Chapter 2. Align Organizational Goals and Culture

A Social Business’s Goals and Culture

As you learned in Chapter 1, “The AGENDA for Social Business Success,” a Social Business is one that is engaging, transparent, and nimble because of its integration of social techniques throughout its processes and interactions with clients, employees, and suppliers. It is different from just social media in that it is applying social features and characteristics to more than just marketing and communications but extends into the heart of the business, with no business process left behind in the competitive advantages that social brings to the table. The result is a company that is more competitive and effective in the marketplace.

In a Social Business, your company’s goals act as a guide through the magical and interesting world of the blogosphere. In essence, the goals drive the AGENDA workstreams.

Your company’s culture and beliefs matter more in your effectiveness in this new world than in the past. Consider Frank Eliason, a client service employee at Comcast. His engagement allowed him to observe Comcast customers who were on Twitter posting their concerns. He decided to converse with them and started that conversation with a question: “How can I help you?” Frank then listened and responded to each and every tweet he received. Frank’s star power on Twitter had a direct effect on his organization. Since Comcast was supportive of Frank’s @comcastcares Twitter page, which has more than 42,000 followers, Comcast has received positive feedback from customers and press. Articles have been posted about Comcast’s success with customer support via Twitter in the journals Businessweek, NY Times, CIO Magazine, and many others. Comcast is continuing to support social techniques and is creating more defined customer support pages on Twitter such as @comcastbill and @comcast. While Frank is no longer at Comcast, he helped to shape the culture there permanently, from an individual working in isolation to an environment where social techniques were used to reach the goals of the customer service plan.

But setting the goals is only half of the mission. If a company simply copies another company’s strategy, but doesn’t pay attention to the culture variable, it will not have the same success. This corporate culture variable (which will inevitably be different between the two companies) will play a critical role.

While both goals and culture are important, culture is the essential swing vote. Before moving on, let’s ensure we have a common understanding of culture.

What is culture? Culture is about individuals in a group sharing patterns of behavior. It is at its core the collective way in which things operate in a business. There are learned behaviors that are common to all employees. Typically these are driven by a set of shared values. Sun Tzu, a Chinese military general from 3000 B.C., indicated that culture forms an integral part of any organizational strategy. It consists of created and shared beliefs, values, and glue that holds an organization together, and it also involves the very nature of the organization.

Adam Christensen, who is a former colleague of mine at IBM and now a great partner at Juniper, commented on many occasions:

“Culture is the most overlooked, underestimated factor determining whether social media succeeds or fails in a company. And when corporate culture and social media are pitted against each other, Social Business will always fail. Always.”

Because a Social Business is engaged, transparent, and nimble, the way it sets its goals and shapes its culture matters. Why?

To engage with peers, clients, and partners, a company must leverage its employees to be subject matter experts and to have the right conversations. Now, if the culture of the organization is not open, these goals would be difficult to reach.

In addition, a Social Business is always learning and believes that there should be no boundaries between experts, whether those experts exist in the company or exist in the marketplace. Because a Social Business learns from how customers respond, it will tweak its goals based on results; however, if the culture doesn’t support giving lots of individuals a voice, or even doesn’t allocate funds for a networked platform, the culture won’t support those goals.

A Social Business is also transparent. With transparency as a means to a goal, this changes the way that decisions are made. In an organization where hierarchy is the norm for the culture, this decision making that is now more transparent, democratic, and consensus-based may not survive if the culture is not modified.

For a Social Business, being nimble applies to all businesses processes, whether marketing, customer service, supply chain, and so forth. Being nimble is the ability of a company to leverage social networks to speed up business and to gain real-time insights so they can make better and quicker decisions. Culturally, I have seen that those companies that adopt experimentation as a way of life succeed more readily. Again, the culture matters.

Let’s take an example. A Social Business gets information to customers, partners, and the entire ecosystems in new ways and new channels based on profiling, geo-location, subscription, and recommendations based on analytics. Experimentation with these new tools would enable a retailer to leverage geo-location tools in which discount coupons could be applied based on a client’s location and vicinity to a particular store. Experimentation as part of a cultural norm gives businesses the freedom to interact when and where it delivers the greatest value, allowing the organization to adapt quickly to the changing marketplace.

