Digital strategy | Social business | People-centric biznology
Hey Google, Maybe when I empty the spam I *am* actually in the market for some canned meat. You never know, right? http://ow.ly/i/qtu9
I had my first video conference of the year with my team this week and shared with them a few resolutions for my professional life. After reading Jeremy Hodge’s post along a similar line I thought I’d put them up too (particularly since they are so similar…I can clip from his post!)
The main one I’d like to commit to is to send (and hopefully, therefore, receive) less email. One of the main ways I figure I can do this is to make much better use of IBM’s internal collaboration system, IBM Connections. It is, afterall, now fully deployed at IBM and all my colleagues have access to it. Sure, we’ve had it up and running for a long time (including in prototypical states like a decade ago) but at this point it’s really gained critical mass. Even our new CEO, Ginny Rometty is using it.
I also really liked the article “Work Smart: Disrupt your Inbox” that Jeremy referenced in his post. It has a few simple guidelines that would make the world a much less stressful place if we all followed them. Here they are:
Experiment with three-sentence emails for a better response rate.
Start with action-oriented steps, don’t leave them at the bottom of the email.
Market your subject lines–make them an advertisement to open and read the email.
Take disagreements offline.
Don’t “reply all” unless everyone needs to be involved.
Use numbers for reference in back-and-forth correspondence to reduce redundancy and length.
I would add, “Put NRN” at the end of emails that are “no reply necessary.” And, “stop thanking people in separate emails.”
The other resolution I want to make for 2012 can also be found in Jeremy’s post. No, I’m not going to attempt to learn any more code than I know already (well, actually…maybe I will…I am kinda inspired by the idea and the little bit of coding I learned over the years in HTML and XML has served me very well….hmmm.) But seriously, the resolution is to limit multitasking This will, no doubt, prove very tough — it’s basically expected that IBMers (tech/marketing people in generally, I bet) are “expert multitaskers.” We probably are, if an expertise can actually be described this way: being the best at doing something that makes you dumb. Claiming expertise at multitasking is a little bit like saying you’re an expert at huffing gasoline.
Minimizing multitasking is going to be tough for a lot of reasons — for one, it means I’m going to have to decline or delay a lot of meetings. It will also mean I will schedule more time for individual tasks, which is tough to do in an organization that assumes that everyone is “pingable” on chat 24/7. But I am gonna give it a go. I have to.
So that’s my thought for professional resolutions for 2012. Maybe more will come to mind, but if I can make those two happen I think I can expect a much more productive and sane year.
Not that anyone asks me anymore why I work for IBM, but this article in Business Insider by Mark Fidelman pretty much nails it. Basically the thesis is that open, collaborative organizations are the way of the future and fear-driven, dictatorial organization are gonna go the way of the do-do. Now, IBM isn’t perfect, but there aren’t many other organizations in the world that can actually claim that they are, in fact, actively working to mold their organizational culture in this way.
Not only that, but the article lays out the business benefit, “IBM has been so successful in its last few years, that it’s outperformed the S&P 500, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.”
There’s also some nice, tidy philosophical underpinnings explained. Here is a selection of my fave quotes from the piece.
“While Apple has been wildly successful, IBM’s Social Business is much more attainable and sustainable than what Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky describes as Apple’s genius led, culture of fear. For the genius is always, as Benjamin Disraeli and later Peter Drucker predicted, succeeded by a “lieutenant of Marines” who understands the business but nothing else. So the company is only left with an innovation vacuum.”
“Work creates a unique social bond – it is the interface between people, technology and culture. Work’s social bond must also evolve. It must responds to market conditions and customer demands. There isn’t a large company that does this better than IBM.
It may be too early for some organizations to come to grips with social business as a strategy. They are stuck in a corporate dystopia, ruled by the equivalent of an Orwellian inner party which condemns individuality and transparency as thought crimes.”
Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM & Less Like Apple ow.ly/8hWP4
The main interesting thing to me about Apple’s recently leaked social media guidelines is that they are titled “retail” guidelines — which begs the question: do they have different guidelines for different areas of their business? Also, they seem pretty standard issue (e.g. they more or less step in a footprint IBM made in early 2006.) Read ‘em here. http://ow.ly/7Pmcn
I just contributed a guest-blog post to the Citizen IBM blog about the volunteer work I am doing at P-Tech. The post is called Volunteerism and Citizenship: One mentor’s story.
The BrainYard interview on social media policy went up last week (I missed it because I was at the Think Forum). http://ow.ly/6GqN5
I’m starting as a mentor at a project IBM is doing with the City of New York called P-Tech. It’s a highschool in Brooklyn that goes for six years — at the end of it the kids earn an associates degree as well as the high school diploma and they are first in line for IBM jobs. One of the main aspects of the program is a one-on-one mentorship with IBMers for each of the kids in the school.
The New York Times wrote a concise piece about it when the school opened a couple days ago.
I’m really looking forward to doing a little more for the community — this is a small thing to be sure, but it is something. I am, after all, a Brooklyn citizen and proud!
When I was living in East Harlem I participated in the East Harlem Tutorial Board — a great program. However, I found it really tough for a bunch of reasons…I’m much more optimistic about this program, especially because (having just gone through the initial training) it seems really well organized.
