In his recently published book, my friend Alan Khazei – the social entrepreneur , Co-Founder of City Year and former candidate for the US Senate – makes the case for creating change through the collaborative efforts of public private partnerships, where citizen activists, business leaders and government agencies work together to address challenges and create new opportunities.  He refers to this model as Big Citizenship, advocating that the old models of relying too heavily on either big government or private industry are tired, ineffective and not appropriate for creating change in the 21^st Century.

Although the concept of Big Citizenship is not intuitive to all, you clearly know it when you see it in action.  I had such an experience recently.  Realizing that our son had no place to skateboard in our town of Brookline, Massachusetts, my wife Patty organized a group of young skate boarders and  parents, teachers, nonprofit and other leaders to advocate for the creation of safe places to skate in our community.  Alan would see this as a clear example of the power of big citizenship, and I would agree. But I also see it as a compelling example of collaboration and, as we are beginning to increase our social and traditional media outreach, a great case study in how the internet can support and turbo-charge the efforts of a small but committed group.

None of this would have been possible without both Patty’s initiative and the phenomenal and strategic efforts of our friend Armin Bachman.  Armin is truly a Big Citizen.  (Last year I encouraged Alan to promote his book by starting a Big Citizen contest where people could nominate others for recognition; I had Armin in mind as a leading candidate.)  Armin is an entrepreneur; he is co-owner of Orchard Skateshop, by far the best skateboarding store in the Boston area.  He is a social entrepreneur, having founded the nonprofit Extension, to make skating more accessible in the greater Boston area.  Armin and

the other owners of Orchard are big citizens in their community as well, giving 1% of their revenues to local nonprofits and helping new artists by hosting shows in the gallery above the shop.  He is also one very smart and connected dude, knowing leaders in the skateboarding space across the country and increasingly around the world, and very gifted at finding data related to developing safe places to skateboard.  (Full disclosure: Armin is also Myles skateboarding teacher.)

Other members of the original group included Nicco Berinstein, a Brookline High School 11^th grader and avid skater; Eileen Amy, Nicco’s mother and a registered nurse; Michael McKittrick, a Brookline High School teacher and the faculty advisor to the school’s skateboarding club; John Wynne, a Cambridge businessman, skater, and a passionate skateboarding advocate; and our son Myles, an avid skater and the person who helped us see the need for safe places to skate in Brookline.

Armin, Patty and John found amazing data to support our cause, including the following:

-     Skateboarding is one of the fastest growing sports in the US (and around the world) and is now larger than baseball.

-     Skateboarding is the 3rd largest sport for ages 6-18 and the 6^th largest participant sport in the US.

-    Skateboarding is one of the safest sports, with less than 1/10^th the injuries of basketball, 1/5^th of baseball and 1/3^rd of soccer. (My own experience mirrors the data: despite logging close to 100 hours watching skateboarders, the only real blood I have seen was my own when I was stupidly carrying my elbow pads while riding across an asphalt parking lot and wiped out on a pebble the size of a peanut  J).

-     Over half of the injuries occur from skating on poor surfaces like asphalt, usually caused by a lack of safe concrete skatespots and parks for community skaters.

-     Skateboarding is less noisy than football or local traffic and skating on concrete features is over 20% quieter than those made out of wood or metal.

-     Brookline has amazing recreational and sports facilities, including 14 official youth baseball fields – or one for every 60 kids who participate in Brookline baseball – and 8 dog parks, but no safe features or parks to skate on for the estimated 600 skaters who skate almost every day.

From Armin and John, we also learned that the idea of “ good places to skateboard” has evolved significantly over the past few years, with leading edge communities working with local architects and landscapers, skaters and national foundations to create a system of neighborhood skate parks, smaller “skate spots” and even smaller “skate dots.” One of the most innovative concepts we learned about was the creation of “skateable art” – concrete artforms designed to be both outdoor sculpture and great skateable features.

Armed with this great data from Armin and the team, I was able to put my Bain skills to work and developed a presentation that we gave to the Brookline Parks and Recreation Commission.  Although the presentation was helpful in getting the support of the commissioners, I believe an equal or greater impact on the commissioners came from the 60 young skaters, their mothers, Brookline social workers, and members of the nonprofit Architects for Humanity who came to support us.   I haven’t been to a Parks and Rec meeting before, but I imagine that 60 people for a single topic was a rather large community turnout.  Credit to Armin again for both being able to factually and compellingly answer almost every question the commissioners asked and for putting our meeting on Orchard’s Facebook page, which received over 100 “likes” from the Orchard Community and many words of encouragement.

Although I am very focused on our goal of getting a system of safe, attractive places to skate in Brookline; as an entrepreneur, I have also learned to enjoy the journey and celebrate the mini-successes along the way.  One of the things I liked most about the meeting was seeing the sense of pride and empowerment Patty’s initiative gave the young skaters in the room.  These high school, middle school and elementary school Brookline residents were seeing democracy and big citizenship at work.  In fact, they were active participants.  Myles spoke after Patty’s introduction about the personal benefits of skating and many others answered questions from the commissioners.  None were shy about expressing their passion for skating or the appreciation they would feel for the town if Brookline embraced our vision of moving from a laggard to a leader in this fast growing, diverse and accessible sport.

