Questions, in life or in business, fall into the following buckets:

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

I’ve spent a great deal of time defining my own as well as evaluating and using other methodologies for strategic planning.  For the record, I’m a fan of scenario planning.  If interested, here’s a pretty good read:  Profiting from Uncertainty.  Having said that, strategic planning methodology can be a lot like ice cream…some people just like different flavors and at times a different flavor is just a better choice.  If you’d like to explore methods, there’s another pretty good reference book called Strategy Safari.

Most of work I do today involves strategic planning around Customer Experience, Social Media, Communities, Influencer Programs and Voice of the Customer initiatives.  When it comes to social I often use the following planning framework to help structure a project:

And in case it’s not obvious, if you use this framework, start with Purpose.  I’m in the process of documenting a playbook based on this approach which hopefully I can share at a later date as the above really isn’t as detailed as it needs to be, but perhaps a reasonable starting point. 

Methodology forces you to ask and answer a lot of questions, but throwing all thoughts of methodology to the side, it has struck me in my last 6 months of consulting projects the imbalance in basic questions. 

Most of the focus on questions are the following:  What, When and How?

• What are we going to do? 
• What technologies are we going to use?
• When are we going to launch?
• When is it going to be done? 
• How are we going to measure it? 

And far too little time focused on these questions:  Why, Who and Where?  (Especially Why!!)

• Why are we doing this? 
• What problem are we trying to solve (ok, ok, that’s a "what" - but it is really a why!)
• Who is our audience?
• Who are the internal stakeholders?
• Where are we going to focus our efforts?

So, maybe the old questions we learned in grade school could be a pretty good v1 planning template.  The irony is that the biggest question I get asked is always around metrics and ROI.  They are critical points, but until you answer the question of why (and gain organizational agreement to that answer!!) you can’t answer the ROI question with any specifics.  I can give you a list of metrics to attach to a social site or community, but I can’t tell you if those metrics matter unless I know what the business objective is.

So, maybe some primer questions to start the list, I’m sure you can think of more to add.

• Why:  Define you purpose
• What:  What are the business objectives
• Who:  Define your audience and/or segmentation
• How:  How do our users do it today (whatever you define it is in the why question)
• Where:  Inventory where users are going today
• What:  What are the interactions we need to enable to improve the experience
• What:  What systems and processes do we need to integrate with
• What:  What technology and tools are necessary to support this effort
• How:  How will we know it’s succeeding
• What:  What are the success measures
• Who:  Who are the internal stakeholders
• Who:  Who are the key people and organizations we need to get engaged / participating?
• What:  What are our policies and/or guidelines to govern internal participation?
• When:  Define the project timeline
• How:  How much is it going to cost (to execute AND sustain)

And maybe two last points.  You’ve got to re-validate that why question again and again and ensure you are continuously educating everyone involved on the answer - otherwise you’ll stray.  And lastly, friends don’t let friends plan without execution or execute without plans:) 

Sean

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Influencers are more than a passing interest to me…generally speaking I don’t take projects that aren’t about reaching out and connecting with influencers as part of a community strategy.  Some time back, WOMMA approached myself, Brad Fay of Keller Fay and Steve Hershberger of Comblu about being co-chairs of the Influencer Committee within WOMMA.  We met and gathered a broader group of experts - primarily practitioners - with the idea of documenting some practices and recommendations regarding influencer marketing and influencer engagement.  While we didn’t agree on everything (what fun would that be), I’m pleased with the outcome of the work, the Influencer Handbook.  Have a look and let us know what you think.  It includes the following sections:

• Definition of an influencer and influencer marketing
• Types of influencers
• Methods to engage and thank influencers
• Guidelines for influencer self-regulation
• Bibliography of influencer communication research and practices

Working effectively with influencers was the section most near and dear to me.  I’m sure we missed some important points and examples that can further contribute to increasing practitioner success with influencers.  If you’re new to this topic, or not, I simply hope you’ll consider a few key principles:

• An Influencer program is different than a loyalty program and requires more comprehensive planning and long term commitment to succeed
• Influencers rarely do what they do to help your brand, they do it to help other users - your benefits are by-products of your commitment and engagement
• Consider the idea of "fair exchange of value" or an influencer "balance sheet" - ensuring the benefits to your influencers are in balance with the benefits that accrue to you as a brand - if not, the likelihood of failure is quite high.
• Knowledge, specialized access and relationships are of substantially higher value to all parties than swag/give-aways. 

