Background: Ideation communities are platforms where customers can post news, stories, ideas, case studies etc and other people can rate, vote for the best ideas, comment and share ideas etc. This is more sort of like a simple Digg.com models where people submit news, community curates ( votes) the best news which is showcased on the homepage.

Ideation communities are a people centric way of carrying the brand message. It is an open platform for people to talk about brand or related businesses. But unlike typical communities or social networks the focus is more on content consumption, curation ( rate/vote/ comment) and creation rather than connecting consumers or building relationships among them.

It will be interesting to see how many popular brands have used such ideation communities:

Starbucks: My Starbucks idea is one of the most popular ideation communities. The agenda is simple. The community members submit ideas on what they would want from Starbucks and others vote and comment upon the ideas they like. By the end of the day, Starbucks has the most popular, democratically decided ideas for its brands. How this benefits Starbucks is that this community automatically positions Starbucks as a brand that is all ears to its costumers which is great for any services company. Secondly it has a platform where people repeatedly come to submit ideas, comment and have conversations, that is better than any marketing campaign. Thirdly through this platform the company knows who are its biggest fans and evangelists and it knows whom to go to for positive advocacy.

Starbucks has put in a lot of effort to showcase how it is taking care of the ideas, which in fact has been the core to the success of this community. My Starbucks idea has a ‘Ideas in action‘ blog where they talk about the ideas that have been brought into action. They also have a leader board to recognize its most active members.

Dell: Surely Dell learnt it the hard way, but then Dell Ideastorm is some of the benchmark examples of brands using social media. Like my Starbucks Idea, Dell Ideastorm is also about the ideas for Dell services and products. The good thing is Dell has sustained this community and nurtured it with time by adding small timely campaigns to it. Presently I see them running ‘Storm Sessions‘.Many companies like Best Buy and Hindustan Times have tried to model their social business strategies along the same lines.

Dell has also used such Ideation platform to run periodic social media contest campaigns to promote and generate buzz on some issues. Dell Go Green and Dell Social Innovation are example of such periodic Social Media campaigns. ( As a disclaimer, I work for the firm that planned Dell Go Green )

Intuit: Intuit, the financial & accounting software company is an interesting example where an ideation community was developed to woo not end consumers but small businesses. The Intuit small business community is an ideation platform for businesses to share stories of success and business ideas and case studies to the community.How Intuit is doing it differently is that this community also showcases the full Intuit shop, intuit products, services and solutions etc. Also there are periodic campaigns and contests like ‘Business Grant Contests‘. This also helps the company position itself as a supporter to small businesses in helping them grow and bring ideas into action. Some other B2B ideation communities/ contests have been built by Intel, Nokia, Tata NEN etc

Idea Cellular: In India, the telecom company Idea has and ideation platform which is although not a community ( that is it does not have profile or relationships) but it is a good beginning. What is interesting about this platform is that it is engaging customers around  the ideas for brining change in India, which in itself is a good social object ( a lifestyle/ passion/ cause which is the core theme around which a community talks) for any community. A similar campaign was run by change.org around asking the US citizens to submit the ideas for change in America.

Conclusion: Ideation communities are a good way to make your business social. You can use them to get customer ideas for your brand, thoughts around a cause or a passion core to your brand, generate buzz through user generated ideation contests, crowd source around important objectives etc. Surely, you would need to incentivize the social behavior among consumers which mainly depends on what core theme you ask this community to ideate upon, how engaging the community is, inbuilt rewards and reputation systems etc.

Cross posted from my blog http://www.achintyagupta.com/

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• 2010 Social Media Predictions: Online Brand Communities Will Come of Age

Last week, Greenpeace launched a campaign against Nestle KitKat procuring palm oil from suppliers who are “destroying the Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing orang-utans towards extinction.”

Apart from investigative reports on Nestle’s practices, Greenpeace launched a gory video that shows a Nestle employee eating an orang-utan finger in a KitKat pack –

Nestle tried to get Google to take down the video on YouTube on the grounds of copyright violation, triggering off the Streisand Effect, as the video went viral on Vimeo and several YouTube users re-posted the video on YouTube. Now the original YouTube video is back up.

