” the same things than from a pilot, their are many chances to be very disappointed.

It taking the specificities of the 2.0 paradigm in a pilot is key, it’s also very important not to call a pilot the necessary discovery and exploration phase, which purpose is to open up before launching a pilot, in order to understand things and prevent from doing mistakes later.

You my also find Steward Mader’s takes interesting..

adoption, changement, conversationnel, conversations, Entreprise 2.0, expérimentation, périmètre, pilote, réseaux-sociaux, transactionnel, transactions

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: adoption, change, conversational, conversations, Enterprise 2.0, experimentation, pilot, scale, scope, social networks, transactional, transactions

Social CRM needs more than a CRM approach

August 24, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 7 Comments

Ross Mayfield recently published a fundamental post about “social CRM“. The statement of fact is simple : 1% of customer’s conversations improve the organizational knowledge, 9% touch the organization without changing anything and 90% are not heard at all, businesses miss an impressive source of possible improvemens. I’m not meaning 100% of these conversations are valuable but harnessing only 1% of them is a real risk. At this point, the question is not to know how to take this conversations into account but, first of all, to be able to join them and participate. Even the stupidest conversation may be of some interest since not paying any attention to it can be seens as disdain. More, statisticians would tell that if businesses want to harness the conversations that can bring real opportunities, they also have to pay consider the less intereting ones : we’re talking about a domain where, if one aims at excellence, he has to accept a high variability, what is the opposite of the beliefs most our business processes rely on.

Those who’d look into this subject because they have a traditional CRM issue may suffer from vertigo : it’s about CRM…but also many more things at the same time. As Ross writes, it’s impossible to change the way a business considers and implements its customer relationship management without changing the way people actually operate inside the company. Knowing how hard it is to change things internally, the point of deciding what has to be changed first (internally or externally), one pushing the other, can be discussed. But the fact is both are needed and that they are the two sides of an only project.

Discussions may help people do a better work

November 2, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Web 2.0 is about discussions. Enterprise 2.0 is about giving value to discussions. But people are paid to work and not to discuss, and when you say “discussion” you often the Taylor that sleeps into many manager’s mind.

Would it be possible to envisage that discussions can help people doing their job better ? Not at all. Everybody knows what he has to do. Once it’s completed, he hands over to someone else who does his job and so on, following a well defined process. Except “I’ve done my part, now it’s up to you” they have no reason to say anything else and any other discussion is a waste of time.

Sure ?

Last year, Louis Schweitzer opened the Pandora’s box, admitting that technical discussions were not enough, and than something more was needed.

Let me tell you something I saw a few years ago. Any similarity with existing people or scenes that take place in the office near yours is accidental, of course.

Conversations and the emergence of unsuspected knowledge

April 27, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

A large part of companies’ knowledge is not available for all for the only reason people are not conscious of the importance of some details of their experience and that, since others don’t know what these people know, they don’t think of asking them anything…

Hence the importance of not organising knowledge capture on the only base of “forms people have to fill” and pay attention to what can capture conversations which are the only way to make emerge “what we don’t know people know and they dont measure the importance”.

That reminds of this famous Donald Rumsfeld’s sentence. It made me laugh at this time, but perharps it has more sense than I though (even if he didn’t did it in purpose…)

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.

But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.