So, the culture to support Social Business goals does not restrict collaboration and communication between employees and customers, but instead embraces it. While it’s important to have a business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-employee (B2E) set of goals, an overall encompassing strategy will ensure that you don’t end up creating different silos of social activity when it’s not necessary. A Social Business really becomes not a B2B or B2C company, but a P2P—people-to-people company.

If you think about this new Social Business, the one that will be most competitive in the future, the one that most CEOs are hoping to become, the next question is, how do you begin that journey or perhaps how do you increase your speed along that journey to have the right set of goals and alignment of culture?

Social techniques are now widespread, and if your company’s goals and culture don’t take into account the new collaborative world, you are already behind. But don’t worry! There is still time to catch up. Now is the time to really think about competitive and innovative companies that are already successfully leveraging these new techniques. If you have already started, there is still much to learn, beginning with your goals and culture.

The expected outcomes of a Social Business culture are as follows:

• Greater employee engagement for innovation in product, service, and beyond (consider the aforementioned Comcast example)

• Tapping into subject matter expertise

• Enabling your employees to solve problems more quickly

• Experimentation as a cultural norm

• Decision making done in a more transparent, democratic, and consensus-based manner

This chapter is an important one. Please don’t skip this Social Business AGENDA workstream. You cannot be bold in the marketplace and win competitively without looking at your goals and culture. Let’s begin your formation of the Social Business AGENDA by working through the following:

1. Your company’s core business goals (what are you in the business of doing and with whom?)

2. Corporate culture norms required to succeed

When item #2 is an impediment, take the smart approach and find ways to change the culture to create a more collaborative environment.

Goals First. Period.

My dad used to tell me that if you didn’t have a destination in mind, any road will get you there! One of the first mistakes people make in their pursuit of Social Business is starting without a goal in mind. I cannot tell you how many C-level executives have said to me, “I need a Facebook page, or a community, or <insert the tool of the moment here>.” When I ask why, their answer is always because they read an article on a plane or heard from a competitor that this was the right goal.

Goals could be as simple as gaining more new clients or increasing client loyalty; conversely, they could be as grand and bold as creating a new product in a new category in the industry. The goals should guide everything that you do, including choosing social techniques throughout your company. Some examples include the way Visa set a goal of having more “relevant advertising” and therefore leveraged YouTube for a campaign that encourages consumers to upload their own videos, or the way Boston Medical Center set a goal of expanding their client base by increased referrals and reduced no-show rates with execution through embedding social techniques.

Because a Social Business is about people, some of the goals that my clients have leveraged for great financial gain for their corporations are to do the following:

• Enable an effective workforce: Operations, human resources, and other departments can increase overall employee productivity and job satisfaction through improved knowledge capture, expertise location, and collaboration. Travel, training, and teleconferencing expenses also can be reduced.

• Accelerate innovation: Product research and development teams can quicken internal idea sharing and discovery, as well as transform how they generate ideas, share strategies, and gather feedback from key customers and partners.

• Deepen customer relationships: With more immediate access to content and expertise, customer service representatives can work more efficiently and provide higher-quality service. Marketing and sales teams can have more time to spend with customers and to dedicate to customer-focused initiatives.

For example, a large global consumer products company with more than 10,000 employees in global research and development (R & D) approached me about defining their current goals and challenges. As one executive explained, “After one of our once-a-month teleconference meetings, I spent four to five hours answering questions through email; often it is the same question over and over.” In addition, experts were isolated, slowing projects and preventing the reuse of best practices and equipment. With the Senior Team, we agreed that the major goals would be threefold: shortening the development cycle, optimizing the workforce, and fostering innovation. (By the way, these goals will entail a cultural shift as there were difficulties in collaboration among far-flung staff and work sites.)

Every single thing we do in life has an end goal. The difference with life is that we have no choice in our very end goal. But in business, you do. Set out your end goals and work strategically toward them. Be prepared that your goals may shift over time and that you need to be nimble to be able to quickly change your strategy to reflect redefined or new goals.

It is important to determine the difference between in-process goals and end goals. While both are important to track, the end goal is usually the one with the financial model tied to it. For example, “great engagement with clients” is an intermediary goal with a purpose of “new product development,” the end business goal. Understanding the difference is important in any consideration of goals.

