The Recipe for Hyper-Innovation

A Success Story on how a company innovated to #1 – Market Leadership, Stock Value, Employee Engagement, Revenue Enhancement/Cost Reduction

Recent GE Logo History

INNOVATION DEFINED:

According to Kikipedia, the term innovation derives from the Latin word innovatus, which is the noun form of innovare “to renew or change,” stemming from in-”into” + novus-”new”. Although the term is broadly used, innovation generally refers to the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas.

THE HISTORY & ROOTS OF INNOVATION:

At GE, an innovation program was developed during the late 1980’s called “Work-Out” as part of Jack Welch’s drive for better productivity, efficiency and greater innovation. Initially, GE’s Work-Out program was intended to identify and eliminate unneeded processes and tasks that were left over from previous years that became inefficient, as Jack put it, riding ourselves of meaningless tasks “Just because that’s the way we always did things”. After the restructuring identified via Work-Out, many GE groups accomplished their goals with fewer people and with reduced cycle time which drove ever higher levels of increased revenues, reduced costs and greater customer satisfaction & delivery.

THE INNOVATION PROCESS:

The aptly named GE Work-Out process involved identifying an area in need of improvement and assembling a cross-functional team of people together from all aspects of the business (design, marketing, production, sales, manufacturing, software, etc.) to identify a better process, method, strategy, etc. The task for GE Work-Out teams was to meet outside of its normal work environment (and occasionally outside normal working hours) to discuss business inefficiencies and to develop business improvement recommendations.

THE PATH TO INNOVATION:

As Work-Out unfolded, Jack Welch began to recognize that employees were an important source of new and creative ideas that would drive overall corporate innovation. Jack then drove to create a sustainable innovation environment that pushed towards a relentless, endless and companywide search for a “finding a better way, every day.” The Work-Out program was then evolved into a methodology that was created to reduce bureaucracy and to empower every employee, from managers to janitorial staff, an opportunity to improve and innovate on GE’s operations.

INNOVATION GOALS:

From a corporate perspective, the goal of the Work-Out program was to streamline GE and to make workers more productive and processes simpler and more straightforward. From an employee perspective, Work-Out was an empowering program that enabled everyone to contribute suggestions, innovative ideas and corporate efficiency perspectives to make their jobs easier/better and enabled them to deliver higher value to customers and to the company/stockholders.  Employees, in short, considered the program ‘liberating’ and a way to shape their own work-place destiny.

THE RECIPE AND INGREDIENTS FOR INNOVATION:

Due to my constant contributions that led to millions of dollars of savings at GE, I was actually asked to participate on Jack Welch’s Work-Out council at the GE Aerospace Division Level. From my perspective, GE’s Work-Out program was one of the most progressive innovation programs ever created (My perspective on having consulted with, and have insights on, nearly all of the Fortune 100 companies and over half of the Fortune 500 companies). The following is my perspective on the ingredients and recipe for a highly successful innovation program like GE’s Work-Out.

Ingredients for a Successful and Well Balanced Innovation Program:

From my perspective, creating a highly successful hyper-innovation program, similar to that of GE’s Work-Out program, depends on developing a balanced approach of delivering both value to company and sense of purpose & engagement to the employees.  The following charts highlight the balanced scorecard that should be the cornerstone of measuring the health of an innovation program. I call this the eight (8) over eight (8) Innovation Scorecard and, if the eight (8) over eight (8) measures are in balance, then ‘the company will be Great & the Employees will be driven to Innovate’. (The left of chart (Y-Axis) indicates my take on the relative imporance of each of the eight factors).

Employee Ingredients for a Successful and Well Balanced Innovation Program:

Employee Ingredients for a Successful Innovation Program

Let’s review each of these eight ingredients of employee Engagement to determine why they are so important:

1. Employees Feel that the Program is Fair & Consistent - Employees believe that the best innovation ideas are supported vs. those coming from the most popular, powerful or political employees. At GE, we felt very good that the best ideas were more important to management vs. the ideas of the most favored employees/managers.
2. Program participation is fun & exciting – Employees actually feel more content with their jobs and participating in the program is “cool”, “exciting”, “exhilarating”, etc. I never had more fun in a job than when I was participating and contributing to the GE Work-Out program. I actually looked forward to coming to work to find additional savings, ‘better ways’, etc. Additionally, water cooler chat at GE was many times about the excitement and activities of the Work-Out program and ‘what teams were up to’ in developing their ideas.
3. Employee cross-functional innovation teams are encouraged - Employees feel like they can cross organizational boundaries to get ideas developed and evolved without fear of negative inter-organizational political or ‘turf’ ramifications. At GE, when we named the cross-functional team members needed to formulate and evolve an idea, management helped ensure that this cross-functional team was on-board along with each of their managers.
4. Employee Recognition & Rewards are Available for Innovators – Employees are provided incentives & rewards for ‘stepping up’ and developing innovations and, as such, are treated with special/extra compensation for being innovation trailblazers.  At GE, there was an array of special recognitions available to top innovators including dinner with senior management, extra cash awards, mention in the company newsletter, potential level increases, etc. As a top innovator at GE, you could get thousand in additional compensation for innovations and going above and beyond the call of duty associated with your normal job responsibilities.
5. Employees ‘Can Own’ Their Innovations if Selected for Commercialization – Employees can see their ideas and innovations become reality and participate in all aspects of its commercialization process vs. ‘having the company move the idea forward without its originator.  The worst thing a company can do to an employee who ‘birthed the idea’ is to say ‘thank you, we’ll take it from here’ and not allow the employee to participate in helping their innovation evolve and become reality.
6. Program Participation is not Onerous or Cumbersome - Employees should not feel punished or overly burdened for ‘stepping up’ and are not made to feel like they will lose any work-life balance for being an innovator. At GE, extra time was set aside for Work-Out and ‘the innovation process’ vs. making it yet another job everyone had to take on in addition to their existing full-time job.
7. Employees Feel Empowered – Employees should feel like there are no obstacles for them to develop innovations and that they have the latitude equal that of the CEO to make things happen to ensure innovation team success. In this fashion, employees feel like ‘they own’ the program and can direct top management to support their initiatives. At GE, employees were ‘charged up’ and were challenging each other constantly to see which group, team, and/or sets of employees could find more efficiencies, greater cost take-out, or better ways of doing things. Once the employees felt like they ‘could change the world’, no manager would dare to stand in their way in fear of being ridiculed for being archaic, a ‘road block’ or worse – an impediment of the program. The “Coolest” managers were considered those who helped support the teams and were also contributing to finding greater efficiencies themselves.
8. Employees are Provided Encouragement & Support from Management – Employees must feel that innovation is a critical imperative at all levels of management and that top managers are involved, supportive and acting as innovation champions and roadblock removers for all impediments to program & team success. Top management must be totally immersed in, and aware of, the activities, successes, progress and top innovations-innovators associated with the program. At GE, we would receive frequent updates as to what Jack Welch was doing to support and ensure the Work-Out program was a success and clearly articulated that he expected all of his management to do likewise. In one video, he stated ‘I would not want to hear that any of my managers were an impediment to the Work-Out program and the employee innovation teams. We will quickly root out these types of people as they do not represent our future way of doing business.’

Company Ingredients for a Successful and Well Balanced Innovation Program:

In addition to the eight employee factors for a successful innovation program, there must also be well thought out components from a company-program perspective. The following chart depicts the company factors and their relative importance that must also be in place to make an innovation program successful.

Company Ingredients for a Successful Innovation Program

Now, let’s review each of the eight company innovation program factors in-depth to determine why they are so important to the overall success of a program:

1. Innovations are Managed in a Knowledge Base/System – In order to keep track of innovations, who originated the ideas, as well as the associated business cases for proving the commercial value of the innovation, a robust innovation knowledge base/system is needed. This helps to ensure that there are duplicate or overlapping innovations, allows the search for existing innovations that can be leveraged vs. re-inventing it for each division, region, etc. At GE, the process was manual and was very cumbersome.  Many duplicate innovations were created, and it was very difficult to leverage the innovation corporate-wide due to limited (paper based) visibility into innovations ‘in-progress’ or ‘being developed’.
2. A Social Innovation Platform (SIP) Manages the Innovation Process – As discussed in a previous blog entry of mine, many Social Innovation Platforms have been developed that fairly and consistently manage the innovation process. These systems did not exist at the time of the GE Work-Out program, but would have helped in managing the process and could have improved the perceived fairness of the programs administration.  Interestingly enough, GE now utilizes Social Innovation Platforms to manage its innovation process.
3. Management & staff are provided training on developing & nurturing ideas, concepts and innovation – Developing and managing the innovation process is not something that comes naturally for many companies. Therefore, in order for the program to be successful, the company and staff need to learn ‘how to’ manage the process most efficiently and effectively and how to tailor and evolve the program to specific and/or changing needs. At GE, this training was more ad-hoc and on the job, so there were many instances of re-work, false starts, and duplication of effort.  We eventually became good at the innovation process, but a good training program would have helped us avoid many missteps.
4. The Program has clear and consistent program metrics, processes and standards – In order for the program to be perceived fair and consistent by the employees, the program must be managed strategically and program governance (i.e. metrics/measured/processes/etc.) must be continually assessed and adapted for further improvement. At GE, this step was lacking and was only done on an ad-hoc basis and by each division vs. corporate-wide.
5. Innovations are Shared & Leveraged Company-Wide – In order to leverage the value of innovations that could be leveraged company-wide a corporate committee should review emerging innovations to determine the degree that this could be leveraged in order to determine the sum total of its applied business value (applied in one division only, one region, company-wide, etc.).  At GE, every division was on their own and there was seldom sharing of innovations between division (i.e. GE Aerospace and GE Aircraft Engines).
6. Rewards and Incentive Systems are Aligned to Support Hyper-Innovation – In order for an innovation program to be successful, the company alone cannot be the sole beneficiary. The company must share the wealth with the employees by sharing in a portion (1-20%) of the value of suggestion (cost take-out, revenue enhancement, quality improvement leading to additional contract captures, etc.). At GE, we developed a program called RAVE – Recognition Awards for Valued Employees that distributed large sums of incentive $$ for suggesting business innovations/improvements, etc. (Refer to the last section of this blog for examples of this rewards/incentive program).  Without these incentives, large numbers of employees would not have participated in the program and many would have sat on the sideline or would have become program detractors vs. advocates.
7. Innovations Are Value and Metrics Driven (Cost/Revenue/Quality, Employee Work-Life, etc.) – It is important that innovations be developed and ranked based on measures that will provide the greatest quantifiable impact to the company. A system of measurement must then be developed and applied such that every program participant is able to quantify the impact of each innovation and compare it to other innovations already in progress toward commercialization. At GE, this was rudimentary at best and caused a great deal of program inconsistencies where some questionable innovations headed toward implementation while other great ones were nixed early in the process. A consistent/metrics driven program would have avoided many of these pitfalls which led to employees questioning the fairness of the program.
8. Continuous Improvement & Change Management Support Evolving to a Culture of Innovation – In order for the program to thrive longer-term, a program (program oversight for the innovation program) of continuous improvement and change support must be developed and employed. The program must be continually measured, improved, and evolved to address employee and/or company concerns, address program inefficiencies, and to take advantage of new processes, technology or changes in regulation or market directions.  At GE, this was handled by a divisional level Work-Out Council which I was part of at the VP level. As a result of writing a letter to both Jack Welch (CEO) and John D. Rittenhouse (the Aerospace SVP) about continuous improvement, I was appointed to the Work-Out council at the VP Level under Al Horvath (Aerospace VP in Syracuse).  On this Work-Out council we handled the administration of the program along with reviewing all of the developing and/or developed innovations. We were also responsible for reporting up to Senior Management on our progress, issues, roadblocks, top program successes, metrics, etc.

An Innovation Program’s Impact on Shareholder Value:

In my opinion and in speaking to many at GE, the company has slipped since the GE Work-Out days in making the innovation program engaging and ‘fun’ for employees.  Insiders tell me the innovation program is more “black and white” now and driven most by metrics and six-sigma measures and the program “seems flat” and “uninspiring” vs. that of the Work-Out program under Jack Welch.

The following chart depicts how GE’s stock performed before, during and after the height of the Work-Out Program. It is interesting to see that when the GE Work-Out program started to change from its original format and lose some of its employee focus (vs. Six-Sigma statistical focus), the company’s stock value began to erode at about the same time. It seems from this chart and from insider accounts, that GE has lost its recipe for successful hyper-innovation.

Potential Influence of Innovation Programs on Stock Value

Case Studies of Success

The following are all real-life examples of Work-Out, Innovation and Incentive/Reward Program Successes.  These samples illustrate precisely how innovations occur within a company and what makes them successful.

A Successful GE Work-Out Example:

Below is one success case study from GE’s Work-Out that involved many of the above principles:

GE Work Out Success Story & Case Study

One of the many Work-Out Successes I identified while at GE is noted in the above graphic. For years, GE discarded their slight used, but still in good working condition, office furniture by paying to ship it to dumps & landfills.  One day, I passed a dumpster filled with office furniture in really good condition that I could use in my home office. I called the local facilities manager and asked if I could take any of it home and was told “No – we can’t have employees digging around in the dumpsters due to a liability issue. Someone could get hurt and we could get sued”.

