Now that businesses are starting to embrace Twitter, there have been some fascinating examples of great customer service.  Ford Motor Company is helping customers find parts, solving problems with accessories, and escalating customer service requests.  Comcast appears to be the Gold Standard with their Comcast Cares account which is solving customer problems with equipment, answering questions about service features.  Bloggers are also helping companies by raving about great experiences.

Photo By CarrotCreative

Can we scale it?

• Be Prepared For A Flood – We all know Twitter is growing very rapidly, and as more people learn about great Twitter customer service, you can count on more requests for service.
• 24 Hours; 7 days – Companies that don’t have this staffed around the clock with clear processes and control will suffer as customers rush to the site.

Who will own it?

• Not the Social Media Team – The Social Media team often start this process and are stuck with owning it as it grows.  Good customer service over Twitter depends on fast responses to customer problems.  But, because the organization considers Twitter to be “social media” (read:  confusing), the responsibility for managing these usually falls to the team handling social media.
• Integrate into Customer Service - Ideally, customer service should own the process, staff for it, and tie metrics to it.  Ideally, this means 24 hours, 7 day a week coverage, a dedicated team of individuals, and clear metrics integrated with the rest of the customer service.

Can we handle the truth?

• Get Ready for Negativity – Every executive will tell you that they are ready and willing to hear what their customers have to say, until they actually hear it.  By committing your business to open customer service through Twitter, you are tying your name directly to negative customer feedback.
• Manage Your Brand – Tying your brand to both positive feedback and negative feedback can aggravate your Brand Managers.  The millions of dollars spent on advertising and promotion can be compromised by a  few snarky Tweets and a well-written blog.

It doesn’t surprise me that many major companies like Microsoft aren’t fully using their Twitter accounts.  Sure, it can be powerful, but if not managed correctly, 140 characters can destroy years of successful marketing.

Photo By Carrot Creative from Flickr

BusinessWeek’s March 23-30, 2009 issue focuses on Smart Ideas for Tough Times which describes how managers are trying new things to weather the downturn.  The most interesting part of the series covers 11 management ideas that are the basics of any business education, but were quite revolutionary at the time.

This 4 part series (See Part 1 here, See Part 2 here, See Part 3 here) will examine these ideas alongside social media to see if we are witnessing a world-changing idea, or just another management fad.  First, here is the recap from BusinessWeek:

Some of the most powerful and lasting management methods were launched during tough times, when companies needed new ways to manage costs and grow. Here is a look back at some of the biggest ideas over the past 100 years.

1910 – The Assembly Line – Explanation

1920 – Market Segmentation – Explanation

1931 – Brand Management – Explanation

1943 – Skunk Works – Explanation

1950s – Lean Manufacturing – Explanation

1967 – Scenario Planning – Explanation

1973 – 360 Review – Explanation

1987 – Six Sigma – Explanation

1989 – Outsourcing – Explanation

1990 – Reengineering – Explanation

2000s – Open Innovation – Explanation

#11 – Reengineering

The Breakthrough: Radically redesign business processes to make them more efficient by removing functional silos and focusing resources on end to end processes.

The Question: Can Social Media help businesses effectively organize resources around complete processes to make them more efficient?

The Answer: Yes, empahtically!

• Cross-functional teams are at the heart of reengineering, and these teams often suffer from poor communication and unclear responsibilities.  Creative applications of Social Media will help cross-functional teams more quickly and easily share information that is relevant and accurate.
• Organizing a business around processes requires suppliers of the inputs to be well aware of the needs of the customers of the outputs.  Social Media improves the communication at all levels of the supply chain allowing for problems to be quickly solved.

#12 – Open Innovation

The Breakthrough: Companies should look beyond their R&D departments to customers, suppliers, and even competitors for innovative ideas.

The Question: Can Social Media help companies discover ideas while still allowing for control over Intellectual Property rights?