Social Businesses set meaningful business goals with metrics. Lots of companies (including IBM) expect ROI (Return on Investment) and revenue results from things that don’t lend themselves to it, like engagement or market research. In fact, I joke that IBM is a company that measures ROE—Return on Everything. So it is equally important when you set your goals to establish a way to measure them. Otherwise, there will be endless debate on the success of your Social Business initiatives if there are no agreed-to metrics of success. Chapter 5, “(Social) Network Your Business Processes,” presents sample metrics to frame to your goals based on your approach and chosen business process.

Culture Matters

Yes, “culture matters” seems like a given; however, in my experience, most people push culture and change off to the side in importance. As one of my clients, who is the CIO at Caterpillar, said during a keynote at IBM’s IMPACT conference, “Culture eats strategy for lunch!” So since culture will dictate the best path or even create an insurmountable obstacle, the remainder of this chapter outlines five steps for Social Business cultural alignment.

Culture is a combination of shared values, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors. Culture is grounded in the assumptions about how people interact. If a company’s culture is not supportive of collaboration outside their four walls, and in some cases, even restricts the use of things like social networking sites, this culture will block reaching the company’s goals. Thomas Knoll, Zappos Community manager, once said,

“Success or failure of a company’s use of social techniques is dependent on its culture and goals.”

Culture is king (or queen!).

Culture begins with a set of shared beliefs because what people believe drives what they think about value. For example, global consumption of bottled water quadrupled between 1990 and 2005. Despite the fact that bottled water is 10,000 times more expensive than tap water (source: Earth Policy Institute, Wikipedia, www.researchwikis.com), by 2011, the market will have grown 42% since 1999. It started because people believed that bottled water was healthier than tap water. Now I am sure not all of you are selling water, but the premise works regardless of industry. Bottom line: What you believe (remember, culture is a set of shared beliefs) drives what you value.

Corporate culture is how you shape your ecosystem (all your stakeholders) to believe in a set of norms for the organization. Predominantly, it is defined by the behavior and actions of senior-level executives. To get people to buy into your beliefs, they need to hear it from people they trust, see evidence, and experience it for themselves.

How do you get a culture that is ready to maximize the power of a Social Business?

1. Define the role of management and the employees, typically with a solid Governance process, beginning with a set of Social Computing Guidelines and a Social Business Digital Council.

2. Empower everyone to participate.

3. Educate and enable.

4. Build a culture for participation started inside first and top down as well as bottom up. (While not everyone needs to be a contributor, everyone, especially senior executives, needs to understand the importance and value of becoming a Social Business. As a senior leader at IBM, I make the time for all things social because of the value they bring my business. While I do have to schedule and prioritize the engagement into my calendar, it is well worth the time.)

5. Experiment and have a structured approach to learn from mistakes.

Define the Role of Management and the Employees

Telling people what we want them to do and believe isn’t enough; it has to be shown. This is why it is critical to have executives show the way, not just talk the way. You need to have a senior leader who is the Social Business Champion. Not every senior executive needs to be active in the blogosphere; however, you need a visible leader.

At IBM, Alistair Rennie, an IBM General Manager in Software Group, personally participates in IBM’s Social Business activities. He models the way for the entire division, by speaking at town hall meetings and web conferences, and sharing the IBM story with virtually everyone he meets. Not everyone, and certainly not every executive, is going to become an avid contributor by posting blogs, updating their status, and posting comments in communities. But you need that senior executive to showcase the way.

Executives play another critical role in that they need to support and encourage their departments to leverage social techniques when appropriate. Our IBM CMO, Jon Iwata, a great forward thinker, supports IBM’s overall infrastructure and the people to participate in Social Business. In fact, he hired a Vice President of Digital Eminence to signal the importance of the concept to IBM.

One of my responsibilities as a Vice President at IBM is to ensure that I reflect the mission and goals of my company to my peers and teams of people around the world who report to me. I’m a strong believer that employees often look to senior leaders to take guidance as to acceptable behavior. I am very vocal to my peers and team that becoming a Social Business is an imperative for sustaining IBM’s competitive advantage as the largest technology company in the world. I recently sponsored and hosted an internal web conference open to all IBMers on “Living Social as a Seller.” The goal of this web conference was to share some success stories from me and other IBMers about increased sales result from engaging transparently with customers using social media internally and externally. This action showcased my support of Social Business and the employees who had followed my lead. Once you have the right level of support or buy-in, a Social Business Champion of Champions, there needs to be structure.

