Leadership matters! One of the Top 5 Social Business Questions Answered!
One of the Top 5 questions people ask me is does it matter if your leaders are sold on social and the answer is YES!
Getting your executives to buy into the concept of a social business in most cases is something that they will either get straight away or not. Those who are switched on to “modern” technology will not need much convincing that implementing social technologies in the workplace will improve communications and enhance productivity. Those who don’t see the need for it, of course, require a little more persuasion.
However you arrive at their participation, they will most likely be nervous about stepping into a less controlled environment. It’s a bit like them going to the local swimming pool where all the employees swim. There’s no hiding!
How do you approach executives who are not Social?!
My advice to getting them into the water is to let them observe for a while. Get your enthusiastic evangelists publishing and propose that your leader checks in on these things. With their permission ask a public question. By that we mean something they will be happy to answer in public. Encourage your other trusted evangelists to do likewise. Use the fact that you have a team of enthusiastic users to vary the method of interaction. Ask in a forum post for a suggestion, ask in a micro-blogging entry something else.
Make it easy for your leader to get into the water by making it easy for them to answer. A couple of short sentences for the first few answers to things is all that’s needed.
Once you have the leader taking part, albeit on a light basis, we need to convince the leadership team that they too should look at taking part. That team will only see value in doing this if they see the chief doing it.
The leadership team will likely be nervous about what their own areas of the organization are putting into the social system – they will be concerned that their dirty laundry might be getting washed in public. Try to quash this concern. Remember that a social business is one which is engaged and transparent (and nimble).
Show your leaders that by participating in the system and answering cross-departmental or cross-organizational issues their area of the business shows its value. Remember – your value is in what your share – not what you know in a social business.
Commitment
Altimeter's report shows that only about 1/2 of executives are engaged. How do you get that commitment in your organization?
Having a strong commitment among the leaders in the organization sets the tone, volume and enthusiasm for the use of the system. Remember that in any organization the leadership team are essentially “celebrities” and when they post information or participate in the system the staff become engaged. As an analogy to this, while many people consider the old-fashioned two-page memo from the chief executive setting out policy and priorities to be deadly boring, everyone reads it. Everyone engages. So to get the engagement, to cross the social chasm, you need your leaders to start becoming more transparent.
You can facilitate this slowly by driving engagement from your core Social Business team from below. Encouraging the execs to take a more active role in forum discussions, making the technology available to them on their chosen mobile device and empowering the gatekeepers to your execs – the secretaries – are all good ways of driving top-down participation which in turn drives bottom-up engagement.
Reverse mentoring as a technique for helping with engagement. You should, however, consider preparing the ground by producing some executive training materials. An executive handbook – amounting to a maximum of 5 pages of tips and tricks, some one-to-one time, and perhaps a presentation provided to them on paper or some other medium to help them get into the concept are all good approaches. Above all show them that these are “special” materials – these are designed only for them. They are intelligent people and like to be treated that way. Give them the facts in tweet-size points.
Ask if you can check in on them from time to time. If you get their approval then MAKE SURE YOU DO IT REGULARLY. But not too regularly to avoid getting on their nerves!
"The Secret to Managing Multichannel Marketing"
I recently participated in a webinar with some top executives from SAP, Chubb Insurance, CitiMortgage and nonprofit Human Rights Campaign along with the Editor-in-Chief of Target Marketing Magazine, Thorin McGee.
We got together at the Union Club in NYC to discuss some of the questions about managing multichannel marketing in today's business environment -- utilizing the latest social tools and techniques, addressing new audiences such as Generation C and millenials, and how to stay 'connected' both internally and externally.
We're taking the topic further this week in a FREE webinar sponsored by Target Marketing, where we'll explore more on this topic, including testing new channels and using metrics to determine success. I hope you're able to join me for this free webinar on Wednesday, December 4, starting at 2:00 pm ET.
Register NOW and don't miss "The Secret to Managing Multichannel Marketing". Bring your own questions to the webinar .Click here to register!
Wanted: Business Analytics Skills! Required for Social Media
Happy Monday!
Skills is such a hot topic. Business analytics is required not just for its insight but is a cross road for social and mobile value as well.
See what you can do!
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Thanksgiving Reflection - Social Helping on the first Thanksgiving
It is interesting to learn that on the Mayflower there were 24 families that arrived in the New World on November 11, 1620, first stopping at Cape Cod, MA, after 66 days of sailing across the Atlantic. A couple of weeks later they sailed to Plymouth, where they began to build their rustic homes. It was the beginning of Winter, and it was not long before the settlers began to get sick and die.
By Spring of 1621, of the 24 women, 4 survived; of the 24 men, 11 survived. All of them were from the working class, town laborers ~ people who knew nothing about farming and cultivating the land. They were faced with the task of growing enough food to last a year. They would have failed had it not been for two people who came to their aid. Two Native Americans came out of the forest to help the dying settlement.
The astonishing thing for these pilgrims was that these Indians, Samoset and Squanto, spoke English! If we probe how it was that these two Indians coming from the forest could speak English, we get to one of the important meanings of our Thanksgiving celebration.
Samoset and Squanto had been captured by English soldiers and made slaves on a British warship. The history books do not tell us how they escaped. What we know is that there on that inhospitable shore, two strands of humanity met, both of whom had been much defrauded and abused. These two peoples the dying group of pilgrims and the escaped North American Indians found each other, as brothers and sisters, in the same human family, recognition born of their common experience of tragedy and misfortune.