The Answer:  Probably Yes

• Open Innovation uses many of the same technologies that launched Social Media.  It follows that Social Media will help Open Innovation succeed because they both allow for increased information distributed to the people who will find it most useful.
• The problem is whether all companies can adopt the concept.  Open Innovation works for Starbucks because a competitor would have a difficult time implementing an idea without the huge distribution network Starbucks has.
• Other industries, like Hedge Funds or Restaurants, will never completely adopt Open Innovation because they can gain no competitive advantage they could protect from competitors

BusinessWeek’s March 23-30, 2009 issue focuses on Smart Ideas for Tough Times which describes how managers are trying new things to weather the downturn.  The most interesting part of the series covers 11 management ideas that are the basics of any business education, but were quite revolutionary at the time.

This 4 part series (See Part 1 here, See Part 2 here) will examine these ideas alongside social media to see if we are witnessing a world-changing idea, or just another management fad.  First, here is the recap from BusinessWeek:

Some of the most powerful and lasting management methods were launched during tough times, when companies needed new ways to manage costs and grow. Here is a look back at some of the biggest ideas over the past 100 years.

1910 – The Assembly Line – Explanation

1920 – Market Segmentation – Explanation

1931 – Brand Management – Explanation

1943 – Skunk Works – Explanation

1950s – Lean Manufacturing – Explanation

1967 – Scenario Planning – Explanation

1973 – 360 Review – Explanation

1987 – Six Sigma – Explanation

1989 – Outsourcing – Explanation

1990 – Reengineering – Explanation

2000s – Open Innovation – Explanation

# 7 – 360 Review

The Breakthrough – Employees get a better perspective from feedback collected from their supervisors, peers, subordinates, and customers/suppliers

Question – Can Social Media provide a more candid, well-rounded assessment of one’s performance?

• Answer:  Yes, with limitations
  
• Social Media greatly improves the ability for managers to assess their talent.  It is now easier to reach more people that can provide feedback as well as reduce the time it takes to collect the feedback – the major complaint with 360 Review
• Because the technologies make it quicker to communicate, employees can receive feedback in real-time, making it more relevant and more actionable
• However, 360 Review feedback requires anonymity which, if not managed properly, can take away the benefits of reach and speed

# 8 – Six Sigma

The Breakthrough: Quantifying processes through statistics to improve and control their outputs

Question – Can Social Media improve business processes through identifying defects and improving outputs?

• Answer:  Nope, not even worth it
• Six Sigma removes subjectivity and boils processes down to data and statistics.  There is no room for interpretation in Six Sigma, and this is important because it is used to make jet engines, medical devices, and nuclear technology
• Social Media is most successful when it facilitates the exchange of ideas and information between people who share the same interests.  It works best when it’s open to interpretation

#9 - Outsourcing

The Breakthrough: Identifying partners who specialize at performing complementary tasks for an organization at a fraction of the cost

Question – Can Social Media provide more opportunities for companies to focus on the tasks they do well and pay for tasks that are not a differentiating part of the value they bring to customers?

• Answer:  No, value comes after the fact
• A company should outsource tasks that distract from their ability to improve product value.  This is why most companies outsource processes like Benefits Administration, Facilities Management, and – interestingly enough – Customer Service.  Many brilliant leaders have weighed the value these provide and determined that profit maximization comes from hiring these outside.
• With Social Media, you can learn the impact of these decisions through a richer discussion with your customers.  Social media allows you to better listen and quantify the level of customer dissatisfaction associated with the outsourcing decisions your are making.

BusinessWeek’s March 23-30, 2009 issue focuses on Smart Ideas for Tough Times which describes how managers are trying new things to weather the downturn.  The most interesting part of the series covers 11 management ideas that are the basics of any business education, but were quite revolutionary at the time.

