Speeches that will make your people feel empowered

by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler

Is this you?

You run an annual event for the public, and you want to expose them to new ideas. For example, ways to run a business and empower workers. Or, how technology changes marketing.

Or . . . you've got a good sized company and you want employees to collaborate using technology to generate new ideas or innovate to solve customer problems.

Or . . .you're a technology vendor and you'd like customers and prospects to see how technology empowers people throughout organizations.

If this is you, we want to give a speech to your audience. They'll leave filled with exciting new ideas on how to manage their organization better and on new ways to reach out to customers. And with the publication of Empowered coming up so soon, we're excited to get the ideas out there.

We're excited to be getting these new ideas out through speeches because we've been gestating this thing for a year now and it's time for it to see the light of day. Also, from Groundswell, we found that speeches -- and the audiences reactions to them -- were some of the most fascinating parts of being an author and a spreader of interesting ideas. I (Josh) have now given versions of the Groundswell speech over 100 times.

If you run a public event for marketers, IT professionals, or managers, we can probably find a way to speak to your audience. If you're not running a public event, we're still interested, but those speeches have a fee of course.But either way, we're highly motivated to connect with your audience.

Below are some speech topics (and as you can see, Empowered covers a lot of ground). If you're interested, email Tracy Sullivan at speakersbureau at forrester dotcom.

• Unleashing innovation from empowered employees.
• Making social technologies work in the enterprise.
• The dynamics of peer influence -- who are Mass Influencers and how can you tap into them?
• How to empower your workforce to solve customer problems
• The new role of IT in the empowered workforce
• Innovation and collaboration systems that really work
• Can a workforce be both empowered and secure?

One more note: if you want to see what's already lined up or where you might meet us, look here.

HIRPS: A new model for PR and influencers

by Josh Bernoff

Here's the problem. "Influencers" -- that's reporters, analysts, bloggers, anyone with an audience -- are targets. PR people are the ones who want to influence them. The PR folks subscribe to databases from companies like Cision and Vocus and then send out hundreds of undifferentiated press releases (it's called "spray and pray"). Some of the pitches are more targeted, but based on my own inbox, most of them aren't.

This system serves both the PR people and the influencers badly. We influencers get clogged inboxes and ignore most of the email; the PR people may reach a few targets but it's 99% waste.

Right now, I'm proposing a way to fix this. I ran my idea by Hans Gieskes, CEO of Cision, and Peter Granat, who is in charge of products there -- they were intrigued, so here goes.

Let's call my system HIRPS -- Highly Relevant Pitching System. My system includes three elements.

Influencer profiles. Influencers would set up their own profiles -- not "who I am" but "what I'm looking for" profiles. The profile would include not just general coverage areas, but very specific details (e.g. "I am interested in new mobile devices" or "I am writing about how marketers measure social media applications.") As an influencer starts doing new research, she would update this -- reporters would update theirs daily or weekly, analysts maybe monthly. Naturally, the profiles would be free.

PR pitching system. The PR people would pay a subscription for access to these profiles. They would then send pitches to the influencers through the system. All pitches must be kept to 1200 characters -- anything further would be through a link to further information.

Ratings for PR people. Every pitch email would include a simple mechanism for the influencer to RATE the pitch for relevance (1-5 stars) and comment on the person doing the pitching.And every pitch would arrive with information about the PR person's rating for relevance.

Here's why this is better.

In a system like this, the PR people have the ability (though searching profiles) to find 15 or 20 actual, interested people rather than 1000 who are unlikely to be interested. They are also incented to create a few personal, relevant pitches -- not to spam -- because such pitches would generate high relevance rankings. This system incents behavior that's good for everyone, and allows clever, thoughtful PR people to be rewarded for being clever and thoughtful with a highly visible reputation. (They can carry this with them from job to job, too -- it's good for their careers.)

From the influencer's perspective, we would get fewer of these emails, and each one would be short and personalized, and come with a rating. If I got three or even ten of these a day, with a star rating on each one, I'd be far more likely to read and respond to them, even as I ignored most of the press releases. And if they matched my articulated needs, I'd be delighted. This system also reinforces transparency on the part of influencers -- a little effort about what you are interested in gets rewarded with far more relevant contacts.

Here's how this is different from what we have now.

Cision and Vocus and PR Newswire have influencer profiles but they're not like this because they're designed to serve PR people -- they're profiles of influencers, not by influencers. Cision won't let you see your profile, although you can change it. Vocus makes you call them if the profile is being abused (which they all are). PR Newswire lets you see and edit your profile but it's way too general. None acknowledge that influencers have changing needs. In fact, as they stand now, creating or editing a profile just makes it easier for PR people to spam you.

