It’s a new synthesis: people increasingly don’t believe in commuting, and many workers are accustomed to working “from home” or in Starbucks or other public coworking spaces. Local 2.0 carries a strong green, anti-carbon tinge as well. And it’s not at all incompatible with periodic jetsetting, everything can interoperate. Definitely worth watching!

Although Valley visionaries and enterprise data engineers have been talking about “big data” for years, this post brings it down to the personal retail level. Due to the growing appreciation of social data and behavior, data scientists and marketers now have the glue to use data to increase relevance to customers and clients.

In this post’s main example, data engineers analyzed purchase behavior of pregnant mothers, sifting through voluminous retail data, and they found plenty of patterns that indicated that women were pregnant, down to the trimester! Obviously, enterprises have a large responsibility to use data in ways that won’t violate trust, and many will make mistakes in their efforts to pump up quarterly numbers.Put another way, buying transactions are *very* social, so retailers, whether bricks and mortar or ecommerce, will unleash tremendous intelligence in the next 3-5 years. The value of big data intelligence will be increased by an order of magnitude when combined with social network data.

Sam, thanks for one of the most intelligent posts I’ve read on the disruption of print I’ve seen in ages. Reading between the lines, I’ll offer this iteration.

Print, especially B2B- or enterprise-focused books, has always seen its role as an intermediary between readers and advertisers. Reading between the lines, they need to blow up that simplistic thinking and reimagine themselves as aggregators of conversations.

Riffing on your scenario, they can track who reads and comments all posts [plus other interaction], so why not let “readers” organize conversations around the content? If they’re not careful, they’ll lose this to Google Hangouts or similar. But subscription options could include their suggestions based on reader privacy and other preferences. In other words, I’m talking with my friends about redefining the employee lifecycle, maybe they suggest a couple of Human Resources or recruiting disruptors to join us.

Of course, the real answer to your questions is organizational sclerosis: the only people who remain are fighting over the last canapes and Champagne as the ship lists 20 degrees more each year.

What do you think of the article/discussion scenario? Would you go for it if the right people were involved?

While preparing to launch Social Business Services for B2B Sales in January 2012, I have been engaged in its Ecosystem Audit. I have plumbed online conversations about B2B Sales and Marketing adoption of social business (erstwhile social media). I have been struck by a recurring realization: a large part of Marketing and Sales as we know them is significantly out of alignment with B2B customers. Social business is permeating customer networks throughout the economy and changing customer behavior and expectations. This has created a rare opportunity for B2B marketing and sales people who understand and respond ahead of the market. If I’m right, this could be one of the most important posts you read this year.

Two quick examples of misalignment: one of Marketing’s underlying assumptions is that it is not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one customer conversations, so marketing must achieve scale through secondary research (and remain isolated from the customer). One of Sales’ key assumptions is that it must rely on primary one-on-one prospect/customer communications to drive value. Both of these are increasingly false, so I’ll drill down on them before offering practical recommendations for how Marketing and Sales can explore social business at a new level.

Perspective

As head of marketing for several B2B firms with direct sales forces since the 1980s, I have worked with my fellow execs in Sales, Operations, Finance & IT to drive the top line. I have sat through dozens of conferences and professional association meetings in which presenters and participants complained about how Sales and Marketing didn’t work together. As a management consultant, I have advised clients in adopting numerous disruptive technologies that have confronted enterprise functions with change. These experiences lead me to believe that social business will transform B2B Marketing and Sales during the next 5-10 years. Moreover, organizations that begin the transformation process earlier will profit at the expense of laggards because social business will improve enterprises’ communications and collaborations with customers by an order of magnitude.

Reexamining B2B Marketing and Sales

To appreciate the magnitude of this transformation, let’s start by agreeing on some basic definitions. Obviously, these vary considerably by organization, but they hold true in most B2B companies. B2B marketing and B2B sales (also “business development”) are usually organized in different silos. They are motivated by different goals and outcomes that are theoretically aligned but are often not aligned in practice.

B2B Marketing usually refers to several practices that vary with the type of business, but the endgame is to define/control message and produce leads that are worked by Sales:

• Defining the firm’s brand, strategy, value proposition and “message”; this includes managing how various brand elements are used (elevator pitches, logos, colors..)
• Designing and running outbound “campaigns” via email marketing, snailmail..
• Attracting/capturing inbound leads via rich media, SEO, SEM, thought leadership..
• Conducting database management (CRM..)
• Producing “collateral” (websites, brochures, templates.. for use by Sales)
• Managing the firm’s participation in conferences and trade shows
• (often) Managing the firm’s channel and strategic alliances
• All of these practices are grounded in scaled group communications; i.e. Marketing communicates with researched demographics, not individuals because they usually have no relationships with individual prospects

B2B Sales/Business Development is a contact sport that usually refers to a direct sales force, which is sometimes supported by indirect or inside sales:

• Identifying leads via face to face, telephone or email interactions with their individual professional networks; often salespeople are hired for their career-accumulated networks
• Working leads sourced from Marketing and their individual work according to a gated pipeline or funnel along which leads approach conversion
• Conducting (telephone) calling and email campaigns
• Getting and conducting meetings with prospects
• Working conferences and trade shows under Marketing’s direction
• Entertaining clients and prospects (golf, opera, sports, other events)
• Collaborating with channel partners’ representatives to exchange and work leads
• Closing deals and handing off to “delivery” teams (or, in the case of professional services, managing delivery)
• All of these practices are based on communications with individual prospects

