Collaboration thru Technology

In a recent podcast I had the pleasure of interviewing Liz Guthridge, the founder of Connect Consulting Group. We discussed Lean, Smart Mobs, Peer to Peer Networks and Crowdsourcing. A lot of ground in thirty minutes. Below is a transcription of the podcast, Relationship Building thru Technology

At Connect Consulting Group, Liz helps leaders implement high-risk strategic initiatives in their organizations. She has expertise in employee communications, research and change leadership. She also serves as a community expert volunteer for Powernoodle, and has facilitated multiple sessions over the past year.

How to unite Development and Operations?

DevOps is becoming a familiar word in the world of IT and as a result shifting the focus away from separate departments working independently to an organization-wide collaboration. It’s about addressing all the work as a whole, versus looking only at the bits and pieces, or only looking at capital versus expense.

One of the leaders of the DevOps movemen is Dominica DeGrandis (@dominicad), who teaches and coaches teams using Kanban for IT Operations and Development Operations.  She is an independent consultant as well as an associate of David J. Anderson.  Her background includes ten years of doing Configuration Management, build and deployment automation, and server & environment maintenance, followed by leading teams performing those functions.

I think whether you are a DevOps or just a Kanban fan,  you can take some insight from this podcast. You don’t just have to be in IT to receive value from this conversation. Enjoy the podcast.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode (right click and save)   or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

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Additional conversations with Dominica:

• Audio file on Dominica explaining her Dev/Ops Class
• Another short Audio with Dominica DeGrandis discussing Personal Kanban

More into Social Media? Using Lean Thinking in Social Media

Using Lean Thinking in Social Media

Ric Dragon’s organization is DragonSearch, one of the best boutique SMM (social media marketing) and SEO agencies in New York. They help companies use existing internal resources to monetize their investment in social. As a result of this work, Ric recently authored Social Marketology: Improve Your Social Media Processes and Get Customers to Stay Forever.

From Amazon:

Drawing from such process methodologies as Lean and the Capability Maturity Model, Dragon helps you develop a social media process that is quantifiable, repeatable—and improvable. His process is based on these basic steps:

• Focus on desirable outcomes: Vision, Goals, Objectives, and Metrics
• Pinpoint the very smallest segments of your customers
• Determine the communities to which these microsegments belong
• Identify the influencers of those communities
• Create an action plan for your project
• Measure and constantly improve your efforts

The beauty of Dragon’s method is its core flexibility. New social media platforms are guaranteed to pop up in the near future. Any strategy based on the methods in this book can be adapted to take full advantage of them.

The age of blind trial and error for social media marketers is over. Social Marketology provides the means to implement an effective campaign that is testable, controllable, and fully integrated within broader campaigns and goals.

Enjoy the podcast:

 

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode (right click and save)   or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

 

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Ric also has another eBook published: The DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual.

Is Relationship Mapping the new Critical Path?

How good are you at managing the relationships that your organization builds? As we move from a Product Dominant to a Service Dominant market, the relationships we create are at the core of our business model. However, how many of us understand these relationships? How many of us know what collaborative networks the other members of our team or organization are creating? Can we be successful, can we be social without this understanding?

Our world is increasingly more collaborative driving changes in the way decisions are made. Our organizations need to change to a more collaborative structure but the question is, where do we begin? I am always amazed how Lean happens to be there when I am ready to use it. It reminds me of the old Buddhist proverb, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Back in 1976, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) saw the need for tools to promote innovation, communicate information and successfully plan major projects. A team researched and developed the seven new quality control tools, often called the seven management and planning (MP) tools, or simply the seven management tools. Not all the tools were new, but their collection and promotion were. They are:

1. Affinity diagram
2. Relations diagram
3. Tree diagram
4. Matrix diagram:
5. Matrix data analysis
6. Arrow diagram
7. Process decision program chart (PDPC)

Recently my use of the relationship diagram in particular has started to increase. Maybe not in the traditional sense of cause-and-effect relationships but the input/output connections between selected parts of the organization and the value that is created. The eerie part of this is that after creating several of these and one rather elaborate relationship map; I compared it to the Value Network modeling that had been introduced to me by Verna Allee, M.A., co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC. It was strikingly close to her model depicted below. (Verna Allee, M.A., is co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC introduced me last year to Value Network Mapping through this Business901 podcast, What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks?).

From Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by Verna Allee with Oliver Schwabe is a digital edition book located at http://www.valuenetworksandcollaboration.com.

One of the items that has intrigued me a great deal over the summer has been The Last Planner® System (LPS). The Last Planner® was created by Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell co-founders of the Lean Construction Institute. In long term building projects, they have found that managing relationships is the important part of project management. Last week, I had a post that discussed this, Crucial & Collaborative Conversations for Predictable Design & Delivery and tomorrow; I have a podcast with Alan Mossman of The Change Business where we discuss this relationship style of project management. An excerpt from the podcast follows.

Joe: One of the things that you mentioned is “Collaborative Short Term Production Planning," and the promise conversation cycle. Can you explain to the audience what that is?

Alan: This promise cycle is completed entirely in language. There is a request, there is the negotiation, there is a promise, there is a declaration of completion, and a declaration of satisfaction or dissatisfaction as appropriate.

What is missing, in my view, in a lot of construction, is that because of the critical path method, there is not enough time spent on managing promises, managing commitments. It's all coming from directives. You will do this. You will do that. So the project manager is telling people what to do rather than ensuring that the people on the project understand what needs to be done, so that they are in a position to make offers and to make promises about what they will do.

The collaborative planning, collaborative programming, make ready, are foundations for Last Planners to make promises about the work that they will do next week, because they've got direct involvement in preparing the work to be done.

As our world changes, it seems that these relationships, these value networks and person to person interactions will not be decreasing but may be our critical path to success.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop.

Storytelling with New Media – Are you ready?

Transmedia Storytelling is a story experience both for and with an audience that unfolds over several media channels. Author Andrea Phillips provides a fantastic introduction in this podcast and in her new book, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. A previous written excerpt can be found at, The Future of Simulation Games: Transmedia Storytelling.

The more you connect to your audience and the more you get them involved in the storytelling process, the more successful you will be. Transmedia isn’t the future, it is now. This is how you tell your story, touch your audience, and take your game to the next level. As you listen, think about how you might create your next storyboard! Could you make it interactive? Could you include video of before and after? What stops you from making a storyboard interactive? Or asking questions of the viewers?

 

 

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

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Andrea Phillips is a transmedia writer and game designer who has worked on award-winning projects for clients such as HBO, Sony Pictures, and Channel 4 Education, plus original projects like Perplex City, Thomas Dolby's Floating City, and the nonprofit human rights game America 2049. Her indie work includes Balance of Powers and the forthcoming Felicity.

This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

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Accessing the Full Value of the Cloud

Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century) was my guest on the podcast, The Next Step in Cloud Computing–Humans. Tom is the author of eight books and founder of Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based think tank, which was named one of the fastest growing private companies in the US by Inc. Magazine. Delphi provides advice on innovation practices and methods to Global 2000 organizations and government agencies.

This is a transcription of the podcast.

Tom is an engaging speaker, (samples at http://tkspeaks.com), and you will find the podcast very entertaining. He left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

Related Information:
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Uncommon Thoughts about Service
Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing
Why is ‘x’ the unknown?

Worry about Security in Cloud?

1,000 laptops are lost, stolen or misplaced every week at Los Angeles International Airport. Where's the security there? There is none.

A Thursday podcast this week is with Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century). Tom is an engaging speaker, (you can find some samples at http://tkspeaks.com), and you will find the podcast very entertaining. He left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

Joe: How does the cloud address security? Is it just as comfortable to have it out there somewhere as it is on your own server?

Tom: Well, the first thing that we should talk about, because it's really important, is the perception around security. Let's write that down. One of the concern's people have is, when my information moves from my local hard disk, or from my local server that's housed somewhere where I can lock it up, whether it be in my home or in my office or in some facility, there is this sense that only I control access to it. That's just not true.

