Salesforce Chatter: Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise 2″0?

By Thierry de Baillon

Twitter was bruising yesterday about Salesforce announcement of its new application, Chatter. With a product introduced as a “Facebook for the Enterprise” by a representative of the company, Salesforce just confirmed what is becoming an important trend in Enterprise platforms:  real-time collaboration.

For a long time, the only asynchronous tool used by companies was email, and one of the challenges of Enterprise 2.0 adoption was in helping people getting used of new asynchronous tools like wikis, blogs, bookmarking or tagging platforms, placing them in conditions to deal with knowledge exchange and serendipity values. In parallel, generalization of the Blackberry is putting email back into pseudo-synchronous mode, instant messaging applications penetration rate in companies is about 40%, according to Gartner, and Google Wave is pointing another real-time head into the game. The point, of course, is no more about discussing whether synchronous tools will be part or not of our new toolboxes. They will, for sure, but are they worth the hype?

The Facebook analogy used by Salesforce is indeed indicative of the direction main platform vendors are today heading to; something like “hey, Facebook works as hell, wouldn’t you like to be able to have your employees sharing, interacting, poking each other on business matters? 230 milliions users cannot be wrong”. But is really the Social Web a similar playground as Enterprise? Definitely not. Bertrand Duperrin recently insightfully sketched the differences between managing communities and managing business. While both worlds aim to drive flawlessly working communities, companies need a lot more.

Furthermore, these new tools will put emphasis on time as a critical material, weighting in most process-based tasks. While searching increased productivity along these processes, with the help of real-time facilitators, executives will put further pressure on actual organizations, avoiding to face the necessary cultural shift which has yet to happen. Platform vendors’ “real-time” pitch is with no doubt good for (their) business, as executives will certainly jump in the bandwagon, not for Enterprise 2.0.

This new trend will oblige us to be even more cautious when implementing social tools, as we now must deploy two different layers of interaction, and that, along with leadership, decision-making, knowledge and information, time is the new dimension we have to deal with.

The Zen of Co-creation

By Thierry de Baillon

Co-creation is to enterprise 2.0 what “mass customization” is to marketing 2.0: not the Holy Grail, since it is definitely not a delegation of responsibilities, but a breakthrough approach to enterprise governance. Think about it as a way to inject a company or brand’s ecosystem’s output inside their internal processes, resulting in a Moebius band like value chain, each iteration providing value by itself, independently of the process involved.

More than with any other 2.0 internal initiatives, setting up the scene for co-creation needs a cultural shift to happen; fostering the right behavior challenges a lot of corporate attitudes, focusing on continuous innovation and persistent interaction.

Co-creation is not about control, but about persistence of a vision

Co-creation is neither crowd sourcing, nor focus groups. Involving partners, suppliers or clients into co-creation, means that you will have to accept losing control on some of your assets to trigger innovation or improvement. On the other side, you will need to share a consistent vision of what you want to achieve and provide a clear framework to your goals. Do not change the rules of the game in the middle of the road; if you intend to reward the best contributions with money, tell it from the beginning. Since co-creation won’t fit into your existing business processes, you have to integrate its output into a larger sketch.

Expect the unexpected

Zen focuses on the gesture rather than on the goal. You will need to perfect your platform and the way you interact, without trying to drive the output of your initiative. True innovation is disruptive per nature; you won’t be able to seize it if you pave the way before proceeding. Embrace the unexpected as the best way to trigger new solutions to known problems.

Forget your strengths, expose your weaknesses

Fear of competitors is a fierce brake put on your co-creation efforts, as you are here to make up for your weaknesses. A co-creation platform is the less adequate place to pitch your competitive advantages. Humility is key.

You will get as much as you give

The more you give, the more you will get. This looks like obvious, but think about the need for dismiss control; how many businesses are today ready to publicly expose so-called “sensitive” data or jealously crafted processes? Procter & Gamble now famous Connect + Develop website is a perfect example of a successful open innovation platform which leverages reciprocity. Giving is not giving, anyway. As Marcel Mauss exposed in “The Gift”, exchange of goods always has a symbolic dimension which goes far beyond the simple act of freely giving up a property. While giving, the deep ownership of gifts remains property of the owner, and cannot be redeemed unless a counter-gift is made. The behavioral nature of exchanges without market is an inherent part of co-creation initiatives. You are not creating a marketplace, even if you reward the submissions; you are in fact creating a value process.

Avoid destruction

The nature of co-creation could easily lead to destruction of value, either by entering too deeply into the exchange process (internal destruction), or by ignoring creative inputs apparently too far away from your expectations. A consistent vision should avoid you the first possibility. Keep in mind that disruption is not destruction, but another angle to consider known assets. Always consider positively any input, no matter how destructive it might look at first glance; just consider it from a different angle.

Keep the shortest path from ear to mouth

As a last bit of advice, report as frequently as you can. Inform the whole company about your initiative progresses, as internal resources are also part of the co-creation process. Engage and inform your external stakeholders, as they are now part of your business processes.

The 2.0 Siloed Enterprise Syndrome

By Thierry de Baillon

Who, in your company, is in charge of supporting your communities or social media efforts? The marketing department? Human resources department? Sales, customer relations, innovation? Dedicated off-processes community managers? If you answered marketing, chances are good that you are a brand trying to connect more deeply with your customers. If you answered Human Resources, you might be a Fortune100 company trying to leverage your workforce’s competencies through collaboration. Sales, you may be an internet pure player. Innovation, you sure are engaged into co-creation…

Delegating your social business experiments to the most involved departments is a good way to focus on successful outcome. Whether to set up a pilot or to develop a whole social media strategy, all key actors have to be actively committed. As more successes will pave your way, you will be able to measure the positive impact of communities on business, to adapt best practices to different departments, hopefully to evangelize a community-based approach and spread it through the whole company.  All of this sounds great (even still a bit utopist)… on paper, but in reality, you will soon be trapped into a 2.0 Siloed Enterprise.

