Customer Relationship & Marketing | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

January 10, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

Do you need a brand strategy on the social web ?

January 9, 2012 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 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.

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

How to keep the humane side of moments of truth in online customer relationship

October 3, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary : even if social media are a good means to make the humane side of the company more visible in the customer relationship, online relationships still struggle at making the most of moments of truth that are key in the service economy. As a matter of fact the human factor plays a big role in such moments and has a big impact on the value felt by the customer. To make up for this lack, it’s important to “put employees on stage”, even occasionally, or to mix online and offline experiences in order to create the feeling that will impact what customers will feel and how they’ll subjectively value the service. But there are two requirements for this to work : an actual service that can be valued and the right culture to behave this way.

When a company uses social media as a channel to manage customer relationships, it could be for different reasons. Because they need to be where the customer, when he’s there. Because it increases responsiveness. Because they make it easy to track weak signals that are about the company but are not directly send to her. Because they make the relationship more humane and more engaging. Let’s focus on the last point.

Nothing is more impersonal than a company that tries to communicate. And things aren’t even better when a company tries to interact with her customers. At best you get a cold message delivered through an anonymous voice. At worse you get a ticket number from the customer service department. In fact things can get even worse when the rules of traditional communications are applied to customer service, what often happens when the communication department starts to try to take care of customers for the only reason they own the social media channel. Using a channel they own to deliver things they don’t master often leads to catastrophes (remember….it’s all about multiplexing). Sometimes, some manage to cross the chasm and, behind the interaction, you don’t feel the cold corporate mechanism but someone who takes care of you. That’s what I call an online guardian angel. This kind of qualitative interaction that make customers feel that, behind the customer relationship/service job there are fully engaged and committed people is more likely to happen on social media than anywhere else. It’s impossible to have the same impact with a contact form. Some may say a phone call should be better at that…but most of time you’ll be answered by someone working at a call center who has nothing to do with the company in question, only following a script to try to answer you. Most of all, you’ll have to fight with the vocal server for a long time to manage to talk with a real human being.

Despite of that, even with the help of social media, online relationships are a true challenge for organizations. When you’re in front on someone, in real life, you can se her attitude, motivation, attentiveness to do something for you. During these moments of truth you can feel more than the corporate customer service policy : you can feel the personal committment of the whole staff. Or not. So, even if some companies ask their employees to sign with their initials the message they publish on the enterprise twitter account, there’s still something missing. Something to compete with these moments of truth when they happen in real life.

Hence the idea to “show” the employees from time to time. Of course it’s only a communication performance around customer relationship that can only be one-shot but they aim at showing this commitment on customer satisfaction. As a matter of fact there’s one thing to be kept in mind : in the world of service, the perceived value matters more than the objectively delivered value. Impressions are essential.

In some ways we can say that Lipdubs, that were very popular a couple of years ago, were a clumsy try in this direction. But they did not deliver any message, any value proposition. But, with time, we began to see more clever and relevant ways to create the “moment of truth” effect on an online interaction.

Your community manager should be a professional. But in which field ?

September 12, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

Summary :with a profile that’s still hard to define, community managers look like rare birds. The only certainty is that they should be true professionals. But in which field ? Knowing social environments, the way they work and their rules seem to be a prerequisite. But, having a closer took to what people really expect online, a good knowledge of the industry and real front-end experience may look at least as essential for a good community manager. Is it sensible for any organization willing to go beyond insubstantial chatter and have a real logic of service toward their customers to rely on people who never met a customer and are unable to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and understand what they feel ? Obviously not.

A couples of week ago a job offer for a community manager position showed up in my twitter timeline. It grabbed my attention and raised a questioning on what skills should a community manager have.

The offer details the skills the community manager should have and, among them, “Knowledge of the travel industry (a trump)”. I stopped on this item. If one think that the role of a community manager is to push messages that have been written by others, say “hello, we’re there” in twitter and facebook, chat with the audience as long as the topic is not too sensitive, it’s true that mastering social tools is enough. But if community management is supposed to be a part of a service driven approach, I’m doubtful.

