Yours socially

A CEO recently told me he had an inkling he needed to get his brands on ‘some of those social media things’ but that he had no idea where to start, or whether social media marketing worked.

In contrast, Andrew Alamango of Etnika fame sold out two nights of Café Brazil jazz last autumn using Facebook as the primary means of marketing the event. Historic house museum Palazzo Falson, which has been on Facebook only a month, says it ‘could not resist the irony of having an ancient house with a strong presence on the most happening social network site’. It appears that those with little or no marketing budget are more inclined to investigate, and invest time in social media channels than potentially more cash-rich businesses.

But social media is nothing new. From internet’s earliest days, we’ve had chat, forums, message boards and virtual worlds. Today, blogs, podcasts, social networks, photo- and video-sharing sites, RSS (really simple syndication) and more, all fall within its scope. We now talk to each other by posting on a Facebook wall, uploading a video on YouTube and ‘Twittering’ about our every move. Even websites’ pre-eminence is being whittled away. Search engines pick up well-tagged blogs rather than website urls. Your homepage is now wherever someone lands when they search for you.

Little of this has, until now, interested business, particularly local business in Malta. But, when Dell has a senior Vice-President Communities & Conversations, you know that social media is moving up a gear and becoming more mainstream as a business tool. Today, any entity used to mediating and controlling its publics will have to face this paradigm shift and engage in online conversations if it is to stay relevant to its audiences.

But social media for business is not without a learning curve. There are some basics to get right, if you want to join the conversations and gain.

Get closer to your clients

Social media is about understanding customer nature, and nurturing it. Consumers today prefer to read and listen to opinions about products and services from fellow consumers and their peers. If you are going to use social media, don’t interrupt their natural conversations with corporate spin and one-way marketing messages. You need to foster a valued, trusted, authentic voice to get heard in the babble.

Listen to some home truths

On social media, your customers tell it to you straight. Dell discovered from its Twitter presence that people thought its customer support centre was abysmal. It took measures to improve the service based on the customer gripes it picked up on Facebook comments. Better to know than not know.

Market cost-effectively

In a recession, social media becomes more important simply because barriers to entering it are zero. It costs nothing to set up and manage a Facebook page or to Twitter; only your time. You can monitor return on investment though, as social media has readily-available metrics. Start low-key and learn what works.

Engage with purpose

Find people who are passionate about social media within your organisation. Let your social media-savvy employees do their bit on your behalf, but as themselves. Palazzo Falson has two staff members with responsibility for its Facebook page, and, according to the curator, they are doing a great job.

Enter social media conversations wisely

Ryan Air heard disgruntled customers moaning about it on Twitter, and entered the fray publicly on the medium giving all customers a cocky brush off. Within an hour, the Ryan Air ‘Tweets’ had been pulled, probably by a senior executive who thought a junior’s hasty responses ill advised. Social media is about immediacy, but think before you post or tweet.

Don’t socialise everywhere

Your goal should be to fish where your fish are. You don’t have to touch each conversation, but you need to be having one or two, because whether your business realises or not, it’s on social media already. Your name is being bandied about as any Google search will show you.

Lastly…see your customers as your allies, not just as people to sell to. They are your real brand value, so value their online conversations about you and with you.

Our new year mashup

I’m never quite sure what to make of year end resolutions – I keep making mine shorter. But like Godin, I think there is no such time as NOW to “use cheap media, available attention and great talent to make something that matters”.  Everyone I know is cost cutting, firing, waiting for some positive sign from somewhere to take them out of credit crunch paralysis and fear.  We believe there are opportunities waiting to be exploited while your competitors stop and lick their wounds.

This is the approach we are taking with our new project:

1. Focus on an area where you have a natural strength – where you can use your unique combination of talents, skills and knowledge to create some meaningful positive change for others.  Specifically, look for an area where you can ‘commoditise’ what you know.
2. Identify a tribe that you can lead.  Click here for a tribe you may belong to without knowing.
3. Use a decent blogging platform like WordPress to get a  mashup blog cum website started.  Start developing your content.
4. Use Ning or Elgg to bolt on a community element and invite members of your tribe.  You know where the first members may be.  Go fishing.
5. Use Facebook  as a powerful inbound link and to reach out to members of your tribe
6. Use Twitter as a short hand blog.
7. Use Squidoo to develop a lens or two as your project starts to take shape
8. Use Slideshare to develop an elevator pitch of your new project.
9. Get your LinkedIn profile updated to reflect the above
10. Go

Skills to survive and succeed at work

On 10th December, I was invited by the University of Malta to give a lecture on business skills in the work place.  The lecture was part of the DegreePlus programme, which provides young people with practical skills and formative experiences.  I like this programme – it always strikes me that most people are totally unprepared for the ’shock of entry’ in the work place.

