threadnaught

Charlene Li Analyst, Forrester Research

I’m going to be talking about social strategies for revolutionaries. The idea behind the revolution that’s happening today is that people are getting together and mobilizing on the internet, and companies don’t know what to do about it.

Examples: HD-DVD crack posted on digg and Kevin Rose ultimately let it run. Jericho was cancelled and 20 tons of peanuts were sent to one person at the network; they didn’t know how many people loved the show and they brought it back. One person was behind the peanut protest – talk show host Shaun – one revolutionary. Show is back on and not doing great, but CBS figured they had nothing to lose. No risk, developed property, why not give it a try?

Groundswell: ’social trend in which people use technology to get what they need from each other rather than traditional institutions like corporations’

Seems like now we’re on the cusp and corporations are ‘getting it’; they want to embrace the groundswell but are largely clueless. They feel it’s important and need to get involved but they don’t know how. People in the space think it’ll be a long painful process to bring these people on board.

Revolutionaries in the audience: Will you be a radical like Thomas Paine? He was the founding spark that touched off the American Revolution, then went to French Revolution and got close to execution; was brought back by Jefferson and by that point the revolution was over. The radical had no more cause, he had no place. ‘Lived long, did some good but did much harm’. Or will you be like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence; was President; organized first continental congress? [A 'doer'?]

These represent two types of revolutionaries: one had vision but couldn’t deliver; the other had process and framework to carry his vision through. To make revolution stick you need framework and process; unless you can put ideas into practice they’re not going to go very far. Individuals living in these spaces will make things happen.

What process is needed? How are revolutionaries creating social strategy?

Four-step approach to groundswell: P.O.S.T.

• People : Assess your customers’ social activities
• Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish
• Strategy: Plan how relationships will work
• Tech: Which technologies to use

Ladder of participation: bottom – inactives. then spectators, who enjoy fruits of social media but don’t participate. Joiners on social networks are next; then Collectors, a small group who organise content; then Critics, wiki editors, commenters; Creators are at the top – they write blogs, create content.

Creators have a different mindset from spectators. We have a lot of data at Forrester, and about 48% or adults 66% kids are spectators. 18% adults 39% kids are creators (43% critics, 58% joiners). What do the social technographics of your audience look like?

In terms of how social technographics [slides on slideshare after this] : as people get older they get less active. It takes them longer to adopt tech and content isn’t geared towards them. But this is changing. 39% of age 51-61 are spectators now, and have potential to become critics/creators. The point to understand is what the level of participation is.

Key roles and their groundswell objectives

• Role: Research – listening. Learn more about customers and what they’re doing
• Marketing – shouting/talking. Marketing will change because of groundswell
• Sales – What if you could get customers to sell on your behalf?
• Support – What if customers could support each other?
• Development – product and process. Often closed. What if you could embrace customers, open up and pull customers into process?

How are revolutionaries creating social strategies?

• Talking. Blendtec’s ‘Will it Blend?’ (YouTube). over 4.6M views. comment videos in response. became highly viral. who came up with this idea? These are $400 blenders, and sales have increased. George Wright, VP of Mktg thought it’d be good to show what the blenders can do, so spent $50 in materials initially to make the videos. He’s not a social marketing guru; used to run marketing/PR for a steel mill.
• Dan Black – campus recruiting for Ernst and Young. Very visionary. Uses FB to recruit college students. He found that people write on FB walls to ask questions, so he took it upon himself to answer questions personally. He’s the head of recruitment; if they don’t hire 3500 students every year he could lose his job. He recognises FB as a place to have direct conversations with potential recruits. Important to note that there are very few times that companies put HUMAN FACE behind them.
• Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, Best Buy – decided to start community: blueshirtnation to allow employees to talk about what’s happening. Not great for understanding insghts but great to give employees voices and support them. Gave all employees email to use with customers. Someone thought it’d be expensive so didn’t tackle it before, but it cost less than $100k so they did it. Took two hours for employees to sort out a display case between them; who knows how long this would’ve taken otherwise.
• Josh Bancroft, Intel. Someone on intranet said it’d be great to have own wikipedia, so he took action to put it in place immediately. Intelpedia. Good tool for Intel employee support.
• Steve Fisher, VP of platform Salesforce.com: give customers voice to make suggestions about how to improve service. IdeaExchange built the case against sawbanners – they had to go, community helped make the case. Having input from the groundswell gave them confidence that they were making the right decision.

How can you get started transforming your organisation? POST. How did one company do this?