We know, since the issuing of an IBM report earlier this year that enterprises are wrong about what they think their online audience expects. While they think customers (in fact nothing proves they are only customers…) need more closeness, to be a part of a community, the audience only wants information, discounts and services when they have an issue with what they bought. The social channel is a shared one and customer service is not its least use. In short, instead of communities, love stories and idle chatter, community managers should expect to be sent to the coal mine. It’s even more obvious in the travel industry as this survey shows.

“Airline companies are sending a lot of tweets. They sent over 25,000 in July alone, but users only tweet at these companies for a few reasons. Largely, users want customer service — 86.2 percent of users follow airlines for that reason. Only .02 percent want a social conversation and only 1.6 percent tweet about airline food and entertainment.”

Any customer who once ended up in troubles because of an airline or hotel issue is in fact in a crisis situation. People often mention Zappos as a successful example of a company able to do anything to solve customer problems and sell happiness. That’s true they’re awesome at that. But as I often say, not everybody as the luck of selling shoes. There’s few things in common between a late shipping or the wrong size being delivered and a cancelled/delayed flight, ruined vacations. The customer is not in the same situation, the problem is more difficult to fix, helping costs much more etc… This reasoning applies to many industries that are much more critical than books or clothing selling…

So, let’s come back to the “knowledge of the industry would a trump” point. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: Communities, community management, crisis, crisis management, customer care, Customer Relationship & Marketing, customer service, skills

Communities and selfishnesses gatherings

July 4, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : while it’s quite hard for enterprises to enter the good olds forums where fans have passionate conversations, they’re still very uncomfortable with the communities they try to agregate on the “modern web”, being uncertain about what to do or give to create a real engagement. In fact, all the problem is in the word “aggregate”. On many new media, and especially on Facebook, what is supposed to be gatherings of communities is rather aggregations of selfishnesses. Consequently, understanding what these “groups” are expecting is key to serve those so-called communities : communication, special offers and services. If you’re looking for belonging, engagement and passion, rather go elsewhere…where enterprises are hardly allowed in.

The web did not wait to become 2.0 to host communities. People who shared common interests or purposes used to gather, most often on forums, to share and discuss. Even if there were moderators and people who talk more than others, we can say that everybody was talking with everybody. And even when there was a “central person”, he or she was a member of the community and not a representative of a company.

What changed these last years is that enterprises tried to gather their own communities or into dedicated spaces on public platforms (facebook etc..). What did the forum become ? They’re still alive and organizations seldom have the right behaviors to be allowed in. That’s why they try to grab the leadership on other spaces. I also heard the funnu story of a large company who managed to deal with experts forums talking about their projects before realizing that those experts were more experts than the ones they had inside. In the end they reversed the process and asked those external experts feed them with thoughts and information instead of making the brand enter the forum.

So, let’s talk about these communities, most of all those hosted on Facebook. A closer look makes us realize one things : people have few conversations the ones with the others but talk a lot to the leading enterprise. In fact…the enterprise talks a lot and sometimes gets reactions, sometimes is being called out but there’s nearly no discussions between members. What may lead to the idea that members or fans are not there to meet together but to be with the brand to get personal benefits. It’s not of community of people but a gathering of individuals that want two ways but personal conversations with the brand.

Truth is cruel : those who love a brand or a product are still gathering but elsewhere, sometimes on old forums and prefer not be invaded by the brand.

There’s a notable exception : in B2B, many vendors managed to gather real communities on more or less private spaces but not on public platform, and managed to have real valuable conversations with their customers and users.

