Call to Action: UK Social Media

Look here at case studies of social media and American financial firms.

Shall we start adding min-case studies of UK social media on the wiki?  Whether we helped, whether we manage it, whether we experience it, whether we know of it - The company, a brief description and an url??

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | 1 Comment 

HR - hold on to your hats - SM is here.

What makes an organization hum?

I am in HR,not marketing, and I think social media is going to change the way we do things for ever.

Jon Ingham wrote yesterday on organizational “mojo”.  An organization must have “mojo” - that undefinable something.  Yep, we know so many of them don’t have anything at all.  Dry and dusty as a deserted museum.

“Mojo” is that difficult to define thing - charisma, character, personality.

Over the key years, I have settled on a key concept:  collective efficacy.  It is a variation of self-efficacy - that very specific self-belief that says “I can do this!”  Maybe you can, maybe you can’t, but you give it a go, and you continue to give it a go.

It may not be enough to get you to the “top”.  You need luck, talent and resources too.  But you have fun trying, and without it, it doesn’t matter how much luck, talent or opportunity you have, you will not achieve anything - largely because you can’t be bothered.  You don’t have the interest or the staying-power.

Leadership and Schools

Collective efficacy is the only known factor to influence school performance beyond SES.

Raising the performance of a school is really, really hard.  Targets don’t help.  Money doesn’t help.  Busing doesn’t help. Collective efficacy is the only known factor to get one ‘poor’ school to out-compete another ‘poor’ school.

What is collective efficacy?

Collective efficacy is the teachers’ beliefs in each other.

We hand out a questionnaire to the teachers asking “how good are the other teachers?”  The school where the teachers believe in each other is the school that wins (handicapped by SES of course - reality still counts).

So how do we get high collective efficacy?

Probably off the self-efficacy, self-fulfilling prophecy spiral.  If the “Head” believes in him or herself, and in his or her ability to lead the teachers (meaning s/he believes they are quite good), then they all get going, and guess what, they get things done, and then they believe they get things done  .   .  .

So how does social media come into all this and into HR and management?

Social media is “mashed inbound communication”.   I only give a damn about what you say, if I I believe your mash-up is interesting, informative, informed, amusing .   .   . etc.  Wanting to listen to someone (not the faked ah, mm of a professional), wanting to listen communicates belief in the other person.  When I want to hear what you have to say

Collective efficacy is already there (in greater or lesser amounts.) By providing more channels for “mashed inbound communication”, we amplify the collective efficacy that is already there, and amplify the upward spiral.

What if there is no collective efficacy at the outset?

Some people do flame on the internet.  But that should be regarded as an opportunity - at least they are talking.  In an organization, it is always silence that you should worry about.  Someone who is not talking to you, really doesn’t care enough to be bothered.  So I am not worried about flaming.

If my “head” was lacking a little in confidence, or self-efficacy, but was essentially sound, I would “hold” his or her hand a little.  Get him or her to write a weekly round-up summarizing the concerns of the school.

Being listened to will have an immediate efficacy effect.

Actually, I think one laptop per third world child, be damned.  I think every school kid in UK should be issued a laptop and cell phone for free, every year!  The best part of all is that the kids can run this.  Communicate some belief in their efficacy too!

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June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | Leave a Comment 

Take away our breath!

Life isn’t measured by the number of breaths we take,
but by the number of moments that take our breath away.”

…Anonymous
Old fashioned marketing wants to take the consumers’ breath away.
We want to let consumers take our breath away!
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June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | Leave a Comment 

We are in the business of mashed inbound communication

Metrics and clear minded thinking

I am more-and-more convinced that we need to measure social media against what we would have been doing otherwise.  That is profound you know!

At Leicester, we heard the story of The Savile Row tailor who developed a successful blog and was able to move his shop to his house up north.  Without the blog, his marketing cost was a shop on Savile Row.  Well I would miss living in London.  But there you are! Business is business.  A blog vs a shop in Savile Row.  No contest in terms of costs.

In terms of the other idea I picked up at Leicester, reputation - breaking into the market - was the constraint.  Can social media be used to break in to the market - to release the constraint?  In this case, yes.  A lot of people who buy expensive suits enjoy talking about them and learning more about cloth, cut, etc.

SM costs are negligible - so we just have to look at our gains, how we would have got them the old way, and how much the old methods cost!

The business case for social media

Making the business case for SM is a different matter.  Remember every business case is actually three business cases intertwined like a DNA helix:

a) the business case for the business buying the social media

b) the business case for the customer who will spend time on the social media

c) the business case for the person supplying the social media (YOU in other words)

I  looked at Neilsen’s site again yesterday.  It looks like magic.  But lets face it.  Unless you are Obama or Coca-cola, you don’t even register on their counts.   Neilsen are selling off their excess computer capacity.  That’s their business case!

