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Today we released preliminary results of the Social Workplace Trust Study, a study that was co-sponsored between Human 1.0, The Great Place to Work Institute, The International Association of Business Communicators, and The Society for New Communications Research. We will post the recording of the webinar in which we previewed a sneak peek of the results tomorrow, and you can find a copy of the deck we used on Slideshare.

So why did we release a sneak peek of the findings?

We truly believe that there is so much in the data that the more we socialize it with people who have an interest in the topic the better the findings from the study will be. If you are interested in discussing the data with us, please contact me at francois [at] human1 [dot] com.

So what are some of the high level findings?

Finding # 1 – most respondents believe that the best way to learn about a company is through social media and that the accuracy of information about a company is higher in social media than on company websites.

The people who agreed with the statement “One of the best ways for a person to learn about a company is by using social media” outnumbered those that disagreed by a factor 1.5X. When we asked the same question from heavy users of social media, that factor became a whopping 15X, and when we asked the question to people outside of the marketing and communication functions, that factor became 2X.

The respondent who agreed to the statement “What I read about a company on social media is more accurate than what I read about the company on its own website” also outnumbered those that disagreed by a factor 1.5X. When we asked the heavy social media users, that factor became 5.5X, and without the communication and marketing functions, the factor became 2.4X.

Finding #2 – if you treat your employees as adults, instead of as children, you can expect a work environment with higher trust, higher loyalty, and higher employee self-esteem.

Treating an employee as an adult encompasses many cultural traits – including risk, trust, hierarchy, passion, and a set of human-centric belief systems. We used the answers to 5 questions from the survey as proxies for determining whether employees were treated as adults or children. The subsequent findings were amazing.

People that are treated as adults are 3.3X as likely to trust management, they are 2X more loyal to the company, they have 1.7X as much job satisfaction, they take pride in talking about their work with others that is 2X that of people treated as children, and 1.5X as many people who are treated as adults consider themselves having larger social networks than others. Now can you see the benefits that companies who treat their employees as adults must be gaining in terms of talent acquisition and retention, increased innovation and word of mouth?

Not only are the benefits not incremental, they are totally non-linear. If you treat an employee as an adult, not only will they participate in conversations about their company in social media by a factor 3.3X compared to those treated as children, with 1.5X as many of them having larger than average social networks, they will buzz more to more people – and therein lays just one of the exponents.

We also found a clear link between treating employees as adults and passion. The factor there is between 2X and 12X – that means that people who are treated as adults are 2-12X as likely to be passionate at work. Now if you are familiar with some of John Hagel’s work on passion, he found that people who are passionate at work are 2X as likely to tackle tough problems and have social networks that are 2X as large as those that do not have passion at work. Again, can you see the benefits in terms of knowledge flow and innovation?

We have many other findings, including how management actually does live in a “bubble”, how there might be an employee engagement gap, how many companies still discourage the use of social media, and how they fail to use social media to humanize their brands.

Another key finding is how companies expose themselves to significant risks and liabilities by not providing training or “guard rails” on the proper use of social media to their employees.

Again, those results are preliminary. We are still conducting qualitative interviews and cross-tabulating survey results, but if you would like to get involved and make it better before we release the final findings, please be in touch.

In speaking with Ed Moran the other day, the co-author of the award-winning Hyper-Social Organization, he brought up a great term – risk intelligence about social media.

When it comes to social media, many companies decide not to participate, which is a risk-averse reaction to the messiness that comes with the social, but which in itself contains a ton of risks. Countless other companies have no social media policies, which in itself is very risky as well. Those companies are not just risk-averse, they are clueless when it comes to risks associated with social media.

They need to become risk-intelligent.

But what does that mean?

