Corporate social technology strategy, Purists, and Corporatists -- why companies CAN participate

by Josh Bernoff

It's time for me to weigh in on the question: can companies be part of the social world?

This is in part a reaction to Shel Israel's comments of a few months back and my colleague Jeremiah's Owyang's responses. But it's an ongoing issue that comes up often in the blogosphere in my conversations with corporate clients.

On the one side are the folks who say, "The social world is an emergent phenomenon generated by people connecting." The original Cluetrain Manifesto rails against many aspects of the corporate world and basically posits that the right way for companies to get involved is for people inside those companies to connect to their customers. Based on my recent participation at a Cluetrain event, Cluetrain author Doc Searls still harbors a lot of skepticism toward corporations pursuing goals in the social world. For shorthand, let's call these folks the Purists.

On the other side are companies who are looking at the social Internet and saying "how can we exploit this to do what we already do -- PR and advertising, for example?" PR and advertising are mostly one-way, broadcast type communications, and these folks continue to try to adapt those one-way modes of thinking in the two-way, read-write world of social computing. I'll caricature these folks as the Corporatists.

I'm here to stand up and proudly say, Purists and Corporatists, you're both wrong.

Here's how I suggest people in companies think about social computing.

If you're in a company, your company can participate. In fact, you must participate. Your customers and prospects are connecting and talking about your products and your company right now -- this is what we call the groundswell. You need to be a part of the conversation. You might start a blog, you might start a Facebook group, you might start a community, or begin twittering, but until you start connecting as a corporate employee, you won't understand what's going on out there. And it can and will bite you.

You also need to start with the recognition that you are not now, nor will you ever be, in control of this "channel," "world," "phenomenon," or whatever you want to call it. It goes its own way and it will continually surprise you. This is where the Purists are right and the Corporatists are fooling themselves. But this is not so new. When my colleague Charlene Li was writing about how to deal with Wikipedia, I suggested it's no different in some ways from the New York Times -- you can influence it, but you're not in charge of it. Same with the rest of the social world -- you can participate, but not control. If this scares you, great. If you can't deal with it, somebody else in your company had better head up your social technology efforts.

But the fundamental principle behind about 80% of our book Groundswell is that you can accomplish corporate objectives in the social world. This is what bugs the Purists. As a corporate staffer, you have no business in the groundswell unless you know what you are trying to do there. You could be trying to increase awareness, generate word of mouth, surface leads, save on support costs, on tap into innovation. But regardless, no corporate activity should go forward without a measurable goal, and this is no different.

So, do you participate as an individual or a corporation? Of course, as a corporation. Companies may be made of people, but those people are not free agents. Your boss needs to know what you're doing, and, we argue in the book, your top management should, too, since they're going to inevitably get some surprises from these efforts. You'll need budget (maybe not a lot), and you need cover. Sometimes you need to push the membrane that Rob Scoble and Shel Israel talk about, finding ways to stretch corporate attitudes just enough to succeed. But you'd better be aligned with the corporation's goals, if not necessarily its tactics and every single one of its rules.

There's a lot of talk about authenticity, too. But the tone I hear from some Purists seems to be that if it's corporate, it has to involve lying, or at least deception. Please. Corporations, like people, have interests. They can talk about their products and services honestly. Of course they will be pro-company -- that's authentic, to believe in what you're making. But a pro-company attitude doesn't prevent two-way communication. In fact, in idea-generating applications like salesforce.com's IdeaExchange, or Credit Mutuel's sijetaisbanquier.com, it's that give and take between customers and people inside the company that fuels the innovation.

Teams -- small teams -- get most social projects done. Corporate bloggers may need help with moderation. Specifying, managing, and moderating communities is not a one-person job. These applications work best when they support corporate goals anyway. That's what gets you backers within the company, not just fearful detractors.

So it is no sin to conceive, create, and deploy a corporate social application. If you have a clear objective and can measure it, you are even likely to succeed. Just recognize that you must start from authenticity, it's a dialogue, and that the social world cannot be controlled. The companies I work with are starting to do this. It's not impossible -- in fact, it's the beginning of an incredible transformation. And their participation won't kill the groundswell, it will make it richer.

