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The students at Baruch College’s Executive MBA Cohort 31 read our book, The Hyper-Social Organization, and authored a detailed blog post with 9 principles to build a successful social business (http://baruchemba31.blogspot.com/2012/01/principles-for-building-successful.html#comment-form). They invited me to engage in the conversation with them, so here are some of the comments I have on their great piece.

On the first principle — Objectives Should Complement Strengths and Help Overcome Weaknesses –I would add that a social business strategy can humanize a brand and therefore make it more appealing to people. People relate better with other people than they do with organizations, which are a relatively new concept when compared to human evolution ( I wrote an article on this here: http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=29788 and also here in terms of how to think of social and brands – http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2011/06/25/creating-unified-customer-experiences/)

On Point II — An Executive Sponsor (VP Social Business) Should Champion Social Business Strategy and Lead Culture Change – I agree. For many (older) companies this will mean a real change management process — and that can be painful.

But I do not agree with Point III — A Single Department Should Own Social Media. I think that when successful, social needs to become part of the fabric of the company. If you give “ownership” to a department then you will end up with one more silo. Customer support needs to embrace it, IT needs to embrace it for their knowledge management and innovation, HR needs to get on board, product development. It is not just marketing and communications. You want to be like IBM, where there is no corporate twitter feed, no corporate blog, but where the employees — all employees — are encouraged to be the face of the company. See my interview with Erin Nelson, the former CMO at Dell where she talks about that http://www.cmotwo.com/2010/03/04/cmo-20-conversation-with-erin-nelson-cmo-at-dell-and-manish-mehta-vp-of-social-media-and-communities/).

I agree with point IV — A Social Media Policy and Process Toolkit is Necessary–, but you cannot be too rigid. Policies need to viewed as guiderails more so than as rigid “do this and DON’T DO THAT or else” type tools. Again, at IBM they developed guidelines, in partnership with the employees, which are encouraging rather than discouraging. The same happened at other companies like Xerox. Because the risks of screwing up are egalitarian (e.g., the CEO is as likely to mess up as the junior communications employee, and the personal risks are as high as the company risks), there is a great opportunity to mitigate risk through education.

On Point V — Technology Platforms and Investment Decisions Must be Identified Early –, I agree, but would caution not to start with technology. My partner, Scott Wilder, who used to run all communities at Intuit, used to say – if your community would not survive in a Yahoo! Group, it will probably not survive anywhere. Companies tend to start with the tools and technology, where they really should start with the tribes and their shared passion, pain and interest. They then need to pay attention at what the day in the life of a user would look like if this were to be successful. It is really product management 101 to determine the features and then select technology that will meet that need.

I agree on VI — A Communications Hub Should be Created by the Social Business Dept –, although many companies give in to the loudest megaphones on social platform and they fix the problems of the individual loudmouths instead of focusing on fixing the problems that affect everyone. A company that truly gets that is JetBlue.

I agree with VII — Trust, Train, and Certify –, although I would say that what you want to do is to allow employees to act as humans again in the work environment — and humans know how to behave as humans. Look at your families and circles of friends — it can get messy, and some people will screw up, but we know how to deal with that. So TRUST is maybe the most important aspect to focus on. Don’t build the system for the 1% of people who will screw up — build it for the 99% who will benefit from it.

On Point VIII — Be Human, Be Transparent – transparency is important, but the more important characteristic is fairness. Sometimes a company cannot be transparent, but as long as that is explained in a fair way, employees and customers will understand.

On Point  IX — Social Analytics Must Drive Key Strategic Decisions — I am not sure that I completely agree. Yes, social analytics are important. But more important is to measure the impact of a social program on a process the same way as you measure the impact of other programs on the process. So for example — if you leverage social programs as part of customer support, measure the impact the same way as you would measure the impact of the call center on customer support; if you use social programs for lead gen purposes, measure the impact the same way as you measure the impact of email marketing, etc.