Social Business Governance

Governance is the structure of relationships and processes to direct and guide the use of social techniques in order to achieve the goal of the company. The Social Business Governance model defines what has to be done to reach the goals, how it is done, who has the authority to do it, and the metrics of success that will be used. Without proper governance, Social Business best practices can be implemented in departmental silos which limit the opportunity for sharing across the entire corporation (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Building blocks of governance structure

Achieving the transformative value of becoming a Social Business involves connecting all parts of the organization (including employees, partners, and customers) in new ways. It often requires quite new ways of managing people, flatter organizations, and significant cultural change. While becoming social provides individual flexibility, it’s important that the change achieves the unifying value for the company of the new goals and culture.

A strong governance program facilitates coordinated change. The governance is led by two complementary leadership groups whose members include the major “organizational structures” (for example, line of business (LOB), Finance, Supply Chain, Marketing, IT, HR, Channel Management, and so on).

The first group, the Executive Sponsor Group, defines the strategic linkage and goals of becoming a Social Business. Members are leaders across the organization and are true believers. They do not have to be the CEO, but they need to be people who are influencers in the organization. This role is very important because an evangelist is someone who showcases the true value of being a Social Business. The ideal situation is where you have a business leader and the leader of the IT business that are joined together in being champions.

The second group is a Social Business Digital Council. This includes executives who are responsible for the organization-wide, execution creation of the Social Business plan. I recommend that your Social Business Champion be the Chairperson of your Social Business Digital Council. The representatives are often the Social Business leaders in their respective LOBs and functional areas, which ensures focus on the vertical and horizontal needs.

What is a Social Business Digital Council? It is a governance body established to ensure that the company is analyzing the reputational effect of employee use of social techniques. The Council—a cross-company, cross-discipline executive council—should ensure that the company is taking full advantage of social techniques to drive business benefit, while simultaneously managing the potential risks associated with employee use of social outside the firewall.

The Council’s goal is to seek to foster greater operational collaboration, standardized approaches, and consistent best practice sharing as the company embraces Social Business. You might also want to consider adding an independent member to your council from outside your company. For example, I sit on a couple of Social Business Digital Councils for other organizations as they look to me to provide outside-in feedback, strategy, and guidance.

This Social Business Digital Council is an important step in ensuring success through the organization. In my first experience of becoming a Social Business inside one of the IBM divisions, this was an invaluable part of my governance structure.

The Social Business Digital Council focuses on the key areas of a Social Business culture:

• Community & Content Management: Provides a common approach to drive change and adoption at and across the LOB and functional level of internal communities throughout your organization. In addition, this part of the Council drives the formation of a content management strategy,. This focus would be on both internal use and external use of information to spread the word in a consistent and integrated fashion. Chapter 4, “Engage Through Experiences,” discusses in detail the role of a community manager and the keys of a content activation strategy.

• Center of Excellence: Shares best practices to create a common social voice and approach across and outside the organization.

• Reputation and Risk Management: Focuses on regulatory risk and compliance (if relevant), social record retention for general discovery, and other legal and financial risks. In addition, this area proactively manages the organization’s reputation and has a defined plan to respond to various levels of negative media or emergencies. Chapter 6, “Design for Reputation and Risk Management,” discusses this area in detail.

• Metrics and Measurement: Covers all elements of data and measurement. This group starts with proactive listening to guide the engagement strategy and metric setting. This includes internal analytics of social networks, expertise, and projects, as well as the external listening and analytics. This group also is responsible for creating and automating the overall program measurements to track success, progress on the plan, and social return. Chapter 7, “Analyze Your Data,” discusses this area in detail.