If you look at what's happened recently with the alleged hacking of Iranian nuclear-power facilities that are generating potentially material for nuclear weapons, those were devices that were not hooked up to the Internet, by the way. Yet, supposedly, now we don't know this for a fact. From what we've been told, the US government was able to hack into those machines and create some enormous damage to the centrifuges that actually create the nuclear material.

All this happened without anyone being aware until the centrifuges spun out of control. We have this sense that, because we have locked it up, it's not on the Internet; it's not attached to the cloud; it's safe. That's just not the case. Any system can be hacked. Security is a fundamental challenge in any computer‑based system.

I'll give you another example. At Los Angeles International Airport, which I often fly in and out of, in a single week, there are over 1,000 laptops that are lost, stolen or misplaced. That's an astronomical number. I can't get my mind around that, over 1000. It's actually 1200 at last count. Where's the security there? There is none.

As we move to the cloud, we actually create a high level of security and here's why. This is the part that most folks don't often understand. The reason the cloud has the potential to be more secure is because the cloud is constantly on the offensive, constantly looking for patterns and trends that indicate that someone is hacking it or attempting to hack it.

You've got a tremendous ability, because of the resources being applied to the cloud, to be more protective and more diligent around intruders and possible corruption of data than you ever would have on your personal computer or as a small business, what you would be able to bring to bear on that problem would be so small in comparison.

Half of all small businesses don't even back up their local hard drives. Again, where's the security? If the hard drive crashes or a server crashes, where's that information? Half of all businesses don't even back up what they have today. We've got to be very careful here because we can't hold the cloud to some arbitrary 100 percent secure standard, because that standard does not exist.

What does exist in the cloud that is a much more sophisticated ability to constantly be on the watch for security threats. That to me is what we should be talking about. How do we invest in that security in such a way that all of us, small businesses, individuals, large businesses; nations have the ability to protect what needs to be protected? That only happens through a concerted, coordinated effort, which is what you have in the cloud.

Related Information:
Process Control Thoughts from the Poppendiecks
Uncommon Thoughts about Service
Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing
Why is ‘x’ the unknown?

Will someone pay for Intangible Value?

In a recent blog post, Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!, I discussed the book Uncommon Service. Next weeks Business901 podcast guest co-author Anne Morriss discusses the four universal truths outlined in the book for delivering uncommon service:

1. You can’t be good at everything.
2. Someone has to pay for it.
3. It’s not your employees’ fault.
4. You must manage your customers.

This is an excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  The next service truth is that "Someone has to pay for it." We talk in the Service Dominant Logic^TM Thinking (Vargo and Lusch,2006) world where the value is in the use of the product. That is what attracted me to your book, the service side of everything. One of the things that is happening, we are making a transition from a product to a service focus; we're switching from a tangible to an intangible world. The things that we are giving away free to sell our product now, are actually the things that have value because our product has been commoditized. I thought your number two service truth, "Someone has to pay for it," addressed that. Does that really address moving from that tangible to an intangible world?

Anne:  It's such a wrenching process and an important journey for some many companies. So many companies are going through it right now ‑‑ some of the most competitive companies in the world. GE used to sell light bulbs. Now, they're providing energy solution, if you look at the profit‑drivers in that company. The same is true for IBM. Those companies are on a big learning curve, right now, in terms of figuring out, what does it mean? We would argue it changes everything! It changes every part of your model. You have to think about the four pieces of a service model. We're talking about in our world view, it's very different depending on services whether you're selling products or selling services.

The importance of culture, it matters more in services. The funding is harder in services. To your question, Steve Jobs can go into his secret phone lab and come up with the perfect phone. Most of the value of that phone is embedded in the product itself. But, when you're selling services you have to involve customers. You have to involve employees in a very intimate way in the value creation process. All the rules are new and different.

Now the funding mechanism is a lot harder. It's easier for us as consumers to pay more for something tangible that we can touch and feel. That's why Starbucks charges you a lot for that drink that's sitting on the counter even though a big part of the experience is the beautiful space, and the comfy chairs, and this third space that Howard Schultz envisioned that was just as nice if not nicer than your living room, and filled with beautiful people, and inspiring in terms of your productivity.

