We’ve been asked to do some research in this area, specifically how social technologies are, and will, impact roll-out of the new U.S. health care reform in a couple of different areas.  I came across this graphic which depicts a traditional physician-patient encounter:

Source: http://dvsbot.com/sm2strategic/sm2-experience.asp

The patient, quite naturally, has more than just the outcome on their mind, which creates an “experience” with that physician.  And social technologies mean that patients have ample opportunity to share that experience.  For example, have a look at Rate MDs or Rate My MD to see how patients have been discussing doctors for a few years now.

This concept of ‘experience’ is not new, and was probably best crystallized in the 1999 book The Experience Economy.  Let’s look at a hypothetical retail example: In the real world, more than just the sale is important to the customer, something many retailers are fully aware of.  But look at the new customer:

There is far greater depth to the experience dimension, as a result of social technologies.  And whether your focus is also retail, or attracting/retaining employees, or managing members/volunteers in your non-profit, or creating a new product, the above diagram technique is a simple way to help you explore and define the complete experience you are striving to create.

The Community Roundtable, a self-described “peer network of community managers and social media practitioners” released a report last week based on research and member input regarding the “State of Community Management”.  While the report is written from the perspective of the role of a Community Manager, it contains many gems within its 60+ pages that any organization that learn from.  See a download link at the end of this post.

I consume dozens of reports and articles like this on a regular basis, but this one actually caused me to print it (*gasp*) to read more carefully.

The report content is organized around the ‘8 competencies’ of their “Community Maturity Model”.   Here are a few of the key findings that directly coincide with what we have found in our life as Social Media Practitioners:

Strategy: “Difficulties in developing social media and community strategies often expose issues with core business strategies, particularly as they relate to cross-functional approaches.”  So true.   It’s hard to knit a consistent approach to anything across organizational silos, and a community is no different.  Added to this, community requires transparency, which not all parts of the organization like very much.

Also in Strategy, “Online communities require an orientation around behaviours, particularly group behaviours vs. demographic characteristics.”   The key focus is relationships.  That’s what matters.  And the unique elements which cause them to formulate and grow in online environments.

Leadership: “Relationships can be saved if constituents are complaining.  When they don’t complain, its far more risky.”  Simply assuming all is good because you don’t hear negative feedback, is like assuming kids don’t complain about parents to their friends, or employees don’t talk about their bosses outside work.  And just as risky.

Culture: “Using metaphors is an excellent way to communicate training, guidelines, and models to individuals newly exposed to social technology and new modes of communication”.  We do this all the time, calling it “story-telling”.  And here’s a great metaphor from the report to describe the skills required to participate in a new community: its “similar to that of an expatriate living in a foreign country.”  Nicely put.  We’ll use that one, too.

Community Management: a few good points here…

• “The ‘community’ gets lots of activity when marketing pushes are done but then dies off quickly afterward because no relationships have been established.”  See above: it’s about the relationship(s).  Marketing, especially, needs to understand the critical differences in relationship between on- and offline campaigns
• “The key to managing successful communities is understanding behaviour economics and anthropology vs. focusing on the latest tools and technology.”  Or flaming logos, or dumb videos.  It’s the people.
• “Idle or off-topic chit-chat is a critical part of community…” “…this is actually a positive indication of successfully enabling relationships.”  People talk to each other to gain trust.  Go figure.

Content and Programming: “Before jumping in or out of (all the social media tools & networks) understand who needs to be communicated with, how, and how they use various technologies and channels, then identify the appropriate tools.”  Someone has been reading our Social Media Best Practices, I think.

Polices and Governance: “Legal and/or HR teams are more comfortable when they know what is going on.”  “Legal teams’ concern is often around the unknown.”  You’ve heard the phrase ‘Never blindside your CEO”?  Ditto for Legal and HR.  Involve them up front.

Metrics and Measurement: “Measure as few things as you can in order to track progress effectively,” and these “should fall directly out of your community strategy that should, in turn, be derived from your business strategy.”  Ditto for our Social Media Balanced Scorecard.

Tools (on social media analysis vendors): The tools are also not intuitive and will still require legwork”.  A Fool With A Tool, Is Still A Fool.

As indicated by a Foreword note, the “report provides valuable insight into the real world human dynamics and (organizational) politics, which are instrumental to enduring success in community building.”  The report is graciously offered for free.  You just have to register with an email address.

Google’s blog surfaced an article today about an Italian prosecution of 4 of it’s executives for criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code.  Three, were convicted of failure to comply with the Italian privacy code, while all 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation.