• Guidelines & Standards: This group focuses on process and technical standards for a Social Business. While Lines of Business (LOBs), major business functions, and so on require the freedom to build their social programs tailored to their needs, the Standards group ensures that the overall company can be nimble in connecting across boundaries in ways not always anticipated. Standards for brand and ways of connecting with partners, channels, clients, and so on ensure that the company is viewed as coordinated and focused on needs versus a “collection of parts.” Setting policies, guidelines, and processes for the organization and associates to participate in social tools externally will be a key part of the mission. This process is discussed in detail in the text that follows. On the technical side, a common Social Business framework enables the new ways of working, as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8, “Technology as a Competitive Ingredient.”

I was the Social Business Champion for one of IBM’s divisions and led our Social Business Digital Council. My Social Business Digital Council was made up of influential participants from all functional areas of our division, for instance, development, human resources, marketing, sales, customer service, and even more of our key areas. We met on a monthly basis, but in the start-up period, we dedicated two days to set out our charter, set our rules of engagement with each other, and define our Social Computing Guidelines. The typical agenda for the meeting included best practices from other companies that were not like us. For instance, we explored some of Nordstrom’s best practices, and studied how Zappos was gaining traction in the marketplace in their approach. We also discussed incentives for use, and published our own Social Business Heroes, those who leveraged social inside and outside our four walls for business success. By setting up a Social Business Center of Excellence with a few people (and a few smart interns!), we created a go-to place for answers and sharing.

Finally, we developed our risk management and reputation management plan (see Chapter 6). A big portion of our time was spent planning how to evangelize more IBM employees, partners, and alumni to be brand advocates for us. A brand advocate is a person who is passionate about your brand and references you as a normal course of business. Defining new roles to have in our organization—such as a Social Business Manager or Community Manager—also became important tasks.

If you are a large corporation, I would encourage you to form a Social Business Digital Council, and if you are a small business, I would encourage you to incorporate these items into your business management meetings. In that Council, ensure that you have the right people from all the critical functions, and outside your organization, ensure that you have a charter and set of measurable goals that are linked to the bigger company goals, and that you focus on the needs you have internally to be successful, such as new roles, incentive structure, and your risk management plan.

Part of the employees’ role is to develop an interest to be a brand advocate for their company, participate in the education, select the tools from the choices supplied by the top leadership (or suggest others!), and participate on an active, engaged basis.

A great way to shape this interaction at all levels of the organization and ecosystem is to create a set of guidelines and values that shape what the company will and won’t allow. It showcases support of its goals and brand values. It provides a way that Social Business can reduce the risk of unleashing its employees into the blogosphere and help to ensure that everyone works together to bring about success.

The Social Business Guidelines

The Social Business Guidelines for your company should be based on your values. Consider the following ten best practices:

1. Guidelines should be written by your employees in a social group setting. Those guidelines developed in a participatory fashion will last.

2. Guidelines should state why the guidelines exist; for example, to innovate in a responsible way.

3. Guidelines should be short and to the point.

4. Guidelines should state your position on open dialogue—what’s fair game and what’s not (confidential information).

5. Guidelines should state consequences.

6. Guidelines should encourage transparency.

7. Guidelines should state privacy and rights of your company’s partners and clients.

8. Guidelines should guide in adding value and learning from mistakes.

9. Guidelines should discuss time spent in social media.

10. Guidelines should encourage your company’s goals in social techniques.

On www.SocialMediaGovernance.com, you can find a collection of company social guidelines. Read through them and define your guidelines in sync with your culture and goals. For example, in sync with its corporate culture, Zappos’s Social Media Policy is “be real and use your best judgment.” This Social Policy showcases Zappos’s trust in their employees! Intel®’s Social Media Guidelines have a few best practices as well. Examples include “be transparent” and “if it gives you pause, pause.” I also love their advice that “perception is reality and it’s a conversation.” I think the key is defining these with a collaborative group of digital citizens throughout your company.

For large global organizations, corporate culture sometimes needs to make way for local culture. For example, at IBM we have a very open-minded culture supported by our senior leadership team. We have sponsorship from the very top of IBM supporting our movement into end-user-generated content to become a Social Business. However, we do understand that there are also cultural differences across the globe. As such, we make sure to understand these cultural differences and embrace them in our Social Business AGENDA. With IBM operating in more than 170 countries, our team reviews privacy acts around the globe to ensure that we keep the interest of the employees at the center of focus, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2 IBM privacy regulations

Social Business Governance is a step in reaching your goals by shaping your culture.