But the point that you are making about mining the big data that comes with social and digital marketing is a great one. Companies need to stop storing, securing and serving up that data in fancy reports and instead mine it for actionable insights like pricing strategy, marketing strategy, distribution strategy and product development strategies.

There was a lot of talk at this week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference about creating unified customer experiences. Questions being bantered around included who should own the unified customer experience and what technology should be deployed to ensure a unified customer experience.

Of course, and as Tom Asacker (@tomasacker) rightfully pointed out in a tweet, you can never create a unified customer experience, as the customer experience gets formed in the mind of the customer – not in the actual transaction. That experience will be based on a customer’s context that  is totally outside of the company’s control.

But assuming that what is meant is to attempt to offer a consistent customer experience, as it would be witnessed by a neutral observer – it is interesting to see how most people focus on the company’s hardware, people and infrastructure, and don’t talk much about the company’s software, its culture.

As you (hopefully) allow more and more people within your organization to interact with your customers, prospects and detractors, you will dramatically increase the number of touch-points between your company and the marketplace. If it also your goal to humanize the experience with your company by allowing employees to be themselves and not to sound like corporate automatons, you will also increase the chances of inconsistent user experiences.

So how do you manage that customer experience across those multiple and diverse touch-points?

Technology and organizational responsibility may play a role, but the fundamental thing you have to have in place for any of this to work is the right corporate software – the right culture. And you can influence culture by adopting, and by living by, a simple set of values. Do like Dell, where the simple values are “be open, be transparent, be simple, and be caring,” or Jetblue, where the values are “safety, caring, integrity, fun and passion.” At Jetblue it allows them to predict how frontline employees with react to a customer problem within 97% accuracy – there is no software or organizational structure that would do that for you. There are of course other examples of companies doing that right, including the Ritz and Best Buy.

But how are those values different from your vision, mission, values, beliefs and other corporate documents that are often useless?

At those companies where they work, everyone lives by their values. It forms the DNA of their culture. If you cannot live by those values the organization will eventually repel you.

In those companies where it does not work, nobody, including the executives who spent fortunes on creating them, could recite their values, let alone live by them. They are a useless set of words that gets used in the annual report once a year.

Culture will trump anything in this large-scale social age, as it always has.

While attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference and hosting a great dinner with 28 thinkers in the space on Monday night (the dinner was sponsored by Clearvale, which is our client), I got a chance to reflect on what social CRM actually means, and how many people are thinking about it in a way that is too narrow.

Let’s start off by one of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Ok, so creating a customer and managing the relationships with those customers should be the heartbeat of a company – we can all agree on that. That is also why Customer Relationship Management should be one of the most important processes within a company.

In the research leading to the writing of our (award winning – sorry couldn’t resist the chest thumping) book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we found that those companies that are successful in leveraging the social as part of their business, turn their business processes into social processes. So turning your CRM process into a social process makes a lot of sense.

The question is – How Do You Turn CRM Into a Social Process?

In order to answer that question, let’s peel back the various layers of the onion that make up the CRM process. And to do that it may be useful to categorize the parts of the overall process into the following elements – the actors, the processes that make up the CRM process, the places, and the data.

The actors are the people that should play a role in your overall CRM process – they don’t just  include your customers and prospects, which most companies will consider as part of their CRM process. They also include your detractors, your employees (those that interact, and those that should interact with the customers – e.g., those that share a passion with your customers), your suppliers (if you run on tight inventories and a supplier has an delivery issue, that will impact customer relationships), and your partners.

The processes that make up CRM include not just sales, marketing, and customer support, but also the buying process (most products are now being bought, not sold), the recommendation process, and the relationship management process – processes that have already gone social and been fundamentally transformed in the past decade.

The places refer to those places where you interact with your customers, or where they interact with one another while making buying decisions and sharing recommendations. They include face-to-face encounters, email, telephone, and social media environments.

The data refers too data that typically will reside in systems of record like CRM systems and financial applications. The data you keep about your customer relationship process should include customer data, transactional data, legal data, financial data, and increasingly social data.