1. You need to understand the risks of doing nothing or the risk of resisting adoption
   You can decide to do nothing, or worse, try to fight it. That won’t stop your customers and employees from using it anyway. By not listening and engaging with what is being said, you risk becoming another Dell Hell. By resisting it you will have to start behaving like North Korea. Both carry unbelievable risks – do you understand them and are you willing to take those?
2. You need to understand the unintended consequences of good social media programs
   Even good social media programs can go awry.  You could get technical glitches that compromises people’s privacy as they are interacting with you, which happened to many well known brands. Or people could hijack your minutiously  prepared plans into directions that you never intended. Or you might announce something only to find out that your organization is not ready to execute on the plan. So many things can go wrong, and when they do in networked environments, they spread like wildfire.
3. You need to be prepared to mitigate risks while encouraging use and embracing the messiness that comes with it
   You need to have policies to mitigate the risks of social media. At the same time you need to develop those policies in such a way that they encourage your employees to become active players in social media on behalf of the brand. If you create policies that are threatening, people will not use it and you will find yourself back at step 1 – not a good place to be and certainly not a risk-free place.

So you need to become risk intelligent and you need to realize that not doing so can have financial risks, legal/IP risks, competitive risks, and safety risks, just to name a few.

At our upcoming Hyper-Social Summit, we will be joined by Risk Management professionals from many leading companies and will dedicate a good amount of time at understanding what it takes to become risk intelligent about social media. We hope you can join us. The early bird special ends today and you can use ‘friendsofhuman1′ (no quotes) to get an extra 20% off the $500 we charge to defray costs.

Following the release of our book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we are now launching the first two Hyper-Social Mini-Summits.

Reading a book is one thing. Turning the ideas presented in a book into actionable and measurable programs is a different thing all together. That is why we created the Hyper-Social Mini Summits – one day events to help you turn the ideas that we developed in the book into actionable programs, tailored for your company.

The first Hyper-Social Mini-Summits will be in New York City (Columbia Faculty House on 9/30/2010) and Boston (Harvard Faculty Club on 10/05/2010). The cost is $499 and it includes participation in the whole day event, a great networking dinner with 50 of your peers, a copy of the book, a pre-conference call to assess your specific challenges and expectations, and a post-conference call to make sure that we can address all the questions that will come  up as you bring the concepts back to your organization.

If you are a marketer thinking of leveraging or already in the process of deploying social media and communities as part of your business, you should attend, as this event is designed for you. And no, we are not offering an early bird discount. If a $50-75 discount is the only way you would register, then maybe this event is not for you. You need to see the value – and we believe  that the value that will be delivered as well as co-created will be outstanding. Not only will the session be somewhat tailored to your needs and challenges (not totally as there will be 50 0f you),we will also share the results of the third annual 2010 Tribalization of Business Study, and have a follow up call to ensure that you can maximize the learnings from the session within your organization’s context.

For more information and registration links, please head over to our Hyper-Social Mini-Summit page. We hope to see you there and maybe even bring a colleague or two. And if you have not done so yet, stay up to date on everything Hyper-Social-related by following us on Facebook.

As I wrote a little while back, the thinking that went into our latest book, The Hyper-Social Organization, affected me profoundly. So much in fact that I decided to refocus and rebrand my company around it.

Well today it’s official – we are now Human 1.0!

We are now focused on getting companies to become Hyper-Social by turning their business processes into social processes. In a way, that is not all that different from what we did in the past as Beeline Labs. The big change is that we are drinking our own Kool-Aid and that we soon will be delivering our consulting services using a social consulting service delivery model. After all, how could we expect our clients to buy services that are not based on the same principles that we preach? We are also terribly proud of a new consulting collaboration that we have with Deloitte, as well as a great advisory board with senior executives from some of the biggest companies to advice us on our business model.

I am also unbelievably happy with the new website, which was designed by my good friends at Brains On Fire – thank you Robbin, Geno, Megan, and Justin! They also joined our Human 1.0 Network, which will be an integral part of how we deliver consulting services using a social consulting service delivery model. The model is being developed with the two dozen people and companies that are part of it and will likely stay in a permanent state of beta-ness as we constantly fine-tune it for better results. Stay tuned for updates on the model as we test it and launch it over the next several weeks.