Chatting with one of my colleagues who is also a mentor, he said “the mentoring dimension of this feels key to me — the primary difference between kids who make it and those who don’t is whether there’s an adult in their lives who cares whether they live or die.” I couldn’t agree more. Looking back at my life there were a few key individuals who propped me up at some rough times — same is true for me as an adult too, really.
So! Fingers x’ed…I just might be able to prop this kid up when he needs a grownup to lean on.
One of the things rattling around in my head these days is the emerging importance of the democratization of digital listening. Publishing (or, talking, if you’ll go with the metaphor) has been thoroughly democratized. That is, blogs & wikis & video-sharing & podcasts etc have been made so simple that just about anyone on the planet with access to a cheap PC can do it. Meanwhile, it seems that really sophisticated “listening” systems are still rare and/or expensive and/or delivered by a cadre of professionals who require significant training.
Somehow digital listening and analysis is still a specialized skill and therefore the business model for those who do it is intact.
But, this is going to change fast — just as self-publishing swept onto the scene (and disrupted the business models of those who owned great big expensive channels) so too will tools for digital listening sweep in and sweep out some established players. I mean this will happen when it is relatively easy for individuals to get significant insights from crowds of publishers at low or no cost.
We’re already seeing free systems emerge for establishing who one should pay attention to (for example, Klout, which is flawed, but at least they’re giving it a go.) And of course increasingly intelligent recommendation-engines built into feed readers like Google Reader etc are giving us better insights into what we should be paying attention to. Meanwhile, tools like ow.ly and bit.ly built into platforms like Hootsuite etc are giving us some sense of who is listening to us (well, basic traffic reports etc.)
The integrator who comes along and combines a decent set of these capabilities with some machine-based sentiment analysis (even English-only so long as it is somewhere north of 75% accurate) is going to have a hit on their hands.
Anyway, that’s all I got before before my 9am Monday morning conference calls. Cheers!
I can’t lie, I’m flattered to be quoted at length in Fast Company’s “Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business” http://ow.ly/6t4a2
A mindmap of our discussion created in real time at WPP Stream; click it for the whole shebang.
The title of this post refers to a session I led last week with my pal, Howard Pyle who has just started as the acting director of digital platform integration at IBM (or something like that). We were both at WPP Stream in Athens, Greece last week and over the weekend (Article on Huffington Post). The conference itself was really remarkable — WPP invites a bunch of advertising folks, digital people of all sorts (startups, innovators, VCs etc) and runs an O’Reilly-style unconference at a lovely beach-side resort in Marathon, Greece (about an hour outside of Athens.)
Moreover, the running joke during our session was that it could just as easily be titled “Does your boss want you to be a social media d’bag?” That is, are you an SME or an SMD? (Subject Matter Expert or Socila Media D’bag?)
In our discussion we opened with a handful of assertions. Namely:
1.Firms are increasingly calling upon their employees to “be” the brand. That is, represent their employer’s brand in new and increasingly personal ways through social digital expressions of themselves.
2. Meanwhile, there is a “social media miracle” mentality out there that needs to be debunked. Most people don’t want to be “brand ambassadors” for their firms — it’s simply a fallacy that you can somehow easily convert them just by asking nicely. And when you engineer programs based on the social media miracle mentality it will inevitably flop due to a lack of authenticity, participation or both.
3. The method by which companies select their social media spokespersons is often random. Typically it’s ill-defined, undemocratic and –worst of all — lacking in mutual benefit. Meanwhile, the traditional means to identify experts and spokespersons (through a PR department…an approach I call “editorial selection”) doesn’t scale to the demands of the social-internet
So the name of the game is this — can you (as a manager of a brand or someone interested in switching on the social-ness of your business) shape the culture, policies and platforms etc within your firm without alienating individuals? Afterall, social media or social business inherently demands the participation of some people (um, “social” right?) so you would think your employees have to be there, no?
There was a good deal of discussion about managing identities — in one case, a communications director from a large pharmaceutical company told us about one of the “rockstar” scientists at his firm who had four LinkedIn profiles. She was exasperated, but being a very busy scientist, didn’t have the time to deal with it. A senior strategist from LinkedIn who attended the session said this is a widespread issue (an “edge issue” she said, but an issue nonetheless) where rockstars’ — like Obama or certain CEOs etc — profiles become essentially fanpages. Again, this is a tension point that I think many of the people we would most like to activate on behalf of our firms confront (and retreat from.)
Of course rewards and recognition for participation also came up — most organizations do not expressly reward or recognize brand-building for individual employees in a meaningful way. Even those in the session who said their firms had built social media participation into some of their employees’ goals said that it was basically an empty gesture or a very peripheral activity.
Finally (well for this blog post anyway) there was a great deal of discussion about the portability of reputation. Who exactly owns the individual’s professional reputation? The answer seems obvious at first, the individual, right? But what if the firm has invested significantly in developing that reputation by allotting time or other resources (like building technological platforms that enable an individual to enhance and retain reputation etc)? The investment implies, I think, some stake on the part of the firm in the outcomes (good or bad.)
Anyway, many of the ideas are captured in the mind-map that you can see attached here. Have a look and let me know what you think.