Empower Everyone to Participate

Why would you want everyone to participate in your Social Business? Because empowering your employees, partners, and even customers to be proactive in solving problems through social tools makes your company more competitive.

Your employees are in the best position to engage customers, partners, and suppliers. The result is to increase the power of your brand, improve your customer satisfaction, innovate new ideas, and try new sales. For example, the book Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, features a story about Leonard Bonacci, who developed GuestAssist, a text messaging system to manage disruptive Philadelphia Eagles fans, to highlight a major client satisfaction idea. Fans with a problem send a text to a short code that matches their seat so that a rep can arrive to discreetly resolve the issue. Now, the National Football League has taken the best practice and is implementing it throughout the league.

The Social Computing Guidelines should empower all to participate. With web content publishing of the past, only select people were empowered to post content. Today, social techniques and policy lay the groundwork for those your company selects to contribute content. However, mistakes will be made, and the way that you respond to them will set a tone with your employees and impact their participation, as Peggy Dau wrote in her blog:

“So, HP empowers its employees with guidelines of expected behavior. Is that really empowerment? I check on various HP blogs from time to time and follow several Twitter feeds. I find them interesting but cautious.”

While the guidelines are the start, a true trust relationship must exist with your employees. People will know if you really don’t believe in them or in social techniques. You must live and practice what you talk about. Your employees will need positive reinforcement; they need to see peers and role models doing the same thing.

There is a difference between the “participation” of your CEO and your entry-level financial analyst. Yes, social may mean democratic, but certainly the business value varies by whose voice is used. Take Bill Marriott as an example. His goals are new clients and crisis management. As the CEO of Marriott Corporation, he writes his own blog from the heart. He not only drives sales through his blogging strategy but also uses this tool to address any falsehoods in the press. His attitude extends throughout the culture. In fact, in one of his blog posts, the 77-year-old CEO wrote, “What’s the big deal? This is simply another medium for me to listen to my customers and talk to my customers.”

November 26, 2008, marks one of the biggest spikes in IBM’s internal blogging system. That was the day that Sam Palmisano, IBM CEO, posted his first entry in the blogging system. What surprised everyone was that he did not post a blog, but instead commented on someone else’s blog entry. His comment was not on another executive’s blog, but instead on a blog entry posted by a programmer in Data Integration Services. While his comment was very important, his actions were even more important as it sent a clear message to all IBMers that our CEO believes in transparency and is openly willing to engage with all employees.

Think about the empowerment of having your CEO blogging! The age of the social CEO is coming, but few CEOs today are actively participating. To have a social CEO, he or she must want to participate and have the right audience to interface and to interact with and prioritize the time. Forrester’s CEO, George Colony, in his blog interview, projected that in five years 20% of CEOs will be socially active, and in ten years it will be closer to 50%. He continued by saying that corporate boards will begin looking for people who can be social for CEO positions.

Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, control work, and make decisions in autonomous ways. Ensure that your movement into Social Business takes this very important factor into account!

Consider Social Business awards as well as a way to reinforce the practice. At a recent Women in Technology Conference, we gave away “virtual” Social Business merit badges to put on participants’ email footer, blog, and so forth if they had mastered certain elements of social techniques. Inside IBM, colleagues can reward each other through a program we call BlueThx (see Figure 2.3). Employees can choose to have their BlueThx rewards and recognitions show up on their corporate Profile page.

Figure 2.3 The BlueThx page.

Educate and Enable

Just empowering and sharing your goals are not enough. To get your employees to take the next step, you need to inspire them to do so. You need to provoke them into action. So what causes people to act? They need an easy way to get started.

To help people get started, make sure you provide them with the appropriate education. Think about the tools that you think fit your goals and then set up training for your employees. This training should include easy ways to start. For instance, one company set up a “paint your face (book) day.” I was at Farmers Insurance University to share best practices on Social Business and they had a session of best practice speakers from all over the industry.

