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What do those three topics have to do with one another you may wonder.

Consumerization of IT, the expectation to bring your own device to work and to find enterprise user interfaces to be as simple as the Google search box, is clearly driven by millennials. While older generations will increasingly want to do the same, it is the millennials, who have never known of a world without the web, Google, and mobile devices, who will demand it.

Many marketers now agree that with the increased transparency from the inside out (us being able to listen in on customer conversations), but also from the outside in (customers interacting with internal employees on social networks, etc.), there can be no dissonance between your internal culture and your brand. So for example if you have an aggressive culture, then your brand has to stand for being bold.

So if your company has a play in the consumerization of IT space, that means that you need to get the attention of millennials. In order to do that and appear genuine, you need a millennial-friendly employee culture.

Do you buy this argument? Let me know.

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.

Many culture scholars would argue that you always have to deal with layers of cultures. There is the gender layer, the religious layer, the ethnic layer, the regional or nationality layer, the work layer, etc. And if you have ever worked with multinational companies you will hear these differences, and especially the nationality one,  pop up every now and then — oh, but that was an American idea, we Brits don’t do it that way.

But does it really have to be that way? Or are they just excuses?

After all, some companies claim that they don’t have to deal with national cultural differences. Francoise Legoues, VP of Innovation at IBM, said that they do not see much corporate culture differences within the various geographical cultural areas. Some other folks I had the pleasure to speak with in the context of our book said the same — they do not have to account for differences in regional or national cultures.

So how does this work?

Culture is an externalization of shared beliefs and values. The way we externalize it is in the form of rituals, language, habits, techniques and behaviors.  What companies claiming to not have to account for local cultures have is a set of corporate values and beliefs that trumps the local cultural belief system. When people are at work they are IBMers first, and not Danish, Spanish or Thai.

So what happens in those companies where people constantly bring up the differences?

It too is part of the corporate culture and not an externalization of the local regional culture. In most cases it’s an excuse to disagree and form factions. It’s a corporate habit – and a bad one. It’s an externalization of a set of shared beliefs held by subgroups of people within the company. It happens when there is no strong corporate set of shared beliefs.

Now of course, nothing dealing with humans will ever be so black and white. There are, for example, some differences in how Asians, who have a more collective culture, fill out their profiles in social environments than Westeners, who have a more individualistic culture. But those differences are subtle and secondary or tertiary in companies with strong corporate cultures and true shared values.

What do you think? Do you buy that?

One of the most important Human 1.0 characteristic  is culture. According to human evolutionary biologists, humans developed culture (broadly defined as tools, language, rituals, etc.) during the rapid climate swings of the Pleistocene era to deal with those climate changes without having to wait for biological evolution to help us out. So while humans from Lapland and the Sahara Desert were identical 20,000 years ago, transplanting one from one region to the other would surely have resulted in death – the cultures of survival were drastically different. When the Pleistocene era ended about 11,000 years ago, humans realized that they were the only species that could deal with change using culture – and so they started to create their own change and adapted to it through culture. That was driven by evolutionary forces that allowed humans to become the dominant species on earth. Culture is influenced by genetic evolution and vice versa, as Boyd and Richerson (Peter J. Richerson, 2006) argue in one of their great books “Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.”

Culture – referring 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 – can develop and change very rapidly. Take the culture of SMS and that of Twitter – they are both less than a decade old yet very different. They use different languages and different rituals.

Humans create culture in all the different aspects of their lives. There are cultural differences between families, consumer tribes, pop-culture fans, and employee groups. Companies that take the time to understand their customer and employee cultures, or better yet, those that can shape it, can gain game changing advantages over those that don’t. Those that don’t try to understand these cultures can continue to expect high strategic failure rates – like the classic 80% product failure rate that has been plaguing modern companies for decades.