Even as Nestle made half-hearted noises about switching to sustainable palm oil, Greenpeace launched a full-on social media offensive against Nestle, changing its UK homepage into a Nestle Killer mockup and asking its supporters to protest against Nestle by sharing the video, changing their profile pictures to Nestle Killer, and boycotting Nestle products –

As fans flooded the Nestle’s Facebook Page with negative comments and Nestle Killer profile pics, a Nestle rep picked up a war of words with the fans –

To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.

Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.

You have freedom of speech and expression. Here, there are some rules we set. As in almost any other forum. It’s to keep things clear.

Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments.

– only to apologize soon afterward –

As you can see we’re learning as we go. Thanks for the comments.

This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologize. And for being rude. We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude.

Now, protesters are asking people to leave the Nestle fan page and join the Boycott Nestle group, which has close to 12000 members –

Make your point, then click bottom left “Remove me from fans” then join Boycott Nestle on Facebook. I’d really prefer to see these fan numbers dropping, at the moment there’s probably a Nestle Executive somewhere thinking it can’t all be bad given we have 95,000 + fans on Facebook! They won’t read the content and won’t take onboard that probably (guess) 94,000 of the 95,000 hate them!

Scott Douglas has created a useful prezi on the timeline of the Nestle crisis –

As the “fan revolt” against Nestle continues on Twitter and Facebook, its useful to look back at the hard lessons Nestle is learning from the debacle –

1. The balance of power is shifting away from big brands like Nestle to anti-corporate activists like Greenpeace, as activists can engage supporters at scale without substantial ad spends, thanks to the viral effect of social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. We can expect anti-corporate campaigns to become increasingly more controversial and hard-hitting, as activists try to tap into these viral loops. Can we expect brands to become more socially responsible to preempt such backlashes? I am not quite sure, but I sure hope so.

2. Brand representatives will realize that it’s almost impossible to “engage” with an angry mob of protesters. In the case of a rumor, a straight-forward response from a company representative (with a name and a face) might prompt the detractors to be more respectful. In the case of an ideological mob protest, it might only add fuel to the fire. The best approach is to promptly put up a response page on the corporate website, with relevant facts and video comments from senior executives, share it on the important social platforms, and point protesters to it. Lisa Barone has some good advise on when to respond to negative comments and when to stay quiet.

3. Finally, it’s almost always counter-productive to try to take down a video on YouTube or delete comments on a Facebook Page. On the internet, the more you try to control a conversation, the more difficult it becomes to control it. The best approach is to point to facts in a negative conversations and try to balance them out by generating more positive conversations. On a self-hosted fan community, it’s possible and normal to put comments on moderation during a backlash like this, but not on a Facebook Page. Expect brands to demand more robust moderation tools on Facebook Pages and Facebook to provide them.

In the cacophony of PR and social media experts quoting from ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ and insisting that Nestle’s social media response is an epic #fail, here are some sane voices.

Andrew Leonard in The Salon (@koxinga21) –

It’s a sad sight, to see a man (or woman) broken by the taunts of an angry mob. But what I find most confounding about this whole sorry display is that the real error here was for the moderator to act like an actual human being. Most corporate public relations is about smoothing all rough edges away with the goal of creating an essentially false version of reality, full of comforting jargon and meaningless buzzwords. Exhibit A: Nestle’s official statement on palm oil. Many of the commentators on this Facebook fracas are saying that Nestle should just have kept reiterating what was in that statement and avoided riling the crowd. But what’s the point of simply pushing regurgitated pap? How can that be considered good manners? It’s managed discourse that means nothing, and I think it’s far more degrading to the chances of real communication between corporations and consumers than the damage done by one person who shows his annoyance at a bunch of people who imagine that they are engaging in some form of meaningful social protest by posting complaints about a company while sporting juvenile profile pictures on a Facebook fan page.

I gotta say I’m kind of loving the nameless gal (or guy) who had the temerity to tell his (or her) critics “Consider yourself embraced.” That was real! That was awesome.

He or she will never make that mistake again, of course, and that just contributes to our greater social detriment. Because if we are going to use social media to its fullest capacity, it should be to help us make real connections between people — not to attack them when they reveal their own humanity.

Caroline McCarthy on CNet (@caro) –

Putting aside all judgment on who’s right and who’s wrong in this situation, we are seeing the dark side of the Facebook fan page: when what was intended to be an open way for fans to show their support was turned into a billboard of outrage on behalf of critics, and with a company representative in obvious panic over how to tame the mob. It’s rare that public opposition will reach a truly uncontrollable level, but when it does, it’s ugly.