As recently reported in The Brookline Patch, the online community news site that wrote an article about our efforts and the meeting, the commission had a positive response to our collaborative efforts:

“The presentation was well-organized, passionate and articulate,” said Erin Gallentine, director of Parks and Recreation.

The town formed the informal subcommittee to talk about the possibilities after two parents proposed facilities for skateboarding at a recent Parks and Recreation Commission meeting.

Gallentine said the town considered adding facilities next to the basketball court at Lawton Playground when the park was renovated, but the idea was scrapped after neighbors raised concerns about noise. A few proposals for skateboarding facilities have came before the Parks and Recreation Commission over the years, but Gallentine said the Underwood’s proposal had been particularly interesting.

Although we have a lot of work to do and know we have only taken the first few steps in what will undoubtedly be a long journey, the collaborative efforts of our small but committed group, the over 100 friends who supported us online and the 60 young skaters and their parents and supporters who attended our presentation to the town’s Parks and Recreation Commission have clearly move us forward.

Here’s what you can do to help:

Join our Facebook page Friends of Brookline Skaters

If you live in Brookline or know people who do, share this and our presentation with others.

Let us know if you are interested in helping with research, organizing or fundraising.

And think about opportunities in your own community to form collaborative public private partnerships and join with other big citizens to create the change you want to see.

Net: Hotels.com provides great consumer value, excellent web and phone customer service and has one of the most rewarding loyalty programs I have seen.  The company shows how applying the philosophy and applications of Web 2.0, good customer service and a well designed and implemented rewards program can create customer loyalty.  Why book anywhere else?

When I tell people I write about Web 2.0, customer service and loyalty, I know some (many?) find these three subjects a bit random or at least unfocused.  Through case studies and other posts, I hope it is becoming clear that they are often critically linked.  A few examples:

·         The case study Another Dell Misfire showed how focusing on Web 2.0 and posting user reviews on your web site without engaging customer service agents can both de-motivate front line sales and service employees and actually lose potential customers. 

·         The case Customer Service Disaster Non-Recovery found that Kimpton hotels invested in a loyalty program, but appear to neither provide customers with a way to comment on poor customer service nor monitor and/or respond to the most popular Web 2.0 travel sites including Trip Advisor and hotels.com.

Consumer value proposition

Hotels.com is a business that appears to be investing in and performing well in all three areas, but before providing details about their Web 2.0, customer service and loyalty initiatives, it is important to understand that they are built on top of a very good consumer value proposition.  Although some of my greatest business successes have come from customer loyalty programs, one of the most important lessons we learned in the early days of AIR MILES Canada was “a good loyalty program will not make up for a bad consumer value proposition or an inconsistent brand.”  Put another way, a great loyalty program can lead a horse to water and get him to take the first drink, but if the water tastes bad, the horse won’t come back.”  We learned this the hard way by signing Safeway – an excellent grocer – as our exclusive partner in Western Canada and another chain – whose stores were so inconsistent that the brand no longer exists – in Ontario.  With our data we saw that non-shoppers were much more responsive to Safeway acquisition offers than the weaker chain and that new shoppers who tried Safeway were about 4X more likely to return there than they were to the Ontario stores.  This lesson is amplified with Web 2.0 and the increasing use of user reviews as customers can check out a brand’s reputation before trying.  

I originally found Hotels.com when looking for a deal on a hotel room.  Although I can’t remember the first hotel I reserved, I am sure that I believed I got a good deal; otherwise I would not have come back.  The business delivers on its core brand proposition – they find great deals on good (or better) hotels.  I had an amazing experience a few months ago when looking for a suite for our family’s trip to Prague to visit my nephew who was in film school there.  Through another site – possibly American Express – I found the Pachtuv Palace, which had what looked to be amazing two bedroom efficiency apartments in a great Prague neighborhood.  Through Amex Platinum Travel, I found what seemed to be a good deal, something like $550 a night, but thought I would check hotels.com to see if they even offered the property.  They did and had a much lower price of $400 per night.

Here’s how hotels.com uses Web 2.0, customer service and a loyalty program to make their brand even stronger and their customer loyalty – and therefore profitability – even higher:

• Web 2.0 – Like many in the travel industry, Hotels.com asks for and prominently uses Guest Ratings to help customers choose hotels.  Their search filters are very good and users can set Guest Rating parameters from 1.0 to 5.0 and sort search findings based on other users’ ratings. 

• Customer Service – One of the things I find maddening about many Web based businesses is their insistence on burying, hiding under multiple layers or just not providing a customer service phone number.  Amazon does this and so does Adobe.  As someone who created and ran a business with over 400 customer service representatives that was also among the first loyalty businesses with a Web site, I understand the microeconomics of Web based vs. phone and CSR based interactions.  I also understand that millennials and other generations increasingly prefer to use the web over the phone for just about everything.  But until everyone has 24/7 Web access and reaches the Internet uber alle state of being, many companies have an opportunity to gain market share by making it easy for customers to find their phone number.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that Hotels.com prominently displays their phone number at the top of every Web page.

Last fall, I discovered how great their service was when I had started to book a room online for a trip to London but ran out of time and had to shut down to drive to a meeting.  I called Hotels.com form the call and was pleasantly surprised by the following:

-          Very short wait time

-          Customer service agent spoke excellent English

-          When I told them I needed a room in London, they asked for a budget, star rating and area and within seconds found a great deal at the May Fair for $200/night.

