Free Empowered Webinar September 10 -- how HEROes will transform your business

We'd like to come to where you work and talk to you about Empowered. All of you. All on the same day, Friday September 10, at 12:00 eastern time. Feel free to bring your lunch.

We want you to embrace the innovation that come from Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives -- HEROes, within your company.

As part of the launch of Empowered, we're presenting a free Webinar. In this Webinar, you'll hear about some of the incredible people we feature in Empowered -- like Leonard Bonacci, who turned 68,000 Philadelphia Eagles fans into stadium security allies, and Gerald Shields, the Aflac CIO who energized the people in his company to create social applications for partners and customers. This Webinar is for marketers, customer support people, Web developers, technology vendors, and IT people -- it covers the full range of advice that's in the book.

We'll provide insights into some of the main concepts in the book, including Peer Influence Analysis, the HERO Compact, and the HERO Index, which is a measure of how many HEROes there are in your your industry, your company, or your department.

It takes empowered employees -- HEROes -- to succeed in this world of empowered customers. We really do want to change the way organizations run so they can tap the power of those HEROes. This Webinar shows how you can join us on that mission.

Sign up here.

Detailed schedule information:

Date: 10 September

Time: 12:00 noon Eastern Time, 9:00 am Pacific Time, 1700 London Time, 1800 Central European Time

Duration: 60 minutes

Location: Your computer (we'll send you the link)

Technical note: this Webinar will use the sound on your computer, not a dial-in connection. It will also include video of us. We're using Sonic Foundry's MediaSite, which requires Microsoft Silverlight. To test your computer for compatibility, go here.

Brian Solis' Engage and how to use it

by Josh Bernoff

Here's what I think about Brian Solis' book Engage.  You should buy it. And you shouldn't necessarily read it start to finish. But you'll find yourself diving in again and again when you need help with . . . just about anything social.

To be fair, I was intimidated. I had promised Brian a review, but the thing is 382 pages long. And Brian has made some unfortunate choices -- Chapters 3 through 14 (of 25 total) have the titles "The New Media University: Social Media 101," "The New Media University: Social Media 201" and so on. It doesn't exactly invite you in.

And yet, it turns out this book is going to be one of the most useful things out there for anyone social.

Start with the theme. Brian's manifesto is "Engage or Die." This is what drives him to write, and it's a good start. It's a good twist on a theme that's been embraced, in one form or another, by the wide variety of people out there who are trying to build social applications.

This is followed by what may be the most comprehensive, believable book on social media available anywhere. Starting with the social media statistics (Chapter 2) and continuing with the "101, 201, ..." chapters I mentioned earlier, this book hits everything, and I mean everything, that there is to know about social applications. There's a complete list of tools and technologies. There are not one, but two definitions of Social Media, of which I prefer the shorter:

Social media is any tool or service that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations.

There's a list of the top 10 monetization trends for social media and microcommunities. There's a nice discussion of how to separate (or blend) your personal self from your corporate self. In fact, whatever you're looking for, it's here. Not one, but several complete sets of social media guidelines from the likes of Intel and IBM, plus a template for your own.

Brian is not shy about quoting others. For example, the Forrester/Groundswell Social Technographics Profile gets a full writeup here, along with other competing systems.

It's a little difficult to get a read on Brian's position on some issues, since he typically quotes both (or all) sides of an argument. But there is no better way than bone up for that argument than with this book.

So, here's what you should do.

If you're new to social media, I'm a bit surprised you're showing up at this blog, but in any case, read this book cover to cover. It will be worth it.

If you're experienced, buy this book and go back into it when you need help. Use the index, the glossary, and the other tools in this book to find what you're looking for. Because whatever it is you're looking for, it's here. When you're preparing that presentation, looking for that example, or trying to convince your boss, you'll find yourself looking in this book for help.

If you're a professor teaching social media, recommend this for your students.

Brian, thanks for putting this all together, it must have been quite an effort. We appreciate it.

