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.

Dan Greller, the former CIO at Legg Mason, and currently technology innovation consultant, speaker and writer (with a great blog), was kind enough to join me for my second CIO 2.0 Conversation.

Dan has 30 years of experience managing global technology organizations, mostly within the financial services industry. Having first entered the job market when the debate between mainframe and desktop computing was raging, Dan has seen his share of technology innovation battles – which made it particularly interesting to discuss this latest battle between innovation and control taking place within most companies around adopting new technologies.

According to Dan, that balance between innovation and control has remained the hardest balance for CIO’s to manage. Between the increasing demands that organizations put on their IT departments and their CIO’s, the accelerating pace of change, and the ease with which employees can now bypass their IT department – that balance will become harder to manage, not easier.

The consumerization of IT, which refers to the phenomenon that consumer technology innovations are increasingly driving enterprise tools development, and also to the fact that many employees now expect their personal tools – their phone, tablet and home laptops – to work within their work environment, is clearly here to stay. The user experience that enterprise tools provide sorely lacks the experience that consumer services provide. Think of doing a Google search vs searching for content in your corporate knowledge management system, compare your corporate procurement process with the Amazon buying process, or look at how your corporate software provisioning differs from the experience you have in the iPhone or Android app stores. There is no comparison, and it is that difference in experience that leads to the consumerization of IT. CIO’s react to these forces in different ways – some say NO, and some put their head in the sand. Clearly neither one of those strategies is a workable strategy. Both will leave your users dissatisfied and relegate your IT department to irrelevance. CIO’s need to partner with key constituents and business unit owners and decide on strategic technical directions that match the culture of the company and deal with the risks associated with those strategies – human resource (HR) risks, compliance risks, legal risks, reputation risks, security risks, IP leakage risks, etc.

Risks are a thorny issue for many companies, and one that can stop innovations in their tracks. Many people, who by nature are averse to change, will hide behind potential risks, often unreal ones, to avoid having to deal with that change. In assessing risks, Dan suggests that people look at the Netflix manifesto about their culture, where they talk about a concept called the waterline. The way they look at decision-making and risk is that they think of their company as a boat, and they think of decisions being above or below the waterline. If a decision is below the waterline, then the risks of having something go wrong is much higher than if the decision is above the waterline.

We then talked about the changing role of IT and CIO’s as it relates to shifting their position from order takers to strategic business partners. CIO’s need to be the leaders who understand technologies and how they apply to the business. They need to be the ones that recommend and provide guidance on how to leverage social computing, mobility, universal access, cloud computing and “big data” as part of business processes.

Social computing should be on every CIO’s agenda, not because it’s a fad, but because eventually it will have to become part of every enterprise process and the systems that support them.

On the topic of measurements, Dan believes that there are two types of measurements – hard measurements and the anecdotal comparisons with peers. And while Dan is not a big proponent of hard benchmarks, which would require the ability to compare apples with apples, something that is virtually impossible in diverse organizations,  he does believe that comparisons with other people and companies in your industry are important. This makes sense in a competitive environment where the winner is the one that can stay ahead of the others. One of the most important measurement criteria for IT departments should be customer satisfaction, but that needs to be balanced with metrics that reflect the increasing strategic partnership that needs to exist between IT departments and the business units.

Culture trumps all and CIO’s should be thinking about culture as part of everything they do. It is what motivates people to do what they do, and it is what ultimately determines the effectiveness of all organizations. Dan believes that companies should listen to Daniel Pink when he says that people have three motivations, autonomy, mastery and purpose. They want to have a say in their destiny, they want to be recognized as a master in certain fields, and they want to be connected to a higher purpose. It’s important to have a culture that understands and promotes those values, both for your employees and also for your customers.

To create or change a corporate culture, you need to articulate where you want the culture to be, communicate it clearly with your employees, walk the talk, and reward and recognize behavior that supports that culture. The latter is especially important for IT departments, where metrics around on-time delivery and zero tolerance for failure have often stood in the way of creating a collaborative and innovative culture.