Frustrated by this roadblock and always viewing every roadblock as a challenge and opportunity, I went back to my cubicle and said to myself “there has to be a better way – win/win for the company and employees”.  I called around to several salvage yards, 2nd hand stores, and several similar 3rd party companies, etc. and to my amazement; said they would love to take the shipment from GE and would pay cash to GE for the furniture and even allow the employees to buy the furniture at favorable rates vs. the general public.  Once I heard that a solution was possible, I called our facilities manager, Bill Biloski, and told him what I had discovered. He got excited about what I had found out and went off to contact the local firms I had contacted. Bill was able to work out a deal with one local Syracuse, NY firm named “The Riverside Shop” whereby GE would sell the used furniture to them, Riverside would then allow GE employees to buy the furniture at deep discounts – a win/win solution for all. Here is a synopsis of the benefits of the Worked-Out solution I developed:

Work Out Solution Benefits Summary

The following is my perspective on how the eight employee factors were prevalent in this work-out solution:

Employees Ingredients for a Work-Out Innovation Success

Other Innovation Program Examples:

Example - Innovations Submitted via Employee Suggestion Program

Above is my suggestion submitted for the “Better Together” program which Martin Marietta used following its acquisition of GE Aerospace. This program was far less dynamic and successful than the GE Work-Out program due to, in my opinion, a lessening of many of the “eight over eight” factors.

Example - Rewards & Incentives for Innovation, Special Achievement, Extra Efforts, Etc.

Above is my award for developing and delivering on a schedule acceleration plan for a major delivery to the US Navy. The Critical Design Review (“CDR”) was acclaimed as a “huge success” and was instrumental in GE retaining (vs. losing) the multi-million dollar Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) contract GE had with the US Navy.

Example - Innovation Program Complimented by Reward Program (RAVE)

Above illustrates my participation on the development of an employee rewards & incentive system to compliment GE’s Work-Out program.  I led this team to the development of what was called the “Recognition Awards for Valued Employees” or RAVE program.  Awards were distributed via this program to the most valuable contributors to the GE Work-Out program. 

Example - Award for Innovation & Excellence on GE Contract Delivery

Above is my award for making the Aegis Ship Software Qualification Tests (SQTs) a success for both GE and the US Navy.   The Tactical Load File (“TLF”) search tool mentioned above resolved some critical software anomalies that would have degraded ship safety and prevented the ship to safely fire its missiles.

Example - Reward for 'Extra Effort' and Going Above & Beyond

Above is my award for developing and delivering on a Prime Item Development Specification (“PIDS”) for a Nuclear submarine program to the US Navy. The PIDS was deemed “out of compliance” by the US Navy and I led a team to turn-around the quality of that deliverable into what was deemed as “exceptional” by the US Navy Top Brass. This was instrumental in GE retaining (vs. losing) the multi-million dollar submarine contract with the US Navy.

Recent GE Logo History

GE’s recent logo changes: Subtle changes vs. dramatic re-design & re-invention.  It is interesting to note that when GE was changing its logo from its 1986 to the 2003 design, John D. Rittenhouse, the then SVP of the Aerospace business, told Jack Welch: ‘Even you are having problems with this change thing – after all of the effort to re-design our logo, all you did was round off the corners a bit’.

Conclusion – The bottom line here is that getting innovation right is a tricky recipe to duplicate and all of the right ingredients must be present for the program to be considered 5-star.  If a company does not find the right mix to the recipe, a great deal of time and resources can be expended for a very questionable gain. It is clear that GE during Jack Welch’s tenure, GE perfected the ingredients and the results of the Master Chefs (employees and management) was a gourmet dish of higher profits, higher revenue and higher stock value.

HOTEL SOLD OUT ?? – SOCIAL NETWORK YOUR WAY IN

When Persistency & Social Connections intersect with a World Class Hotel General Manager – anything is possible…

A story of how a very persistent and well connected social media expert was able to network his way into an otherwise sold out hotel by socially connecting with the hotel’s world-class general manager…

Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing

Date: July 1st, 2011, Situation – Hotel Sold Out on 1^st of 2 day Planned Stay – Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing is the best hotel for my upcoming & out-of-town meetings, but I can only book Thursday July 14^th, not Wednesday July 13^th which is completely booked – no luck in booking 2 consecutive nights at this same hotel. The hotel showing booked for 7/13 for many days. Call hotel – they say the hotel is oversold. I obtain Hotel General Manager’s name from front desk agent – his name is Mike Costello.

Date: July 10^th, Action Plan – Find Mike Costello on LinkedIn, Send Him an Invite, Ask to Connect due to ‘upcoming stay at hotel’

LinkedIn Invite to Hotel General Manager

Date: July 9th – Connect & Correspond to the Hotel General Manager – Mike Costello, General Manager from the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing Connects with me. I send him an e-mail based on his e-mail address being available on his LinkedIn profile:

Accepted LinkedIn Invitation by Hotel General Manager

E-mail to Hotel General Manager After Connecting on LinkedIn

Date: July 11^th, Update, Receive Response E-mail From Hotel General Manager: Mike Costello e-mails me indicating the 13^th is completely sold out and suggests that I drop my bags off early on Wednesday so I could proceed to my planned meetings. Mike Promised to “review our status tomorrow for any changes due to cancellations or people not showing up without indicating so.”

Date: July 11^th, Update, Send Response E-mail To Hotel General Manager:

Letter to Hotel General Manager - Thanks for Following Up

Date: July 12^th, 9:30 AM, Update, Receive a “Reservation Change” E-mail from Hyatt indicating my reservation for the 13^th had been made.

13th Opens Up, Reservation Changed, I'M IN !

Date: July 12^th, 11:24 AM, Update, Receive an E-mail from Hotel General Manager. Mike Costello indicates I am I am “Set for Wednesday “ (the 13^th) and wishes me “Safe Travels”. I write back immediately indicating “Thank you so much!”

Date: July 14^th, 9AM, The last day of my stay. I make it a point to visit the hotel Administrative offices to thank Mike, but unfortunately he is a meeting. I convey my “Thank you” to his Administrative assistant. She Promises to relay the message to him.

Date: July 14^th, 4PM, Call from Hotel GM while on the train on my way home. Receive a phone call on my cell phone from the hotel GM (Mike Costello) indicating he was glad to be able to help me and appreciated the fact that I told him that his hotel was top-notch and that I really enjoyed my stay. Mike then said to please consider coming back to his hotel when I am in the area again. I told him I would now consider no other hotel except the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing to stay when in the area due to the following:

1) His world-class customer service and going above and beyond to assist guests

2) The way the hotel was run as a model of hospitality from the excellent level of guest service and the excellent staff that was always willing to help at every instance.

Bottom line – Persistence and connections do pay off (I seldom take no for an answer and always ‘figure out how to get to the goal line’ no matter what - my nickname was “tank” in college days for being so persistent and always getting the job/task done), but only if this persistency is met by a savvy and World-Class Hotel General Manager like Mike Costello from Hyatt.

If you are in the Philadelphia area, I urge you to seriously consider the Hyatt Regency Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing – the staff, the management and accommodations are world-class and 5-star all around.

Social Media LIFT Defined. My LIFT Score = 42,347. What is Your Score and/or Your Organization’s Score?

Question 1: What specifically is Social Media LIFT (a.k.a. Reach)? 

Answer 1  The calculation is simply as follows: LinkedIn{Connections}+Facebook{Friends}+Twitter{Followers}.

My Social Media Reach (LIFT) total social is as follows = LinkedIn “Connections” (7,078)+ Facebook “Friends” (4,727)+Twitter  “Followers”(30,542)+ This means I have access to communicate my message directly to 42,000+ individuals who have opted-in to receive (follow) my messages.  Charts 1 & 2 clearly depict what social MediaLift is and how I derived at my score:

This chart (#1) speaks to the definition of what a social media reach (LIFT) score is as follows:

Chart 1 – Social Media Lift Definition

This chart (#2) speaks to what my specific social media reach (LIFT) score is and how it is calculated:

Chart 2 – Social Media Lift Calculation

Ever notice firms claiming to be experts in social media, yet have relatively low Social Media Reach and Lift Scores?  I have seen global consulting, database management, direct marketing and even advertising agency firms with paltry scores  under 10,000, all claiming to be able to help you develop ‘world-class social media programs’. My question to you is, if they are unable to develop decent reach (LIFT) for their own firms (i.e. earn a high social media lift score), then how in the world will they be able to help you and your organization? Social Media Lift loosely translates to Database Size in traditional marketing & CRM terms.

WHY IS LIFT SO IMPORTANT?

Let’s reveal the root of the problem with a set of simple questions as follows:

Question 2: What will most social media & traditional media firms try to sell you so that THEY make the most $$?

Answer 2: Setting up Facebook fan pages, developing new websites, setting up infrastructure and establishing your presence in social media, the web, etc. While these get you established in social media or the web, they do little to provide bottom line value to your business. Building social media infrastructure without adding effective lift is like having a gun with just a few bullets – Looks impressive, but will enable you to only hit a very few targets with limited results.

Question 3: What will provide you with the highest business value from social media?

Answer 3: Having a large social media LIFT Score (a.k.a. social media reach), bigger than your competitors, so that you may communicate, sell, brand and influence your followers. Without effect LIFT you are limited by how widespread you can leverage your message to the world.

Of course having high quality contacts and building relationships with them is equally important, but if you don’t have a decent lift score or social media following, you can’t get do either of these next steps.  I, for example, have screened each of my friends/connections/follows to ensure they are of high quality and are of the type that can help my business grow.  In this case, Reach Quality = Correlation of Lift contact Needs/profile to your brand messaging/content.

HOW DO I ACHIEVE A HIGH LIFT SCORE?

Question 4: How do you attain a high social media lift score?

Answer 4:  By running effective social media follower, friend, connection campaigns to increase your lift score. There are many examples of these campaigns by organizations such as ‘help us reach 100,000 Facebook fans and we’ll donate to $x to charity’, ‘when we reach 50,000 followers, we’ll host a fan appreciation party’, please connect to me for important news on topic x’, etc. It is surprising how many organizations establish themselves in social media (‘hey, I’m now here’), but then do nothing do increase their fan bases, reach, etc. The web is littered with firms that have taken the first step in getting into social media, but have done very little to expand their presence and LIFT scores. This last step is the most important in ‘getting real’ in terms of social media.  I have developed a very unique cross-platform campaign system that is highly effective in gaining connections, friends, followers – hence my high LIFT score.

HOW CAN I MONITOR & MANAGE MY OWN LIFT SCORE?

If you really want to determine your score, your firm’s score or that of a social media company you want to hire, you now have to look no further than a relatively new site called SocialChiefs.com (http://www.socialchiefs.com) .  You submit your account information to this site and they calculate your social media reach (LIFT) for you (http://www.socialchiefs.com/default.aspx?c=3 ). I recently did this and found out in recent weeks that I was rated the #4 globally in Social Media Reach by SocialChiefs per the following chart:

Chart 3 – Global Social Media Reach Ranking as Rated by SocialChiefs.com

The following chart illustrated my specific reach (LIFT) calculations by SocialChiefs.com

Chart 4 – Specific Global Social Media Reach (LIFT) Calculations as Rated by SocialChiefs.com

Question 5: What is your social media reach (LIFT) score and what is the score of the social media firm you’ve hired?

Commentary on your score - If you hired a social media firm to build you social media presence and now your LIFT score is under 10,000, then you likely got ripped off and/or not netting the true power of social media. They took the big $$ to get you set up in social media and then left you hanging with paltry reach (LIFT) numbers (<10,000) which is equivalent to taking the money and leaving you with little to show in terms of real business value.  “Hey look at my Facebook Fan page – isn’t it great! But I only have 200 fans to communicate with – was this really worth it?”

Developing Breakaway Competitive Advantage via Social Innovation Platforms (SIPs)

Part Three (of 3) – Leveraging Social Innovation Platforms (SIPs – a.k.a. innovation management, social suggestion boxes or crowd sourcing applications) to transform your company into an innovation leader

In my previous two blogs I covered the first two of three mega-trends that are hitting the social media marketplace for large Fortune level organizations.  In the first blog, I addressed how the use of enterprise social monitoring and intelligence platforms are helping companies leverage key insights from an array of market activity and major trends including competitor activity & weaknesses, key opinion leader sentiment/needs, regulator trends and concerns, political leader and influencer sentiment, public opinion and key public concerns.  In my last blog (2 of 3 in the series), I covered how Enterprise Collaboration Platforms are changing how teams communicate and interact in order to boost corporate productivity.