I used a Microsoft-sponsored study on  essential skills in business as the catalyst for the talk, grounding the principles in real-life stories.    I’ve embedded the slides here, as they may have some relevance to a wider audience.  

Serious skills part 2

Ann E W Stone says that she once read a book that changed the course of her career, and her life.   She learnt that people make snap decisions on others based on ’signals; and that it was within one’s power to manage those signals.  The first part of her transformation was to understand the operating style she had; the second was to get some fundamentals right before she could achieve her career goals.

Her ‘25 skills that signal that you are to be taken seriously‘ have been modelled on what she has learnt on her way to fame and fortune and an appearance on the Larry King show.

1. How you walk into a room

Walk it like you own it.  Head up, confident.

2.  Your handshake

Put your hand out at a 45 degree angle and make it firm, not harsh.

3.  How you are dressed

Ms Stone recommends that you dress for the position you aspire to.  Dark colours and jackets imply power (green is a non-starter for a suit.  Yellow, red and purple if you’re female.  No open-toed shoes or coloured stockings).

4. What you read and talk about.

You need to demonstrate that you read the papers and have an opinion on ‘word events’.  You have to assume that most people are not interested in your family affairs.

(I found this particularly difficult to embrace.  Sarah Palin is more interesting as an ice-breaker than some family anecdote?)

5.  Self-confidence and optimism

‘If you want ot get ahead in business, you have to be an optimistic person’, says Ms Stone.  ‘People want positive leaders.  People do not follow pessimists.’

6.  What you put in writing

Ms Stone says you have to think before you write.

7.   How you present new ideas

You need to lay claim to some ‘new ideas’. 

(Right).

8. Organisation skills

Ms Stone says she will always hire women re-entering the workforce after having raised young children, because their multi-tasking skills are so developed by this stage.

(This makes perfect sense).

9.  Learning and motivation outside your job space

You need to demonstrate a yearning for knowledge.  Get books, go to seminars, join a trade association.

10.  How you handle yourself in the office

No crying, giggling.  Learn from your mistakes but don’t take them personally.  Don’t talk back to the coach.

(By this time, I was thinking of my rather stubborn, curious-about-the-world six year-old.  And started giggling myself).

11. Verbal skills

You need to be able to speak in public or to groups.

(Another one for the blogging and Dale Carnegie fraternity).

12.  Vocabulary

13.  Spelling

Always use a spell-checker before you communincate in writing.  ‘Spelling tells people how intelligent you are.’

14.  Be courteous

Show good breeding.

(I thought of Trump and Alan Sugar for starters).

15.  Business cards

You need to hae one, even if you don’t have a job.

16.  Ability to delegate

Men are apparently much better at doing this than women.

17.  Computer & Technical Skills

18.  A support system both inside and outside the office

Don’t make enemies.  Keep your own counsel.  Unload only with your family

19.  Be on time

This is a signal of respect.

(Totally, totally agree with this.  Sadly, this is not a trait which works in Southern Europe.  In fact, being late is often used as a show of ‘power’)

20.  Market yourself and celebrate your sucesses

Ms Stone believes in self-promotion and advises that we should not ‘bury our accomplishments’.

(There was much nodding from the audience.  And the blogging community, I suspect).

21.  Show you love the competition

This was an interesting one.  Ms Stone believes that many people shine on the adrenalin of beating the competition.

22. Make money one of your measures of success

Ms Stone had started her talk by saying that she managed to increase her salary five-fold in 11 months once she started applying her signalling skills in earnest.

It sounded particularly hollow as the markets went into freefall. I just know so many people who love what they do without thinking of how much money they are making from ’selling their life’.

23.  Think like management

I come from the other side of the equation.  Management has to think like the factory floor to get things done.  Or the people on the help desk, the front of house, the doers and the cleaners.  Period.

24.  Have clear goals

It helps knowing what you want in life.  And work.