You see – culture trumps strategy. You can develop the best internal or external strategies – change management initiatives, new product development plans, or go-to market strategies –, but if you do not have a good understanding of the cultures in which you will attempt to deploy these strategies, they are almost certain to fail. That does not mean that strategy is not important – it is. It just means that focusing on strategy without understanding the fundamental Human 1.0 cultural characteristics that underlie all successful strategies is like focusing on a recipe without having any understanding of the ingredients.

We have developed a fully comprehensive maturity model to analyze consumer and employee cultures, and I will document that in a future blog post.

For someone who co-authored a book on how companies that succeed in leveraging this current wave of innovation, powered by the social, do so by turning their business processes into social processes, it may seem contradictory to now hear that you should not turn your business into a social business.

There are several reasons why those two concepts are very different. And most pundits declaring that  you should be building social businesses are missing the point.

First off, a social business (see WikiPedia entry) has been defined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus inhis book Creating a World without poverty — Social Business and the future of capitalism as a “non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today. It is distinct from a non-profit because the business should seek to generate a modest profit but this will be used to expand the company’s reach, improve the product or service or in other ways to subsidise the social mission.”

If you’re GE,  IBM, or Pfizer, you may not want to turn your business into a social business.

What you want to do is to power your business processes with humans and the social characteristics that have been innate to them for tens of thousands of years . You want the individuals and their creativity to help you humanize your brand, you want people from outside your R&D department to help you innovate, you want human employees (as opposed to corporate automatons programmed to stay on message with corporate speak) to engage with humans who may want to buy your products or come to work for you.

Companies that found the key to making this work do end up with social benefits — happier employees, happier customers, tighter-nit communities, etc. — but they do not need to become a social-objective driven enterprise to do that.

You want to turn your business into a human-powered enterprise, we called it a Hyper-Social Organizations,  not a social enterprise — and therein lies a big difference.

What are your thoughts? I will try to get back to more regular blogging…(and I know you’ve heard that one before

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.

Many companies are trying to understand and predict online social behavior using traditional marketing research techniques – both qualitative and quantitative. In most cases those companies are in for big disappointments.

Let’s take a classic social phenomenon to make the point.

You have a crowd of 300 people who come to fill a theater with 500 seats. When they are all set and done, you will have clusters of people with big empty chunks of seats in between them, maybe nobody sitting in the front, and perhaps some surprising groupings of people.

How would a market researcher approach this situation?

The qualitative person would probably try to interview everyone ahead of time and make cluster predictions based on kinship, friendship, professional affiliation, etc. Not knowing when people arrive, nor understanding the true social motives for sitting in a particular place at a particular moment, most of those predictions would be wrong. Yes, maybe a couple will tell you that they intent to sit with a pair of neighbors, but when they get there, spot a potential client who they did not know would be there, and realize that the neighbors are not there yet, they might very well change their mind. There is no qualitative data, that you could have uncovered ahead of time, that would let you make that prediction.

The quantitative person would wait until everyone sits, lift up the curtain and take a snapshot of the sitting arrangement for further data analysis. The problem is that the data won’t tell you anything. If there is a cluster of single women in the theater, you have no way to know, based on the data, whether those people were motivated by being with others who are just like them, or whether they maybe all came together as part of a mommy social group. If there is a cluster in the back, you have no clue whether those people were motivated by the desire to potentially leave early, or whether they wanted to be in a position where they could observe everyone else in the theater and just have a better people-watching vantage point. The data is meaningless when it comes to predicting social behavior.

So what can you do? You need to be more like an anthropologist and less like a market researcher. If you have the luxury to interview people ahead of time, and then watch the seating arrangement in progress, you will be able to make more informed assumptions, but you will still need to validate them through qualitative interviews afterwards. If you don’t have the luxury of interviewing people ahead of time and see the seating arrangement in progress, you can still make assumptions and validate them through qualitative interviews.

But by focusing on understanding the parts of the whole through individual qualitative interviews or the whole by capturing data about the end result only, you will not learn anything meaningful about the true social drivers of this social gathering.