So, what are those groups that are brands want to manage of facebook ? The answer is key because it will help to find out how to deal with them in order to make the most of them, create a win-win relationship. They are gatherings of people who are obviously waiting for three things : information, special offers and service. So rather than communities, these groups are aggregations of selfishnesses that need to be fed and served because they will seldom help one another. Help happens elsewhere. Proof is how these groups behave in case of a crises : while in a real community people are helping each other until no one is in trouble anymore, here, people join the group because they have a problem and leave it once fixed (most of time by the company, by other members), without paying attention to other who may still need help. (Yes…people can become fans because they’re unhappy with a brand). And the success of the brand does not matter either to them, their only interest being their personal satisfaction.

People have long thought that the person in charge of such a system had to bring live to communities, stimulate conversations… Not at all. He has to bring information, send gifts and foot the bill when there’s a crisis. Less appealing…but better be lucid when it comes to build a system that works. Organizations need both communication and service professionals.

And what about Twitter ? Neither community space nor group…it’s a place of its own kind. But it may be the less non-community space on the web : no structured communities but lots of open conversation on any topic, and anyone is free to join. It may also be the place where the entry barrier to discussion is the lowest for organizations who want to join the conversations on them, provided they behave the right way.

Bottom line for any organizations ? If you want to play an active role in the system, have a service driven approach. If you don’t mind being more passive, create something appealing and let people do what want with. If nothing happens the problem may not be your approach but you product…(no media can improve bad products…) Of course, both can be done at the same time

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: Communication, Communities, community management, Customer Relationship & Marketing, customer service, facebook, twitter

Salesforce ignores communities…and that’s ok !

May 24, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : when talking about customers, collaboration, web and anything social or 2.0, it’s impossible to avoid communities. Whether made of clients or employees, they are the answer to any issue and no one can have asocial/2.0 discourse without mentioning them. This approach, applied to customer service, has often been hard to implement because of the uncertain behavior of customers communities as well as the gap between the platforms used by customers to share their concerns and those used by those who have to deal with their issues. That said, we have to pay attention to what Salesforce said (or did not…) at Cloudforce 2011 : communities have no place in the corporate discourse, the approach is more structured and cases seem to be the missing link that will fill the gap between structured systems (CRM…) and communities.

In early April I attended Cloudforce 2011 in Paris. At the beginning, my major interest was about multichannel customer service management without flow breaking (to make it simpler : how to receive / intercept any message from a customer, from any media -twitter, facebook etc…-, solve the problem, in a agile and collaborative way if possible, and answer to the customer on the same channel he used without having to switch from one tool to another). I saw interesting things….but, in the end, another thing caught my attention.

I heard lots of things on “social”, customers, collaboration but nothing on communities. I think it’s the first time in such a event that the C word is not overmentioned. Let’s try to understand why (and why it’s good).

- I’ll write about that later but, as I already said here and here, that’s not because your customers are on the web and are talking to you that they are a community. Most of all, when it’s about service because the fact customers are gathered does not change anything to the fact it’s all about individual issues and that people only care about their own problem and not the other’s.

- dealing with such cases, internally, is not about communities either but about adhoc collaborative structures, would it be a permanent experts team or the temporary gathering of people to deal with a case. Identifying those people through a network and finding information in communities does not change anything : it’s a kind of workgroup with a defined goal even if it’s not designed to last after the problem has been solved. Making it work is more about management than community management.

Besides that, Salesforce also showed groups that were not related to customer case management…but very quickly. The reason, in my opinion, is quite easy to understand. What they call “groups” is what others call communities and their viability highly depends on people’s will. Participation on cases is easier to generate and sustain and its result easier to get and value for organizations.

What else ? That confirms several things :

- participation is always easier in the flow than over the flow and tangible benefits are easier to assess in the first case.

- it’s easier to catch the attention of businesses when putting 2.0 activities around the flow rather than shutting oneself way with community management discourses that only have an indirect benefit and which mechanics are hard to implement.

- between structured logics like CRM and unstructured logics like networks and communities, there is a grey zone that’s still poorly addressed and would make a lot of sense : case management. Sure that this topic will become hotter and hotter in the next months.

