2020 Social: Because Business is Social

What Are the Biggest Use Cases For Corporate Online Communities?

Posted on 07. Mar, 2010 by gaurav in Ideas, Reports

My post on the biggest Social CRM (SCRM) use cases set me thinking about the biggest use cases for corporate online communities.

A company can build and host ten different types of communities to serve different business objectives:

1. Communities of Interest: to connect customers and influencers around a lifestyle, an interest or a cause that is related to the company’s or brand’s values.

2. Communities of Practice: to connect customers and influencers around a profession, a skill or an industry that is related to the company’s offerings.

3. Evangelist Communities: to connect customers who are passionate about the company, its products or its brands and energize them to drive advocacy and referrals.

4. Employee Communities: to connect the company’s employees, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

5. Partner Communities: to connect the company’s employees and partners, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

6. Talent Communities: to showcase the company’s work culture and employees and attract prospective employees to the company.

7. Ideation Communities: to solicit and select product and process improvement ideas from employees, partners, customers and influencers.

8. Research Communities: to identify trends and user behavior related to the company’s industry or products to use in product and process innovation.

9. Social Marketplaces: so that customers can help each other select and purchase a product or service that is most appropriate for them, with some facilitation from company employees.

10. Support Communities: so that customers can help each other solve problems and use products or services in the best way, with some facilitation from company employees.

Each of these ten types of communities differ from each other not only in terms of the business objectives and the business function that owns them, but also in terms of the types and numbers of members, the type and frequency of editorial and user-created content, the functionality required in the community platform, the integration of the community platform with existing social networks and, finally, governance, reputation and reward systems.

Some of these communities are native to B2B or B2C contexts, while others can work across business contexts. Some are public or private by default, while others can work anywhere on the public-private continuum. Some of these communities are built around one primary driver — insights, response, activation, or crowd-sourcing — while others incorporate elements from all four.

The State of Community Management report from the Community Roundtable touches upon some of these aspects in its strategy section, then goes on to discuss the hands-on aspects of community management, based on its Community Maturity Model:

A particularly insightful comment relates to the 1:9:90 rule –

Unlike a commonly held belief, all communities do not develop a 90-9-1 pattern – i.e. 90% lurkers, 9% contributors, 1% authors and they should not necessarily be built with that expectation. That profile is a good benchmark for large consumer brand communities and product support communities, but is not such a good profile for market research, employee, innovation, or customer advocacy communities.

While the report is thorough and packed with practical tips, here are three ways in which Rachel Happe and Jim Storer can make it even better:

- Include case studies from the Community Roundtable members to bring alive the tips.
- Provide a how-to-guide for the organization to move from the Hierarchy stage to the Emergent Community, Community and Network stages.
- Provide tips by type of community, starting with the ten types of communities I have listed above.

Here are some of my other favorite resources on online communities:

- The Art of Community by Jono Bacon
- The Tribalization of Business report by Beeline Labs
- Building and Sustaining Brand Communities by Radian6

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

What Are the Biggest Social CRM (SCRM) Use Cases and Market Opportunities?

Posted on 06. Mar, 2010 by gaurav in Ideas, Reports

Altimeter Group has recently released a white paper in which analysts Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang have identified 18 use cases for Social CRM, based on conversations with almost 100 users, influencers and vendors.

Roughly, most of these uses cases can be classified across five business areas (Marketing, Sales, Support, Innovation, Collaboration) and four dynamics (Insights, Response, Proactive, and Crowd-Sourcing). I like this simple action-oriented classification better that coming up with names for each use case combination.

Owyang and Wang have further classified these 18 use cases based on market demand and technology maturity. Market demand reflects the urgency by organizations to deploy a use case while technology maturity reflects the market readiness and maturity of the available solutions.

In this matrix, Evangelizables present the most immediate market opportunity, for both product and consulting company, while Early Movers presents the most important marketing opportunity for product companies.

- Evangelizables (high market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by insights, response and proactive uses cases for sales, marketing and support.
- Near Tipping Points (low market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by crowd-sourcing use cases in collaboration and innovation.
- Early Movers (high market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by response uses cases in sales and marketing.
- Early Adoptions (low market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by insights use cases in collaboration and innovation.