SNCR Survey And Social Technographics

by Josh Bernoff

I got a nice email from Jennifer McClure, Executive Director of the Society for New Communications Research. They're doing a survey on Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age Of Social Media.

Go ahead, take it yourself. They'll send you a free copy of the research.

While you're taking the survey, you might want to take a close look at question 30, which caught our eye. Here it is.

If this looks familiar to you, it may be that you saw something very like it in our research or right here on this blog. It's highly compatible with the Social Technographics ladder that we use to classify consumers.

 

Does this make our classification some kind of a standard?

We'll look forward to seeing the results of the research at their Forum April 22-25 in Sonoma.

Cluetrain Revisited: Jake McKee, Lego hero (liveblogged)

by Josh Bernoff

Jake offered a paean to Cluetrain. Read my description -- see how many Cluetrain ideas you can see.

Jake McKee told us the incredible story of what Lego was like before engaging with AFOLs (adult fans of Lego), and how it changed as a result of his introduction of those fans to the company.

Jake explained that when he started there, Lego tried not to listen to its consumers: "we don't accept unsolicited ideas".

But an engaged kid spends about $25 per year. AFOLs spend on average $2000. Fans are weird. But their events attract lots of kids, and even media.

So, time for a culture shift. Jake began to evangelize the idea that "Lego is a creative medium" -- the AFOL's central idea.

First step: don't respect the hierarchy.

Second: use tenacity and get air cover (he got that from Tormod Askildsen, who's in our book).

Third: get the company to come down from its ivory tower. He proved that the fans new more about Lego than the people at the company. He invited fans in to look at a set of new products (Lego trains) -- which they rejected. Result: the designers redesigned the sets based on the fans' feedback.

Fourth: there are no secrets. Jake released information about bricks for the fans, which created an internal uproar -- until he proved that the "secret" wasn't much of a secret. And Jake repeats (and I agree) -- skip the NDA. NDAs inhibit conversation. (For the record, I respect NDAs, but I find them frustrating.) Lawyers want to reduce risk to zero -- but that is not what business is about.

Fifth: don't hold your breath.  Change takes time. "A big part of my job was to get people out of the office to visit" events -- see what's happening out there. Jake tells an incredible story of how after exposing some marketing people to a Lego event, he had to explain why people engage in hobbies.

Sixth: the answers are not within the company. AFOLs had built their own tools where they shared everything from the contents of Lego sets to photo sharing. "There were so many tools, I didn't have to build anything." Lesson here: don't build tools if your community already has them.

Summation: "Success by 1000 paper cuts." Don't start with a huge program, build small piece by small piece. "Your company has a fan club" -- go for it.

Listening to Jake's story, I heard a lot of echoes of themes we talk about in the book -- getting cover, starting small, reaching out to customers, letting them take charge. If Lego can do it, so can you!

Cluetrain Revisited: Doc Searls, still radical 10 years later (liveblogged)

by Josh Bernoff

Doc Searls started his talk at the Cluetrain @ 10 event talking about the genesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto. This was fascinating to me. He started with reflections of the overblown 90's (Push, Pointcast). "Customers treated as plankton." A reaction to the overblown venture investments in "capturing eyeballs" in the 90s.

The genesis of a lot of those ideas as he described (e.g. 95 theses, "markets are conversations") sounds as if it wasn't all that thoughtful. And didn't take that long to write. But what made these ideas so fresh and powerful (my opinion here) is that it was obvious to them long before anyone else was even thinking about it. The cluetrain authors were unafraid to talk about it frankly. And -- this is important -- they had each other to bounce things off of.

Does it hold up after 10 years? Rereading it -- and listening to Doc -- it does. The strident tone seems a bit "of its time" -- that is, they were screaming about things you don't have to scream about any more. But the content seems as true as it did when it was written.

But Doc has remained way out in front of what's happening, rather than consolidating the gains we made in getting to the Cluetrain world.

I love Doc's take on Web 2.0. He implies that O'Reilly's emphasis on the software is misplaced -- and wants to know why he uses advertising as his first example. I concur. The real change is about people and how they relate to business -- software is the enabler. Fascinating, as Doc points out, that Google search "Web 2.0" search yields ads about Advertising.