The first Thanksgiving was a thankfulness not for abundance, but that God had kept their settlement from extinction through the gift of two strangers who shared their knowledge and their friendship. The power and the gift here lay in the respect for equality and mutuality of two races, two peoples, who needed each other in order to survive.
This story tells us that survival and nurturing on our Earth is a function of our relationships. When people come together, reach out to one another in the spirit of mutual care and concern, it is in that Spirit that our world will endure and from which thankful hearts will be born!
Black Friday offer for Get BOLD! A big Social Business THANKS!
It's that time of year again....the sights and sounds of the holidays, everyone full of good cheer and planning holiday dinners with family and friends.
But wait!!. Let's not forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday! While many of us decry the early shopping times now available at so many stores on Thanksgiving, I and many others will head to the stores come Black Friday. It's almost a tradition now in some families to start shopping as early as Thanksgiving, and continuing on through Black Friday and of course, Cyber Monday.
IBMPressbooks.com is joining the foray for power shopping this week with a special offer for several books, including my best-selling book, "Get Bold", which has been translated into 9 languages. "Get Bold" provides tips, hints, and an agenda on how you can leverage social tools to transform your business operations while improving client and workforce relationships, while improving the bottom line.
Don't miss these sweet deals to grab a couple books for yourself and for your friends on your holiday list!
Black Friday (November 24-30) Offer: Buy 1, Save 30%; Buy 2, Save 40%; Buy 3, Save 50% with coupon. Products included: books, eBooks, and full-course video tutorials
Happy Thanksgiving!!!!!
Social Is Sales Caffefine! Get Bold!
Get Bold! Use Social To Drive Up Your Sales Results!
Social media is changing everything. I don’t have to tell you (or Jeff Gitomer who wrote Social Boom!) that Social media will change the way we live and work.
Get Bold is a Must Read because:
- It shares advice from a business leader who has leveraged Social Media to drive ROI in her businesses.
- It has an actionable framework to help you do something, not just read something. The Social Business Agenda has been used in over 64 countries for business success!
- The story is told with over 70 case studies from companies in B2B, B2C, small, medium, and large, and every industry and country.
- It is about real ROI. Did you know that on average adding Social into your sales process increases your sales by 15% according to a McKinsey Study?
- It recognizes that transformation takes more than luck, technology or prayer. It takes a culture. Afterall, Culture eats strategy for Lunch!
Adding social to your sales process makes you more competitive.
As an example of what you will learn in the book, read this real case study!
In IBM, our ibm.com team must attract a high volume of leads from a new set of customers. Since Social has become a tool for getting information on products and services, we wanted to explore how to leverage word of mouth. For instance, after a Twitter search or deeper conversation in a LinkedIn group or forum, potential buyers might ask companies for more information, but they also often turn to their peers, other clients and trusted advisors.
So our ibm.com team decided to go social. Our inside sellers drove prospects to their Rep Pages –- personalized ibm.com pages that play a “virtual business card” role for inside sellers. These pages have relevant information to clients, enhance the relationship, and give clients one-click access to interact with their reps.
After training on how to engage and nurture potential clients, the ibm.com team built Twitter profiles to establish a presence in the social networking world. The ultimate objective of this pilot was for sellers to use social media to add value to conversations and build a pipeline of leads.
We (IBM) also worked with an outside firm to identify the most prominent influencers in the our space, so sellers could then follow them and comment on or retweet their posts and learn and connect. We developed a unique engagement strategy for each influencer, based on their activity and what they were saying.
To make it easy to maintain their Twitter presence, sellers also have a social message calendar, accessible via the feed reader function within Lotus Notes. The calendar features time-sensitive messages reps can tweet, with enough content for three tweets a day.
Over a 7 month period, these ibm.com teammates increased their Twitter followers by 5X
In the first two weeks of this effort, sellers’ Rep Page visits rose by 106 percent –thanks to a systematic pattern of Twitter mentions. The sellers reached 1.9 million contacts.
As we move ahead, social selling success will be reflected by the rep’s Klout score, which gauges influence in the social world, an increase in the number of direct Twitter followers, and relationships developed with key influencers.
I’d love your comments and feedback on “Draw Up Your AGENDA,” provides a showcase of complete Social Business AGENDA case studies with a summary on each workstream your company will need to complete. See a sneak peek of the 10 top lessons of using Social Media to your advantage!
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Many thanks to Jeff Gitomer for his mentorship on writing this book!! He is SUPER!
Levels of Maturity for Communities
Communities are essential for Social Businesses. All communities go through a community maturity model.
1. Potential: Planning phase of maturity. It typically involves setting up the community elements required for long term success such as roles and responsibilities, strategy, mission, membership planning and activities.
2. Formation of the community. Having a great community manager is a key factor of success. During the formation, the initial members and influencers
3. Building and Evolving. The community builds and evolves as it forms. The best communities stick to their goals but evolve in the way they reach them. Typically building and evolving involves driving traffic to community and increasing member participation. The topic of content curation is also one that grows and questions of contribution of content and consumption is reviewed. The community may review how to improve quality of content and how to train the leaders.
5. Adaptive. This final phase is where the community now takes on the personality of the members. It enables the community manager to drive the goals to the next level.
At IBM, we do Health Checks for our communities.
- Ensure the communities have the design for success
- Clearly defined strategy and active plans
- Produce Healthy communities
- Utilize the Brokerage Service to ensure long term vitality and maturity of the community
Happy Thanksgiving Week! Give thanks for your mobile device!
Happy Monday!
Let's have some fun this Thanksgiving as there is so much to be thankful for!
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