New Comm Biz

Yammer Helps Your Company Create More Edges and Flows

On March 12, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

Last month I gave Yammer (a product I like) a hard time because it doesn’t integrate with microblogging clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck and I feel that their pricing is prohibitive to large, enterprise companies.

I got several comments from people and had some really good discussions around the use of Yammer and the good and bad people face with the product. To my surprise the most engaged commenter was David Sacks, Founder and CEO of both Yammer and Geni, was previously the COO of Paypal and if that wasn’t enough, producer of the movie Thank You For Not Smoking.

I’ve been meaning to, to do a follow up post on what Yammer decided to launch instead of the features I thought they should have implemented but yesterdays Social Business Summit provided the perfect fodder I needed.

Lane Becker, CEO of Get Satisfaction, made the comment that we need to create more edges in our companies. Edges are where the cool things happen, it’s where conversations with partners and customers happen; it’s where innovation occurs.

John Hagel then later made the comment that companies need to move from knowledge stocks (proprietary IP that they milk dry) to knowledge flows (rich interactions and collaborations with stakeholders).

Earlier this month Yammer released Yammer Communities a tool that can do just that. From the Yammer blog:

This new product feature enables companies and organizations to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain. Yammer Communities provide companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.

This is an excellent move for Yammer. Traditional “partner portals” or “extranets” are secure, intranet like sites where companies can share things like documents and announcements with partners and over the years extranets have grown to include some level of collaboration. Most extranets suck for two reasons:

They’re hard to use have horrible UX
People don’t want one more place they have to remember to check

I have no doubt Yammer will destroy current extranets on both accounts. However I still think that being able to access Yammer from an aggregated application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic will make the service much easier to use. But David is a successful serial entrepreneur, the one category of business person I have the most respect for, obviously knows what he’s doing and shouldn’t be listening to every blogger with an opinion and an overinflated sense of importance.

I’m looking forward to giving the new communities feature a test to see how well it works.

It’s pretty long (just under 30 minutes) but if you’re interested here’s an interview Robert Scoble recently did with David.

I chat with the CEO of microblogging and corporate social service leader, Yammer, about what they are doing and how the enterprise market is becoming hyper competitive with companies like Salesforce, Jive, Socialtext, SocialContext, Google, and Zoho all angling for the market that Yammer was first in.

Internal social media is about to go through the growth external social media went through for the last few years. It’s going to be exciting to watch.

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Social Business Will Take Us Back To The Middle Ages

On March 12, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I had an amazing day at the Dachis Social Business Summit. I have so much to write about it might take me a few weeks to catch up. Especially after surprise guest John Hagel presented. That was the most insightful 15 minutes I’ve heard in a long time.

I’ve been thinking out loud on this blog about what the future of the marketing org will look like inside companies.This has lead me to wonder about the total reconstruction of corporate organization. I’ve researched a lot of different models but there is one area I never looked to: The Middle Ages.

Douglas Rushkoff, who I wasn’t familiar with but if I was a normal PR/Marketing person I probably would have been, as he is an award winning writer, documentary film maker, media critic and accomplished author. He recently published a new book called Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Amazon Link) which we got for free at the summit (see disclosures at the bottom of the post for full FTC disclosure).

Doug, Dachis’ own Lee Bryant and several others referenced the pre-twentieth century corporate driven economies of Western Europe. While this may sound like heresy to many of us American capitalists their point was that we are moving back to a relationship driven economy. One common theme was that we have entered a time where relationships matter. The network is no longer roads or servers, the network is us and we are people who connect with people.

Our current business climate functions the way it does because in order to achieve scale we have to give up intimacy. The twentieth century belief was that you couldn’t have both. The Internet, in theory, gave us both scale and intimacy but social media has fully delivered on that promise.

What was surprisingly absent from the summit was talk of technology. There was some, but just used mostly as examples not recommendations or even suggestions. The general agreement was that our current technology will look nothing like our future technology, but more important than that was that the technology, while enabling, doesn’t matter. Our current processes, value propositions and especially the way we communicate is about to devolve back to the Middle Ages.

