Going Social? Don't Forget the Fun!

I dropped by a couple of conferences in London last week, both dealing in one way or another with the emergence of social businesses... whether they call themselves that or not.

There were a number of 'good news stories' as established corporates told delegates of the successes they'd had in rolling our enterprise social networks as well as some of the challenges they faced.  I even told a good news story or two of my own.

One thing I did notice, however, was that a couple of these organisations had sought to implement 'social' as if it were A.N.Other bog-standard enterprise application.  The fundamental differences of social technologies and their implications for culture and behaviours hadn't been ignored, but they'd certainly been deprioritised in favour of the C-Suite's preference to deploy a tool aimed at boosting productivity rather than anything that might be seen as fun or, God forbid, be described as Facebook for the enterprise.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, these rollouts were being cited as successes, but I do think there is a risk that the opportunity to taste secret sauce inside an enterprise social network may be lost if corporates feel that the only way to implement is to pretend it's another SAP upgrade from the 1990s.

Some of the best implementations take seriously the boosts to productivity which can be gained through enhanced collaboration and the power of sharing... but they don't forget the fun.

Photo:  Bethany Weeks

Innovating socially: the old and the new

I'm as evangelical an advocate of social technology and processes as anyone. However, in the work I do to build 'social businesses', I'm regularly reminded of the importance of not throwing the old (pre-social) baby with the new (social) bathwater. Social technology is a great exploiter of the power that exists in the connected world we inhabit but it doesn't mean that all that came before is irrelevant. Indeed, it is often the coupling of what we've always done well with the power of social that yields real value in the organisation.

Reading +Tim Kastelle's excellent piece on 'Why your innovation contest won't work' provides a topical illustration of the importance of keeping the old with the new. Tim's thesis is that the current vogue of running collaborative 'ideation' activities - contests, jams, etc - crowdsourcing ideas through social technology, detracts from the really difficult part of innovation: turning ideas into reality. He believes that organisations focus on this part simply because it's easy.

And how right he is. Done badly, crowdsourced ideation can be the technological equivalent of that crime of innovation: the staff suggestion box! Placed ceremoniously in reception, covered in last year's Christmas wrapping paper, it sits there waiting for employees to earnestly surrender their latest epiphany to 'Management' in the firm belief that it will be acted on and transform the business. The result: an overwhelming amount of ideas and a rapid realisation that no-one had thought through what they were going to do with them.

As Tim says "Innovation is the process of idea management". The key determinant of success is what happens after ideation. This is where that traditional, pre-social activity comes in. Taking the time to establish good old innovation governance and funding mechanisms means that ideas can be taken through to material benefit as quickly as possible. It's the discipline of the (old-school) stage-gate process that makes innovation work.

Despite what Tim says, I believe that effective ideation is as key to successful innovation as what happens after it. Tapping into a source of great, relevant ideas is essential for innovative organisations. And, with a bit of pre-social thinking, social ideation can enhance your innovation process. Two specific elements make a big difference. Firstly, constrain the ideation - explain clearly and persistently to the crowd what your stage gate parameters are so that they focus their ideas accordingly. Secondly, involve those instrumental in implementing the ideas (the budget holders, the customers, etc) from the outset of the ideation process. And social technology helps bring all this together, connecting the crowd and the decision-makers. Dare I say it, connecting the new with the old!

photo:  Will Hastings

Instinctive work

Being social is instinctive. We're social animals after all. We have assimilated social technology into our lives with unparalleled speed and intensity. For us, social feels natural and something we should never have been without. However, as with much 'instinctive' human behaviour, mapping social into the workplace is not a straightforward task. Becoming an effective Social Business is something that warrants a bit of forethought; not a huge amount - social is a world that flourishes in the absence of protocol - but success comes more willingly when you invest a bit of thinking up front. This is particularly so when much of your current business is already working reasonably effectively in a decidedly 'pre-social' manner. Here are three things +Tim Difford and I have found helpful in our pursuit of building great Social Businesses.

Define the use case Having a clear and widely understood expression of why and where social technology is going to make a positive difference to work is, we believe, an invaluable first step on the way to success. We frequently create simple 'Use Cases' to define the outcomes we are anticipating and their impact on the business. Publishing these at the outset enables us to explain what we are planning to do, guides how we configure the environment and finally helps us explain results. In our opinion, use cases (or whatever you choose to call them) are the single most important factor in directing instinctive social behaviour into productive success.

Help others find their voice Using social in the workplace can be pretty scary - even for those all over Facebook and Instagram in their private lives. All of a sudden people tighten up, become extremely wary about revealing their inner thoughts in the full glare of a professional audience. Social technology is most effective when people are comfortable with 'working out-loud'. And not just one or two confident evangelists, either. Social needs volumes to work and you need to get as many people as you can past the nervously-tiptoeing-through-etiquette stage into social-fluency as quickly as possible. Two suggestions here. Firstly, role model. Loudly and obviously. Blatantly use hashtags, @mentions, likes and other taxonomies, signposting their value for all to see. Secondly, give people a safe sandpit to experiment in. Consider creating private areas where an individual can feel that the jeopardy of exposure is limited prior to leaping into the wider enterprise and beyond!