Peer-to-peer training is often the most effective. What I mean by peer-to-peer training is focusing your training efforts around educating a couple of people in a specific job role. You might have to spend some additional time with them so they fully understand how to use the technology. The goal is for these people to become your advocates and build specific use cases on how some or all of these tools can help them do their job better. Now you have some advocates in a certain job role, and you want them to go educate their peers with similar roles and responsibilities. For example, if I’m in corporate communications, I want someone in corporate communications to educate me on how this is going to help me in my job. The same holds true for other job roles.

A couple of things to ensure you are successful and engaging:

• Make sure your education takes into account the level of your employees. If you have some employees who are already active, it could be as simple as these employees training others through lunch-and-learns, or formal classes offered at your facility.

• The training should encompass tools and technology, how to leverage them as well as best practices and case studies. Tools that assist internal communications increase efficiency and reduce costs by applying them in the right way, engaging the employees.

• Because there is a divide between those who leverage social techniques and those who do not, you will find that the education needs to be continuous and in waves to make room for the new believers.

• Training should be customized by job role, as it assists in people understanding how this can help their role.

• Reverse mentoring programs can help—such as a junior employee being paired up with an executive who is scared or just not savvy about social techniques. At IBM, we have a program called BlueIQ that is basically a program that recruits volunteers to do just that: reverse mentor. BlueIQ Ambassadors are social software experts who help IBM employees, teams, and communities with using social tools, such as blogging, Dogear, and communities.

• Make sure that the education is hands on. There is nothing that sinks in faster than active learning. For instance, I was recently at a conference where they had a “community building” booth for those companies that wanted to set up a community right then and there! It was so effective because you didn’t learn about how to do it; you did it!

At IBM, our training is done in person for the C suite and key influencers, and, for the empowered employees who are located in hundreds of countries, via online tools. For example, we have videos posted in communities on best practices, and our Social Business Heroes—those who have seen great returns from their use—share simple how-to videos and stories with everyone. In addition, we have set up an “I Live Social” section in our discussion threads. This enables all our employees to see how to leverage social techniques in sales, customer service, marketing, and beyond. In addition, we set up a series of seminars for our IBM Business Partners so that they can also effectively leverage the new tools in their small businesses, and even present an esteemed award—called the Beacon—for the best usage of social.

We are not the only company that has internal programs. I was recently at Manulife in Canada for their Global IT meeting. With their leaders from throughout the world, their conference focused on innovation and featured three outside speakers to share best practices from across the industry on becoming a Social Business. Training should include case studies—to prove it works—and don’t be shy about asking others to share. After all, a Social Business is all about sharing its expertise!

Building a Culture for Participation Started Inside First

The best way to learn is through doing. Start your team out by participating inside your four walls. There are a lot of great benefits to taking this approach. You can learn quickly from mistakes and generate value for your company. IBM first started experimenting with internal communities back in the early 2000s. We learned some valuable lessons around building and maintaining a healthy community. During this time, we also were building out our guidelines and starting to measure the business value of communities. It wasn’t until 2008 that IBM started to allow communities to be established externally on www.ibm.com. In 2010, IBM won a Forrester Groundswell Award for excellence in support via social media with an estimated ROI of $100 million savings in support annually.

There are many tools that are built or can be set up for internal-only use—for instance, wikis to enable you to share information dynamically, or blip.tv that features private RSS feeds. There are micro-blogging tools like Twitter that enable an internal-only view of communities, and even video tools like Ustream with private channels for inside corporations. Starting inside first gives you insight into how your employees will leverage the tools and provides a way to reduce the risk of how they will respond once outside the firewall.

For example, a building manufacturer had a business model that needed to be more engaged with its clients. However, they decided to first use social inside their four walls to learn the lay of the land before they took their involvement external. The goal of the internal use was to reduce the risk of a social disaster outside the four walls given that the employees would learn the ins and outs of social first in a safe environment.

The ultimate goal was to create an agile, efficient culture of open collaboration that would lower cycle times, drive innovation, and speed product time to market.

They set up communities of interest internally to tackle challenges common across locations, marketplaces, and skill sets, and leveraged wikis and blogs to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and expertise, as well as feedback and comments. They had more than 10,000 employees working in 400 communities on regional initiatives. After this internal project, they now have more than 1,600 employees who are collaborating in external communities to drive product innovation. And most important, they now have 10,000 “trained” advocates for their brand ready to go!

