Author: Bill Freedman

What If All Employees Had Access to Corporate Social Media Accounts?

By Bill Freedman

Access to corporate social media accounts for everyone? Are you chuckling and thinking “Armageddon?” For a multi-thousand-person enterprise, that might be the case.

But what about for smaller organizations with brands built on service, authenticity and vitality? There is a strong case for providing access to corporate social media accounts (along with a modicum of guidance and training) to everyone.

Social media is about participation. Social media is a choice. Social media is … social. Having many employees sharing their wisdom with many community members and fans is powerful.

My belief is that the benefits of social media participation outweighs the lost opportunity from social media silence. The people that participate on your social networks will do so by choice. They’ll provide information and share successes. They’ll help out peers and increase the visibility for your company. What’s more the diversity of perspectives that come from multiple contributors adds texture, nuance and humanity to your brand.

Some may worry about the negatives: rouge comments, insensitivity, disclosure of confidential information, etc. Yes, all these things may happen with social media. They also happen in everyday life. You can’t stop mistakes from happening, but with social media you are able to demonstrate how your business takes responsibility, shows empathy and fixes problems. In most cases, you can enhance credibility by quickly and decisively fixing mistakes aired through social media.

When I say a modicum of training, here are some simple rules to share with employees as you open up and encourage social media participation:

  • Jump in
  • Have fun
  • Share your knowledge
  • Be helpful
  • Be relevant
  • Be concise
  • Proofread before posting
  • Share your corporate posts with your personal social networks

And here are a few things to avoid:

  • Don’t disclose confidential information (if in doubt, ask)
  • Don’t feed the trolls
  • Don’t break the law
    • No copyright violations
    • No slander

Management Considerations: Access to Corporate Social Media Accounts

Management needs to participate in the process in three important ways. First, encourage and praise participation. Nothing drives social media success like positive reinforcement!

Second, management needs to create an escalation process for dealing with negativity when it arises. Basically, you need to demonstrate that you care about dissatisfied customers and provide a channel for solving individual issues. It can be as simple as teaching your active participants to post a response “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. Please DM us. We’d like to help.”

Participation issues arise from mistakes made by employees. You may need to temporarily “bench” an employee that goes outside of the participation guidelines. Help them understand the mistake and demonstrate a better way to participate. After a short benching, most employees will return to using social media with renewed vigor.

The final management topic is measurement. Social media needs to contribute to business outcomes. Understand what drives benefits and learn how to avoid ratholes.

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Social Networks for Business: Starting Strategy and Tactics

By Bill Freedman

I’ve recently been asked by a client about defining their “social strategy.” For the client this meant “how can I leverage blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networks for business?” My answer shocked: “the more important question is how will you deliver social channel activity?”

Social Networks for Business Landscape

Social Networks for Business via BuddyMedia, Inc.

The debate, in other words, was over the semantics of social network participation: is it strategic or tactical. The client was asserting that social is a strategic endeavor than needs planning. I was advocating that it is a tactic that needs consistent execution, and to analyze if it was necessary to apply this strategy to a product using a sample size calculator is the best choice to learn this.

As with most semantics arguments, both sides are right. Social network participation benefits from a strategic foundation: funding, staffing, tools, policies and processes, for example to manage the payments on a company getting the paystubs online could be the best choice. And social networking is defined by action: posts, tweets, comments, etc. The strategic foundation is a benefit, not a requirement, as anyone who has set up and account and messaged “Hello world” knows.

Neither of us dealt with the real issue: outcomes. How will social networks drive awareness, generate leads, provide service and build an online community? What are the measures of success? How does the marketing budget and promotion mix change with a focus on social?

Social Networks for Business

The solution was simple: start now and evolve participation over time. We chose a company blog as the primary content delivery channel to be supported by Twitter and LinkedIn posts, commenting and monitoring. YouTube and Facebook are left for another day.

The deliverables will evolve a marketing strategy with indexsy.com. A blog post. Tweets. A blog calendar. Requests for follows. Retweets. Updates to LinkedIn. Blog comments. Lather, rinse, repeat ( and measure).

Content is targeted to be 60% educational, 30% entertainment and 10% shameless sales pitches to start.

Strategy complete. Now the client’s social networks for business journey begins…

How would you do it differently…leave a comment. Thanks!

Truisms That Inspire and Amuse

By Bill Freedman

When writing gets difficult for me, I turn to HL Mencken. The “Sage of Baltimore” was a free thinker and prolific writer in the early 20th century. His writing inspires me, improves my own writing and, I believe, helps me amuse my audience.