Filed Under: Customer Relationship & Marketing, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: adaptive case management, advanced case management, case management, cloudforce, cloudforce 2011, Communities, Customer Relationship & Marketing, customer service, salesforce, salesforce chatter

In Social Business, Businesses are the Care Bears

May 10, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : Either externally with customers or internally with employees, one the pillars of any “social” or “2.0″ project is people’s need for more closeness, even intimacy with the enterprise and between themselves. This is the reason why organizations started focusing on engagement, social networks and communities. But is this lever so relevant ? It seems that even if communities have a role to play, organizations and customers don’t agree on the role each of them should have inside and even of the legitimacy of a brand joining customer communities. Ditto for employees who seem to have more desire for efficient work tools than for approaches aiming at bringing them closer one to another. In the end, people seem to be more pragmatic and realistic than businesses. A call for these latter to move toward more operational and pragmatic approaches ?

Among postulates that underlie many social or 2.0 approaches, one is so ubiquitous that seems to be taken for granted by everybody. According to this postulate people, either outside the organization (when they ar customers) or inside (when they are employees) have an irrepressible desire to strengthen their ties with business, to tell them things, to feel valued, to “be a part of something” that will bring them together. Businesses, that are “by definition”, aloof, malicious and inhuman, have to listen to this cry from the heart, facilitate and join communities where attention, passion and even love between participants will make amazing things happen.

We could have believed that businesses with their cold and rational logic would have stepped away and stand their ground…but they did not. They dove into the social world, often in a ungainly way, dreaming of internal and external communities, of being as one with passionate and engaged people in a win-win relationship. With uncertain results.

Some weeks ago, an IBM study dropped a bombshell. It shows that, even if businesses need to be closer to their customers, they don’t understand what customers are expecting.

On the place of social media in corporate strategies

April 21, 2011 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : More and more strategic plans are now involving social media. Should we welcome this or worry ? Knowing that tools are there to serve strategies it may be a bad news to see them promoted to the same level as what they have to serve. The risk of seeing the “social phenomenon” becoming something fashionable enterprises must mention without any real articulation with the strategic plan is very likely. Saying that tools are as important that the goals they serve shows that, in many cases, organizations still don’t understand the social thing and it may have negative consequences in the future.

As usual, when economy takes a turn, in a way or another, organizations change their strategic plans and explain what are their priorities for the next years. So a plan is replacing another that’s not been completed but that’s the way our world is : things change so fast that organizations need to change their direction as fast and often.

Now that’s the economy is slowly recovering, organizations have to change their pose, project and discourse to send signals to the market and re-mobilize their employees. These last months, I had a look at some of these strategic plans that’s been recently published. Most of them share three main points, usually worded like this :

1°) Put customers at the heart of the corporate strategy and concerns

2°) Improve employee’s well-being and development.

3°) Become a leader in social media.

More than being common places, points 1 and 2 are quite clumsy. They will cause comments like “Ah ? Because you didn’t use to care about our customers and employees before ?”. As for the third point, worded as such, it looks rather like a mandatory and opportunistic statement, because organizations can’t afford not paying attention to the last fashionable thing? What does “become a leader in social media” means ? Increase one’s presence ? Create one’s own services for customers and employees ? And what for ?

That’s typically what I call a social media strategy : any organization has to be there, and use these tools without knowing what for. What makes me say that they don’t understand why ? If it was the case, the articulation of the points 1 and 2 with point 3 would be more elaborated. To some extent, the point 3 would have nothing to do there because it’s only a means to serve a strategy and not a goal per se.

Then I guess we’ll soon be witnessing the coming of window-dressing projects, without any connection with reality and which impact will be hard to demonstrate. Have a “social media strategy is mandatory” so let’s have one to look modern. What would you think of a restaurant that would want to become a leader in mustard or pepper ? [Read more...]