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Photo credit via kennymatic

FTC Disclosure Icons via Louis Gray

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Tagged with: Dachis • Social Business • Social media • SXSW

Twitter to SXSW: You’re Using Our Product Too Much.

On March 11, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit here in Austin right before SXSW kicks off. Like all conferences they’ve established a hashtag #sbs2010. While trying to follow along with the rest of my attendees, to see who’s here and what’s resonating with them and I got this message

Possibly the most disruptive technology in social media was when Twitter acquired Summize which later became Twitter search and they’re limiting it at probably the biggest geek event of the year, SXSW, the very even that launched Twitter several years ago. And the SXSW Interactive hasn’t even started yet.

Could you imagine if Bing limited search right now as they’re trying to compete with Google? Twitter is the little train that could and is competing/with partnering against/with, Google, Bing and Facebook.

I couldn’t think of a worse move. AT&T knows SXSW is going to be huge and they’re beefing up coverage just for the event.

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Tagged with: search • SXSX • Twitter

Solving Problems vs Fixing Problems

On March 11, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

As I was traveling to SXSW last night I was struck by a thought about most of the PR & Marketing industry: We fix problems.

Solving a problem is what people do when they figure things out for the first time. When you solve a problem you create a solution. The next time you solve a problem you’re applying the solution to the problem to fix it.

The problem may be a communication crisis, it may be that people aren’t using a product because they don’t know about it or understand it. There are a hundred problems we fix everyday.

There’s a problem though; I don’t like fixing problems, I like solving problems.

Don’t get me wrong, fixing problems is great. People develop a mastery for applying a given solution to a problem. Unless they’re in research, Dr’s fix problems. The world has a lot of problems and we need people to fix them. There aren’t as many jobs for problem solvers, once you solve it you then need fixers.

We need more fixers. Fixers take solutions and continue to make them better. They improve on them and make them more efficient. They teach other people how to fix problems. What are your favorite problems to fix?

Fortunately we’re in a phase where social media still needs a lot of solutions. The trick for me, and you if you’re a problem solver, is to keep finding problems to solve. Keep applying social media to bigger and bigger problems. Maybe I’m idealistic but I believe social technologies have a real opportunity to solve the World’s biggest problems. Things like illiteracy, poverty and oppression.

What problems are you trying to solve?

Photo credit via Balakov

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Tagged with: agency • problems • Work

We Need to Completely Rethink How Business Operates Using Social Media

On March 10, 2010, In The Book, By Tac Anderson

I’ve mentioned the book I’ve been working on. I’ve actually made considerable headway on the weekends (except I can’t come up with a good title to save my life) and thought I’d share my current working summary. I’d love to hear your feedback.

I am looking for examples where social technologies have been used by companies to build trust, retain knowledge, foster collaboration and spur innovation. If you or your company have any good examples please leave me a comment or shoot me an email: tac@newcommbiz.com

Social Media has brought about a groundswell of change that has swept the business world up in its wake. Antiquated processes, organizational structures and technologies have kept companies from staying tuned in and engaged with customers and employees, to say nothing about keeping up with smaller, nimbler competitors.

No one can dispute that the Internet has radically reinvented the financial drivers and restraints of traditional business models. It has lowered almost every barrier to entry in almost every industry. What the Internet has done to business models, the technologies behind social media are doing to the rest of business.

For the first time since the universal adoption of the org chart and the inbox (the physical not the digital one) we have the opportunity to fundamentally rethink how a business is run and what the various stakeholders of a company are and do. Customers don’t just buy products, they are helping companies ideate, design, develop and then sell products. Partnerships between two companies in a supply chain are no longer one dimensional relationships. Partners can also be competitors, customers and shareholders. In the very near future the way we recruit, retain and manage employees today will seem medieval.

The social media revolution is on the verge of creating truly social businesses. This change is being driven by the forces of: Trust, Knowledge, Collaboration & Innovation. These forces have become so important that have become there own form of capital. And like monetary capital they follow the same laws of capitalism and the free market. Until now companies have tried to govern these new forms of capital like a controlled market when what is needed now is a free market approach. Like in a free market, the rights of the owners must be protected but the free trade of capital must not be restricted.