Lionel Menchaca, Dell: Product technician and engineer, understands how products work. PR needed someone to run product reviews so asked him. He was well-connected and knew all product managers and engineers at Dell. Dell Hell: products were breaking, CS wasn’t good. Lionel mined community for problems and solved them one by one. He was the right person to turn to to start a blog (summer 06): ‘you can’t get this stuff off the shelf’, but it didn’t launch well. Michael Dell gave him support to talk to customers and keep going, which gave Lionel the confidence to change the conversation. ‘flaming notebook post’: a notebook had caught on fire. Customer support aspects of dealing with battery recall was played out on blog and set tone for the blog going forward. CS was upset, but Lionel insisted that such a thing coudn’t just be ignored; it had to be dealt with. Simple comments on it made a huge difference and marked a turning point for Dell; visitors to blog went up, comments went up. Dell started to trnaform itself. He opened mindset to whole organisation.

Dell has blog for investor relations now. Investors are freaked out by social media, but Dell wanted to put it all out there. (Dellshares.) Dell transformed itself and crafted a social strategy.

How do you find and support revolutionaries?

• Find people who are passionate about developing relationships
• Educate your execs: show them how policies can produce real business objectives
• Put someone important in charge and hold them accountable
• Define ‘box’ with policies and process – legal often needs to get involved. How to mitigate risks?
• Make it safe(r) to fail – As you go into this, companies are risk-averse. Things will be uncomfortable, so there’s a need to increase company’s risk tolerance. Groundswell is very forgiving; not responding and participating is worse than making mistakes.

Final words of advice

• Making revolution stick will require frameworks and process
• Start small but think big. All the people I’ve talked about used personal initiative and failed over and over again in trying to figure out what works. All had a vision they followed.
• Don’t isolate social strategy – make it the responsibility of every single employee
• Be patient – cultural change takes time.

Charlene Li: groundswell.forrester.com

Q: I have a lot of clients launching blogs who have angst about showing success. What are your recommendations for showing that it’s made an impact?

A: I’ve done research on ROI. You can use a blog to do any of the five things I’ve talked about, and metrics will be different for each. HP has a LaserJet blog to support people who’ve bought them and encourage buying more. It’s the same as saying ‘how do I measure the impact of a website?’ There’s no single one answer.

Q: Any pointers for companies where companies want to connect but they’re in a regulated industry?

A: Have lots of clients in pharma etc. These have guideline and shortlists of adverse effects to avoid.

Q: What about avatar-based vitual worlds? Anything happening there now?

A: That’s a place to be avoided from a marketing perspective. There are few people in SL. Those are very unique environments and useful for corporations to share info, but among strangers, it’s the wrong tool to use for marketing.

Q: Culture change comes slowly – there seem to be two techniques for internal revolutionaries mentioned so far: stealth adoption and education (Facebook Fridays). Any other tips for internal revolutionaries?

A: Yes, lots in the book. Communicate strategy, get people to live it. The wikipedia idea is really powerful; we push everything to wikis and if it’s not in wiki it doesn’t exist. Collaborative software too. With marketing/external stuff things get harder cos you’re bucking against long held beliefs about brand, control and marketing that need to go out the window. Often marketing people keep customers at arms-length to maintain their pristine image of customers. Actual customers do subversive things – when they interact with brands in the way they want to it’s much better than no interaction at all. I always say that if you don’t feel a bit queasy about it, you’re probably not moving fast enough. These are relationships, and therefore uncertain and inconstant. If you’re not off-kilter you won’t move forward.

Q: How to convince internal leadership? They want Facebook, but inside the company.

A: SNs, communities can happen internally. Razorfish has a great wiki/blog. There’s a long list of SN providers for companies (80-100). The hard part isn’t the tech, it’s to get people to break email habits and get them into collaboration tools. Also need to let go of control. Sharepoint’s good, but what if anyone could talk to anyone else? What are CEOs afraid of? People ask, what about product dev? In that case secrets etc. are OK, but why wouldn’t you want better expertise sharing generally? Focus on the benefits and the tech part is easy. So low cost you can justify investment for one dep’t.

Q: You spoke about wikis and blogs; there are ots of tools out there. What else are you excited about?

A: Buzzlogic, which looks at influence and gives you a dashboard to spread goodness. Forums and BBSes, although they’re not web 2.0 they’re a good, robust tool for people to connect and support each other. These have been around for ages and it’s not about the tech, it’s about how these tools are used.