Social Media: Thinking Over Words Meaning

By Thierry de Baillon

Terminology, as language itself, always had a huge impact on our thinking. Considering the pervasive place social media has taken into our online lives, from mundane Facebook conversations to companies-wide collaborative platforms, including strategies as diverse as Youtube-based marketing campaigns, Social CRM initiatives or open innovation frameworks, it appeared to me interesting to look a bit closely at the words themselves: ‘social media’.

Conversely to Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0 (or anything 2.0, as far as it seems), the term ‘social media’ doesn’t have a clear origin to trace back.  Despite that, it appears that everyone knows about it and has a more or less clear (even if not expressible) idea of what it is.  Isn’t ‘social’ about conversation, and ‘media’ about the channels (technologies) that support it? Yes, of course, but meanings are obstinate, so let us listen to what the words themselves have to say.

Social by nature

When writing “Du contrat social” in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, after John Locke, theorizing and popularizing the meaning of ‘social’ being the fact of pertaining to a human society as an organized (and beneficial) structure. In this sense, all of our interactions are social. Work, by nature, is social, since implying active interactions inside an organized system.

Symptomatically enough, ‘social’, as in ‘social media’ and most related concepts and tools, seems to relate more legitimately to the ‘outside’ world, where individuals discuss and interact ad libitum, than to enterprise’s world, where its use is even perceived as controversial. It looks like, in executive’s language, the word’s side connotations (of friendliness or of welfare handling) had taken over the deep political and economical implications of the word and of its use. Social CRM, for example, relates to interactions with customers, not to an internal collaborative evolution of CRMs.

Does that really make sense? ‘Social’ is at the heart of our organizations. It isn’t about Facebook. It is about how people interact with each other, how they exchange knowledge, and about the patterns emerging from these knowledge flows. It is the way we manage capabilities, hierarchies, practices, and collaboration. It is the way we drive business and profit. The necessity to deal with the shift needed to cope with a hyper-connected economy, with customers and workers new needs and expectations, cannot be avoided forever, and ‘social’ kept out of the work realm for long.

From media to mediation

Similarly as we underestimate the ‘social’ dimension of ‘social media’, we routinely overestimate its ‘media’ dimension. ‘Media’, as a singular noun, first appeared in 1923, the very same year the first commercial appeared on radio.  Since then, its definition shifted from “a means of conveying something” (the original definition of medium) to “a channel broadcasting information”. Media is not about conversation (a two-way exchange of information), but about one-way diffusion of information. Or even, as McLuhan explained in “Understanding media”, about one-way influence this channel holds on our cognition.

Bill Ives, in his last post, pointed me to Douglas Coupland’s book about McLuhan, and to David Carr’s review. Carr quotes McLuhan: “The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations … When people get close together, they get more and more savage.” But is this vision, while striking if we look at individuals as a myriad of broadcasters, still relevant if we stop thinking in terms of pushing information through multi-fragmented channels and instead immerse ourselves in a global conversation?

It is no wonder brands began to think of ‘social media’ as new conveyors for push marketing information the same way they broadcast advertising in most other channels –and many still do-; the ‘media’ word is a testimony to that immature interpretation. But this is a reductionist view of what is really happening online: ‘social media’ have become true multiway channels to mediate exchange of knowledge.

It might be time to consider ‘social media’ (or should we say ‘social channels’) from a true ‘social’ point of view: a disruptive environment where knowledge flows freely, and sets the base for a new economical and political ‘social contract’.

I would love to hear your view about that and, oh yes I am late, I wish you a very very very happy New Year.

Have We Yet Integrated Social, Scottie?

By Thierry de Baillon

Another day, another buzzword… Integration is quite a hot topic on these days of predictions, especially after both David Armano, from Edelman Digital, and Jeremiah Owyang, from Altimer, qualified 2011 as year of social (‘media’ for David, ‘business’ for Jeremiah) integration.

Integrating social into business

As many words, ‘integration’ has quite a few meanings, but they all rely to the fact of ‘getting the part to fit into the whole’. From a business perspective, the matter of integrating ‘social’ into every aspect of companies’ operations is of course a trend we will all see happening one day or another, but I cannot keep from being dubitative about the length of the road 99.9 percent of businesses will have to follow to transform themselves from their present state to truly social businesses. Integration requires parts to exist before they can fit into the whole.