And if you really want to know about influencers…connect.  Throw away the data, analytics, tools and economy of scale for a few months and go sit down face to face with as many as you can.  There’s "tactile knowledge" required to really understand a brand’s influencers.  When I was a practitioner, it was this seemingly over-investment in face to face that really changed my perspective.

Sean

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I was lucky enough 3-4 years ago on a business trip to Munich to be invited by a group of local Microsoft MVPs to attend what is known as a stammtisch.  What’s a stammtisch??  Well, according to wikipedia and translated to English (with some edits for readability by me):

A Stammtisch is a group of several people who regularly gather around a (usually larger and often round) table. Stammtisch are not organized meetings and, therefore, only a voluntary merger of participants…The focus of such a Stammtisch round is social togetherness, card games and often political or philosophical discussions.

Perhaps an experienced German will see this post and provide some welcome expertise to the history and intent of the stammtisch.

It was a great event.  A cornerstone of my job at that time was engaging with communities.  There are lots of ways to connect and gather information:  Events, conferences, surveys, personal participation in the communities, calls, monitoring tools, etc - and they all have their place.  That said, I really like the feel of the stammtisch.  We gathered in a bar around a table, perhaps 7-8 of us, and spent the evening just talking.  Out of the business setting, the conversation could take a much broader and free form route.  Not to mention the co-presence and casual venue allowed for an informality that brought out contributions I don’t think could have happened through other gatherings. 

Driving business changes is often about great story telling. I love getting research, but quantitative data rarely tells you a story - it sets the scene.  Quant data is always improved by qualitative input from verbatims.  Something about reading comments in support of "quant" data gives you a more visceral and defendable story.  Likewise, if you want to take verbatims to the next level, go talk to your customers face to face…and then try it in a bar!  You really walk away with a different ability to tell the story.  Now, to be fair, all qualitative and no quantitative is no way to live either - as it can mislead you to edge cases.

Ever since that Munich Stammtisch, I’ve wanted to try it again.  When I left Microsoft after 15 years to start consulting on community strategy, I knew I wasn’t an experienced, career consultant.  I’d been on the practitioner side a long time.  And while consultants and industry experts had played an important role, the simple truth was I learned the most from my industry peers in other corporations.  Now, as a strategist and consultant, I wanted to see if I could bring together some of the practitioners I knew - to connect them - "stammtisch style!"

I do a lot of work in the silicon valley, up to two weeks a month in the south bay - so that seemed the first and best spot to try it out.  Last Wednesday night, 9 of us gathered (it was a rectangular table - it really does need to be round for better discussion) at the Village Bistro in Santana Row.  The evening included colleagues from Apple, Google, EBay, Yahoo, EMC, Adaptive Planning and Cisco.  It was a great gathering and universally we thought worth turning into a semi regular happening (event seems the wrong word).  I think one of my favorite moments was someone sharing the challenges of getting many parts of their company to understand community and the importance of social computing as a customer connection activity.  Given a few of his fellow attendees, he was sure they didn’t have quite the same challenge…LOL!  It was cool to listen to the shared challenges and great ideas throughout the night.  I’ve heard already that 2 attendees are meeting for lunch and another two connecting for coffee!

I’m really looking forward to Stammtisch 2…to be announced.  Here are few thoughts on next time:

• 1 weeks notice worked, but I should have got on the plan sooner
• A short round of intros is all that’s necessary - the conversation had no trouble flowing from there
• Small is better - I think 10-12 people is probably the max
• Get a round table!
• Think casual dining not fine dining - this isn’t an event - it’s a gathering of friends!

So, if you’re not connecting with your industry peers - figure out how to do it.  Here’s a couple of other more formal suggestions for making industry connections:

• http://blogcouncil.org/
• http://creativegood.com/councils/

sean

Popularity: 35% [?]