Dan ended the conversation with a few pieces of advice for IT professionals – don’t just focus on the bits and bytes, but focus on humans, their cultures and their biases; reach out to other disciplines like psychology and economics; think beyond your technical expertise when you think about the competencies that are needed to get your job done.

Well said.

Other things that we discussed include:

• How smart companies now deal with risks through a combination of education and guiderails rather than through policies alone
• The importance of e-discovery and archival systems in regulated markets
• The positive aspects of operating in regulated environments where everything gets recorded on business communications
• The importance for CIO’s to stay abreast of what happens to their industry by networking with peers
• How companies and individuals deal with innate human/cognitive biases like the confirmation bias

As usual, you can listen to the actual podcast at the CMO 2.0 Site.

I truly enjoyed my CMO 2.0 Influencer conversation with Tom Asacker – who I consider a friend and also admire as an original marketing thinker. Tom is the author of multiple books, including Opportunity Screams: Unlocking Hearts and Minds in Today’s Idea Economy, and also blogs at A Clear Eye. Before becoming a successful author and speaker, Tom started his career at GE, where he participated in a management buyout of an electronics firm. After that he became the founder and CEO for a medical devices company.

The first topic we tackled is that of marketing in a world where everyone, including executives, is increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of information that is coming at them. Tom is convinced that most executives need to pause and rethink their purpose and how they will execute that purpose. While the priorities of marketing have not changed all that much  - drive top line growth and grow marketshare -, those are results that come from understanding and feeding the hungers of your audiences and the customer insights, and from better defining one’s brand and how to deliver a differentiated value proposition. Marketing executives cannot optimize their way to success by measuring everything and everyone to death. They need to care deeply about their audience and create unique value that improves their audience’s lives. You cannot expect results from spreading messages all over the place hoping that somehow you will connect with the feelings of your audience – you have to really care.

Marketers also have to rethink their content, and develop it in a way that it will travel in those circles where buying recommendations are being made. That means that we have to understand what value people will derive from using the content we develop with others. After all, most people only do what they value – and that is true for making recommendations and reusing vendor content. Marketers need to switch from their traditional inside-out perspective and start looking at everything they do through the eyes of their audiences.

People need to realize that everything in the marketplace has changed – the amount of products and services is overwhelming, and the amount of information is overwhelming, buyers’ attitudes about how they filter and process information and how they are making their decisions has changed.

Next we switched to one of Tom’s favorite topics – branding. Branding is of course something that exists in the mind of a customer – it’s an expectation of value that gets created through interactions in the marketplace. Those interactions can include advertising, pricing, social exchanges with other users, packaging, financing options or interactions with company employees. As you can see, many of these interactions are happening with touch points that are somewhat controlled by the company. So to say that the consumer owns the brand is a fallacy. Tom wishes we would have a Deming-like figure in the branding space – someone who could influence how everyone in a company feels responsible for the brand.

About engagement, Tom said: “People at successful companies love what they do, they believe in what it is they get up in the morning and go to work to do every day. Secondly they love who they do it for; the’re interested in in their audience and what they’re all about and how to improve their lives and how to make things better. And the third thing, is which I call engagement, is that they like the process of keeping what they do and what they love connected to others: others’ interest and others’ values. They love the idea of injecting energy into their idea and bringing it to life for everyone’s benefit.” How is that for a definition of engagement? Much better than most definitions being bantered around in the agency space if you ask me.

Continuing on the topic of engagement, Tom described the three steps you need to follow to engage people – three steps that are described in more detail in his latest book “Opportunity Screams: Unlocking Hearts and Minds in Today’s Idea Economy.” The first step is you want to engage people’s conscious attention. How do you get someone to stop and think about what’s being presented? You do that by charming them and by providing some cue to value. Once you feed their hungers and you’re reflective of them and their self-identities, you entice them to participate. All they want to do then is believe, and you can help them believe in what you do by conveying purpose through your actions, by stimulating interaction and sharing like you discuss all the time. But you always have to have value and unfortunately most businesses don’t believe in the distinctive value they add to people’s lives.