But this is the first time that we’ve seen such a massive blow-up in the comments of a Facebook fan page. Right now, the Facebook page is one of the hottest digital marketing tools out there, and brands hearing about the Nestle debacle are also seeing the downsides of operating such a public forum to welcome consumer comments. Whether this will be remembered as a single badly mismanaged user backlash or a pratfall of social-media marketing in general has yet to be seen.

Dennis Howlett at ZDNet (@dahowlett) –

Much is being made of the Nestle PR debacle. All perfectly understandable. References to the bombing of Nestle’s Facebook presence are already being hailed as a social media case study in the making. Again, understandable. But…is it making any difference to Nestle?

Whether Nestle’s actions around the Facebook issue will have a permanent effect on its share price? Today’s evidence would suggest no. Would a change in the way Nestle manages its social media outreach make any difference? … The financial markets don’t give two hoots.

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) –

- While every company has critics, they can now organize a coordinated attack. Every company I work with has some degree of critics, it’s a natural state of the market. Now, these critics may start to organize globally by using similar tools and technologies brands are to market themselves. Expect coordinated and organized attacks from critics.

- Facebook fan page brand-jacking is the new form of tree hugging. As movements form, the organized groups can stage mass attacks on brand Facebook fan pages, overrunning it with negative messages. Like sitting in trees with banners to slow down clear cutting and spray paining messages on buildings, this is simply the digital form of real-world protest. Expect more of this in the future –not less. (Update: interesting perspective on “social media warfare“)

- Ownership isn’t clear –yet the power belongs to community. The brands think they own the Facebook fan pages, but the fans can demonstrate power and take over ownership. When you look closely, neither parties ‘owns’ the property, it belongs to Facebook –but don’t expect them to do much, brands are really on their own.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

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A friend asked me some questions on doing Recruiting through Social Media. Here’s what I answered:

1. What is the web2.0 (pl explain in the simplest terms!) and which of these can be used by the Staffing team of the company?

Web2.0 is the collective name for a lot of technologies by which people can interact with other people (and organizations) on the web, publicly and in a transparent manner. It can include forums, blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook, orkut etc.

We believe that Social technologies help people connect around some Core Dynamics – Content Generation, Conversations, Collaborating together, Community Formation and Collective Intelligence. Different functionalities enable users to connect differently

2. How widespread is the use of the web2.0 for finding top talent ? (can you give examples of companies who are doing this?) For instance, are there companies who are using Twitter to keep in touch with the campus crowd?)

The first question the recruiter needs to answer is – who is my top talent and what is he/she interested in? Primarily there are interested in the content and knowledge component of the job. Followed by organizational culture and the mechanics of the job. The recruiting firm needs to reach out to the community where top talent is likely to be present and present the above – by way of blog posts, youtube videos, pictures and discussion forums.

An example of a recruiter using Twitter is Christa Foley [@electra] of Zappos.com. She gives followers an inside look into her career at Zappos. She tweets out examples of negative recruiting interactions with potential clients, outreach she does with high school and college students, and ultimately looks for potential Zappos candidates.

A different example From HBR Blogs on how Best Buy tweeted an opening and then changed it based on feedback from the community:

Consider what happened at Best Buy when they posted a job description for a position as Senior er of Emerging Media Marketing. The qualifications included one year of active blogging experience, a preferred graduate degree, and 250+ followers on Twitter. Yes that’s right: the number of followers you have on Twitter is now finding its way into a job description. This led to internal commentary, and spawned a number of blog posts and dozens of re-tweets and conversations.

What happened next is an indication of the future direction of recruiting: in listening to these conversations, Best Buy decided that the community had other ideas — and good ones — for how this job description should look, and what the qualifications should be. As a result, the job description was crowdsourced, and anyone with an interest was invited to post qualifications to the job role on Idea X, a forum for Best Buy customers and employees. The final job description spoke to the traits of the social media revolution we are all experiencing: humor, collaboration and authenticity.

3. What are the simple ways for companies to start using the web2.0 to connect with top talent?

Here’s some things that EMC has done using social media
External employment branding – encourages bloggers to act as organic brand ambassadors
EMC Careers on YouTube – Twitter – Facebook – Wordpress – LinkedIn
Help Save Nick Glasgow – a social media campaign to save an employee suffering from cancer

Microsoft has Microspotting – An HR and recruitment focused community platform

-Twitter becomes a great medium to share news and information with people who choose to follow you – and making it relevant for their use. On a different note advertising using Google Adwords is a great way for reaching out to people interested.