More and more initiatives exist which prove the competitive advantages associated to becoming a social enterprise, and the exponential growth of the social web, where most of customers’ conversations now take place, is now an unavoidable business fact, but the vast majority of organizations still do not get it at all. These are still mainly emergent behaviors. Seriously, heralding 2011 as being the year of social integration amounts to claiming it the year of time travel.

Integrating social into platforms

Integration is also a technology matter. In this context, ‘integrating’ can be helpfully defined as ‘dealing with’. The iPod ‘deals with sound’ so that, when associated to iTunes, it integrates most of the ways we daily interact with sound. The result is a sleek, one-size-fits-all device able to generate the best ever user experience while hiding all internal complexity.  Similarly, Microsoft Excel ‘deals with numbers’ with the single elegant paradigm of a grid.

We all dream of integrated beauties such as Star Trek’s Tricorder, but ‘dealing with’ doesn’t always stands for a great user experience. Another Microsoft product, Word, for long, is a synonym for big bloated piece of software, with many features one doesn’t even want to hear about. In fact, Word ‘deals with words’ in the same way the iPod ‘deals with sound’, which shows that integration is far from being straightforward when it comes to deal with complex concepts. There are so many radically different ways we use words in written documents that no software can seamlessly integrate them.

When it comes to ‘dealing with social’, large platforms tend to look much more like Word than with the iPod or Excel.  Huge sets of collaborative tools clearly do not facilitate collaboration: not even do they facilitate the comprehension of what ‘social’ means. Time will tell if vendors will succeed in developing a new paradigm for collaborative interfaces, but, in that sense, actual toolsets clearly demonstrate a failure in what we can expect from integration.

Nevertheless, we are seeing today technological integration happening much faster than business integration… for better or for worse.

Integrating social into CRM?

Considering the growing importance of the social web, it is not surprising that companies are looking for ways to monitor customers’ activity and interaction beyond engagement in communities. ‘Dealing with [social] customers’ is Social CRM’s ambitious promise. As you have guessed, integration is here too a key concern (or should be); but should we look after integration in this domain?

If I had one prediction to make for 2011, it would be the rise of analytics tools.  Dealing with customers means a lot of data mining and analysis, and most tools are either quite awfully imprecise, like sentiment analysis, or require deep knowledge and heavy hand-tuning, like social network analysis. Add to that the difficulty of tapping into real-time modifications of your customers’ interactions, and you will understand why we need much stronger analytics tools than those available today.

Furthermore, a global understanding of what your customers are talking about is a lame objective. What customers want is a personal experience, at every single point where they choose to interact –or not- with your company. Traditional CRMs are about personalized relationships, and Social CRMs must follow this track, and aim at offering a comprehensive view of individual customers’ interactions.

Unless being able to deliver on such a demanding promise, social CRM integration, from a toolset perspective, is quite nonsense. Whether you start from a collaborative or a CRM platform, present offering will leave you with a gathering of imperfect tools for a less than perfect result.

On the other hand, companies’ needs –and will- to better understand social customers’ behaviors grows rapidly, whether it be to progress toward a more social business, or, more often and prosaically, to ‘traditionally’ increase profit through social channels.  While integrating social into business is still far away, interacting with social customers is a reality most departments are facing today, to reach different goals, following different processes, using different tools. To understand how social business can drive better business, companies need to be able to reach them, they need to feel the way customers now want to get their jobs done better with the help of the goods and services they buy. Social CRM has this power, and, as fuzzy a concept it still is, its integration into business has the potential to change the way most business is done.

Moving Beyond the Smoke Screen

By Thierry de Baillon

“Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.” This definition, taken from Wikipedia, and quoted by Andrew McAfee in his 2006 definition of Enterprise 2.0, summaries pretty well most present ‘social’ approaches. Or misconceptions, should I say… ‘enables’, really?

