Being Peter Kim

Words vs. Deeds

What matters more: what people say or what they do?

It's not just an adage to live by - I'm thinking about how this applies to managing a social business.

Over the past few years, the brand monitoring market has been steadily growing and maturing, with hundreds of companies adopting solutions like Scout Labs, Nielsen Online, and Radian6. Not surprisingly, the first step in any strategy - social or otherwise - is to "listen first," i.e. research and understand the landscape.

This gets us a sense for what people are saying and necessitates short-term response. In the long-term, these insights supposedly can be used for insights, planning, and setting business direction.

But should companies really be listening to these people who are telling the world their opinions? Status updates are carefully crafted to create a particular image, perhaps with the intent of getting a new job, settling an old score, or selling social media advertising. Is this really unbiased, valuable data?

Maybe companies should also step up their efforts to pay more attention to people's behaviors and predictive models of the outcomes. In some ways, that which isn't said - but rather demonstrated by applying personal resources, whether time, money, energy, or all the above - might be exponentially more valuable than just chatter.

Perhaps the answer isn't either/or, but both. However, solutions for the latter aren't in abundance today as far as I can tell - feel free to leave suggestions I should investigate in the comments below. Jeremiah calls this "The Intention Web" - what do you think? As we enter 2010, I see the potential for a new cliche to come to life: "an action is worth a thousand words."

Harnessing cults of personality

By now, you likely have heard about the couple who crashed last week's White House state dinner. As pointed out by the WSJ, I agree that this isn't an anomaly but the public surfacing of a cultural trend: everybody thinks of themselves a hidden star, just waiting for the right opportunity to shine.

The trend is unavoidable - unlike sporting events, where broadcasters avert their cameras when a fan jumps on the field and does something stupid, the media magnifies the actions of the attention-seekers. Moreover, in many ways reality TV acts as the same type of expressive outlet as social media.

As a business person, there's lots to think about here from both external and internal perspectives.

• Externally, the good news is that this trend drives consumers to talk online - a lot. This allows companies to gain market intelligence, if they know how to approach the listening landscape. The challenge, however, is distilling signal from noise and at an extreme, avoiding detractors that actually seek to do your brand harm.
• Internally, we've seen cases of social media "rock stars" who help raise company profiles...in the echo chamber for sure, in the broader market perhaps. But it's not just the ones who hold the titles that possess a cult of personality. ALL of your employees have some modicum of event crasher, waiting to happen. Traditional management means are for the most part effective in preventing ego anarchy.

The most interesting opportunity for businesses lies taking a positive approach and harnessing this trend to activate individuals. Which drives the question: how social is your business, really?

Measuring your way to a good night's sleep

I've been spending the past month using the Zeo, a consumer electronics device that measures sleep patterns and provides sleep coaching guidance. Schneider Associates sent me the device (much appreciated). I had just read about Zeo in Delta's Sky Magazine and was curious - unfortunately, I don't sleep well on business trips, which gets to be a problem when you travel as much as I do.

The Zeo stands as a proof point in the ongoing consumerization of technology. The only sleep studies I'm familiar with are ones from TV, where subjects spend the night in a lab hooked up to wires and sensors like they're plugging into the Matrix. The Zeo allows the sleep-challenged to spend the night in their own bed with a monitoring device about the size of a headband. The data is fascinating. By measuring electrical signals produced by your brain, the Zeo records the amount of time you spend in REM, light, and deep sleep.

After a couple weeks, I realized that just seeing the numbers each morning wasn't going to make any difference in my sleep quality. You can't really make yourself get more deep or REM sleep (I think). To paraphrase Lord Kelvin, "if you can measure it, then you can manage it." In this case, I was able to measure something previously difficult to get data on. The data alone is interesting but of little value; a behavior change is required to drive different outcomes. To this end, the Zeo recommends a series of coaching sessions to alter approaches to sleep.

When it comes to social business design, measurement is scattered, making management more difficult. For starters, businesses need to understand what to measure, why it matters, and how to do it. Where do you start? In fundamental practice areas: customer engagement, workforce collaboration, business partner optimization. The next step is making the data actionable. How can you change culture, process, and infrastructure to drive better outcomes? Behaviors must be altered to capture value.