HL Mencken

HL Mencken

As time moves forward, Mencken becomes a little more obscure and misunderstood. But he remains eminently quotable. For example:

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

He’s inspired me to collect and share many a truism, bon mot, aphorism and even a few jokes. With that, here are a few anonymous entries from the archives:

  • Bad breath is better than no breath at all.
  • Old age may not have much to recommend it, but generally speaking, it is preferable to the alternative.
  • When you are not sure what to say or how to answer, the only two good choices are to either 1. tell the truth or 2. be quiet.
  • If you want something to be different, you need to do something differently.
  • If you always tell the truth you will never need to remember what lie you told to who.
  • Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
  • Fall down seven times. Get up eight.
  • Truth is illusory. Rumors are real.
  • “Transparent” is the new buzzword for “buy my product now!”
  • The best way to avoid a fight is to make sure the outcome is obvious before the first punch is thrown.
  • Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes because there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
  • Character is what you are. Reputation is what people think you are.
  • A man who says marriage is a 50-50 proposition doesn’t understand two things: 1. Women. 2. Fractions.
  • The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.
  • The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

And I close with one more from the “truisms that inspire” archive from Mr. Mencken himself:

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

CIO Priorities for 2013 from 2,053 Industry Leaders

By Bill Freedman

Every year a Gartner survey summarizes global CIO priorities, and every year I take a very close look at the findings.

The most recent survey was conducted in the fourth quarter in 2012 and included 2,053 CIOs. These individuals span 41 countries and 36 industries. I like this annual survey because it is a well designed study into the priorities driving US$3.7 trillion of spending on information technology and personnel.

CIO Priorities: the Findings

Top 10 Business Priorities

Ranking

Top 10 Technology Priorities

Ranking
Increasing enterprise growth

1

 Analytics and business intelligence

1

Delivering operational results

2

Mobile technologies

2
Reducing enterprise costs

3

Cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS)

3
Attracting and retaining new customers

4

Collaboration technologies (workflow)

4

Improving IT applications and infrastructure

5

Legacy modernization

5

Creating new products and services (innovation)

6

IT management

6

Improving efficiency

7

CRM

7

Attracting and retaining the workforce

8

Virtualization

8

Implementing analytics and big data

9

Security

9

Expanding into new markets and geographies

10

ERP Applications

10

One of my favorite parts of this survey is that the technology executives are asked about business priorities first. They may be propeller heads at their core, but they understand their primary task is to find ways to align technology with business initiatives and drive strategic results. As a result, top line growth, business expansion, cost control and personnel issues are clearly present in the business priorities. The only item that I’m surprised isn’t explicit ed stated in the business priorities is accelerating product cycles and decision-making.

The technology list is dominated by newer technology that has enough of a track record of delivering disruptive results. The heightened priority suggests that these investments are moving from lab experiments to broad deployment. Cloud and mobile are the talk of Silicon Valley; it’s also found, in my estimation, in 6 of the 10 priorities. Multiyear initiatives where the necessity has out-paced results are also on the list: Analytics, Security, Virtualization and ERP.

Large budget items like desktop hardware, software and support, which in many cases are the largest portions of annual budgets are not strategic topics in this years survey. Likewise, vendor relationships and outsourcing aren’t a priority this year as they’ve been in the past.

Takeaways

  • Its going to be a good year for technology in general as top line growth leads the list of priorities
  • Its not just that CIOs are spending on cloud and mobile, their organizations are benefiting from these technologies
  • Enabling agility from the bottom-up is a big opportunity. From mobile and cloud, to analytics and virtualization, and ERP and CRM, technologies that provide productivity leverage across the organization will be easiest to justify
  • Infrastructure investments won’t be slighted. Organizations will strive to move quickly, but with a strong foundation. Security, scalability and maintainability will be built into to major initiatives. This is a correction to previous years where organization were burned by having to spend on remediation and refactoring to fix mistakes of moving too fast.

What do you think? Comments welcome.

Analytical Rigor Trumps Big Data

By Bill Freedman

The Silicon Valley brain trust, from VCs to entrepreneurs to business executives, are all agog with the relatively new phenomenon of big data. It’s clearly an important technology trend at the intersection of internet’s ability to generate massive amounts of data and cost efficiencies involving the storage and processing large data sets.

Big Data

Image by Rachel Jones of Wink Design Studio using: Tagxedo.com.

Funds are flowing into many big data start-ups which are creating powerful systems and tools for enabling new types of decisions aided by big data collection, analysis, workflow and communication. Established tech companies are building connectors to big data systems. And, not to be left out, mainstream businesses are launching internal big data analysis projects.