The innovation literature is full of controversies between technology-first and customers-first invention, but there is very few evidences of preeminence of technology in emergence of new human behaviors. As Steven Shapin stated it:

The tendency to exaggerate the impact of technological innovation follows from an artifact of historical consciousness

Use transforms technology, and gives it its meaning and usefulness. Enterprise 2.0 makes no exception; wikis, for example, are a more than 15 years old technology, and some companies have developed a true collaborative, adaptive and customer-centric structure without the help of any 2.0 or social technology.

Vendors pitch ahead

… co-workers come together to swarm on problems, seize opportunities, and make the important outcomes happen. They easily share what they are learning and doing in real time, to keep the wheels of innovation turning.

This glorious sentence was picked on Jive Software’s website. I have nothing against Jive, I instead think they are developing one of the most innovative and interesting platform of its kind. But this sentence is typical of a discourse indistinctly mixing important behavioral concepts with marketing babble, typical of a trend toward technology-driven transformation.

Examples abound. BlueKiwi allows you to “engage with your influencers”, although influence is for now such a vague and loose notion than nobody can precisely define what an influencer might be. IBM’s Lotus Connections call Communities what should in fact be called Groups, blurring further the concept of workplace collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 tackles trust as it “provides trusted access to the right information to the right people at the right time”. And I could go on endlessly…

An unavoidable wreck

Technology moves fast. Really fast. Reframing for the social enterprise takes a lot of time convincing, mentoring, changing people mindset to foster interaction and build trusted relationships among people who mostly don’t trust each other as I wrote in my last post. The fast pace of technological innovation doesn’t leave vendors enough time to align their solutions with organizational problems. Considering that new behaviors are enabled by technology will lead to an unavoidable wreck between vendors’ promises and actual companies needs. Today, as IT companies and departments take over the place, there is no more room for pilots, cultural change and bottom line uncertainty in Enterprise 2.0’s bandwagon…

Let us stop believing (and saying) that technology enables collaborative and innovative behaviors, and focus instead on the fact that it can at best support them.

Integration into existing hierarchies and systems, spontaneous customer adhesion and socialization of business-as-usual are a smoke screen, which hides both the difficult rise of new and emergent ways to drive business and the richness of human mind’s resources. We don’t need more social platforms, we need more human companies.

Is Collaboration a Crock?

By Thierry de Baillon

Let us face it; we, as humans, are selfish, individualists, and undoubtedly clinging to any privileges associated with power. Goodwill and sharing among peers follow Nielsen’s principle, and most of us wouldn’t even imagine acting differently unless obliged to. The social Web is opening a path to new ways of fostering knowledge flows inside and outside our organizations, but the need for collaborative behaviors to unlock models of work suitable to the new hyperlinked economy taking shape nowadays is only fulfilled (or even reachable) by few.

Communities and trust: a reality check

In this context, the pillars of efficient and creative collaboration, connected communities and trust, might be far more difficult to leverage than heralded by Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts. Developing and nurturing communities is a hot topic, but which reality does it uncover? Communities are about passion, and passion is first about learning from your peers. No real community is ever thinkable without that. Thousands of Facebook pages are created every day on the mostly false promise to build communities. Coca-Cola’s page has almost fifteen millions fans but is there a reason to call this gathering a “community”? Is there any in-depth interaction or, let’s say it, collaboration, involved?

The internal version doesn’t behave better. At organizational level, most collaborative work is, in fact, teamwork, where cooperation is aligned along tasks in a linear and predictable way. Communities of practice, which develop truly collaborative and adaptive behaviors along time, rely much more on passion, patience and involvement than on 2.0 technologies to grow and operate. They usually perform well online because they already do offline. Beyond that, many “successful” Enterprise 2.0 case studies do not offer any reality check apart from the number of connections recorded and number of “communities” created. Socialwashing is the new rule of thumb.

Besides nurturing a favorable collective environment, true collaboration requires trust. The problem here is that trust is an endangered quality. Brands cannot ignore that customers are less and less confident every year, and that erosion of trust shows up everywhere, social media space included. Trust inside organizations scores even lower. Micro-management, continuous performance-based evaluation measured against predefined work conditions, hierarchical and economical pressure, have impaired trust among employees in many companies. In a vast majority of circumstances, collaboration is a crock.