Finally, Owyang and Wang define the 5M’s, foundational processes that cut across all these uses cases:

- Monitoring: to track social media conversations.
- Mapping: to link up social graphs, including profiles and relationships.
- Management: to tie back systems to business processes and priorities.
- Middleware: to define workflows across social and enterprise platforms.
- Measurement: to analyze metrics related to business objectives.

Here’s the Altimeter report on Social CRM:

At 2020 Social, we spend a lot of time thinking about how the Social CRM toolkit is coming together and how it can help organizations design a talk-worthy experience ecosystem.

On one hand, we are trying to put together a toolkit for marketers who want to use social CRM, but we aren’t quite there yet, as the tools don’t quite connect with each other as seamlessly as they claim to.

On the other hand, we are speaking with the product teams of some Indian CRM solutions providers, to help them extend their CRM solutions by incorporating social and community elements in them.

The trick is that social is public, many-to-many and emergent, while traditional CRM is private, one-to-one and rule-based. Social CRM lies at the intersection of social and CRM worlds and I’m not quite sure if we have figured out how to use the best from both the worlds into Social CRM.

By the way, here’s a 70+ slide deck we use for workshops on Social CRM: Decoding the Social in Social CRM. Do share your feedback.

Here are some other useful perspectives on the Altimeter Social CRM report:

- John Lovett, Prem Kumar Aparanji and Brian Solis praise the report for its pragmatic and thorough approach.

- Clo Willaerts and Jacob Morgan point out that few, if any vendors, provide a solution that works across the 5Ms highlighted in the report.

- Stefano Maggi, like myself, tries to reclassify the use cases in a way that is more action oriented, by linking them to the five objectives in “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technology“, by Charlene Li (@charleneli, at Altimeter Group) and Josh Bernoff (@jbernoff, at Forrester Research): Listening, Talking, Energizing, Embracing and Supporting.

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

Decoding Social: How Are Social Technologies Changing Business, Media and Society?

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by gaurav in Announcements, Ideas, Media

At 2020 Social, we understand that the nature of knowledge is changing from stock to flow and knowledge will become redundant in the blink of an eye, if not shared with others. On the other hand, if we share knowledge with other, often for free, they repay us with attention, and we create more opportunities for ourselves to learn and share more.

In this spirit, we will be sharing all our research, point of view, conference and workshop decks with the community of social media practitioners and enthusiasts we have learned so much from.

We speak at almost a dozen events every month, and sometimes use the same ideas across talks. For instance, I have given several related talks on “how to scale passion?” or “what can entrepreneurs learn from activists?” at BITS Pilani, IIT Roorkee, TEDIndia, Startup Saturday Delhi, Social Media Club Mumbai, IIT Delhi and Pecha Kucha Bangalore. Each talk is a work-in-progress artifact and I have seen these ideas evolve, each time I talk about them. While individual slide decks for each talk are interesting as artifacts, I’m beginning to think that it’s better to share a master slide deck (that’s in constant beta) so that people can easily refer to the latest iteration of our thinking.

With that background, let me share the latest version of our 100+ slide workshop deck titled “Decoding Social: How Are Social Technologies Changing Business, Media and Society?”

I used a version of this deck earlier today as the first of my three guest lectures at Mudra Institute of Commuications, Ahmedabad on how social technologies are changing business. I intend to use this deck next in the introductory session of my NASSCOM Foundation workshop on “how to scale passion”.

Here are the three key mantras the deck builds upon –

- The future has already arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

- The tools are transient; the values embedded in them are persistent.

- To understand how social technologies are changing media and business, begin by asking how they are changing people and society.

Here are the five key questions the deck seeks to answer –

- What are social technologies and why are they important?

- How are social technologies changing people?

- How are social technologies changing society?

- How are social technologies changing media?

- How are social technologies changing business?

If you want one of the 2020 Social experts (Gaurav, Dave, Gautam, Kaushal) to speak at your event, write to us at contact@2020social.com.