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One of those fundamentals in WOM is creating stories that inspire people to talk.  Often times this comes down to doing the unexpected - which is generally unexpected because the “front lines” just aren’t empowered to do much beyond execute on their function. 

Today, I’m grabbing some laptop time in a local Starbucks and took a table very near where the baristas are working - only table available near an outlet of course:)

As I’m setting up I hear, and then watch, the following transaction.  A guy orders and pays for a grande iced latte.  When the latte is called out at the bar, he takes it and I hear the following:

Guy:  “Is this a grande?  I thought they were bigger than that.” 

Barista:  “Yes, that’s the grande, the venti is the even larger one.” 

Guy:  “Oh, ok.” - no frustration, just simple acknowledgement.

Barista:  “Would you like me to make that a venti?”

Guy:  “Ummm…you can do that?”  (he almost looked guilty, like he shouldn’t say yes - he got what he ordered after all)

Barista:  “Sure, not a problem.” 

She takes the drink back, then a second later, she hands it the orginal grande back to him.

Barista:  “Here, you can just give this to someone if you’d like, I’ll make a new one that is a venti.”

Guy:  “Really, ok, sorry for the trouble”

Barista:  “No trouble at all’

Guy approached me and asked if I wanted the free grande… nope, I have one already, but he took his new “WOM object” with him out of the store:)  I’m pretty certain he’ll tell this story a few times today.

Now it’s gonna be pretty tough to attach any metrics to this, but I thought it was a good moment and a simple reminder of the opportunity every company has to create the conditions for WOM by empowering their front line employees.  I think we can be pretty confident the barista never went to a WOM class.  Many companies have large populations of employees who touch many customers every day at retail, in customer service, in the support org, at their conferences, online, etc…I wonder how often those critical roles are forgotten in the grand plan for creating a WOM campaign.  It’s a shame that so many call centers in particular are seen as cost centers to operationalize instead of the WOM machines they could be.

Sean

Popularity: 49% [?]

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I’m a big fan of the old “crawl, walk, run” approach on most projects that have medium to high complexity and impact (note:  most of the work I do is with $500M+ companies).  Ideally, these phases are defined against business goals and user experience milestones while building what I’d call the operational muscle to drive to the next point in the project.  For example, an operational muscle might consist of a metrics, business scorecard and review process to evaluate status.  Or it might refer to staffing and training the team.  Projects that try to “run” out the gate often end up “running” the wrong direction or take so long to reach fruition that the teams involved lose steam, commitment or even a clear understanding of what they were trying to do in the first place.  Other projects have never looked past “crawl” and get out the door and leave the team thinking “huh, now what?” Or, “wow, this isn’t going the way we expected, what do we do now?”  Or, perhaps the worst crime of them all, the sad “ahhhh… check, that was on my MBOs - mission accomplished.  Next task.”

Quite often the projects I work on cut across multiple organizations and/or businesses within large organizations.  Inherently this brings a new set of challenges to project planning and defining realistic and meaningful schedules.  In a recent session, I described another way to approach crawl, walk, run - especially the crawl and walk phases.  For context, the company in this session was $1B+ in scale and the room include representation from marketing, partner, web/UX and support organizations.  I recommended getting really clear and explicit on the following against the overall business objectives.

• What can this virtual team do with no additional funding or approval from other stakeholders/execs?
• What can this virtual team do with no additional funding, but requires stakeholder/exec buy in?
• What can this virtual team ONLY do with additional funding/resources (stakeholder/exec buy in implied in incremental ask)?

While this CANNOT replace a sequenced approach focused on business goals and user experience milestones, getting clear on each of the above buckets can get projects moving more quickly and help gain valuable experience and momentum that support the longer term project.

Just a thought.

Sean

Popularity: 63% [?]