What is the business case for the company buying the social media and for you, if you were able to develop and sell a similar service?

I like data.  It is amazing what a bunch of data tells you.  Powerful stuff. Unfortunately it is usually in the realm of Emperor’s Clothes.  The big boys have staked the ranch against an ego-trip, you know they are wrong, you run the data, then you run .    .    . Emperor’s Clothes aren’t called Emperor’s Clothes for nothing.  Yes data is cool.  But it pulls down without replacing it with anything better.

The real issue is getting the Emperor to put on some clothes.  Actually, the real issue is social relations have become so distorted, a heck of a lot of people are pretending he has got clothes, and if you are the buffoon who points out his nakedness, even with wad of computer printouts as a shield, it will be “off with your head”!

I am not trying to be pessimistic here.  I just don’t want you to be drawn to professional suicide.  Data isn’t power - it is a bludgeon.  I believe, like the social scientist, Karl Weick, we must define problems in ways that we can do something about them.  That’s our task as managers, gurus, or whatever the privileged call themselves these days.  If we feel we are in a cul-de-sac, turn, leave, find a better route.

So what is our contribution to the common good?

I got this from David Terrar who was talking at NLabNetworks about his work with the Chartered Accountants.  DT and colleagues were asked to set up an online community for the Institute’s 133K members.  We would expect the 1:9:90 rule to apply.  So we would be happy with 1,3K active members. 12K listeners and occasional participants.  90% inactive or at best lurking.  In 4 months, the new “online community” achieved: 3K users, 175 posts and 400 comments.

3 comments per post (on average - probably a J curve).  3 comments per post.  This is the magic number and the insight. 3 comments per post.

For everything you say, how many replies do you get back?

We are NOT in the business of content.  We are NOT in the business of broadcast (well I seem to be most of the time!).

We are NOT even in the business of sonar radar.  When they ping, they don’t want a reply.

When we ping, we don’t want an automatic reply.  We want the ping to circulate around a person’s emotional system and come back digested, mashed, and different.  We are in the business of MASHED responses.

Going back to Emperors and their clothes

Social Media just amplifies what is already there.  We provide an easy way for people to talk to the Emperor.

The first time the Emperor appears a little scantily dressed, some people comment.  Because they trust the Emperor and the Emperor trusts them, he puts on some more clothes next time he goes out.  He even appreciates the 3 comments from the “people” saying where the best tailor shops can be found and gives them some custom.  Everyone is happy!

If the people do not deign to appraise the emperor of his lack of apparel, mmm .   .   .

a) no inward communication (how many mashed replies to each outward message?)

b) no inward communication on something that is obviously important (check the last time you updated your own beliefs about what is important!)

c) no one in the “court” wants to pass on messages that imply criticism or they miss any irony completely

These are all signs of an empire running on borrowed time.  Now empires are like cars, they run a long time without a service.  So, don’t panic.  You have time.  But don’t kid yourself that you will change the fundamentals with some social media.  If things are this bad, keep your head down, buy a copy of “What Color is my Parachute?”, and figure out what you should be doing with your life and with whom!

It’s disappointing to find yourself in the court of an Emperor with no clothes, but it happens.  It’s disappointing that’s all.  It is not a disaster unless you make it one.

Inward Communication

Now I certainly don’t have the knack of opening up a discussion.  There is a personality type “the chair” who is brilliant at that.  The flip side, is that they just don’t get anything done on their own.  But the front person is ideally a “chair/team player” - the inveterate socialite.

I’m the shaper, completer-finisher type.  You can see it in my post.  Is what we doing important and are the important things getting done?  I tell the socialites to kick me under the table if my timing is off.  I won’t necessarily get the replies, but I will read them!

We need a mixture of people in social media and I can see a course on Belbin team roles and social media coming up.  We need to get both sides of the coin: a charming environment so the replies come in, backed up by people with a more analytical disposition.

The points

If someone asks what is the ROI of social media, ask back: what do we have to get done in this business, how will we do it, give me 24 hours to sketch out how we can use SM to do it more quickly and more cheaply.

If someone asks what is SM: we use modern internet as a system of inbound communication.  We will leave automatic ping-backs to other people.  We deal with “mashed” replies - where our consumer has added an opinion or a variation that is deeply valuable to us.

If their eyes glaze over, and they don’t want to know, don’t fight it!   You have the answer to your business case!  Your next step, then, is to look at the business case of everyone - consumers, rivals to your customer, rivals to you, and position yourself accordingly!

If I am right that we are in the business of mashed inbound communication, then we want to pick our clients.  We want clients who can disrupt the current business model (like the Savile Row tailor) by using social media and who ‘get it’ - at least intuitively.

I want a session on July 5 about our clients - who are they, how do we understand their businesses, what can we do to help them.

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 11 Comments 

Did you know we have a conversation going on over here!

I didn’t!  How can we make this feed the comments through email?

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments