The Jordan Rules

Mediocrity is relative, so it’s not usually something that can be monitored. You can monitor the people you put in charge of leading your business, however.

Innovation is rarely the reason companies fail, but when it is, it tends to be a acute failure. On the flip-side, mediocrity is like a chronic sickness that will kill a company, but can keep it alive for decades.

I’m usually hired to help guide marketers toward achieving their goals by improving user experience. However, doing this can sometimes lead me down a path I was never expecting to go.

Late last year, a major Canadian financial institution hired me to improve online customer experience. It started off as a great project, they had huge budgets, and have been stagnant for years - so they were focused on getting it done right, over getting it done fast.

I’m now involved with a inter-departmental restructure, and the distribution of talent. When I started the project, I never thought I’d be involved with something like this, but I feel very lucky to be able to be a part of it.

Although I’m not allowed to reveal the name of the financial institution, I’ve been authorized to share some key learnings, and solutions to issues that ran much deeper than a mediocre online customer experience.

Insight #1 - The organization has too much red-tape to be innovative.

Solution: Institue TOMB protocol

Description: To enable innovation from every corner of the organization, I worked along side an ethnographic research firm to identify key barriers to achieving this goal. We created the TOMB protocol to expedite potential issues, and ensure those issue don’t prevent forward thinking & innovation.

TOMB stands for: Technology, Operations, Minority customers, and Budget. Essentially, there are interdepartmental directors that facilitate the TOMB protocol, which can be used to identify concerns without placing restrictions on a concept. Whether there be technological concerns, operational/ organization concerns, concerns regarding minority customers, or budgetary concerns, the TOMB protocol can be used to ensure a concept can make it through the red-tape without being shot-down or diluted.

Cutting through the red-tape doesn’t mean a concept will actually make it to implementation, but it’s surprising how much money, time, and resources can be made available for good ideas that might never have gotten past gate-keepers.

Insight #2 - Jaded business leads are relying on outdated thinking to inhibit innovation.

Solution: The 3-Year Glitch

Description: I’m not sure if this is as pervasive as I think it is, but it was definitely a big issue in this company. Many business leads have held their positions for decades, while producing mediocre results. They weren’t doing anything that would require disciplinary action, but they weren’t doing anything that required recognition. They were meeting their goals; many seemed to be struggling to even do that. We found out the reason was the goals were often set on market analysis that put very little weight on the decisions made by the business lead. As long as they maintained the status-quo their goals should be achieved.

So, when business analysts and external consultants were hired to identify how the business could move to the next level, many business leads resisted any suggestions that put the status-quo at risk. I actually used a quote I took from a business leads email correspondence to her business analyst to explicitly illustrate this point: “Well, yes, we NEED to get better, but we don’t want to change anything substantial to do it.”

This helped us to pass a new HR policy called The 3-Year Glitch. Essentially, once a business lead has held their position for 3 years, they will be moved to lead a new part of the business. We created a series of programs that supported this in terms of training, peer reviews, mentoring, skills/ interest analysis; but essentially, after holding a position as a business lead for 3 years, you got to own a different piece of the business. The rationale was that the open-mindedness of business leads within the first three years of holding the position, encourages innovation, discourages mediocrity, and fosters trust & reliance on subject matter experts & consultants.

Insight #3 - Fear of failure is causing inter-departmental sabotage

Solution: Transparent Non-Departmental Bonus Structure

Description: This one still hasn’t passed, but is being presented to the board of directors. The issue we identified was that business leads were deflecting potential failure by transferring issues to other departments. An example was, rather than improving recruitment & training for call centre representatives; the business lead for online customer service buried contact numbers. Although this might help short-term figures in the sense that there’s fewer calls, and less of a requirement to have staff available to take calls; it eventually will lead to customer dissatisfaction, or a branch visit. Either way, the offset cost, is simply a band-aid solution for an overwhelmed call centre. So, instead of rewarding the business lead for saving money in his department, we’d penalize the entire corporation if the bottom-line fell.

This suggestion has a substantial appendix of methodologies to improve collaboration, communication, and team work among different departments. Essentially, we want to enable employees to identify root-causes of issues & ideate innovative solutions. With regards to the call centre issue; we’d prefer the business to put the contact numbers up-front, and staff properly. Ideally, some of the collaboration methodologies should help him identify that the root cause of an overwhelmed call centre is because of unclear communications, lack of self-serve options online, and improperly trained customer service representatives. These would all be actionable items that could increase profit for the entire company.