In summary, Marketing has served as the firm’s research and scalable communications arm while Sales has been responsible for doing the deals. Marketing’s value proposition has been researched intelligence, strategy and scaled communications. Salespeople would develop intelligence based on direct feedback with their own networks. They have been focused on their own books of business and have had little information on what other prospects were thinking. But they have interacted with individuals and have been intimately engaged in helping customers understand or apply the product/service to obtain business results, so in a sense their information has been more “real” than Marketing’s. It has been individualized. Theoretically, the information created by Sales and Marketing are complementary—when they communicate continuously and completely, which rarely happens because most organizations usually fall short of their goals or strive to surpass them. This often creates a struggle for authority between Sales and Marketing. Whose information and approach is more important?

How Social Business Is Disrupting B2B Marketing and Sales

Web 2.0 social venues like LinkedIn, Twitter, mainstream media sites with comments, and blogs have created the opportunity for prospects and customers to connect with and educate each other very quickly, which enables them to be much smarter. They no longer depend on Sales to educate them as in the past. I heard Paul Gillin (“Social Marketing to the Business Customer“) speak this morning, and he nailed it: “The sales funnel has inverted, the new funnel is: 1) go to where people are; 2) listen to what they care about (in their terms, not yours); 3) invite interaction (by helping them understand their situation); 4) respond to them and adjust your approach.” (paraphrased). The point is, most salespeople go to their networks and try to create contacts for the pipeline. They don’t think of joining very relevant conversations (because scalable social business conversations haven’t existed before), helping people with problems, building their reputations and letting people come to them. The customer is far smarter than before, so they self-educate and approach people whom they (or their friends) trust. This is a different world. Sales organizations that don’t realize it will be competing for a smaller market each year; the smartest prospects are dynamic and self-educating. They need collaborative salespeople who form relationships built on trust, people who serve, don’t sell. This world is accessible through transparent (i.e. public) social venues that have far different economics of communications and relationship than traditional B2B Marketing or Sales can imagine.

More specifically, social business now gives Sales much more access to scaled individuated communications. Salespeople that understand this are on the verge of a new golden age due to mass collaboration opportunities in online social networks and forums. For example, they can:

• Introduce business scenarios to hundreds of prospects in online forums and ask their advice (for example, when pitching a solution to a prospect, they can get input on the prospect’s situation and even objections, leading to unprecedented credibility)
• Discuss proposed contract terms in forums and get other members’ input; if they are even more daring (I’ve done this), point the prospect to the online conversation
• Respond to prospects’ discussions about situations that are relevant to the firm’s product/service
• Share articles that address prospects’ top of mind concerns via major platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn) and in forums
• Create networks in platforms that will deliver relevant articles to them for free
• Blog about prospects’ situations and their thoughts about them
• Note that all of these communications are digital and forever; these artifacts are (mostly) individualized and can be reused by salespeople or discovered by prospects at any time in the future

Meanwhile, mass communication’s impact on prospects has been plummeting since the early 2000s. Very few people fully appreciate the reason: human beings have almost always preferred to be considered and communicated with as individuals. During the 20th century mass communication age, people accepted mass communications because they were new and marvelous; however, today, they are abjectly normal and usually superfluous. Even more poignant, many-to-many communication tools have been changing expectations: people increasingly prefer to learn through their networks, “friends” or “connections” rather than mass communications because networks are more personal. People want to be addressed as individuals. To have impact, communications should apply to the prospect’s individual circumstances. This is where Marketing and Sales have to be if they want to remain relevant.

How B2B Marketing and Sales Can Evolve with Social Business

Marketing usually sponsors CSRA‘s social business engagements, so I have numerous data points. Marketing’s biggest mental roadblock is the habit of being isolated from the customer. “But I don’t touch the customer, that’s Sales.” No, Marketing has to evolve its approach because it’s more out of alignment with the market with each passing quarter. Marketers that realign themselves will unleash value that they could only dream about before. Here are a few specific ideas to get your evolution thinking started:

• Marketing makes most decisions in isolation from real customers (research and focus groups are too artificial because they rarely focus on customer-to-customer interactions, which are an order of magnitude more enlightening). Marketing can start infusing marketing research with direct communication with prospects and customers. For a hypothetical example, let’s say that research shows that the firm’s product/service could be relevant to a new type of business/geography/market. Marketing can engage proposed prospects in that market in forums, blogs and comments in mass media articles (i.e. Wall Street Journal). There is no need to make assumptions in isolation. This is fast and cheap to do. But Marketing needs to develop skills in starting and managing online discussions without marketing to get best results.
• Conferences and trade shows can be fantastic opportunities to connect with differentiated prospects; however, I’ve yet to work with a company that even comes close to realizing the ROI. Even in very specific conferences, most leads are seen as low quality and are rarely worked. The opportunity here is to re-imagine events as connection opportunities that happen to have a geographical/time dimension to them. Marketing currently spends most of its attention on managing the logistics of the physical event. What if they used the event as an excuse to involve prospects in discussions leading up to the event? At the event, they capture the most relevant customer/prospect conversations or learnings on video, which can enable other prospects to “be there” and get engaged in the discussion. Similar, they design programming that engages attendees and non-attendees in what happened “after” the event. But “the event” is no longer bounded by the physical event.
• Transform the channel by organizing online collaboration spaces that connect various channel partners in ways that are meaningful to them. Most parts of the channel have information that is useful to others, but it’s almost impossible to get someone on the phone. Email is very inefficient. And people need guidance for how to interact in transparent social venues.
• Here’s how many-to-many communications in social venues have different economics: Research has consistently showed that, in most online social venues, about 10% of participants are interacting while 90% are observing. But, if it’s a forum for retail management and your security solution helps with shrinkage, the people in that venue are interested in the topic although 90% aren’t interacting. But a portion of them will become actively interested in the discussion a few months from now. And they can go back to it. Moreover, anyone interested in that topic can find it. Now. Email is a closed system that has no leverage in comparison. Digital social venues enable people to find you. And your customers have been improving their search skills every month since Alta Vista was a factor. Yes, you’ve heard marketers say this before. But it wasn’t true to today’s extent because the customer wasn’t in the conversation. High-quality, relevant digital conversations are almost always superior to any “content” that any company can create because the prospect is involved. It’s more relevant, it’s more individualized.

Sales needs to come out of its shell. Many salespeople are actually shy in front of large audiences they don’t know personally (how many times does the sales team gab amongst themselves at the trade show booth?). They feel very comfortable within their networks. So, it’s a stretch for many salespeople to converse with “strangers” in social venues. Many of them are afraid of writing (they’re talkers). Here are specific examples for Sales:

• Although many people have learned this, I’ll repeat just in case: in general, writing questions and responses in public is held to a fairly low standard grammar-wise. Most people aren’t going to attack you if your sentence structure is horrid. You can spell-check words. Get over this fear if you harbor it. (rare exceptions apply).
• Like Marketing, Sales need no longer accept assumptions about “market conditions,” or prospects’ needs. Find and interact with people in social venues who are talking about things your customers care about. Observe what they think, and ask them questions.
• Think about yourself compared to your colleagues (both within your company and elsewhere). What specific knowledge do you have that lets you add the most value? Or maybe it’s an interest that you have related to the product/service. Experiment with search: create keyword combinations that filter these conversations, and observe them for a while. Then jump in and add your perspective. Remember, these conversations are your thoughts immortalized. Even better, you can bookmark the best ones and share with prospects later. Imagine this: you’re trying to score a meeting on a phone call, and the prospect mentions a specific concern. You say, “I understand that, funny, we were just talking about that the other day in the LinkedIn Health Administration forum, I’d be glad to send you the link and drill down if you’d like to get together.” In the LinkedIn forum, the prospect will see you offering value-added information and guidance; when people thank you, your credibility goes way up. In forums, other prospects are setting the table for you to help them and gain huge, immortal visibility.
• Work the list above (“Salespeople on the verge of a new golden age..”).

Action Steps

Marketing and Sales both need to get out of their comfort zones if they don’t want to fall behind early adopter competitors who are getting in the (digital) room with customers. This is uncharted territory for everyone right now. Although far from perfect, the existing boundaries of Marketing and Sales have defined each function and have been comforting, as familiarity usually is. Here are some suggestions for how Marketing and Sales can collaborate in social business:

• Realize that the customer doesn’t care about your organization. Customers want relevant information and assistance that help them to solve problems now. They want to trust your company to have their best interests in mind. It doesn’t help them to have Marketing and Sales operating separately. They no longer want “marketing messages”; they respond most to people who help them with their problems now.
• Marketing can develop develop highly specific search tools for Sales and Marketing to use to locate conversations. These searches can search the entire Web and return 30 conversations per month on grease fires related industrial kitchen hood filters.
• Marketing and Sales can collaborate in covering highly relevant social venues, which works beautifully when you define roles and topics. Members of your teams can ask each other for assistance right in the venue. To add the most value, Marketing needs to get more experience with specific client scenarios, so they can offer specific resources. “I’ll send a brochure” (or video) doesn’t cut it anymore.
• Marketing can develop specific bits of content based on their observations of and interactions with real people with specific challenges. Sales can offer links to these. Marketing can use Delicious to create specific bookmarks that refer to answers to what prospects ask. Make these links the best, even if they aren’t the firm’s content.
• Marketing can ask questions in relevant forums and manage discussions. Ask questions about insights you learn by observing customer and prospect conversations.
• Sales needs to adopt the mantra, “Serve, don’t sell.” No one likes to be “sold to” because it refers to a salesperson with his/her own agenda. It features low trust. It’s a dinosaur. But sales needs to develop quantitative metrics for trust development (here’s one mind-expanding example and a social business lifecycle model).
• Most important: after years of conversations with executives, I realize that it is very difficult to read about this and understand it. You have to experience it. Although I’m an early adopter, I began my career in the 1980s; I have experienced all these technologies, and many of them put your mind in a blender. You can’t imagine them.
• More suggestions in “2012 Will See B2B Early Adopters Move on Social Business” in MENG Online.
• As an example, this link returns many of the conversations to which I’ve contributed comments: think of how powerful it would be if you were to contribute comments and collect your responses, which you could always share with prospects. It’s a new world. Carpe diem!