The lesson – don’t try to understand online social behavior by doing traditional qualitative market research like interviews or focus groups (in which people will tell you what they want you to hear anyway),  nor by doing sophisticated quantitative analytics research. Neither one will give you good results. Instead, focus on observing what happens, make assumptions and predictions based on basic human cultural behavior (need for status, need to hang out with like-minded people, need to impress others, being competitive among groups, etc.), and validate those assumptions through qualitative interviews and more observation.

Social “anything” is hot these days, and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon to define what it means (full disclosure (in case you missed it): including myself).

Social learning, social recruiting, and social talent are some of the most recent ones that made it onto my radar screen. Unfortunatelly, and too often, people view the social aspects of traditional business processes through narrow-minded blinders. And that, inevitably, will result in missed opportunities.

Take social learning as an example. What does it mean to you? A way to expand the learning process to leverage the power of the crowd? “Designed” to reduce cost and increase the efficiency of the learning process?

Sure…

But social learning is also much more than that. Social learning is about understanding that we do not need to learn everything ourselves – that some other team/tribe  members may be better at learning  certain aspects of how our world functions. It is about knowing who those people are and having lines of communications to tap into the knowledge they have when we need it. Social learning is not about social media, nor is it about crowd sourcing – social learning is about learning as a tribe (you know certain things better than I do and I trust you for being knowledgeable and up to date on the latest and greatest related to that topic) . The main benefits to organizations are neither bottom line nor top line (those are nice side-effects), they are game changing and relate to employee passion and customer loyalty.

Turning business processes into social processes allows you to scale those processes to levels that you could never achieve with traditional management techniques. And the benefits you derive from creating social processes always go beyond cost savings and increased productivity.

It used to be that the company with the better product won. Then came the age when the company with the better message about the product won.

Very few companies still win with on the basis of having a better product. Apple is probably one of the few that can still achieve that. Their products are cool and we buy them because coolness used to get us better mates.

Most companies can no longer win that way. Coming out with products that have new features no longer gives us a sustainable competitive advantage – either users don’t care, or if they do, competition catches up in no time.

It’s also much harder to differentiate your offering based on the story you might craft about it – as customers and prospects are now increasingly owning that story.

But so – how do companies win today?

The way companies win these days is by delivering services on top of their products that make customers go WOW.  The reason why exceptional service is the new competitive differentiator is not just because it’s easier for competitors to catch up product-wise, but because the news about exceptional service travels fast in the networks that matter – peer and friend networks where the buying decisions are increasingly being made. When people recommend products to friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, they do not focus on the features, functions and benefits the way many marketers have been trained to do – they focus on the overall experience of adopting the solution, and the exceptional qualities of that “whole” offering.

So if you are like most companies and operate in a market where it is really hard to differentiate  based on the product alone, you got to focus your attention on WOW service offerings.

What do you think? I would appreciate your input and feedback.

What do you expect from your marketing department – to be your brand advocates in the marketplace or to be your customer advocates within your company. Chances are that you will say both but only empower and reward them to be brand advocates in the marketplace.

And therein lies a problem.

You see, most buying decisions happen when your people are not in the room – not part of the conversations that lead to buying decisions. So for them to be brand advocates is to a certain degree a waste of time. What you need is for your customers and prospects to be your brand advocates. They will be more effective as they participate in the conversations that matter.

Brand advocacy among your customers and prospect is a naturally occurring phenomenon – as long as you do not screw up in the marketplace that is. The question is, how can you increase the volume of brand advocacy among your audiences? The answer is not by adding company-employed brand advocates to the mix. The answer lays instead in turning your marketing employees into passionate customer advocates within your company. By having them become customer advocates they will gain a higher level of trust among your customers and prospects – giving them a more prominent  seat at the table where the real buying decisions are being made. Not only that, but by turning them into customer advocates instead of brand advocates you will also break the “groupthink” mentality that often occurs within new product innovation teams – allowing you to build better products and reduce your new product failures.

So by setting up a reciprocal relationship with your customers as it relates to advocacy – I scratch your back if you scratch mine – you will end up with a higher level of influence in buying decisions and in the long run perhaps with better products.