You cannot have a conversation with Tom without talking about culture and so we talked about this whole notion that culture trumps strategy, and what that means for older companies that may not have ideal cultures to roll out new strategies. In older companies you often have what Tom calls cultural immune systems that end up blocking new ideas and new perspectives. Leaders need to be aware of this and be willing to take off their cultural glasses and expose themselves to new ideas (Note that we will be conducting a research project on culture and strategy in partnership with the Schulich School of Business at York University, email me if interested).

“Business is about people, it’s about culture, it’s about feelings, it’s a way to help people feel prosperity and well being. It’s not about numbers,” said Tom, and I must say that I could not agree more.

We talked about a lot more things than can be captured in this blog post. I hope you will find the time to listen to the podcast.

Other things we discussed include:

• How Drucker’s moto that business is marketing never materialized
• The importance of the last transaction on the brand perception
• How the expectations that we have from brands has soared
• The role (or lack thereof) of agencies in meaning making
• How engagement is not the same as sustained attention
• The resistance of middle management to cultural changes
• Ways to change corporate cultures that do not involve a near-death experience
• The importance of finding meaning at work and being able to bring passion to work

As usual you can listen to the full conversation at the CMO 2.0 Site.

[update 5/17/11] – the editor for the magazine got back with me, apologized and rectified the situation. I removed their name from the title of he post.

At some point in time tonight, I got a Google Alert about the Tribalization of Business Study, a study which I co-founded with Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research and which is in its 4th year.

The article, written by Marco Ciobo, a Principal at AT Kearney, claimed that “A study by AT Kearney in 2009, called The Tribalization of Business, found that the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies in the US investigated, and then relegated, social media to the marketing department, which was also given responsibility for imposing tight policy controls on its use.” (screenshot here)

I immediately posted a comment on the Business Spectator Article, alerting them to the fact that the study was not done by AT Kearney, but by Human 1.0 (formerly Beeline Labs), Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research. I also tweeted my indignation with the obvious plagiarism. After all, the study made for the foundation of our award winning book, The Hyper-Social Organization, which was published by McGraw-Hill last year.

The comment was not approved, but the article was modified to say that “A study by Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research, in 2009, called The Tribalization of Business*” – without any mention that:

• The article had been modified
• Human 1.0/Beeline Labs is a founding sponsor and a driving force behind the study

In my book, this is a bad practice all around, violating most Human 1.0 principles we discovered through the Tribalization of Business study.

Everyone knows what word of mouth means (WOM) – it means a positive or negative recommendation about a product by another user, a friend, a trusted resource, or a stranger. Observational learning (OL) is another phenomenon that influences our buying behavior and relates to observing others use a product or service. Observational learning works on us because we are a herding species that tend to copy others. So if you have a lot of information about a restaurant and you go there, only to find a line at another restaurant across the street, you are likely to go stand in that line and use the observation of others preferring that place instead of your own data.

This new research, Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment of Word of Mouth Versus Observational Learning, published in the April 2011 Journal of Marketing Research, has some interesting findings and quotes, including:

• 71% of US adults who purchase online use consumer product reviews for their purchases (according to a recent Wall Street Journal Survey)
• Negative WOM  information is more diagnostic, and researchers have found it to have a greater impact on consumers’ adoption decisions than positive WOM information
• Both WOM and OL  have a larger impact on buying decisions early on in a product lifecycle
• There is an asymmetrical impact of OL on sales - meaning that a lot of OL will drive a lot of sales while a lack of OL for niche products does not hurt sales of those niche products – so while negative WOM is more influential than positive WOM, positive OL is more influential than negative OL
• The amount of WOM strengthens the impact of OL information (i.e., they are complementary)

So what does that mean for your business? Try to encourage as much WOM as you can and if you can show potential buyers OL from others, do it in conjunction with your WOM efforts.

