the Spice Blog

I attended the excellent LikeMinds Conference in Exeter last week and the quality of the speakers and presentations got me thinking again about how we need to move beyond our infatuation with social media as a set of tools or a channel towards integrating "socialness" into the entire organisation. Olivier Blanchard is choosing to rename it Social Communications (I tend to agree with that) and his presentation at the conference (deck to be available soon) was really illuminating when it comes to approaching the creation of a Social Enterprise.

So, in my thinking I revisited a post I wrote on another blog a few months ago and thought I would reprint it here to kick off my discussion of the topic. Here's the original post:

Creating the Social Enterprise is hard. There are some big obstacles in the way.

Scott Gould wrote a piece on why companies don’t get it the other day that pushed some buttons on this topic. You should read it.

Then Olivier Blanchard wrote a piece describing the principal characteristics of a social business. You should read that one too.

Good pieces all around. They got me thinking about the controlling nature of (especially big) companies.  Why do I say “big”? Well that was the image I had in my head as I was thinking. It seems to me that companies develop an overbearing rigidity as they grow (even big companies were small once). The lack of freedom or flexibility afforded employees is, in many cases, a function of size of the company and of the level of trust placed in the workforce (or maybe trust is a subset of size). That is, size informs corporate culture in a significant way, effecting trust and humanness and the personality of the business.

I have worked in a few companies that were relaxed and open and allowed, trusted, even encouraged, their employees to be individuals. However, as those companies grew, an increasing amount of structure crept in, establishing more and more rules, regulations, and restrictions. Maybe during growth, the steady spread of the internal network, where original employees slowly find themselves thinned out and losing touch with the far reaches of the organisation, engenders a creeping malaise and mounting paranoia, causing management to attempt to “hold on to” the old feelings of close community through regulation and rigidity.

If an employee knows everyone else in the business, has regular conversations with them over a cup of coffee in the company kitchen, she feels comfortable about trusting them in their work and vice versa. The management feels the same way. As the company grows, however, new employees arrive, new departments are formed, new layers applied and management slowly loses that firsthand personal relationship with everyone and, perhaps somewhat understandably, slowly loses the trust they had that every employee could do her job and represent the company in any and all interactions. Therefore, management decides to try to give themselves some certainty by putting everyone in a professional box, restricting their roles and limiting their interactions and influence.

It seems to flow like this: Business growth leads to loss of internal relationships leads to lack of mutual trust leads to increased regulations leads to reduced employee independence. (somebody get me an info-graphic designer )

A factory mentality does exists, as Scott points out, where management attempts to create a giant corporate machine. But there is also a brand control aim at work. And, more to my point, a personal control mentality exists which has a slightly different ambition, less about efficiency and image control, more about, perhaps, attempting to know, the company through structure. As management, in the absence of real relationships, I can construct a quasi-relationship with my workforce if I carefully define their functionality – in essence I “know” them because I know what their roles are.

Personal relationships are a basic human requirement. We need the interaction. But somewhere along the way, in the face of corporate sprawl and in a “modern” attempt at efficiency, we’ve abandoned them as a basic business requirement. Unfortunately, it’s replacement environment has grown deep roots over the past 40 years.

Maybe this mirrors a rule in nature about the complexity of organisms where the constituent parts of those organisms are required to behave in increasingly narrowly defined or specialist ways as the complexity of the whole increases. I’m not sure. Is anyone here a molecular biologist?

So, creating the Social Enterprise is hard. Socio-cultural heritage, twisted human nature, maybe even the bio-mechanics of organisms are at work here.

Now that I’ve got all that off my mind, I can move onto the question of getting past all of the detritus above to recreate an internal corporate relationship environment, to create the social enterprise. But that is for the next post… at least.

In the meantime, keep your eye on what Scott, Drew Ellis, Olivier and others are talking about (and planning to do) in this area through their P2P likeminds movement.

Web analytics are seen as the marketer’s scientific justification for online marketing, but analytics are useless if the measurements are based on flawed thinking or poor methodology.

Why measure?
This may seem like a redundant question to some, but it’s a good opportunity to point out the implicit obligation in measuring – which is: are you going to make decisions and change strategy or implementation as a result?

If not, why are you measuring?

No really, if there is not the commitment to take action based on the results of measurements - there is no point to measurement – stop now!

Remember that simply measuring something changes nothing.

Analytics should go hand in hand with a culture of constant improvement. Sustainable online success only comes as the result of continued effort and a non-stop commitment to adjustment and support – support from search engine optimisation, advertising, content creation, social media marketing, PR, and all the other strands that make up a comprehensive marketing effort.