Although these three insights & solutions are specifically designed for one large financial institution, many of the principles can be applied to any size company, from any discipline. I know that some of these solutions don’t contain enough detail to be implementable, but I’m not writing this article to provide you with specific, actionable, solutions - but am writing to (hopefully) inspire you to join the fight against fear-based mediocrity. If you have business leads who’re afraid of a lower bonus, losing their job, or just being blamed; you’re encouraging fear-based mediocrity.

I encourage you to find solutions. If anyone else has run into issues like this, I encourage you to share them & share solutions you think could correct the problem.

Obviously, not all companies are willing to change; but those that are open to it are setting themselves up for success.

@thejordanrules

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One of the most common questions I was hearing two years ago was “How should I use social media?”. Recently, I’ve been hearing the question less and less. I’d normally be thrilled that people were learning how to effectively use social media, except people aren’t. People have stopped asking, but only because they’re jumping in without a plan - or worse, with a poorly designed plan.

Since November of 2010, I’ve been collecting data from a series of spiders, feeds, and alert platforms I was able to tie together. I’ve sliced the data-up and created the reference guide (located below) outlining the most effective ways to use various different social media channels, some pitfalls to be aware of, and some opportunities & insights to consider.

I also included three pieces of “stinky” advice that have been presented to me over-and-over. These are some of the most dangerous pieces of advice, because they seem logical, yet can be interpreted in hundreds of different ways. People misinterpreting these pieces of advice are actively damaging brands, wasting money, and annoying their audience.

Stinky advice #1: Fish where the fish are.

I have two big problems with this; it’s obvious, and it’s misleading. It’s obvious because it’s common sense; you don’t fish in the city, and don’t market AXE deodorant in bingo halls. It’s misleading because people have been using it to rationalize being on Facebook & Twitter. Sure, your audience might be on those social networks, but so is everyone else. The real question should be: how are they using those social networks? Answering this can provide you with insight on how to really target the people who’d be most receptive to your message.

Stinky advice #2: Listen & respond to your customers.

On the surface, this seems like advice that everyone should follow. My issue is that it’s not specific. Almost anything can be considered a response; and your customers talk about so many different things, the real value is finding commonalities between the subjects your customers talk about. Many agencies & marketers I’ve been working with have interpreted this as: listen for brand mentions, consider sentiment, and respond accordingly. This, obviously, isn’t a bad thing to do; but it’s the least you can do. If you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on the lowest hanging fruit social media channels can produce. If you want to really create brand advocates & engage with your customers demonstrate that you’re listening through real-world actions. (i.e. Don’t just tell me you’re sorry, fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again.)

Stinky advice #3: Content is king.

This has to be the most ambiguous statement I’ve ever heard. Everything a marketer produces can be considered content, so yeah, it’s king, queen, and everyone else. I’ve actually worked with several major brands that use this statement to fuel their shotgun approach to content development. They’ve interpreted this to mean: Create an editorial calendar that focuses on supporting different business units throughout the year by targeting different user personas. The problem with this is that a brand that tries to be many different things to many different people risks alienating everyone. A better option is to focus on something you can own, and use alternate communication channels for secondary messaging.

(original size)  or  (PDF)

The better you understand the concepts illustrated in this reference guide, the better you’ll be able to craft a communications plan.

1. Understand what you want from participating in social media:

Branding: building or maintaining an image or reputation.

Direct Sales: selling a product or service directly to users.

Indirect Sales: converting a user into a customer through the use of a conversion funnel.

Research: finding out insights about your customers, your market, or your industry.

Customer Service: helping users who are already customers.

Collaboration: helping employees learn & communicate with each other (and your customers).

2. Understand the issues & opportunities associated with each potential social media channel.

3. Select channels, and set realistic benchmarks. Understanding how different networks grow, and what to listen for is key.

4. Never stop testing, evaluating, and learning from the communities you participate. It’s better to participate in fewer channels effectively, than it is to try and participate everywhere the “fish” are.

I encourage you to ask questions, post comments, and share any insights you have.