- Making a Facebook page and Orkut community are other tools that businesses can do to engage talented candidates in conversation.

My view is that someone in the Marketing/Recruiting function needs to take a “Talent Community Manager” role to drive these initiatives – and to get others internally in the organization to get engaged with the candidate community. This community manager needs to have a mindset of open and honest collaboration and organizations must be clear about what objectives they expect from her/him and therefore what metrics to track to check his/her performance.

Social Media can be used as a channel to keeping candidates enagegd between the time they are handed the offer letters to the time they are on-boarded.

I think soon companies will collate all these efforts into a community that they will own – and which will have representation on social networks and blogs.

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I was reading the latest blog post on 2020 Social blog by mohit on Social Community efforts by banks and financial institutions and realized that I might have something interesting to add here. In my view the thing worth noticing about the social media efforts by these BFSI institutions is the difference in the way their communities are architectured when they are targeting different segments of customers.

Background: When it comes to investing & saving ones own hard earned money , people prefer researching, asking others, going for tried and tested methods and moreover playing safe. Investments and savings are something that are although done by almost everyone but then not everybody has an expertise and hence people generally prefer taking expert advice, ask peers, research, read news just to keep themselves informed and updated. Many banks, financial institutions, trading and brokerage companies have realized this behaviour and are using a social web presence to solve their problems.

Scope: In this post I have covered three types of social media efforts by the BFSI sector. The first category represents the social media efforts by banks & financial services towards personal banking, the second category of efforts are towards targeting corporates, SMEs & entrepreneurs while the third is towards targeting the investors into stocks to make them smart traders. You will see a fundamental difference in the way these institutions use social web to target these three different categories.

Illustration:

a) Social media efforts towards personal banking: A large no. of BFSI institutions have realized that providing a platform to people to talk and learn about their business needs helps them multifold. Firstly, it helps them position themselves as an institution which cares to enable people to make smart savings and investments. Secondly, it helps them listen relevant conversations and establish conversations and relationships for business development. Thirdly, it helps them understand the current needs and feedback of customers which is like the best market research ever. In this a very inspiring effort has been made by the Young&Free Alberta community powered by the Servus Credit Union to give a voice to the young generation. Y&F launches annual contest where the community chooses its spokesperson. This spokesperson then participates in the community as Y&F ambassador and educates and converses with others through blogs, videos etc. Y&F also oganizes many events for its commuity which include year round online contests and offline events. (For more details see mohit’s post at 2020 Social blog).

ING Direct is also making several efforts in wooing savers on social web. They have a Saver’s Blog and a community for publishing feel good news about markets and investment called Savings feel good. The news is either submitted from press or by community members. The community also runs timely contests to build interests.

Another interesting effort in this direction is by mint.com which is a maney management and budgeting software company. They have a tweet aggregator platform with tweets from various experts on savings, budgeting, retirement, loans etc.They also have an official blog on similar topics.

As you must have realized that all these communities are architectured around people expressing their financial needs and helping people make smart savings and gain important informations about investments.

b) Social media efforts for corporates, SMEs and entrepreneurs: In such efforts the focus is to help the SMEs and entrepreneurs network and gain valuable information and aid related to their business. For example the Visa Business Network helps you find out businesses in your locality, related vendors, partners, suppliers and customs. It also helps you discuss important information in your work related discussion group, set up business related goals and get help from others to achieve them. A possible goal can be ‘to same some xy amount of money by year end. The person can get interesting article links from the community on savings. Or a goal can be ‘to find business through referrals’

Effectively you can see that the aim of the community is to help businesses communicate, learn and network. It helps the financial institute powering the community listen about the financial needs and ideas among entrepreneurs. Also it sends across the message that the bank reaches out to help businesses which helps them bringing in more business. Amrican Express, HSBC and Bank of America also has similar business networks the details about which you can get from mohit’s  last blog post

Another interesting effort here is by Kiva which is a one to one micro lending community where entrepreneurs submit their business idea. For this kiva partners with micro lending institutions. The community helps the entrepreneurs reach financial targets.

c) Social media efforts focussing on stocks and trading: There are a bunch of trading communities which are helping people become smart investors, invest in right direction, communicate with expert and get relevant market information. Also these communities help professional traders gain reputation as influencers. A good example is Covester where members can follow other members investments, read and write information blogs and if they see a trader making very good investments, the can align their investments with him and give him a share in profits for sharing his data.

