Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Making Internal Social Media Work
Now let’s try it internally
When I joined Lawson Software in 2006, it was merging with another software company, Intentia. Both companies had roughly 2,000 employees. Lawson was headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota and 95% of its revenues came from the United States. Intentia was based in Stockholm and 95% of its revenues came from Europe. We were merging two regional companies to create one global company.
I was responsible for merging the two marketing departments. I found employees scattered all over the globe and no shortage of ideas on how we should integrate and communicate the “new Lawson”. I met people as quickly as I could and asked for suggestions on how to build an internal infrastructure, integrate marketing operations, share the best ideas from around world, and re-brand the combined company.
One idea I heard frequently was, “Let’s launch a wiki.” So we did. Marketing staff could share ideas and get acquainted through a global marketing wiki. We found some free software, organized it minimally, and launched it. I sent out an e-mail endorsing the idea and inviting everyone to participate.
Then I stood aside. I was familiar with the traditional wisdom that, “The surest way to stifle innovation is to let the boss speak first.” So, instead of participating actively, I let others take the lead. I assumed that was the best way to bring out creative ideas that we could mash up into effective innovations.
The wiki launched with a surge of enthusiasm. But it didn’t last long. Some people dominated the conversations; other people shied away. Conversational threads spun off into infinity. I thought the wiki would be an excellent place to share ideas and processes. As it evolved, mostly it was a place to share opinions – sometimes heatedly. Ultimately, it sank into irrelevance.
I could have saved a lot of time and effort, if only I had had McKinsey’s new report on social media as an internal integrator. McKinsey notes that many companies have invested in social media for external use but that, “…internal applications have barely begun to tap their full potential.” McKinsey also notes that companies could unlock up to $1.3 trillion in annual value through “products and services that enable social interactions in the digital realm.”
How to unlock that value? McKinsey suggests we follow four basic principles:
Add value, not complexity – the best social technologies “… become central to the organization and complement (or, ideally, substitute for) existing processes.” Our little wiki at Lawson was one more thing to do, not one less.
Provide essential organizational support – identify your objectives, select a technology, and then figure out what support and encouragement is needed to make it work. One of McKinsey’s clients used “Connections Geniuses” to encourage people to use the social technology. At Lawson, I thought the wiki was simple enough for everyone to use. Actually, it probably was but I forgot the need for ongoing encouragement.
Experiment and learn – as Tom Kelley points out in another context, treat everything as an experiment. Experiments only fail if you don’t learn anything from them. As our wiki sank into obscurity, we just let it go rather than learning from it and trying again.
Track impact and evolve metrics – when you’re experimenting, you’re not always sure what the best metrics are. Don’t jump the gun and commit prematurely – you may be measuring the wrong thing. Rather, let the experiment proceed and then decide how best to measure its impact.
Vuja De
I’m having déjà vu and amnesia at the same time.
I tell my students that, if they want to be more innovative, they need to improve their observational skills. I encourage them to think like an anthropologist – to carefully observe what’s going on around them and how people interact with each other. Observing complex social behavior is no different in Denver than it is in, say, Papua New Guinea.
To practice their observational skills, I ask students to notice something new when they commute to work. They’ve driven that route hundreds of times but I’m sure that there are many things they haven’t noticed. So I ask them to make a special effort to notice something new each time they drive to and from work. I also ask them to keep notes on what they’ve newly noticed – that is, what they’ve been missing.
We then discuss what they haven’t seen. Students typically report that they’ve missed seeing an entire category of things or people. Perhaps they missed certain types of buildings or businesses. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed people waiting at a bus stop or the way people dressed for different weather.
Students often ask me, “How can I notice what I don’t notice?” I typically advise them to ask their spouse. After doing something together, ask your spouse what he or she saw. You may be surprised at how different your observations are. For instance, I tend to miss green stuff – plants, flowers, trees, etc. I’m sure that my wife never does.
By and large, my students are surprised at how much they’re missing. It’s a fun exercise as well as being useful. I feel like I’m helping to prepare a bunch of amateur anthropologists – or maybe police detectives.
