Author: simongterry

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

It’s not the critic that counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better…The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and often comes up short again and again. Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause. And who, if at best in the end, knows the triumph of higher treatment and high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his soul shall never be with those cold and timid ones, who know neither victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt

(via scpb)

Internalise Externalities

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Businesses must increasingly manage the impacts that they have on society. Social media creates new accountabilities for organisations externally. Social media offers a way to better manage these external impacts. Enterprise social technologies can help make the enterprise socially oriented.

Reputation matters

In a social and digital era, reputations of organisations are more important than ever. The days in which the organisation controlled the message are over.  Consumers and communities have access to every action and every message of an organisation.  They will consider far more than its marketing. Every impact that the organisation has can and will be found, discussed and assessed. Critically, consumers and communities have a much greater ability to research and organise around issues at digital speed.

More than ever we operate in a world where each business must negotiate a community licence to operate. Regulated, utility & trust based have faced this issue to date. However, many more organisations are increasingly finding that they need to explicitly engage segments of their consumers on issues like environmental impacts, diversity, social impacts, employee issues and any other area of community concern.  You don’t have to believe that we are consuming resources unsustainably, that global warming exists, that fairness or other social issues matter or that there is the importance of a diverse organisation.  

All that matters is that someone in your community does.

Reputations leak everywhere

The truth will out. We are no longer in an era where good marketing and public relations will shape a company’s reputation. Every conversation and every action is equally likely to leak, be discovered in legal or other proceedings and rapidly shared around the world. No secrets are secure. A business that relies on keeping secrets from its customers and community is doomed.

Importantly, your employees & customers bring issues inside and carry them out each day. Look on social media, whether external or internal, and you will see good and bad customer service moments, queries around environmental impacts and even debate around the social impacts of your products and services.  You may also find people querying how you treat your employees, the state of your workplaces, the tone of your leaders and the diversity of your organisation. You need to at a minimum monitor and reflect on these conversations.

If you don’t offer employees avenues to discuss their issues internally, there is a good chance they are discussing it on Facebook, Twitter or at least with their friends. People will raise issues with them every day. Do they know how to respond with facts? Uninformed by an open conversation internally, your employees can help spread rumours or inadvertently confirm them with awkward silence or ‘I can neither confirm no deny’ answers required by many communication policies. Leveraging enterprise social technology can help you to engage and inform your employees on social issues.

If you don’t engage, the issues don’t go away.  Instead, you run the risk that they grow into rumours, campaigns or even boycotts before you are even aware.

Social value can be created

The demands of customers and community don’t have to be a threat to the organisation’s reputation.  Every piece of feedback is a clue as to how your organisation can improve the value that it delivers.  You will not be able to make everyone happy.  However, seeing you move to respond to feedback and create additional value for everyone is a key step to building a leading reputation and benefiting from a social & networked economy.

Many organisations have found that addressing these wider issues also drives the bottom line by removing waste, engaging employees and fostering innovation.  Start to create more social value as you go about your business by engaging differently with your people, customers and community:

  • Listen to feedback and act where there is an opportunity.
  • Measure the value & waste you create and share the results
  • Engage openly in discussion internally and externally around the issues of creating greater value
  • Collaborate internally and externally on key issues
  • Make social impacts a criteria of decision making and innovation
  • Over time build a strategy that incorporates your social value and makes yours a more social enterprise

Ask new questions

If all we consider is old questions, nothing will change.  Creating a more social organisation that can profit from the networked economy requires us to consider:

  • What impacts are we having on our people, customers and our community? What could we do differently? What are they saying?
  • What do our people, suppliers and partners know?  What conversations are they having?  How can we engage them to create greater value?
  • What would we do differently if everything was public information?
  • What external impacts should we be considering as priorities?

Major League Baseball Can’t Talk to Me

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Allow customers to support and engage your brand at different levels in marketing communications. Not all customers are extreme fans. As much as you’d like all customers to be extreme fans engaging them that way is likely counterproductive.

Take Me Out to the Baseball

I’m a bit of a casual fan of baseball. I would happily be more engaged. I just happen to live in the wrong hemisphere to spend much time on the game.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to go AT&T Park to watch the Giants lose to the Dodgers in a great game in a great environment. It was an amazing day. I would happily repeat the experience.

Talking Baseball

So where’s the issue?

Buying my game ticket online there was an option to opt out of receiving an email of news & marketing from Major League Baseball and the San Francisco Giants. There’s not much baseball news in Australia.  Against my usual practice, I opted in to email marketing.