There are other online invester’s communities like Zecco, Moneyrec, Stockhouse and Trade2win. Tipd gives a stock and financial news aggregation platform and news community. People consume, curate and create news articles on a model similar to digg.com. The value for these stock related conversations can be estimated from the face that certain corporates like Berkshire Hathaway have discussion forums for their own stocks.

Visiting these communities are worth it. We would love to have some such India focussed communities by large banks as there are many people here who because of dearth of good investing knowledge  and lack of trust on private banks go for safest government investments like FDs and RDs giving very low returns. Also there are many who do not understand the financial jargons of the large investment products given by these banks. Banking communities can definitely help there.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

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While researching on health and wellness communities I fell upon various platforms worth of interest. It is fascinating to see that people understand that with changing times and health demands people are more interested in discussing out their health problems, helping each other referring the best practitioners and using similar social tools for health related purposes. When research shows that a majority of people seek the initial help of internet for any health research or related problems, it makes sense to make the entire health research and discussions social which is popularly known as Health 2.0.

There are a vast number of health related platforms running on the social web. On a broad scale they can be grouped as Health 2.0 communities, Health Applications and Health online tactical programs. I have discussed each of these platforms in detail below:

1) Health 2.0 communities: There are a bunch of Health 2.0 communities following roughly the same engagement architecture for the members. There are influencers (doctors, health experts, coaches, sportpersons) writing blogs and news articles on various health related topics, support forums on various topics various the influencers are participating and providing expert advice. The community members can interact with the experts on their blogs and discuss and find help for their problems on the support forums. Some such popular communities are Web MD (see pic) and Aarp.org’s health page. There are various other communities like Steady Health using news aggregation models similar to digg.com where members submit their health related news and others curate (rate/vote) the news articles to get the most popular news on the homepage. In India similar health 2.0 communities like Bolohealth are gaining interest. Similarly Quaker oats too has health related discussion forum on its Good morning heart community.

Apart from these independent health and wellness communities, there are some hospitals powering such communities too. Mayoclinc for example supports blogs and stories from patients, relatives, friends and staff of Mayo hospital at sharing.mayoclinic.org

2) Health Applications: There are many interesting health applications on the social web. One such application is Patients like me where you can enter various communities, feed your personal health data and find patients like you and get relevant help. Another interesting health application is by Gold’s gym (see pic) which is running of facebook. Here the members can set their personal health goals ( like losing weight etc.), find people like them, recruit supporters and post their progress. Other members can provide support and comment on their progress. In India saffola ( an Indian edible oil company) is currently running a health application where people can set up goals for better living, find people like them and get health tips.

3) Online tactical programs:  These include short user generated contests or advocacy programs run on the social web. An example of such a user generated contest to promote health was run by Gimme20 health community where participants were asked to submit their fitness stories in form of pictures, text or videos to win prizes. Mayoclinic Hospital runs an advocacy program where the patients can submit stories about their experiences with mayo clinic. Similarly another hospital chain Porter Adventis Hospital allows members to start free ‘carepage’ which are personalized web pages by/to patients and their families /friends to provide emotional and moral support.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• IT Employer brands on Social Media
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• LiveMint Story on My NASSCOM Foundation Workshop on Social Media for Non-Profits
• My NASSCOM Foundation Workshop on Social Media for Non-Profits

Last week, the social Web felt a bit like a bad holiday sale…as some notable brands suffered collisions with their respective audiences. The combination of business processes and the consumer reactions, expressed via social media, played a role in each of them.

Post continues here.

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I was pleasantly surprised recently to see that Tata Indicom is using its account statements to invite customers to participate in its blog and forum –

I have been presenting slides on how real employees (including old friend Nidhi) use the Tata Indicom corporate blog to have real conversations with their customers –

I tend to be very particular about building the right customer community platform using the right software (which, very often, is something like Lithium), and for a reason. The right platform enables and encourages the right behavior, opens up new degrees of freedom, both for community users and the administrators.