It was only last night, however, that I discovered that there’s actually a term for noticing what you haven’t noticed. I heard Tom Kelley, one of the founders of IDEO, give a presentation at the University of Denver. He noted that we’re all familiar with the term déjá vu – we see something for the first time but we sense that we’ve seen it before. He suggests that we turn the term around – vuja de – to describe something that we’ve seen so many times that we fail to notice it.
As an example, Kelley described watching an in-flight safety demo. He’s seen it thousands of times. But recently he noticed that the air mask that drops down in an emergency really does need to be redesigned. As he pointed out, you can’t tell if it’s working or not because the bag doesn’t inflate. The only way you can tell that it’s not working is by passing out. That’s probably not the best human interface.
We miss important clues simply because we see them so many times. They’re hidden in plain sight. By improving our observational skills, we can learn more about the world around us and find many more opportunities to innovate. It’s as simple as vuja de.
(To find Tom Kelley’s books, click here, here, or here. They’re all good).
Social Media Gets Creepy
Yikes! It’s Twitter!
As we discussed social media in my branding class, one of my students noted that she was inundated with bridal ads when she announced her engagement on Facebook. That seemed a little creepy – an event in your private life fuels a targeted, persistent ad campaign. Still, with the new rules of Facebook, it’s not unexpected.
A few months ago, I wrote a brief article about Twitter‘s ability to identify your location and your relationships. In turn, that information could power an innovative (and free) package delivery service. The delivery service sounds like a good idea, but the fact that Twitter can identify your location with such precision and immediacy seems a little creepy.
On Saturday, I read an article about college admissions officers. They’re now using social media to understand their applicants better. In some cases, they’re using social media to reject applicants who are otherwise qualified. You could be ready to go to the school of your choice when they discover that you’re a bit of a jerk and decide that you’re not the kind of person they want in their school.
If I applied for a job, I would expect the human resources department to check me out online. That’s appropriate due diligence and doesn’t seem creepy. But to check on teenagers as they apply for college? That seems creepy. They’re teenagers; of course they say stupid stuff. It’s creepy to expect them not to.
Then I read an article in Technology Review that assesses how software will soon be able to assess our personalities via our tweets. The goal is “to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” says an IBM researcher. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual—what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”
If all goes well (?), the software will review your Twitter feed and assess your Big Five personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It could also score your values (hedonism, conservatism, etc.) and needs (curiosity, need for harmony, etc.).
And what would they do with all this information? Target ads at you, of course. If advertisers understand your individual psychology, they can tune their messages and their content to your individual needs, emotions, fears, and desires. It’s like food engineering that’s designed to keep you eating, except that this is designed to keep you buying.
It’s creepy enough that advertisers can use your inner self to sell you stuff. But what happens next? Will potential employers assess your personality via Twitter? Will college admissions officers reject you because your Twitter psycho-scan says you’re needy? Now that’s creepy.
So, I’m wondering — as social media becomes creepier, do you feel like you’re being stalked? At what point do you think social media crosses the line and becomes too intrusive? Will any of this change your social media behavior? Let me know.
On-Demand Innovation?
Unless you turn the innovation engine off.
It’s not easy to innovate. Many companies make it even harder on themselves by trying to turn the innovation engine on and off. Turn it on when a crisis erupts. Turn it off again when things are rolling along smoothly. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. Innovation tends to be all on or all off. You can’t just turn it on when you need it. You have to bake it in to everything you do.
Samsung is my favorite recent example of “all-on” innovation. Samsung recently rose to number two in Boston Consulting Group’s annual ranking of the world’s most innovative companies. According to BCG, Samsung is ahead of Google and only slightly behind Apple. Samsung’s mantra – which they apparently repeat at every meeting – is “Change everything but your spouse and your children.” In other words, everything must change. No wonder they make such cool refrigerators.