It would be absurd to put meters next to those chairs. It's a lot easier to charge five dollars for a cup of coffee. That's one of the challenges that service companies have to wrestle with when you're talking about this kind of intangible value that you can't drop on your foot. How do you get people to pay for it?

Our basic message is you need pricing that's simple, transparent, and fair. The other piece of it is that the answer might not be to charge your customers more. You may have to figure out other ways to fund it.

The book’s website is an excellent resource and I encourage you to take the survey and utilize the Service Design Tool located there. This is a very challenging perspective for most of us. However, I think you will find the information to be well researched and presented in a compelling fashion.

Related Information:
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The End of Best in Market
Where does a Customer Find Value in your Organization?
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts!

Inspiring Innovation thru Standard Work

Standard work should be an enabler of innovation, not a hindrance. In an upcoming Business901 podcast with Terri Griffith, we will take a look at a few of these principles and find out why it is so important to access where you are at before venturing into the unknown. In the premier show of Innovators Exchange, Tad Milbourn, senior product manager of Intuit Brainstorm, speaks with Terri Griffith, author and professor of Management at Santa Clara University. Tad and Terri discuss her new book, The Plugged-In Manager and the role that a plugged-in manager can play in inspiring innovation. It serves as an excellent preview to the podcast.

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Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business

USERS, NOT CUSTOMERS

Forrester predicts that by 2012 half of all consumer purchases will either be transacted online or driven by online research and word of mouth. To succeed in the digital marketplace, it’s no longer customers that matter most, but users—anyone who interacts with your company digitally. Keep users happy, and customers follow.

The Business901 Podcast guest, Aaron Shapiro CEO of digital agency HUGE in Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business, shows why today’s most critical driver of success is usability excellence.

"Today’s most successful companies organize their business around users and building user satisfaction," writes Shapiro. To make users your growth engine for your customer base and for your entire organization, Shapiro introduces a comprehensive approach to refocusing every aspect of your operations on users including sales, marketing, HR, and organizational structure.

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Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Users or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Based on his experience helping some of the world’s biggest brands evolve to meet the challenges of rapidly changing technology and evolving consumer habits, Shapiro outlines the seven things every company needs to change in order to survive in a digitally driven economy. Shapiro's analysis also includes a study of the Digital Leadership Set - companies in the Fortune 1000 that most effectively utilize digital across all aspects of their business. These companies, including Best Buy and Zappos, attract customers by providing appealing digital experiences. And they're rewarded with rising stock price and performance. You'll learn how digital leadership has brought huge profits to companies large and small including:

You don’t need to be a techie to master a user-first management philosophy. You just need to accept that the people who interact with your company online are what's most important.

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Does the Customer Experience mimic the Employee Experience?

After reading The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW it really got my mind spinning. So much has been written and said about Zappos that I can’t say the book surprised me but it did allow me to gain a deeper understanding of the internal workings. More so, the book really generated my interest on the relationship of employee and customer experience as demonstrated in my blog post, Is Zappos the Next Toyota?

Does the customer experience have to mimic the internal company culture? Is that not what Zappos is all about? Reviewing my latest readings and blog post on organizational culture, When Efficiencies and Innovation no longer work, is Customer Centricity the answer?, I would have to say that to be true. So how would you create that fun game type culture? Of course, I turned to Gamification which has been used primarily to focus on marketing and extending the customer experience.

If have to mimic the internal structure to the external, should not Gamification apply internally. I turned to my favorite Gamification resource, Amy Jo Kim and reviewed a recent slide deck of hers that was based on 7 Core Concepts for creating Compelling Products.

1. Know your players: design for their personal & social needs
2. Build fun/pleasure/satisfaction into your core activity loop
3. Design for 3 key stages of your player lifecycle
4. Build a system that’s easy to learn and hard to master
5. Use game mechanics to “light the way” towards mastery
6. As players progress, increase the challenge & complexity
7. Embrace intrinsic motivators like power, autonomy & belonging

Beyond Gamification: 7 Core Concepts for Creating Compelling Products

View more presentations from Amy Kim

Do you think you can get Human Resources in on this? A recent podcast of mine, Games maybe your only chance to attract the best and brightest talent may give you some additional thoughts on this subject. But if you want to create the customer experience, than maybe you need to start designing the employee experience.