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

Designing Organizational Learning for the Social Business

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

Adults learn by social processes. David Kolb’s Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (1984) theorized that four combinations of perceiving and processing determine four learning styles that make up a learning cycle. According to Kolb, the learning cycle involves four processes that must be present for learning to occur:

• Activist – Active Experimentation (simulations, case study, homework). What’s new? I’m game for anything. Training approach – Problem solving, small group discussions, peer feedback, and homework all helpful; trainer should be a model of a professional, leaving the learner to determine her own criteria for relevance of materials.
• Reflector – Reflective Observation (logs, journals, brainstorming). I’d like time to think about this. Training approach – Lectures are helpful; trainer should provide expert interpretation (taskmaster/guide); judge performance by external criteria.
• Theorist – Abstract Conceptualization (lecture, papers, analogies). How does this relate to that? Training approach – Case studies, theory readings and thinking alone helps; almost everything else, including talking with experts, is not helpful.
• Pragmatist – Concrete Experience (laboratories, field work, observations). How can I apply this in practice? Training approach – Peer feedback is helpful; activities should apply skills; trainer is coach/helper for a self-directed autonomous learner.

It is our belief at 2020 Social that social technologies can provide each employee with their learning content that suits their overall approach and help in better retention of learning. Hence the proposed solution will have elements that cater to all the above.

Part 1: Consists of static content that would help people to discover the “must know” aspects of what is to be learned

Basic Content focused on the Subject Matter that every new Executive/Manager would go through when they join the organization. It would cover the following

1. Basics of the subject expertise – Files, Websites, Videos, List of Books that act as a primer for gaining knowledge
2. Additional Reading Material – Documents that people can download
3. List of Resources – Agencies, Thought Leaders, Partners collated at one point.
4. List of People (yellow pages) – employees who have worked on Initiatives and how to contact them (email, Skype, IM)
5. FAQs – A series of basic questions focused on what a new employee needs to know
6. Best Practices – e-books, videos, ppts.

All the above can be edited by certain key people. Other employees can add comments below the content.
Once people have gone through this they can be tested for their knowledge using a quiz/survey tool – acting as a feedback measure to what they have learnt

Part 2: Dynamic Learning

What’s new and up to date in the domain and what is the buzz around the firm’s products/services/ operations and what is the Market/Competitive Intelligence

This would consist of a stream of constantly dynamic news and market/competitor intelligence that would get updated on an employee’s dashboard that he/she can click through and view the detailed content if he/she wants.Personalised Dashboard for each Employee which can be customized to follow information and news relevant for his/her own needs

1. RSS feeds of Google Alerts with key words around the brand name, competitor name, market name.
2. RSS feeds of thought leaders’ blogs and websites to ensure new ideas come directly to the employee’s desktop
3. Twitter updates of the who’s who of subject matter so that employees can track and even interact with them. Using lists curation services like http://listorious.com/
4. Competitive Intelligence – A dynamic page which is updated with news/tweets about the major competitors based on publicly available data. Collated and shown on a specific site. The comments section would enable the employees to add their personal experiences on what the competitor is doing in their specific regions.
5. New videos and Slideshows – Using a keyword tracking processes, new videos and slides updated on the specific subjects (like “Financial marketing” or “Consumer Behavior” or “HR Trends”) would be embedded in the dashboard of the employees.

Part 3: Collaboration

Enabling employees to learn from each other using learning logs, ideation and connecting with each other.

This part would focus on how employees can use social software to connect with each other and work together to create strategies, tactics, execution. This would consist of the following parts:

1. Ideation Platform: A blog/wiki in which senior management asks for ideas around a certain campaign, product on initiatives
2. Status updates – would let other people know what the employee is working on so that if anyone has any ideas/lessons to share can do that via the tool.
3. Lessons Learnt: Similar to the ideation platform focusing on the past initiatives and what worked and best practices learnt from them
4. Sharing project plans for campaigns and getting peers’ feedback on them.
5. Q&As with partners, senior management, consultants – which are archived – and after some time some which are basic can be moved into the FAQs section in the static part.
6. Discussion around events like conferences, trainings that some employees go to – can share learnings, videos, slides with the rest of the peer group – resulting in richer and more learning

(Cross posted at Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

Employee’s Participation in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives

Posted on 15. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

I can see whatever the issues that were there during Knowledge Management also getting repeated when it comes to sharing and collaboration in the Hyper-Linked Organization aka Enterprise 2.0

During the turn of the century – when KM – and the dream to let employees share what they know – was directed , the KM advocates (like me!) suggested that knowledge sharing should be given rewards. The thought was that if a person does not see a benefit for himself why would he share his knowledge with the behavior.