The truly social business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders. By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust is a necessity to creating greater shared knowledge, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

No business has fully achieved this seemingly radical state but many early revolutionaries have developed pockets of deep expertise and experience. While many companies and their employees believe that the lack of adoption of these new technologies is hindering this quintessential state, the fundamental barriers are the outdated structures and process that have existed inside corporations since before the Internet. It’s time to stamp out the last bastions of resistance and remove those barriers and get out of our own way.

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Tagged with: Collaboration • Innovation • knowledge • Social Business • Social media • Trust

The Conflicting Definitions of Social Business

On March 9, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

As social media has continued to evolve and we start to move into the era of social business we’re running into a linguistic snag; There are now two different definitions for Social Business.

Those of us in the social media world have not yet settled on an industry wide definition but I’ve recently started using this definition for social business:

The Social Business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders. By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will also regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust will result in greater knowledge creation, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

But according to the all mighty wikipedia Professor Dr. Muhammad Yunus, in his book Creating a World without Poverty – Social Business and the Future of Capitalism used this definition:

Social business is a cause-driven business. In a social business, the investors/owners can gradually recoup the money invested, but cannot take any dividend beyond that point. Purpose of the investment is purely to achieve one or more social objectives through the operation of the company, no personal gain is desired by the investors. The company must cover all costs and make revenue, at the same time achieve the social objective, such as, healthcare for the poor, housing for the poor, financial services for the poor, nutrition for malnourished children, providing safe drinking water, introducing renewable energy, etc. in a business way. The impact of the business on people or environment, rather than the amount of profit made in a given period measures the success of social business. Sustainability of the company indicates that it is running as a business. The objective of the company is to achieve social goal/s .

Of course you could have a social business that is also a social business according to both terms. In fact if we simplified the second definition of social business to a business with the objective to do social good (ignoring for a minute the nonprofit like financial status) then I would argue that a social technologies enabled social business would be more likely to do social good because they would be in tune with what their customers and employees want and that the non-profit like social business who uses social technologies would be a more successful social business.

As I pointed out in my post, The Evolution of New Media, Web 2.0, Social Media, Social Business: A Brief History of Everything, we are still in an evolving space and our definitions will continue to evolve. Will social business stick around? I don’t know, right now I can’t think of a better word.

Do you have a better word that fits the first definition?

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Tagged with: definitions • Social Business • Social media

The Most Important Book You Will Read This Year

On March 8, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

You may be familiar with author Daniel A Pink (blog & Twitter). As a right brainer, I loved his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and I just finished his most recent book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. (Amazon affiliate links)

I downloaded the audio book for my last drive down to corporate headquarters in Portland, OR. I listened to the first half on the way down and the second half on the way back. Before my road trip was done I found a bookstore and bought two copies of the book. I’ve already given them away and will buy another two today. Maybe I should just buy them in bulk.

This is probably the most important book I can recommend for you to read this year. You will question every aspect of business management, your business model, organizational structure, parenting, schooling, even what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

We have reached a level where work and knowledge can be and should be intrinsically motivating (doing it is its own reward). Not all jobs of course fit this model but as the economy rebounds there is no reason to do a job you don’t want to. In my last post I talked about the parts of your business you are least likely to give up.

Social media has changed the landscape driven by our collective shift in motivation. In my opinion, we have entered a new economy, an economy where money is no longer the only capital. Money may no longer even be the most important capital.

Fellow New Comm Biz author, Jason has posted about companies sucking their wealth from the new Bourgeoisie. Maybe we have reached a point where, money is a commodity, easily obtained. Maybe not for everyone but for the western world where a college degree doesn’t mean as much as it used to money is no longer enough of a motivator.

I have a lot more to write about this topic but first I suggest reading Drive, then my posts will make a lot more sense. If that’s really possible

Photo credit via Balakov

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Tagged with: Business • business books • Daniel Pink • Drive • motivation

Innovation and Disruption, What’s Holding You Back?