Some people say that a CRM system that contains social data is social CRM – but when you look at all the parts of the social customer relationship process, you realize how myopic this view of social CRM is. Some consider the act of managing customer relationships in social media social CRM – an equally myopic viewpoint.

Social CRM needs to encompass all the different parts of the Customer Relationship Management Process – the Actors, the Processes, the Places and the Data.

That of course is not an easy task, and will not happen by deploying technology applications alone. Social CRM is about culture, people, and processes supported by technology.

What do you think?

I would also like to thank the people with whom I had good conversations on the topic: @elsua, @pgillin, @billives,@dankeldsen, @scratchmm, @mkrigsman, @mingk, @marklazen, @sameerpatel, @denispombriant, @absolutezero, @pitosalas, @rawn, @crmstrategies, @jyarmis, @_richardhughes, @skwilder, @debyang, @mjayliebs.

Understanding your tribes and the Human 1.0 characteristics (reciprocity, fairness, etc.) that have been driving humans for the last 10,000 years are critical to help you make sense of employee, customer and prospect behavior. But you cannot develop a truly comprehensive understanding of the people you interact with without having a clear understanding of their culture.

You see, culture is actually another Human 1.0 characteristic (at least according to biological anthropologists) that we as humans developed as a way to accelerate our evolution without having to wait for evolutionary biology to make the changes required for us to do things. We developed boats and paddles to travel over water rather than wait for evolution to equip us with those capabilities as part of our bodies.

Culture is influenced by genetic evolution and vice versa, as Boyd and Richerson argue in one of their great books “Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.”

While the definition of culture is hotly debated between social/cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologists and others, the term generally refers to a body of knowledge, rituals, language and beliefs that gets passed around to help us make sense of our surroundings and drive parts of  our behavior. Culture is not something that is fixed, it is something that we constantly change and modify depending on our environment. And sometimes culture can change extremely rapidly. Take Twitter, mobile phones and Facebook as examples. The language used in all three environments are different, the do’s and don’ts are different – and all that happened within the last few years/decades, which is nothing more than an eye-blink in the context of genetic evolution.

If you truly want to understand the behavior of your employees, customers, prospects and detractors, you not only need to understand them from a tribal perspective, with modern tribes forming around shared passion, shared pain or common interests, you need to understand them from a cultural perspective. In some cases you will need to shape or change parts of your corporate culture in order to get things done, and in rare instances you will be able to shape or create a culture around what you do – which totally changes the game by creating competitive barriers that are hard to overcome.

At the recent 2010 CIO Summit – The Year Ahead – Tony Scott, the CIO from Microsoft asked the audience the question: “who here is best friends with their CMO?” Only about 1 in 5 hands went up, to which he made the comment that by next year everyone should be friends with their CMO or risk to no longer be in their role.

That struck a chord with the audience. CIO’s should be best friends with their CMO counterparts and here is why:

1. Changing processes will require a different infrastructure
   Whether companies pro-actively embrace the social wave that is currently hitting businesses or not, most marketing and sales processes have already profoundly been affected by the social. People no longer listen to companies and instead make their buying decisions based on recommendations from peers. The funnel disappeared and is being replaced by a messy, swirly social buying process. Innovation and support can now be turned into social processes involving customers and employees whose job it is not to design and support new products. The CMO cannot enable his team to support these new processes without the CIO and the CIO’s team cannot build the right infrastructure without thoroughly understanding the new processes. They need one another to succeed in this area.
2. Cultural environment conducive to high technology adoption rates
   CIO’s need to find pockets of culture within their company that are ripe for social technology adoption or enterprise 2.0 adoption. In many companies the marketing department may be that department. Most marketing departments are being forced into adopting social tools by their customers, prospects and detractors. So for CIO’s to get a win under their belt with social tools, they may benefit from befriending the CMO.
3. Together create an opportunity to regain senior strategic roles at the executive table once again
   Many CMO’s and CIO’s have lost their strategic place at the executive table. At a recent large investment banking portfolio company retreat, the three execs from the portfolio companies that were invited to represent the  executive team were the CEO, the CFO and the Exec in charge of Human Resources. Look at many executive teams on company web sites, many of them don’t have a CMO or CIO reporting all the way to the top. The CMO and the CIO can team up together to regain a strategic seat by representing the voice of the customer within the company. That will require for the CMO to stop thinking of their role as the company advocate in the marketplace and instead become the customer advocate within the company, and for the CIO to stop thinking about how to build hard walls around the company and instead to find ways to extend the edge of the company to encompass customers, prospects and detractors. 

