Thanks to everyone who attended today’s webcast.   As promised, I wanted to put some supporting materials online for you.   If you have any questions I will answer them here in the comments area.

There are two big reasons to get started creating a set of guidelines

1. The massive proliferation of so called “social” technologies means that our employees are WAY more engaged with each other and the “outside” world.  Most of this is a net plus but it does have its downsides – as the line between personal and professional can get seriously eroded and conflicts or misunderstandings are made totally public.   This extends well beyond just how you reach your customers – inter-office communication can also create serious issues such as workplace bullying.  Expect a new raft of laws in the near future similar to sexual harrassment laws.  It is good to get ahead of these problems.

2. As with any social group – the social web is full of communities that are bound by a common set of norms that guide behavior and denote inclusion in the group. The social web is all about identity and authenticity - and that is why violations of this compact are so eggregious.  This is why Walmart was so punished when they went out with a fake blog: Walmarting Across America

There are four pieces you need to consider when putting together your guidelines:

Your Industry – Regulations, known liabilities, standards of conduct etc. These can be very specific – A Financial Services firm has totally different considerations than, say the YMCA.

Your “as is” Culture – value is created in social systems through sharing, soft leadership, natural hierarchies – some work cultures are much more amenable to this – others less so. Every company can take steps – but it is good to have a realistic understanding of your “as is” culture

Your Employees’ Social IQ – In the same way that we design solutions based on the affordance of our customers (are they online, do they use these technologies etc.) we should always understand the behavioral profile of your employees

Your Employees as co-authors – Consider having your employees help you create your guidelines. You can do this by creating a small guidelines committee and setting up a collaborative wiki where your employees can help you refine the document. You will be killing two birds with one stone – establishing clear guidelines with employee buy-in baked in and getting some experience with collaboration.

Whatever you do, Engage every key department.   This harkens back to understanding your industry (regulatory, ethical codes etc.) as well as general issues such as expectations of privacy, code of conduct for inter-office interactions  etc. – but also in understanding that Social Media cuts across the whole company – HR and Legal are obvious – but also Customer Service, Customer Insight, Marketing etc. Often you will find these engagements begin with marketing but – b/c of the two-way nature of social communication – the information and exchanges that start with marketing have direct impact on other groups.   Be sure that you can follow through — if marketing people begin receiving customer service inquiries (and they will) are they prepared?
Design for Possibility – Then Design for Risk
Disclosure of sensitive information is usually the biggest fear that companies have around social media. Really, this is not a new problem – email and telephone pose the same risks and are harder to monitor.
I talk a lot about beginning from a position of trust – While there are possible negatives involved in having employees on the social Web, most employees have common sense. Begin with a set of possibilities first.  These should be tied to business objectives (increasing awareness, improving customer service, gaining customer insight and so on) then draw up a list of worst-case scenarios (bad mouthing the company, inappropriate language, leaking IP, to name a few). Modify the guiding principles for your employees below to help mitigate the risks you’ve identified.    If you get everyone on board first imagining what is possible — you will enroll them in helping you move forward.   Often I find that IT / Legal (the people charged with lowering risk)  are not engaged in any planning — just given a program that scares the heck out of them — and they they do their job:  tear it down because it is risky.  Engage them early and often in your planning.

Resources:Here are some of my favorite guidelines:

IBM:  My favorite set is here.   IBM wrote these in collaboration with a broad set of employees — To me even the language in these feels distinct and genuine.   Best section: “Don’t forget your day job”

Intel:A very healthy set of guidelines that harken back to an Intel Code of Conduct.  Best section, “If it gives you pause, pause”

Dell has been a leader in social media – from innovation hubs to using Twitter.

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great set of guidelines around safe blogging.

SAP is another company that developed their guidelines in collaboration with employees.

Laurel Papworth did a massive rundown of guidelines if you want more.  Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing me to these.
Lastly – this flowchart from the Air Force made the rounds a while back – Though it is focused on how to respond to blogs, it does a great job of visualizing how to engage in social media.

If you have any examples you would like to share – feel free to put them in the comments.  If you have any questions I will do my best to answer them here.

Here are four key principles for creating a better business in the network economy:

· Listening beats Talking

· Open beats Closed

· Relationships Beat Transactions

· Questions beat Answers

I have been going into details on each (very slowly if you have been paying attention). If you have questions or other examples to put into the posts – please add them into the comments. This is the third post in the series:

Relationships beat Transactions:

Most companies are structured to talk and not listen (marketing, PR, tradshows and events etc.). Similarly, most companies are structured to reward transactions (the sale, the time it takes to process a support call etc.) as opposed to relationships. This is in large part due to the fact that relationships are more difficult to measure. However in the network economy it is strong relationships that insulate a company from price sensitivity, create word of mouth, and foster collaboration (see Open Beats Closed). Just because it is harder to measure doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be working hard on building stronger relationships. (and just to be clear – relationships beat transactions doesn’t mean giving up  core skills on managing operational efficiency.  It does mean that those core skill no longer differentiate you from your competition).