Adoption is not diffusion

However, there is no doubt a truly collaborative enterprise is the best-suited organizational model to tackle the increasing complexity of our economical environments, to leverage the power of companies’ ecosystems toward sustainable competitive advantages. More than ever, organizations need a shift. Knowledge workers need to continually have new resources at their disposal, while work and learning must now blend in a continuous stream. But since so few are mature enough to embrace this complexity and allow for redefining work as a fluid, collaborative flow, how can we help and coach the others?

Bertrand Duperrin proposes to introduce social routines in employees’ daily workflows. Such a framework facilitates adoption of collaborative practices, but neither does it question the actual relationships existing among members of a company and the underlying lack of trust, not does it address one of the main shortcomings of business processes: socializing them helps dealing with fuzzy operations, an approach somehow similar to Thingamy’s Barely Repeatable Processes, but does not perform well with uncertain outcomes. Processes need predictable outcomes, which are less and less available.

Gil Yehuda just proposed another framework, asserting that collaborative dynamics could (and should) take place aside traditional management models, hierarchy- and incentives-based forces. He has strong points here, but I believe that enabling collaborative mechanisms would deeply modify the organizational structure, and that their coexistence isn’t sustainable the way he exposes it. What we need is not forcing adoption in conservative structures, but facilitating diffusion, by the use and modification of some existing, but latent, mechanisms, to allow emergence of new ones.

Redefining the internal customer

I recently wrote about the way companies can (and have to) build new relationships with their customers and non-customers. These relationships are not transaction-based, but rely on the value companies can create on helping customers solve their daily problems by making better products and services proposals. The social web facilitates this service-dominant logic, allowing getting better insight from people’s interactions (this is what SocialCRM is about). Establishing this kind of relationships is a necessary prequel to collaboration, which ultimate goal is the co-creation of value. I am not talking about communication or funky social media marketing here, but about a shift in economic and marketing fundamentals. Lack of trust, and the inconsistence of so-called “brand communities” is not an issue in this context. Why couldn’t we apply the same framework into enterprise?

“Customers” always had an internal reality. But companies always work on an outdated definition, most internal interactions being oriented toward selling services or pushing decisions from management to teams. Rather than helping their customers getting their job done through continuous interaction, many support functions put them at the end of process-based funnels. For example, the IT department hopelessly formalizes its relationships with internal customers through requirements, despite their inability to address real-world problems in real-time. Redefining the internal customer according to a service-dominant logic would set up the organizational scene for collaboration. Most departments would benefit from it; HR, for instance, would leverage true career development, beyond roles and job descriptions.

At individual level, the same definition of “customer” (those who are impacted by our acting and proposals) and the very same behaviors would enable a new kind of relationships, and foster a shift toward a collaborative mindset. What if managers consider their teams as customers? Facilitating subordinates’ tasks and listening to the way they deal with them… As Olivier Blanchard pointed out to me, this sounds like good leadership practice. Sure, but while we know how to deal with customers, who knows what a leader exactly is?

I believe that applying internally what we are learning to do with external customers provides a real-life solution to help preparing the shift toward a collaborative enterprise, for the vast majority of organizations in which collaboration is a crock. There is no framework here, just a practical call to action. To facilitate the rise of collaboration, let us redefine the internal customer, and deal with him the same way we now have to deal with our brands’ customers.

The Importance of Non-Customers

By Thierry de Baillon

Michael Wu, Scientist of Analytics at Lithium, has posted a great article upon the different components defining the strength of a Relationship.

• Time: amount of time spent together
• Intensity: emotional intensity and the sense of closeness
• Trust: intimacy or mutual confiding
• Reciprocity: amount of reciprocal services

In his post, he details how companies can leverage their relationships with customers through the analysis of these four components. Nevertheless, there is in my opinion another component, which underlies any relationship, which shouldn’t be ignored in this framework: its direction.  Like magnets attract or repel each other, relationships are either positive or negative, and this has a deep impact on other components as well.