He's still got a problem with advertisers and advertising -- including on Facebook. Searls' updated theses (numbering is not a mistake -- he skipped a few)

1. Advertising as we know it will die.

2. Herding people into walled gardens and guessing about what makes them "social" will seem as absurd as it actually is. (Facebook is his example.)

3. We will realize that the most important producers are what we used to call consumers. (Yup.)

4. The value chain will be replaced by the value constellation. (Many connections.)

5. "What's your business model?" will no longer be asked of everything. (What's the business model for your kids?)

6. We will make money by maximizing "because effects". ("Because effects" are what happen when you make more money because of something than with it.) E.g. search and blogging.

8. We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. (Agreements between companies and customers shouldn't be skewed in favor of the companies.) At Harvard Law they call this VRM -- vendor relationship management -- which is what Searls is working on (projectvrm.org).

10. We'll marry the live web to the value constellation. (The Live Web isn't just about stars. Relationships of anybody to anybody.)

Examples: The personal RFP -- find me what I need (driven by buyer not seller) I should be able to manage my own health care data. I should be able to inquire and relate to whole markets on the fly.

Here's my take on all this. I am pleased that Doc is still rattling cages. And I think he makes a lot of good points.

Respectfully: I think this is still a little naive about companies and how they behave. "Companies should" statements don't typically get companies to go along. So I wish there was more engaging with companies in this speech.

As the cluetrain audience here will hear from me in a few hours, I think Doc is still a radical -- a bomb-thrower, a provocateur. But to create real change, you have to be a revolutionary -- someone who engages with the powers that be to create major change. We need radicals. But we need revolutionaries too.

Why Social Applications Will Thrive In A Recession

by Josh Bernoff

Is a recession coming? Don't ask me -- I'm not an economist, and even the economists don't really know. But if it's anything like the last recession, advertising will plummet and experimental media will crater. (In the 2001 recession, US advertising dropped 9% and Internet advertising plummeted 27%, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson.)

But do not panic. Things are different this time.

Here's what smart marketers should know:

• It's not a tech bubble. The last recession was caused by the dot-com bubble and the terrorist attacks. There was a lot of ignorant money out there chasing illusory opportunity, and companies had overinvested in technology. This time, the precipitating event is a housing bubble, and technology spending is not irrational.

• Awareness ads will lose effectiveness. Advertising (or as we often call it, "shouting") is mostly about generating awareness and reinforcing brands. In a recession, ordinary consumers like you and me aren't as willing to spend. Sure, we'll be aware of the product, but that doesn't make so much difference when you're worried about your future. Advertising is expensive and is a lot easier to cut than headcount. Many are predicting ad spending will hold up; I'm not so sure.

• But social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks . . . they're about people connecting with other people. You may resist advertising if your finances are tight, but if your bud tells you that new movie is really worth seeing or that the Gap has the cutest new tops, that's more persuasive than advertising. Basically, in a recession, the consideration phase is more important than awareness -- and that's where advertising flops and social applications succeed.

• It's cheap. Social applications can be nearly free (think blogs, Ning.com, facebook pages) and even more sophisticated communities are typically $30K to $200K -- a lot cheaper than a significant sized ad campaign. After our last post, all the responses were positive. One interactive marketer from a highly cyclical company told us this:

"Budgets are tight in light of the economic conditions as you surmise, but [the budget for social applications] has not been impacted. We are still keen to move forward with our trial and have support….at this point anyway.  Interactive in general has been more protected than other comms areas and saw an increase."

• It's measurable. If your social application doesn't have a measurable output, you'd better get one. But if it does -- if it generates leads, or conversions, or buzz, or something useful -- then you can prove it's working. beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads, Procter & Gamble told us. That won't get cut in a recession.

These same arguments apply to some other forms of online marketing, including search ads and email marketing. Those are going to be good investments in a recession. If you're smart, you'll position yourself now with proof your apps are working. Then when the ad dollars get tight, you'll be in good shape.

Click here to see what we wrote for our clients (we've made this piece of research free for everyone).