Here is how:

Engage the Community beyond your borders

There is a world of conversation taking place about your company. I have long wanted to write a post titled, “Your Company Sucks – But Don’t Take My Word For It….” About how many Facebook groups are solely organized around how your company sucks (If you don’t believe me – just start searching for your company + “sucks” in Facebook or Google. If you are in a company of good size, prepare to be appalled.) There are tons of good ways to get started listening to what people are saying about you on the social web. You can get started here. Once you are tuned in – you can start participating in some form. Since the web is essentially an emergent (bottom up) force – it is best to think about responding in a similar way. Consider how you might empower your employees to adopt social tools. At my employer, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly has led the charge by blogging and avidly using Twitter. He models the behavior, tone and manner of how these social technologies are used at O’Reilly. This goes a long way. There are dozens of O’Reilly employees listening, responding and posting to the social web everyday. This far exceeds what any single, top-down strategy could get done – which leads me to the next point.

Mobilize Your Workforce

As the number of customer-to-company interactions increase – it is hard to scale relationships through traditional, narrowly-controlled broadcast channels. Customers expect some level of interaction if not intimacy with the brands they are engaging with and five people in marketing aren’t going to get you there… Digital outreach should no longer be the sole domain of marketers. In other words, the whole workforce can be motivated to participate. The key is appropriate training. Intel is doing a good job by providing a Digital IQ workshop.  This is also the idea behind the innovation labs I run.

Start Operating within the Social Contract

We have many years of refining a martial model of management that centers on routinization of work and command and control hierarchy. We have extracted as much productivity as we are likely to get from these techniques. We are entering an era when the more fluid, open models of collaboration and cooperation will be the ground where competitive advantage is won and lost. But playing on this field has different rules. It requires operating under a social contract – social contracts are very different from business contracts that dominate the 20^th century organizational mentality. In the business contract the basic metaphor is the binding, legal contract. The basic metaphor for the social web is relationship. The building blocks are trust, reciprocity and authenticity. This is the hardest change for companies to make because it involves a fundamental shift in culture. For more on this – see my Forbes post – Why Business Needs to Get Social.

Realize that Customer Service is the New Marketing

In an always-on environment companies need to stay engaged on a personal level with the people they interact with.  Customer Service is the New Marketing simply because every customer is now a broadcast tower and their opinions carry a whole lot of weight.   It also means you should probably stop looking at your call center as a cost center and more like a public relations department (though I dread the connotation of that word).

Examples of great relationship companies – The Ritz-Carlton hotel where every guest is recognized and remembered and where every employee is empowered to solve any customer issue they encounter (‘If you find a customer problem, you own the problem” is one of their mantras),  Zappos, where every first customer is surprised by an upgrade to overnight shipping and the customer service is legendary.   And I humbly submit my company O’Reilly Media – where we constantly have our ear to the ground. If we find an unhappy customer on the web – we try and fix it. When your problem gets fixed without you ever directly contacting customer service – that can be a conversion moment.

For more on this subject see my post on Emotional Transactions or “Moment of Truth: We are all Marketers Now”

Roughly one year ago I was in conversation with the CEO of one of the largest online portals for Human Resources.  My pitch:  Human Resources should be leading the charge in helping businesses understand the possibilities and implications of social technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks etc.  CEO’s response:  Human Resources is full of backwards people who are always behind the curve.  Don’t waste your (read “my”) time.  This is not an exaggerated paraphrasing.

While Human Resources is still trying to grasp the “what” and “why” of social technologies, they are missing an enormous opportunity to lead on “how” these tools are successfully employed in the enterprise. It is high time that they lead.

Why?

Ask anyone engaged in bringing social technologies into the workplace and you will hear the same thing;  “it’s the people stupid.” (what I call “The Harder Stuff”)   The primary resistance to the new operating principles at work in social technologies lies with the mindset, culture and leadership of today’s workplace.    So if Human Resources’ expertise is people, change and transformation (after all this is where our leadership, training, communications and change management groups are housed) why aren’t they leading the charge?   The market is quickly moving beyond the “what” (what are social technologies?) and the “why” (why are they important to my business strategy?) and engaging the deeper question of “how” (How do I employ them in my business?  How do they threaten business-as-usual?  How do I manage the transition?).