This third blog in the series is dedicated to a social media trend hitting corporate America that focuses on Social Innovation Platforms (SIPs). This trend has the ability to transform companies into a leader in innovation, enabling them to leapfrog their competition in much the same way Google and Apple have out-innovated many of their competitors. A full 83% percent of respondents in this year’s Bloomberg/Business Week/Boston Consulting Group (BCG) annual survey of top executives said innovation will be a key part of their strategy to benefit from the economic recovery¹. While companies might hire innovators, in order for them to be successful there needs to be a very robust methodology, culture, and process that support these executive innovators.   This blog is focused on a new category of tools that are designed to achieve this culture of innovation.  In the same format as my previous two blogs, I will cover this subject as follows:

A) What is a SIP or Social Innovation Platform (a.k.a. social suggestion box)
B) What are the benefits from using an SIP
C) What are the hottest tools/applications in the marketplace
D) How do you implement this SIP capability

A) What is a Social Innovation Platform (SIP) or Social Suggestion Box?

An SIP is a social media application that allows the sourcing of innovative ideas, content, suggestions and inventions from an array of sources including internal company departments and employees (internal innovation/idea sourcing) and from external stakeholders, customers and experts (external innovation, content, or idea sourcing).  Think of a company suggestion box on steroids and on the global web – that is what a SIP is. Has your company had your SIP of hyper-innovation, thus allowing you to utterly leapfrog your competition? If not, the rest of this blog is a MUST READ for you!

These platforms are designed to increase intra-corporate idea & innovation collaboration, decrease time to market, and to enhance overall corporate productivity. There are two types of Social Innovation Platforms – internal and external. The platforms that source ideas and insights from the general public  are typically called crowd sourcing solutions, but can also be called idea sourcing, idea & insights cultivation, etc.  A SIP can radically change your corporate culture to be more innovative, change oriented, enable out-of-the box thinking and greatly enhance your ability to create great content/ideas/insights/innovative products/services, patents, etc.
The following illustrates the key features and capabilities of a best-of-breed SIP platform:

Social Innovation Platform (SIP) Key Features:

1) Internal & External Idea Sourcing Web Portal
2) Idea & Innovation Content Management with full innovation library taxonomy
3) Online Innovation Community Creation – both internal and external
4) Collaboration on ideas in order to rank, improve, and evolve sourced content and ideas
5) Idea rating, scorecarding, ranking – makes creating and managing ideas easy by enabling the simple management of ‘evaluation teams’ by offering functionality like simple to use workflows, multiple round scorecarding, and idea insight sharing
6) Manages and merges ideas into business proposals & business cases
7) Social project management  to manage and track idea borne projects while monitoring and reporting on the financial value/impact of the overall innovation pipeline

B) What are the benefits – Why are companies, organizations and government agencies adopting social innovation platforms capabilities?

The following list represents just a few of the benefits of implementing an SIP or social suggestion box:

1) Accelerates the participation of Stakeholder and Customers in your Innovation Process – Allows you to Inform your customers about your challenges, encourages them submit, discuss and evaluate great ideas, with ratings and incentives for the top contributions

2) Enables the sourcing of high-impact and game changing business concepts, ideas, suggestions, and product enhancements – from both internal and external sources

3) Boosts the number and quality of incremental ideas – enabling for the development of a culture of innovation within your company or organization

4) Facilitates the process of researching or getting a patent on your sourced ideas by systemically managing and elevating only those ideas that are commercially viable

5) Optimizes the process to systematically manage the flow of business proposals – this can be from ideas sourced internally or from start-up companies and partners

6) Improves ROI on R&D spend by enabling business process environment to create, manage and vet ideas and innovations

7) Motivates key contributors – Motivates your employees by providing a transparent and easy way to handle idea management. Employees feel empowered to submit ideas and innovations in this highly transparent environment.

’8) Empowers Teams and Departments – Encourages team empowerment and contributions and inter-departmental cooperation on ideas, innovations, patents, etc.

9) Delivers increased Control over Intellectual Property and Digital Assets – Single/integrated environment for innovation, idea and idea proposal/business case management

10) Increases the appetite for increased intra-organizational change and the appetite for innovation and entrepreneurialism. Complimentary to this is the need to support the implementation of an SIP with a heavy dose of change management as this implementation represents a paradigm shift in the organization’s appetite and acceptance of change (pace of, rewards for, change agent & innovator recognition, etc. )

11) The overall goal of the increased innovation derived from these SIP is to decrease the time to market with products and services that have increased market relevance and can leapfrog the competition in terms of market demand. 

C) What are the hottest tools/applications on the SIP or Intra-Social Application market?

Almost all SIPs are relatively new to the marketplace and few have been deployed to several Fortune-500 level companies.

Leading SIP Software Vendor & Tools – Includes Idea Management and Crowd Sourcing Applications

1) Brightidea Innovation Suite.  http://www.brightidea.com/ Included in this solution are the Brightidea’s WebStorm, Switchboard and Pipeline modules. The Suite combines enhanced idea collection functionality in WebStorm and proposal management and development in Switchboard and social idea/innovation management in Pipeline. Leading multi-national companies including Cisco, Wyeth, American Express, Kraft, Sony, Bayer, British Telecom, etc,  use Brightidea software to execute targeted internal campaigns to solicit ideas and feedback from employees on everything from new product development to cost saving and process improvement ideas. Cross-functional and inter-departmental brainstorming is possible through a software platform that is similar in nature to Facebook and enables companies to monitor the process of innovation and socialization from concept to monetization. Brightidea software not only concentrates on the front end of idea collection/prioritization that creates an idea repository & management environment for ideas across organization and departments, but also offers a systematic, streamlined way to turn ideas into actionable & ROI driven business proposals. These proposals can then be prioritized within the organization that facilitates ‘best idea maturation’ and delivers on what matters most, measurable business ROI and results. Strengths of this solution/company include:
a. Well established company with over 10 years of experience
b. Constantly innovating and improving their platform and solutions
c. Many top tier clients have implemented their solution

2) Chaordix – http://www.chaordix.com/ Chaordix is a crowdsourcing solution that began in 2006 and began as a crowdsourcing community to discover new business and technology ideas. It attracted 55,000+ members and several thousands of ideas from the crowd.  The Chaordix crowdsourcing platform is a proven, flexible engine to tap communities for vital business insights to innovate, improve operations, and reduce the risks of competing in the marketplace. Chaordix software makes it simple to seek, manage and analyze input from a crowd. What sets the Chaordix technology apart is its proven scalability to handle large crowds, ability to mitigate bias in voting and crowd behavior, and social networking sophistication that helps to engage both similar and disparate crowds. Strengths of this solution/company include:
a. Well established company with over 10 years of experience
b. Very scalable and flexible platform – able to scale to large & complex crowdsourcing requirements
c. Leadership team provide deep thought leadership in innovation management

3) Cognistreamer. http://www.cognistreamer.com/en/index.html CogniStreamer® is an idea management software solution.  CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal is an open innovation and collaboration platform where internal colleagues and external stakeholders align to create, enrich and assess innovative ideas within strategically selected ‘category’ topics. Their downstream analysis, ability to direct conversations within the platform and integration with e-mail and other outside systems is reportedly best-in-class. The CogniStreamer® portal module is an ideal collaborative and management platform that invites users to actively build a strong idea & innovation pipeline. In addition, it provides a powerful resource for internal and external knowledge collaboration and sharing. The CogniStreamer® framework module is used by companies that include Atlas Copco, Bekaert, Case New Holland, Cytec, Imec, Picanol and ThyssenKrupp.  Strengths of this solution/company include:
a. Very capable senior leadership team w/10+ years of experience
b. Smooth graphical look and feel
c. Leading methods and approaches on cultivating innovation

4) Hype Software – HypeIMT. http://www.hypeinnovation.com/  HypeIMT is a leading software solution for idea and innovation management supporting the entire new product development process from idea development to the commercialization of a new product. This product also offers a systematic process for capturing, rating, comparing, and selecting ideas to ensure only the most viable ideas receive project funding. Flexible and customizable, HypeIMT allows companies to custom design the innovation management process, in order that it will support an array of very specific product development strategies. Several of the Global Fortune 500 companies, including General Electric and Procter & Gamble, are already utilizing HypeIMT to manage their Innovation process.  Strengths of this solution/company include:
a. Well established company with over 10 years of experience
b. Well established customer base
c. Privately held German company, but profitable since inception

5) IdeaScale – http://ideascale.com/  IdeaScale is another leading crowdsourcing solution and enables ways for companies to solicit ideas and allow customers to rate, discuss, and brainstorm ideas for the company.  The process commences with ideas being posted within the IdeaScale community. Every idea submitted can be expanded via comments and additional insights from each of the participants of the community. Through a voting system, the ultimate value of an idea is determined by participating voters, while also allowing people to share their opinions and insights as to why the idea, in their opinion, will or won’t be successful. Via this voting system, any idea can be voted to the top of list or de-valued down to the bottom of the list of ideas. Companies using IdeaScale include Subaru, Choice Hotels, Wired Magazine, Boy Scouts, Reuters and Fiserv Risk and Compliance Solutions.  Strengths of this solution/company include:
a. Relatively inexpensive solution – can be used by smaller businesses
b. Mobile application allows submitting of ideas ‘on-the-go’
c. IdeaScale made Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest-growing private companies.

6) Imaginatik – http://www.imaginatik.com/  A core component of Imaginatik’s solution is an module called Idea Central. Idea Central is a web-based application designed to help organizations maximize the benefits from the creativity, expertise, insights and ideas of employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders and even third parties. Imaginatik’s solution also includes a idea portfolio monitoring function for Idea Central, a module that can be customized to provide project leaders, managers and ‘idea participants’ the ability to track ideas as they mature from raw idea to potential commercialization candidate. Portfolio Monitor offers community users visibility into current and past ‘idea projects’, allowing stakeholders to track the progress of their ideas. Portfolio Monitor also allows the conversion of ideas from Idea Central into other project management tools in order to facilitate the seamless flow for transitioning ideas that escalate into full commercialization projects. Imaginatik has provided Innovation and idea management solutions to companies such as The Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Boeing, Pfizer, Xerox, World Bank, Goodyear and Cargill. Strengths of this solution/company include:
a. Well established company with over 10 years of experience
b. Strong consulting background with an proven ability to help clients become more innovative (i.e. help clients capture ROI from the solution)
c. Many best practices has been derived from experience on large international clients

7) Spigit – http://www.spigit.com   Spigit is a leading provider of collective idea management software, connecting employees, customers, business partners and other 3rd parties for collaborative innovation development. Spigit is used by several of the Fortune 500 companies as a means of combining crowdsourcing and social networking to source ideas, rate and mature ideas with the highest potential, and then promote only the best ideas to implement and commercialize. A very innovative aspect of the solution, Spigit also includes a literal idea marketplace whereby company employees can buy and sell shares of ideas. Spigit customers include AT&T, Lloyds Bank, Allstate, New York City and over 100 other companies. External recommendations for Spigit include CIO Magazine’s list of 20 companies to watch in 2011 and JMP Securities hot 100 private companies for 2011. Strengths of this solution/company include:
a. Recent to the market but with slightly more innovative approach to idea management
b. Very strong list of top-tier clients
c. They have strong financial support ensuring they will likely to continue to be a main contender over the next several years

Niche & Specialty SIP Software Vendor & Tools (Sample)

The companies below are considered niche players in the SIP market in that they source very specific innovations and content from vendors, customers and stakeholders.

1) Brand Tags – http://www.brandtags.net/ Brand Tags is an interesting concept in that it solicits people via the internet to tag associated words that come to their mind when they think of a particular brand/product/service. Responses are then compiled into ‘tag clouds’ displays that reports back which words are thought of most often. To date, Brand Tags thousands of companies have participated in this ‘brand tagging’ and there are now ~2 million tags on their website.

2) CrowdSpring – http://www.crowdspring.com/ CrowdSpring assembles and leverages a large community of creative designers to provide an effective, easy and relatively inexpensive logo and custom graphics design service for smaller businesses and organizations. Persons can post design projects or copywriting projects, specify the price range they are willing to pay and then choose from a wide range of concepts/ideas/designs submitted from the CrowdSpring design community around the world. On average, there are more than one hundred submissions per project. The price paid for crowd designed logos or taglines start from around $200 USD.

3) CustomAdart – http://www.customadart.com/ CustomAdart asks a crowd of creative professionals to develop your perfect image at the price range you set. This concept is allowing companies to migrate away from the traditional stock photography model by allowing advertisers to post specifications for very custom and specific shots and then getting community members to submit their best images/graphics/photos to satisfy the desired specifications.

4) Fellowforce – http://www.fellowforce.com   Fellowforce.com was founded to connect organizations to an array of high quality ideas, innovation and solutions. Fellowforce.com aims to open up organizations to outside participation from experts, consumers, and other interested parties to generate powerful new innovations and solutions via networked innovation via collaboration. Fellowforce.com enables open innovation, idea generation and problem solving to a multitude of organizations worldwide. This is the first open platform that covers a very diverse set of business areas such as business & strategy, human resources, marketing, sales, customer service, innovation process management, design, engineering, IT, and supply chain.