This post is a follow up to last week’s Innochat with the Innocat tribe. The chat was so fast and furious that I had a hard time keeping up – so this is an attempt to continue the conversation asynchronously.

The first unanswered question came from @bpluskowski where he asked to define what “successfully” meant when I said that Hyper-Social organizations are those organizations that have successfully baked the social as part of their DNA. When we talk about “successfully” baking the social as part of their DNA we mean companies that have embedded the social as part of everything they do: customer engagement, employee engagement, new product innovation, etc. , as opposed to companies that have discreet programs (often times marketing programs) that somehow leverage “social” media. To succeed with social it must become part of the fabric of your company culture – like Erin Nelson, ex CMO at Dell said when I interviewed her “Compared to other CMO’s I consider myself lucky. Dell Hell put our brand under pressure and  so to engage in social media  was actually a question of survival….you cannot get into social media by just putting a toe in the water – you are either all in and it becomes part of your culture, or you’re not.”

Some people had questions regarding the Human 1.0 principles – reciprocity, fairness, need for status and power, wanting to be with others that are just like us, being a herding species, etc. Those are not learned behaviors, they are reflexes and hardwired behaviors that have been explained by evolutionary biologists. We developed reciprocity as a reflex because if we can get strangers to care for our offspring as if it were their own, when we go hunting and gathering, there is a higher likelihood that our gene-line will survive. If we are not willing to pay a personal toll to punish someone who treats us unfairly, then freeloaders could bring down our reciprocal society. We love power and status because it used to get us access to better mates and more food. We like to hoard status and power because it ensures better mates and more food for our offspring. We are herding and self-herding because we are driven by a need to preserve energy, and if we can safe energy by not making decisions and instead take those of our tribe members as a proxy we will do so.

There were lot’s of questions and comments about the tribe concept. Tribes are different from psychographics because understanding tribes requires you to understand the tribe’s culture. Psychographics touch on behavioral characteristics, but they only focus on individual behavioral characteristics, not cultural/group behavioral characteristics.

Tribes and communities are the same – tribes is a term that anthropologist use and communities one that sociologists use to mean the same thing.

During the conversations some people started talking about fans and ambassadors. Fans are a tribe, but with sometimes very different characteristics that other consumer tribes. Ambassadors are what I sometimes refer to as the leaders of your tribes. Besides understanding the culture of your tribes, it is very important to understand their leaders and find ways to engage them. And yes, you do self-select to be in modern tribes, and you can voluntary leave them, making it tricky to exert too much top-down control in tribal environments.

As to how many tribes we can belong to, I think the answer is different depending on the person. But it is safe to say that most people will only belong to one tribe per interest. That points to the fact that there is a true first mover advantage for those companies that can tap into their tribes. As long as Fiskars does not screw up the Fiskateers, it will be very hard for others to create another vibrant scrap-booker community.

@dscofield made the point that many companies seem to find their external tribes but few find enable their internal tribes. That is so true, and the power that you can get from matching your internal tribes with your external tribes (put people from within your company with a shared interest, shared passion or pain in touch with people on the outside) is tremendous.

We found examples of companies turning business processes into social processes for every imaginable process, except finance and legal. I think that we may never find them, but would love to document them if they exist. The reason why I think we won’t find them is because successful Hyper-Social organizations stop being company or product centric. They instead become 100% customer, employee or human-centric, like Fiskars, Jeep or Mini (see this blog post). @bpluskowski disagreed with that point and listed microfinancing and venture funding as examples of social financial processes. I do not disagree with that point, but the point I was trying to make is that we have not found internal finance processes to be social. So the internal financial department within a microfinancing organization or venture fund is unlikely to be social.

