I really don’t care what you had for breakfast – how social sub-network tagging can end irrelevance on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

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?

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

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?

Response from Dell

Just noticed this response from Dell manager. Bonus points for finding this new blog and post and for the very candid response on how Dell’s culture is still evolving to embrace customer and customer service collaboration. His comments:

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.

Are you “waking up dead people” or “killing a culture?”

One of the great byproducts of Web 2.0 is that I often hear from friends and colleagues I have lost touch with.  I am sure you too receive the “I found you on the internet, Facebook, Linked In, …” email from time to time, hopefully from people you actual want to talk to.

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?

Case Study: Another Dell misfire demonstrates why Web 2.0 and customer service must be linked

I have been an IBM ThinkPad customer since 1991, about the year they starting making them, but the extremely poor customer service I experienced from Lenovo regarding my X61 Tablet forced me to look at other manufacturers. Although I have never been a fan of Dell laptops, I was attracted to the ads for the new latitude E6400 model and decided to give one a trial.

I first called Dell a few weeks ago and was pleased to be able to talk to Bernard, a sales rep. Three pluses for Bernard:

1. He speaks flawless English and is  located in a US service center.
2. He was very knowledgeable about configurations, listened to my needs and helped me understand why I needed a 7400 RPM hard drive.
3. He never tried to oversell. I know this because I would have paid more for options I asked about, but he didn’t believe I needed them.
4. He gave me a direct phone number where I could call him back.

All good. I also learned that he was on commission and told him I would call him back soon. Last week, I was ready to call Bernard back and close the deal. But before I did, I wanted to do a final check for user reviews of the E6400 (It is a new model and although CNET had a positive editors review/video, there were no customer reviews the first time I checked).

Fortunately, there were 5 reviews on the Dell site for the E6400. Unfortunately for Dell, 2 of the 5 were very negative:

In all fairness, the other 3 reviews were glowing, but these 2 did cause me to re-think my decision. I was also very surprised to learn that Dell did nothing at all to respond to these negative reviews on their own site. Back to our 6 Web 2.0 Imperatives for All Businesses. Dell gets the imperative to support customers by enabling and encouraging users to talk about their products and services on the web. But this alone is necessary and – as this case shows – terribly insufficient. You must (a) listen to what they are saying and (b) authentically interact. Where is the E6400’s product manager’s response????

But wait, there’s more…

No problem, I thought. I’ll just call Bernard and he will be able to address these customer concerns quickly and move on to close the sale and earn his commission.

So I called Bernard, who answered the call himself. (More bonus points for Dell, or a sign of the slowing economy?) I told him I was ready to buy, but had read the negative reviews on the Dell web site and was concerned about making the purchase, especially given the comments about speed – a huge issue for me as I often work with 20MB+ presentations. To my incredulity, this is what happened next:

• Bernard had no idea that there were negative comments about the laptop on the Dell site.
• Obviously, he had not been made aware of these concerns as he had no credible answer, saying “What’s fast for some users may be very slow for others” or something to that effect.
• He could not pull up the Dell Web site to read the review. I had to email it to him.

So here you have a Dell employee (or an employee of a Dell contractor) who had no idea that customers were complaining about the product he sold and no ability to even see the complaints. What’s happening from a 3C 5 Sphere perspective:

• Bernard feels less than thrilled about not being aware of or able to respond to these Dell enabled complaints. Poor/no technical capability = decreased employee commitment.
• I am less confident about buying the product. Failure to respond to customer reviews and equip sales agents to address them decreases the probability of a Dell purchase that could result in a long term $20-30,000 customer.
• The call took longer than it should have and most customers would have thought more about it before purchasing, if at all. Increased costs.
• I am writing this blog post and sharing a negative customer experience with everyone I know.

Some of you may be thinking, “If Dell isn’t going to address these types of customer complaints, they shouldn’t provide a forum for them on their site.”

This would be the exact wrong response. The more ubiquitous and easy blogging and other forms of customer generated feedback become, the more the probability that negative customer reviews about defective products will reach your potential customers will approach 100%. If Dell didn’t enable customer feedback, I would have found them on CNET or other sites.

Listen, ask, and authentically respond and act. It is not enough to stop at the second step.

Better yet, fix your quality problems.

Full disclosure note: despite Bernard’s inability to answer these customers concerns, I still ordered the laptop after being assured that Dell has a 30 day money back guarantee with no restocking fee (unlike Apple). No waiting for delivery. Stay tuned.

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