The crime? Some idiots at a school in Turin, Italy posted a video of themselves bullying an autistic child.  Google’s response was not only to take down the video as soon as Italian Police made them aware of it, they assisted the police in identifying the culprits which led to a successful prosecution.  Nonetheless, a prosecutor and judge in Milan thought Google needed to pay which resulted in convictions.

This is a mindset that could bring the internet to a halt.  As Google says, if “sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

I encourage you to read the full post.

I thought I’d share a few of these this week:

• TED2010 recently wrapped up, and among the many entertaining and thought-provoking gems from every TED conference, I watched this talk from UK Conservative MP David Cameron on the Next Age of Government.  I’m not a political watcher by any means, but it may be worth your while to check out his answer to the question “How do we make things better without spending more money?”  The answer, of course, lies in the people-based technology we use today for the rapid dissemination of information.  *ahem* Social Media.  My take:  nice to see at least one politician thinking about spending less money, enabling transparency & accountability through more information, and  thinking we need to measure more than just GDP to assess community well-being (can anyone say Social Media Balanced Scorecard?)
• You can’t have a week go by without the the largest internet playah on the planet causing a stir, and last week was no different.  Google announced Buzz, a real-time lifestream integrated with Gmail, that some have called a Facebook/Twitter killer.  Mashable editor Pete Cashmore provides his early views on CNN, and also, Mashable reports on the backlash that is taking shape in a class-action lawsuit against breach of privacy.  There is also a privacy review here in Canada.  My take:  if you think Buzz is a breach of privacy, you probably don’t want to know how much Google already knows about you.
• The Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) released the “Guide To Disclosure In Social Media Marketing” this week.  December 2009 was the effective date of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.  WOMMA decided to create complimentary Social Media Marketing guidelines.  My take:  too cumbersome, which means, you’ll never get unscrupulous marketers to comply.
• Vator TV hosted an interesting interview from an internet analyst at CitiBank, Mark Mahaney.  Mark predicts that cash-rich notables will be looking to acquire smaller companies in the smart-phone, ecommerce, mobile advertising, and location-based services spaces.  My take:  could not agree more.  Mobile anything will be huge this year.  If you are an Atlantic Canadian business in mobile, this will be your break-out year.
• There are frequent company-bashing stories coming out of the social media space, but if you’re a teacher, you may want to read this story about a student who set up a Facebook page called “Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!“   and encouraged people to post what they didn’t like about this educator.  The ‘Ferris Bueller‘ of Facebook was reprimanded and suspended.  She subsequently sued the school and the judge decided the school had over-reacted since “essentially the school was trying to control the student’s actions”, i.e.: chatting on a social network, outside of school hours  “when it was none of their business.”  My take:  sticks and stones may break my bones, but Facebook will never hurt me.

You will have to consume summaries from both Microsoft and Accenture to get the complete picture, since for some reason; they have each decided to report slightly different levels of detail, while reaching the same conclusion:  workers want, and use social media, while executives don’t want it and implement policies against using social tools:

• 73% of workers see business value in using these tools, yet only 11% of executives drive their use
• Over 1/3 of workers save 1-2 hours per day using social tools, and 64% cite productivity gains by up to 50%
• 39% of execs cite ‘security’ as their major concern, and 74% have security policies in place
• 74% of workers say social tools helped complete their projects on time or ahead of time
• Only 18% report social tools are aligned with corporate culture
• About 2/3 of employees use social tools daily to collaborate with other employees
• Most cite scarcity of skills/talent, increasing number of international partners, and complex and changing regulatory environment as top drivers for social media requirement in oil & gas

Using the age-old Capability and Willingness Magic Quadrant, here’s how I see the distance between workers and executives in the industry:

To raise willingness, you provide motivation.  And the gap you see here is a big world problem.

So, what will motivate employers in Oil & Gas, or all employers for that matter, to increase their willingness to use social tools for work, when there is obvious benefit to both the corporation and the workforce?

This is a common disconnection, not unique to oil & gas.  Here are some of my recent thoughts on the matter:

But to an industry as crucial to the region as this, why do executives still maintain a non-productive, old school stance?  These businesses will operate long beyond the current executive and workforce base has retired.

Perhaps a cultural “blowout” will need to happen for Oil & Gas to begin preparing for the extinction of their thinking and the transition to control by Generation Y and beyond.