-          They took my credit card and did not charge extra for a phone booking, something I have come to expect from other services.

• Loyalty – Hotels.com offers consumers a free loyalty program called Welcome Rewards.  It rates high on many of our keys to success for a profitable loyalty program, including the following:

-          Aspirational reward: Free hotel rooms up to $400 in value.  Anyone who is booking on Hotels.com would find free rooms, especially at this level, rewarding.

-          Attainable reward: Members earn a free hotel room after only 10 nights – that’s nights not stays.  This is nearly off the charts attainability and value.  Considering consumers can often find three star hotels for $100-150 and four or five star hotels for $200, a free night in a $400 room (hotels.com rate, not the rack rate) translates to between 20 and 40 percent back.  Compare this to the average value of a frequent flyer point at 1 percent back and you can see how strong the Welcome Rewards value proposition is.  If this doesn’t change behavior, nothing will.

-          Simple to earn and redeem: Once you sign up online, every time you book either online or by phone, you automatically earn credits toward the ten needed for a free night. When you are ready to redeem, you can easily do so through either phone or online bookings.

-          Awareness: Hotels.com prominently features their Welcome Rewards program on their home page and recently on TV advertising as well.  Their customer service agents are in the loop as well and promote the program to sign up new members. 

Dave Nichol – the brilliant creator and promoter of President’s Choice, the powerhouse store label brand of leading Canadian grocery retailer Loblaws, once defined loyalty as “nothing more than the absence of a better alternative.”  Although I was and remain a huge admirer of Nichol’s intellect, drive and accomplishments, I respectfully disagreed with his definition.  One of the ways I define loyalty is the presence of a value driven relationship that removes any interest in looking for an alternative from the consumer’s mind.  In other words, a loyalty customer goes there first. 

For me, at least, Hotels.com consistent consumer value proposition, their use of Web 2.0 and their top notch customer service and loyalty programs keep me coming back.  Why would you book anywhere else?

1. Forrester’s 2008 Technographics research found that over 50% of the members of all major age groups are actively engaged with at least one Web 2.0 application, including blogs, user reviews and social networks.



2. A 2008 McKinsey study of over 1900 large enterprises around the world found that only 28% were applying at least one Web 2.0 technology or tool.
3. Of those companies surveyed by McKinsey that had applied at least one Web 2.0 tool to their business in 2007 and 2008:

• 21% were very or extremely satisfied with their investments
• 22% were very or extremely dissatisfied with their investments

 Yes, more businesses were dissatisfied with their investment in Web 2.0 tools than were satisfied.

The six myths:

1. My customer (or employee or business partners) base is too old to engage with Web 2.0 and social media tools. This makes a lot of sense for businesses that cater to a younger population, but not for us.
2. Our business is in a serious industry where privacy is very important. Therefore using Web 2.0 tools would not be appropriate.
3. Web 2.0 is a fad and it will go away.
4. Less than 30% of businesses are using Web 2.0 tools; if it doesn’t fade away, the next person in my job can deal with it.
5. Social media applications do not need to be “launched” either internally for employee applications or externally with customers or partners. You should just put them on the web or your intranet and if they are valuable, people will use them. We tried an experiment and nothing happened, all of the above are correct.
6. No one has been able to measure the business impact or the ROI of investing in social media technology.

Data and case studies to support 1-6 to follow in future posts.  Let me know your favorite myths. 

Net: Despite the fact that user generated ratings and reviews have been a mainstay of the internet since at least 1999, many large businesses fail to provide an easy way for customers to provide feedback and do not monitor and respond to customer comments on the Web.  I recently experienced this first hand from the Hotel Monaco in Washington, D.C. It is the first experience bad enough to earn a ” CHU Un-recommends.”

In our page Six Web 2.0 Imperatives for All Businesses, we emphasized the following points under Imperative Four: Build, Activate and Support your Communities:

• If you don’t provide a place on your site for customers to ask questions, it is highly likely that at least some of them will go to a third party site where they will be prime targets for your competitors’ marketing efforts.
• Whatever you do, make it incredibly easy for employees, business partners and customers to provide feedback. And go the next step by proactively asking for feedback. Then, make sure you authentically respond to their feedback.

A few months ago in the post “A car for a car, a coffee for a coffee, $10 for free porn?” I wrote about several positive experiences where businesses seized the opportunity to turn service failures into brand building recoveries.   This post is from a different perspective.

A few weeks ago my wife and I were planning to attend Rhodes Scholar and Oxford University reunions in Washington, D.C.  I went to Hotels.com to find a hotel room for the weekend.  They had what looked like a great price on the Hotel Monaco, a Kimpton Hotel in a perfect location.  I have stayed at other Kimpton properties and always had good experiences, so I booked the hotel.  [Hotels.com is a great business and will be the subject of a future post.]

I flew to Washington early in the day so I could take my fellow alum and Microsoft uber-lawyer Steve Crown to visit Year Up, the innovative work force development program founded and led by Gerald Chertavian, for lunch.  We had a wonderful tour and Steve had a great session with several students, sharing experience and advice from his years of success and answering all of their questions.   After our visit to Year Up, I went to check in at the Hotel Monaco.  My wife Patty was arriving later in the evening.

The Hotel is in a beautiful historical building that used to be a famous Post Office and appeared to have all of the usual Kimpton features – cool lobby, interesting bar, water bowl for dogs, etc.  I checked in and went to the room.  Although we had reserved a “deluxe queen,” room, it was very, very small.  It felt like there was less than 12 inches of space from the side of the bed to the window or the wall and a small desk was crammed into an alcove.  The room was a fraction of the size of the rooms we have had in other Kimpton properties.  Not exactly the venue nor the ambiance I had envisioned for a romantic weekend in DC without our kids.

No problem, I thought, I’ll call the front desk and get a better room.  All seemed good when the desk staff offered to move me to a “deluxe King” on the “first” floor.  It turns out that the first floor is subterranean, i.e. it’s the basement.  My initial concern was that the room would be noisy, being so close to the street.  The front desk clerk assured me that they were quite quiet, and it turns out that is true.  But as I descended the stairs to the “first floor” I started to notice a bad odor.   Despite my attempts to simultaneously act like a two year old and ignore the smell and try to convince myself that Patty wouldn’t notice, it was clear the first floor smelled like a damp basement with a mildew problem.  Nonetheless, I powered on to the room.  The room was actually nice, with a huge bed, high ceilings, decent bathroom, and more room for the desk.   The architect had done a great job making the half-windows to the sidewalk seemed larger than they were and let in a lot of light.  Best of all, the room was not noisy at all.  I thought I could still smell something but rationalized that the odor was just coming from the hall.  I cranked the AC on high, ran around the corner to get some candles to complete the romantic ambiance I was determined to create, and took off for the Rhodes event.

The event to honor Sir Collin Marshall, who was retiring as the Warden of Rhodes House, was held at the British Embassy and it was wonderful.  By the end of the event, Patty had arrived, checked into the hotel and met me and several of my classmates at a Georgetown restaurant.  The food was great, the company even better and we stayed at the restaurant until almost midnight.  On the way back to the hotel Patty said, “Did you notice our room is in the basement of the hotel, the hallway smells like dog pee and our room like mold? ” I briefly considered returning to my two year old mindset, but chose to say something like “maybe a little, but I bought a lot of candles” and quickly change the subject.

The candles and the AC helped cover up the smell, and we decided to not try and change rooms again given that the front desk told me the hotel was sold out with two wedding parties.  The next day, Patty discovered there was mold on the bottom of the shower curtain.  A definite first for me in a “four star” hotel or for that matter, any star hotel.  In addition to the smelly hall and room mold problems, the on-demand movies in our room were very fuzzy and the engineer on duty could not fix the problem.  And whoever cleaned our room on Friday night forgot to remove the mold, but did remove our wine glasses and did not replace them.  All in all, a pretty bad experience.

One of the good things about blogging about customer service is it can change your perspective from “this is terrible” to “this is great material.”  I don’t think Patty shared my enthusiasm for the experience, but she is a great traveler and never once mentioned how badly I screwed up picking this hotel.

But this is not really about our experience with the room, it is about what happened – or didn’t happen – next:

1)      I looked all over the room for one of those, “comment cards” where guests are encouraged to offer feedback on their stay.  Couldn’t find one. Lost opportunity number one.

2)      I went to the front desk and asked if they had a comment card.  Again no luck, but the nice lady brought me a piece of Hotel Monaco, a Kimpton Hotel stationary.  She wasn’t trained to ask if something was wrong with my room.  Lost opportunity numbers two and three.

3)      I went to the Kimpton Hotels web site and looked for a customer forum, request for feedback, or any place where I could share my experience.  Couldn’t find one.  Lost opportunity number four.

4)      In order to get free internet access, Kimpton requires you to join their rewards program.  This is an interesting approach and I have no problem with it, as you can opt out of program and hotel emails.  I did not opt out, in part because I was expecting to receive an email asking for feedback on the stay.  Over the past two weeks, I have received several emails from Kimpton, but none asking for feedback on my stay. Lost opportunity number five.

5)      I did receive an email from Hotels.com asking about my stay.  Finally, someone out there gets it.  I responded to the email, explaining the problems we experienced and almost immediately received a response apologizing for the experience and encouraging me to post a review of the property.  I am assuming that Kimpton has not asked their third party booking partners like hotels.com to share feedback with them.  Or if they do, no one from Kimpton responded.  Either way, missed opportunity number six.

6)      I posted reviews, including pictures of the moldy shower curtain, on tripadvisor.com and hotels.com.  Still no response from the Hotel Monaco or Kimpton hotels.  Missed opportunity number seven.

Maybe the eighth time’s the charm, but I won’t hold me breadth that they will ever find or respond to this post the way that both Dell and the Mayo Clinic have.

In addition to not heeding our advice to proactively ask for feedback, Kimpton is ignoring the second of our Six Web 2.0 Imperatives for All Businesses:

Listen and understand your business’s and your competitors’ presence on the Web.

I am sure that the decision to invest in cool physical plants, hip curtains and bed spreads, great bars and large dog bowls were deliberate decisions made by Kimpton executives to create their brand.  But they need to understand that the world has changed and the impact of bad customer experiences and word of mouth are no longer limited to the few people an unhappy guest might tell.  For many businesses, your brand is being shaped – positively or negatively – in conversations on the web.  I am fairly certain that investing in asking for customer feedback, monitoring conversations about their properties on the web and responding to customer concerns – both online and offline – would be far less expensive than all but the dog bowls and equally, if not important than their other initiatives to build and maintain their brand.