What are your thoughts? Feel free to post questions in comments below.

Strategy

Whether you lead a startup, an established small/medium business or a global brand, the fundamental tenets of strategy, focusing on stakeholders and their activities, should not change; however the size of the desired effort will impact the complexity of the strategy and execution. That said, I have consistently seen that, if you are trying to engage defined stakeholders, you’ll need to be focused in your effort to develop and engage those audiences, no matter what size your firm is. Not all social business initiatives try to engage defined audiences; for example, a company’s main (general) Facebook Page, which generally serves a public relations function for all audiences. However, if you have a defined business intent for engaging a specific audience, here is how you would approach strategy, regardless of size:

1. Forget social platforms until you define and identify stakeholders (customers, prospects, partners, employees, regulators..). These definitions need to be specific enough to create very granular keyword families to identify SHs online. All SHs aren’t created equal, and client/brand needs to be clear on the relative importance of each SH.
2. Define and identify relevant workstreams. In most cases, client/brand is only interested in SHs who are engaged in specific activities, in a certain context in which their brand is relevant. Develop granular keyword families to identify workstreams online.
3. By combining SH and workstream keyword families, you can rank social venues in which SHs are having the most heated conversations about targeted workstreams. This tells you what venues to use (where to engage). Here at SNR, we do that during the Ecosystem Audit.
4. Now brand/client has to look in the mirror and ask, in terms of SHs and their workstreams, what *unique* value can we add? The answers here underpin the content strategy for each venue (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+..). Of course, the venue also colors the nature of how we engage. This is covered in SNR’s Readiness Assessment.
5. Now look at the top venues in which SHs are having the best conversations about topics that are relevant to you. Look at the patterns in the top three venues. Determine your content strategy. BTW, at SNR, we believe that the conversation is the content, so “content strategy” refers to conversation topics you want to start and nurture, not only stuff you are going to share (i.e. links, photos, posts..). The latter are included in the content strategy, but they are the starters, the focus is on interaction.
6. Best practice is using this strategy process to determine how to add unique value in several venues, which you leverage extensively by managing your venues as an ecosystem (venues’ activity will magnify impact). For example, Facebook and Twitter are excellent for chit-chat, where blogs and forums are often ideal for deeper conversations.
7. By having a robust strategy, a company of any size can be far more intentional AND set up business-relevant results metrics. You can also use this approach to “relaunch” existing social media efforts that are underperforming (the majority).

Execution

The size of firm/organization can have a major impact on how you execute because larger organizations have more stakeholders (internal and external), more resources and complex business processes that you must accommodate. To illustrate the point, I’ll give a general description of how small and large firms might execute strategy differently.

Small Firm

• Team: Although this is a general statement, size often affects culture. If being small and nimble is part of your org’s persona, having top executives or the founder(s) involved is probably a good idea. If a big part of your brand is the founders, it’s critical. They don’t have to have do most of it, but they should be present.
• Collaboration: Small firms generally have more informal communications, so your execution can follow that and be more loosely organized (since everyone’s talking regularly anyway). This means getting around a whiteboard and determining who will cover what part of the content strategy as well as the basic social business ground rules (write these down). Make realistic commitments, goals and metrics. Choose qualitative and quantitative metrics that indicate increasing trust and commitment. Here’s an example.
• Learning: Use Google Docs, your wiki or a collaboration space on your intranet to share insights—or meet every other Friday and exchange ideas. Be committed to sharing your learnings regularly; even better, white them down. Grow the number of people who are involved; start them small and let them expand.
• Scaling: Work up the ladder of engagement in each venue (here’s a Facebook example). Once you start getting some traction, start inviting your favorite clients and business partners to get involved by commenting.

Large Organization

• Team: Generally speaking, large brands are known in themselves, they are less connected to individuals. Unlike with small firms, stakeholders probably won’t expect top executives to be involved. However, in many cases, one of social business’s key values is personalizing relationships (i.e. “humanize the enterprise”). Therefore, it can make sense to weave executives and other usually-inaccessible experts into the content strategy when they add value to the content strategy.
• Collaboration: Communication and collaboration will probably be more formal, so you will need a digital collaboration space, meetings (virtual or not) and knowledge capture/sharing processes. You will need formal project plans and participant templates to keep everyone synchronized. The project plan (we call them “charters”) only needs to be 3-6 pages max, but it should make everything explicit for each initiative. “Templates” are task sheets for every role involved (i.e. some people might specialize on sharing unusual links, while others are asking people questions). Here at SNR, the nexus for learning and scaling social business is the Competency Team.
• Learning: If you see significant potential in social business, you will probably want to create more formal learning, training and mentoring programs. We use mentoring because social business can’t be cookbooked or formulaic, that’s are of the point. You give people guidance, but they have to be themselves.
• Scaling: Similar to the small business, ask key internal or external stakeholders to participate as well, but in your case, it can add considerable value to have other parts of the enterprise enter the initiative. For example, your business development and account services have kicked it off; now expand by getting engineering and product development involved.

