Guiding principles for success in the networked world

I've been thinking about some guiding principles to apply to working in the networked world.

Let me know if you think they are helpful?

• None of us is as clever as all of us

• Adaptation to an environment is always best achieved by those living in the environment

• That which we create, we embrace.(Alan Moore)

• Less messages; better products

• No broadcast - only relevance.

These guiding principles can be applied to any proposed course of action as a sense check - a measure we are doing things in the way of the networked world.

Eg None of us is as clever as all of us - leads us to actions which open processes to the crowd. There are always better ideas outside the org than in.

Adaptation... Is always best achieved by those living in the environment: leads us to engage with those niche communities for whom the outcomes matter most.

That which we create, we embrace - leads us to value the power of friend recommendation - delivered through creating WITH the right communities rather than delivering outcomes at them.

Less messages, better products: reminds us when engaging in social media, peer to peer messaging (recommendation) is a happy by product of community engagement in the co-creation of things they care about. Messages aren't for layering on. They are a consequence of action.

No broadcast - only relevance: Communication must always be on a human scale. Relevant, useful and welcomed. All the rest is spam.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so I may have to tidy it up later ;-)

Breakfast in London, Manchester and Leeds

E-Consultancy have signed me (and 90:10 Group) up for a UK mini-tour in November this year. This consists of breakfast briefings in London, Manchester and Leeds.

They offer an opportunity for me to spread the word about the real value of social media - the bit that's less about messaging and more about innovation. For the full outline, see below.

If you'd like to be at any of them use the following links to sign up:

• London November 2, 2010
• Manchester November 10, 2010
• Leeds November 11, 2010

Social media offers much more than an opportunity to ‘reach new audiences’. It offers powerful new efficiencies, better fit marketing, products and services your customers demand and care about – and new business models.

It can’t be layered on to your current strategies. Better-than-ever-connection with stakeholders (customers; potential customers; suppliers; employees; and anyone who cares about achieving what you have set out to achieve) places social media at the heart of what you do.

It creates disruption and opportunity in equal measure. These breakfast briefings will identify who is taking advantage – and how you can, too.

Areas for discussion include:

Location Based Services: 90:10 Group has researched the impact of LBS in social media. We’ll answer which brands are having success with FourSquare, Yelp and Gowalla and whether there is scale for LBS to matter to enough of your customers in the UK and beyond.

How innovation must shift from making better messages to making better things:
We’ll address how using the tools and techniques of social media delivers the ROI of better things, more fit for those they are intended for and how those better things come pre-loaded with the peer-to-peer power of the advocates who helped make them.

Scaling co-creation:
Bringing people together to share ideas and inspire creativity is nothing new. The scale and affordability delivered through social media is. What does this mean for everything from Marcomms planning to customer service, New Product Development to sales?

Innovation in the org:
Those who take a few steps into social media soon discover that old silos and ways of organising fail. What is CRM is PR is Customer Service is NPD and R&D.
We’ll make the case for change in the way organisations should organise and how they should now define their role as platform organisations.
Based on the forthcoming book: Platform thinking: How social media changes the organisation of business and the business of organisation.

All of this will be supported with case studies and data to take us from the theory to the practice.

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It ain't customer service until the customer receives the service.

I like Ikea. So please, this isn't meant as a specific attack - more an illustration of a general point.

And the general point I'd like to illustrate is: It ain't customer service until the customer receives the service.

Case in point: I left Ikea in Milton Keynes today having handed over a bit more at the till than I had expected. Now, anyone who has wandered through an Ikea store will tell you this is not an unusual experience. By the time you've thrown a dozen or so items of small value alongside your main purchases, you're soon in the realms of 'guess the basket'. I am used to failing at this game. So when my bill rolled up at approximately £15 more than my ready-reckoning had reckoned, I thought little of it - paid up and headed home.

En route my lovely wife and I did a bit of mental totting up. No matter how many times we did this we still fell short of the total Ikea's happily chatting checkout staff had got to.

So when we pulled on to the drive at home, I rooted out the receipt and... sure enough, we'd been double charged for a picture frame.

No matter, I have the receipt - and it's full of very useful info. Including a number to call for this kind of eventuality. Yes it was a call centre and yes there were a number of robots to select options against between me and a conversation with a human (a couple too many for comfort) but when I finished the interminal option dance I got straight through to a very nice, friendly lady. In customer service.

And what she did was tell me that this was absolutely no problem, they had a record of the transaction, they could see the error, they'd refund my card. One small snag... she couldn't actually refund the card herself. That's down to the store. Who she would alert. And they'd call me back. This afternoon.

They never did.

And there-in lies the problem. Ikea's customer service is just more marcomms unless it can actually deliver the service the customer needs. And it can't. So it's a misnomer.