I have changed my belief – in part due to analysing my own behaviour on the social web.

Behaviours like sharing and collaboration are Organizational Citizenship Behaviors – and are a product of Employee’s Engagement with the organization. This discretionary effort is not like one’s work behavior – and needs to be rewarded not monetarily – but psychologically.

Psychological rewards will impact only a very few of employees, and that is okay.

Highly engaged employees who would indulge in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors follows the Power Law – much like social networks’ law. In that a minority will create and curate the majority of the content.

So what are the ways that such employees can be recognized?

1. Public Acknowledgement – A leaderboard style table of key frequent contributors is a dynamic public assertion of who is helping and creating content
2. Social Voting and Curation – Like the rating system it shows the people whose content has been deemed most useful by the users.
3. Collaboration – When a person shares content about a certain domain area it reveals his/her interest in that area. Involvement of the person in that domain would be a dream.

What are the other ways in which such contributors can be recognized?

(cross posted on Gautam on Organization 2.0)

Social Media In India Wiki

Posted on 19. Jan, 2010 by Hardeep Kaur Rai in Announcements, Ideas

Social Media in India Wiki

If someone questioned me what does the term ‘best idea’ refer to, I’d probably reply that which is the simplest and the most logical. You know when an idea just suddenly seems to stare at you in the face and makes you jump up and scream “But of course!”. Well, that is probably your best idea.

Keeping this in mind, the best idea that had us hollering at 2020social was that of building a Social Media India Wiki. Considering the growth rate of social media in India, it just makes complete sense to provide one single platform that is built not just by us at 2020social, but by all the social media players in India. The idea just clicked as the obvious next step.  So much so, it just instantly made me wonder how no one else had thought of it (thank god for that). But then again, my CEO isn’t considered the social business strategy guru for nothing!

The wiki as a single platform creates a two-fold contribution:

1) We share information and resources, thereby promoting healthy competitive growth.

2) We also guide each other by sharing our experiences and issues faced.

In this manner the whole industry comes together to coordinate as ONE. This helps decide how to create focus and promote growth in the Indian social media sphere.  Of course, social media clubs and other offline events are a great way to interact. But I believe that limits communication to a certain city or a certain group or topic. What do people do if they cannot commute to another city to attend a workshop? And honestly, how many of you actually end up interacting or sharing resources with all the 50 attendees from the workshop?  And what if you just cannot, for the life of you, remember the name of that blogger you had met at last week’s workshop??

You’d probably have to scroll through 10 different online resources to figure out who he was and his blog’s URL.

Well, we figured a wiki would be the perfect answer to avoid such instances and make things simpler.

As the name suggests, Social Media in India Wiki is a simple one-stop storehouse for everything required by a social media practitioner or even a business looking to utilize social technologies. Clearly structured, the wiki comprises of various self-explanatory categories:

• Social Media Practitioners in India
• Indian Brands on Social Media
• Indian Communities of Interest
• Indian Celebrities
• Indian Non-Profits and Activists on Social Media
• Social Media Job Openings in India
• Indian Journalists Covering Social Media Space in India

Each of the above categories then branches out into miniature lists collating information to a specific platform or group.

Visitors can also edit or contribute to the wiki. To do so, a visitor needs to firstly register and create a profile. Then he/she can ask for write permissions from the wiki admin and advance to editing as required. Discussion forums and threads help members to directly interact and network with people they have read or heard of. To make matters easier, users can also submit new page suggestions with sufficient examples to the wiki admin. The wiki admin then creates the requisite page structure and opens it up for more member contributions.

While the wiki is still barely 2 weeks old, yet the response to it has been marvelous and beyond encouraging. At the time of writing, the wiki had 73 members who had joined it to build this knowledge base.

We are grateful to each member for his/her participation and contributions. The feedback reinforced the belief that there was indeed a need for such a source in India and that we are on the right track. Since the building phase is ongoing, we are constantly thinking of ways to evolve and add more to the wiki. Plans to add exciting new pages like blogging policies, issues facing social media practitioners are in the pipeline.

So whether you are a social media practitioner or an enthusiast, do come join the fraternity by jumping aboard the wiki wagon and submitting your say to the industry. Each one of us has some knowledge or expertise we can share and the wiki is where your skill, no matter how trivial, will help build this into India’s largest resource for all things social media.