We hope you will find the way to stop by and let us know what you think. And if you have time, let us know what it means to you to be human in business again…blog it, tweet it  (tag it #hypersocialorg), or send it to us and we will publish it. If you want to create a picture about it, we may even put it on our home page and add it to our Flickr account.

The big day has arrived – our first book is officially out and can be purchased at Amazon.com (Borders and Barnes & Noble still show the old release dates for some reason).

Needless to say that this  is a moment that I am very proud off.

Over the next couple of weeks and months, I will write about some of the principles that we developed as part of the book. Many of those posts will be repeat topics as I tested a lot of those concepts as we were writing the book.

The writing of the book and the sense-making that came with it has had a profound impact on my thinking – so deep in fact, that I am repositioning my company around it. I had hoped to re-launch my business before the book was out, but that was preempted by the early release of the book by Amazon. Stay tuned for an update on that in a few weeks.

The book has three parts to it. The first part deals with the fact that if you want to understand this current wave of innovation – powered by social media, social computing, or social networking - you are in fact better off understanding what we termed the Human 1.0, which has been around for tens of thousands of years, rather than the Web 2.0 tools. We describe the main elements of the Human 1.0, including reciprocity, our innate sense of fairness, our need to look cool and to attain status and power, and other human quirkiness that can explain a lot of what is happening in business today.

The second part of the book deals with the fact that companies that are successful in harnessing the power of Social Media, Communities, or the Web 2.0, think differently about their business and they act differently. They focus on Tribes and Knowledge Networks instead of the more traditional Market Segments and Information Channels, and they are human-centric to a fault, ditching the old company and product-centricity.

The third part of the book talks about what successful companies actually do differently: they turn all their business processes into social processes and they embrace the messiness that comes with the social. In our research we have found examples of companies turning every business process into a social process except two – finance and legal.

I have not frequently asked for help, and have focused most of my work on this blog on providing value. Today I will ask for your help. Please buy the book, help promote it if you like it, and help us develop a better second book. Here are some ways in which you could help:

• Buy the book – for now the best way is on Amazon.com – http://amzn.to/9hRSok
• Become a fan of our Hyper-Social organization fan page on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/hypersocialorg
• Sign up for our upcoming webinar about the book – https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/558348201
• Leave us comments, write reviews, and let your friends know.

We have many more endorsements of the book, but for now I will leave you with what Barry Judge, Chief Marketing Officer for BestBuy had to say: “To the extent that we can be human with what we know, and share it as freely as we possibly can, we’ll go a long way towards gaining a higher or stronger level of trust with our consumers. The authors of the Hyper-Social Enterprise not only explain why that happens – they also provide a roadmap for how to embed it in all your customer-facing processes.”

THANK YOU!

Please join me for “The 24 Hours of Innovation Event” which will take place May 15-16. It’s a non-stop marathon of innovation initiatives that promises to be be real interesting. Here is from the organizer’s web site:

The 24 Hours of Innovation is a non-stop, online marathon of innovation initiatives around the world. The event takes place during a full day and night on May 15-16 from 10.00 am to 10.00 am (CET). (as a reference: Sydney 6 pm, New York 4.00 am, Los Angeles 1.00 am)

The 24 hours are divided in time slots, each one featuring an exciting innovation ranging from an innovation award to creativity sessions, start-ups, and interviews with global thought leaders. Everyone can follow and join the 24 Hours of Innovation on www.boardofinnovation.com, from where the event will be covered cross-media on blogs, traditional media, twitter, slideshare, ustream, coveritlive, flickr, scribd, vimeo,…

My time slot will be at 8:20 EDT. I look forward to seeing you there!

The CMO 2.0 Conversations which I conduct over on the CMO 2.0 Site has been receiving a lot of great reviews – thank you for that! In order to broaden the conversation we have decided to expand the CMO 2.0 Conversations with key marketing influencers – those forward thinking authors and thinkers who CMO’s should be listening to.