If you’d like a high-res PDF version of this, you can download one here.

@thejordanrules

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I think R&D and an investment in a “Labs” strategy can drive any business forward. I’ve surveyed a total of 1000 agencies & marketers from North America to find out one thing: What do you do with your R&D budget?

Although many respondents have a substantial R&D budget, only about 25% have formalized a “Labs” department that drives company-wide innovation. Of those respondents that do have a “Labs” department, less than 1% encourage innovation from outside the organization.

Open innovation can do something almost magical for businesses; it can give perceived ownership to customers. The pervasiveness of open innovation can reach every facet of of business, from marketing, to product development, to human resources, and administration.

Some companies like Dell & Best Buy make affordances for open innovation, but very few do an adequate job at following the cycle of open innovation. If you get your customers involved with core business strategy & product development; you need to explicitly show the results of their involvement, and support the outcome in an ongoing iterative way.

Introducing “The Cycle of Open Innovation”

(Full Size)

Understanding: A Great Place to Begin

Social media represents an invaluable resource for developing a deep understanding of your customers. The simple act of engaging and communicating with communities on social networks can reveal powerful user insights that can change the way you approach business.

The best way to gain these insights is to listen to what your customers are interested in, and probe them on the identified subject to find out how your business can take advantage of their interest.

Don’t patronize your community members by asking them inane questions; demonstrate that you’ve been listening & ask them questions that link back to your company; or at least your industry.

Example: The way Steve Jobs described the reason for introducing the iPad was that a market gap was identified & the iPad was created to fill the gap. Then Apple (theoretically) went through the process of producing the iPad (designing it, sourcing the production with Foxconn, and beta testing it.)

What if Apple followed an open innovation model of product development? Would there have been a camera on the iPad, a finger print resistant screen, a usb port, near field communications, a fold-able keyboard?

Better yet, what if Samsung followed an open innovation model for the Galaxy Tab? Could they have figured out how to better compete against Apple?

BIG QUESTION: Why do companies think they need to identify and solve business problems internally?

Identification: An Expert Analysis

Business strategists, market analysts, brand managers, and all those well-paid titles are still valuable, and often essential, for open innovation to work. Being able to interpret user needs, market requirements, and business goals is best left to those people who understand them.

The better you understand your customer, the more likely it’ll be that the experts will craft successful strategies and create products/ services that work.

Test: The Missing Link

I understand the value of being first-to-market, but strongly believe the value of open innovation outweighs the risk of potentially not being first-to-market.

I know that spending three months experimenting, testing, and analyzing feature sets costs additional money, but think the value of doing this is worth it. These types of activities can often be conducted without revealing the end product.

Example: You don’t need to reveal that you’re making an iPad in order to test & facilitate recommendations on gesture-based text input. If this was experimented with, and open to the community, it’s possible that Swype might exist as the native text input method for the iPad.

Produce: Standard Model, Opened

The standard production model wouldn’t change, but there are opportunities to accept innovations surrounding production from an public, or semi-public community. I’ve seen examples of sourcing influencing design. An example could be the shift from plastic casings to aluminum casings. If materials affect price, and material quality affects purchasing behaviour, than innovations surrounding the ability to use materials that can be perceived as higher in quality, while maintaining price, will affect design. (This is all too true with web development. User experience architecture is often influenced by the technology being used to create the site, app, or software. There are things that work well in HTML5 that wont work at all in Flash. There are designs that produce a positive user experience when created using AJAX that produce a negative experience when created using Javascript.)

So, if one manufacturer can produce a higher quality product for the same price through an innovation in their production process, designs can be reexamined to be optimized. (Example - Using micro-dimpled glass decreases glare & fingerprint smudges. However, creating a mass production system specifically designed to create the glass would be expensive unless the sourcing is opened to the community & a production facility already equipped to produce the glass comes forward - or is open to sharing their technology.)

Adoption: Integrate or Abandon

Rather than simply making a decision to keep or scrap a product or service based on preliminary business data, an open innovation model would allow for community input. There’s been instances where communities rallied to save a product, service or idea just as is was about to be scrapped.

There’s also the potential of being able to use the community to identify why the product or service is either successful or failing. Working together, the community and business leaders might be able to turn a failing product into a successful one through iterative design improvement; additionally, they might be able to identify keys to success that can propel future products/ services to success.