FICO (the Fair Issac Corporation) are widely known for their credit scores and enterprise decision management systems.  They are huge, they are regulated, they are well-known, they are very successful, they don’t seem to be the type of company to take many risks.  And, they receive an enormous amount of inquiries from customers (people like you and me) on how to make their credit scores better.

Since they are governed by the U.S. Consumer Credit Protection Act (a.k.a. Credit Repair Organizations Act), they can’t directly advise clients on how to improve their credit scores.  Barry’s brain-child, was to create a community where FICO customers could help and advise each other.  Better for them, better for FICO.

The numbers’ side of the house are quite impressive.  To name a few:

=> A significant reduction in the ever-increasing support calls they field (23% increase down to 1%) => Product spending increases 66% after a customer joins the MyFICO community => MyFICO forum postings accounts for 39% of search engine traffic to the FICO web site => MyFICO page views accounts for 20% of overall web traffic in the organization => Community membership growth is in the 10’s of thousands every month, and is now at about 340,000

But any regular readers of our corporate blog know I hate incomplete success stories , especially when they are labelled “case study”.  So I asked Barry about the set up and maintenance costs of the community.  Rather than revealing dollar amounts, I’ll frame it up this way:  establishing the community paid for itself in 6 months.  That’s vendor and internal costs included.  Ongoing conversions of community membership spending also more than pays “the really small amount,” as Barry puts it, to maintain the community.  And the further marketing opportunities that are available from there.

ROI?  QED.

But I took Barry a bit further, away from hard data into the “soft” stuff we use to judge things like ‘mood’ and ‘personality’ and ‘sentiment’.  I’ve been asked to speak with the San Diego Software Industry Council next month about how to analyze the Community Experience.  Part of that will be presenting the Social Media Balanced Scorecard we’ve been working on.

“I’m glad you’re asking about that,” (the soft data), Barry says.  As it turns out, it seems to me, that this is something that Barry is most proud of.  And, I can see why.  It’s the overlooked success story, in my opinion.

If someone said to you, “I’m going to build an online community where people are going to openly discuss, advise, and reveal things about their poor credit scores,” what would you say?  Likely, “Yeah, right.”  When I asked Barry what upper management at FICO thought of his idea, he said, “Well, there was a lot of head-scratching.”

But here’s what actually happened: the community members very quickly used the platform to provide support for one another, when peer education was what was anticipated.  Super-Users, or “VIPs” in MyFICO-speak, began spending hours online, on their own time with no compensation, just to help other community members who were concerned about their own credit scores and what to do about it.  This behaviour has continued to grow.

I said to Barry that it sounds like community members feel like it’s a ‘safe’ place to discuss such sensitive information. “Yes,” he said, “That’s exactly it.”  “All members have a sense of ownership, and I just spend about a quarter of my time guiding the community leaders.”

There are many other aspects to this story, if fully described, would take a book chapter to explain.  Things like the steps he took and discussions he had internally to get the system up and online, how he established and maintains good behaviour, and how the community discussion is becoming a source of information in the financial world.  Not to mention, more ‘hard data’ regarding internal marketing and customer support.

A “Podcamp” is a concept created by Christopher Penn and blogger/author Chris Brogan back in 2006.  It is a free, community-driven “unconference” (where attendees create the agenda and present topics) focused on new media.  The concept is very popular, and Podcamps have been held in many locations around the world ever since.

Last year, Halifax held the first Podcamp in the region, and the event was terrifically successful.  This year’s Podcamp looks to be just as good, judging by the fact it was “sold-out” weeks in advance (although it is free to attend, organizers need numbers for fire regulations). But also, since it’s free, some may decide at the last minute not to show up.  So it may be worth your while checking it out anyway.  You can add your name to the waiting list here.

The key factor in a Podcamp, to me, is the insights you glean from people in your “neighbourhood”.  There are no high-profile speakers conducting the sessions (apart from the lunchtime keynote guest), just a deep display of knowledge and talent from the area.  And the topics are varied and engaging.  So much so, you will likely want to be attending sessions that are running concurrently.  It’s handy, therefore, attendees are encouraged to exercise “the law of two feet” and move freely between sessions as they are being conducted.

My schedule will not permit me to attend this year, which is unfortunate, since I had such a good experience at the inaugural Podcamp Halifax last year.  Here’s a very brief clip from that event:

http://blip.tv/file/3110319

Podcamp Halifax is very well run, the hosts are exceptionally gracious, and I’m sure this year will be even better than last year.  My thanks to them for helping to spread the word about social media in Atlantic Canada.