This isn’t a matter of love and hate, since those both sentiments, when applied to an individual, share in fact a lot of similarities, and we can find more than a few case studies explaining how brands’ more virulent detractors might be turned into ambassadors. (Group hatred obeys to different mechanisms, but here too, these mechanisms are quite close to those driving empathy in groups). Both can be considered as “positive” relationships.

“Negative” relationships, on the other side, are driven by sentiments like disgust, fear, or conscious avoidance.  Typically, people maintaining this kind of relationships with brands are to be found among non-customers. Non-customers who might have been customers before, or who might never have been but have built a distorted image of brands, this for a lot of reasons.

I remember my father who, when wanting to choose and buy some household appliance, systematically dismissed products from one famous brands. Some of his justifications were, of course, highly irrational, but he also had some very good points. So good, in fact, that, if the brand had heard about, this could have lead to real products improvements.

Listening to your non-customers is not an easy task. They don’t speak about you, they don’t interact with you, but they don’t ignore you; they are just staying away from any of your attempts to meet their expectations. They don’t eventually gather into communities. They have low, if any, expectations for your brand. But these non-customers are the ones who might give you the more clues about how to serve them better.

Forget about Enterprise 2.0, think brands

By Thierry de Baillon

Fostering collaboration means blurring boundaries. Internally, it involves letting knowledge flow across organizational silos, capitalizing on informal knowledge to reshape work according to more efficient and human-centric patterns. Externally, it assumes nurturing new relationships with customers to better help them in their day-to-day lives, providing a better service and learning from their interactions.

I am of course over-simplifying here the scope and complexity of Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM fields, in order to make this simple and obvious statement: blurring internal (among stakeholders) and external (with customers) boundaries won’t be a sustainable evolution unless it is considered as a step toward a more radical change. The traditional (industrial) dyadic model of company-customers must also evolve to adapt to our new hyper-connected environment. But where do we go from here?

Avoiding decomposition

Sadly enough, most discussions around Enterprise 2.0 only scratch the surface of the consequences of evolving toward connected ecosystems on business. Socializing business processes merely keeps the fundamental nature and operational aspects of organizations unchanged. Internal collaborative problem solving, as well as social learning applied to in-work training, is often no more than a chase for efficiency, while staying stuck in present paradigm.

In large corporations, the main (if not only) reason of existence for many roles, and even departments, is to ‘keep things together’: insuring coherent vertical integration, bridging across silos, reducing internal friction… Diffusion of collaborative behaviors will at some point dismiss the necessity to maintain them. Nevertheless, effectiveness cannot be left to autopoiesis. On the other side, the more the companies have to reach out customers on multiple contact points, the more internal departments are involved in the walk, without necessarily speaking the same language. Retailers won’t take the same approach than wholesalers, who might be contradicted by customer service…

Enterprise 2.0 thinkers have put a strong emphasis on leadership, on the necessary role of leaders in employees’ empowerment. Leaders have indeed the necessary skills to fuel the collaborative engine. But how many leaders can a single, unified, organization afford? It takes some kind of personal vision to lead, and chances are good that coexistence of several leaders, or even some kind of distributed leadership, might induce more chaos than convergence. In our complex multi-relational world, maintaining a single, corporate, voice is no more an option. To blur internal boundaries while avoiding decomposition, companies need to experiment with new organizational models.

Brands as strange attractors

At the other side of the spectrum, do customers discuss together, gather into communities, they are wishful to improve their own personal life, they are ready to suggest improvements in products or services. But they don’t bother about an organization’s hierarchy, corporate culture, or… yikes, processes. They buy propositions made on behalf of brands. Whoever being at some point in contact with customers must meet the expectations raised by those brands, sharing a defined set of values, delivering a defined level, and nature, of service.

Brands are mainly considered as intermediaries between companies and customers. They convey factual, as well as emotional, information upon products, reinforcing both consumers’ confidence in their buying choices (through information accumulated in brand’s offering history) and their self-esteem (through symbolic exchanges channeled by brands values and personality). This linear approach (information against emotion) leads to companies hiding their internal structure and mechanism behind brands. This is perfectly on line with the traditional value-in-transaction model, but is clearly unsuitable with connected ecosystems, where companies and customers share an ever growing number of contact points.