More on the Hyper-linked Organization

Posted on 07. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends

JP at Confused of Calcutta is musing about what the Facebookisation of the Enterprise means for IT departments. Here are some of the posts we have done at 2020 Social on the same issue: How to Build a social organization and Making of the Social Organization

As he says:

Was I talking about Facebook? Or was I talking about the IT department

Which brings me to my final point. Facebook does not invest in the edge apps, build them, host them, amend them. They don’t support them, maintain them, back them up. I think IT departments would do well to learn from this. Let the people at the edge build what they want, within a 21st century enabling framework. They know what they want better than any IT department can. What the IT department should do is their utmost to guarantee safety and security of access, privacy and confidentiality, search and subscription tools, scheduling tools, data migration tools, visualisation and mashing tools, prioritisation and ranking tools.

Here’s what I think: 

The biggest benefits of the “Facebookisation” is higher employee engagement – hence it is not the IT department that would take a step ahead with that – but the Ops, Strategy and HR groups that would be asking the IT department to follow FB’s lead to create a truly hyper-linked organizaton.

The other big benefit (and this would need to be taken a call by Org Design and CEOs) is do the other systems and processes in the organization support the openness and transparency that the Facebookisation would bring. – if people are rewarded for individual behavior and if the Peformance system does not incentivise a culture of sharing and connecting – the phenomenon would be limited to the “social innovators” within the enterprise alone.

What do you think?

2010 and Web 3.0: The Year of the Social Business

Posted on 06. Jan, 2010 by Dave in How To Guides, Ideas, Media

2010 is underway, and “social media marketing” nomenclature is fast giving way to “what’s real.” So, what’s real? For starters, the core technologies of Web 2.0, a.k.a. “the social Web.” They are part of the mainstream-Internet use around the world, and their impact on business — worldwide — is significant. The continued evolution of the Web-based technology — whether deployed on a desktop, laptop, netbook, or smartphone — is pushing businesses to reconsider business design. The shift extends to the entire c-suite, not just the marketing department.

This post continues here.

Avoiding Collisions on the Social Web

Posted on 30. Dec, 2009 by Dave in Announcements, Case Studies, How To Guides, Ideas

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.

What Social Media Taught Me About Management and Leadership

Posted on 28. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends

I started my career in HR in 1999, and I started blogging here in 2002 – so in my mind both of these are linked in some way.

In my career in moved from KM to e-learning, to Training to a HR Generalist stint and then to HR Consulting – and parallel to this I was discovering more and more tools as they got invented and went out of fashion – from Yahoo Groups to Ryze to Linkedin to Orkut to Facebook to Twitter.

Looking back at my career and social media journey over the last decade I thought I’d point down my thoughts on what social media taught me that an MBA in HR did not (or maybe I didn’t pay attention to it)

1. People have a lot more in common than their differences. Social media gives amplification to the basic desire of human beings – to connect and to express. Some people like to express more and some like to connect more. Leadership is going to mean more about giving them tools and work that meet that need is the key.
2. Conversation is key, if you want to persuade someone – influence someone, you have to talk to them. Sometimes, conversing is hard, with the volume of connections we all have, hence the prioritisation and knowledge of whom you have to convince-is imperative. The age of leading by command and control is truly on the way out.
3. Learning happens by doing and sharing – We all learn in different ways but the key to learning something in today’s ever-changing world, is to “learn in practice”. Learning Officers need to understand that simulations would be key to actual learning and not “classroom” or even “e-learning” in the way it exists today. As a leader and manager
4. Keep connected to innovators and the Average Joe. Hanging out with social media types one can get lost between the excitement for the next shiny new thing. Not hang out with the experimenters and you might miss the next big trend. HR people have a similar dilemma, focus on the high performers or the average performers. They are as different as chalk and cheese. The answer is “both”
5. Give to receive. Social media is the epitome of the giving it away thinking. Giving away ideas, thoughts, links. Telling people “here’s how that other guy/website/community can be useful for you” makes them come back to you and drives your influence up, ironically. It’s time for managers and HR people to admit that sometimes they don’t have all the answers, and to know who the experts are and send queries to them. That would build better trust.

What has social media taught you?