On March 7, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I have stated before that, while I don’t know the guy and have never met him, Marc Andreessen is probably the entrepreneur of my generation that I most admire.

Today I came across a post on TechCrunch where Marc is quoted as saying that Old Media needs to burn the boats. I love this type of bold strategies. When Cortes came to Mexico he burnt the boats so they had no choice but to conquer, Marc says media companies need to do the same thing. The post is short and well worth your read but here’s my favorite quotes.

We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Everyone knows this true (even if they don’t admit it). At some point physical media will be too cost prohibitive to create at the mass market level. Print will be the new vinyl.

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

And finally the part that will end any business discussion with any old media CEO:

Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

Radical strategies like this either get you excited or terrify you (or both). Could you imagine the NYT or WSJ stopping all print publications and going digital only? Wow, that would be amazing. Lay off everyone connected to print and forge ahead. It won’t happen for years, maybe decades. Maybe they’ll always keep some niche print production, but eventually most printed papers will go away.

But it’s easy for us to criticize the media for not being willing to let go, but what about your business? Every business has boats they’re holding on to. And it’s usually the part of their business that’s stopping them from being truly innovative. That’s the part of the business the startups love to attack.

In my world, agencies continue to submit to hourly billing even though it’s a pain, unproductive and not conducive to providing the best work. Marketers refuse to give up on the CPM advertising metric (cost per thousand rate advertisers charge). It’s broken and doesn’t prove any type of business ROI. These are two boats I would volunteer to ignite myself.

What are your business boats? What would be the hardest thing to give up?

Photo credit via very little dave

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Tagged with: Andreessen • Business model • Disruption • Innovation • newspapers

Social CRM is the First Step Towards Social Business and World Domination

On March 5, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

What is Social CRM? Is it a sales tool? Is it a support tool? The answer depends on your company and your business objectives. I can tell you this, Social CRM is not a Twitter key word search juxtaposed next to CRM data. (Sorry, personal rant.) And if you’re wondering about the title, everything with me is about World Domination (more at the end of the post).

This morning Jeremiah Owyang and R “Ray” Wang of the Altimeter Group, released a report (which I’ve embedded at the bottom of this post) on the state and future of Social CRM. It’s a great report you should all take the time to read. I also want to give Altimeter props for the use of Creative Commons and a bold new approach to analyst reports and their business model.

I particularly liked these 3 points from Jeremiah’s blog:

For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are doing to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.
Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and ComcastCares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of customers happening. They need tools, and they need them now.
Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed. Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.

Altimeter sees 18 use cases for Social CRM. I think we’ll eventually see more than this but for now this is more than any company can handle.

This is a topic that has been close to my heart for several years now. When I was at HP I started doing some very early Social CRM initiatives with our enterprise sales teams. The below image is the slide that Rob Brooks proclaimed was the most confusing (yet interesting) slide ever shown at Social Media Breakfast Seattle. This is the slide that shows a use case for Social CRM geared towards sales.

By pulling in CRM data, matching that with direct marketing and Web analytics data I could identify the enterprises that were most responsive to our marketing and potentially interested. I would then use LinkedIn to identify the key IT decision makers and the people in the org and from there try and find them on Twitter and blogs to see what they were saying about HP, our competitors or the industry.All of this was very manual and labor intensive but the size of the contracts were worth the expense. The tools didn’t exist then and still don’t, to do what I was trying to do.

This report gave me a very robust report I could give to our sales teams. Before they ever walked in the door they knew what we had sold them in the past, what offers or products they had showed the most interest in and what their sentiment was towards and or our competitors. Early tests showed a decrease in sales time an increase in renewal rates (for existing customers) and increased upsell of additional products and services. And this is only one use case of Social CRM, #6 of 18 identified by the Altimeter Group.

Social CRM has been widely discussed for years now, Social Business is starting to gain more attention. To me Social CRM is the first example of a Social Business application. One of the things I found most interesting about the Altimeter report came in the executive summary. The definition of Social CRM is surprisingly close to the definition I gave for Social Business last month.

