Do you need a brand strategy on the social web ?

January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the presence of brands on the internet is a major concern for businesses entering the social web. But there’s a big difference between thinking and definining oneself as a brand and an ogranization. A brand is the expression of an identity while the organization is rather an action driven approach to customer service. Both should come together but, unfortunately, the social channel is often owned by the people in charge of one of these two approaches at the cost of the other. As recent surveus show, customers, even if they appreciate appearances, often prefer to value the execution of the promise. It’s time for organization approaches to replace brand strategues on the web.

Every time a new platform or service is launched on the web, the first question that comes is “how to make brands exist there.”. From a personal standpoint, as an internaut, I find it exasperating. I don’t want to rub shoulders with a brand or to become “friend” with it, most of all when it corrupts the system. You may retort me that I sometimes interact with brands and appreciate it. In fact I appreciate these interactions as long as it helps me to satisfy one of my needs. According to what I see, the more a business acts like an organization and less as a brand the more it succeeds at satisfying my needs. And, according to reports I mentioned in a previous post, it seems that I’m not the only one who thinks this way.
What is the difference between a brand and an organization ? And what are the deep consequences of the differences between a brand oriented approach and an organization oriented one ?

A brand is a matter of identity. “This is who /what I am, what I embody, my image”. Having a brand strategy is unavoidable when we see how much time we’re spending online and to what extent our online experiences impact our lives and decisions. Brands have to be known, have to let people discover and know them better, deliver a message that’s better understood when carried by conversations instead of declaration. So, having an online brand strategy is vital. But not enough. The post I mentioned above clearly shows that internauts, contrary to received ideas, don’t value neither social conversations with brands nor being part of a brand community. They want concrete and operational outputs.

For instance, let’s consider a clothing business. It can hire a kind of muse that will embody and carry the brand, make people buy its products. But if the product has a poor quality or when it need some cleaning, I not sure that asking the muse will be of any help. Not because the muse won’t want to help, but only because it’s not her job.

Another example. Everybody knows that I appreciate KLM a lot. Of course, they have a very good brand strategy but this is not the reason why I began to watch them and pay attention to what they were doing. It all started because of their effective organization strategy that once turned what could have a nightmare into a nice travel experience. Without excellence in customer service, brand strategy has little value and may even be counterproductive.

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Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Signals instead of conversations ?

November 15, 2011 By 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.

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Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

From services management to enterprise 2.0

October 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the shift from the old manufacturing model to a service one is key to the future competitiveness of lots of industries. Rather than adding a layer of service at the point of contact with customers, it’s about reinventing businesses, value propositions and the way it’s executed. It’s easy to understand that the paradigm shift needed for this revolution is very similar to the one needed for enterprise 2.0. And is surely more understandable for lots of organizations.

 

A couple of weeks ago I discovered and read with a lot of interest Du management au marketing des services : Améliorer la relation client – Développer une véritable culture de services (in english from services management to services marketing – Improving customer relationship – Developing a culture of services) by Benoit Meyronin and Charles Ditandy. You may wonder what is the link with the topics I usually discuss on this blog. In fact it’s quite about the same thing but seen from a different point of view. It’s even possible to consider that the ignorance or misunderstanding of some issues related to services management is a real barrier to enterprise transformation, to the paradigm shift that is needed to rethink old manufacturing models and turn them into a services model and prevents from drawing all the organizational consequences.

As am matter of fact, as the book says, the key question est about implementing a culture of service within organizations. Let’s start with a quick aside. There are many ways to define a culture of service. A first one applies to people in their day to day actions and behaviors, most of all when facing customers. The second one is more global. It’s about execution but, also, the way things are seen, thought and designed. The first can come without the seconde but is only to dazzle customers. It makes employees embody a system, a policy that as no structural and operational reality in organization that don’t question themselves. It prevents value creation through services. Pratically speaking, when organization add a service layer on an old industrial/manufacturing model without trying to reinvent the whole, it’s like putting some polish on the customer interface. It has no impact no the delivered value and even less on the perceived value. In such a context, services are a cost that is easy to cut instead of being a value lever.