Can you think of a few ways this might look and apply at your company?

About Amy Jo Kim: Presentation is from Amy Jo Kim, an adjunct professor of Game Design at USC’s Digital Media school, recently named top US-based game design school. She’s also the author of Community Building on the Web (2000), a design handbook for digital communities that’s used worldwide at game studios & universities.[Email Amy].

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Demonstrating Social Media using an Elephant

Great lesson on using social media. It is not about the tools but more about the connection. We have all heard this before but the Antwerp Zoo give us the perfect lesson through the birth of a baby elephant. 

They do it so well that at the end of the video, you hardly remember a single social media tool used.

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What will your workplace be like in 2020?

Jeanne Meister, co-author of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today discusses how online technologies and the advent of digital and social media are changing the ways in which companies source talent, customize employee development, and promote agile leadership.

In this video Jeanne connects 2020 with TODAY!

The 2020 Workplace is a book that I believe is a must read. Key points are made about having 5 generations in the workplace, reputation management and the role that social media will play internally and externally at your organization. I think one of the key takeaways from the book is the authors’ description of the  social learning ecosystem. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

Many of the items mentioned are being used in forward thinking companies already and I believe that you need to be preparing for them now. The authors do outline a strategy on how you can do just that.

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Building a team & Who they Chose

Central is a Research, Design & Development firm based in Sausalito, just over the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco. They use the design process to tackle complex problems and help transform the way organizations, people and networks look at systems design. These two videos of 20 videos are part of a process they used to assemble a group of people suited to taking on the task of fixing sustainable fishing. 

Building a Team from Central on Vimeo.

The Workshop, Part II: Who we invited and why from Central on Vimeo.

If you are intrigued by the Design Thinking concept these videos represent some real life demonstration of the process. It is not someone just talking about it.

P.S. And there is a lot of personality in the videos. 

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Are right brain thinkers better leaders?

Timothy W. Fowler (also known as The Right Brain) is CEO of BusinessLeadership.com. He details numerous process improvement efforts utilizing right-brain dominant-skills in the Business901 podcast and answered a few questions I had…

1. Specifically what is Right Brain problem-solving?
2. How can right brain thinking help business leaders?
3. Do you want a whole group of right brains in one group?
4. How do you hold right-brainers accountable?
5. What are the benefits of right brain thinking?

Tim is a University of Kentucky Certified Lean Master, a Goldratt Institute Theory of Constraint Supply Chain Expert, an ASQ-Certified Six Sigma Black Belt, and a Licensed Social Worker with a SECRET clearance. He is a visual-spatial thinker who designed President Obama’s Air Force One secure inspection and re-fueling process and he is also the founding Director of Super Bowl Champion Coach Joe Gibbs Youth For Tomorrow

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Tim will also be speaking at the ASQ Columbus Spring Conference. It is a one day event on March 24th with registration beginning at 7:30 AM and the conference from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. Additional information and registration can be obtained at http://www.asq-columbus.org.

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A Business Perspective on Social Media

The secret to connecting with consumers in a fragmented, chaotic marketplace, then, lies in how businesses collaborate with customers. WIKIBRANDS: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace (McGraw-Hill; January 2011) by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover builds on a breakthrough, multimillion-dollar marketing research program initiated by Don Tapscott, technology guru and author of Grown Up Digital (McGraw-Hill), to deliver a state-of-the-art appraisal of the latest developments in customer engagement. Using findings from this study and hundreds of other examples, Moffitt and Dover explain how brands like Ford, Zappos, Starbucks, P&G, and other businesses large and small stopped marketing at consumers, and embraced peer-to-peer technologies to:

• Engage customers via social influence, word-of-mouth, and user-generated content
• Create an experience through the creation and aggregation of customer-driven ratings, reviews, and online groups
• Build communities using Twitter, “crowdsourcing,” and other shared experiences
• Make connections that are authentic, built on genuine trust, and enhance value by creating a network that ties a brand’s consumers as much to each other as to the brand

Part wake-up call, part action plan, WIKIBRANDS is the blueprint for how businesses are driving innovation and growth through technology-based immersive customer interaction.