There are tools sort of like this now. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is designed to hook reporters up with sources (which their founder Peter Shankman told me are as likely to be small businesses as they are larger PR shops). But when you sign up a source, you get undifferentiated email with dozens of entries about what reporters are seeking. This doesn't use the social intelligence of the net, it doesn't scale, and it doesn't include ratings. HARO was just acquired by Vocus.

Profnet, like HARO, is focused on "experts," (especially academics), not PR people. You have to pay to join as an expert. It's now owned by PR Newswire.

I'm sure I'll hear from startups who've done something like this, but frankly, it's the incumbents like Cision who can do this best. They start with tens of thousands of PR customers for their databases; Cision already has indexed a million influencers. More than any startup, Cision or one of its competitors can leverage these connections to make this work. And since it will know what pitches people are rating highly and responding to, it can improve the quality of its database.

This won't end irrelevant PR email. But it could certainly create a lot more relevance in our inboxes. What do you think?

Empowered Customers Need Empowered Employees Need Empowered IT

[Originally published on Ted Schadler’s Blog for Information & Knowledge Management Professionals.]

by Ted Schadler

Groundswell technology comes to consumers first. At home, we get social, mobile, video, and cloud services pitched to us 24x7. Facebook, Android, iPad, Foursquare, Google, YouTube, Office Web Apps, Twitter. The list is endless and growing every single day. Empowering technologies like these will always come to consumers first. Why? Because it's a wide-open market. A single developer can build an application that changes the world from their broadband-connected bedroom.

All this technology puts tremendous power directly into the hands of your customers. Your customers often have more information than your sales team — or medical staff — does. They can also whack your brand from their smartphone, with video even, while waiting impatiently in line. They can get a recommendation from someone in their business network while listening to your pitch. Customers are empowered by information and connections. You'd better make sure you give customers better information than they can get elsewhere.

The only way to do that is to empower your employees to directly engage the needs and expectations of empowered customers. Only empowered employees can solve the problems of empowered customers.

Fortunately, your employees are not standing still. People are problem solvers. Left alone, your innovative employees (we call them HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives) are building new solutions using these same groundswell technologies — and many others besides — to solve customer problems.

In fact, 37% of US information workers — employees that use computers for work — use do-it-yourself technology to get work done. Personal mobile devices. Unsanctioned Web sites like Skype or Google Docs or LinkedIn or Smartsheet.com. Unsanctioned software downloaded to a work computer.

And it's mostly good. It's covert innovation — your employees solving your business problems at the ground level. Being productive by harnessing new tools.

Your challenge is to support this innovation while keeping the company safe. Your opportunity is to work directly with managers and employees to empower employees to solve customer problems. And that takes a whole new way of thinking and acting. It takes an empowered IT organization working under a new set of principles.

Empowerment is chapter 3 in the Internet story. Chapter 1 is the Web. Chapter 2 is social computing. Chapter 3 is empowerment. Empowerment has that feel of inevitability. Companies like Best Buy that empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers will win. Companies like Circuit City that don't will lose. [Oh, they already lost.]

My colleague Josh Bernoff and I have written a book about it that will be available in September. And we’ve just published an article in Harvard Business Review. And for Forrester customers, you can read an expanded report.

We all have lots of work to do to empower employees. I’d love to hear what you're doing.

Empowered in the Harvard Business Review

Something very cool has happened.

The folks at Harvard Business Review have accepted and published our article about the concepts in Empowered.

This article is a great introduction to the ideas in Empowered. It talks about how empowered customers place demands on companies, and how it takes empowered employees -- highly empowered and resourceful operatives, or HEROes -- to fight back. It's a nice introduction to the HERO Compact between HEROes, IT, and Management, as well.

What's new here is that for the first time, we're telling the stories of some of these HEROes, like Mark Betka at the U.S. State Department, the Twelpforce team at Best Buy, and the incredible Rob Sharpe, who transformed sales training at Black & Decker with his own internal YouTube.

We were really fortunate in that not only did HBR publish the article, they have also made it available for free to everyone who wants to read it at HBR.org for the next month or so. (Their content is nearly all behind a password and available to subscribers only, but they made an exception for this article.)

So do this for me. Read it, and let me know what you think -- comment over there, here, or on Twitter. I'm looking forward to the feedback.