Also on this topic, see also David Armano's post on 10 ways digital can help you thrive in a recession. And an earlier Paul LaMonica post (CNN Money) featuring my old colleague Jim Nail.

Finally: I'm anticipating this topic might get some currency around the blogosphere and the mediasphere . . . if you want to follow the reactions, tune in to my twitter feed at twitter.com/jbernoff

How the recession will affect social applications

by Josh Bernoff

I'm just curious -- corporate social strategists: Are you getting pushback in the face of the potential recession? Are your budgets being cut? Or maybe increased?

Add your comments here or email me at jbernoff (at) forrester.com -- I'd love to hear from you.

The social profile of political candidates

by Josh Bernoff

We don't normally do political polling. But when we did our last Social Technographics survey I got sneaky. I asked people who they were voting for. The result is a fascinating peek into the minds and social behaviors of voters. The full report is available to Forrester clients here, but I'll share the data we published with all of you blog readers below.

First, for your reference, here's the social technographics ladder again, most current version. As we described this spring, it show how people are at different levels of participation in social activities, and the groups can overlap.

Just as with business travelers, we can apply this to any group of people we can identify. So let's see how social participation differs among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. (For the purposes of this survey we classified people who usually vote Democrat as Democrat and people who usually vote Republican as Republicans -- the Independents are those who don't consistently vote one way or another. There weren't enough third-part types for us to get their profile.) Here's the data (over 10,000 online people surveyed nationally):

Right away you can see there is a persistent tendency for Democrats to participate more fully in social technologies. Looking at the index (all adults = 100), you can see that Democrats are at least 10% more likely to do just about anything involving social technologies. The Republicans are the opposite -- they're a lot LESS likely to participate (like Nixon's "silent majority"). They're 22% less likely to be a social network (Joiners) and 21% less likely to be uploading video or blogging (Creators). These are not extreme differences, but there are definite tendencies here, likely correlated to the fact that Republicans tend to be older than Democrats on the average. Notice that the Republicans are near par for Spectators, though -- they're watching, even if they're not as active participants. The Independents are somewhere in the middle, approaching the average in Joiner and Critic activity.

Now let's look at it by who people are voting for. Here's how the Democratic field looks (these are the top four most popular candidates in our national survey; we included Al Gore in the survey in case he decided to enter the race). Remember, these are the profile of the candidates' supporters.

There are important differences among democrats. One in three Obama voters is a Joiner, which may be helping the my.barackobama.com strategy. Edwards voters (62% Spectators) are the most likely to be consuming social applications; Clinton voters are the least, with only 49% Spectators and 42% Inactives. 34% of Gore voters are Critics -- he ought to connect with them in some sort of community or forum to make them a force for his issues in the general election. Obama, Clinton, and Edwards voters are all rich with Creators (at least 22% of their supporters) -- energize those voters and they'll start getting the Spectators excited.

The profile of supporters of Republicans is perhaps the most revealing:

Note the relatively anemic levels of Creator participation -- no Republican gets above 16%. The Creators are the voters who energize everybody else with their contribution. As we get into the general election, which of these candidates can energize the online social world? (Ron Paul, who didn't get enough votes in our poll to generate a profile, clearly could, but it seems unlikely that he'll get the chance.) It's also interesting that Mitt Romney's supporters are more active than the rest of the Republicans' -- he ought to be doing more than just having his offspring blog.

Interestingly, while as far as I know we haven't been contacted by the candidates since we published this research, we have been getting some interest from other companies. Why? Because marketers see the social drama playing out in the election and want to see what lessons can be drawn for their own brands.

Listen folks -- I can do this type of analysis for just about any group of consumers. What would you like to see next?

Social Data Applied: Looking at travelers

by Josh Bernoff

Charlene's April post about the Social Technographics ladder got picked up by hundreds of bloggers -- no surprise since it's some of the only hard data out there about how different people participate in social technologies.

Now it's time to show how that data can be put to use.

In the previous post I talked about the POST method of social strategy, the first step of which is PEOPLE. You can't undertake as strategy until you know the behaviors of your audience. But how do you analyze those behaviors?