As a related aside, I couldn’t but help notice that two other enterprises I recently interacted with proactively asked for my feedback. Both Toronto’s YYZ Pearson Airport and the TSA security check points at Boston’s Logan Airport prominently post signs asking for customer feedback. Pearson goes even further by providing wired laptops staffed with enthusiastic young people in their terminals and giving customers a $5.oo Tim Horton’s certificate for completing the survey.  Interesting to note that both of these are government owned monopolies.

Questions for you:

1. Are you more like Kimpton Hotels or the TSA and YYZ?
2. Do you make it easy for customers to alert you to problems and give feedback?
3. Do you monitor what is being said about you on the Web?
4. Are you authentically responding and seizing the opportunity provided by the crisis of a customer service disaster?

Net: The fact that 50% of all consumers are engaging with social media, but less than 40% of businesses are doing so means that some companies are leaving their customers exposed to competitor’s initiatives. BMW is one of many examples.

Last fall, I leased a new BMW X3 to replace my old one whose lease was expiring. The replacement X3 did not have the built-in navigation of its predecessor, so I decided to go online to search for a portable unit. First stop was BMW.com, where I expected to find an owners’ community where I would be able to ask others for advice.

When Underwood Partners conducts a Web 2.0 audit for clients, one of the outputs is a “heat map” that visually shows competitive and complimentary companies’ use of social media technology tools. The map is color coded: green represents a highly visible and useful application; yellow represents an application that is either buried deep in the site, poorly marketed or has a confusing user interface; red indicates that either the company is not using the application or we can’t find it. And given the amount of time we spend online, if we can’t find it, we don’t believe customers will either. [Note this graphic was first developed by Max Palmer when we worked together at Social Sphere.  Max claims it was called a "Palmer Map." He's a great analyst, but not so good on the marketing front!]

If we were doing a Web 2.0 audit of www.BMWUSA.com, the column Customer Forums would clearly be coded red. Although “My Account” has lots of information about how to make payments, pay off my lease early, order a new vehicle, etc., I couldn’t find any place to connect with other customers. So, I logged onto Edmunds.com, one of the pioneers of providing user reviews, customer forums, and other Web 2.0 applications in the automotive space.

On the Edmunds’ site, it was easy to find a BMW X3 Forum in their “Car Space” section where I was able to start an online discussion asking for help with aftermarket navigation systems. But as I was doing so, I noticed that Cadillac ads began appearing on the page. By not investing in Web 2.0 applications like customer forums, BMW literally drove me to a place where I was being served up competitors’ ads.

Some businesses delay developing a Web 2.0 strategy because they are afraid of “losing control” and fear their customers will post negative comments about their products on their own web sites. As this example shows, if you don’t provide an opportunity for customers to talk to you and each others about your products, someone else will. At best, you will have lost an opportunity for customer engagement, research and communication. At worst, you will be giving a third party the opportunity to monetize your customer through selling ads to a competitor. Which, at the end of the day, could ultimately cost you the customer’s business.

Net: In 2007 EMC launched an initiative to develop a social media technology strategy because the company decided they should develop “social media proficiency” as a competitive advantage in their industry.  Despite the fact that the initiative did not have a specific financial return requirement, Chuch Hollis, the EMC executive who lead the development of their Web 2.0 strategy recently published a White Paper that estimates tens of millions of dollars of return on their sub-million dollar investment.

Last Thursday, I got up at an the ungodly hour of 4:45 am to fly back to Boston from Toronto to attend the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s Social Media Summit:  What’s the ROI of Social Media? (Travel note: in Canada you have to check in at least an hour – not 59 minutes – before flights to the US or have better selling skills than I to get through if you are late.)

Full of hope (and Red Bull) for more great case studies to add to my files, I arrived only a few minutes into the first speaker’s comments.  Danah Boyd, the brilliant and charismatic Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was giving a very interesting presentation on youth engagement with various forms social media.  She was not – however – talking about anything remotely related to the “ROI of Social Media.”  Maybe I could have missed that flight and slept in?

Next up was a panel of corporate users and social media agencies, but they too seemed to be tip toeing around sharing hard numbers to demonstrate the financial returns of their investment in Web 2.0.  And then he said it. He was Chuck Hollis, EMC’s VP, Global Marketing CTO. More importantly, he was the executive tapped to lead EMC’s development of a strategy to utilize social media technology to enhance the company’s competitive advantage.  What he said was,

“…and we eliminated a multi-million dollar training budget by moving it onto our social media platform.”

Chuck went on to say that he had blogged about the experience over the past two years and recently published a White Paper, entitled EMC|ONE; A Journey in Social Media. Chuck and the other panelists, including Leslie Forde from Communispace, went on to detail a number of hard number savings, revenue increases and/or productivity improvements from relatively minimal investments in Web 2.0 technology.