Social maturity

It used to be that just launching a social application made you a marketing leader. Now everybody's doing it.

Some people just run campaigns. Doritos' Super Bowl ads are a great example. So are little applications like Mad Men Yourself, where you can make your own icon to represent yourself as a Mad Men character. These are great, but they don't really change companies. They also don't challenge the organization -- they get launched, they run, and even if they last, the marketer doesn't change.

But we increasingly run into organizations that have multiple social applications running. Take Dell, where there are internal and external initiatives on everything from communities to Twitter. Or Intuit, where the TurboTax help function is actually a community, and other communities of "experts" advise the company on directions to take the software.

In some sense, we're all going where Dell and Inuit are. There are going to be more social applications in the future, not fewer. Companies are going to need to manage them. And the organizational model model isn't obvious -- letting everybody do their thing is chaotic, but managing it all centrally may squash the creativity out of people.

What we need is a maturity model for organizations building or using social applications. And we'd like your help to create it.

We're interested in how this works at your company. We'd like to hear from anyone involved in social applications -- marketers, sure, but also PR, IT, legal, finance, HR, and so on. Why not take our survey? We'll share a summary of the results with everyone who takes it, and we'll share the top line results right here.

Note: this isn't really designed for vendors, agencies, consultants, or regular consumers -- we're looking for people who work on on social technologies within companies. So if you're somebody like that, why not just comment on the post right here, or you can join our community for further discussion.

What you can learn from PTC's long journey to community

by Josh Bernoff

PTC is a company with 5,000 employees and 25,000 customers. It makes CAD (computer aided design) and PLM (product lifecycle management) software. The story of what it took for PTC to create a customer community is instructive, because it's not a straight line. In real companies, it's not easy to create social applications, so there's a lot to be learned from PTC. This is a good example of the kind of management stories we have in Empowered.

I encountered PTC in 2009. Robin Saitz, an SVP in marketing, hired Forrester Research to help the company  with the appropriate strategy for creating a customer community. Robin and Rachel Nislick, PTC's Director of Interactive Marketing, had already decided to use Jive Software for the community, but there was some discomfort with the overall initiative from other members of PTC's management. (I'm grateful to Robin and Rachel for allowing me to write about this -- our projects for clients are typically proprietary to the client unless the client wants it to be otherwise.)

Two elements were at the core of the Forrester engagement with PTC. First, we undertook a large survey of their customers worldwide. And second, I interviewed many of their executives.

As it turned out, the customers were enthusiastic. With PTC's permission I'm sharing the Social Technographics Profile of PTC's customers. As you can see, they're not just ready for a social application, they're eager for it. This sentiment was robustly consistent across job roles and geographies and for customers of all of PTC's products. Other elements of the survey helped us to determine just what sort of features they would want in a community.

But this in itself was not sufficient. My interviews with their management revealed all sorts of concerns. Their customer service people were worried that a community might threaten maintenance revenues . Their CIO at the time wondered if Jive was the best platform. There was concern about how a new PTC community would live alongside and complement the existing PTC/USER online forums. And among product managers, some were far more enthusiastic than others. This is what it's like to do social technology projects in real companies.

I presented our recommendations to PTC's management team, who asked provocative and insightful questions -- they were truly engaged. At this point, I left PTC to its own devices and hoped to hear about their community launch soon after.

Instead, almost a year passed. But Robin and Rachel weren't just sitting around. They were building an ironclad case for the community. They conducted an extensive technical review of community platforms (in the end, Jive won). They lobbied and gained the support of management, including Jim Heppelmann, who is about to step up to the CEO job at PTC. They hired a community manager. And the product managers who were skeptical, one by one, started to become believers.

PTC's community launches this week. I expect this community to be very successful. The reason has nothing to do with features. It has to do with the preparation the company undertook to understand its customers and to align both management and IT behind the idea. Rachel and Robin are HEROes, and we profile them in Empowered because they demonstrate how, in real companies, launching social applications for a large customer base requires planning, politics, and support from all across the company.

Now accepting entries for the 2010 Forrester Groundswell Awards

We first started the Forrester Groundswell awards in 2007. What a great run! We've seen applications like the one that the amazing Pete Williams used to raise a million dollars for recovery from Australian brush fires and the one that remade the rules for NASCAR. And for the people who created these award-winning applications, the awards have given them the recognition that helps them justify the great work they do.

This year, we're expanding them to match up to the expanding role that social applications play in business. It also means you have more ways to win.

