heregoesheather: November 2011

What is the link between the on and the offline world. It’s us. Or “two worlds bound by flesh” as Benjamin Ellis says. The uniqueness of the individual can be a help and a hinderence depending on what you want to achieve.

So we have to start with the question, how does virtual become real?
It could be something that gives us inspiration, moves a conversation online to the pub with friends, 3D printing or physically going somewhere.

And if we flip that, how does the real become virtual? That’s done through recording, media capture - blogging, podcasting, pictures, etc.

BUT most companies limit themselves to the idea of input “the keyboard” and output “the printer”

A lot of our offline interactions happen away from the desk. We see that in two ways where we don’t end up capturing the content/ideas we’re discussing:

The meeting/ corrider conversation: Valuable corrider conversations end up not being captured and those thoughts and moments are lost. They are great for those who are there but what about the rest of the business. They won’t benefit.
Conference calls/ mobile: you could put them online and do speech to text so they are searchable but most people don’t.

What we need to do is bridge this unstructured process. This is where the interesting things happen. You want to make it easy and effective - but these are opposite things. So you need to get it right to make it easier later.

What can we currently do to instantly move from real to virtual:
QR codes: The QR code is one way. Though we may question how many people are using them, 14 million americans in the month of July used a QR code. That’s a lot of scanning. But how can it be used beyond marketing on a poster or business card? How about adding them to your meeting documents so you give attendees access to the original source or a wiki where they can add their input. These are jump off points, yes, but can still be creative: http://www.flickr.com/groups/qr-art/pool/show/

AR: Augmented reality is starting to be experimented with. Layar.com layers information over a physical page/add/wall/whatever so when you use the app, you can interact with the page virtually.

AV: Augmented Virtuality is allowing for personalisation in virtual worlds. Arcade Fire has a great example of using video and HTML 5 that creates a personalised experience - music, technology, personalisation - marketing at it’s finest. http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com

There is also Blue Mars Lite which is a 3D virtual world platform. See more here: http://www.bluemars.com/bluemarslite/ You could get people into a space, share documents and chat, all online.

A few examples from the crowd:
theSocialCV.com - You can add conferences you go to onto your online CV
lanyrd.com - online vs offline tracks who’s there and collects the artifacts - slidedecks, writeups, videos and it helps us reconnect with people who where there.

So to wrap up: Social media can blend on and offline. So much of the valuable information is offline, so we need to get that online to share more and better. Then you can layer on the physical product and use technology to blend those worlds.

I’m looking forward to the future…

Who is responsible for social media governance?

View the story “Who is responsible for social media governance? #dellb2b” on Storify]

The question of Influence at #dellB2B

Influence is long recognised as being important. Back before this explosion of social media and micro-publishing, a small amount of people were considered to have a lot of influence. Or at least they were the ones that could be seen. PR teams would take them out for lunch. Wine and dine and hope they say nice things so people would flock to their brands. But this method, wasn’t connected across the company or through communities.

Blogger outreach was used by a lot of companies to find the 50 people that would be influencers. But more and more professionals are now online so there are a greater number of people in the middle who may not have global influence but have influence within a specific community or area. With Twitter, LinkedIn, etc there is a movement of more individuals who are more influential in new areas and new platforms than ever before.

Companies now need to find who is relevent in your area and on the topic you are interested in reaching. This is about moving programmes from targetting 50 people to 500 or 1000. The good bloggers curate their twitter streams really well - just as journalists did in the past. Where they took from trades to put in nationals, they do this with Twitter now.

By the time it’s reported, we’ve already talked about it online. Getting to the magic middle makes it easier to get to a larger, more targeted group. But if we think influence can’t be scored, why are we interested? Someone in the audience uses it as a quick indicator and another uses it as it’s embedded in some twitter clients.