Different department have a different approach to business, different organizational requirements, and present processes have an interesting impact: they rationalize a company’s relationship with the different parts of its ecosystem, no matter who is in charge of dealing with a particular stakeholder. In a typical Enterprise 2.0 organization, those stakeholders’ activity and point of view influence the company’s organization, leading to very different behaviors as appropriate.  Instead of nurturing an organic interactive system, communities would grow as disjoint entities.

The other day, my friend Gabriel Rossi posted three great tweets about marketing and its pivotal role inside enterprise, which we often underestimate. Marketing is one of the key activities which may act as the internal ‘glue’ to help a community-based enterprise grow, if properly leveraged.  But one approach doesn’t fit all. Your company might be sales or R & D oriented, and this might have dyed its entire operation. Finding the missing link,  the department which has cross over influence on your whole organization, and involving it in every of yours social media efforts is a crucial step toward Enterprise 2.0. If the only one you can find is the mailroom, then your company might be in deep trouble in the forthcoming times…

Will Enterprise Avoid the Worst Scenarios Ever?

By Thierry de Baillon

Michael Idinopulos recently published an article encouraging companies to “skip the pilot” and adopt social media at company-wide scale. While I agree with him saying that providing a global environment for social initiatives inside Enterprise is the right way for companies to embrace the real power of the tools (provided they can afford the sometimes hefty price tag), launching E2.0 tools at company scale raise crucial issues about strategic management and governance which cannot be easily solved in most companies.

To highlight some of these issues, let us imagine a firm where collaborative and social software has been implemented everywhere, and look at different scenarios:

Off-process freedom

In most of our objectives-driven companies, social initiatives will be kept out from business processes outcome, and although employees might be encouraged to participate in several ways (from requirement to incentives), they will have to do it apart from their day-to-day tasks. Results are easy to figure out: collaboration and positive sentiment will decrease with time, leading to failure. Expecting to leverage collaboration and interaction without implementing them directly into business processes and allocating work time accordingly is a mere utopia.

The regalian enterprise

Implementing social behavior into business processes is not sufficient. I wrote about the need to enable consensus rise directly into networks, as it is directly related to enterprise governance.  Separating collaboration from decision taking is of course an easier path to follow, especially when dealing with large scale initiatives.  This, of course, flattens the whole hierarchy, as control steps and feedback loops can easily be rationalized and simplified in processes. But far from being an evolution, such a governance model is a regression from present structures, reinforcing a small group of decision takers and isolating it from the base. This somehow reminds the paternalist model from XIXth century industrial era or, in the worst cases, the monarchic model.

Lethal paralysis

Failing in implementing decision taking in a strategic way at the right level, and on the right time, may also lead to a less obvious, but equally devastating situation. The output from networked-based processes, if not correctly monitored and channeled, quickly leads to information overload, thus to a lack of necessary agility, and ultimately to paralysis. The wider the scale, the more overwhelming the effects. Frustrations, loss of company’s culture, lack of competitive advantages, inability to innovate, are among the most probable results from letting this situation taking over.

Avoiding these pitfalls, and adopting the right model for 2.0 governance, are a true challenge, but never forget that tools are only tools, and that only people have the power to successfully embrace today’s business evolution.

McDonald’s France : Does Branding Allow Of Faking History?

By Thierry de Baillon

McDonald’s is presently celebrating its 30^th year of presence in France. But when I came back in Paris in 1978, I remember having eaten in some of the half a dozen McDonald’s restaurants opened at that time. So what happened?

The first McDonald’s in France was opened in 1972 in Créteil, near Paris, by Raymond Dayan, who had acquired the franchise from the American company. Nevertheless, in 1982, following an epic legal battle, Raymond Dayan was forced to give up McDonald’s name, while keeping his restaurants open under his own O’Kitch brand. The reason invoked by MacDonald’s company was a failure to respect corporate hygiene requirements, and McDonald’s France re-opened its first restaurant in Paris in 1988, while “officially” settled in France since 1979…

Most have forgotten (not everyone), but to justify such an incredible mess, McDonald’s France has adopted an incredibly rigid branding strategy: the company celebrates this year the opening of the first restaurant of McDonald’s France, NOT the first McDonald’s restaurant IN France. Is this sustainable? Definitely not.

Rigidity is no more an available branding strategy
Even if you are still in control of your brand, you cannot deliberately ignore anymore your customers. Branding has became a matter of interaction between them and you, products are not elements you may hide behind. Be prepared to move and to meet your customers wherever they are, the way they need it.

Transparency as a rule of thumb
Of course, brand transparency is an illusion, as understanding all the internal mechanics and implications of maintaining a brand and manufacturing products require some literacy not anybody has. But marketing transparency is a requirement. Whichever action or communication you plan, don’t allow for misunderstanding or bad communication. Our world moves at fast pace, and you would suffer backfire before even noticing.

Be prepared to fail
The importance of experimenting new ways to engage with your customers has already been underlined, largely enough. Experimentation might lead to failure. You must be prepared to fail, of course, but even more importantly, you must be prepared to answer to failure. As the web is fast to crucify a brand for unsuccessful initiatives, your marketing plan must integrate the possibility of failing and the way you will publicly acknowledge it. Today, every communication is potentially crisis communication.

The rules of branding have changed, and while adopting a rigid branding strategy and somehow faking history, McDonald’s France failed in following any of them. In France, the company has an incredibly long way to go before being more than a commodity.