This 4 part series (See Part 1 here) will examine these ideas alongside social media to see if we are witnessing a world-changing idea, or just another management fad.  First, here is the recap from BusinessWeek:

Some of the most powerful and lasting management methods were launched during tough times, when companies needed new ways to manage costs and grow. Here is a look back at some of the biggest ideas over the past 100 years.

1910 – The Assembly Line – Explanation

1920 – Market Segmentation – Explanation

1931 – Brand Management – Explanation

1943 – Skunk Works – Explanation

1950s – Lean Manufacturing – Explanation

1967 – Scenario Planning – Explanation

1973 – 360 Review – Explanation

1987 – Six Sigma – Explanation

1989 – Outsourcing – Explanation

1990 – Reengineering – Explanation

2000s – Open Innovation – Explanation

#4 – Skunk Works

The Breakthrough – Lockheed Martin organized an autonomous, high-performance team separated from bureaucracy to develop a plane in 143 days.

The Question:  Can Social Media improve productivity by minimizing the organizational need for bureaucracy?

• Answer:  Somewhat, but not completely
• We like to complain about bureaucracy, but it has a purpose in organizations.  Don’t believe me?  Well look around and talk to people in the world’s largest organizations.  If bureaucracy were not a competitive necessity, it would not be present in ALL of the world’s largest firms.  Skunk Works was a success because it gave TOP TALENT the ability to work around the controls required to make a large organization run efficiently.
• For non-Skunk Works teams, made up of Typical Talent where control and oversight are necessary, Social Media can streamline the governance process through more timely communication.  It can allow teams to break from painful state-gate cycles to move to an environment of more iterative, constant feedback.

# 5 – Lean Manufacturing

The Breakthrough: From Toyota, an approach to efficiency that allocates resources only to those processes that create value for the customer.

The Question:  Can Social Media identify and improve those processes that create value for the customer?

• Answer:  Not really
• Social Media is all about communication which is more art than science.  In order to improve communication skills, you have to practice.  Practicing communication has a fuzzy connection, at best, to creating consumer value
• There’s a soft argument around Social Media democratizing communication to allow front-line employees to identify processes, but most modern production facilities have processes/systems in place already to do this.

#6 – Scenario Planning

The Breakthrough: Shell Oil improved strategic planning by creating scenarios, or possible outcomes, that take into account the combined effect of many different possible factors.

The Question:  Can Social Media improve strategy by offering a better view of the possible future?

• Answer:  Yes, emphatically
• Good strategy is hard evaluate because it can only be measured in hindsight.  Bad strategic decisions are is easy to justify because you can always tie a bad outcome to something not considered in the strategy.  Social Media can offer exponentially more points of view on the future than currently used by strategy managers and consultancies.
• Social Media can also improve the quantification of probabilities of possible outcomes through technologies that can collect and measure the perspectives of millions of people.  These technologies are in their infancy, but will scale rapidly as more data is collected and analyzed.

Photo by ChrisL_Ak

Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta write an ambiguous, bland, and wrong piece on Forbes.com about the need for CEOs to use Social Networking technologies.  Their seemingly decent argument cites Web 2.0 Evangelists (no one particular, just the “evangelists” in general) who apparently claim the following:

Web 2.0 evangelists, on the other hand, argue that social software can be used to boost productivity. They say it can facilitate an open-ended corporate culture that values transparency, collaboration and innovation. Most important, it can be an effective way to build a customer-centric organization that not only communicates authentically but also listens to customers and learns from that interaction.

Of course all this is true, but two of the examples they use, Blendtec CEO’s “Will it Blend” series, and Zappo’s CEO Twitter Feed, feel like a simple marketing channel.

Simply put, CEOs make a lot of money because they are good at managing talented people.

Average CEO of an S&P 500 company was $10.5 million in 2008

Say whatever you want about executive pay…but CEOs have unique skills and are therefore highly compensated.  At $10.5 million a year, and assuming no sleep, that’s about $1,200 an hour.  Shareholders demand that CEOs should focus on what they do best…

CEOs Would Need to Spend Many Hours Building Social Media Skills

It takes a decent amount of experience to use this technology authentically without sounding artificial.  And, the only way to do this is “learning by doing”.  So, if anyone says, “It only takes a couple of seconds to Tweet”, remind them that the best Twitter users are ones that have practiced writing pithy updates.