Meet us in San Francisco, Boston, London, and New York

The Empowered book tour is beginning. Here's where you can meet us -- and we'll be adding more events around the ones in these cities as we get closer to the dates:

Josh, San Francisco/San Jose, August 23-27. Josh will be speaking at the ANA Business-to-Business Marketing Leadership Conference in San Jose on August 26. Topic "B-to-B Social Media and The Dynamics Of Peer Influence." I'm also meeting with some journalists and bloggers and doing a client event at a San Francisco Giants game. (Some of this travel has its advantages . . .)

Josh, Chicago, September 14-15. Josh working with clients.

Ted, Boston, September 16-17. Ted will be speaking at Forrester's Security Forum 2010 on "The Role of Security In An Empowered Enterprise". Empowering employees can be scary for information security professionals -- Ted will explain the security model that can keep them innovating safely.

Josh, London, September 21-22. Josh will be giving a keynote at ad:tech London. Topic: "The Dynamics of Peer Influence."

Josh and Ted, New York, September 27-28. We give a combined talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. If you're in New York, this is the perfect chance to hear more about the whole book and the implications of the HERO idea for marketing, management, and IT.

Josh, Boston, September 30. Josh will give a book talk to the Ad Club of Boston.

We hope to see you in one of these places. For more details on our travel schedule and speeches, see the authors page which lists them all.

How to win the Forrester Groundswell Awards

by Josh Bernoff

The Forrester Groundswell Awards entry deadline is in two weeks, on August 27. As usual, most of you have waited until the last two weeks to enter. If you haven't entered yet but plan to, this advice is for you. (If you just want to see other people's entries, click on the items at the left of the Awards site.)

Our awards process is transparent, and so are our criteria. So in interests of helping you spend your time wisely, let me tell you how to win. I'll use examples from entries already submitted, and from previous winners. (Just because I show an example doesn't mean it will win ... we judge things in detail, this is just from a cursory review.)

I'm going to assume you already built a kick-ass social or mobile application for customers or employees. So your only problem is to show it off. Here are three pieces of advice:

1.Include numbers. Show us, as quantitatively as you can, how you accomplished a business goal. For  example, this entry from TurboTax has some impressive numbers including a sales increase of 18%. That kind of thing gets our attention.

2. Link to more detail on the Web. For example, this entry from Federated Media links to a PDF file on Google Docs. The PDF file has links out to several other places, including a video. Our entry form may be limited in space, but with the URL you get to type into it, you can link out to any place on the Web where you talk about your entry. Some people just link to a blog posts about their entry ... that's a nice way to tell others that you're entering the awards even as you provide the backup information we need to judge the entry fully. In the case of PTC the blog post was right within their own community, which is a nice touch.

3. Point out what you've done that's unique. For example, this employee application from UPS saved money by using viral techniques to accelerate hiring -- not a typical objective for a social application.

By the way, don't agonize about what category to put your entry in. The FAQ gives details on this, but if we determine that your entry would be more likely to win in a different category, we'll move it.

We'll leave with three pieces of advice on what NOT to do.

1. Don't wait until the last minute. A good entry is made up of a lot of pieces -- an external site, a graphic, some statistics on how you accomplished business goals. You're not going to be able to do a good job if you have to assemble this on the last day. And we won't accept late entries -- the deadline remains August 27.

2. Don't forget to get your client's permission. Those who submit the entries -- including technology vendors, PR agencies, and advertising agencies -- need to secure permission to publish the information. We've gotten those embarrassing calls -- "Our client doesn't want to make this public, can you please take it down off the site?" -- and they make you, the agency or vendor, look very bad. You did check first, didn't you?

3. Don't call us to see if you've won. I promise, if you've won, we'll call you.

So, now you know how to win. Get those entries in! We can't wait to judge them.

How Are You Using iPad For Business?

by Ted Schadler

(Cross-posted from Ted's blog)

We are getting many requests for help on iPad strategies for the enterprise. It's clear why. iPads are a tremendously empowering technology that any employee can buy. My colleague Andy Jaquith has a report coming real soon now on the security aspects of iPhones and iPads, and I'm launching research on case studies of iPad in the enterprise.