We've got:

• New geographies. We are recognizing B2C entries in both North America and internationally.
• New categories. There are now mobile categories in both geographies.
• B2B awards. As we did last year, we will recognize entries for B2B separately.
• A whole new management division. We now have three awards for applications aimed at employees.
• More places to recognize winners. We'll be giving out awards in Washington, DC at Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum (Management division), Chicago at Forrester's Consumer Forum (B2C North America division) and London at the Forrester's Marketing & Strategy Forum EMEA (B2C International Division).

If you've got something worth rewarding, here's what you should do:

1. Build a great application. Frankly, if you haven't built it by now, it's probably too late. So I guess this should be "Recognize that you have built a great application." Anything social or mobile can qualify.
2. Read the rules. Please read the rules. People who read the rules and follow them win. The ones who don't are wasting their time. Honest -- they're pretty simple rules.
3. Prepare your entry completed by August 27, 2010. That's the deadline; don't say we didn't warn you. But submit early so people can vote on your entry.(If you are deadline-challenged, read this and learn.)
4. On your own site or elsewhere on the Web, create a “My Forrester Groundswell awards submission” page or document describing your application. Also include a single screenshot that represents the application. You'll need to put URLs for these into the entry.
5. Only submit your own work. Agencies and vendors can submit work they do for clients, provided they have obtained permission from the client. (This is your responsibility, please don't embarrass yourself in front of the client by posting without getting permission.)
6. Only post stuff that's public. Submissions go live within one business day and are open for ratings and reviews. If you put it into the entry, it's public and on the record.

Once you've read this and you're ready, go here to post your entry. As soon as we get a few, I'll start promoting them. I can't wait to see what you've come up with this year.

If you screw up, they will trash you. There is no PR fix.

by Josh Bernoff

A Twitter account called @BPGlobalPR has been trashing and mocking BP for a while now. The new development is that he's blogging about what he's doing and why.

What should BP do about this?

Nothing.

BP's first job is to fix the spill. Any other activity now is pointless and won't help.

The PR department at BP's job is describe, accurately, what they are doing. Any attempts to spin are pointless and will backfire.

BP could sue and get the Twitter account closed, maybe. The publicity about this suit would hurt more than help. If they were successful, the tweeter would just pick another handle. Hence: do nothing.

BP is twittering and there is a very nice Facebook page for Deepwater Horizon Response. Better to have them and connect through them than not, but every drop of oil that spills or lands on beaches does more damage than any amount of social outreach. This problem cannot be solved by social technology.

Social can't solve problems that come from customer (or environmental) abuse. Your company has problems, too, although it can't possibly be worse than BP's problem. If lots of your customers are upset, for every dollar you spend on fixing your image or social outreach, spend ten or a hundred dollars on fixing your customer problem.

Who cares about Facebook privacy? Not who you think.

by Josh Bernoff

Go ahead. Name me one company of a significant size whose business suffered due to its treatment of people's private data.

Unless I'm missing something, you can't.

TJX put 45 million credit cards at risk. Do you even remember (it happened in 2007)? Has anybody stopped shopping at TJ Maxx? Can't see the impact.

In the online world, I can't name a single significant company that had a problem. They pay lip service to being concerned about privacy, but in fact, a small number of verbal people whine, but very few leave. If a site is useful, most people (not you, the smart readers of this blog, but average everyday people) vaguely wonder about what happened, but won't give up their site.

So let's take this context and apply it to Facebook. We've had multiple revisions of the privacy policy. We've had CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that privacy is no longer a social norm. And we've had web searches on how to leave Facebook trending. But still, Zuckerberg says not many people are leaving.

Our own quick poll shows that few are leaving -- and our readers are way more knowledgeable than the general Facebook population.

Read the new Facebook announcement carefully. Here's my analysis of what Zuckerberg is saying: Facebook's engineering process led them into this spot. It's not that Facebook is against your privacy, it's just that they weren't paying close enough attention -- they were concentrating on connections to the open Web, like the "Like" button. But now the outcry is loud enough that they've fixed things with a simpler set of settings.

Not stated, but in the background, is this key fact: the more private your content is, the more Google can't index it. The more public it is, the more Google searches can land on it. Facebook is trying not to be part of the splinternet, but its own members won't let it.

What does this mean?

First, the most important impact of the Facebook flap is not on its own members, but on Congress. Regulation would cause lots more problems than a few members leaving. This is the real battle to watch, and the one that was probably quite persuasive in getting Zuckerberg to change his tune.