5) InnoCentive – https://www.innocentive.com  InnoCentive is based on a straightforward concept in that, if a company is unable to solve a problem on its own, why not use the power of the Internet to see if other Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can solve the problem? This concept has resulted in the establishment of the world’s first open innovation marketplace with a global network of ~200,000 ‘problem solvers’. In this network, you can find engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people with expertise in life sciences, physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, math, marketing, human resources and computer science. Companies can post their challenges and problems on the InnoCentive website, and offer registered problem ‘solvers’ substantial financial awards for the best submitted solutions.  Problem solvers compete to win monetary prizes offered by various companies. Over 1,000 challenges have been posted thus far by nearly 200 firms, including large/global companies such as Procter & Gamble.

6) Philoptima, llc. http://www.philoptima.org/ Philoptima, llc.™ enables foundations, donors, and grant makers to describe a challenge to the idea community and to post cash prizes to incentivize ‘idea solvers’ to solve the issue put forth. This collaborative system facilitates participants coming together to collaborate and solve a wide variety of community and public interest related problems by connecting consultants, researchers, and subject matter experts that offer best-in-class solutions via a web-based open innovation community.

7) Poptent – http://www.poptent.net/  Simply stated, Poptent enables crowdsourcing for advertisements.  Poptent is a relatively new start-up that solicits crowdsourced advertising ideas and content from an array of global creative talent. The company brings together a vibrant community of filmmakers, actors, comedians, graphic artists, animators and then connects them with companies who need their advertisement creative services. Companies and/or brands can post their requests for an advertisement or specific ad content, which is then developed and submitted by Poptent’s pool of global creative advertising talent – all via a robust web collaborative crowdsource application.

’8) ThinkTank4 – http://www.groupsystems.com/  ThinkTank4 is a social collaboration & idea management platform that is used primarily by larger consulting companies. ThinkTank4 is a structured collaboration platform for professional services which enables content sharing, project collaboration and best practice/intellectual property management. ThinkTank aims to increase profitability by enabling consultants to deliver more client value via reduced cycle time and reduced manual effort.

D) How do you implement this capability – what are the steps and considerations on implementing this capability within your organization and company?

Social Media innovation platform (SIP) implementation success requires comprehensive visioning; with stepwise implementation, guided both by an innovation paradigm shift & culture change, roadmap and integrated project plan.
I have developed this capability for several Fortune 500 companies and the capability can be enabled via four (4) Major steps as follows (Summarized):

1) Step #1: Develop an innovation culture prior to implementing the SIP in order that the automated process will not be met with resistance. This includes the following:
a) Re-engineer performance metrics and employee KPIs to recognize and reward the most innovative within the company
b) Develop pre-automation innovation contests
c) Develop an innovation newsletter and intra-net site
d) Put forth innovation or idea generation challenges with substantial rewards and visibility from upper management to the top participants and winners
The bottom line here is that, if you don’t have an innovative company culture, implementation of a SIP will likely lead to shelf-ware and a system very few utilize to its full potential.

2) Step #2: Develop a SIP Implementation Strategy & Roadmap including the following:
a) SIP  Strategy/Vision, Objectives, Business Drivers, Critical Success Factors, Community/ Forum Listening Strategy, Key Metrics & Performance Plan, Organizational Plan, Change Management Plan, Communications & Risk Management Plan, monitoring policies, governance plan
b) Put together an implementation roadmap and a centralized PMO to manage the implementation of the roadmap/SIP vision
c) Form your SIP strategy & vision with key stakeholders

3) Step #3: Social Media Technology Platform Evaluation & Selection
a) Identify potential SIP platform & community management vendors
b) Develop Needed SIP Requirements and Capabilities
c) Perform Technology Platform Vendor Selection
d) Onboard Vendor
e) Build a techno-functional architecture to support the roadmap

4) Step #4: Develop SIP Program Pilots & Deployment Plan
a) Develop Pilot Project & Deployment Plan
b) Develop SIP management processes that provide organizational confidence and exercise process excellence transparency to solidify user/stakeholder buy-in and acceptance.
c) Develop Technology Pilots
d) Develop  Program Pilots
e) Invest in Organizational change management to instill solid user/stakeholder adoption
f) Develop Organization & Process Pilots
g) Deploy Pilots and Programs including
1.  Center of Excellence Deployment
2.  Multi-Channel Integration
3.  Policies/Processes
4.  Roles, Rules, Responsibilities
5.  Change Management, Change Management, Change Management

That last bullet point is not a typo as I would honestly say that the #1 key to success in implementing this type of software is an extremely capable change management program. This type of software requires a behavior change on the part of your employees and management and it won’t come easily.   I can say this with confidence – If you are not considering a heavy dose of change management as part of this implementation, your implementation is most likely going to fail!

In summary, SIPs are gaining a great deal of Momentum.  Many Fortune 500 companies are either planning to implement this enterprise capability or already have.  Is your organization planning on implementing this potentially game-changing capability? If so, give me a call at 518-339-5857, as  I call help you achieve world-class programs that enable you to surpass your competition and bring your organization or agency to the next level of innovation.

¹http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_17/b4175043789498.htm

Leveraging Enterprise Collaboration Platforms (ECPs – a.k.a. intra-social applications) to Increase Internal Collaboration, Productivity and Overall Company Performance

Part Two – Leveraging Enterprise Collaboration Platforms (ECPs – a.k.a. intra-social applications) to increase internal collaboration, productivity and overall company performance
 

In my previous blog, I covered the first of three mega-trends hitting the social media marketplace for large Fortune level organizations.  In this blog, I address how the use of enterprise social monitoring and intelligence platforms are helping companies leverage key insights from an array of market activity and major trends including competitor activity & weaknesses, key opinion leader sentiment/needs, regulator trends and concerns, political leader and influencer sentiment, public opinion and key issues. 

This second blog is dedicated to the second social media trend hitting corporate America that focuses on the Intra-Social Media Application or Enterprise Collaborative Platforms (ECPs). In the same format as my last blog, I will cover this subject as follows:

A) What is an ECP or intra-social application
B) What are the benefits from using an ECP
C) What are the hottest tools/applications in the marketplace
D) How do you implement an ECP capability 

A) What is an Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP) or Intra-Social Application?

An ECP is a social media application much like Facebook, but exists entirely behind the firewall and is designed to increase intra-corporate collaboration, decrease time to market, and enhance overall corporate productivity. In direct response to this fear of implementing a full bi-directional (conversational) social media program that might trigger a negative market reaction or a warning/fine from regulators (Life Sciences and Financial Services organizations), companies are investing heavily into this new intra-social application since it sits entirely behind the firewall and is virtually risk-free from a market faux-pas or fear of regulatory consequences (particularly true for Financial Service & Life Sciences Companies).  The following illustrates the key features and capabilities of a best-of-breed ECP or intra-social solution/platform:

Intra-Social Enterprise Collaboration Platform Key Features:
•  Social Networking at the Department Level (Intra-Social Networking)
•  Internal & Secure Social Communications System – Behind the Firewall
•  Intra-Social productivity enhancement environment including :
•  Internal Chat
•  Internal Meeting Coordination & Management
•  Internal video conferencing
•  Internal document management
•  Internal blogging, wikis, team profile (expertise) profiling and locating

Capabilities include:
•  Out-of-the-box social networking capabilities
•  Pre-integrated enterprise communications
•  Business Systems Integration
•  Content Management System Integration
•  Enterprise-grade security and policy management

B. What are the benefits – Why are companies and government agencies adopting social Intelligence capabilities?

The following list represents just a few of the benefits of implementing an ECP or intra-social application:

1) Optimized Team Building – Environment increases team visibility, sharing and collective insights, and collaborative/virtual project development

2) Increased Knowledge Sharing – Enables collaborative knowledge development and sharing near real-time

3) Integrates Communications and Business Processes – Integrates and accelerates the use of chat, video sharing, teleconferencing, blogging, video conferencing, etc.

4) Accelerated Team Performance – Facilitates real-time and interactive participation via the right team expertise

5) Fully Engages Teams and Departments – Encourages team interaction and inter-departmental cooperation on programs and projects

6) Increased Control over Intellectual and Digital Assets – Single/integrated environment for asset management

7) Accelerated Return on Existing Application Investments – Integrates and accelerates the value of existing IT investments by seamlessly integrating enterprise content management, unified communications and business management applications

’8) ECPs allow companies to ‘cut their teeth’ on developing a social media capability without the risk of mistakes that would trigger a market or regulatory backlash. This social media indoctrination includes prototyping the following social media components:
1) Organizational Design
2) Policy and Standards
3) Process design & execution
4) Performance metrics & KPIs
5) Application standards
6) Support model and associated support structures

9) ECPs, when architected properly, can easily integrate with an external and fully bi-directional social media program

10) Companies who integrate and optimize ECPs with traditional market communications channels such as call center, web, mobile, e-mail, etc can benefit from a dramatic increase in the overall customer and stakeholder experience.

11) ECPs can dramatically increase the appetite for increased intra-organizational change and the appetite for innovation and entrepreneurialism. Complimentary to this is the need to support the implementation of an ECP with a heavy dose of change management as this implementation represents a new way of conducting business

12) The overall goal of the increased internal collaboration and productivity derived from the ECP is to decrease the time to market with products and services that have increased market relevance.

C) What are the hottest tools/applications on the ECP or Intra-Social Application market?

Almost all ECPs are relatively new to the marketplace and few software vendors have deployed to more than a several Fortune-500 level companies. 

Leading ECP Software Vendor & Tools:

* Cisco Systems – Quad. Cisco was well positioned for the intra-social market in that they had many of the existing components that are essential for a world-class ECP. Cisco already had many very capable collaboration applications such as the following:
a) Video teleconferencing and team conferencing
b) Instant chat features via their ‘Click-to-chat’ functionality
c) Instant meeting management via their ’click to meet’ functionality
d) Group management and profiling.

The Quad platform allowed them to effectively integrate these pre-existing capabilities with some additional ‘Facebook like’ features such as the following:
a) Community development and management,
b) Blogging and Wiki collaboration,
c) Team member or team activity broadcasting and management,
d) Team expertise profiling, etc. 

The integration of all of these components as well as the integration capabilities with existing corporate applications like document management, CRM system integration, social profiling for customer service and many other features brings Cisco to the forefront of ECP platform vendors and is well positioned to remain a leader in this space

* IBM – IBM Lotus Connections.  IBM was an early entrant into enterprise social tools, and this has enabled the IBM Lotus offering to remain in a leadership position.  IBM Lotus connections has many of the same features/functions as Cisco Quad such as Communities, file sharing, Wikis, team profiling, blogs, team activity tracking, home page activity and preference management, etc.  In addition to these features, the IBM offering has a Social Analytics function that facilitates the user on profiling those who might be good connections both on an individual level and community level. The IBM offering also provides mobile access to access the technology from a mobile device and also provides chat forums to share insights, ideas and concerns.

* Jive with Microsoft SharePoint & SharePoint Connector: Jive in conjunction with Microsoft SharePoint is a very powerful collaboration platform.  Jive is used as the hub for socializing and sharing content broadly across the enterprise. SharePoint can be used in conjunction with Jive with the SharePoint connector by integrating SharePoint with Jive, using SharePoint as the workflow and document storage system (what is was designed to be best at). Together, these two applications drive awareness of enterprise activities by socializing content and team activities, wherever it originates, to inform better business decisions.

* SalesForce.com – Chatter. Following on their success with their Sales application, Salesforce.com has developed a very robust intra-social ECP application called Chatter which allows all people within the company to interact and collaborate on projects. Many times the Sales Force of a company will be the first to adopt this technology due to the fact that the sales force is already using the sales application, hence is a good pilot group to pilot the intra-social application.  Similar to Cisco’s Chatter application, the features and functions are designed to maximize team interaction and collaboration so that teams can operate more efficiently by eliminating the need for many manual cycles to coordinate and conduct meetings, collaborate on documents and projects, and develop deep insights based on team specialization and expertise.

* Oracle  Beehive. Oracle Beehive is also a strong contender due to the size of the company, its existing installed base a relatively strong product line. Similar to many of the software vendors above, The Oracle Beehive product provides an integrated set of modular collaboration services including email, calendar, team workspaces, instant messaging, and conferencing.

Challenger ECP Software Vendor & Tools:

The companies below are considered challengers due to their smaller company size, relatively new entrance to the market place and/or their set of smaller customers that have their products currently installed.

* Atlassian Confluence: Atlassian’s confluence product is mostly seen as a productivity wiki tool, geared toward technology departments. However, the product is highly extensible with integrations into Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Connections.  The product is also most geared toward content sharing, discovery, creation, etc.

* Novell – VibeCloud.  The company’s acquisition of SiteScape brought the company beyond email and calendaring and more into the collaboration space. Novell has many of the futures as some of the leaders above such as document management, social messaging, conversation tracking, group & community management, etc.

* PBworks – PB Works appears to be geared to mid-sized companies in providing collaboration Software for Smaller Advertising Agencies (PB Works Agency Edition), Legal Firm, Consulting, Medical, Associations.