What to measure?
This is the key to the success or failure of the analytics exercise – get it wrong, and you could be at best wasting the budget, and at worst, acting on poorly chosen measurement data that could result in extensive damage to your marketing efforts.

Imagine a situation where dentists are paid based on the number of fillings they perform in a given period. Does this reflect the amount of work they are doing? Yes. Does it improve the nation’s health? Of course not – in fact it positively encourages dentists to give us bad advice so that we ruin our teeth and encourages them to ignore maintenance and remedial work – maybe even performing fillings that are entirely unnecessary. (And before any dentists complain – mine’s great by the way – I am talking hypothetically).

So where to start? Start with the goals of your organisation and work down to the goals of your marketing plan. Then work out how those goals can be achieved and measured. Look at identifying a few key performance indicators to check progress.

But then reflect back at these indicators and back up this chain – do they really help in assessing whether the marketing objectives are being met? And the organisations?

Working back from the indicators, look at all the possible implications of measuring these and acting on them. Make sure that they do not imply courses of action that run against your marketing plan or organisation’s objectives.

How to measure?
Just because we now know what we want to measure doesn’t mean that it is measurable. We may have to accept significant compromises in matching what is capable of being measured with what we would like to measure. If so, we again need to check they are truly appropriate for the task.

You may have to face the fact that some key performance indicators may not be measurable under any circumstances.

What was the real reason your customer bought a product? Was it in fact because their mother said it was a great product, and not the search engine ad?

Was it because your competitor uses flash on their website - which their browser had problems with – and yours did not, so they bought from you?

How could you possible measure this?

Perhaps a friend bought it for them and the registered owner of the product had no say in the decision whatsoever?

Make sure the measurement is unbiased – it’s very easy to construct measuring systems that will simply confirm what you want to hear.

What to do with the data?
Two issues here – analysing the data to extract useful lessons from it and taking action based on that information.

Any statistics related to the Internet are always highly suspect – there are still too many variables to draw detailed conclusions from most data sets. However, trends in the data are generally very useful and indicative.

Statistics can be tricky things – often reflecting the analysts preconceptions – the history of science is littered with cases where inconvenient measurements were ignored or misinterpreted because they didn’t fit the conventional wisdom, or where measurements were selected to fit some political agenda.

Once data has been analysed and key points have been extracted from the results, these should be presented to decision makers in a format they can understand and relate to. In a scientific environment this is all you may need to do, however in a business environment most decision makers would be looking for recommendations as to what action should be taken or what conclusions should be drawn.

It is also vitally important that this whole process takes place within a timeframe that makes the measurement meaningful.

It is no good measuring social media sentiment and delivering a report two weeks after the brand has been thoroughly trashed by bloggers, twitterers and Facebook users.

Finally, and most importantly, to reiterate the point made at the beginning, some action should be taken. (Which admittedly, might include carrying on doing what you are doing because it’s all working!)

If you're not prepared to act on the results, your measuring process is irrelevant, no matter how good it is.

We all know branding is essential on the web - but why?
The reason is that it links to trust through reputation. Next time someone asks you why branding is important, here’s a quick explanation.

Trust
There is no single more important commodity in business than that of trust.

It takes time and effort to establish and yet can be lost in the briefest of moments.

Every person in every part of an organisation has to work to engender trust in the customer and a single action by a single person on a single day can break that trust and undo many man-hours of effort.

So trust must be nurtured and maintained and preserved at all costs.
When doing business on-line, the importance of trust is multiplied by the remoteness and impersonal feel of the Internet.

Reputation
Gaining trust is easier if an organisation has a reputation – and a good reputation is priceless.

When looking for an information source on the Internet one may find many hundreds of potential web sites – what makes you choose one over another? Reputation.

It is an organisation’s reputation that gives authority to the information.

Branding
To leverage – or make the most of – this reputation you need branding. Branding helps the customer associate the organisation with the reputation.

By being able to recognise the organisation behind the current message quickly, easily and even subconsciously you are making the connection between the message and the organisation’s reputation implicit – as the customer trusts the reputation, so they trust the organisation, and therefore the message.

Little or poor branding confuses the customer and they no longer have confidence in either the organisation or the message.

Strong branding allows you to recognise an organisation quickly and easily, triggering an associated feeling about that organisation’s reputation which leads to an evaluation of how much you trust that organisation.

Without branding you cannot leverage reputation and trust.
Without reputation you cannot engender trust.
Without trust you cannot do business.