Make it ordinary In many ways an organisation's journey to enlightenment will only be complete when social moves from being something special and exciting to something ordinary and, dare I say it, unnoticed. Much of this transition will be Darwinian. 'Natural selection' will ultimately ensure that the medium of social will eventually supplant much of the pre-social world. However, there is also room for some judicious 'intelligent design' in the building of a social business. Don't rely on the power of viral uptake alone. There's nothing coy about social. It is brash and loud and should be bold too. Identifying some core day-to-day processes and actively transitioning them to social is often the key to getting things moving. This isn't about mandating the elimination of email, but it could and should be about replacing regular communiques, running workflows and publishing governance documentation. On its journey to the ordinary, contriving social is definitely OK.

photo:  Howard Lake

Green Shoots of Social Business

It's easy (and fun) to declare something dead and then sit back to watch the reaction.  

So the recent debate about whether the Social Business is dead or not has been entertaining and mildly diverting for those of us deeply involved each day working with organisations who are only now coming to terms with what becoming truly social will actually mean for all aspects of their businesses.

Social media, social technology and social business are still staples of the typical CXO Strategy Away Day agenda and they will be until executive teams across many diverse organisations fully grasp the implications for every line of business. The situation is, in some ways, similar to green and sustainability agenda items which, five years ago, strategising executive teams were trying to digest in between working lunches and the first nine holes.  

At first many execs didn't really accept the need to invest in and support green initiatives and often opted for lip-service and green-washing, using comms to convince the market that they were taking it seriously. After a while though, it became clear, particularly to the CFOs in the room, that doing the green thing was, in many cases, doing the right thing for the balance sheet and looked a lot like good old-fashioned cost-cutting as infrastructure replacements were pushed back and reuse, recycling and slicker, more efficient business practices were eventually ushered in.

Sadly, just when, businesses were beginning to grasp the importance of green and sustainable activities for the future of their organisations, the issue dangerously slipped right down the agenda due the global financial crash, which refocused the minds of corporate execs worldwide overnight.

Today though, social business is still very much taxing C-Suite minds and many remain to be convinced of the need to adapt and transform through the adoption of social behaviour, culture and technology.  

So what can we learn from what has gone before?  

Well, if you're looking to convince a sceptical CFO of the merits of social media, then warm tales of community engagement and collaboration might not cut it, much like the planet-saving messages of the green and sustainability consultants a few years ago. However, what worked then, works just as well now. Demonstrating the impact of green and sustainable programmes on a company's bottom line eventually convinced the CFOs of a few years ago. They need to be convinced of the merits of becoming a social business in just the same way... and it works.

For example, just mention to the CFO who has just been asked to sign off on brand new contact centre how GiffGaff has completely stripped these costs from its business by engaging a motivated and committed crowd of customers to provide support for each other. See if that piques their interest in becoming a social business!

Just a thought.

photo:  innpictime

The Circle... the Social Business on Steroids!

You probably read a lot of business books.  I do too, but always interspersed with some great fiction. So it's great when a fiction choice merges into one of my favourite business topics... social media.  I've just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers and found it fascinating and frightening in equal measure.

The story follows Mae Holland, who joins the Bay Area campus of The Circle, a global search and social organisation a few years into our future.  To give you an idea of scale, The Circle has already swept up minnows such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and the like through acquisition and is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate as more and more users rely on its services for many aspects of their lives.

Mae's 'onboarding' at The Circle is friendly and frantic and offers a humorous insight into the West Coast start-up culture many of us recognise today.  We follow her (as do a steadily increasing crowd of customers/fans from across the globe) as she learns the ropes and struggles to balance the demands of life on campus with ailing parents and an already strained relationship with a former partner.  After a couple of hiccups, Mae soon becomes immersed in the hyper-social reality that is a job at The Circle, taking on more and more tasks and dedicating more of her time to the organisation.  Every aspect of her daily activities is monitored and shared globally and just when you think it's not possible to share any more... well... no spoilers here.

The Circle offers fascinating insight into everything that's exciting and enticing about the power of social technologies, but, at a time of major media concern re spying and and snooping and the relationship between tech giants and governments across the world, the book also offers some stark warnings about privacy and the implications for the global citizen, as people's reliance on social technologies grows increasingly prevalent.

If, like me, you're fascinated by social business and wonder what the organisations of today could be evolving into, The Circle is essential reading but tells us that, if mishandled, the decades to come could look more like some of the darker chapters of the twentieth century rather than a bright new social future for us all.

Have a read, then we'll work together to try to get social business right.

Rubber bands. Everywhere.

It feels like we're in changing times. Uncertainty is everywhere. Planning horizons are incredibly short. Confidence flips between fervent zeal and paralysing doubt in the time it takes to transition a powerpoint slide. The precarious economy is clearly a significant contributor to the change we're experiencing, causing us to question much of what we previously held to be self evident. But the void of uncertainty is being filled with new perspectives driving real changes in the way we work, the way we live.

Through technology, the way we work is becoming more social. This is a fact that is no longer denied (even in the conservative corporate world in which Tim and I spend much of our lives). It's encouraging that conversations in most boardrooms are now way beyond the 'Shall we be social?' stage. It's all about 'How are we being social?' And the speed at which this is happening within the glacial dynamics of corporate life is truly terrifying. 'Rubber bands' of change are everywhere, with pioneers earnestly thrusting out into the unknown restrained by the wary majority, held back by an unmet need to know where they are going and how to get there.

Managing these rubber bands is complex, so complex that Tim and I feel it's time to create a forum for sharing these observations. Through this blog and a companion magazine we curate on Flipboard we want to share experiences and ideas from those on the front line of social businesses. Socially, of course. What better way to release the tension in those rubber bands and get your organisation moving?

photo:  Larry Rosenstein