If you only read one thing about the impact of social media technology applied to the employee sphere, I strongly recommend you read pages 26-35 of the paper, starting with the section “Impact and Measurements.”  You should read Chuck’s entire White Paper, but start here if you are a results junkie like we are.  Before sharing a few quotes from the paper, I need to first make sure you understand that Chuck went out of his way to downplay the financial returns of EMC’s investment in social media, partly because he believes the greatest impact comes from the more immeasurable benefits of improved employee and business partner engagement and collaboration and partly because, as Chuck wrote:

“The entire topic of measuring business impact is very controversial for these type of projects.  There is no consensus regarding generally accepted metrics for social media proficiency. Furthermore, this inherent lack of useful measurements and metrics can be used as an excuse to not undertake an investment in social media proficiency.

“A key part of any initiative is establishing general agreements regarding these success factors.  We ended up talking in terns of our ‘measurement philosophy’ rather than concrete measurements.”

That said, here are a few data points you will find inside the White Paper:

• Accelerating time-to-revenue of multiple $100MM business initiatives by even a few months or even weeks results in substantial sums.
• The group manager of EMC’s competitive group estimates his group is now 3x-4x more efficient and impactful by using the social platform.
• EMC is now in the process of methodically complementing and/or substituting online community interaction with meetings in the physical world.  These efforts either result in costs savings (millions per year), better and more time interactions, or both.
• A reasonable estimate of the combined value of EMC’s blogging capability (in terms of alternative investment) would approach 20-50 million dollars annually.
• Putting a number on the business value of [EMC's] open interrogation is difficult, but probably runs into the tens of millions of dollars annually.
• Estimating the business value of tens of thousands of employees who are significantly and statistically more satisfied and engaged is a difficult task, but probably approaches tens of millions of dollars per year in terms of improved attraction and retention of talent, fewer costs associated with turnover and related aspects.

As impressive as these statements are, having listened to Chuck talk for a couple of hours last week and reading most of his White Paper twice now, I suspect he is most proud of this impact:

” In reality, all we have done is created a mechanism where people do what they already want to do – meet new people, discuss topics of interest, and help each other out.”

Our sentiments exactly.

Net: Facebook and Twitter updates are becoming increasingly irrelevant and brand diminishing as users broadcast information to their entire networks that are of interest to only some of their friends and followers. A relevance increasing solution could be the ability to selectively send and receive updates using social sub-network tagging.

I have written before about the importance of relevance; it’s one of the Four R’s of developing relationships.  We believe it is one of the most important elements of any effective communication – be it advertising or talking to a friend.  Relevant communications have a chance at being listened to.  Relevant messages that are interesting to the recipient have a chance at being acted on and looked at again.  Junk mail and spam isn’t necessarily something you didn’t request; it is most certainly about something you have no interest in.  I’ll gladly click on ads for Lib Tech snowboards 50% off; but not for Single Under 40? I’m an avid snowboarder; I’m also avidly married.

How many social networking updates are actually relevant?

If your Twitter and Facebook feeds are anything like mine, you get a fair amount of info about the details of your “friends’” daily lives.  A recent Jeff Koterba cartoon from the Omaha World Record (no I don’t read the Record, it was reprinted in the NYT), parodied this fact.

If you are reading this on a small screen, it says in part:

” You waste time boring the daylights out of your  friends with the most mundane details of your life.”

The concept of Social Sub-Networks

I have been guilty of boring friends and followers when I post updates or pictures that I know are irrelevant to many on the receiving end.  And I check in with Facebook less often than I would if I didn’t have to wade through updates I just don’t care about – e.g. what the weather is like in London this morning or what someone had for breakfast.  But when I do read through updates and tweets, I often find something I wish I had know about earlier – “U2 concert tickets go on sale Friday” or “this is the last day to get a discount for the Web 2.0 Expo.”   Relevance is subjective.  You don’t care if had eggs Benedict for breakfast, but my sister would as it was one of our father’s favorites. Relevance is person specific and it is at least partly by your interests.  One way to think about things that are interesting to you is to look at your sub-networks of friends.  Mine looks something like this:

My interests include:  work – Web 2.0, loyalty, customer service; my family; my nonprofit interest – Year Up; Snowboarding; Red Sox; etc.

My friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter likely share at least one of these interests with me – updates about them are relevant.  It’s probably safe to assume my connections would like to read about my experiences in a shared circle.  But when I post a picture of the sign in Leicester Square asking Londoners (e.g. users) to go to a web site and provide their input to redesigning the square, it’s safe to assume that many of my friends don’t really care about that – but those in my Web 2.0 sub-network clearly would.  Similarly, most of you don’t care about a photo of Myles catching big air on his snowboard, but those in my “family” and “snowboarding” networks would love to see it.  As the Venn diagram of my social networks illustrates, there are very few people I have relationships with who share all of my interests – I can’t think of one right now.  Therefore the majority of my updates are irrelevant to those receiving them. And thus, if you believe the importance of relevance to creating repeating behaviors – like visiting Facebook and actively participating in Twitter – most updates are actually decreasing the utility of those and other “social networks” whose greatest hopes of delivering value for shareholders relies upon repeated usage by members.

Facebook and Twitter have attempted to address this phenomenon by letting users select those they want to “hide” or “follow.”  But these features offer only an all or nothing solution.  They are giving me a meat axe when what I am looking for is a scalpel to select only those relevant updates and tweets from the many some post.

Your choice:  All or none of Ken?