* Socialtext: Socialtext was best known for bringing Twitter-like status functionality to the enterprise called “signals”.  Social text has many of the same features as the leaders above, but is a smaller sized company than an IBM or Cisco.  Socialtext also provides integration with Lotus Connections and Microsoft SharePoint.

* Traction Software: Traction software is highly focused on managing projects in that their own tagline is “Social Software meets Project Management” . Forrester lauds Traction for bringing blogs and wikis to the enterprise

D) How do you implement an ECP capability – what are the steps and considerations on implementing this capability within your organization and company

Social Media Implementation & Program success requires comprehensive visioning; with stepwise implementation, guided by a roadmap and integrated project plan.  I have developed this capability for several Fortune 500 companies and the capability can be enabled via three (3) Major steps as follows (Summarized):

1) Step #1: Develop a ECP and Intra-Strategy including the following:
a) ECP  Strategy/Vision, Objectives, Business Drivers, Critical Success Factors, Community/ Forum Listening Strategy, Key Metrics & Performance Plan, Organizational Plan, Change Management Plan, Communications & Risk Management Plan, monitoring policies, governance plan
b) Put together an implementation roadmap and a centralized PMO to manage the implementation of the roadmap/ECP vision
c) Form your intra-social strategy & vision with key stakeholders

2) Step #2: Social Media Technology Platform Evaluation & Selection
a) Identify potential ECP platform & community management vendors
b) Develop Needed ECP Requirements and Capabilities
c) Perform Technology Platform Vendor Selection
d) Onboard Vendor
e) Build a techno-functional architecture to support the roadmap

3) Step #3: Develop Social Media Program Pilots & Deployment Plan
   a) Develop Pilot Project & Deployment Plan
   b) Develop ECP management processes that provide organizational confidence and exercise process excellence transparency to solidify user/stakeholder buy-in and acceptance.
   c) Develop Technology Pilots
   d) Develop  Program Pilots
   e) Invest in Organizational change management to instill solid user/stakeholder adoption
   f) Develop Organization & Process Pilots
   g) Deploy Pilots and Programs including
      1.  Center of Excellence Deployment
      2.  Multi-Channel Integration
      3.  Policies/Processes
      4.  Roles, Rules, Responsibilities
      5.  Change Management, Change Management, Change Management

That last bullet point is not a typo as I would honestly say that the #1 main key to success in implementing this type of software is an extremely capable change management program. This type of software requires a behavior change on the part of your employees and management and it won’t come easily.   I can say this with confidence – If you are not considering a heavy dose of change management as part of this implementation, your implementation is most likely going to fail!

In summary, ECPs and intra-social applications are gaining a great deal of Momentum.  Many Fortune 500 companies are either planning to implement this capability or already have.  Is your organization planning on implementing this potentially game-changing capability? If so, give me a call, I call help you achieve world-class programs that enable you to surpass your competition and bring your organization or agency to the next level of market and intra-social collaboration capability.

Leveraging Social Listening Programs To Develop Market & Competitive Intelligence to Leapfrog Your Competition

Leveraging Social Media Capabilities and Applications to Develop Competitive Advantage – Three Current Social Media Mega-Trends

 

Part One – Leveraging Social Insights & Intelligence to formulate better decisions to gain market, competitive, political and social advantage

In keeping a very close eye on the trends on the rise in the marketplace on how companies and government agencies are leveraging new social media capabilities and technologies, there are several on my radar screen that are coming up over and over again and again.  These trends are evidenced by the numerous requests I am receiving in these topic areas in the form of responses to proposals and information, requests for ‘lunch and learns’, requests to speak on the topic, etc.

Some of the hottest trends in the social media space from a corporate or governmental agency perspective are as follows:

1) Leveraging of Social Media and ‘Social Intelligence’ as a component to developing overall competitive and Market Intelligence Insights & Capabilities
2) The use of Intra-Social Enterprise Collaborative Platforms (ECPs) to enhance organizational productivity, internal collaboration and decrease overall go-to-market cycle time
3) The use of Intra-Corporate Social Crowd Sourcing ‘Innovation Acceleration’ Applications & Capabilities

Over the course of the next three blog entries, I will cover each of these social media mega-trend areas in the following format:
A. What is it – Description of the functionality this capability enables
B. What are the benefits – Why are companies and government agencies adopting and using this capability and how are they benefitting from its use
C. The hottest tools/applications in the market for this capability – who is leading, lagging, emerging
D. How do you implement it – what are the steps and considerations on implementing this capability within your organization and company

There are several instances where the use of social media insights could have helped organizations be better prepared for market shifts, product issues & defects, crisis management, and better able to spot trends regarding regulation, key opinion leaders, competitors, and go-to-market issues (sales, marketing, customer service, warranty claims, etc.). In the rest of this blog I will cover the first topic/trend of “Leveraging of Social Media and ‘Social Intelligence’ as a component to developing overall competitive and Market Intelligence Insights & Capabilities”:

A. BP Gulf Oil Spill – Admiral Thad Allen, Admiral from the Coast Guard who managed the gulf oil spill cleanup, indicated that if he had better insights into the issues and ‘mood’ of people through social media listening techniques, he would be much better prepared with action plans to respond to concerns, issues, inquiries, etc.

B. Toyota Stuck Accelerator Recall – If Toyota was monitoring the chat and commentary via many social media sites, it is very likely that they would have been able to spot potential automobile defect issues starting to trend and handle them earlier vs. blowing up in the media.

C. Egypt Social Unrest – Many of our intelligence agencies were caught off guard at the speed and magnitude of the protests that eventually topped the Mubarak regime. A few experts say that the information that this was going to occur was right in front of them in the form of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. If they had a social intelligence platform and methodology to interpret the information, it is also likely that this would not have been such a surprise to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

D. Drug Issues & Recalls – Had Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Companies had a social or market intelligence solution in place, many say that companies would have been able to spot very early the issues with Vioxx, Tylenol, etc. Many people were commenting about the problems with these drugs via social media, but many companies were not listening, hence unable to respond until the issue hit crisis mode.

A. What is Social & Market Intelligence – Social Intelligence is the collection, aggregation, assimilation and dissemination of information from social media forums, blogs, wikis, websites in order to spot key trends around topics of interest such as the following:
1. Key opinion leader sentiment,
2. Regulatory issues, news, public sentiment trends,
3. Consumer feedback on your products and services,
4. Consumer concerns with product safety or availability,
5. Public sentiment about current issues, political leaders, public policy, etc.
6. Public sentiment about how a crisis is being (mis)handled
7. Information on your company or brand activity such as consumer feedback, market issues, market facing issues or trends, new products/services, news, etc.
8. Information on competitor activity such as consumer feedback, market issues, market facing issues or trends, new products/services, news, etc.

This function is usually developed into a single Market or Competitive Intelligence portal as a one stop shop to all market insights. The information will also bring together functions such as text mining, comingling of structured and unstructured data and text, and trend analysis and alerting and will also integrate with Business Process Management (BPM) functions in order to make the insights collected – actionable.

B. What are the benefits – Why are companies and government agencies adopting social Intelligence capabilities?
There are many benefits to adopting this social and/or market intelligence capability as follows:

a) Ability to capitalize on competitor trending market issues or weaknesses
b) Ability to spot competitor trends or new market initiatives before they erode you market share
c) Ability to accurately spot Key Opinion Leader (KOL) issues, trends, or preferences in order to  respond with products/services/policies that are in-line   with these stated needs/preferences
d) Ability to spot consumer sentiment trends that will impact or change regulation that might impact your company or organization
e) Ability to gauge unmet market demand or needs via consumer sentiment
f) Ability to gauge trends in the social-political climate and mood of the country in order to accurately predict needed public policy changes
g) Ability to spot and respond to potential product defect trending issues early before they get to crisis mode and erode your brand image
h) Ability to have an integrated  ‘one stop shop’ repository for all market relevant information – news, blogs, web feeds, RSS feeds, structured data, unstructured data, text feeds, etc. 
i) Ability to accurately gauge social moods and perceptions during the time of crisis in order to develop responsive programs and messaging in order to demonstrate proactiveness and responsiveness
j) Ability to filter out social noise and one-off commentary vs. significant trends and market shifts

The trick in realizing these benefits is twofold. One, you must develop robust trending functionality in order to filter out the noise associated with a few comments being said about a certain topic in order to be focused on rapidly building or significant trends vs. sentiment blips.  The second is integrating the social insights with Business Process Management (BPM), so that actionable projects or programs are put in place once significant and impactful trends are spotted. Chart 1 Illustrates how the social media listening lifecycle should be structured in order to develop a robust social and market intelligence capability.

CHART 1

  

 

C. The hottest tools/applications in the market for this capability

Some of the hottest platforms in the social listening space are as follows:
Leading Social Listening Tools:
1) Attensity – Attensity Analytics Suite. Social Monitoring and Analytics
2) Converseon – Conversation Monitor, Conversation Miner. Converseon also performs outbound social conversation management via their Conversation Manager
3) Jive – Social Media Engagement Platform – Inbound Monitoring and Outbound Community & Conversation Management
4) Lithium – Social Media Monitoring Console (formerly Scout Labs). Lithium is also a leading conversation management platform.
5) Nielsen  – BuzzMetrics. Nielsen also performs outbound social conversation management via BuzzMetrics.
6) Radian6 – Radian6 Listening Dashboard. Radian6 also performs outbound social conversation management via the Radian6 Engagement Console. 
 

Next Tier (alphabetically):
1) Alterian – SM2
2) Collective Intellect – Social CRM Insights
3) Cymfony – Cymfony Maestro Platform
4) Dow Jones – Dow Jones Insight
5) Evolve 24 – The Mirror
6) Visible Technologies – TruCast Suite

In addition to the social listening companies and platforms above, many new firms are entering this space at an incredible pace. I recently performed a vendor selection for one of my clients with many of the above tools and the selection process was extensive.  If anybody needs additional insights into these vendor or platform capabilities, please feel free to contact me for assistance.

D. How do you implement it – what are the steps and considerations on implementing this capability within your organization and company

I have developed this capability for several Fortune 500 companies and the capability can be enabled via three (3) Major steps as follows (Summarized):

A) Step #1: Develop a Social Media Monitoring and Strategy including the following:

1) Social Intelligence Strategy/Vision, Objectives, Business Drivers, Critical Success Factors, Community/ Forum Listening Strategy, Key Metrics & Performance Plan, Organizational Plan, Change Management Plan, Communications & Risk Management Plan, monitoring policies, governance plan

B) Step #2: Social Media Technology Platform Evaluation & Selection
     1) Identify potential social media platform & community management vendors
     2) Develop Needed Listening Requirements and Capabilities
     3) Perform Technology Platform Vendor Selection
     4) Onboard Vendor

C) Step #3: Develop Social Media Program Pilots & Deployment Plan
     1) Develop Pilot Project & Deployment Plan
     2) Develop Technology Pilots
     3) Develop  Program Pilots
     4) Develop Organization & Process Pilots
     5) Deploy Pilots and Programs including
           a.  Center of Excellence Deployment
           b.  Multi-Channel Integration
           c.  Policies/Processes
           d.  Roles, Rules, Responsibilities
           e.  Change Management

In summary, Social Intelligence, Social Monitoring, Competitive Intelligence and Market Intelligence are gaining a great deal of Momentum.  Many Fortune 500 companies are either planning to implement this capability or already have.  The practice has gained so much momentum there are even associations and groups being formed like the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) group (http://scip.org/index.cfm ) in order for members to collaborate and share best practices. Is your organization planning on implementing this potentially game-changing capability? If so, give me a call, I call help you achieve world-class programs that enable you to surpass your competition and bring your organization or agency to the next level of market and social intelligence.

Governance & Organizational Design for World-Class Social Media & Customer Management Programs

Governance & Organizational Design for World-Class Social Media & Customer Management Programs

By Steven M. Jeffes

 
1) Background – Lack of Effective Governance can Wreak Havoc on Social Media & Customer Management Programs

 

In my previous blog entry titled “Social Media Pitfalls and Mistakes – the Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media Programs”, I covered the major mistakes companies make when developing and managing enterprise level Social Media programs.  One of the points that I focused on was not developing an effective governance model and organization in order to oversee and manage the strategic direction and overall success of a social media program.

  

The lack of an effective social media governing organization is the most widely encountered issues by companies and can, by far, be the most damaging to the activities of social media & customer management program. An effective governance model is absolutely critical and will directly influence the overall quality of a social media and customer management program.  The following lists the potential impact of not having an effective governance model for your social media and customer management programs:
1) Inconsistent and overlapping customer communications
2) Infighting amongst departments and functions leading to highly inefficient operations
3) Inefficiencies and cost escalation due to inter-departmental duplication of effort
4) Programs that are consider unfair, confusing, inconsistent and ineffective by stakeholder and customer groups
5) Inability to improve or scale the program due the lack of focus on cross-organizational continuous improvement

  

The bottom line, if you can’t develop an effective governance model, you are not likely to have a very good social media & customer management program. The remainder of this blog post will highlight the critical considerations in developing a highly effective social media and customer management (CRM)

governance model.