Deloitte Consulting also focused first internally. With a project called Deloitte D Street, they set up a community to ensure that they had the collaboration inside their company first. With a set of social tools to help them form virtual teams, educate employees, and even provide flexible work options, they reached their employees and trained them while raising their employee satisfaction rate. Because the average age of their employees was 27, the use of social tools for Millennials turned out to be a big satisfier! As David Boland, the leader of the Deloitte D Street project, commented,

“Deloitte created an interactive decision tree to help users think through who they’re trying to collaborate with—internally at Deloitte, or with contractors, clients, or vendors. For example, the decision tree leads users to better understand the best ways to use the tool, and get the information they’re seeking.”

You can set up an internal community to share new ideas or brainstorm that next big product. At IBM, we formed ThinkForward. It is a community of almost 5,000 marketing and communications experts to share and collaborate on our IBM brand while learning about communities and their value. In addition, IBM has SocialBlue, an opt-in social networking site for IBMers. On SocialBlue, you can customize your profile page with information about yourself; upload and share photos; share your ideas, thoughts, and opinions through top-five lists, which we call “hive fives;” and organize events with other IBMers. There were 38,000 members in nine months. All of these activities help IBMers learn how to behave and optimize in the Social Business world.

Deloitte and IBM are not alone. Coca-Cola, Sprint, Eddie Bauer, and Johnson & Johnson not only have tried out the techniques internally but have now externally launched their social projects more successfully.

The goal of launching first internally is to provide your employees a practice ground in which to learn how to be effective with the tools in an internal setting first, to reduce the risk when you move your engagement outside your four walls. Lessons learned typically include how to communicate in 140 or fewer characters, how to effectively use the tools, and how to interact online!

Experiment: Have a Way to Learn from Mistakes and Others

The definition of experimentation is to “try something new, in order to gain experience.” The goal of experimentation is to see what works for your company and your clients and employees. Social techniques provide a great way to experiment. Trying something in the morning can yield results by noon so that changes can be made. It is important that your employees and others experiment with the usage as you cannot understand the value of social without having experienced it for yourself.

Social Businesses pilot innovations. They stimulate the extended management team to break the mold of existing business models. Think “green field”—what would you do if you were a new entrant with no legacy burden or the freedom to question the obvious? When you think you have the answer, ask “why” again.

Neal Schaffer, the author of Windmill Networking: Maximizing LinkedIn, wrote, “It’s about finding what sparks engagement, spread of word, new fans, and action in what you do in social. And guess what? You won’t know what works until you try it, analyze the results, and incorporate your findings in how you refine your social strategy going forward.”

Frame your experiment carefully and determine what you are testing. It is important to understand “what you know” and test “what you think.” For instance, you could be testing the best use of your employees in brainstorming on video or blogs. You know that involving employees in brainstorming the next product feature is a best practice, but you “think” that video is a better way to get the results. This experiment is about the most effective tools. Experiments could be focused on best use of social techniques, best use of a tool, new engagement methodologies, cultural differences in different parts of the world, and the list goes on. Be careful about the experiment.

Unfortunately, there is a misconception that most of the effort required in successful experimentation occurs during the actual conduction of the experiment. In fact, the bulk of the effort in successful experiments is invested before the experiment itself is conducted, in the preexperiment phase. Moreover, substantial effort is also required after the experiment is conducted, when the results are analyzed, understood, extrapolated, documented, and disseminated.

Social Businesses have a mechanism to learn from the experimentation. Make sure when you experiment that you are sharing the learnings through the Social Business Digital Council discussed earlier in the chapter.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we went deeper into the bold AGENDA for Social Business around aligning your company’s goals and culture. Social Businesses need to have solid goals and to consider culture before beginning on the social journey. Projects without regard to culture fail. If the current culture doesn’t align, Social Businesses need to change it, and create a culture of engagement and experimentation. Top-down mandates generally don’t work and neither do completely grass-roots efforts. It takes a cultural change. Experiment and learn. This is a continuous process! And don’t forget to measure the results. In Chapter 5, I will share some ways to calculate your ROI.

Now that you have completed the Social Business AGENDA workstream on goals and culture, let’s take that power to outside the firewall. Let’s proceed with how to gain “friends” through social trust!