We will be announcing additional CMO 2.0 Influencer Conversations as well as new CMO 2.0 Conversations shortly, but for now we were hoping that you could join us for the following sessions:

• May 5th (YES THAT IS TOMORROW) at 1pm ET, we will be having a conversation with Rob Kozinets, who is Associate Professor of Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. He is the editor of Consumer Tribes, a book that captures the diversity of international research on tribal marketing. Rob blogs over at Brandthroposophy. You can register for the event here.
• May  22nd at 10am ET, we will be having a conversation with Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor in Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and author of Predictably Irrational. You can register for that session here.

We hope you can join us for those sessions as well as the upcoming CMO 2.0 Conversations with Pete Blackshaw, EVP of Marketing at Nielsen Online, and Porter Gale, CMO at Virgin America.

A conversation with Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of NPR, and Scott Anthony, president of Innosight and author of “The Silver Lining”

The explosion of choice, erosion of once enviable business models, challenging economic times and other factors are leading to major disruption in the media industry. With consumers more empowered than ever before, organizations are scrambling to find the right way to configure themselves and their products to provide value.

A webcast addressing this pressing trend will feature ideas and insights from Vivian Schiller, the president and CEO of NPR, formerly the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, and Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight who has worked with a number of media companies and spearheaded the “Newspaper Next” project with the American Press Institute, and is the author of the forthcoming book “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times” from Harvard Business Press.

It is a recurring theme now – people often ask us: why are you doing what you doing? Why are you doing the CMO 2.0 Conversations, why are you doing the Marketing 2.0 communities, the Marketing Intelligencer, and what’s up with the Tribalization of Business Study?

The simple answer – we’re practicing what we preach.

We do not interrupt people and try to convert them into clients – rather we engage them in conversations that they want to have. And we make sure that we package the content that comes out of those conversations in such a way that they want to reuse it with their friends and colleagues (several CMO’s have now told me that they tell every single one of their team members to listen to the CMO 2.0 interviews). These offerings and activities also allow us to reach members of marketing industry associations who see benefits in sharing that content with their members.

Or take another example: our Marketing Intelligencer newsletter in which we are not trying to exclusively push our stuff, like most marketers do, but rather add real value by being trusted curators for what’s most important for marketers to read on the web – even if it means pointing them to content from competing firms. The Tribalization of Business Study is a lot of work – but it got thousands of people to download that information and pass it along. And our Marketing 2.0 Communities have almost 15,000 members – what push marketing program would give you this amount of attention you think?

We do not try to buy attention from people – we try to earn their attention.

Just as important as getting all that attention from people we may want to engage with commercially at some point is the learning that we get from doing these programs. We get to fully understand the issues that marketers are facing in today’s economy, and how they frame those issues. And equally important is that we have fun doing it!

Join us on March 11th for a webinar with three leading voices in small business – including Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, and John Field from Career Renegade for a Webinar.

Topic: No Time, No Budget, Fewer People? 5 Big Ideas for getting all that work done.

Hosting: The AppGap blog, an editorially independent thought leadership blog sponsored by Intuit.

Venue and registration: You can register here (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/585901512).

With tens of thousands of layoffs announced every week, the “workplace survivors” left behind are faced with doing more work with fewer resources.   What new thinking, strategies and tools can help teams work smarter, pre-empt personal burn out and help their companies weather the storm?  In this webinar you’ll learn about 5 ideas you can put to work today from 3 leading voices in small business , marketing , and career strategies.

In this webinar you will learn:

1. How to automate what you hate — tasks and processes that are time sucks you never noticed or didn’t know you could offload to new tools
2. How going virtual can help — prudent outsourcing can make more sense than ever
3. Why getting “social” at work is good for business — seek technology applications with social media features and that connect you with communities that can provide speedy answers, serve as “free” extensions of your team, connect you to customers faster
4. Why and how to reframe how you think about your job — advice for doing more of what matters and less of what doesn’t
5. How to get your head in the cloud — move more work to the web and save more time and money

Attendees will also have the opportunity to win one of 10 copies of the panelists’ books, signed by the authors.

We hope you can join us.