Second, if Facebook followed the path it was on, it risked becoming the first significant company to lose business due to not paying close enough attention to privacy. Eventually, some company will create something so compelling that they think privacy doesn't matter. At that point, we'll see which people prefer -- fun/utility, or privacy. And I'm betting fun/utility wins. Because while few will admit it, Zuckerberg might be right -- privacy isn't much of a norm any more.

What does this mean for you as a marketer or Web site? The angel on my right shoulder wants to tell you to behave carefully with people's information. But the devil on my left says you won't lose many customers even if you don't. Just remember, it only takes one violation to trash your reputation -- a lesson Facebook should have learned three years ago with Beacon and Charlene Li. Assuming you don't care about your reputation, your customers may just stick with you anyway.

(Speaking of Charlene: her new book Open Leadership cites Facebook as a very open company. I'm curious about what Charlene thinks about their most recent behavior.)

Photo credit: Rob Pongsajapan via Flickr

Thoughts on leadership in the social era

Charlene Li's book Open Leadership has generated some discussion about what it means to lead in a social world. I wanted to share some thoughts about leadership in the social era from our own research for Empowered.

Empowered includes lessons on leadership from Scott Cook, founder of Intuit; Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail Resorts; Bary Judge, CMO of Best Buy; and the management at Dell Computer. You've read about some of these companies before, and you'll read about them again -- it's not coincidence. Many, many companies have created social applications. Very few have transformed themselves as a result.

As you'll recall, we talk about HEROes -- highly empowered and resourceful operatives -- and the applications they create. HEROes move quickly to serve customers. This can create chaos. It takes a different management technique to stimulate this innovation without allowing the company to devolve into a welter of random projects.

The challenge, as Clayton Christensen pointed out in The Innovator's Dilemma, is that your competitors -- including little startups -- are innovating at this speed already. You have to embrace this innovation and manage it, or you'll get eaten up from below.

Here are few principles we've found that are common in companies that are encouraging and managing HERO activity well:

1. Share strategy continuously, especially changes in strategy. When Rob Katz changed Vail Resorts' media strategy to focus on social and short-lead media, he hired Mike Slone away from Razorfish to run his social application. Furthermore, he walked the talk -- look at this blog post from popular music-industry blogger Bob Lefsetz about how Katz engaged with him and solved his problem on Twitter. Slone's department doesn't just respond to tweets, it helps create and promote video of what's actually happening on the slopes, working with the existing staffers at each of Vail's multiple resorts. Leadership means not just changing strategy, but communicating with your actions, not just your words, how you will support that strategy.
2. Embrace half-baked ideas. Best Buy's marketing can move fast because Barry Judge is willing to support plans that aren't completely baked -- and he emphasized this half-baked quality in his interviews with me. That includes things like posting TV ads on his blog, opening up the API's to bestbuy.com for other sites to use, and engaging the whole sales and support organization for Twitter response: the Twelpforce. Allof these ideas had risk associated with them. None of them were completely debugged before they went live. But Best Buy launched them anyway, and adapted. Embracing this kind of innovation kicks your workforce and its customer-focused creativity into high gear.
3. Use councils to coordinate. There are over 100 social initiatives at Dell. Manish Mehta, Dell's VP of social media and community, is in charge of herding these cats. They don't report to him -- that's no way to stimulate innovation. Instead, Manish meets with representatives from all the major departments working on these activities weekly in a council, looking for best practices and efficiencies. Top-down is not the answer. Neither is chaos. Seeking commonalities in creative applications from around the company -- and around the world -- is the way to go. It also helps alleviate the "does anyone else around here understand what I'm going through?" feeling that social developers often get.
4. Celebrate failure. In Empowered, Scott Cook says "we have a high tolerance for experiments." And he acknowledges that most of them will fail. As long as you can prove you've learned something, there is not a penalty for failure. Look at how Jeff Bezos treated a high-profile failure in this Wired article (scroll down to the Jason Kilar part) -- he just acknowledges it and moves on.
5. Celebrate success. Don't overlook the power of an attaboy and an inscribed chunk of lucite. HEROes need public encouragement. At Comcast, service standouts get the Bowtie Award, named after company founder Ralph Roberts. An email celebrating a successful HERO project is never out of place. We celebrate success at Forrester a lot -- we have company meetings almost monthly, give out a lot of Veuve Cliquot champagne, and recognize values like collaboration and creativity. One of the Brits who used to work here called these "happy clappy" meetings (there's an awful lot of applause) but people love to get recognized.

What has been your experience with leadership in the social era?

Photo credit: Pedrosimoes7.