In short, adding a service layer to a system designed with an industrial/manufacturing approch costs money while rethinking the model as a service one makes organizations make more money. Examples are numeros in our day to day lives. I’ll spare you my usual and favorite digression on the airline industry (which really need to understand this !) but the book is full of examples from many industries (hotel, transportation, car parking…).

Take a minute to think of what “selling mobility” vs “selling cars” means for a car manufacturer. If the old car selling model survives, the “mobility” option costs a lot because it’s layer added on the system. If mobility becomes core, it’s differentiating and helps to create more value. That’s the path that’s followed by lots of car manufacturers. In B2B industries, tire manufacturers have stopped selling tires to airlines for years : they now sell a number of landings and take-offs.

In the end, here are a couple of examples of what a service culture means, taken from the book. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books I read, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 needs reverse management

September 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : there will be no enterprise 2.0 without managers 2.0 with new practices and a new way to contribute to collective success. But holding managers responsible for the whole change is a mistake. Managers will need employees 2.0. In return for their new autonomy, employees will have new responsibilities in the management relationship and will need to learn how to manage their manager. But do they really want to ? Not sure at all.

When we talk about management and enterprise 2.0 it’s often about the unavoidable but tough evolution of the role of middle-managers and with a top down approach, focusing on the relationship between managers and subordinates. A role that’s moving toward facilitation, being supportive, someone who says “how can I help you” rather than “that’s the objective, the methodology…now help yourself”, someone who leads by leadership rather than by objectives etc… The least we can say is that this change is not obvious at all for the people in question. First because it goes against everything they’ve been taught for decades, what’s they’ve been rewarded for. Then because the “you just need to….” is easy but, when it comes to actually doing it, they feel rather lonely.

Of course, such a such is hardly possible without a strong support and accompaniment program. But managers also need their staff. Organizations tend to holding managers responsible for the whole change while employees also have a large responsibility and, consequently, a work to do themselves.

It’s not realistic to thing that managers will let things go, rethink the concept of power and how they contribute to collective success while empowered and autonomous employees will live their own lives, do what they want and ring their managers in case of need.

Employees will have to carry  a part of the change for two reasons :

- to support managers that will need signs, evidences that they do their job well, that they are useful.

- because the evolution of management relationships, empowerment and autonomy come with new responsibilities. Employees will have stakes in driving work relationships because they’ll assume part of the leadership to drive things.

In short, employees 2.0 will need to learn how to manage their managers and wear part of the once despised suit that used to be their manager’s one. But are they ready for this change ? Do they want it ?

I remind of a survey I heard of 2 or 3 years ago on french workplaces. It said that even if more than half of the workforce did not like the way their managers were doing their job, less that a quarter would like to be at their place.

Long is the road…

 

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Enterprise 2.0 people-centric ? Are you really sure ?

January 4, 2011 By 4 Comments

Summary : one of the biggest claimed contribution of enterprise 2.0 is people-centricity. But, apart from having a rich profile telling who people are and the capacity to publish information without information and sign it with their name, what does this people-centricity mean for people ? According to the principle that says the system only lives by the contents that are published, it seems that, even unconsciously, people are asked to serve the system and not the inverse. In fact, users are “promoted” to a content producer without any consideration for their ability and capacity to reuse and make the most of the shared contents. If we want the system to become really people centric we need more than this : new practices to acquire and the freedom of putting them at work. Any 2.0 approach that does not come with an empowerment project will remain content-centric, not people-centric.


One of the key elements of the proposition of value of enterprise 2.0 is to be people-centric instead of being document, processus or anything else centric. The quite clear idea behind this is to say that, if people are the organization biggest asset in the knowledge economy, the whole system has to be structured around them to serve them instead of enslaving them and monopolizing their time and attention for tasks that don’t creat any value to the detriment of those that do.

It applies to a wide and impressive range of situations : useless emails or email discussions unable to support a long and structured conversation, loss of information and knowledge that force people to waste to find them a big amount of time that won’t be available to use them, to much time used to process “internal spam”…

Centering any logic on the user means sparing him with tedious tasks so he’ll focus on those he’s irreplaceable at.