 

       The following chart (Chart 1) from my firm’s SMARTE methodology depicts two different governance models for social media and customer management. On the left, governance of social media and customer management is performed with brand silos, each having their own unique version of dealing with their stakeholders and customers. While each program is effective in each silo and meeting the needs of the specific brand, there are many issues created from a company and stakeholder management perspective. There also many missed opportunities in terms of revenue optimization and cost containment.

Chart 1

In addition, the left side governance model in silos is prone to the following:
1) Duplication of effort between brands – higher costs
2) Lost customer management opportunities (i.e. cross/up-sell) – lost revenue
3) Lack of focus on cross-company efficiency and continuous improvement – higher costs
4) Perception by customers that the social media and customer management programs are not very effective – lost revenue, wasted capital
5) Frustration by employees of continually having to reinvent the wheel in terms of programs and customer interactions – higher costs

As seen below in Chart 2, the left side governance model in silos is much more likely to generate frustration and contempt from the customer’s perspective vs. the holistic governance model on the right. Refer to the following chart for a sample of the different types of customer comments each of these governance models is likely to generate. Obviously, the left side of the chart generates many more positive stakeholder and customer comments and it much more likely to result in higher customer loyalty, share of wallet, customer cross/up-sell opportunities and will generally result in lower costs and higher revenue.

Chart 2

Based on the above outcomes on both sides of the chart, the following rules apply to social media and customer management (CRM) governance:

 

Programs In Silos Stifle Effective Delivery (PISSED) – 

      These silo’s programs tend to create PISSED   
      stakeholders & customers due to perceived inconsistent,

      inefficient and ineffective program delivery

 

Programs Leveraged Enterprise-Wide Aid Synergistic & Effective Delivery (PLEASED) –

      Remember,  these non-silo’d programs tend to create 

      PLEASED stakeholders & customers due to perceived

      consistent, efficient and effective program delivery.

   

2) Impacts from Ineffective Social Media & Customer Management Program Governance

Based on my firm’s SMARTE methodology (SMARTE stands for “Social Media Adaptive/Responsive/Transcendent Enterprise”) and direct client experience, I have found that in order for Social Media and CRM programs to be highly effective, a company must develop and maintain an organization design and corresponding governance structure that maximizes the ability of the company to build and leverage enterprise-wide synergy. This governing structure must be built to avoid developing programs that exist in brand or channel specific silos such whereby everyone is developing their own flavor of social media and customer management that appears to the outside world to be inconsistent, unfair, non-relevant, unappealing or just another one-off initiative.
The following are the top 5 Impacts of poor organizational design and governance for social media and customer management programs from both an internal and external perspective:

Internal Impacts of Poor Organizational Design & Governance:
1. Many individual departments are attempting to develop their own flavor of Social media without any regard to consistency
2. Infighting exists between functions & departments on which direction the SM program should take
3. The department(s) that led the introduction of the social media program thinks they own the social media program and is attempting to control the program by dictating program rules, standards, policies, etc.
4. Lessons learned and cross-brand insights are not being cultivated and leveraged for the benefit of the entire company vs. individual brands
5. Social Media & customer initiatives seem ad-hoc and are really not driven by solid metrics, business cases, enterprise-wide strategic business plans, etc.

External Impacts of Poor Organizational Design & Governance:

 1. Stakeholders & customers receive contradictory messages from organizational silos (i.e. different brands, different messages – brand A special vs. brand B special discount vs. valuable customer total discount – all brands)
2. Stakeholders & customers are treated inconsistently based on the department they are interacting with or channel they are interacting with (Facebook vs. Twitter, on-line vs. traditional off-line channels)
3. Stakeholders & customers find your company’s content and messages ad-hoc (vs. themed) in terms of relevancy, timing, venues by which messages are communicated, etc.
4. Stakeholders and customers are not recognized cross-functionally, but rather just in brand silos which tends to create frustration (i.e. “I just told ‘brand A’ my preferences, why do I have to repeat this all over again for brand B!?”)
5. Stakeholders and customers are not treated differently based on their specifics needs and enterprise-wide profile (e.g. valuable customers that buy both brands A and B do not receive differentiated ‘valuable customer’ treatment across the company)

 

3) Best Practice Social Media & Customer Management Governance Design Principles:

In order to avoid a sub-optimized governance model and one that is in silos, some best practice design principles must be followed when developing and/or optimizing a social media or customer management program. The following chart (Chart 3) depicts a very small sample of the governance design principles put forth in my firm’s SMARTE social media methodology:

Chart 3

These governing principles are accompanied by an entire set of practices and methods for developing a governance model and corresponding governing organization. These were developed following over 50 successful consulting engagements on Fortune 500 clients involving the development and/or improvement of social media and customer management programs.

 

4) Sample Governance Organizational Structure:
A very typical governing organization for social media and customer management is shown in the following chart (Chart 4):

Chart 4

The key message in this chart is as follows:
1)  Policy and strategy for social media and customer management program must be holistic, based on cross-functional leadership direction that is applied and leveraged enterprise-wide
2) Program planning and tactics must be developed by mid-managers who have direct expertise and responsibility for stakeholder and customer communications & touch-points.
3) Operations and Interactions must be carried out by professionals who are well versed in customer management, social media interactions (i.e. social media conversation managers – topic to be covered in a future blog post), and who are incentivized to optimize the customer experience to the point of best in class stakeholder and customer excellence.

5) Conclusion & Share Your Stories:

The bottom line here is that, without a strong and well thought-out governance model for customer management and social media, you will likely end up with a chaotic and ineffective program.  Trust me I know as I am hired by many companies to help re-engineer the situation after they have gone awry. Anybody wanting to hear more about social media governance, please feel free to give me a call. 

Anybody else run into governance issues that they’d like to share?

The Social Media Balanced Scorecard: Balanced External and Internal Social Media Metrics – Critical Components of a World-Class Social Media Program

by Steven Jeffes

In my previous blog entry titled “Social Media Pitfalls and Mistakes – the Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media Programs”, I covered the major mistakes companies make when developing and managing enterprise level Social Media programs.  One of the points that I focused on was not utilizing the correct key performance indicators (KPIs) in measuring the success of a social media program. This blog post will highlight the critical components in developing a highly effective social media measurement system and how to craft an effective social media balanced (measurement) scorecard.

Based on my firm’s SMARTE methodology (SMARTE stands for “Social Media Adaptive/Responsive/Transcendent Enterprise”) and direct client experience, I have found that, in order for a large-scale social media program to be successful, a balance must be struck between the internal success metrics and the external success metrics.  By simultaneously establishing and tracking metrics in the following areas, a program can be built on the balanced scorecard concept so that the most effective social media program is delivered externally via the optimal internal delivery model:

External Balanced Scorecard Metrics – How the program is perceived by external stakeholders and participants to be fair, engaging, referable, worth following, responsive, etc.

Internal Balanced Scorecard Metrics: How the program is perceived by internal company stakeholders to be efficient, effective, systemic, consistent, compliant, repeatable, etc.

If we place the external scorecard metrics in the numerator of the Equation and the internal scorecard metrics in the denominator the result is the Social Media Program Balanced Scorecard.

Before we demonstrate an example how this balanced scorecard can be used, let’s take a look at some of the specific measures for both the external success metrics (balanced scorecard numerator) as well as the internal success metrics (balanced scorecard denominator) for this balanced social media measurement scorecard.

Top 10 Market & Stakeholder Focused/External Social Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
1. Forum Engagement Score: Rating by stakeholders in each forum on how creative the program is in terms of engaging and interacting with the overall community
2. Forum Referral Score: How often program followers and stakeholders refer other people to follow the forum of interest
3. Forum Audience Score (Relative to Other Community Audiences): Rating by forum participants on how fair the program is in terms of consistent responses
4. Forum Responsiveness/Quality Metric: Rating by stakeholders on how responsive the social media program is to their needs and sentiment
5. Content Quality Score: Rating by stakeholders on how engaging the content is perceived
6. Content Relevancy Score:  Rating on how relevant the content and engagement is to forum participant’s needs and preferences
7. Content Timeliness Score: Rating by forum participants on how timely the content and engagement is to forum participants
8. Content Referral Score: Rating by forum participants on how likely they are to refer people to the company forums, initiatives, contests, etc.
9. Brand Quality Score: Rating by stakeholders on how brand perceptions are increasing/decreasing based on their social media interactions
10. Overall Program Quality/Appeal Score: How program participants perceive the quality and appeal of this program relative to all other social media programs they’ve been exposed to and/or interacted with

The top five benefits of measuring these external social media success metrics are as follows:
1)  Allows program participants to feel empowered to provide input into the programs’ design
2)  Enables companies to govern program delivery based on external/objective measures
3)  Enables development of best-in-class social media programs as rated by their constituencies
4)  Facilitates the development of a dynamic, exciting, engaging program
5)  Enables maximized creativity for program interaction and delivery

Top 10 Company Efficiency & Effectiveness Focused/Internal Social Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
1. Social Media Process Efficiency: Cycle time by which major program components (contests, new offerings, special topics, new forums, etc) are developed, deployed and adapted. This would include meeting critical process excellence Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for sign-off and completion of program materials as part of a social media process excellence model
2. Social Media Engagement Timeliness Score: Cycle time to address stakeholder concerns, comments, sentiment, needs, preferences, etc.
3. Social Media Sentiment Analytic Score: Effectiveness in locating and performing analytics on sentiment trends, issues, critical response items (i.e. product defect early warnings)
4. Social Media Forum Coverage Score: Coverage metrics on how comprehensively analytic platforms are sourcing data from social media forums and how well the company is responding to forum sentiment (both positive and negative) from all applicable forums
5. Social Media Internal Engagement Score: Metrics on how well  internal employees feel engaged with and empowered to act as an effective component in the social media program delivery
6. Brand and Forum Consistency Score: Rating by brand management on how well all of the social media participants are maintaining brand and forum consistency as to engage stakeholders and participants in a highly qualitative and consistent manner
7. Social Converter Score - Metrics on how well the company converts social engagers, social brand detractors and ‘brand interested’ into traditional prospects, brand advocates and brand customers respectively?
8. Social Media Program Value Score: Based on the Social Converter Score as a baseline, what is the current and cumulative value of the social media program and how has it delivered tangible value from a brand perception/value, prospect conversion, or customer (cross-sell, up-sell, higher share of wallet, etc) perspective.
9. Social Media  Service Line Contribution Score: From a service line perspective (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Product Management, etc), how much has the social media program contributed in terms of sales lead increases, increased marketing reach and customer conversions,  new product ideas (i.e. via Crowd Sourcing), customer service improvement suggestions or actionable feedback, etc.  –Refer to service line specific metrics** below.
10. Overall Program Quality/Appeal Score: How well is the social media program perceived by internal stakeholders and constituencies relative to all other social media program these departments/employees have been exposed to and/or interacted with

The top five benefits of measuring these internal social media success metrics are as follows:
1)  Allows companies to deliver cost-effective social media programs
2)  Enables companies to deliver consistent, repeatable program content
3)  Enables companies to convert social media interactions into prospects, customers and sales for bottom line results
4)  Enables companies to rate the comprehensiveness of their social media program coverage
5)  Enables company employees to feel excited about the program and to be engaged for brand, company and constituency benefit

Now back to the Social Media Program Balanced Scorecard. If we were to weight each of the ten external and internal measures at 10% (or 10 points each) , we would have 100 maximum score for external measures and a 100 maximum score for internal measures.  Here are some example scores and their potential meaning as an example:

External Social Media Score – 100
Internal Social Media Score  – 50 
   or a Balanced Scorecard result of 2 (100/50).
This typically means that stakeholders consider the company’s program to be great, but the company is struggling internally to deliver the program
  
External Social Media Score – 40
Internal Social Media Score  – 100 
   or a Balanced Scorecard result of .4 (40/80).
This typically means that stakeholders consider the company’s program to be weak, but the company is effective and efficient in its delivery

The bottom line here is the best (balanced) score is when the program has a 1 to 1 ratio or a score of 100 for both external and internal metrics. This mirror effect indicates a well-balanced social media program that is considered world-class by the external program participants, yet is (internally) efficiently and effectively delivered by the company. Obtaining a Social Media Program Balanced Scorecard score of 100, while somewhat demanding, can have a dramatic impact on the ability of your company to increase sales and market share.
  