Johnathan Schwartz is the rare example of a CEO who can do this, but I suspect there is some ghost-writing behind this blog.

The Best CEOs Hire People Who Are Smarter Than They Are

Find a social media expert, apparently they’re everywhere.  But hire them and have them communicate to you like any other functional leader in your organization.  Find a strategic thinker who can drive change at all levels of the organization to impact your business objectives.  Don’t have a CEO spend their valuable time learning Social Media skills when they are experts in the much rarer skills of Management.

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Diversity of skills and experience is key to making a Social Media Initiative stick.  Many companies rush to staff a social media initiative by assembling a diverse team across functions, experience, and interests.  However, companies need a balance of skills to succeed and often sway to the extremes by staffing either ALL social media experts or ALL organization insiders.

This matrix can help you staff your team by identifying skill gaps, both in social media and in organizational change, that can help you fill key roles in your initiative.

When you are done, ask yourself this question:   “Does this look like a winning Bingo card?”  If yes, then identify your gaps and look to bring in Subject Matter Experts to help strengthen your initiative.

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Organizational Change Skills

Influences senior leadership

• High – Has relationships that can be used to influence change outside a presentation setting
• OK – Presented compelling arguments to senior management

Deep industry experience

• High – Has 10+ years in industry and deep relationships with suppliers and partners
• OK – Has 5+ years in industry and contacts with suppliers and partners

Creates new metrics and communicates their importance

• High – Developed metrics beyond revenue/profit for a new business initiative
• OK – Has used new metrics to inform business decisions

Empathizes with customers

• High – Conducted customer ethnography to develop actionable insights
• OK – Customer facing experience in a sales, service, or marketing function

Rapidly iterates technology projects

• High – Led a major technology initiative requiring quick implementation to requirements changes
• OK – Participated on a technology team to define enhancements and changes

Leverages experience in a corporate change initiative

• High – Has led a major corporate change initiative like Six Sigma or Innovation
• OK – Has participated on a corporate change initiative team as a Subject Matter Expert

Social Media Skills

Understands the details of good content

• High – Has a high traffic website
• OK – Writes content 2-3 times per week

Analyzes qualitative data to determine audience needs

• High – Developed insights from qualitative consumer data
• OK – Collected and understands limits of qualitative data

Surfaces diverse information from online resources

• High –Gathers information from diverse RSS feeds
• OK – Familiar with getting information beyond “Google

Exhibits patience with community detractors

• High – Manages an online community with 100+ members
• OK – Has added to discussions of controversial topics in an online forum

Turns virtual connections into real-world connections

• High – Participates in real-world “meet-ups” of online communities
• OK – Has developed REAL relationships with people met online

Creates buzz through pithy writing

• High – Has a high number of followers on a site like Twitter
• OK – Can write headlines that catch your attention

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I’ve seen a couple tweets pop up from managers recognizing employees for a great job. Rochelle Grayson started some thoughts back in May of last year, that I thought should be built upon.

First and Foremost, It SHOULD NEVER replace the handwritten note made famous by Jack Welch, but for quick “atta-boys” or “atta-girls”, it can go a long way

1 – Quick – 140 characters, bam.  It’s a perfect medium for quick recognition for a job well done.  I’ve seen so many managers get nervous and hesitate to properly recognize their employees…but this is a overwhelmingly easy way to give quick feedback.

2 – Public – I would love for my followers to see that I did a great job at “making a coherent argument for an idea in a meeting…”   A simple @benphoster, and I’m working nights to come up with better arguments.