Customer Service, it appears, is actually DONE (rather than talked about) in store.

And the bottom line is this: no matter how charming the people you call your 'customer service' team, no matter how professionally and courteously they deal with the customer's call, they are just another marcomms lie unless they have 100% back up from the do-ers - the deliverers of their promises.

The distance between what you say you will do and what you actually do, is a lie.

Harsh? Perhaps but for those on the receiving end of this mismatch, it's painfully true

UPDATE: Aug 7, 2010.
I had to call them back today - having not heard from Ikea to refund the money they had taken from me. This time they told me it 'takes 12 working hours'. When I probed further it turned out they would be reviewing CCTV evidence before giving me the money they have misappropriated from me. And that wouldn't happen today. I may get a call on Monday at the earliest. I told them in future I would be going v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y through their checkouts. And I advise everyone else so to do.

The initial pretence of trusing the customer was clearly a sham - a pretence - a lie. Marcomms at its very worst.

Now I'm not only out of pocket - I am angry about the misinformation and misdirection.

Ikea, not only is your customer service a misnomer, it's clear you actually don't trust your customers. Well, in at least one case, that feeling is now entirely mutual.

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Tomi Ahonen, Alan Moore and me at Oxford Uni

It's not often you get the opportunity to see both of the authors of the seminal Communities Dominate Brands in the same place at the same time (Alan Moore and Tomi T Ahonen) - and even rarer that you'll find yours truly joining them in what promises to be an exciting exploration of Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media.

Not only is that the title of Tomi's latest book, it's also the title of a course at Oxford University on October 12-13 led by Tomi, Alan and myself.

We tried to run this course almost two years ago. Now that iPhones have become so ubiquitous, there may be more readiness for it.(image via w3.org)

Hope you'll know someone who ought to be there! Book Your Place

The following is from the University of Oxford's Continuing Education site.

About the Course

Mobile is emerging as the 7th mass media channel, whilst legacy mass media witnesses a decline. This course presents a journey through some of the most advanced content and media services deployed on mobile phones, in the most advanced mobile telecoms countries such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Finland.

Intending to build on the content of Tomi T. Ahonen’s sixth book ‘Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media’, the course provides a unique opportunity to explore the taxonomy of the seven mass media, with an emphasis on what lessons can be learned when newer media are introduced.

The course will begin by examining the overall industry and the consumers of mobile content, before moving on to explain how to build compelling content to mobile, and exploding the myths of the limitations of supposedly too small keypads and tiny screens. The most promising early media content types: music, gaming, TV, internet, advertising and social networking will also be discussed.
All delegates will receive a free copy of Tomi T. Ahonen's book Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media.

Tomi T. Ahonen speaks to CNN - watch the video here

Who is it for?

Anyone in the current legacy media space who wants to understand new media, thus digital media executives in television, print, radio, cinema, recordings industries and advertising; all in the internet businesses who are interested in the future of the web; and those within mobile who work with media and convergence. No prior knowledge of mobile telecoms or media is necessary.

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Information or relationships?

I was recently engaged in a piece of work aimed at transforming an organisation through the tools and techniques of social media. A big one.

Part of the process included interviews with internal stakeholders. We used a tranche of revealing qual/quan techniques to surface use and attitudes toward social within the management team.
Two questions stand out for me in revealing those attitudes.

First, I asked which was most important: information or relationships.
Later, I asked: What's the single most important thing the Internet offers?

I'm pleased to say the answer to the first question came back, consistently, without fail: Relationships.

Excellent, that tells us a lot. We humans think relationships are really important. We're super-social.

That and we know the best route to all the other stuff we need (information) is with and via other people. Team Human has been our competitive advantage since evolution began - and we haven't forgotten that.

So what of the later question (deliberately not juxtaposed)?

Consistently we got the answer 'information'.

Eh? The Internet - the engine that drives the social, sharing peer-to-peer, human connectedness we clearly think so vital, is for information first?

What's going on here?

Well, I think what we're observing is a relatively normal response in many large orgs. The intellectual argument for engaging with customers and internally with staff, is, for the most part, won.

But there is a gulf in understanding that resides on the cultural level and which must bs overcome before you can operationalise.

Choosing information over relationships suggests you think the Internet is a place you go to harvest and take from.
It suggests an attitude to the tech from the broadcast world - a place where fans somehow appear on your Facebook page and remain on passive standby until you grace them with your advertising message.

This is not a disaster. It can be fixed by engaging for yourself in the network rather than observing from planet broadcast.

And it must be fixed. Because if you plan on showing up at this party empty handed you won't be getting quite the welcome you hoped for.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so I may have to tidy it up later ;-)

FasterFuture is regularly updated by David Cushman