There are many other reasons why CIO’s and CMO’s should be best friends, but those three alone should make for the divide that exists between them to disappear now.

[self-serving ad coming up]That is also the reason why the upcoming Hyper-Social Mini Summits are now focused on both CIO’s and CMO’s – which should make for a great brainstorm session.[/ad]

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!

You may recall the Tribalization of Business Study, a study sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research, which looks at how companies leverage communities and social media as part of their business. The yearly study has come to be known as a valuable resource for companies that plan on leveraging social media and communities as part of their business, as well as a benchmarking tool for those already engaged.

We have just opened the survey for the 2010 edition (http://2010tribalizationofbusiness.com) of the study. If you are involved with communities or social media, we hope that you will join us in taking the survey and perhaps also participate in the upcoming qualitative interviews that make up the second part of the annual study.

In return for your time (the survey should take no longer than 20-25 minutes) and your valuable input, we will send you preliminary results of the complete survey results.

Who Should Participate?
If you are involved with a company’s social media programs or communities, as an executive sponsor, community manager, or outside advisor, we are looking for your feedback.

What’s in it for you?
We happily share the results of the Tribalization of Business Study with those that participate – the companies and/or individuals that are willing to share their learnings and are interested in what others are doing and what it takes to succeed. We also share our interpretations of the results through blog posts, articles, and conference presentations.

What is in it for us?
Two of the sponsoring organizations are strategy consulting companies that help clients connect their needs and problems with the best available knowledge. The other sponsoring organization is a research organization that aims to serve its members and other constituents by providing unique industry-specific insights.

What else can you do to help the industry?
Pass the survey link around to friends, peers and colleagues who are involved with communities and social media – the more people that take it, the better and more accurate the results!

Thank you for your time – we look forward to hearing from you.

[warning: rant]

I have been harping on this topic too many times, but as I recently sat through many conference sessions, and finally opened a book on communities and social media marketing that defined social marketing as “a process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products, or services through online social channels and to communicate with with and tap into a much larger community that may have been available via traditional channels,” my hair got on fire.

I mean seriously – a channel to pimp your wares that has the potential to reach a bigger audience than TV audiences? Get real! This is bad advice.

Companies that approach social media marketing from that perspective will fail… miserably. Those that realize the real potential of social media will win… big time.

You see, social media marketing is not about you talking with an audience – it’s about them talking with one another. It’s about having a real time window in what your market is currently thinking about – what they like, what they dislike, who has the trust and who hasn’t. It’s all ABOUT THEM – NOT YOU!

Social media marketing has to be steeped in humanity and reciprocity – you give and take. And I recommend you start by giving. If you don’t, people will not only shut you off, they will punish you for not respecting the basic social rules that have ruled human societies for tens of thousands of years. People are no more likely to enjoy a twitter feed that constantly spews company information than they are enjoying a person at a party who only talks about herself.

If you really want to understand social media marketing, start thinking about how you would help a friend or colleague make a buying decision. Would you send them your corporate brochures? Would you spam them the way you do with your corporate twitter feed? Would you use the words you use in your marketing materials?

Chances are you would not.

For some stupid reason, people forget to be human when they step into the office. It is as if they leave their humanity at home and reserve it only for friends and family.

Social Media Marketing is about common sense – it’s about being real, authentic (there is another word that takes on new meaning in the corporate world), and helpful.

It’s about being human.

It’s simple – really.

[rant/end]