3 – New - As of right now…no one is doing this.  Show your team that you’re one of those “forward-thinking” manager types that they’ve been hearing so much about.  Set up a #tag for your team to allow the group to publicly see the motivation.

BUT NEVER LET IT REPLACE A HANDWRITTEN NOTE!

I’ve heard of Social Media being aligned in a bunch of different functions across the organization.  In a perfect world, Social Media is its own function with the leader reporting directly to the CEO.  But…we’re not quite there yet.  TheSocialOrganization.com had a great post about corporate initiatives being staffed in its own “function”, but until we get there, here are 3 common approaches and their pros/cons.

Marketing

Pros

• Easier to tie results to key business metrics (revenue, profit, brand awareness)
• More natural fit for organization makes it easier to gain stakeholder buy-in

Cons

• Can limit potential – initiatives focused on increasing sales
• Customer perception of spam – lame company attempts at Twitter

Information Technology

Pros

• Easier to iterate/change technology applications
• Employees with more experience in the space

Cons

• Over-engineered solutions that complicate content
• Many tech departments aren’t known for being user-friendly

Strategy

Pros

• Provide longer-term, “big-bet” focus to the initiative
• Able to apply value to multiple organization functions

Cons

• Can be focused too focused on “great thoughts” instead of quick action
• Often balancing multiple strategic initiatives which could divert attention from Social Media

Download Slides Here

A great post at davefleet.com outlined eight questions to ask Social Media experts.   Josh Peters at shuaism.com gave some great answers.  Almost as common as Social Media experts are Social Media teams in organizations.  I thought this excerpt was very relevant:

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing people sign up for Twitter, follow ten thousand people (many of whom follow back) to build a substantial following, then start spouting advice as though followers equals expertise. Some of them are experts, for sure. Others, however, seem to have little beyond a big mouth to back their words up.

Almost as annoying, but just as dangerous, are the hordes of traditional practitioners that have realized they need to include social media in their pitches nowadays, but have no experience whatsoever using those tools.

Every company is starting a Social Media group/team/initiative, here are 6 questions to ask your organization’s Social Media team:

1 – Will the team have access to any tool, technology, or website they want?

• Watch for any hesitation towards full and complete access
• Probe for the process required to get access from tech admins and compliance teams
• Sounds like a ridiculous question, right?   It’s not, if admins don’t trust their social media teams, chances are that management doesn’t yet trust them either.  You’ll be surprised how many times you hear “well, we just don’t support Firefox.”

2 – What is your “VPV” – Visitor Value Proposition?

• Watch for any answer that could be translated into “Build it, and they will come”
• Probe for specific examples on why this improves upon the current solutions available to potential visitors
• Many otherwise brilliant senior leaders expect the love they have for their organization is common….but unless you are providing visitor-driven, stunning content, no one cares about your company.

3 – How does the organization deal with negative feedback?

• Watch for a sugar-coated answer that is too good to be true
• Probe for examples of leadership acceptance and response to negative feedback
• Social media teams are trained to expect negative feedback but rarely does management understand the true essence of negative comments that customers, partners, and employees post.

4 – What is the biggest regulatory/compliance restraint facing the social media strategy?

• Watch for answers at the extreme, positive or negative
• Probe for the ability for the organization to respond quickly without bureaucratic constraints
• Every organization faces regulatory constraints.  An answer like  “we’re free to do whatever we want” is naive.   However, some industries simply can’t maximize social media’s potential because of their industry regulations.

5 – Who does the social media team report to?

• Watch for organizational layers without a direct reporting structure to top management
• Probe for the strategic objectives of the function that Social Media is most closely aligned
• I’ve heard of social media groups in marketing, strategy, technology, innovation, and even customer service.  Ideally, the social media team will be it’s own function with a a direct report to the CEO to make management buy-in quicker.

6 – What metrics are management using to measure success?