I think that too often, people jump from measurement to ROI too quickly. If we take a different approach that accounts for the interim steps required to get from start to finish, we'll be able to sleep better knowing how our social business investments are performing.

FourSquare and Social Business Design

Judging from the number of invites I'm getting for FourSquare these days, its slope of new users must be getting more vertical every day. (If you're not familiar with the service, read their overview.) After using FourSquare for a while, I've been thinking about its implications for business - and they're deeper than you might think, extending far beyond happy hours and local advertising opportunities.

At initial consideration, this may seem ridiculous. I'm not going to tell you that FourSquare is the next Twitter - it's not. It's different. But just like so many people were initially dismissive of Twitter, the same can be said for FourSquare. After all, the driving concept behind the application is "a leaderboard for Saturday night." The second time I heard about FourSquare, I was told that it was popular among New York moms and nannies for setting up impromptu playdates. Not exactly the FriendFeed crowd...I signed up immediately.

To understand FourSquare's emergent business value, you've got to think of it as a social business application, the backbone of which is measurement. Even more than other social apps, game mechanics drive the FourSquare experience. Based on the single activity of "checking in," all five elements exist:

1. Collecting badges and mayorships.
2. Earning points throughout the week.
3. Feedback though the leaderboard and a personal stats page.
4. Value exchanges from keeping tabs on your connections.
5. Customization of your profile and check-in messages. Anyone who uses the app knows all this.

When I consider FourSquare through the lens of Social Business Design, the value jumps off the page. The service:

• Relies on content generated by personal profiles and places, which come together in time-sensitive relationships. It also utilizes emerging technologies reaching critical mass. We call this an ecosystem.
• Motivates participants to broadcast their whereabouts with an implicit invitation to meet up. You become part of a relevant community based on geographic check-ins. This is hivemindedness.
• Allows users to send implicit messages about their status - on multiple levels - based on time and location. Others can respond in kind. These are dynamic signals.
• Permits control of messaging to personal preferences. Where and when a person checks in has meaning; some people check in "off the grid"/in private, whereas users can mute pings from others who are found to be irrelevant. This is a metafilter.

Think about these characteristics applied as a white-labeled enterprise application. Twitter : Yammer :: FourSquare : [a new "GrandCentral"?]

• Connects employees of distributed organizations when in geographic proximity.
• Lowers cost of coordination, handled today by many fragmented applications.
• Increases content production. Game mechanics spur participation and encourage collaboration.
• Allows colleagues to vet locations and set alerts for one another.

Applying these ideas in a marketing context address three hot B2C interests: mobile, social, and local. However, I think brands will find that scalability ends quickly. There are much bigger opportunities in the B2B context.

Are you seeing it? Or do you still think FourSquare just a waste of time?

Using Twitter at scale

In three short years, we've witnessed the evolution of Twitter from a way to exchange "inconsequential information between friends" to a business communication tool with a US$1 billion valuation.

As Twitter's user base has grown into the millions, companies have followed their consumers onto the service and started participating in conversations. You're already familiar with companies like Comcast, JetBlue, and Best Buy, among the hundreds of companies with corporate Twitter accounts.

But many of these companies are starting to face the scalability issue; a single person can manage the communication channel to prove the concept, but moving beyond one person/purpose can be difficult. Companies, unlike individuals, need to think through participation strategies for channel migration, which requires process, culture, and technology support.

To that end, Dachis Group is pleased to be a part of CoTweet's Enterprise Innovators Program. We will be working with forward-thinking brands to help capture value from their Twitter activity. These companies have started moving beyond the proof of concept stage and are starting to measure their efforts to better manage outcomes. If you are interested in participating, you can request an invite.

Some of the experience we'll be bringing to the program comes from a project that we completed recently for a well-known B2C brand. The company has been using a combination of personal and corporate Twitter accounts on an ad-hoc basis for customer support, but needed to step back and formulate a strategy for making their efforts work at scale. In our research, we found that most businesses are still using home-grown approaches, which are near if not already at their limits. If your company could use some help with this issue, let me know.