*cough*

Throughout the 2009 calendar year, Danny, a Toronto-area PR and Communications consultant, ran a campaign he called “12 for 12k”.  He dreamed up a simple concept:  raise $12,000 per month, for 12 charities, over 12 months.  It may not have hit the overall target, but starting at zero awareness late in 2008, 12for12k proved yet again that social media is a viable and valuable tool for non-profit organizations.

The fund-raising technique that may be surprising was the campaign’s use of something called the ChipIn “widget”: a small, easily implemented piece of functionality on a web site that allowed donors to contribute very small amounts of money to their charity of choice.

For the most part, non-profits still rely upon telephone or door to door canvassers looking for donations from individuals or selling tickets for some draw or other, and universally seek more substantial amounts from corporate sponsors.  Yet the social media micro-method multiplies the potential donor audience, and increases probability of donation by lowering the entry donation amount.  In some cases, a donation minimum of merely $0.01.  The result is a vastly greater number of people contribute small amounts, resulting in a highly successful overall donation total.

Not convinced?  The American Red Cross needed a very quick, simple way to respond immediately to the terrible disaster this week in Haiti.  They turned to social media.  Using primarily Twitter and Facebook, they asked cellular users to send the SMS text “HAITI” to 90999.  This resulted in a $10 charge conveniently added to the user’s cell phone bill.  In about one day, they raised almost $4 million dollars (USD).

“Micro” is a key aspect of social media, and with respect to non-profits, an often overlooked concept.  In future posts, I’ll also cover the concept of ‘micro-volunteering’.

And what does this have to do with business in Atlantic Canada?

Business-people here spend an enormous amount of time and effort supporting non-profit organizations in the region.  You only have to look back to last year’s Top 50 CEO Winners, who volunteer with over 270 organizations, and provided over $20.6M in cash and in-kind contributions.  So this article is aimed squarely at you, Mr./Ms. Atlantic-Business-Person, so you have some evidence you can take back to that non-profit you work with, and try to change some old thinking.

The opportunity for non-profits to improve relations, increase awareness and (potentially) increase the money they need is almost old news across the internet.  But as a service provider who lives in this part of the world, I can’t point to any examples from here as successful as the ones mentioned in this article.  As business people in the region, I hope you are helping that special cause of yours to make the transition into social media.

For further reading, view this presentation we used a few times last year:

Are there stories you can share about non-profits in Atlantic Canada using social media?

The list of weird and misspelt names never seems to end, continually changes, and you think you’ll never keep up.  Is this all just Greasy Kid Stuff, or is there something about Social Media that means something to you?

We only have to look to recent history to discover similarities between today’s explosion of social technologies, and other technologies your organization has implemented.

I’ll lay odds, for example, that a few of you remember staring at your first Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and wondering how it was going to improve a business function, much less make your life any easier.  Could your organization function as well without a spreadsheet now?

Or how about email?  You may have even been one of the few who had an assistant print them off for you to read.  Or at least been resistant to this new inundation of messages from people.  Hands up if you now carry a smart phone and access email anywhere, anytime to communicate with individuals and small groups of people.

Many of the people you do business with started asking for the address of your web site.  So you finally gave in and created one to communicate with larger groups of people you didn’t even know.  Would you take down that site and give up your domain name now?

Organizations exist for many different reasons, but for-profit or not, still share common operational requirements:  make more money than you spend, do that as productively as possible with the best people you can find, through relationships with many different groups.

Social media doesn’t change that.  But as many are discovering now, it can help the people in your organization communicate, collaborate, and be more effective at what you need them to do.

Technology will continue to evolve, as humankind desires to create better tools to help us do things in better ways.  As a race, we tinker with things that exist to improve them and innovate to conceive whole new approaches to things.  We are always looking for that better mouse trap.

Social media is the “how”; a reflection of what people do:  they communicate, work together, ask questions, help each other, achieve things.   It’s the next iteration of a continual technology evolution that parallels human behaviour.  But if you are finding the tools are too hard to use, or too hard to understand, it’s not really your fault.  It’s because the technology has not yet caught up to how smart people really are.

But that won’t last for very long.  Just watch any teenager send a text message, while surfing the web, listening to music, and playing a game.  The pace of change is accelerating.  The next consumer and workforce generation demands it.  And that tomorrow is not far off.

This blog is here to raise awareness of the many aspects of Social Media, and provide a venue to discuss what that means to Atlantic Canadian businesses.

So what does it mean to you?