Simple test:

• Would your organization hire someone today in marketing that didn’t understand how social networks change marketing outreach and customer insight?
• Would your organization hire someone today in R&D that didn’t understand the role of online communities and customer led innovation?
• Would your organization hire anyone in Human Resources that had no understanding of how social networks are being used for talent management and employee retention?

The answer is likely no.  Yet the employees that most organizations have working for them today do not possess the skills the organization needs for tomorrow.

Human Resources is uniquely positioned to lead the inevitable move to incorporate social technologies into the enterprise in the form of:

• Skills training: organizing workshops to help employees grasp the operating instructions (what, why, how) for using social technologies.
• Policy support: helping define appropriate terms of use within their companies (one of the largest killers of any project is the lack of understanding between a business unit employing these tools and the legal department’s existing terms of use).
• Leadership development: helping leaders understand how social technologies prompt a new type of leadership
• Talent Management: how social networks can be used in recruiting and retention strategies.

Who better to address this than HR?  As lower skill responsibilities such as payroll get outsourced I am hoping that HR takes a strategic leadership position in the organization.  Anyone reading this that knows someone in HR – please forward this post.  Anyone in HR reading this – please add to the comments or contact me.  Let’s get HR into the game.

Here are four key principles for creating a stronger business in the network economy:

• Listening beats Talking
• Open beats Closed
• Relationships Beat Transactions
• Questions beat Answers

Over the course of the next few posts I will be going into details on each.  If you have questions or other examples to put into the posts – please add them into the comments.  Part one focuses on Listening beats Talking.

Listening beats Talking
In the network – listening is a prerequisite to learning.  It is the critical precursor of everything we do – the beginning of joining conversations, building trust, learning and developing relationships.
Listening is not passive, it is another way of finding answers from new places – from customers, partners and employees outside of the traditional leadership circle.  It sounds simple but the problem is that most of our companies are structured to talk – Marketing, PR, Communications departments, even tradshows and events are all vehicles for advocacy – not inquiry or information gathering.
Fox, GM (yes, it is true), Salesforce.com are all examples of companies that are listening in new ways  but I want to take a deeper look at what Starbucks is doing as an illustration of Listening beats Talking:
I am no fan of the company but I have been impressed by www.mystarbucksidea.com.

Taking a quick look at the interface you can immediately see what they are doing right.  Users can submit any idea for consideration.  Other users (and this is critical) can vote these ideas up or down and discuss  them.  Often the comments build out the initial idea and give it more substance or potential value.  The key insight here is that the normal role of the product manager, the person who sorts through ideas and assesses their potential value, is being done by the community itself.    Rather than ask and answer the question from within the company, Starbucks is using listening as a form of customer led innovation. This same idea can also be applied to many areas of your business including product development (which ideas are most important to improve customer experience of my product) and human resources (more on that below).

Once the ideas are in motion Starbucks has managers that can respond in the comments.   Ideas that get a lot of votes/comments can then be put into review.  As a user you can see that the idea is actively under consideration.  The whole process is public; from “under review” to “reviewed” and (potentially) “Launched”

For a quick tour of all the changes and innovations that have been inspired by their customers – check out the Starbucks blog here.  This is just one detailed example of Listening beats Talking.
Dell and Salesforce.com have also had great results with these types of idea exchanges.  On the B2B front Salesforce used the same Idea Exchange platform has has been able to deliver “four new releases [in 2007], in contrast to only two in 2006.  New releases now include three hundred new features, three times as many as in previous years.” (source, Groundswell pg. 186)

Human Resources Where Art Though?
Lest you think that this is just a business-to-consumer idea – what about hooking your internal employee population up to something like this?  Imagine two big buttons on your intranet, “Things we Should Do Less Of” and “Things We Should Do More Of”  -  “…Less Of” lists suggestion to drive down waste and inefficiency   “…More Of” drives employee led innovation through suggestions on what the company should be doing.   Following Starbuck’s example, all suggestions are transparent to other employees and can be voted up or down – management closes the loop by putting winning ideas under review and implementing select ones.  Traditional “workout” sessions aimed at eliminating redundancies and waste that used to be conducted with a limited team together in a room can now be distributed on a simple platform accessible to all employees regardless of title or workplace.  That is powerful.

How to Prepare:
In its more mature form Listening is a commitment to take action on the part of your company so if you launch something like this then be prepared to handle the “tail costs” of reviewing ideas, responding to comments and honestly committing to a few winning ideas.  Also, be prepared to see some criticism aired in the open.  Trust me, that criticism is already happening around the proverbial watercooler (for your employees) or in other public forums (for your customers).  The difference here is that you will be able to see it and do something about it.

Next Post will focus on “Open beats Closed”