But numbers? Why do we need one? For example, footballers are ranked on a Sunday in a score out of 10. If it’s bad, you wouldn’t have Alex Ferguson say “hey Wanye Rooney, you have 7.6” but to someone that is important - a way to mark the changes on performance. But are we moving to something that retail businesses may use a score to give an upgrade or special deals? Are they using you as you are influential in a community that they want to reach? Or, on the otherhand, call centres may not put you through to a VIP service if your score isn’t high enough. Is that right?

Peer Index looks at areas of influence while Kred looks at influence and outreach - so they reward people for the generosity. It shows how authentic they are. The rockstars are the ones in local communities and not necessarily global.

500 influencers may have a reach of 5 million and they may be more influencial as they have a smaller network that trusts them.

I think the area of influence and scoring is an interesting one but it is still gamable and is still very much in it’s infancy. The race is really to find the greater integration, the true data underneath it all - I can see the future to be more about credit scores and spending data being integrated with social footprint.

But until we can extract the full influence, I think we will be missing some of our greatest influencers and therefore our greatest customers. Influence is not just about chatter or overtweeting/autotweeting/spending our lives on Twitter. It links back to trust in a community and that’s not just found online.

Discussing Trust with Cairbe Sugrue at #dellB2B

So in the search for finding power and a seat, my typing fingers weren’t as fast during this session but trust is an interesting one. It’s something hard gained and very easily lost.

In crisis situations people want to hear from more individuals. We’ll listen to friends, trust some bloggers and are going to more spaces for information but the CEO must also be a prominent voice. Examples like Dominoes come to mind but recently Sony and Rim have tried to follow suit (though the timeline led to the downfall of the success - they took too long to be transparent. Timeliness has to be as important as transparency).

Generally people need to hear things 3-5 times, but if they trust you they only need to hear it once or twice. I’ve never considered that, but it’s true - I’ll click through to a link, I’ll head to an event, I’ll try a product, if a trusted person or publication has recommended it. It’s the same during crisis. I’m more likely to trust a company if they build up the trust with me beforehand. I’ll be more likely to believe them.

So in order to gain trust, we need to have more substance and have long term planning - you have to show strong commitment. It follows the adage, do what you’ll say you’ll do.

Crawl, walk, run, fly. I think more companies should think that way.

To see the full slides or Cairbe Sugrue’s presentation, head over to: http://www.edelman.com/trust/2011/

Lee Bryant talks Social Business at #DellB2B

Dell B2B kicked off with Lee Bryant from Headshift talking about Social business.

As we begin our digital and social shift, we, as businesses are expected to have an open and accessible network externally but what about internally. With cost pressures and increased competition, though our organisations can seem advanced, they are often too expensive internally in how they function so they can’t be global. Corporate IT is ripe for re-invention & humanisation but we need to make a deep structural change to a network centric world. Then we can have the speed and agility that are needed to have continued success.

Lee made a point about how we are moving from bureaucracy and friction to a place of network and collective intelligence - google did that with search. People enter in what they want to search for personally but that insight adds to the greater needs of the community. Our search becomes better through the gathering of that data.

For Lee, there are 5 main trends that we will see filtering through our organisations:
1) Mobile: The user experience is changing. It must be ubiquitous, personal and integrated.
2) Cloud: Getting to your server should be two clicks away - computing needs to be a utility and when it is, that is when you can do interesting things.
3) Consumerisation: experience beats features - you need to give your employees as good an experience as your consumers. Without a consumer-grade user experience your employees won’t be able to achieve their full potential.
4) Big data: mining large data sets for the minutia gives us insights to customer needs that helps us to get insight to our customers. Indentification in real time will be necessary moving forward.
5) Social: This needs to be on the inside, not just the outside. Technology is driving a lot of this change. You need to know what the customer thinks but if you are not engaging with your suppliers/ employees, etc, then you won’t be able to deliver on the outside.

My favourite quote of the discussion: “Never waste a good crisis” Necessity leads to invention so really we need to humanise the enterprise: people over process to make better use of our talent and brain power. Let them get on with it instead of micromanaging. With a rise in activity streams: Yammer, tibco and socialcast, scale and intimacy are where trends are leading to. For some of us, we’re already there but what do you think the future is?