The big data excitement is clearly a new phenomenon. Its roots come from applied mathematics, forecasting and econometrics. Statistical analysis has looked as data samples, built models, tested hypotheses and simulated outcomes for many years. Businesses have tested everything from pricing proposals to demographics to feature lists with applied math. Weather forecasts and evaluating baseball talent routinely use applied mathematics. Google’s successful business strategy is a triumphant use of applied mathematics.

What’s changing is that technology makes it efficient to collect the entire universe rather than samples. Size has its advantages. Analysis of larger samples improves accuracy. Collecting large samples quickly speeds decision-making.

But this is where we need to be careful. I believe that, in most cases, more value is created through rigorous analysis rather than collecting larger samples. While the cost of data collection is lower than ever, the labor pool capable of rigorous analysis remains fixed in size. Yes, these brains are increasingly working with larger data samples or the full universe.  Their tools and intellect are data size independent.

Invest in Analytical Rigor

Before jumping head-long into big data, I recommend investing in the brain power needed to do rigorous analysis. Analytical rigor is hard…and it takes a major investment of time, personnel and leadership to accomplish. This is a very different effort that making capital investments in computer hardware, software and processes. Creating a culture of analytical decision-making has paid off for Google and the Democratic National Committee.

Anyone can buy big data tools (heck, anyone can download Hadoop, R and many other big data management and analysis tools for free) and tell their investors they’re using big data. The missing piece that is the commitment to rigorous analysis, to building a team that has the brain power needed to collect the right data, to building valid predictive models that enable profitable decisions.

Once your organization excels at analytical decision-making, expanding into big data is a no-brainer. If you choose to invest in big data without having a foundation analytical rigor, results will likely be illusive.

Connect With Customers Through News: Instagram & Google Drive

By Bill Freedman

The news cycle from April 2012 is nearly over but two tech stories are capturing headlines and my imagination:

It’s pretty clear why these items are newsworthy with the mainstream press: large companies, large markets, large valuations. The press and public alike care about Facebook and Google, and these announcements demonstrate their industry power and offer guidance to future strategy.

My interest in these stories are a bit different. For me, these news stories provide an opportunity to connect with customers through current events. Bill Freedman’s Soon to be a Major Trend doesn’t pick winners, cover breaking news or expound on industry trends, but we do talk about persuasion, marketing and growing audiences. The Instagram and Google Drive news tie into principles that are near and dear to my efforts: focus and agility.

Instagram Succeeds With Focus

Instagram Succeeds with Focus

Instagram Succeeds With Focus

I have Instagram on my iPhone. I like the interface and have used it take many photos and to share a few photos with my social networks.

Instagram has a good product and an even better strategy. They focused on mobile photography sharing process for iOS. They innovated with simple-to-apply filters, social sharing and free distribution. They didn’t rush into obvious and difficult areas such as Android and video. Their iPhone app first shipped in October 2010, but they waited until April 2012 to ship on Android. They haven’t released a video app. May be they will in the future…I don’t know.

Focus didn’t mean they did only a little. It means what they did, they did very, vey well. Most will agree that their mobile app works well and the cloud component of their solution scaled well as they added more than 130,000 users per week.

Focus is a great strategy, especially when combined with a large market and product innovation. Focus takes significant management discipline. In a startup, the hard thing isn’t killing bad ideas. It’s killing all the good ideas you shouldn’t do right now. For Instagram the results are indisputable: their small team scored big!

Google Late to the Cloud Storage Party

Others More Agile than Google Drive

Others More Agile Than Google Drive

I’m a big fan and heavy user of Google products. They are a company that has done more to sieze the Internet opportunity and capitalize on the digital revolution than virtually any company on Earth.

Google Drive is a nice product. It delivers Dropbox-like cloud file storage and Box.net-like cloud content collaboration. I’ve used Google Drive sporadically for the past week. It works as expected and nicely integrates with Google Docs and Chrome.

I’m quite happy that I chose to work with the nimble Dropbox solution and didn’t wait for Google Drive. I first heard about Google Drive around 2007. Shortly thereafter a working product became available from Dropbox, which I started using for free. Dropbox succeeded quickly with a freemium cloud solution before most of us had heard of “freemium” or the cloud. My cloud sharing workflow is humming nicely with Dropbox and I see few advantages to selecting a new supplier for this service.

Kudos to Dropbox and Box.net for being agile, innovating, investing and executing with the “cloud of Google” hovering over their marketplace. An additional shout out goes to Synology DiskStation NAS and Apple Time Machine for enabling set-it-and-forget-it back up/restore for our home computers.

Their is an optimistic lesson that every start-up entrepreneur can learn from Google Drive. Chirs Sacca put it best in a tweet: In the end, my lesson learned again and again? Never count on a big company beating a startup. Never.