The solution (at least a non-technical one): Social Sub-Network Tagging

So, how could these growing and therefore increasingly irrelevant updates become more relevant and increase the value of sites like Facebook and Twitter?  What if we could all set up our own sub-social network groups (and even sub-subgroups like “immediate” and “extended” within “family”) and “tag” or categorize our updates with these.  The concept is already being used on blog posts and other Web 2.0 applications.  Because I write about four topics – collaboration, Web 2.0, customer service and loyalty – I categorize each post or white page with one of these topics. That way, those who only care about loyalty can click on the loyalty header and see only the posts in this categorized.

If Facebook, Twitter and others gave users the opportunity to set up their social sub-networks and then “tag” updates to be sent to specific groups, they would cut down a lot of noise and – at least I believe – brand diminishing irrelevant updates that clog member’s home pages.  This could also be “receiver controlled” as well, by making it easy for followers to select the update categories they wish to receive.  For example, I would select “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Red Sox” from Andrew McAfee but maybe not “andyasks;” “For Immediate Release updates,”  but not “London weather” from Neville Hobson; etc.

Or better yet, why not develop a new site or application that would be a simple “input page” where we could all fill-in the “what are you doing/thinking about/want to share” box, attach URL’s, pictures and video’s, categorize them to send to relevant sub-groups and then post on Facebook and Twitter?

For now, I’ve secured www.myinputpage.com.  I’ll leave it to the programming teams at Facebook, Twitter and Echo Ditto to figure out how to make this work.

Questions:

• Does this already exist and is in high use among those under 50, but I am clueless about it?
• If not, do you agree this would add value to existing social network sites?
• How would you develop the concept of sub-social network tagging?

Net: Despite being in a business where privacy is heavily regulated and systems stability can literally be a matter of life or death, The Mayo Clinic has established itself as one of the leaders in applying social media technologies to build their brand and engage employees and customers (i.e. patients). And they are doing so with great agility and very little incremental investment.

How many times have you thought or said one of the following rationales for not developing an internal and external Web 2.0 strategy to build your brand, engage your employees, customers and business partners in the co-creation of enterprise value, and increase profits?

“Our brand is a matter of life and death to our business.”

“We are in a serious industry.”

“We can’t diminish our brand by playing around with something my kids do.”

“We are one of the country’s oldest and most revered companies in our business.”

“Protecting our customers’ information is a top priority.”

“Our lawyers and IT executives will take years to even think about approving something like this.”

I just listened to an outstanding interview on the For Immediate Release (FIR) podcast. Started in January of 2005 by Neville Hobson, one of Underwood Partners UK colleagues, and Shel Holtz, from Concord, California, FIR is one of the longest running podcasts. In addition to their twice weekly podcasts on business and nonprofit enterprise applications of Web 2.0 and social media technologies, Shell and Neville frequently interview leading edge practitioners. The February 5^th FIR Interview featured Lee Aase, Manager of Syndication and Social Media at the Mayo Clinic. The interview is very well done, lasts about 50 minutes and is well worth your time. A few highlights:

• The Mayo Clinic began experimenting with podcasts in 2005 by taking interviews with their doctors they had developed for their web site and posting them on iTunes . They were surprised to see downloads rapidly grow from 900 to 74,000 a month. As a point of reference, the Mayo Clinic treats about 50,000 patients a year, or less than 4,200 a month.
• Lee’s team found using flip video cameras to interview doctors to be an efficient way to get breaking news (e.g. research findings) to media and patients. Paraphrasing Lee: “It was low cost and enabled us to be a lot more nimble. Instead of going through the four day process to get copy editing done for a traditional news release, we shoot a ten or fifteen minute interview and pull out five minutes of it for video news releases.
• The Mayo Clinic created what they call “a culture blog” sharing.mayoclinic.org, where patients share their experiences with diseases and treatments.
• Mayo uses WordPress for their blogs with the full blessing and support of IT. Lee: “We have been very blessed with our IT colleagues who were supportive of using WordPress.” Mayo uses CSS customization and maps the blogs to a sub-domain of their patient web site. The Mayo Clinic is paying about $55 a year per blog or “about a couple of Starbucks per month.”
• Health care providers are all bound by HIPPA regulations that prohibit them from providing information about patients’ conditions. But the legal team working with Lee, whom he describes as innovative, supportive and “enlightened folks,” determined that if the patient decides to tell their story it is the patient disclosing information, not Mayo Clinic. He adds that the Clinic has blog guidelines and encourages patients to think carefully about what they put on the site.
• Mayo Clinic has a Facebook group with 5,577 members. The Mayo Clinic main page on Facebook offers people a chance to write on their wall. Said Lee: “We did this so that people’s friends would see that they wrote on our wall and what they said about us.”
• The Mayo Clinic YouTube channel was established 12 months ago. Although some questioned “whether YouTube was the kind of place for an august dignified brand” like the Mayo Clinic, Lee’s team did research and found that among those who had an opinion, 39% were positive about  a Mayo Clinic page and only 6% were negative .
• YouTube was also a no or low cost initiatives as the videos come from interviews used for other purposes and YouTube is free for nonprofit organizations. They use YouTube as their video server because is far cheaper than self hosting and easier for others to imbed in their blogs and share with friends and colleagues. (They also make the raw files available.)
• The Mayo Clinic engages employees with an internal blog “Let’s talk” and has used it to engage Mayo’s 50,000 staff members in their strategic plan by inviting comments and asking employees to collaborate on such topics as “What does quality mean in your area?”