Conclusions

• Although this is a very short treatment of a complex subject, I hope it helps you to plan or manage your social business initiatives.
• Regarding execution, our clients have had excellent results in hiving off more specific presences from general ones (i.e. firm’s general FB Page starts a campaign to a stakeholder and hives it off to another page when metrics are met). But key to success is thoroughly understanding SHs and workstreams, engaging SHs and rapidly adjusting when you validate what works.

Which of these techniques are you using?

“Social media monitoring” is one of the trappings of social business, and most organizations are bewildered by the various approaches they could use to “listen to the ecosystem.” No one argues that a key part of social business governance is determining meaningful metrics to measure the impact of interacting in social venues, but how you use metrics to listen and measure is far from obvious, so here I’ll share some insights I’ve developed based on helping clients through the process of selecting a “listening solution” as well as the process that we have used. Based on these experiences, I have developed an offering by templating the processes, but I won’t go into detail about that here.

Do You Recognize This?

After you have been active in social venues for a while, you can expect to be contacted by representatives of two types of firms: PR agencies that have expanded their traditional media monitoring services to include social media, and representatives of social media monitoring (SMM) platforms. The former uses the latter, but they synthesize the information for their clients and even respond according to predefined triggers, so their clients don’t have to learn the software.

I have sat through numerous SMM platform demos with clients. All of the platforms sport useful features, increasingly fine-grained search, workflow capabilities, etc. But the problem with the demo approach is that it is solution- or software-focused, not client-focused.

Before we get into solutions, let’s examine when you really need to start thinking about SMM.

When Do You Need a Monitoring Solution?

It is useful to recognize that “social media” IS media in this context, so you can treat it as such. How sensitive is your organization’s media footprint in general? Do you have highly vocal or critical groups that follow you and may be antagonistic? Your legal and PR people can help you understand the risks you have traditionally faced. Social media can increase all kinds of mentions, but the types of mentions and the motivations behind them will typically resemble those you’ve seen in the past. Most organizations do not have a very sensitive footprint.

Looking at the situation from the other side of the desk, organizations are not very effective negotiating partners for agencies or SMM vendors because organizations don’t know what they need. Few organizations want to spend $500-$5000 per month for a solution of whose value they are unsure. This is exactly what most organizations end up doing if they look at it too early.

Unless your organization’s footprint is very sensitive, I usually counsel using a bare bones approach (see below) to monitoring until you have had several social business initiatives underway for several months. Only then will you start to know what you really need. The thing is, all these solutions can give you fabulous data, pretty charts and export to your datamart (remember that, and how much you used its information? ;^). None of that matters. It’s like going to a banquet: only go if you know what you want and why. Until you do, it’s a bunch of food on a fancy table.

A Client-Centered Approach to Selecting an SMM

The cornerstone to selecting a monitoring partner is to evaluate options using a true “work context.” When you use real workflows/activities to evaluate the various possibilities, you aren’t only trying to compare vendor features in terms of the software, but you are testing each in terms of your work processes. Here is a step by step approach that works for most organizations:

1. Based on your social business initiatives, ask yourself two questions: what kind of information has helped your teams the most to measure your effectiveness with each initiative? Based on this, think about ways that information could be packaged to make it easier for you to use and respond to the information. You will need to talk with the different people who have been involved with your social business initiatives. Summarize the findings of your discussions. Think of this as your proverbial “requirements document.” It won’t be perfect, but it will put you on solid ground to start the process because you will have some idea of what you want and need.
2. Your approach to defining and selecting a solution should fit with your culture. Play it loose if you can. If you need a “scientific” or objective approach, get a consultant who knows the ins and outs of the platforms to develop a “selection matrix” for you. These can include quantitative scoring and weighting criteria.
3. In any case, it can be helpful to get advice from a trusted person who has been through his/her own selection process. Have him/her look at your requirements and help you rank their importance.
4. Now look for vendors. At this point, you can decide whether you want a service provider to use the SMM and filter the information for you (so you don’t touch it) or you want to contract an SMM yourselves. Develop a list of three to five vendors. Here is an excellent list of SMM vendors.
5. Schedule demos with two or three of the vendors, and have your key social business people there, the people who interact. Be prepared to be overwhelmed by features, but that’s okay. During the demos, the goal should be to get a general overview of the types of features they offer.
6. Based on what you learned from Step 5, loosely define desired SMM workflows (how you would like to monitor, use the information and how that fits in with your ongoing interactions). Let’s say you have a blog, two Twitter accounts, a Facebook Page and a YouTube channel. Ask the people in charge of them how they measure the impact of their actions. More important, ask them what kind of information would make their jobs easier? Rough out how they would like to monitor information in ways that would make their interactions with social venues easier and more powerful.
7. Schedule a shootout. Vendors will give you access to their platforms for one to two days on average for you to “play with.” You can tell them when you are holding the shootout and ask them to participate by giving you logins during the same time period (the shootout). During the shootout, use the workflows you developed in Step 6 to interact with the platform and take notes on what was easy or difficult. Make sure to have the social business team people scheduled for the shootout. Each contributor runs through his/her workflows and has the structure to compare and score in a meaningful way.
8. Assemble and have each Contributor present his/her findings, and develop your final list. Invite two or three vendors to give you a second demo. Make sure the rep has real knowledge of the platform, so you can go through some of your workflows and ask detailed questions. Also beware of “Oh, that’s scheduled for the next update.” You will hear that a lot. You can’t use that today. It is true that development is torrid, and many things are on the horizon.
9. Select a vendor, and take a short-term contract; reuse this process in six months to reevaluate. They will offer basic online or video training and sometimes advanced training. However, training is usually focused on platform features, so it’s of limited value by itself. In the context of your workflows, it’s much more useful.