I was struck immediately by the passionate tone of the emails that flowed and their determination that I must be a diehard Giants fanatic. Apparently, I needed prompting several times a week to participate in club activities, to purchase MLB services from partners and to attend every game. I had invitations to vote for players in awards that I didn’t know existed. I was offered lots of products I can’t buy and discounts I can’t use.

Of course, I ended up unsubscribing because what was missing was any news or marketing relevant to a curious casual fan of the game living on the other side of the world. Even if I had been as passionate as they seemed to expect, I just couldn’t do anything they asked. There were no relevant calls to action and no content that wasn’t a call to action.

Passionate Fans Matter

Everyone should cater to the passionate fan. By all means cater to their every need. We all like to think that talking passionately about our brand will rub off. It might. If that all you do, it can be counterproductive.

Plan for the Less Passionate Too

I was left with the impression that the curious, casual or distant fan segment is missing from the Major League Baseball email marketing plan. Maybe baseball don’t need this segment in email or it is not profitable enough. Maybe growing the brands engagement with travellers or those with a casual interest is not on the agenda. The issue is that baseball will now never know what might have been possible.

Build Engagement with Segmented Calls to Action

Every brand needs to segment its calls to action in every channel. Always allow options for the less engaged or those building engagement with your brand. Given your customers and potential fans meaningful ways to build engagement.

If you don’t, the only option for a hard won prospect (and potential future hardcore fan) is to unsubscribe.

Post Script on Social Marketing

Interestingly, the strategy around @SFGiants twitter account is much more accessible to a fan who wants to build engagement. Then perhaps they know that many of the half million followers will never have bought a ticket.

Talk Like a Customer

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Every moment of every customer or employee experience matters. Talk like a real person, your customer. What you say sends a big signal.

We all know the moment. The moment a starts talking generic corporate speak to us. Often we are so used to these meaningless generic moments they are almost a parody

– “we apologies for the inconvenience”
– “your call is important to us”
– “because your safety is important to us…”
– “our operators are waiting for your call”
– “it’s not personal”
– “policy says…”
– “buy now and as a special offer we will throw in free steak knives”
– “satisfaction guaranteed”
– “have you tried restarting the computer”
– “thank you for your business”
– “is there anything I can help you with”
– “operational issues require…”
– “the assets of this business walk out the door at the end of each day”
– and many more

Don’t use these words. Stop. Every moment you use a generic phrase you remind customers and your people that you are just like everyone else. Every time an employee has to say one of these things you run a big risk that they stare blankly into space and disengage from the customer and from you. You have declared to your customers and employees that there is absolutely nothing special or unique about you.

Customers don’t talk this way. They say things they mean in their own words. They are real people. You should be real people too.

Opposition is engagement

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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Many years ago I pitched an initiative to a senior executive group. The presentation went without a hitch. There were no hard questions and no push back. I walked out of the meeting pleased until a wise mentor of mine asked a devastating question:

What level of engagement was there in the room?

My mentor went on to point out that without pushback it is unlikely anyone in the room actually turned much of their mind to my initiative. The lack of pushback was bad news because it meant that support would fade quickly and little follow through would occur. Sadly, he proved right.

That day I learned a lesson to bring on questions, debate and conflict to generate engagement. No matter how compelling your case for change, you need debate to get people to consider the options, risks and issues. Without debate, people don’t agree. They just acquiesce.

Debate, questions and conflict are an essential part of how knowledge gets attention, currency and is shared in organisations. You can’t advance a meaningful agenda without them.

If it feels like you lack opposition, then there’s a good chance you are inadvertently playing to the safe ground. Platitudes might win unthinking support. That might work for a while, but there’s a risk you will lose your support when real challenges arise.

If others aren’t bringing debate, then start the debate yourself. Raise the hard questions and doubts. Provoke your likely opponents. A real discussion upfront is always better. Knowing where you stand as a change agent is critical.  It will give you valuable information on what to do next to move forward.

Getting credit

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration

It is amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit – Harry S Truman

Yesterday I discussed the vexed issue of ownership of collaboration. Credit for the successes of collaboration is one other reason people are so keen to own it and also why ownership belongs with the users.

Credit is also a vexed issue for innovation. As Harry Truman notes, giving credit away is often the only way to get something done. Far too many change agents are frustrated that their good ideas are quickly taken for implementation, often without credit or further involvement. Sadly, the great ideas don’t get implemented easily.