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More and more I’m seeing this title - especially amongst consultants.  I’ve been called one, introduced as one and hired as one many times, but let me state for the record, I’m not one.  Huh?  (and yes, this post is partly tongue in cheek…)

Here’s the deal:

• If someone asks you what you do and they don’t understand your answer, then you might not have the right description - Seriously, next time you’re on a plane, tell the person next to you that you are a social media strategist and see what happens.   Worse, watch how easy it is to devalue what you know and do when they ask you what that is - “oh, I help companies figure out how to use blogging to talk to their customers.”  I admit it.  I said this once on a plane.  Never since.  I immediately thought - wow, I’m tired.  That was a dumb answer.  That is so not what I do or want to do. 
• Does the phrase really make sense - “social media strategist” - isn’t social media a tactic?  I’ve asked in many speeches, how does social media or web 2.0 change your business objectives?  Trick question - it doesn’t.  This is of course a big semantic game.  Take my last job at Microsoft.  What was a strategy for one of my direct reports, was a tactic to me.  What was a strategy for me, was a tactic for my VP.  What was a strategy for my VP, was a tactic for his Sr. VP…and so on.  These things should cascade up.  What’s important is that everyone up and down the chain are clear on what true north is and how to make empowered trade off decisions that support the bigger picture. 
• Does this mean I don’t believe in having a social media strategy or I’m not working on social media strategies for companies.  No, of course not.  I think every company needs to have a social media strategy - but the this work needs to support a broader objective around customer experience.  If you ask yourself why you need a social media strategy, you will likely be a lot closer to the real strategic objective.

So what the heck do I do.  Well, that’s the journey I guess.  In the end, I’m in the customer experience business.  Now, fair enough, a “customer experience strategist” doesn’t really sound any better!  So, let’s push this a little further, how about the advocacy business?  I like that a bit better - easier to explain and more aligned with what I do.  It’s a relationship and experiential marketing world.  Driving deeper and more connected relationships between you and your customers across all the touch points in your business is the best path towards building brand and product advocacy resulting in what really matters - growth, competitive differentiation and affinity.  I’m a big believer that Social Media is one of the most important opportunities to re-invent customer experiences - but, if the answer to every customer experience improvement opportunity across your business is social media - you might have hired the wrong consultant!

What would you call it?

sean

Popularity: 73% [?]

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I used to think this was cute.  A fun, light-hearted way of showing your growing pains.  Now it is driving me away slowly but surely…maybe not that slowly.  Why is that sleepy, smiling whale mocking me!  And why does he seem so content to be out of action.  hmmm.

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I’ve done a number of workshops the past few months with clients designed to do two primary things:

• Land a common understanding across the teams involved around what social media, communities and influencer programs really are and more importantly why it matters to a business. 
• Drive a strategy development process that results in a project vision, objectives, roadmap and success metrics.

Each workshop is its own learning process.  I’d like to say I’m getting this codified down to a common process such that each workshop is easier to repeat, but the reality is they are each governed by some of their own unique characteristics. 

Here are some random thoughts from a collection of these experiences and feedback from conference speeches:

1)  Features are NOT user experiences:  Warning…if you ask someone about desired user experience and they say wiki or forum, you have work to do.  Lots of diverse versions of this.  My advice - get people talking about the customer lifecycle from pre-consideration to post purchase.  What is the outside-in approach at each phase in the lifecycle today and then focus on how to make that better (and connect that to business measures that matter).  The answer is NOT always social media/community - that would be another warning sign if it was.

2)  Including your agency partners in the workshop can be extremely useful:  Likely not a good solution in all scenarios, but I had one client include their agency partners in the workshop and I thought it went brilliantly.  I was impressed how difficult it was to tell who was who by the 2nd day.  This is a big complement.  They were very in sync and collaborative and having them there prevents a large “translation” effort from what we learned and decided to the partners who will ultimately help them implement.

3)  Cross functional participation is important - but consensus is only a “nice to have”:  Much of the long range benefits from doing this work brilliantly accrues from driving cross functional execution(Marketing/Support/Business Units).  For example, if you go create an external facing idea portal but don’t do the hard work to drive process change internally with the functions that own the changes your users want - your idea engine could do you more harm than good.  That said, if you are a large company, it could take you 3-4 months just to coordinate calendars to get all the right people gathered!  So, don’t get paralyzed by the cross group challenges - move it forward and determine where the opportunities to improve customer experience are for what “you control” and drive progress there - then fan out with your early successes.  