Rather than transactional amplifiers, brands have another important role to play for connected organizations; they have to be considered as the strange attractors of the complex systems formed by companies, their stakeholders and customers.

A step toward a more sustainable model

A more and more important part of the value associated with a brand comes from interaction between the company and customers This either directly, both shaping the brand’s personality by transferring emotional values and sentiment generated (as in the case of brands communities), or indirectly, accumulated along cradle-to-grave customer’s journey with the brand.

All these interactions are the expression of forces at work between individuals during the whole brand’s lifecycle: companies’ internal mechanisms, customers’ relations circles and communities, customer service, empowerment and influence (which Michael Wu recently insightfully described ), open innovation, crowdsourcing… where the brand itself is no more an intermediary, but a representative symbol.

Customers and marketers have been accustomed to such transfer of value, value in expectation, for instance, being directly linked to the brand associated value. But organizations themselves should care much more about brands, as they offer a new model to maintain, and reinforce in a meaningful way, the collaborative enterprise. Let us envision networked specialized entities or departments, gathered around shared brands’ values and directly linked to customers. This model, as it works for Zappos and a few others, might prove itself an alternative, more sustainable, model for today’s rigid and bloated organizations.

Redefining Brands, the Social Way

By Thierry de Baillon

Let us start with a little quiz: What is the most crucial aspect of your business / organization? Which aspect of your business / organization is hardly predictable, fast forward moving, unreliable, hyper-connected? The answer to both questions is: your customer. Let face it, the way the social web is transforming the consumer’s world at warp speed will have deep impact on every aspect of the way we are doing business.

Adapting to this new world means that companies’ most important assets are no more the products or services they create, manufacture, produce, sell, but their customers, and the way they want, buy, use and herald their products. This might not be new, would you say, as almost a century of consumerism has accustomed businesses to consider sales as their most fundamental activity… Which has also accustomed them to ignore a whole world of actionable activities, involving loyalty, advocacy, recommendations, use scenarios and user experiences. The problem is that this world has become prevalent, and that there is no way back. Ignoring this change is paradoxically putting the customer in total control of brands, and might prove lethal for many businesses.

Albeit being a step in the right direction, internal use of the same tools which enable the social web will not save organizations from a radical change in the way they do business. Heading toward Enterprise 2.0 for the sake of efficiency is a lure, as long as collaboration is not designed toward, and with, the customer.

Brands Need to Be Social, Commodities Not

But, as I recently wrote, not every business is meant to become social. Involving your customers requires that… they want to. The mass consumption era leaded to an overwhelming number of brands whose mainspring relied on two main wills: capturing shares of ever-expanding markets, and creating new needs to fulfill. Entering any store presents us today with at least half a dozen products for each category, products whose only intrinsic differences often lie in price and marketing claims, competing with each other. Consumers do not want to discuss about everything they buy. They want to be part of products and services which help them getting a better experience in their conscious, voluntary and meaningful activities. This means that ‘the rest’, entire categories of products and services, are considered as commodities, unless they are able to bring enough innovation to level up customers’ experience to a really different and meaningful experience. In that logic, most brands are just reminders of who is the cheapest, whose wrapping are the easiest to tear off, etc. For those, being ‘social’ means nothing but leveraging customer service (which is often a giant step anyway). Commodities do not need to be ‘social’, they aren’t even intended to.

It is not innocent that travel and tourism businesses, which operate in a service-dominant logic, already began undergoing such a change more than a dozen years ago; customers demand helped segmenting the market in two opposite directions, custom-tailored high-end services and standardized mass products. The actual, and fundamental, difference in today’s ‘social’ evolution is that customers are pushing the envelope further. Not only do they want to be listened by your brands, but they want to share their insights, so you can co-create with them the best product or service ever (according to them, of course, but aren’t they the only ones who matter?).

Beyond Value in Use, Value in Expectation

Traditional branding focuses on brands’ perception and alignment with actual product or service, thus focalizing on the act of purchase, while service dominant logic focuses on value in use during the whole product or service lifecycle. Unfortunately, this leaves aside most of customer’s interaction before any transaction takes place. While customers’ expectations might be considered as part of the global user’s experience, it would be much more useful to isolate ‘value in expectation’ to try to better understand the fuzzy border between brand and commodity from a customer’s point of view.