I am currently hearing about three business scenarios for iPad and tablets, but I'd love hear of your experiences, plans, concerns, or frustrations. Ping me at tschadler(at)forrester(dot)com. Here are the three scenarios:

1. Sales people out in the field. This is the "Hollywood pitch deck" scenario. The iPad, particularly with a cover that can prop it up a bit, is a great way to scroll through slides to show a customer or demonstrate a Web site. In one situation, I heard that there's a competition brewing for who can manipulate the Web site upside down (so the client across the table sees it right side up) without making any mistakes. Now there's a new skill for sales: upside down Web browsing.
2. Executives on an overnight trip. No, iPad doesn't replace a laptop (at least not yet; more on this below). But it's great for email, calendar, reviewing documents, and presenting PDF or Keynote decks.
3. Warehouse managers, retail floor staff, medical staff, and anybody else that needs real access to apps while on their feet. iPad's form factor, battery life, mobile Internet access, panoply of applications, and touchscreen abilities make it a great device for these typically frustrated and under-served employees. Why retail floor staff? Because then a customer can be served with a custom order while they're looking at the too-small-but-way-cool sweater on the rack.

So what can't iPad (yet) do? Here are my top three requests:

1. Full Microsoft Office support. Microsoft's missing a huge opportunity to build apps that can create and edit common documents. Tablets are going to be huge, but Microsoft's Office business will have to device-agnostic to avoid getting displaced on it. Today, I have to use Keynote to make a presentation. But I'd rather use PowerPoint. The Office Web Apps products could solve this problem fairly easily. Until we get that, iPad will never replace a laptop.
2. Mouse support. For pete's sake, I can use a bluetooth keyboard, why can't I use a bluetooth mouse? That would make it a full authoring tool. Until we get that, people will suffer finger contortions and stiff necks reaching over their keyboard to touch the screen.
3. More and better business apps. This is mostly a matter of waiting for the market to build great iPad apps. We have some great ones already: Citrix GoToMeeting, Cisco WebEx, Email, and I'm sure a whole lot more that you'll tell me about. But until we get access to corporate applications, employees will still have to log around their laptops.

I'm working on a report for the Fall on using tablets for business, and I'll be presenting on this empowering technology at our Content & Collaboration Forum in October, so please let me know what you're interested in learning.

Alos, please let me know how you are using iPad for business. What features do you want? What other tablets are you excited about?

Great new goodies for Empowered readers

by Josh Bernoff

Maybe you've noticed that our Web site has become Empowered. This is in preparation for our book launch on September 14, and it means a lot more than little lightning bolts in the graphic design. We have a few new tools for you to play with now. You can think of this as a tour of the new site (go ahead, poke around) or a bunch of new goodies intended to help out companies and highly empowered and resourceful operatives -- HEROes -- within them.

Some highlights:

• A new tool to help you evaluate your projects. We've taken the effort-value evaluation (EVE) from the book and turned it into a widget. If you're about to start a technology-involved project -- a new community, a Facebook page, a mobile application, or the like -- answer a few questions and we'll tell you just what level of challenge you're in for. The tool emails you the results, so you can forward them to people you're trying to collaborate with or get approval from.

• Chapter 1 of Empowered for your review. Register with us to get access to Chapter 1 -- including cool stories from Maytag and Best Buy and the main thesis of the book. If you're already registered with Forrester, or if you're a client, you can just log in and download it.

• Case studies. It's the stories of HEROes that (I think) make Empowered compelling. That's a big part of what people told me they loved about Groundswell, and we've gone deeper here into what it actually takes to be a HERO in a big company. We've listed them to give you a peek into the folks, stories, and companies featured in Empowered.

• Follow our travels. Where Ted and I are speaking and you can meet us.

We'd love your feedback, especially on the EVE Widget.

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.