It’s aligning them to your company’s value system which is the key issue, I think.

25.  Show you are a team player

Make the boss look good.

This is tougher than it seems.  Especially if you are practicing 20 above.

As I left the hall, I couldn’t help feeling that Ms Stone does not spend much time advising start-ups or geeks.  Perhaps it was her disapproval of open-toed sandals.  Or making money one of the measure of success.  Or maybe it was just a transatlantic approach which does not translate in its entirey across the pond.   There was a seeming lack of awareness that there are ‘cultural differences’ that cannot be ignored when you are doing business in different parts of the world.

All I know is that not all of the above would work in the cauldrons of an office in Milan.. where ‘bella figura’ has its own code of behaviour.. or the earthier variations further south.

Still, in an age and medium obsessed with lists, there is some common-sense to be gleaned from Ms Stone’s thinking.

It would just be a much nicer world if we didn’t have to worry about ‘being taken seriously’ and just had the internal confidence that we are in the right place, at the right time, doing the job we are meant to be doing, to the best of our abilities.  And having some fun in the process.

It’s not about the code

London always gets me to do some soul-searching.  There are days when I wonder why I turned my back on it, in the nineties.  Whenever I am in the city, I guess I reconnect with the part of me I leave behind – and my old ghosts. 

I moved to London in 1985.  Costa Coffee and Bar Italia were the closest to a real cappuccino.  Ken Livingstone was about to be kicked out of the Greater London Council.  The Brixton Riots designated chunks of South London as a no-go zone.  The Who were planning a 25^th Anniversary concert.  Music was just plain horrible.  It was the first time I had seen a PC, one of those first IBM ‘portables’ with a screen built into the case and a keyboard dangling out of a socket.    Six months after my arrival, I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and my boss told me that now I had a licence to make money.  The statement was not exactly prophetic.  Eighties London was rubber-stamped by bean counters, Margaret Thatcher and Loadsamoney.  I wasn’t particularly taken by the concept of making money, but I knew I wanted to travel and that something in strategy was probably more life-rewarding than accountancy.  So my natural habitat became multinationals.  On the day I was interviewed for a European controller job with IP Sharp (IPSA), a Canadian computer timesharing and consulting Group, I was informed that Reuters were close to a takeover.  In other words, the risk of LIFO loomed over any eventual appointment.

As it happened, I spent two years immersed in restructuring and change management – and understanding the promise and limitations of technology.  At face value, the IPSA / Reuters deal was a marriage made in heaven.  IPSA specialised in data warehousing, yesterday’s information, Reuters in today’s, the Reuters screen.  Reuters decided early on to integrate the IPSA product into its core service offering, believing it could corner the market.  What Reuters failed to understand was that Sharp’s product had been developed by a network of brilliant, but highly ‘un-corporate’ APL software developers.  People who worked weird hours, often from home, and in many cases were accountable to nobody other than their own whims.  The clash with Reuters’ blue-chip corporate culture where information was transient, and nobody was indispensable, was immediate.  Reuters’s frustration grew by the day as the Special projects team charged with the integration realised that:  the APL developers were indispensable; that IPSA was a ‘people’ business as opposed to a technology platform; and that there the company they had purchased was worthless without some major culture changes in both organisations – and a leap of faith from both camps to try and get the deal to work.  Being the new kid on the block, my job quickly evolved into working with IPSA country managers to prepare people and systems for the inevitable integration and determine who could make the transition.  I also became a conduit to the Reuters guys whose job was on the line to ‘complete integration’ within two years.  By the time this period had flashed by, I had worked in many countries in Continental Europe, learnt about the idiosyncrasies of multinationals, saw some people resist and others thrive on change.  There are always winners and losers in acquisitions and mergers.  Some of IPSA’s best people could not accept the new suits and moved – in some cases, with crippling consequences on the core product.  The more political elements (sic. sales and marketing) were in a rush to move their desks to Fleet Street from Victoria.  And in typical fashion, having got through my two-year project and being told to ‘cruise and wait for the new dream position in Reuters Special Projects Department to be approved ‘ – I decided life was short, and moved on to Hitachi Data Systems.   