However, the Tata Indicom example is a reminder for me that brands can do a lot of right things without using sophisticated software. Their blog is built on the free Wordpress blogging software and their forum is built on vBulletin, not a particularly sophisticated forum software. The forum user interface is unwieldy, the different pieces of software don’t speak to each other, and there’s only so much that Tata Indicom or their customers can do with it.

However, even though Tata Indicom doesn’t have the right software to run a customer community, it sure has the right soul and, in the end, the right soul matters more than the right software.

When we build online communities for our clients, we work hard to get both the software and the soul right. Ask us how.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

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It’s too late to submit your big business idea to the WagonR Think Big Challenge now, but you should still check it out.

Basically, Maruti Suzuki has tied up with the Times Group to launch a contest to find smart business ideas, a theme that ties in with the WagonR positioning of “For the Smarter Race”.

Compared to most Indian consumer generated content contests, the WagonR Think Big Challenge aims big and does several things right.

- First, the theme of the contest, or the social object, is closely tied to the brand positioning. Smart business ideas from/ for the smarter race.

- Second, the contest is supported by television, print, radio, online and on-ground activities. Here’s a gate for the WagonR Think Big Challenge I spotted outside a Maruti Suzuki dealership next to my office:

- Third, the contest extends over city, zonal and national rounds, with prizes worth over Rs. 5o lakhs across different stages, and gives WagonR an opportunity to sustain interest in it over a long period.

- Fourth, the presence of celebrity endorser Madhavan adds a dose of appeal to the contest.

- Fifth, the contest has an active media room, and has received significant coverage in national and regional press.

Still, the contest fails to generate interest on the social web. The YouTube video has about 6000 views but no comments, the Facebook page has almost 1200 fans but no activity, the Twitter profile has less than 50 followers, and I could find less than a dozen blog posts about the contest. The contest would have benefited from a tighter integration with social platforms like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter during the voting phase and stronger social media outreach, especially to influential business bloggers.

Buoyed by the marketing spend behind the campaign, the contest website has overtaken the Maruti Suzuki website in terms of Alexa traffic rank:

However, I don’t see this interest being sustained unless WagonR comes up with a clear answer to the question: what happens after the contest?

My free advice: WagonR would do well to follow up the talent hunt contest in phase one with an online reality show in phase two, where the winners share their entrepreneurial journey in first person. Then, next year, they can perhaps mentor the next round of applicants as they seek to bring their big ideas to reality. Now, that would be a really smart idea for WagonR.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

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Meera Seth recently asked me to share my analysis on a Business World case study about an Indian retail chain E-sqd exploring whether it should dip its toes in the messy world of social media. The case ends with the E-sqd management team discussing the Motrin Mom fiasco and arguing the pros and cons of opening a corporate Twitter account.

Here’s my analysis: social media isn’t only about Twitter –

Analysis: Using A New Language
To engage social media users, its underlying value system has to be understood

The Motrin case is a popular case study of how a brand took a beating on social media. There are several similar morality tale-style case studies that argue that “unless the brand is present on social media” it will not be able to respond to negative rumours and consumer backlashes, or worse, get brandjacked by profile squatters or spoof artists.

Such doomsday scenarios often attract the attention of senior executives and dominate conference room conversations about social media. These conversations inevitably involve conflicting points of view, as executives and managers have different comfort levels with social platforms in their personal avatars, and may lead to one of these five possible scenarios.

1. Sometimes, these horror stories scare away executives from social media, as they associate social media with morchas and mob mentality.

2. Sometimes, executives correctly decide that such scenarios are an exception rather than the rule, and creating an elaborate social media presence as a form of insurance isn’t really an attractive proposition.

3. Some recognise the value of listening to social media conversations and start a listening programme, but are disappointed when they realise that no one is really talking about them.

4. Some executives mandate a corporate Twitter account, or Facebook page, and realise that engaging people takes time and, sometimes, a dedicated resource.

5. Still other managers decide to dip their toes in social media themselves and create a Twitter profile, or perhaps even a personal blog.

In all these scenarios, executives are disappointed with the results in the first three months — 200-odd followers on Twitter, 125 fans on Facebook, 22 or so subscribers on the blog — and decide that Twitter and Facebook are peripheral to their business, perhaps even a distraction. Often, they are right.