There were some comments and questions around the differences between B2B and B2C. Our research has found no difference between the success criteria of B2B or B2C companies that turned themselves into Hyper-Social organizations. The reason for that is that when it works, it’s not B’s talking to B’s or C’s – it’s people talking to people.

We talked about Netnography being a good methodology to understand/study online tribes. The founder of Netnography, @kozinets, was kind enough to post a white paper about netnography after our chat – thanks Rob!

Thank you all for the great chat – I did learn a few things as usual - @Renee_Hopkins, @AndreaMeyer, @bpluskowski, @dscofield, @MWCemily, @lindanaiman, @ken_rosen, @stevemassi, @greggfraley, @adhansen, @bo, @CreativeSage, @SteveKoss, @gnosisarts, @bikespoke, @innovKelli, @sourcepov, @DrewCM, @blogbrevity, @DavidWLocke, @Note_to_CMO, @futurescape, @MaxMckeown, @thehealthmaven, @adivik2000, @thebrandbuilder, @YKabakibo, @pprothe, @johntodor, @thotstr, @tomasacker, @webby2001, @LadyZhere, @mambomedia, @marydpadilla, @pavanvoice, @TomOB, @4byoung, @TheB2BModel, @Adrianaology, @Chris_Eh_Young, @megheuer, @T_C_P, @quality1

[update 12/21/2010] @fearlessweb tweeted me the following message: “@fgossieaux Your URL has been unblocked due to a false positive and should be accessible to your customers. Apologies for the inconvenience.” – hopefully done for now…

Original message:

Trend Micro is an Internet Security software company that claims to be protecting your business from viruses and spyware. They do that, and they also prevent small businesses like mine from conducting  business.

Our site, www.human1.com, which is built 100% on WordPress, and designed by some of the best people in the industry is categorized as ‘malicious’. Human 1.0 prospects and customers have alerted us of that fact for well over a month. We tried to submit for reclassification of our site, but you need to be a customer to do that. Obviously that is not something we would ever consider.

They also claim to be listening on twitter and so I engaged them there – again with limited success.

So how is it having an immediate impact on our business?

We are running two very high end workshops in January. We invested thousands of $$ to promote the events, only to find Trend Micro clients not being able to access our site. Not only can they not access our site and register, the fact that Trend Micro calls us malicious does not make for a good impression –  let’s face it, the fact that “the security system” calls us malicious is not good for our reputation. We even had a sponsor for the event pull out because of this issue…

So Trend Micro – what is it going to be? Do we need to spend more money to have our lawyer contact you? Who is the ‘malicious’ party in this case?

You are hurting business…and you should be ashamed of your business practices. Maybe you should be regulated.

Seriously…have you ever thought of that? Is your brand powered by people?

Because if it isn’t, you are missing out.

JetBlue is bringing humanity back to the airline industry, IBM got rid of its firewall and encourages every one of their 400,000 employees to start a community with outsiders about whatever they want, Xerox and Humana are enlisting their active social networkers and bloggers to participate in their product launches, even though 80% of them talk about things that have nothing to do with the company.

What are those companies doing that you are not? They are humanizing their brand – in effect powering their brand with people. And they realize that in order to do that you need to start by empowering and trusting your employees.

Check out the attached presentation to find out how they really do it.

Seriously — is it?

I have finally had a chance to catch up with some blog reading and have been struck by the number of people who focus on building social media programs to reach customers and prospects in new ways. And they use advertising metrics like engagement to decide how successful their programs are.

That is not what this current wave of innovation is all about!

While using traditional marketing programs in social media environments may yield some results, they do not leverage the social…they are plain old marketing programs that are driven by incentives, coupons, or other traditional marketing drivers. They die the minute you stop fueling them.

As some people have called it, social media a platform for participation. It’s actually a massive platform of participation that allows the social for which humans have been hardwired, to scale to the point where it makes a difference in business again – both as employees or customers/prospects.