Wim Rampen (@wimrampen) pointed me the other day to a really interesting research on Reference scales of service quality and satisfaction judgments in restaurants. One of the important findings of conducted studies is that the tolerance range in which customers consider the delivered service as acceptable / desirable is much narrower when the restaurant is branded, while uncommitted (neutral) customers are much more prone to react. Consider those marketing implications:

• Customers expect a definite level of service, which I call Value in expectation. Although defined by brands promises and by peer recommendation, this value is set by potential customers, and branding’s new role and responsibility is to align their actual service delivery to customers’ expectation. Value in expectation is the new brand equity.
• Customers don’t necessarily expect more from brands. But they expect brands to deliver more accordingly to their expectations. Truth matters more than claims.
• Enhancing your service is useless if your customers don’t expect it, they will become uncommitted. Value in expectation will only be raised jointly by customers and brands. This also means that engagement through social media is useless unless actual customer experience expects it. Facts trump conversation.

Value in expectation is what brings together brands and customers. Value in use is what keeps them together.

Time to Move Beyond Outdated Models

By Thierry de Baillon

While not being the post I recently announced about social business, service, brands and commoditization, this short post quite perfectly sets the stage…

This inscription, painted on a truck parked nearby my office, reads “for coffee lovers… Sophistication of best brands – Elegance of service”. And I couldn’t help sharing it with you…

You will agree that “sophistication” is nowadays no more relevant for brands, as it refers to a groundless claim. But what is a brand, if not a dual set of promises and associated services? What is the brand value, once it relies on third-party services like the company who owns this truck is aimed to deliver? Is such intermediation sustainable, as it merely commoditizes the brands it uses?

My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

By Thierry de Baillon

I find quite ironic that, while emphasizing the transformations needed / involved on the road to Enterprise 2.0, most case studies and literature on the subject, specifically when it comes to ‘adoption’, focus on the steps, and so rarely on the whole journey. Although collaboration is claimed to (hopefully) become our global way of working, much accent is put on technologies, practices, pilots, behaviors, management,… introducing tools and recipes without considering the constraints and mutations stressing the whole system: Enterprise itself. This sometimes makes me think of physicians talking about organs, topical cures and diseases without ever mentioning, or taking into account, the whole human body.

The vocabulary used is itself indicative of this state of mind. ‘Enterprise 2.0 adoption’ sounds like a technology-inclined, more process- that people-centric, one at a time methodology. Don’t misunderstand me; I am not saying that we should skip pilots, onboard anyone with a gentle smile and shout “we got the tools, we are 2.0 now”. Very few have tried, and even fewer are succeeding. Number of connections on a social platform doesn’t mean anything beyond brainless propaganda and top-down socialwashing. We will need to keep on coaching, evangelizing and scouting emergent practices for quite a long time. Seeding, then nurturing, is the correct attitude. Taking a broader view on Enterprise 2.0 diffusion dynamics in organizations might help leading the transformation at systemic scale.

Corporate culture, individual empowerment and management model are the three main assets any organizational change has to deal with. Let us see how a collaborative paradigm could fit an organization, given different corporate backgrounds and agents of change, and consider three main different approaches.

Holistic diffusion

Convergence between corporate culture and a leader’s vision offers, indeed, an ideal loam, not only to nurture a collaborative environment, but to leverage a whole social business ecosystem around the customer. Transforming such a business is only a matter of time and good communication, as the right practices get weaved into each company’s department. This might sound like an ideal world, but we all know the examples of Zappos and Cisco…

Empathic diffusion

Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration. Fostering its diffusion throughout the organization requires undertaking the usual steps we, practitioners, all know about: finding the right champions, targeting business departments already prone to work in a collaborative way, communicate about successes, and iteratively extend the experience. Enthusiasts will become ambassadors, and initiatives will spread to other parts of the business. Michael Idinopulos described this approach pretty well on his blog. Chances are good that this may help compensating for an unfavorable internal culture, with good support from the management. No wonder that most present case studies are following a similar approach: empathy, which Michael calls enthusiasm, is the glue of human relationships.