This week, in London, I ran a Forum for key users of a legacy business support system, built over some eight years by a Delphi developer.   I had to use whatever powers of persuasion I have to convince my client that it was worth the investment to get people round a table to take stock of developments over the past 12 months and address the thorny issues of standardisation.  This in an environment where customisation was the name of the game, where system changes were made ‘on the run’ and in many cases undocumented, and where the developer and his team were in a never-ending spiral of design, build, customise, support, design.  User training was sporadic and had to be fitted around the developers’ support time.  User and technical documentation was virtually non-existent.  Twelve months ago, the CEO lived in perpetual fear that the developers would move and leave the company stranded without the backbone of its successful business model.   Which was why I was called in.

The situation with the legacy system twelve months ago reminded me of the scenario Reuters inherited when it bought IP Sharp.  The mistake Reuters made then was to ignore the people side of things (‘soft’ was the buzz word then) and try and rail-road the solution by focusing on getting the technologies to talk to each other.  I decided the only way round the undocumented legacy system was to engage with the people behind it and get into their headspace – before developing a strategy to get out of the never-ending spiral of customisation and ‘software development on demand.’  I made mistakes, tried to move things too quickly, retrenched, did the drinking / listening / bonding bit.. whatever it took.  Ultimately, developers demand respect, like anybody else working for a living.  In this case, these guys had just barricaded themselves in.  Slowly, I gained some level of trust.  To enable us to get out of crisis management mode into starting to establish clear arms-length relationships with the non ICT literate users of the system.  In 12 months, the system was documented, users were forced to stop bickering and request changes via formal channels – significantly reducing the number of changes until they trickled into nothing.  We focused on user interfaces as opposed to more development changes.  I engaged a process specialist to map out the company’s core business processes as I was convinced that the system had simply evolved to support the whims of the more vociferous elements of management instead of what core business required.  We made some major changes within the organisational framework of the system to mirror the real life processes.  We did some stuff like relabelling and designing new icons to help navigation.  And on a particularly inspired evening, we branded the system Elvis, to send a playful signal to the rest of the organisation that the system had a life of its own, and was no longer the domain of a particular developer.

I guess sitting with ten people in London with people who caught trains and planes to engage in a discussion on an IT system they loved to hate was a bit of a coup.

Sometimes I wonder whether middle age is when déjà vu really kicks in.  Sometimes I feel l can see the movie of my life flash past.  When mainframes ruled at IPSA and we shared files over our global networks and used email many years before the Internet made it all pervasive .

Then I see my four year-old, clicking a mouse and laughing at the clips I have uploaded on Google Video and realise how we all have to relearn what we thought we knew.  Every day. 

The never-ending search for learning

Next Tuesday I’m off to Berlin for Online Educa Berlin , a get-together for technologists and strategists in Europe.  It’s the first time I’m attending, so I’m really curious about what I’m going to find.  I must admit – I’ve never been a great networker at events like this – even though the event is pitched as ‘enabling participants to develop multinational and cross-industry contacts & partnerships, as well as to enhance their knowledge, expertise, and abilities’.  It’s a character trait that I have learnt to live with.  I am very comfortable delivering workshops with large groups – or doing the odd presentations to demanding audiences.  And equally so in one-to-one meetings, including those where there are some tough negotiations to get through.  But put me in a Conference corridor surrounded by people with mobiles and name tags and juggling coffees and my first instinct is to find a corner and watch from a distance rather than into the ‘cold-call’ hand shakes and networking.  I really have to work hard to get over this.

But – I’ve always been interested into Technology Supported Learning and this time I know what I’m looking for - technologies that can be customised, rebranded and launched as proprietary products.  So I’m looking forward to next week.  As I wake up into my mid-forties and official middle-age (!), the desire to learn new stuff  has accelerated, instead of going into some sort of decline.   There’s a lot of talk about your hunger for life and success diminishing as you race past your twenties and thirties.  With us, the exact opposite has happened.  We juggle raising a young child with having to think out of the box every day.  And increasingly, our knowledge comes from our networks of connected people, some of them on different sides of the world, and the usual eclectic mix of blogs and wikis.  I still get a kick out of reading something like 37 Signals’ Getting Real.  I still love the fact that despite the cynical age we live in, there is still so much knowledge-sharing going on.  The old adage about information is power is still true - and yet, we live in this exciting time when we have it all at our finger-tips. 

The only inevitability about middle-age is that you end up working with younger people.  Somehow, somewhere along the line, you became the peer group.  Which is scary.  But always energising.  As long as you keep obsessed with learning - wherever it comes from:  your Economist, your neighbour, or the blog of some geek in Illinois – there is just too much to do to worry about losing your edge.