Three other challenges come for organisations that run on the concept of credit:

  • Credit debates are rarely factual. Credit is usually a part of a performance management process that is not connected to facts. Debates about credit suggests people are much more concerned with appearances of performance.
  • Credit gets in the way of collaboration. Credit tends to assume there is one creator of every outcome. Collaborative outcomes, like design thinking processes, don’t fit the system
  • Credit is distinct from accountability which is much more important. I would rather know who is taking accountability for delivering something than who would like to plans to claim it.

How can an innovator or change agents deal with issues of credit?

  1. Don’t Play the Game:  There is nothing to gain and a lot to lose playing along, keeping ideas secret and trying to hog or claim credit.
  2. Work Aloud: working aloud enables others to understand what you have been involved in and reduces the risk others misjudge your involvement later.  Working aloud engages stakeholders progressively. Working aloud reinforces accountabilities, because it enables others to know who to follow up.
  3. Move on & Work with Collaborators: The advantage of being oriented to innovation is you know you have more ideas and opportunities ahead of you. Many of those clamouring to gain credit know that they don’t have the luxury. Often they will learn their lesson when they need help on the next round.
  4. Give Credit Where it is Due: Innovation processes can be convoluted with lots of participants inputs, reuse of ideas and evolution to a successful implementation. Recognition at the end is hard.  Make sure you recognise others along the way. You will discover building a fact based culture of recognition will flow back in appropriate recognition of your role.
  5. Take Accountability for the Innovation System: Individual ideas matter less in an organisation. What matters more is to have a functioning system of innovation, a consistent process that delivers a cadence of innovations into the market. Innovators and change agents should be build a system that lets everyone in on innovation

At bats

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Baseball has one thing right. Nobody expects a batter in baseball to get a hit every time.

Baseball tracks at bats and hitting percentages. Batter’s careers are determined by the percentage, not the individual hit. It is expected that the best bats will:
– work there way up through thousands of little league and minor league at bats
– have a slightly better hitting percentage
– swing and miss more than half the time.

Many people won’t start something unless it is a sure fire hit. Like baseball, life doesn’t work that way. You have to have the attempts to get a small percentage of hits. For most people, improving performance is not a matter of improving their strike rate, just making more attempts.

Importantly, the only way to improve either the strike rate or the number of successes is to try. If you strike out, try again. If you haven’t had a go for a while, step up and try.

Next time you are wondering where success comes from remember to step up to the plate.

Who owns collaboration? You do

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Leadership

Lead users to realise the value of better collaboration

Twice last week in conversation I stumbled across the challenge of who owns collaboration. Once was an organisation grappling with who “owned collaboration”. Once was a tech company who noted that their valuable tools lacked a natural “owner” in their clients. This is such a common challenge at least one vendor proposes the effort of annual reviews of ownership.

In many cases what drives the debate about ownership is the need to cut a cheque to invest in a better solution. Imagine if the English language had a license fee. I can imagine the organizational debate about who owned English and who had to maintain it. People see the immediate inconvenience, the benefits are diffuse and there is often a tricky path to realizing value for the company strategy.

In other situations ownership debates arise from the number of parties involved. Ownership is a problematic concept with something that inherently involves multiple silos and many engaged people.

Having spent much of my working life being asked the question of “who owns the customer?” I have the same answer:

The end user does.

Each customer owns their relationship with an organisation. Decisions should be made to meet the customers needs. We need to reflect the customers right to choose or they will go elsewhere. That means everyone in the organisation needs to put the customer first. Everyone needs to put their ego in check and deliver on the best experience the whole organisation can deliver.

Collaboration is owned by the users

Collaboration is no different. Those who collaborate, the employees and other users, own collaboration in your organisation. After all, they make decisions each day to invest their critical time in collaboration to create value for themselves and the organisation. Increasingly, they can engage elsewhere. Engaging users is the best way to create, sustain and build value from collaboration.

Every organisation needs leaders to make sure that that activity is supported & guided to benefit the organisation’s purpose and strategy. In enlightened organisations, just as with customers, support will come from the highest levels. If not, it is up to you to take responsibility to support the users in your organisation.

How do leaders help users own collaboration?

When nobody else will step forward to advocate for a critical skill for future organisations, it is essential that you do. Leading users to own their own collaboration and create increasing value will deliver huge rewards for you and your organisation.