Fractal diffusion

One of the most discussed aspects of Enterprise 2.0 diffusion strategies is the necessity and the difficulty to involve the middle management. Our businesses hierarchical structure put a heavy pressure on managers, and their role is key to most business processes. Asking them to change to embrace collaboration and its inherent complexity is often perceived like asking them to dig their own grave. In this case, empathy won’t work, and even best evangelizers will fail along the way.

Modern businesses are inherently fractal, composed of nested routines, structures and know-how which deeply influence the behavior of the whole company, even without explicitly noticing it. The real backbone, the DNA of a company is sometimes hidden, buried behind processes or Excel dashboards. Identifying the core competencies of a business, whether it be in teams, departments or divisions, and leveraging collaboration in those places, will produce patterns which are reproducible throughout the whole organization. New practices, new managing routines will emerge, which can then be injected into other teams, departments and divisions. This, of course, will challenge managers. Some will adapt, some won’t. But new leaders will emerge, paving the road for a more empathic or holistic approach.

The Guilty Gift

By Thierry de Baillon

La version française de ce billet est, une fois n’est pas coutume, sur le blog de Seth Simonds.

Is, in France, cause marketing soluble in social media? This is the question I asked myself when Seth proposed me to write this post, question which quickly turned into: “is cause marketing soluble in French culture?” as we must agree on the fact that, in Descartes and Pascal homeland, money, fine feelings, companies and charities maintain complex relationships.

Whether it be individuals or organizations, French people give, and give more and more. They are also ready to engage into causes they find ethical: 47% of them now claim having changed their consumption habits towards more sustainable products. This is not the lack of motivation or creativity, which occasions the charitable discretion of French companies, “discretion” which is particularly remarkable on the social web, but rather a mix of cultural and social factors unique to France.

The distrust paradox

It is a commonplace to say that consumers less and less trust brands’ and businesses’ communication.  More thought provoking is that they consider the same businesses’ engagement toward populations as largely inefficient (CSA study – October 2009). This is a highly paradoxical situation: for a company, getting committed to a cause allows giving credibility to its willingness to act ethically, but communicating about this commitment discredits it at the same time. For example, Kinder France initiative with the Secours Populaire, is barely promoted outside the limits of its website, echoing neither on Kinder Facebook page, nor of the Secours Populaire one. Many such initiatives are not highlighted beyond the company’s corporate website (Innocent) or beyond the point-of-sale (Pyrex).

Commitment and empathy, friendly rivalry

Unlike the Anglo-Saxons, who give sense to an initiative through action, the French generally put discussion at the heart of their approach. This behavior encourages my compatriots, when mixing feelings and discussion, to completely dissociate empathy (the charitable claim) from commitment (the gift and its assertion). It is good practice to stay (and look) restrained when we give, and to not too explicitly call for action when talking about a cause. French do not mix money with feelings.

Considering this, it is hardly surprising that the only NGOs leveraging the viral and empathic power of social media are “activist” associations like Greenpeace or Aids. They consider action and feelings as intimately related, and part of a global approach. Most others only timidly step outside of traditional media channels, even preferring to leave this initiative to internet users, without giving any active support. The page devoted to “webbénévoles” on the French Red Cross website delivers a clear message: make us your donations, relay our cause, but please do not ask us to engage ourselves. In such a paradoxical context, it is not surprising to notice how much associations are reluctant to associate themselves too openly to businesses, those symbols of profit and wealth.

Ethical = sincere

From “consume more” to “consume better”, marketing has recently undertaken a change of focus which, if often driving businesses to more commitment, is still largely prisoner of our cultural reflexes. But is this so bad? Are global, mainly American, brands which previously partnered with (RED), so well-intentioned? Don’t they seek, through their highlighted commitment, to restore an undermined trust, where French brands, for the same reasons, keep themselves understated? Social media do offer real opportunities to cause marketing, but require something today missing from so many initiatives: sincerity.

Photo Filtran