At Forrester we solved this problem with a survey that asked not just about social behaviors but about many, many other behaviors of consumers. The result is we can create a Social Technographics Profile of just about any group.

For example, have a look at these two graphics, which are the Social Technographics Profiles of people who travel. (For the definitions of the six groups I refer you back to the Social Technographics ladder. And remember, since the groups overlap, they add to more than 100%).

What can you learn from these? First of all, leisure travelers participate in social activities at about the same rate as average online adults. So if you're planning on using social networks, or blogs, or other forms of social applications with them, you can expect some participation. But just like average Americans, 43% of them are Inactives -- you won't be able to reach this segment.

Business travelers are different. The index of 150 for Creators means that these folks are 50% more likely to blog, upload videos, or indulge in other social creation activities compared to average Americans. They're more likely to be Critics (people who react to others' content), Joiners (people in social networks) and especially, Collectors (people who use RSS or voting sites like Digg).

If you're selling business travel, now you know that you have a high chance of success with a discussion forum, you could probably ask your customers to upload pictures and have it work, you should have an RSS feed, and you may want to look at marketing through LinkedIn or Facebook. All of these are more powerful for business travelers than leisure travelers.

What should you actually do? Well, that depends on your objectives. Start with People, go on to Objectives, then follow up with Strategy, and finish with choosing a technology (POST, remember?).

If you find this interesting you should know:

• Sarah Rotman Epps' insightful report on travel and Social Technographics is available to Forrester clients here. That's where I stole the graphics from.
• There are a dozen similar graphics in Groundswell. This data is part of the value we're trying to create in the book. It's behind everything.
• We can use this to analyze anything from Toyota owners to online banking customers to Target shoppers. We are building these questions into nearly all of our surveys moving forward so we can score just about anything.
• And if you've gotten this far, stay tuned. On Monday we'll display the Social Technographics of voters -- Democrats, Republicans, and supporters of the top presidential candidates.

I think data like this is fascinating. Do you?

POST method report available for bloggers

by Josh Bernoff

Interested in our report "Objectives: The Key To Creating A Social Strategy?" The report describes the POST method in detail (see previous post).

I'll send a review copy to the first 100 bloggers to email me at groundswell@forrester.com.

Include your blog's URL with your email. Looking forward to hearing your take on this.

The POST Method: A systematic approach to social strategy

by Josh Bernoff

What do most companies do wrong when they enter the social world? No, it's not that they're being fake, or don't "get it." It's that they don't really know their objectives.

Is your company doing its social strategy backwards?

If you started by saying "we should do a blog" or "we should create a page on a social network" or "we should create a community" the answer is probably yes.

In any other business endeavor we start by figuring out what we want to accomplish. Social technologies are not magic. They accomplish things, too. It's time to stop doing social because it's cool. It's time to start doing it because it's effective.

To help clients with this fundamental idea, we invented a little acronym called POST. It's been one of the most popular ideas we've ever created, even though it's so simple and commonsensical. If you were at our consumer forum in October you saw it (and many of you who were there contacted us afterwards for help with your strategies). It's at the heart of our book Groundswell. Now I'm sharing it with all of you.

P is People. Don't start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. If you're targeting college students, use social networks. If you're reaching out business travelers, consider ratings and reviews. Forrester has great  data to help with this, but you can make some estimates on your own. Just don't start without thinking about it.

O is objectives. Pick one. Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them? Decide on your objective before you decide on a technology. Then figure out how you will measure it.

S is Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you're done. Do you want a closer, two-way relationship with your best customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones? Imagine you succeed. How will things be different afterwards? Imagine the endpoint and you'll know where to begin.

T is Technology. A community. A wiki. A blog or a hundred blogs. Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can decide with confidence.

This may sound simple to the sophisticated readers of this blog. But it works. Try it. Think your strategy through. Even if you're just clarifying your own strategy, this should help you explain it to your boss.

Or, feel free to ask us for help. it's what we do.

Thanks to all the bloggers who've posted after our presentations and encouraged us to get this out there.

UPDATE: Free review copy of the report to the first 100 bloggers who email me at groundswell@forrester.com with your blog's URL.