Recognize that the SMM market is hypercompetitive and that you are beginning. After you have done as many of the above steps as feasible, you will be in a much better position to select something that will work for you. After using an SMM platform for six months, you’ll be in an even better position!

How to Start? The Bare Bones Approach

As I mentioned above, if possible, avoid selecting an SMM until you have had several months of experience with various social business initiatives. The trade-off is spending thousands on something you don’t know how to get value from and thousands more in staffing cost because you’ll need a person using it and notifying other people of events. Remember, there has been a river of mentions before, and you haven’t heard them.

The types of tools in your barebones arsenal will vary based on your initiatives. Realize that there are two types of content you’re probably interested in: public and private. If your social business initiatives are Facebook-centric, for example, some key information might be private, especially if you have Groups. Pages are public information. Private information will have to be searches in-platform. SMMs only search public information. You will need processes to search private spaces within platforms.

There are many low-cost social media monitoring tools (links below). Google Advanced Search has undocumented uses that are mind-blowing if someone on your team knows how to structure the searches. However, I would recommend using some of the SMM vendors’ free offerings as well. Many have a freemium pricing strategy in which they give you basic features for free, often indefinitely. I am an SM2 client, for example, and they have a decent freemium version.

Point of View on Software vs. Service

Although each situation is different, I believe that most organizations will benefit from getting their hands dirty. Stakeholders of all kinds are increasing their use of digital social venues, and they are increasing the depth and breadth of the conversations they have with every passing month. This observation has led me to call social business “21st century dialtone” because people increasing expect organizations to communicate via social technologies. Therefore, most organizations will benefit from developing internal competency. Hence, contracting your own SMM is a better choice for most organizations. You don’t want to be once removed from the biggest revolution in communications since the telephone. And it’s way more scalable.

More Resources

• List of SMM vendors
• List of monitoring tools; another list; still another list
• More links on SMM (more unstructured and diverse than above, includes reviews, vendors)

Blake Mycoskie is a gifted storyteller in his own right, and, in this South by Southwest 2011 keynote, he entertained the audience with the story of TOMS Shoes while imparting a simple but profound principle of 21st century business: discovering the meaning and potential of giving. Here are the highlights of TOMS story, which will help you appreciate the context of the blockbuster business idea.

• Mycoskie was co-founder of DriversEdDirect, a start-up that was putting California driver’s education online. He had been to Argentina the first time during the Amazing Race, which lasts 31 days; he and his partner (his sister Page) lost by four minutes because he didn’t want to ask for directions, so they lost the $1 million prize.
• Burned out from starting up in 2006, he decided to return to Argentina to take a break; this time, he spent time to see the country; tango lessons, polo and Malbec vineyeard tours; at the latter, he ran into some volunteers on a shoe drive; they were canvassing wealthy people to donate slightly used shoes to poor people in the country. He agreed when they asked him to join them.
• He had never been involved in a shoe drive before and had done minimal volunteer work.
• However, he felt “elated” when he gave shoes to kids and families whose children had often had to share shoes; he implied that shoes had profound meaning beyond footwear.
• While journalling, he started thinking, “What happens when these kids grow out of their shoes? Why depend on charity, why not use entrepreneurship instead?” He hit on the idea of “Buy one, give one” (pair of shoes).
• He talked to his polo teacher, Allejo, about the idea, and Allejo said they had to do it, so he asked his partners to stay another month in Argentina.
• They cobbled together some local shoemakers to make 250 pairs using local materials, and he took them home to Los Angeles.
• Held a “creative dinner” with six girlfriends (predictable laughs from the audience.. “No, not like that, female friends”). He asked them what they thought of the shoes without telling them anything else. Got very positive reaction. Then he told them his idea, and they got excited and suggested boutiques that might be interested in selling them. This set off an amazing chain reaction and led to the birth of TOMS.
  • One retailer ordered 80 pair, and one of their customers was Booth Moore, the Los Angeles Times fashion editor. She promised to do an article after talking with Mycoskie. She didn’t prepare him for what would happen next.
  • It ran on the cover of the (pullout) fashion calendar. He had configured the (e-commerce) website to email him whenever a pair sold. He woke up, turned on his Blackberry and completely lost control of the machine because it wouldn’t stop buzzing long enough for him to turn off the notifications. They sold 2,200 pair that morning.
  • Frantically he started placing ads for interns in Craigslist. Worked with Allejo to increase production, but they could only manage to make 800 pair a week after a month of tweaking.
  • In July 2006, “The Devil Wears Prada” came out (implied that TOMS Shoes were referenced in the film), which sparked a call from Vogue Magazine and an article on Mycoskie that made it appear that he “knew what he was doing,” rather than showing TOMS as a very entrepreneurial operation that was run out of his apartment and a warehouse with no heat or air conditioning.
  • Retailers in London, Paris, New York and many other cities placed orders, notably department stores like Saks.
  • Humorous anecdote about Nordstrom’s assistant buyer insisting on ordering shoes TOMS didn’t have, one of Blake’s interns knew how to calm the buyer down when he got testy after being told that there were none available. They sold 10,000 pair that summer.
• But what really drives home the magic is “placing” shoes on the feet of the children. On their hands and knees, TOMS team members clean the children’s feet and place the shoes on their feet. The reactions of the children and their families are incredible; Mycoskie was visibly moved when telling the story. He said that he’d started crying uncontrollably when seeing his mother doing placing shoes on one trip; she had not previously been out of the country (the U.S.).
• One story suggests how shoes can be transformative. While preparing to wrap up a shoe placing mission in Argentina, he was approached by a mother and three boys who was crying for joy. She said that, for years, her sons had had to share one pair of shoes, so they could only go to school one day out of three (presumably the school requires shoes). Now they can go to school together for the first time.