As the “Godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction – or the data associated with it… Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment.

Now look at my definitions for Social Business:

The Social Business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders. By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will also regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust will will result in greater knowledge creation, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

I went even further and qualified Collaborative Relationships further:

Collaborative Relationships: Open transparent and mutually beneficial relationships between companies and its stakeholders.

Social CRM is being driven because it has real measurable impact on ROI. It also provides the first real opportunity to demonstrate the power of a fully functional Social Business. Social CRM is just the tip of the iceberg.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Finally I wanted to offer a word of warning and talk a little about the use of World Domination in the title and the use of the LEGO picture (which I’ve been using a lot lately). If you know me, I talk about World Domination a lot and if you know me I think LEGO’s and Star Wars are together better than peanut butter and jelly, but Social CRM and Social Business do have a potential dark side. Just because you can track more than you ever thought possible about your customers doesn’t mean you should. With this rush of data will come a customer backlash. Proceed, but proceed with caution.

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Photo credit via Balakov

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Tagged with: Social Business • Social CRM

Don’t Overreact to Your Social Media Mistakes

On March 4, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I recently wrote about Alex Payne, a developer for Twitter, who posted a tweet that caused a lot of contention among the Twitter developer community. Think Before You Tweet: The Do Not Tweet List.

Alex is not the first person to put his foot in his mouth on Twitter and he certainly won’t be the last. Because Twitter is so public and 140 characters is not enough to provide proper context, this will become the new normal.

Remember, we’re all human here. (unless you’re not for some reason)

Yesterday I read on GigaOm that Alex has decided to quit blogging, partly due to this most recent incident and partly because he had already been thinking about taking a break. I find his reasoning very poignant. (Emphasis is mine)

Lately, I’ve found the cathartic returns from blog-format writing to be diminishing. The ideas I’m trying to express never really get put to rest in my head when I write, now. Instead, they spark whole conversations that I never intended to start in the first place, conversations that leech precious time and energy while contributing precious little back. Negative responses I can slough off, but the sense that I’m not really crystallizing my unset thoughts by writing here is what bothers me.

This is an unfortunate response to a small blow up. It’s easy to overreact when something like this happens. For so many years social media has been a niche activity. No one but a bunch of geeks talking online. But sometime over the last few years social media quit being a back channel. If you’re a decent writer with interesting things to say, like Alex, then more and more people start paying attention. Pretty soon the random thoughts you’ve been writing down take on a life of their own and those thoughts beget conversations all on their own. This can be very intimidating.

Over the years we read about (seemingly) huge blowups that happen to other people and companies and it’s easy to talk about what they should have done differently. And then it happens to you. These fire drills are emotionally consuming and extremely stressful. No one wants to be “that guy.” I know because I’ve been that guy and was even written up for it.

But in the grand scheme of things these blow ups aren’t that big of a deal. They blow over and everyone moves on with things. Why? Because at the heart of things none of us is perfect and we all recognize that it could have been us. If we have learned anything from politicians, it’s that people are willing to forgive.

We all have our own reasons for blogging. Like Alex, I writing is part of my thinking process. The feedback I get from all of you help to formalize my ideas. Blogging is taxing and that may be the larger reason for Alex’s hiatus but it’s connection with this most recent mistake is unfortunate.

Last post I gave you 10 things to avoid tweeting, today I’m going to give you 3 things to do after it happens.

Apologize for the mistake (or at the very least the misunderstanding).
Clarify the statement (or action). Most mistakes are more miscommunication that an actual mistake.
Move on. Don’t dwell on the mistake, instead reengage with the community and get back to having fun.

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Photo credit via Balakov

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Tagged with: Mistakes • Social media • Twitter

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New Comm Biz

Social Media and the Future of Business

Twitter to SXSW: You’re Using Our Product Too Much.

Solving Problems vs Fixing Problems

The Most Important Book You Will Read This Year

Innovation and Disruption, What’s Holding You Back?

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