The problem is not with the social platforms themselves. Twitter, SMSGupShup, Facebook, Orkut, Flickr and YouTube are all powerful platforms that have enabled new forms of social behaviour and unleashed unparalleled creativity among their users. The problem is with the excessive focus on the platform of the year.

These social platforms are transient, the underlying value system is important, which can be summarised in the form of five archetypes, or the Five Cs of social media.

Consumer Generated Content: Your consumers are authors, photographers and filmmakers, all rolled into one. Tap into their creativity and ask them to interpret your brand.

Conversations: Your customers, partners and employees are talking about you, in public. Listen to them, reach out to them and engage them in a two-way conversation.

Collaboration: People work together in flow when they connect with each other as people. Create rich profiles and shared workspaces to enable people to help each other.

Community: Communities come together around a shared social object — a lifestyle, cause or passion. Build and nurture a platform to host these conversations and become associated with an idea that is bigger than your brand.

Collective Intelligence: Customers, employees and partners can give you new ideas and insights. Ask for their ideas, help them build on these ideas, recognise and reward them for their contribution.

So, Lopa should start by asking how can these five underlying dynamics help E-sqd achieve its business objective of becoming a world-class lifestyle retail chain? Can we seek insights from our customers on what Easy Elegance means to them? Can we identify E-sqd evangelists and ask them to share stories about items they found at the store and the reactions these items elicited from family and friends? Can we integrate the customer community with our loyalty programme? Can we ask our store employees to share stories on how they handled a particularly difficult customer or went out of their way to help a regular customer? Can we collect stories from the internet on what Indians are saying about fashion, style and design, and showcase them on this community platform?

If Lopa looks beyond Twitter and asks herself these questions, she will realise that E-sqd can do so much with social media and that it is easy to start.

Also, if her CEO Dwij Nanda asks if the internet user base in India is significant enough, Lopa can tell him that India’s 40 million active internet users are not only young, urban and upwardly mobile, but also heavy users of social networking and blogging platforms. Add to that India’s 400 million mobile subscribers, of which 20 million use group SMSing services and 20 million use mobile internet. The base is big enough to be interesting to most Indian marketers, certainly a high-end lifestyle retail chain such as E-sqd.

Gaurav Mishra (gauravonomics.com) helps Indian and international brands build and nurture online communities as CEO of business consultancy 2020 Social (2020social.com).

(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 14-12-2009)

Do ask us how an India retail chain can benefit from building and nurturing an online customer community.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social media and Social Change.

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• Exchange4Media Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
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BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.

When Gautam met Sumit he said “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years – if we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights… my question is how can I help help them to tap their full potential and connect with each other?”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Gautam tells Sumit “You have the right approach, however before jumping into an initiative like this you have to think through certain aspects”

“What are those?” Sumit asked, intrigued.

“The first thing is you have to understand such an initiative will mean disrupting existing power structures – are you sure you want to do that? Will the rest of the management team support this initiative?”

Sumit pondered on Gautam’s question “Maybe not, but I am prepared to push my way through – as this is what will enable us to break to the next level”

“You can’t push an initiative like this Sumit, it has to be owned by all the leadership.. however what you can influence is by leading the way – and influencing others to follow your lead. Let’s assume over all your objective is to increase the engagement of people with the organization and with each other, would that be right?” asked Gautam

“Yes true” agreed Sumit

“You need to build a community that will congregate around areas of work, levels and other areas of interest”

“You mean like a Facebook for the whole group?” Sumit asked.

“Well, it would look like that, and have rich features to encourage people to connect with each other – however there would be features that would encourage a mix of social and business interaction. What would really help this would be the softer aspects of the initiative”

“Such as…?”

“It would encourage people to connect with others, discover people across organizational silos, understand them beyond their roles as individuals – and trigger overall encouragement. It has been proven that having friends is a sign that people will be more engaged at work.”

“Really…?”

“Of course, people like to work in a place that enables them to bring their whole selves at work”

“How do we know that people won’t just goof off? Keep chatting?”

“You’ve got to give them guidelines, Sumit. We can help you in evolving these guidelines. Many large organizations have such guidelines. However, you have to remember that the ‘how we use it’ will become a process when people realise that they have to work with people, not to do things to them. People like you and your senior team will be instrumental in creating that mindset – which is why we’ll have to collaborate with them extensively to make this a success.”

If you liked this post, you should also read:

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• Designing Organizational Learning for the Social Business
• The making of a Social Organization