A user-centric approach would mean providing them with what they need and, most of all, teaching them to use it. Too many employees manage to find the right ideas, the good practices or information and have no means to use them. This kind of situation is often caused by lack of empowerment, when people have the right competences to implement things or to lack of support when they don’t have the competences and are looking for someone to rely on.

And what is the main line of many adoption strategy ? Make your employees contribute. Make them generate contents !

For most employees, it just does make no sense because they have the impression to be told to serve a machine they have to feed without expecting anything in return. It’s a little bit like telling a train driver that the specificity of the new “driver centric locomotive” they’ll drive is that…they’ll have to put coal into the boiler themselves.

At this point, enterprise 2.0 is not people-centric (even if there are noticeable exceptions) but content centric….and the quantity of content is often the way success is measured regardless to what contents are (re)used for.

But this is not an irreversible situation if we consider content generation as a primer But users need to know the following steps that will make them feeling like starting the content machine.

A user-centric system should :

• Guarantee users that the information and people they need will be present, identifiable and mobilisable in the system.

In other words, if we want people to get involved we’ll need more that a system used by only 10% of employees. It implies a systematic sharing of some information (to be put in the flow, with all the consequences in terms of job description, evaluation etc…)

This can partly automated. An action in a given tool  can generate an element and event in an activity stream without asking people to double-enter the same content, what is something they’ll never do. Example : a salesperson enter data in the CRM should be able to enter the quantitative and “narrative” data in the same interface, one going to the CRM and the other to the social platform with a link  between both. Synergies and integration are key here.

Mobilisable… here again we’ll face management/HR issues. Make oneself available may make sense for many employees. It may also make sense for the organization if employees are evaluated and rewarded according to a global optimum vs a local maximum (ex : being incited to generate a value of 10 for oneself instead of helping a colleague to generate 30.)

• Empower employees to help them reuse what they’ll get

Even if they have the impression or the certainty to find what they need, employees need to know how to (re)use it. Change the way they do things, implement a new solution to a problem is something they need to learn and has to be secured. It’s about empowerment, trust, letting go… Without these elements, information is not usable so it has no value. So contributing is useless.

• Optimize the information flow

It’s nothing but a tool logic and the good news is that it’s coming, at least from some clear-sighted vendors. “Pushing” the right sources, suggesting the right contacts to users depending on their activities, history, improves the signal/noise ration and improves the perceived value of the tool and the social approach for employees.

Building anything people-centric in the organization is allowing anyone to mobilize the right resources and information and use it to face their day-to-day problems. What I called “service oriented organization” (or SOO) two years ago shares some points with adaptive case management that will surely be a major trend in the upcoming months….and not only to provide people with a rich profile linked to their contributions in which they’ll say they love fishing or to encourage them to write tons on contents to possibly win an internal Pulitzer prize !

PS : One question  came to my mind while writing this post. In your opinion, is there any difference between people-centricity and user-centricity ?

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Engage with customers. And then ?

August 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that the use of social media within companies and between companies and customers are not compartmentalized but complementary disciplines. If the “internal” company is more and more trying to get in touch with customers, the world of marketing struggles to make his way toward internal departments. As communication is becoming service, initiatives that target customers can’t be separated from those that aim at reversing communication flows inside the organization, redefining roles  and realigning the whole organization with the needs of employees who are directrly in touch with customers. To demonstrate its value, social and community makerting will have to replace “push” with “pull” not only in its interactions withn customoers but also in the way the whole organization works.

Even if the external/marketing/communication part has never been my prefered one, it has become obvious that it’s impossible to dissociate the evolution of work from what’s happening outside the corporate walls. First, because no company creates value on its own et a high level of internal performance is useless when a business is not as efficient with its external partners and clients that it is internally (theory of the limiting factor or bottlneck…as you prefer), second because the internal shift from push to pull logically leads to consider customers.

The time when 2.0 was either about marketing or collaboration but not both at the same time is over. Yet, the concept of enterprise 2.0 evolved overtime and everybdoy finds logical to include all external stakeholders into it, what is confirmed by the rise of social crm. But even if enterprise 2.0 is heading down toward customers, marketing struggles to head up toward internal activities.