 

Key Takeaways:

1. Don’t assume you know what your customer wants
2. Fostering personal ownership of product/service development can create powerful brand advocates
3. Innovation can come from many sources; tap into them
4. Using social media to encourage & utilize innovative ideas is one of the most powerful methods of communication and one of the most relevant uses of social media
5. If you’re investing your R&D budget building & investigating ideas & technologies that already exist, and are well established, you’re doing your business a disservice. Labs should not be about training, they should be about innovation.
6. Experiment with the Open Innovation Life Cycle model. Even in small-scale, it will work.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, feedback & questions. @thejordanrules

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I remember when social networking was about sharing personal content with family, friends, and colleagues. Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of inauthentic brand communications littering my streams with noise.

The Conflict

I do ‘like’ certain brands, and want my friends to know which brands I have a particular affinity for. However, I don’t want to get spammed with creepy questions, or comments from a brand spokesperson. (or Brand Ambassadors)

Branding and PR are intrinsically linked

I subscribe to the idea that it’s possible to create and maintain a brand through social media. I don’t believe PR is the most effective way of doing that.

The Dell Example

I like some of the stuff Dell’s been doing, but think some of their more recent initiatives have been misguided.

Richard Binhammer (@RichardatDELL) according to this interview, Richard was involved with a team that intended to build Dell’s presence in communities around the world, and was subsequently asked to interact with bloggers.

It’s important to note that I think Richard is doing a great job at being a part of many communities, and establishing dialogues with influential people around the web.That said, I don’t believe attaching a friendly, well-spoken, public face to the brand is addressing the root cause for needing a friendly, well-spoken, public face. - Don’t get me wrong, I think Richard would be a great member of any community regardless of whether he dropped the “atDELL” or not.

The real question is: Why are so many negative Dell conversations occurring in the first place? Sure, you can make use of fancy PR strategies, but it doesn’t correct the underlying cause.The Dell Social Media Listening Center & DellCares are recent initiatives that are, seemingly, intended to monitor the entire social web & respond when appropriate. Again, this is just my opinion, but I think this is one big PR stunt. If you check out this article, you’ll see a couple people behind a glass door, in a dimly lit room with about 10 large monitors displaying all kinds of data. Its reminiscent of that command centre Jack Bauer visits in 24. It looks cool, but information about what they do with the data they collect doesn’t seem to be available.

From visiting the @DellCares Twitter account, it looks like they’re a customer care centre that reacts to brand mentions. Although I see the value in customer care via social media; Twitter’s inherent 140 character limit makes helping users somewhat difficult.Again, the big question is: Why are users so frustrated that they resort to posting negative information about Dell? Not to say social media isn’t important, but why aren’t traditional customer care channels working? As a user of a Dell Laptop; if I needed customer care I would definitely use Google to find self-serve support first, check-out their .com site second, make a phone call third, and only post negative information if I finally gave up.

To be clear, I’m not saying what Dell is doing is wrong, I’m saying it seems like a PR play to mitigate how far negative brand mentions travel. In doing this, they’ve subscribed to a method that’s ruining social media.

Noise & Authenticity

Here are my two big concerns with PR gaining a foothold in social media.

1. PR causes brands to create a lot of noise. As I said earlier, ‘liking’ a brand is very different from wanting to receive a status update in my news feed, every day from a spokesperson from the brand. If a brand has something real, something important, or something beneficial to say to me, I’d appreciate hearing it. But don’t clutter up my news feed just for the sake of engaging with your audience. This is the big reason I don’t think social media PR will ever be as successful as social media marketing initiatives.Side Note: The best social media marketing initiatives are either entertaining or useful. This is, generally, a polarized scale; meaning, the most useful things don’t focus on entertaining you, and the most entertaining things don’t focus on providing utility (and by utility, I don’t mean usability.)

PR, generally, falls in the middle. Most of it isn’t useful or entertaining. I’d suggest upwards of 90% of it gets ignored completely. Within the next two years, I think social media filtering will advance to the point where community members will be able to ignore brands attempts at meaningless engagement, and pay more attention to their family, friends, and colleagues. I also think this evolution will regress many business from focusing on social media in a PR respect, and focus on creating provocative, engaging content that allows users to share initiatives amongst themselves.