Why Giving is Good for Business

Mycoskie’s main message was that many businesses could incorporate giving into their businesses, and they should explore it because it makes good business sense. Here are some powerful advantages that TOMS has that other businesses could create.

• Giving confers another channel of meaning to your “product” beyond its utility (something to put on your feet). You give people the chance to get involved in something bigger than themselves. This results in much more stickiness and repeat business.
• Your customers do your marketing for you. He ran into a young woman in an airport, who was wearing TOMS. He asked her about them without saying who he was. She got very excited and told him the whole story, gesticulating wildly while beseeching Mycoskie to get some, too. He felt guilty but fessed up to being the founder. Her eyes widened, “Why did you cut your hair?!!” (he’d gone short that summer).
• You get and retain passionate employees who love to be a part of a cause (cause elevates people, gives their lives meaning). You can create a culture of service in your company. You don’t have to go as far as TOMS, but he strongly recommends giving employees a chance to serve together in some way.
• Business partners want to do business with you because they want to be part of it, too. For example, Ralph Lauren asked if he could design some shoes for his Rugby line. He had never designed for any company except his own. AT&T did an ad featuring TOMS (which had long used AT&T) story of giving.
• In a dramatic finish, he revealed that there was no “Tom.” Originally, he had wanted to call the company “tomorrow’s” shoes, but that wouldn’t fit on the tag, so it was shortened to TOMS. “Buy shoes today, give shoes tomorrow.”
• Secondly, on June 6, 2011, TOMS will cease to be a shoe company. They will introduce another “one for one” product for people (I’ll wager cell phones).

Analysis and Conclusions

• It was clear that TOMS is so powerful because the value proposition is serving people, and feeling the impact. Mycoskie was able to get that across to the audience, and it was easy to imagine him explaining it effectively to employees or any other business partner.
• TOMS is serving its employees and partners by giving them a chance to elevate themselves through service. It’s a new channel of value. When it is authentic, it is very powerful. It can only be authentic when you give into it, allow it to move you. It can’t be a ploy.
• I’ll wager there is another “law” here: the more your company is committed to the cause, the stronger the signal and the virality. But you have to give first and be committed without caring about the business angle. Mycoskie implied this but he didn’t address it explicitly.
• I agree with him that “giving” will become a significant part of company culture at many companies and other organizations. People need meaning in their lives, but they don’t often know about how to find it and create it. If your company can do that, you will become very important to people. Material wealth confers comfort and status, but these are less important than meaning to people in affluent societies.

Geosocial Background

• The concept of Gowalla: creating memories of travels and trips to share with friends. Scrapbooks.
• An early inspiration was a charm bracelet of European travels, each city had a charm; his girlfriend could tell the whole story using the bracelet.
• Gowalla the name comes from “wallaby,” the Australian term for outback, plus “go”; they later discovered that gowalla is a word in Hindi that denotes death, “one who goes places.”
• Positioned Gowalla against Foursquare, which is more about checking in, badges and points; Gowalla is about creating trips and stories.
• As much as Williams clearly didn’t like the “check-in mania,” he admitted that it has played a useful role in encouraging adoption of geosocial; Google Latitude was too intusive in that it was persistent, it showed where everyone in your network was constantly, and it drained the battery quickly; checking in is useful because users can decide when and where to report their locations.
• However, people are going overboard, and check-in fatigue is evident among some users.
• “Gamification” is hyped; it’s not new, and too many companies are abusing it to substitute for a real value proposition; it can add value, but use it to enhance a solid value prop.
• The industry should stop using terms like “gamification” because they prevent more general audiences from adopting.
• Foursquare mayors can be useful information, but they don’t tell a story.
• Quoted Mel Brooks, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges” (to prompt us to share, if we’re telling a story).
• People want social validation by getting retweets, thumbs up or favorited on Flickr.
• Gaming elements add value to Fitbit, Epicmix, Quora.