I was reminded of Samsung as I browsed through Rita Gunther McGrath’s book, The End of Competitive Advantage. McGrath identifies six warning signs that your innovation engine is broken. In general, all six signs have to do with turning the engine on and off. Here are McGrath’s big six:
Innovation is episodic – it’s the on/off switch. Would you bet your career on a project that might be switched off? Maybe not. In the environment that Samsung fosters, you don’t have to make that bet.
Process is invented from scratch – each time we turn on the innovation engine, we act as if it’s never been done before. Time for a brainstorming session! But there’s a lot to be learned (even on this website) about the nature and processes of innovation. Why re-invent the wheel?
Resources are held hostage – as Rosabeth Moss Kanter has pointed out, if you’re trying to finance innovation out of the “regular” budget, you’ll fail. Too many people already have dibs on the funds. McGrath writes that too many companies don’t play to win but rather play not to lose. To innovate, you’ll need to gamble. You’ll need a person with the authority to gamble and some funds for her to do it with.
Innovations placed in existing structures – if you turn the innovation engine on and off frequently, where would you place an innovative project? After all, it’s likely to be temporary. So, just make it a “bag on the side” of the existing organization. But innovations require new processes, not just temporary homes.
Judging innovations by “historic” criteria – perhaps the worst example of this is to measure the ROI of innovative new products. ROI works best when there’s some consistency and predictability in the mix. An innovation has no history. Applying standard financial metrics to an innovative product will simply stifle innovation. In an “all-on” environment, you can afford to develop innovative metrics for innovative products. In an on/off environment, you can’t. (For some non-traditional metrics, click here).
Holding the innovation to plan – of course, you’re going to create a plan for the innovation. The danger comes in sticking to it and holding people accountable for the plan as originally created. Things change. Some innovations fail. You’ll need agile leaders rather than by-the-book managers. Punishing an executive for failing to stick to the plan will eliminate any incentive for other executives to innovate.
Moral of the story: once you get the innovation engine running, never switch it off.
Innovation and Collisions
Want me to mash something up?
As I’ve written on several occasions (here, here, and here), mashup thinking is often the driver behind breakthrough innovations. Mashup thinking is not the same as thinking out of the box. Rather, it’s thinking out of several different boxes.
Wheeled luggage is a good example. There’s a box called wheels. There’s another box called luggage. You take an idea from each box, mash them up, and create a third box called wheeled luggage. Now we can select an idea from yet another box called power supplies. We mash that up with wheeled luggage and we get yet another new product: self-propelled wheeled luggage.
Note that the originating ideas (wheels, luggage, power supplies) are not breakthrough ideas in and of themselves. Indeed, they’re rather mundane. It’s only by mashing them up that they become, new, different, and valuable.
How do you promote mashup thinking in your organization? The simple answer is collisions. You need to get people, ideas, and concepts to collide. Think of it as an atom smasher. When two atoms collide at high speed, they produce a very interesting array of new particles. You want to produce similarly productive collisions in your organization.
Here are some tips on creating productive collisions:
Diversity – let’s say you get two engineers to collide. That’s interesting but not usually productive. After all, they’re in the same box. The trick is to get two people from different boxes to collide. That requires diversity. This includes ethnic and geographic diversity. Some very innovative companies have found that putting together people from, say, Africa, Europe, South America, Japan and the USA can produce very interesting results. Age diversity – old people mixed with young – can also create productive collisions. For me educational diversity is equally important. Indeed, I tell my clients that one of the reasons they should hire me is because I don’t have an MBA. I think differently.
Seating arrangements – why do so many companies put engineers in one area, marketers in another, finance people in another and human resources folks in yet another? That practically guarantees that all collisions will be same-box collisions. Randomize your seating chart. You’ll be surprised.
Architecture – the way you organize your space can either promote or prevent collisions. Fewer bathrooms, fewer coffee stations, and fewer lunchrooms all promote collisions. Rather than providing lots of places to congregate, offer fewer. You’ll get larger congregations.
Policies – earlier this year, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! announced that employees would need to come to the office. No more working from home all the time. The policy got a lot of pushback. But I’m sure that it also produced a lot more collisions.
My Social Media