I recently found this interesting deck about the failure of social media initiatives. It tells us that

- there’s a lack of strategy (81%) and most marketers don’t undestand the value of interactions…and how all these things work.

- consequently, businesses invest more on technology than on people and relationships.

Why Social Media Project<s Fail?! – A European Perspective
View more presentations from BSI.

I’d like to go a little bit further and sum it up in one sentence : when marketing and communication people use social media to communicate better and differently, there are two possibilities:

- either they (or their company) don’t get it and that doesn’t work.

- Or they understand how to make a good use of social media and…they deceive their customers.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The organizational double flip

February 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If we try to summarize in two points the challenges businesses will have to face very soon, I’d say “from push to pull” and “from local to global”. It looks like a double flip for companies but it’s not that far from reality.

• From push to pull : employees have to make more and more “unique” things, would it be for his own purposes or according to what clients ask them. Anyone who’s facing a need has to determine what he needs to achieve is mission because no other person know the situation better. In the worst case he crowdsources within his colleagues or outside the organization the best way to achieve it. Upper levels define the framework of what’s possible or not and provide lower levels with what they need. It’s not level n that decides what n-1 has to do but n+1 that supports level n. It’s an application of the principles of empowerment and subsidiarity I’ve already writen about here.

Generally speaking, it also shows that enterprises are deeply impacted by their environment that defines businesses more than being defined by them. Societal and economic phenomenon, even if they don’t drive businesses, give a framework and a line no CxO can ignore. Not to mention social responsibility or even social busness, we are forced to admit that the way things have to be done is seldom an enterprise decision but the understanding of a problematic raised by a non decision-making plauer (employee, client, supplier, society…).

• From local to global : we produce less and less by following a producting line or its immaterial reincarnation, but rather user an adhox ecosystem of value creators that may be me internal or internal people The expression “constellation of value” that is more and more used describes very well a company that instead of driving people connects stakeholders. Whatever, it’s complex because a large part of the activity and of the results depends on what other people are doing. Knowing that what we do impacts the work of many people, often unknown and that our day to day work is also impacted by these people, having a global or systemic view is essentiel. Systemic seems to be a more appropriate word.

Everybody can unsdestrand that in this kind of situation, bending one’s head and looking at one’s show prevent people from doing anything good since they are affected by things without any hope of anticipating and mastering them. I would loke to know if those who don’t agree to that drive their car keeping their eyes on the number plate of the car they follow. Most of all when the weather is bad.

Having a systemic view makes it possible for people to ancitipate. Anticipate is the right word, better than foresee because complexity is unforseeable by nature. On the other hand complexity is understandable and it consequences car be anticipated provided people are autonomous enough. I won’t explain once more time how focusing on local maximums instead of global optimums badly impacts the overall performance and what are the consequences of a change of scole on management, evaluation etc… but it’s an issue that explain, more than the fear of change, many barriers to change and organizational transformation. These are logical barriers : people are blocked by the consequences of what companies want them to get rid of.

By the way, thinking systemic is also admitting the validity of the previous point.

Many things are said and writen about business issues, what companies should do or not. Whatever how you will call what will be done, what’s sure it that it will have to empower this double flip.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Talent is the bottom-up side of competence

December 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A friend of mine was making fun of the use of the word “talent” since he didn’t see in which way it was different from “ressource”, even if human. He was only seeing one more employer brand trick, a promise that only engages the one who hear it.

It’s true that HR marketing, as general marketing, likes to use new terms to value the people it talks to even if that doesn’t mean anything really changed in the workplace. But if we look into the subject, there is sometimes a true reflection behind all that and we can guess this will spread in the upcomming times.

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Must companies stop trying to organize cross-organization work ? The Nortel Case

December 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Nortel announced they were going to give up their complex matrix organization to focus on their business units. The purpse is to act faster, making decisions as close as possible to the market. Making decision close to the marketin reminds me of either SOO or subsidarity at a time when but is it a pure coincidence, I see many companies trying to tackle the question of empowerment.

The post where I got the information is wondering about the efficiency of going back to a vertical model. What can we think about that ?

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