- From the McGraw-Hill News Release:

A Business Perspective on Social Media

This is a transcription of a the Business901 podcast, Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace with co-author Mike Dover. Mike is Managing Partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group. As Vice President, Research Operations, for New Paradigm (Moxie Insight), he led the operations for research programs for the bestselling books Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital. He also has provided review support for more than a dozen other books.

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Is the Future of Business sharing?

At TED@MotorCity, Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh talks about a future of business that's about sharing all kinds of stuff, either via smart and tech-enabled rental or, more boldly, peer-to-peer. Examples across industries -- from music to cars -- show how close we are to this meshy future.

Great Line: “We are more connected with everyone in the world except for the person next to us!”

Lisa’s book was interesting well researched but fell short in the hype that I read on Amazon. An accurate review of the book stated, “If you read this book, there's no reason everything can't work with sharing. If you think about the world, you know that can't be true. “ The good part of the book is that hypothesis of her idea is interesting and with her numerous case studies in the book and on her website you are hard pressed not to come away with an idea or two for your business.

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Collaboration in a Customer-Driven Marketplace

From the McGraw-Hill Press Release:

Social Media. Brand Collaboration. Content aggregation. Microblogging. User-generated content. And the list goes on… It’s been said that business is in the midst of the customer-centric marketing revolution—a trend which points toward business treating brands less like “property” and more like an extension of an organization’s values. The upshot is this: Smart companies are finally figuring out how peoples’ desire to participate is becoming a key driver of marketing success. But to be a winner in this environment, businesses have to fill this need and at the same time compete for consumers’ increasingly scarce time and shrinking attention spans. More complicated still, companies have to do all of this while also earning consumers’ trust.

The secret to connecting with consumers in a fragmented, chaotic marketplace, then, lies in how businesses collaborate with customers.

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Mike Dover, co-author of the book, WIKIBRANDS: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace was interviewed on the Business901 Podcast and though we did not cover every topic above, we certainly touched upon how you go about engaging customers, creating experiences and building communities – FROM A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE.

Mike is Managing Partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group. As Vice President, Research Operations, for New Paradigm (Moxie Insight), he led the operations for research programs for the bestselling books Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital. He also has provided review support for more than a dozen other books.

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Online collaboration is leading the way for Lean Marketing

Social Messiness Explained

This is a transcription of a the Business901 podcast, Making Sense of Social Messiness. My guest was Francois Gossieaux is co-founder and partner at Human 1.0 (Beeline Labs), a marketing innovation strategy firm, a Senior Fellow and a Board Member at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR).

Making Sense of Social Messiness

The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media , Francois Goissieaux of Human 1.0 and Ed Moran of Deloitte identify how (and which) social media are fundamentally changing core business processes and the way businesses and customers interact. These changes are being driven by what the authors call the “Hyper-Social Shift.”

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Making Sense of Social Messiness

I encourage you to sample the first 2 minutes of this podcast. This is a tool-less conversation about social media. We actually started out the podcast with me commenting on the title and yes another book on social media which led to this comment:   

Francois: I think a lot of people are like that. I wish we wouldn't have had the subtitle that says it's a competition by leveraging social media, because that's what people think: "Ugh, there's another social media book," and it's so not a social media book, it's really a business book.

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In The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media , Francois Goissieaux of Human 1.0 and Ed Moran of Deloitte identify how (and which) social media are fundamentally changing core business processes and the way businesses and customers interact. These changes are being driven by what the authors call the “Hyper-Social Shift.”

An excerpt from the podcast:

I think this study from McKinsey that says that 60 to 80 percent of all buying decisions are made, without anybody from your company being involved and without any person from your company being used. So, they are made by people asking their tribe's members ‑ you know, their friends, their colleagues, experts that they respect and stuff like that, that's how they make their buying decisions. And so, you need to go a step beyond thinking of advertising and start thinking about how can I make, how can I develop content that people who are already making recommendations about my products and services are going to use to make better recommendations.

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