Why engage in social media? Lee states that the primary drivers of patients to Mayo Clinic are word of mouth and stories in the news media. Their social media programs combine the power of both while increasing engagement and collaboration of many of Mayo Clinic’s stakeholders. He goes on to add:

“We treat 500, 000 patients a year and have 50,000 employees. Our goal is to engage and empower them and to get them involved.”

Question:

If the Mayo Clinic can use Word Press blogs, Facebook and YouTube to help achieve their enterprise goals, why can’t you?

Good points on social media in the enterprise as a whole. Thanks for the write-up. While we at Dell place social media as a top priority, clearly we have room to improve.
To be honest, even though we consider ourselves leaders in the PC business on social media, our “corporate culture” is still evolving. We implement changes based on what our customers tell us on IdeaStorm, Direct2Dell corporate blog, and our own Dell Community Forums constantly.
This is clearly an area where we have some work to do- getting front line tech, care, and sales agents steeped in social media concepts like ratings and reviews.
I thank you for pointing out our shortcomings in this area, and will make sure to pick up the “Read your own ratings and reviews” baton myself, and get the word out.

Last week I caught up with two friends – one who was on the Alliance Data Systems (ADS) deal team when they bought The Loyalty Group and later joined the team at US Loyalty/Jaz Rewards, the 2001 start up that attempted to develop a coalition loyalty program in the US.  The other was a dear friend from my freshman year at college whom I had not seen for almost 30 years.

Jim Sullivan, my former ADS colleague told me about his new business, Built to Lead, which as best as I can understand it, provides executive and organizational coaching to help  “build sustainable, high performance individuals, teams, and leaders in work and life.”  While I haven’t studied their web site, materials, exercizes and – most importantly – customer testimonials and case studies in sufficient detail to be able to recommend their services, I can tell you that Jim is very enthusiastic about Built to Lead.  I can also tell you that his elevator pitch/mission statement was one of the most break-through I have heard:

“we wake up dead people”

That one got my attention.  But it also got me thinking as Jim went on to talk about how many people are going through the motions at work, without anywhere near the passion they could have for their work and therefore likely under-performing on a daily basis.

A few nights later I had a wonderful dinner with my college friend.   She was working at a company that shall remain nameless, but it’s a fast growing retailer with over 800 outlets, a cool brand identity and  a name you would recognize.  She had read some of our writings about the importance of customer service and engaging “the employee sphere” in the creation of business value.  She went on to tell me about how her company’s culture was changing. Like most high growth businesses, the company found they needed larger space to accommodate their growing HQ staff and recently moved to a newer building.  A few things bothered her and most likely many other employees:

• No one asked the employees what they liked most about their current space or what they wanted in the new offices. (They may have had a cross functional team with representatives form various departments,  but there clearly was no attempt to use a blog, wiki, an online survey tool like Survey Monkey or even a good old fashioned email survey to get the broader employee community’s input.)

• The one thing that my friend thought everyone wanted was showers in the rest rooms, as the company is located in a part of the country where most people are highly active and fit and many either bike to work or go running or riding at lunch.  But no one asked what they wanted most and the employees arrived at the new office to find “huge new restrooms that could easily have accommodated a couple of showers”, but did not have even one.

• One of the things she liked best about the old office was they almost everyone in her group rode their mountain bikes to work and parked them besides their cubes.  Anyone with a new bike received notice from others and “user reviews” were requested. Within a few minutes, test drives were taken around the office.  It was a fun way for people to take a break and do a little bonding. It sounded like mountain bikes had become the new water cooler or – probably more accurate – the mostly pre-kid employees version of sharing baby pictures.  All this changed at the new office when they arrived on the first day and were told “no bikes allowed on the elevators or in the office floors.”  Big surprise and at least a small bummer for the bike loving employees.

So what’s happening here?  At Underwood Partners, we have been working to develop a graphic that illustrates our belief that:

…asking employees, business partners and customers to contribute in the enterprise value creation process sets in motion a virtuous cycle of engagement, collaboration and contributions. (see The Philosophy & Approach of Web 2.0.)

Here’s our latest version:

We would appreciate any comments, suggestions or references/links to a better graphic than this one.  To us the formula engagement + collaboration = contributions/results/impact is consistent with our core beliefs and representative of our experiences from leading companies.  Recognizing the the contribution and its impact on the business can turbo-charge the cycle by taking everything to a higher level.  The only thing we don’t like about this graphic is that the boxes should be getting bigger with each revolution, but our power point skills need some expert assistance to do so.

We also believe that a corresponding “downward cycle” can be created by not engaging employees in the business outside of their functional/departmental roles.  Part of the cost of non-engagement is the lost opportunity of the creative ideas that come from cross-functional engagement.  But as this small example illustrates, the failure to listen to employees desires and ideas can  be de-energizing to committed members of your team and turn the water cooler (or mountain biking) conversations away from “isn’t this a cool place to work” to “our culture is changing, and not in a good way.”

Given the ubiquity of low cost, easy to implement social media technology tools designed to engage your stakeholders in your business, there is no excuse for not doing so.

What actions or non-actions are you taking today that will either “wake up dead people” or begin to kill your culture?