4)  None of the following are community platforms:  Wikis, Blogs or Forums.  I wish that could be enough said.  These are not platforms…these are implementations on top of platforms.  A platform should have an extensibility model, a content management model, a user profiling/membership model, a rating/reputation system (for content and authors), and registration system, etc, etc, etc…you get the idea.  A wiki may have all these things, but that does not a platform make.

5)  PMO required:  ok, if you are just doing a team blog, maybe not, but that isn’t the work I’m focused on.  Most of these projects end up touching multiple orgs, have multiple phases and senior stakeholders.  In this scenario, you really need Program/Project mgmt and your consulting partner (in my opinion) should not be your PMO.  Given the organizational and culture change issues, someone who is an insider and onsite is an important success criteria.  If your subject matter expert is also your PMO, you are either over-paying for PMO help (bad) or being undercharged by your SME (good job!). 

6)  Social Media is not new…just digitizing the norm:  Reminded of this all the time.  Social Media is really just facilitating what are actually much more natural human interaction behaviors than traditional web was able to support.  To me, this is why this isn’t a fad - but genuine change in the customer interaction model (user to user, user to brand and brand to user).

7)  I’m not convinced there is a “tipping point” for social tools (like twitter):  Many may disagree on this and likely we’ll end up debating semantics…but here’s my thinking.  Television hit a tipping point - but channels (NBC) don’t.  Ok, ok, maybe they do in terms of commercial viability, but inherently there is motion from channel to channel based on content, time, cost, benefits, etc.  I think the same is true for the bevy of social tools.  Social networking has hit a tipping point, but the channels will continue to ebb and flow.  The channels are interesting and at times very useful, but the channels are not “the change.”  Maybe one of you can make this perspective better or give me a different way to think about this. 

8)  “Participating in the conversation” is hollow advice for a large corporation:  Too many give the advice of “join the conversation” without enough guidance behind the surface.  I spent a long time in a very large brand.  Had someone shown up and said “join the convo,” I would have thrown them out.  Why?  The advice isn’t wrong - but too simplistic.  As I was leaving that brand we looked at sizing the amount of conversation (hard activity), but the best research we had indicated over 2 Billion conversations about product, service and brand.  Go join that!  Good luck.  If you haven’t been participating until now, another 6 months won’t kill you!  Take the time to step back and do the analysis work to understand where the conversations are taking place, how do you categorize them, who are the influencers, what should the internal accountability model be for taking action, ensure you are trained/ready to participate, determine what are you trying to accomplish and how will you sustain the participation.  Nothing like deeply listening before you start talking to help ensure what you are doing is “joining the community.”

9)  Most companies have “hearing systems” not “listening systems.”  It strikes me that the word listening has sort of become tainted.  Most every company can give you a valid and committed set of “listening processes” they have had in place for the past decade or longer.  So, they are listening, right?  Well, in most cases their users don’t think so and the perception matters.  I describe this as hearing systems.  I hear your feedback and stuff is happening to change, adjust, fix, etc.  But, I’m not closing the loop back with you to tell you what I did with your feedback.  To me, that’s the difference - that is the opportunity.  A real listening system both “hears”  and “responds” to its participants.  Response is really hard work - but that is where the reward is in driving brand affinity.

10)  Converting behaviors in the participation demographics is NOT the goal:  70/20/9/1.  Let’s assume we can generally agree that ~70% will lurk, 20% join, 9% will be regulars and 1% participate in the community in extreme ways.  There is a temptation to look at this and say, hey, it’s a pyramid.  Therefore, the business goal is to mix shift the segments!  Move 70% to 60%, 20% to 25%, 9 to 12% and 1 to 3%!  I think this is the wrong goal.  The distribution is essentially a reflection of human behaviors.  Changing behaviors is exceptionally hard and very expensive.  Even if you do change behaviors, I’m not convinced you’ll know why or that it is sustainable or that the cost model you put in place is sustainable.  I think the goal is to grow the entire pyramid and optimize the experience for each segment.  Make the 70% more successful at finding what they want to find and make the 1% more effective at contributing in the ways they want to contribute.  If the demographics shift in your favor over time…great!  But not likely the first order of business.