The following is a list of other best practices to follow on developing a highly effective social media measurement capability:
1. Monitor success via social media dashboards – Track social media metrics via organizational dashboards for various company levels and functions to ensure everyone has a view into the success of the program
2. Institutionalize the metrics – Ensure that achievement of the metrics identified for social media are tied to departmental and individual performance measures
3. Establish preliminary metric benchmarks – Establish early performance success benchmarks to gauge the success of the program from day one
4. Evolve metrics via continuous improvement – Evolve the metrics each year as to improve year-over-year performance in each metric category.
5. Operationalize the business case – Ensure that a business case is built and maintained for the social media program and ensure corporate stakeholders take ownership for achievement of the projected benefits

** Function Specific Metrics:  Here is a small sample of the service line metrics I establish for my clients in terms of measuring the impact social media has on individual company functions:

1) Sales (sample):
• Social Media Lead Generation Score: Number and value of Sales Leads generated via social media
• Social Media Event Sales Score: Number of company event attendees that are attending the event as a direct result of social media marketing activities
• Social Media Sales Closure Score:  The number of sales closed as a direct result of a social media lead
• Social Media Sales Referral Score:  The number of sales generated as a direct result of a referral from an existing social media participant

2) Marketing (sample):
• Social Media Ad Effectiveness Score: Additional prospects or customers sourced as a direct result of social media advertising
• Social Media Campaign Management Lift: Additional prospects or customers sourced as a direct result of social media campaigns (i.e. direct marketing)
•  Social Media Community Lift: Number of community members acquired over a period of time into company community forums, communities, sites, etc.

3) Customer Service (sample):
• Customer Service Delivery Efficiency Score:  Rating on how effectively customer service is administered via social media venues and forums (internal/external)
• Brand Issue / Concern Resolution Satisfaction & Cycle Time Score: Rating on how responsive customer service is administered on brand specific issues or concerns via social media venues and forums (internally & externally measured)
• Brand Issues / Defect Analytic Score: Rating on how well customer service can develop trend analysis in order to correlate a number of customer service complaints to specific brand and/or product defects and serious issues (manufacturing issues, chemical contamination, safety issues, assembly issues, etc.).  (internally measured)

4) Brands/Products (sample):
• Product Insight & Engagement Score:  Score on the engagement with social media communities to source product ideas, implement feedback and suggestions for improvement and  how well this feedback is incorporated back into the product life-cycle.
• Brand Positive Perception Score (BPPS):  From a brand perspective, how well is each brand regarded from a social media perspective (externally measured)

Questions for Readers of this Blog:
1) What are some of the critical social media measures, metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you use to gauge the success of your company’s social media program?
2) How do you judge a great social media program?
3) What types of impressions do you have (i.e. what are the words come to your mind) of a company that delivers a great social media program?
4) What are some other things companies can do to enhance the measurement of their social media program(s)?

Social Media Pitfalls and Mistakes – the Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media Programs

Social Media Pitfalls and Mistakes – the Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media Programs

By Steven Jeffes

How Fortune 500 Companies Make Critical Social Media Mistakes and How These Can be Avoided

The following is a synopsis of the seven deadly Social Media Sins that Fortune 500 companies commit when developing & managing social media programs and are detailed in my post below:

1)      Organization & Governance – Departmental infighting and inconsistencies cause social media disconnects and customer confusion

2)      Program Measurement: Companies are lulled into a false sense of security by believing they have a great social media program

3)      Policy & Standards:  Companies do more harm than good by being erratic & unpredictable to their customers

4)      Program Process:  Successful delivery of a social media program is not repeatable due to the lack of a process excellence model

5)      Legal & Regulatory Compliance: Social Media Program exposes the company to huge compliance and customer management issues

6)      Human Resource Management (HRM): Human resources misses the opportunity to empower and excite the workforce about social media

7)      Financial Performance: Success of social media is judge via subjective vs. objective and financial performance measures

Remember the dot com days in the 1980’s and early 1990’s when companies furiously scrambled to add an e-channel or internet communications to their list of capabilities and rarely gave a second thought on how to efficiently integrate these capabilities with existing off-line & traditional channels? Remember when ‘just adding something’ and demonstrating any e-channel capability to the public was critical and ‘online’ departments, organizations and functions were added as separate silos within the overall organization? Also remember the effort that went into trying to undo some of the inefficiencies caused by these non-integrated and dichotomous processes, procedures and operations?

Any guess to what is happening today from a Social Media standpoint for many companies? In short, Dejavu is occurring in regard to Social Media and many companies are ignoring the hard lessons that should have been learned during the 80’s. Indeed, many companies are proceeding down the same path without fully considering the correct methodology to use and unfortunately will end up designing programs with the same discontinuities and pitfalls as they did when developing an internet capability.

The following chart is a quick comparison of the companies in the dot com 80’s and the parallel to the development of social media capabilities of today:

Dot Com 1980’s Internet Capability Development	Social Media Capability Development Current Comparison
Adding Capabilities just to show up	Yes
Build now/fast, determine how to integrate later	Yes
Build functions in silos or with just a few departments	Yes
Ad-hoc inter-organizational program governance	Yes
Processes and organization not totally optimized	Yes
Standards and Policy Developed on the fly	Yes
Financial Business Case Not Fully Developed	Yes

As part one of a series of blog posts, the following post will provide you with an overview of the seven areas where I have seen my Fortune 500 clients make major mistakes when attempting to develop top-notch social media programs. Following this post, I will address how a best-in-class social media program development methodology I have developed called SMARTE – The Social Media Adaptive/Responsive/Transcendent Enterprise enables companies to avoid many of these pitfalls and mistakes, but rather facilitates the development of a world-class social media program that leads to increased market share, higher brand values and increased customer loyalty.

The seven deadly Social Media Sins – Pitfalls and Mistakes Companies Make in Developing a World-Class Social Media Program:

1)    Social Media Organization & Governance:

One of the largest of the seven deadly social media sins is not determining the optimal way to govern a social media program, including determining who sets social media policy, develops social media standards, develops and/or approves processes, optimizes or aligns the organization, etc. Efficient and optimized social media programs are governed by governing organizations that include a great deal of cross-organizational representation and include legal, finance, marketing, customer service, brand management, human resources, etc.  In this fashion, decisions are made holistically and with insight into all organizational considerations prior to proceeding. Many companies I’ve analyzed commence social media program development with one or a few departments considered and the resulting programs are generally ad-hoc, non-systemic, disjointed and often myopic to their own department’s needs.  Ideally they should be holistically focused on the needs of the entire enterprise.  Some of the specific sins committed for social media organization and governance are as follows:

• Social Media Programs are governed in silos vs. holistically, systemically, and cross-organizationally.
  • Issue Created: this creates many of the same problems as the issues that were create between the ‘on-line’ vs. ‘off-line’ organizations including discontinuities in customer communications, customer management inconsistencies, etc.
• Social media program is started with just one or a few departments.
  • Issue Created: When additional departments develop social media capabilities, many times, much re-work needs to be done to standardize the process across departments
• The Social Media Programs Organization is separated from the Customer Relationship Management Functions: Brand Management, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Shareholder management, etc.
  • Issue Created: Customer management is handled inconsistently across all customer facing departments and functions which leads to customer frustration, confusion and resentment.  
• Social Media customer intelligence is not integrated and managed as a strategic asset across all departments and organizations including Product Management, Branding, Campaign Management, Customer Experience, Sales.
  • Issue Created: Pockets of social media learnings and opportunities are not operationalized across all departments and functions, leading to many missed improvement opportunities.

2)    Social Media Program Measurement:

• Social media metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not balanced between both internally and externally focused measures
  • Issue Created: By measuring too heavily on internal measures, companies can be lured into a false sense of social media success by believing they are successful when customers do not reflect this sentiment.  Additionally, by focusing too heavily on external measures, companies can be ignoring key internal efficiencies in delivering the social media program, hence driving up the cost of the program unnecessarily.
• Social Media is treated as a ‘check-box’ and treated as a victory for just showing up vs. measuring sales, marketing, brand value gains
  • Issue Created: A feel good social media program is created and perpetuated where companies pat themselves on the back for just having a social media presence while potentially damaging customer relations (i.e. many programs that do more harm than good in terms of brand reputation). 
• Social Media performance dashboards are not available for CxO level management to gauge program performance against key measures like brand value, average public sentiment, brand buzz and excitement values, etc.
  • Issue Created: Key issues impacting shareholder and/or stakeholder value are not missed and are not managed to create a positive impact.

3)    Social Media Program Policy & Standards:

• Standards are not developed to consistently ascertain and respond to the ‘average customer sentiment’
  • Issue Created:  Each social media interaction is handled inconsistently; thus leading customers to perceive the program to be biased, unfair, and/or just poorly managed.
• Brand consistency is not considered when developing social media programs and customer interaction is highly inconsistent
  • Issue Created: Companies do not present ‘one face to the customer’ and appear inconsistent, disjointed between departments and company’s brand quality is perceived to be highly variable
• Standards and policy have not been created in terms of managing customer communication protocols: This includes frequency of responses, tone/manner of the responses, handling or rebutting negative brand or company comments, opt-ins/opt-outs, etc.
  •  
    • Issue Created: Companies do not present ‘one face to the customer’ and appear inconsistent, disjointed between departments and the company’s brand quality is perceived to be highly variable.

4)    Social Media Program Process:

• A best practice process and organizational framework has not been fully considered for the social media program
  • Issue Created:  A best practice social media program is not just about technology and applications, but must be equally supported by a robust organizational and process framework. Lacking this structure, the program continually languishes in mediocrity without a governing continuous improvement process framework to evolve the program to world-class status.
• Acknowledgement of customer brand input is not acknowledged and responded to which translates into a negative customer brand experience
• Brands feel compelled to respond to every negative comment posted about their brand, products and/or organization
• Utilizing traditional media tactics for bi-directional and conversational social media venues
  • Issue Created: Social Media interactions appear non-interactive, disingenuous, or canned, which in turn, leads to negative sentiment about the social media program being a corporate ivory tower programs that are perceived to not listen well or interact effectively. 
• Inability to synthesize and analyze intelligence from across multiple social media venues or not listening to all relevant communities and platforms creates an inability to develop a coherent brand action plan
  • Issue Created: Key social media input and ‘intelligence’ is overlooked, creating many missed opportunities to positively influence brand perceptions, customer loyalty and company product & service quality perceptions. 

5)    Social Media Legal & Regulatory Compliance:

• Regulatory compliance is or was not part of the overall social media program design such as the following sample regulatory rules that impact social media program design:
  • Financial Services: NASD 3010 and 3110, SEC Rule 17a-4, Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
  • Cross-Industry: Sarbanes Oxley Compliance.
  • Pharmaceutical: Fair Balance Act, Adverse Event Reporting, HIPAA Privacy Rule
• Developing Social Media programs that assume customer opt-in permission and channel preferences are the same for traditional media
  • Issues Created: Huge customer trust issues are created that negatively impact brand value and company perceptions. Regulatory compliance publicity or fines are also at risk if compliance is not fully considered when designing a world-class social media program.

6)    Social Media Program Human Resource (HR):

• HR does not tie social media program performance to individual key performance measures
• Human resources fails to facilitate a sense of excitement about social media and is treated like ‘just another program’
• Customer sentiment values are not tied to program and individual performance measures
• Company employees are not encouraged, trained and incentivized to become social media conversation managers, Tweeters, Bloggers, etc  in order to converse with and positively influence constituencies, customers and stakeholders.
  • Issues Created: Employees feel left out and uninspired by the social media program vs. being excited, engaged and empowered to participate/communicate in order to facilitate program success.  

7)    Social Media Program Financial Performance:

• Business case development for social media is not tied to financial  performance goals
• Social media optimization tests do not take into account financial performance
• Program are initiated with strong dose of intuition vs. realistic business cases vs. initiating each program based on ROI, payback periods, net present value discounting, etc.
  • Issues Created: Social Media is success is measured exclusively by highly subjective measures such as customer & program reach, customer sentiment, etc. vs. highly objective and financially driven measures such as sentiment vs. share of wallet, program reach vs. acquisition costs, etc.

Do you have any war stories that you like to share about social media programs that have gone awry? Has your company committed any of the above seven deadly social media sins? Do you have any other perspectives on mistakes companies make in developing and managing an enterprise-wide social media program?

My next series of blogs will be taking you through my SMARTE social media methodology on how to avoid all of the above mistakes in developing and managing an enterprise-wide social media program and will enable your company to develop a social media program that is considered world-class.

Social Media Campaigns That Drive Bottom Line Results!

By Steven Jeffes

Infrastructure Establishes a Social Media Foundation, Campaigns Capture Business

Many firms can say they can help your business in social media, all offering help in setting up Fan Pages, web pages, event and photo pages, groups, SEO, etc.  All of this will help you establish a basic presence with Social Media as the bare minimum you will need in setting social media infrastructure, but very little of this foundation building activity will actually help you drive real business by now merely showing up on social media. What is needed to be successful in the realm of social media, after setting up this basic infrastructure, is architecting a robust campaign management program to help drive additional prospects, inquiries, build relationships, and drive actual new or repeat customers.  A sample of the many social media components many firms will attempt to sell your company explains why most are not revenue generating, but rather basic infrastructure and foundation setting in nature:

Component	Description	Net Result
Fan Pages	Establishes a landing area about your organization and business	Basic Facebook web page to be discovered – infrastructure
LinkedIn & Facebook Groups	Establishes a group for people to join with a common purpose or affinity	Building a basic presence on which people ‘might’ join – infrastructure
LinkedIn Events	Establishes events for direct 1st level contact to sign-up with intent to attend	Building a basic presence on which people ‘might’ attend – infrastructure
Twitter Pages	Established a landing area about your organization and business	Basic Twitter web page to be discovered or ‘followed’ – infrastructure
Social Media Analytics or Sentiment Analysis Tools	Develops listening posts at various social media venues and communities to gauge public sentiment about your company, products, brands, services	Develops intelligence on what conversations are occurring that are relevant to your business – infrastructure
Social Media Campaigns such as connection to me campaigns or fan campaigns that drive increases in fans, friends, or connections (refer to sample campaigns below)	Drives increases in general audiences and in specific segments for campaign targeting and for sales closure.	Increases the universe of potential customers and specific groups with affinity toward your specific products and/or services. Closes sales for your products and services

The bottom line with the above is that many activities will set up a presence within social media, but few activities drive real leads and closed business like social media campaigns.  Social Media pages, events, groups, etc. all develop the repository (setting up the pool) for people to come to when asked, but social media campaigns actually drive people to sign-up, join, fan, friend, etc. (filling the pool with high quality water) that will then be captive for driving and closing new business.  The following sections will look at some examples of how social media campaigns have driven increased prospects and real/closed business.