Those companies that are successful in leveraging social media do not use it as a channel to reach audiences. They use it to turn their business processes into social processes – they power their business with people. They get all their employees and customers participate in product innovation processes, customer support processes, knowledge management processes, marketing and sales processes and others. They don’t care about engagement, because in many cases, as is the case when you try glean insights from the marketplace, engagement with the company is not even required – its the engagement among the people that counts.

If you are interested in the topic, you may want to join us for our Hyper-Social Mini Summits coming up in January, where we will be joined by companies who have done it before and brainstorm with executives on how to make that work.

Call me jaded or cranky – I don’t care – but I have had it with self-proclaimed social media experts. And not because they are one of the most ego-driven bunch of (un)innovators that I have seen in my entire career. After all, I have been able to live through the age of A-listers and following exclusionary eras of social media without getting too caught up in it. I’ve had it because they are hurting the reputation of people who truly understand this wave of innovation by giving their clients and customers bad advice.

The only thing I used to do was to follow a simple rule to help me decide whether or not to friend someone on social networking sites. Besides some other rules that I use for various sites I would not accept people who called themselves social media experts of gurus. Maybe it’s time to step that up.

So what got me so riled up? A post by Chris Kieff (who I normally enjoy reading), about what makes a social media expert. In it he describes how you cannot call yourself a social media expert unless you have a set number of followers on facebook, twitter and LinkedIn, and how you need to have a certain level of Facebook fans to qualify. In other words, another piece of bad advice for companies who are trying to recruit people to help them make sense of this current wave of innovation.

On Chris’ Facebook posting about the blog post I said “You can be all that and when a CMO comes along and asks how to leverage the social as part of lead gen or product innovation be at a total loss…or when a CIO comes along and asks how all this impacts his infrastructure (CRM, PLM, etc.) be completely clueless. Social media is about “the social” and humans know what that means…they have been hardwired to behave that way for eons. What is hard is how to embrace all this social activity into a business environment – and to do that you need a deep understanding of business processes and how business people measure success…they do not want to measure the impact of social media in customer service by the number of followers – they want to measure the impact the same way as you measure the impact of a call center…” I then added “…the metrics you use may in fact not be a good indicator to evaluate an expert…I agree that you learn by doing, we are aligned there…but in this case that is not enough. In fact there are people with huge followings that are a) business clueless and b) socially awkward – neither one of those profiles would be a good hire if you are trying to leverage the social as part of your business…”

Others, including Danny Brown weren’t quite as delicate in telling Chris that this was bad advice – and I really cannot blame them. Chris came back with a lame rebuttal, typical of self-proclaimed social media experts’ discourse with the pot calling the kettle black – calling the feedback he got coming from the “social media echo chamber.”

It is not good for our industry to tolerate people putting out bad advice – it hurts us all. Customers who listen to  that advice end up disappointed, hurt or confused. In writing our book, The Hyper-Social Organization, I talked to a well known and social-media savvy CMO who asked for my opinion about popular social media experts. Not knowing where he was going with that I played it safe and said “I know a lot of those people and I am friend with some of them, but there are many people out there who lack real business experience,” to which he responded “EXACTLY – most do not understand my business, and much less what my role is.”

That of course, is not good for the reputation of the industry as a whole.

How many dead corporate blogs have you seen out there? How many company-centric corporate-speak spewing twitter feeds? How many corporate Facebook pages with fans that come only because the company distributes coupons on its page? Those are some of the best examples of what bad advice can lead to. At least they are not hurting the companies that deploy them. But even those best case scenarios hurt those organizations and consultants that can truly help companies leverage social media as part of their business – those that understand that social media is not about the media but about the social, and those that realize that to succeed you need to power your business processes with people – not enable your marketing processes with a new social media channel.

Sorry Chris for using your posts as examples – they are the posts that made me reach my tipping point.

What do you say?