2. PR is often unauthentic. Although I like & appreciate RichardatDELL, and DellCares, there’s a strategic business reason for bringing them into existence. I believe Dell is a smart company, and has very smart advisors, but they are using their understanding of communities, and human nature to improve brand perception. I’ll say there’s some utility in having customer service available through Twitter, but I don’t believe it’s more useful than an easy to use, salient, chat portal on Dell’s .com site. It seems to me that disguising true intentions of PR is less authentic than marketing initiatives. (For instance, I expect marketing initiatives from Old Spice; when Isaiah Mustafa’s YouTube responses were introduced, I had no question that he was an actor that was representing Old Spice. The content was entertaining while involving the community. Additionally, my news feed wasn’t spammed by him, and I developed brand affinity.)

Conclusion

I recently read a post by David Armano on his blog Logic + Emotion that suggested a framework for creating a social business plan. I felt that he hit all the right points, but then I read this related presentation “Community Engagement: Managing Communities Across Digital Embassies” and started questioning long-term value of this framework. Slides 11-20 seem to directly speak to reasons I believe PR is ruining social media. Specifically, slide 14 that talks about ambassadors and envoys. In many cases they’re the same person, the community manager or community management group, and they’re the ones doing this low-level “Social Engagement” as an attempt to facilitate low-level “interactions, communications, and participatory behaviours between individuals”.

That said, I’m not completely discounting David’s framework. In fact, it’s just the implementation and examples that were provided in the presentation that make me feel that some of these deep insights are being misused. I agree with the principles of embassies, outposts, ambassadors and envoys, but think they should be used to support social media marketing initiatives. Well crafted marketing initiatives, that use rich content and employ an iterative brand equity framework can be much more effective than more frequent low-level engagement methods.In the end, I don’t want to be friends with the majority of brand spokes people; and they don’t really want to be my friend either. The fact of the matter is that they get paid to interact with me and they have a set of goals that motivate them. If businesses are planning on becoming truly social, they’ll need to do something they probably won’t ever do - stop being afraid.

For instance, if Dell really cared about me, they’d put a lot more weight behind their “Ideastorm” platform. There are hundreds of fantastic ideas on there, many have been implemented. Making this system more robust, interactive, and creating a community of “ambassadors” and “envoys” who actively seek out this type of information & follow-up with community members would be a great way to use social media resources. Maybe one day product development, and beta-testing can be facilitated through social media. Obviously, the issue with no stealth product development is that first-to-market benefits could potentially be reduced. (i.e. If Apple told everyone a year in advance that the iPad was coming, and how beta-testing was going, it might have made the iPad v1 better, but would have shown their hand to companies like Samsung, Dell, and Microsoft.)

To those in social media public relations

I’ve worked with several large PR firms over the years, and appreciate the work you do. I just don’t think you should be leading social media activities. I think many marketers have taken your advice, and have engaged you to lead some initiatives, but I strongly believe you’re ruining social media for everyone. Please let content & creativity lead marketing initiatives, be more transparent, better understand what members of social networks expect, and stop getting brands to use spokes people that actively try to make us believe they want to be friends. [example: JenniewithAXE is an employee who could care less about what my new years resolutions are, so why is she asking me like she’s my best friend? What would be more expected is if you created an iPhone app that tracks how well you’re doing at achieving your new years resolution, and allows users to post their status to Facebook & Twitter. It could potentially be made more viral by tying into a leaderboard that shows who’s doing the best at achieving their goals, and allows other community members to add supportive comments that spawn push notifications on the users iPhone. - like “Way to go!”]

I know the friendly spokes person tactic tends to work short-term, and it removes any barrier to participation, but keep in mind those status updates appear in my news feed. You’re participating in my network, if you keep hitting me with messages that are perceived to be irrelevant, it’s less likely I’ll pay attention to you at all. The response rate isn’t that grate anyway: considering the AXE Facebook page has about 730,000 fans (which would translate to over 1M with the halo effect) having 150 likes is about a 0.02% response rate; is that worth frustrating some of your fans?

I’d appreciate any comments, questions, or feedback you might have. If you don’t think PR is ruining social media, let me know what you believe. If you post a comment here, or ask a question on twitter, I’ll definitely respond. Happy 2011. @thejordanrules

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