• Watch for a direct answer with narrowly defined metrics or an ambiguous answer with little thought
• Probe for measurements in other functions that tie to social media objectives and for a set of metrics that work together to measure progress
• Social media has multiple ways to impact the bottom line, but the answer here shows strategic thought given to the business model.  The metrics don’t matter as much as the thought process behind them.

What are good answers to these questions?  What else would you include in this list?

Social Media is a hot topic in the corporate world, but many employees are skeptical of the value it can add to their business.  By viewing Social Media in the context of two recent corporate initiatives (Six Sigma and Innovation ), leaders can learn from a historical management perspective of how to implement the radical change taking place around us.

1 – Six Sigma

• Organization Ability to Understand Difficult Concepts – My three favorite Six Sigma companies, GE, Motorola, and Amazon spent tremendous resources, financial and human, to embed Six Sigma capabilities across their organization.  While the low hanging fruit ripe for Six Sigma may be gone, there is no question that the focus on fixing defects that annoy customers will continue to be critical to organizations.  Just like Six Sigma, Social Media isn’t the easiest concept for people to understand (ever try explaining the value of Twitter to someone?)  Not every employee needs to understand regression analysis but Six Sigma forced all employees to look at their work in the context of a business proces….which brings me to my next point.

• Business Process is a Common Language between Management and Employees – Leadership doesn’t have the time to understand the details behind every function in the organization.  But, Six Sigma tied the day-to-day work of front-line employees to metrics and results that leadership understands and wants quantified.  Businesses will always benefit from effiicient processes, but Social Media strategy execution requires rapid iteration and an almost wiki-like approach to the details of the execution.

2 – Innovation

• Solving Unarticulated Customer Needs – Since the dawn of capitalism, economic value has been created by those who can recognize a customer problem and solve it profitably.  It used to be a competitive advantage to have an innovation focused strategy, but it is now a strategic necessity because most companies have adopted a disciplined, consumer-driven approach to developing new products, services, and business models.  Social Media strategies and execution must follow the same process in place at innovative companies:
  • Ability to Surface Unarticulated Customer Needs – No one specifically said to Twitter, “I need a way to share 140 characters of text in as many ways as possible.”  Rather, the founders listened to people who wanted simplicity in communication and openness in idea sharing.  Social Media teams benefit from a member who knows advanced market research techniques (like ethnography) to surface customer data.
  • Skill to Quantify the Breadth and Intensity of Customer Needs – Just because someone says they need something, doesn’t mean you have to solve it.  Social Media teams must spread their customer insights across the organization to solicit feedback and perspective.  It’s not always a hard number that measures the need for a solution.  But through a diversity of opinion, you can separate customer insights into those that are interesting and also relevant to your business model.
  • Generating Ideas that Solve Problems – The IBM commercials made this concept famous.  But, a simple ideation session can yield a high number of ideas, few of which have staying power because they don’t solve a customer problem.  Social Media teams are prone to adopting fancy technology ideas that aren’t necessarily the solution to a customer problem.  However, they can learn from Innovation’s structured ideation sessions that focus creativity on real problems
  • Focus on Execution over Ideation – Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article shows historical examples of simultaneous discovery like calculus and the telephone.  Simply put, ideas aren’t the magic bullet.  A Social Media team needs to understand that tradeoffs between the idea and reality will be required.  Execution is typically a function of hard work, so as long as the Social Media team can immerse itself in the details required to execute their solution to an unarticulated consumer need, success will not be lost along the path to realization.

• Strategic Risk-Taking over the Long Term – Innovation requires “big bets” often without an immediate payback to the organization’s goals.  Leaders are trained not to argue with the “big bet” principle, but true innovative companies are those that adopt risk-taking and measure management on the ability to take smart risks.  Social Media teams should seek to understand management’s commitment to patience and constant re-calibration of goals and objectives based on findings from constant iterative customer feedback.

For Discussion:  What other hot-button  ”management trends” are relevant to Social Media teams?  How can you leverage past organization-wide initiatives to better suceed in your goal for change?