If the Berlin trip pans out the right way, I’ll post some material after that. 

Outside In

There’s something mildly dysfunctional about being a consultant engaged to work as part of a team on the inside.   

In most cases, as a change agent, your role within the client’s corporate environment is fairly clear.  You’ve been called in to devise solutions to long-standing problems – normally within a short period of time.  You’re a catalyst for initiatives that have to be embraced by insiders.  Occasionally there are those calls when the client thinks he knows what he needs to change but feels he has to engage an outsider to move forward (these are rarely great gigs).   But as an external change agent, you know your parameters.   You hit the ground running.  There’s the client – the company, with its unique political environment and value systems.  And there’s you – the outsider, with your own baggage, looking in.  You just get on with it.

In much of the work that we do, the insider / outsider roles get purposely blurred.  As an example:  over the past 12 months I have been engaged as an outsourced CIO in a business that is going rapidly multinational.  I have set up a new department, hired new staff, and manage them on a day to day basis.  I do all the things that CIOs do, including constantly aligning ICT and the new B2C channel with the company’s successful operating model that to date has relied virtually exculsively on B2B channels.  But I am also the chief evangelist for e-business and knowledge management.     When it comes to ICT, my job is essentially operational.  With e-business and knowledge management, I am a change agent working on the inside – driving innovation and cultural change.  And I also form part of the company’s Executive Team.  It makes for an interesting existence.

For a start, there are issues relating to staff management and motivation to absorb.  You have to lead from the inside.  You move seamlessly from devising strategy to securing buy-in to full implementation mode – sometimes within a day.  And you also have to thread more carefully than usual.  You cannot come across as an outsider who is not committed to last the course, or serve the cause.  Most important of all, there are corporate cultures to absorb, manage – and even embrace – before you can start becoming effective.  

There is a clear linkage between corporate cultures and value systems  - you cannot be effective as an Insider Outsider if you ignore that.  The challenge is when you find yourself in situations where the client thinks that corporate culture means ‘homogeneity’.  In other words, that to fit into the corporate culture, you have to be a certain ‘type of person’. 

One of the most effective effective managers I ever come across was a pin-striped suited, ex RAF engineer, at a Vice President level.   Rumour had it that Alan was not ‘hot on management techniques’.  He readily boasted that he did not like all the people who worked for him – but they were ‘all brilliant at what they did, and kept him in an incredibly well-paid job’.  I am not sure that this won Alan many friends with his peers.  But there was always something tongue in cheek in the bravado.  For a start, Alan’s direct reports (and I admit, I was one of those) would always go the extra mile for him.  He let us get on with our jobs, and never interfered in our management styles.  He was a master in the art of delegation and arms length management.  He was also highly-skilled  in hiring the right people, even if at face value, there appeared to be little in common between them.  Alan intuitively realised that teams need to have edge.  The result was creative energy and debate – loads of it.  But the guy would always, at the end of a session, rein people in, unruffle feathers and, having listened to the various points of view, map out the next move, clearly, succinctly.  And we would move on, together, as a team.

Too often, we come across situations where a difference of opinion is interpreted as conflict; where different reactions to a common challenge risks putting someone in a bad light.  We continue to live in an age where the old Pirandello notion that ’You are not who you are, but who other people think you are’ continues to prevail.  We have seen many CEOs make bad decisions by judging their teams at face value; by interpreting difference of opinion as dissent that needs to be stifled; by subconsciously only listening to people who agree with them and blinkering themselves from getting the whole picture. 

The best managers, the best strategists, have always intutively known that diversity is what makes the Belbin theories so compelling.   It is possible for people with very different backgrounds and modes of behaviour to gel together in a team.  In many cases, sitting on the fence, and absorbing different points of view before making up one’s mind, will lead to a better decision. 

It all sounds very simple.  In real life, we continue to allow our own ‘baggage’, our own filters, our own need for affirmation, to get in the way of seeing the wood from the trees.

So when I find myself in that kind of situation, when I am starting to shut out something I should be listening to, I think of Alan and his multi-cultural, mildly dysfunctional management team.  And of Groucho Marx, reminding me that he never wanted to belong to any club that would accept him as a member.

There is freedom in diversity.  Always.