10a)  This applies to Influencer programs too:  They should be about finding, activating, facilitating, appreciating and aligning behaviors NOT creating behaviors.

11)  Affinity represents a shift in thinking:  I wrote about this before here.  It’s gratifying to see this resonating and opportunities to push the model further.

I know once I publish I will think of other items, but already this is too long.

sean

Popularity: 78% [?]

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Is your corporate culture really ready to drive success with online communities? 

One pillar of every community strategy I work on (particularly with larger companies) is assessing and driving organizational readiness.  There are a number of components to this (training, staffing, policy, sponsorship, etc…).  One challenge is that many companies (and consultants I expect) treat culture change like a journey.  We can describe what is problematic about the current state and we can describe what the desired state looks like - but when it comes time to drive change it starts to look like internal road shows (speeches), policy adjustments and training.  This isn’t bad, and in most cases it’s needed, but it often lacks the fundamental change in ethos that is big enough, clear enough and actionable enough to really be certain you did something completely different. 

I’m not going to dive into a big discussion (already had a few million times on blogs) about the opportunities and challenges that user intimacy brings through more socially driven design and user communities.  Instead, I want to hit on what I see as a very clear (but addressable thru culture change) disconnect between how companies behave and there ambitions for customer-centricity.  Almost no companies will stand up and deny that they are customer-centric (and they truly believe it!!).  They will list the advisory boards, feedback systems, usability testing, research, customer conferences…all the things they do to listen, listen, listen.  I even believe them (that they believe it)! 

They think they are customer-centric. 

So, let’s take a simple test all you “customer-centric” brands!  Be honest and ask yourself the following question:

“Within our company, what is the #1 thing we celebrate?”

Quick…what’s the answer?

Ship Day!!  Launch!! 

Right!  If you are a big product company and this isn’t the #1 answer - I’d love to know about it and what your answer was!!  If this was your answer, guess what, you are NOT yet firing on all your customer-centric cylinders!  In fact, you are re-enforcing a set of organizational behaviors in direct conflict with achieving success long term - particularly with your community strategy. 

Let’s look at this a second.  First off, this is nothing new and if you said yes, you are hardly alone.  This is what “we taught” ourselves to celebrate for decades.  We finished the task.  Time for a launch party!  We worked hard, we deserve it!  Heck, most of us are task centric individuals, so no wonder we have task centric companies.  But aren’t we rewarding an activity and not a result here?  Particularly when we are trying to build strong word of mouth brands. 

Here’s the problem:

• What have you really accomplished?  No one is using it yet (beta customers don’t count!!!)
• You’ve left your customers out of the party (at least in a meaningful way)
• You just let a huge percentage of your employees “off the hook” on achieving the results.  Heck, now its sales, marketing and supports job to do the rest!
  • Ever heard a product developer say “I’m not a marketer or I’m not in sales” - no wonder we have organizational silos.  Companies with legendary brands “hide these seams” brilliantly. 

Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t celebrate all the amazing work that goes into building a product…but tone it down.  Find the real day worthy of celebration.  Decide what that day looks like for your brand, product and or service.  And hint hint…it’s NOT a sales target either!!  I know, I’m taking away all our favorite milestones.  In terms of long term brand value, revenue is a KPI, not a metric!  It’s a great indicator, but can hide problems and is a poor predictor of future performance.  Look for engagement metrics!  Customer to customer conversation.  Brand sentiment.  Net promoter.  You get the idea.  Celebrate when your users are starting to celebrate that they like the product!  And better yet…find those influencers, and party with them.  After all, if you’re now customer centric, don’t you want to pull those key users inside and begin preparing for the next wave of innovation!

That’s all for now…what do you think?  What do you celebrate!  And can’t you make this suggestion extremely actionable!  This would be real change and evidence of culture change … much better than “85% of employees complete the mandatory “customer advocacy” online training module!”

sean

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This is pretty 101 and not intended to be comprehensive, but I was putting together some quick high level teaching points for the internal culture change on launching a community and thought I’d share it.  Feel free to add.

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