“Social Media Messages All Seems Like a Stream of Consciousness with No Rhyme or Reason”…

Several times in the past few months, several of my clients have commented to me that they see many firms putting out messages via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. that are mostly a stream of consciousness and seemingly have “no rhyme or reason”.  My comments back to them was that, for many companies who do not know how to use social media effectively, that is the impact they are having – sending out uncoordinated and unfocused streams of consciousness without a consistent theme, goal, brand message, and in many cases annoying messages about mundane and uninteresting topics more about themselves vs. anything anybody else would be interested in reading.  In essence, these companies are turning off the very people that they are trying to sell to via social media.

I was then asked if there was a way to change this so that companies were sending more coordinated, interesting communications that all made sense and built upon one another to generate a common and interesting theme.  This would encourage people to read more, and more importantly, make them interested in potentially purchasing the company’s products and/or services.  My response to this seemingly silly question was “of course there is.” 

One of the main ways companies can end this stream of consciousness existence on social media, is to utilize a campaign planning template I use for all of my clients in order to facilitate a more professional and coordinated presence on all social media sites.  Similar to the campaign plan/brief/planning template that many of the best of breed Marketing Automations software tools employ like Unica, SAS, Oracle CRM, SAP CRM, Chordiant and Alterian, this campaign planning template can bring order, clarity and relevancy to your messaging on social media sites. It can literally transform your presence from the realm of annoying, irrelevant, and to be ignored – or worse, de-friended, opteded-out, de-connected, etc. to being highly engaging, referred to via viral forwarding, and saved on ‘favorites’ list and other must follow mechanisms.

This campaign template also enables your campaigns to be successful in converting new business by be synchronizing them from a cross-platform perspective (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) such that present consistent and complimentary messaging that supports your overall brand strategy and campaign themes.  Employing this facilitates your firm in building intelligence into your social media campaigns by pre-designing a campaign brief around key message themes for each platform.  This template is a very small part of a Social Media Best Practice Design Methodology and toolkit that I have developed called SMARTE – The Social Media Adaptive/Responsive/Transcendent Enterprise.  A sample of this Social Media Campaign Planning Template, which is part of this SMARTE methodology, (in summary form), is as follows:

Social Media Campaign Planning Template:

Campaign Brief: Theme, Goals, Tactics, Platform Targets, etc.
Campaign Theme: Social Media for Automobile Dealers	Campaign Timing: May 1 – May 30th	Campaign Periodicity: One message ever other day on each platform
Platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn Facebook	Campaign Success Metrics: Ten  Inquires, Two signed Contracts	Campaign Goals:  Convince automobile dealers and brokers
Campaign Targets: Automobile Dealers and Brokers	Campaign Tactics: Generate dealer general interest in social media from May 1-15; Communicate how to be success in social media from May 15-20; Communicate we know how to from May 21 – 30th.	Lead Follow-Up:  E-mail “Social media for dealers” white paper, dealer testimonials, and invite to June 15th Webinar – “Dealing for Dollars – A dealer’s social media success guide.
Platform Specific Campaign & Message Plans
LinkedIn Campaign Messaging Plan:	May 1: Auto Dealers benefit from social media via 7% lift in sales in March	May 3: Dealers find that social media generated leads account for top 35% of most profitable customers.
….May 16th: First steps to developing a highly effective dealership social media program: http://xys123.com	…May 28th: Auerback dealership recognizes Edgeup Marketing for excellence in social media: http://abc711.com
Twitter Campaign Messaging Plan:	May 1: …	May 3rd: …
Facebook Campaign Messaging Plan:	May 1: …	May 3rd: …

The top part of this template under the heading “Campaign Brief: Theme, Goals, Tactics, Platform Targets, etc.” lays out the overall plan for the campaign and form the global parameters governing the campaign such as goals, timing, success metrics and KPIs, tactics, lead-follow up plan, etc. As part of my SMARTE methodology, I employ an SCAPE of Social Campaign Analysis, Planning & Execution methodology to plan and architect highly successful social media campaigns.

The bottom part of this template under the heading “Platform Specific Campaign & Message Plans” lays out the overall plan for the platform specific campaign messaging that support the campaign such as goals, timing, success metrics and KPIs, tactics, lead-follow up plan, etc. The development of this part of the template is also part of the SCAPE of Social Campaign Analysis & Planning methodology from the overall SMARTE Methodology.

Campaign Execution & Follow-Up

During and following the execution of these campaigns, a similar template governs the follow-up to all campaigns activities, leads generated, inquires, 2^nd wave follow-up campaigns and needs to be carefully considered when developing the original campaign.  In this SCARF or Social Campaign Analysis & Response Follow-Up template, all contingencies are accounted for in terms of plans needed to follow up on the campaign including the business rules needed to support the follow-up, the campaign resources required, the type of response required by segment, etc.  I chose SCARF for this component since every aspect of the campaign response needs to be wrapped up and accounted for in order for the campaign to be considered actionable and successful.

Social Media Campaign Success Samples:

The following are a few sample campaigns I’ve executed via social media with this method that have netted huge results in very short periods of time that have helped me acquire several new contracts representing net new business for my firm:

A)   LinkedIn – 15,000+ group members in ~1.5 years!

Consider the following real accomplishments I have accumulated in the realm of group management via the execution of intelligent and coordinated social media ‘connect to me’ campaigns:

1. In the past year or so I have established and grown the following mega-groups on LinkedIn, each with over 1,200 members by leveraging effective social media viral campaigns:

a)      Current and Former CSC Employees  – 8,100+ Members

b)      Lockheed-Martin Employees – 2,100+ Members

c)       General Electric Current & Former Employees – 1,600+ Members

d)      Capital District & Upstate NY Professionals – 3,200+ Members

e)      IBM Current & Former Employees – 1,380 Members

When these groups were first formulated, I adopted an ‘invite a friend’ campaign for many of these groups whereby I encouraged and incentivize people to invite their friends, colleagues, associates, etc. to join these groups. The incentive to invite a friend encouraged each existing member to invite their friend, colleague, associate to the group to grow each of the group’s membership. Where I am still employing this campaign, the Capital District & Upstate NY Professionals is adding about 200 members a month across New York State. I also recently re-branded and expanded the group to include most of New York State – from Plattsburgh to Tarrytown and from the Berkshires of Massachusetts all the way to Rochester and Ithaca. Through this active campaigning, this group is now the largest social networking group in all of Upstate NY. 

While the above numbers do not rival the number for some other broader groups categories like ‘Marketers’ or ‘Job Seekers’, the groups member drives above have done well given the limited and narrowly audiences for each group.

These group connections now enables me direct access to over 15,000 professionals world-wide that I can promote my consulting services. As a result, I have landed several consulting contracts through these LinkedIn groups worth $500k+, by using these now large social media groups as a sourcing area for new business – thanks directly to intelligent and **free** social media campaigning.

B)    LinkedIn – 3,000 connections in ~1 year!

By utilizing the group template function of LinkedIn, I employ and ongoing campaign to send a personalized message to everyone who joins one of the above groups to connect to me and to follow some of my activities as follows:

Welcome to the “Capital District and Upstate NY Professionals” Group!

I am the President, Founder and Group Manager for the “Capital District and Upstate NY Professionals” Group and I’d like to welcome you to the group. Please feel free to reach out to me if you might need any assistance from this group and/or any of the members of the group.  Good news – this group just surpassed 3,200 members since I formed this group in late last July! **We are now the largest (and most active) social networking group in Upstate NY!!**

Please invite me to your network if we are not already connected http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenjeffes. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/steven.jeffes, Twitter: http://twitter.com/SocialSteven

Also – check out my brand new blog on Social Media at: http://stevenjeffes.wordpress.com/

Please send the following link to your friends and colleagues to invite them to this group: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/153859

Lastly, please also check out my career profile website (Social Media & Marketing Subject Matter Expert) at http://www.Stevenjeffes.com and my consulting company website at http://www.edgeupmarketing.com and my awards/client letters at: http://www.stevenjeffes.com/stevenjeffes_awards.html. I am also an adjunct professor at Excelsior College teaching an array of Business & Technology classes.

Thank you,

Steven M. Jeffes, LinkedIn Founder & Group Manager

(518) 339-5857 (Cellular, message)

Capital District & Upstate NY Professionals – Upstate New York’s Largest and Most Active Social Networking Group

Through this “connect to me upon joining” campaign, I now have built over 3,000 first line contacts on LinkedIn in approximately a 1 year period of time by soliciting a connection to me from everyone who joins the above groups. In addition, everyone invites me to connect with them, which totally precludes me from using up any of my limited LinkedIn invites.   This pool of 3,000 highly accomplished current and ex-professionals from Lockheed-Martin, IBM, GE, etc. now become my audience for business development activities for my consulting services.

C)    Facebook – 4,400 friends in four (4) months!

As a result of intelligent campaigning, I have now amassed 4,400 Facebook friends in a four (4) month period of time – almost unheard of according to many Facebook experts.  Many people take several years to accumulate this many friends and 5,000 is currently the lifetime limit you can have on Facebook.  Through an intelligent execution of Facebook Friends campaigns, I amassed this many friend in the period of October 1, 2009 and January 31^st, 2010 – just a four month period of time.  Through a ‘suggest a friend’ campaign, 3,800 friends were referred to me, all of which were highly correlated to the needs and interests of my marketing, CRM, and social Media consulting business.

In addition, most of these 4,400 friends are businesses and not persons as is typically the case and include the following business categories:

Albany NY Businesses, Appliances, Architects, Ashville NC Businesses, Auto Dealers, Banks & Credit Unions, Bridge & Port Authority, Brokers, Chambers of Commerce and Convention & Visitor’s Bureaus , College & Education, Computer, Construction, Contractors, Cosmetics, Culinary, Dental, Energy, Environment, Equipment, Fire & Police, Fishing Charters, Foods, Furniture, Gifts, Golf, Government, Health, High School, Hospitals & Medical, Hotels, HR & Recruiting, Insurance, Jewelers, Library, Limo & Transportation, Manufacturing, Media & Films. Metals, News, Not For Profits, Optical, Payroll, Pharmaceuticals, Politics, Pools & Spas, Printing, Professional Friends, Public Interest, Real Estate, Recycling, Restaurant & Wineries, Roofing, Security, Spas, Sporting Goods, Stadiums & Arenas, State & National Parks, Supermarkets, Technology, Travel, Utility Companies, Veterans, Yacht Companies

Personalized Campaigns – Messaging Specific to Each Group:

As a result of being able to save my Facebook friends into the above customized business categories, I can personalize campaigns and messages to individual businesses within these industries. For example and as a result of having a great deal of business experience with pharmaceutical companies in the area of CRM and social media, I just launched a customized campaign to Pharmaceutical companies with the title of “Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry – Mastering the Four C’s: Challenges, Concerns, Considerations, Capabilities. Based on this campaign, I am now planning of delivering several workshops on the topic to several pharmaceutical companies. 

Social Media Campaign Success – Similar Stories?

The above shares a small sample of the success I have enjoyed planning and executing campaigns for my own firm and for other companies.  I would open this blog up for people to share their own success stories in social media campaigning and to share insights on what other methods, campaigns, tools, and techniques you have utilized to drive social media campaign success for bottom line results.

About the Author

Steven Jeffes is a thought leader in developing world-class CRM, marketing, social media, loyalty, customer retention and customer experience programs. The recipient of many awards (http://www.stevenjeffes.com/stevenjeffes_awards.html), Steve is expert marketing  strategy  design & optimization: design, development and launch of world-class and best practice marketing and social media programs; change management organizational design and process excellence in marketing, sales, customer service, engineering, product management; and development of successful sales and sales management programs for Fortune 100 companies and government entities. He holds dual B.B.A. degrees in Computer Science and Finance from Temple University and a Master’s in Organizational Design and Excellence from the University of Pennsylvania/Wharton.

Steve can be e-mailed at stevenjeffes@yahoo.com or contacted via phone at 518-339-5857.