Geosocial Future Trends

• Locations will begin installing machines where users can check in with their mobiles by swiping.
• Do not look for automatic check-ins (i.e. your phone checks in your whereabouts automatically).
• However, do look for geosocial apps to begin passively suggesting check-ins under certain conditions (i.e., “Do you want to check in here?”); it will be limited, though, until battery technology improves.
• In general, the future of mobile is huge and adds incredible value, especially in certain conditions like natural disasters (Japan) and political situations (Egypt, Libya).
• Gowalla started with no database, but they were able to crowdsource standardization of place names and other data after the fact, and there are now 3 million locations on Gowalla, including pictures off the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone, 38th Parallel in Korea); 10,000 photos are now shared each day.
• Gowalla strives to add value by helping people find the extraordinary in everyday things or unusual trips.
• Another value prop is using your friends’ Gowalla trips as inspiration or guides for your real-world trips. We need to inspire more (U.S.) Americans to travel; only 30% of Americans have passports.

Analysis and Conclusions

• I relate to Williams’ concept of telling a story; it is how I use geosocial for the most part; the “trip” idea adds another metaphor on top of it. I have noticed that I use Foursquare to tweet a lot when I am moving around and doing things in which I think my followers will be interested. I share a lot of pictures, too.
• How you use the tool is probably more important than the tool itself; of course, tool functionality makes it easier to use for some things than others, to do certain things.
• I didn’t understand Williams’ point about tech terms and general adoption; in my experience, the general population ignores tech terms and focuses on how a technology can be useful to them.
• Whatever you call it, “gamification” is very powerful; people are wired to like to compete and play, and gamification allows us to overlay play and competing onto all manner of human activity. Here’s one Gov2.0 example.

Read on for my insights from working with them so far: it’s interesting because their use-case for the SNR is quite different from that most of CSRA’s clients.

New Use-case: Using the Social Network Roadmap Tactically

The MLDLCA is a new venture with seasoned leaders Jeff Musson and Deborah Lewis who had collaborated on some local high tech events in Toronto. Everything aligned for them to hold the launch event at SxSW. The challenge was they had only nascent presences on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, along with a website. Their primary stakeholders are well known, but with a twist. Digital startup entrepreneurs, angels and venture capitalists fit hand in glove (no matter what they say about each other at times ;^); however, MLDLCA’s niche is bringing foreign investors and Canadian startups together to do cross-border deals. By definition, this requires a robust digital environment to provide continuous dialtone among global parties.

Therefore, MLDLCA was under the gun and had little time to conduct a strategy, and they were working with volunteers. They wanted to increase quality and focus their execution to improve results and forge a solid reputation. CSRA weaved together a “fast start” process, which looked like this:

• Ultra-light diligence process to verify the MLDLCA team’s assumptions about stakeholders, focusing on major platforms, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. It helped that this business is fairly transparent and straightforward.
• Launch a blog to be the cornerstone of their in-depth communications; blogging is widespread among leading Canadian and U.S. venture capitalists, a key stakeholder.
• Tweak existing presences to focus on stakeholders, focusing on Twitter.
• Use SNR’s templating toolset to provide guidance to volunteer tweeps and bloggers. Templates provide guidance and focus and are designed to enable team members to flow in and out of the team easily.
• Note that the presences are spinning up and adjusting in real-time, so unlike the usual case, which is planned and more controlled, we are iterating in fast cycles. Note this gels with their culture; it wouldn’t necessarily work in a corporate environment.

Normal Use-case: Using the Social Network Roadmap Strategically

Most clients fall into two groups:

• Those with very conservative cultures that rarely implement any initiative without a strategic planning process; they usually have held off on doing anything with socialtech (social media).
• Clients who have thrown up some presences that never produced yet keep draining investment, so client turns to strategy to sort out why.

In these cases, we use a two-part process to create the social business strategy before we execute:

• The Ecosystem Audit is an external view: it defines and analyzes the digital environment around the business, so we learn what the most relevant conversations among stakeholders are and where they are happening.
• The Readiness Assessment in an internal view: it defines and analyzes the company to determine what unique and sustainable value it can efficiently deliver to the ecosystem. In other words, how easily can we deliver this value to the ecosystem? In most cases, developing relationships takes time, so we prepare for a distance race rather than a sprint.
• We create the social business strategy by weaving the two together: it positions the company to focus on the unique value it can deliver, and it knows where within the ecosystem to focus the delivery; this includes holes in the ecosystem, which are opportunities for the company to create a presence; the strategy focuses the company on interoperating with its ecosystem to maximize the value it delivers—and efficiency.
• The social business strategy also recommends several pilots that have two goals: test unknowns in the strategy and develop the team’s social business competency. They begin the “execution” process.

Conclusions

• Although we are only a few weeks into it, initial results are promising for using the SNR for fast-start engagements, when the company’s risk tolerance is fairly high.
• The SNR’s templating toolset is very valuable to decentralized teams, and with volunteers, because it is very explicit about the intent, goals, general techniques and desired results for each Contributor type.
• This use-case can work especially well when the stakeholder relationships are either well known by the company or are transparent, as with VCs and digital entrepreneurs.
• Will return in subsequent posts to discuss other learnings.
• Read the news release for more information about the event and partnership.