Charlene Li, Analyst at Forrester Research, gave an excellent presentation about Social Strategies For Revolutionaries; these ideas are further developed in her upcoming book, Groundswell (Note: this is transcript, so please excuse the grammar and run on sentences):

“You know that it’s essen­tial for your com­pany to be involved in social tech­nolo­gies — but your exec­u­tives are too afraid to pull the trig­ger. This ses­sion will give you the strate­gic frame­works that will appeal to the log­i­cal, ana­lyt­i­cal side of exec­u­tives, while tap­ping into the rev­o­lu­tion­ary spirit needed to cre­ate a groundswell of sup­port for your strat­egy. Based on the upcom­ing book, Groundswell: Win­ning In A World Trans­formed By Social Tech­nolo­gies, the ses­sion will lay­out how to think about how peo­ple are using social tech­nolo­gies, the busi­ness objec­tives that can be met, and review a quick case study of how one com­pany trans­formed itself. High­lighted through­out the ses­sion will be the role of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary — the key per­son inside an orga­ni­za­tion who leads the trans­for­ma­tion. You’ll learn how to chan­nel the tra­di­tion of rad­i­cal­ism into a force that can trans­form your company.”

 

 Exam­ple of DVD code on Digg, where users revolted when Digg sup­pressed the post (Digg was forced to repub­lish the post with the code). Another exam­ple is Jeri­cho Nuts on CBS. One day, 20 tons of peanuts showed up in the producer’s office that can­celled the show. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary behind this was a talk show host, Shaun, who loved the show and didn’t want to see it die. CBS brought it back.

The Groundswell is “A social trend in which peo­ple use tech­nolo­gies to get things they need from each other, rather than form tra­di­tional insti­tu­tions like cor­po­ra­tions.” Com­pa­nies now want to embrace the groundswell. When a com­pany says “let’s get a blog,” it’s because they feel they need to get involved and don’t know how.

So, will you be a rad­i­cal like Thomas Paine? He was the found­ing spark that led to the Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion. After that, he went to France, and when he came back, the rev­o­lu­tion was over and he had no more voice. His funeral was attended by 6 people.

Or a rev­o­lu­tion­ary like Thomas Jef­fer­son: the dog days of 1776 was a tedious process to get colonies to agree on dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence. He was a dif­fer­ent type of rev­o­lu­tion­ary, because he had the process and frame­work to pull peo­ple together.

Mak­ing rev­o­lu­tions stick requires frame­works and processes.

The POST Process

Peo­ple: Assess your cus­tomers’ social activ­i­ties, from Inac­tives (44% adults, 26% youth) to Speca­tors to Join­ers to Col­lec­tors to Crit­ics to Cre­ators (18% adults, 39% youth). Youth are always off the charts and an indi­ca­tion of the future. Fewer and fewer peo­ple are inac­tive. This is the social techno­graph­ics of your web­site. Age is a major dri­ver of adop­tion. It takes boomers longer to learn the tech­nolo­gies, and the con­tent is not really geared for them. But this too is chang­ing. They are at least engaged as spec­ta­tors and are start­ing to com­ment and become crit­ics. Soon, they will pro­duce con­tent as well.

Objec­tives: Decide what you want to accom­plish. (ie. why do you want to have a blog?). From research to lis­ten­ing. From mar­ket­ing (shout­ing) to talk­ing. From sales to ener­giz­ing. From Cus­tomer Sup­port to sup­port­ing. From devel­op­ment to embrac­ing cus­tomers, pulling them into the process. For exam­ple, Blendtec talks with viral videos, which became embeds. These $400 blenders have seen mas­sive increase in sales. He spent $50 on the first video he made. George Wright, VP of Mar­ket­ing, decided to use YouTube to show what Blendtec could do. He worked at a steel mill before and was not a social media guru. Another exam­ple s Dan Black, Direc­tor of Cam­pus Recruit­ing at E&Y. He cre­ated a Face­book page and he took it upon him­self to write back to stu­dents in a very per­sonal tone. He is the Head of Recruit­ment and needs to hire 3,500 col­lege stu­dents each year. He real­ized here was a forum where he could be in direct con­tact with poten­tial hires, with the peo­ple E&Y most des­per­ately want to reach. Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt at Best Buy cre­ated blueshirtnation.com as a front line sup­port sys­tem for employ­ees. This gave them a place to have a voice. They gave an email address for each employee, so they could now email cus­tomers back, for exam­ple. Joah Ban­croft, tec­nol­ogy evan­ge­list at Intel and geek blog­ger. He put up an inter­nal wiki in a day (not weeks), Intel­pe­dia, a tool for peo­ple inside the com­pany to sup­port each other. Steve Fisher, VP of Plat­form, Salesforce.com, wanted to get a way for cus­tomers to pro­vide feed­back. They set up the Suc­cess­Force Com­mu­nity, the Sales­Focre IdeaEx­change, a Digg style vot­ing sys­tem for ideas. Get­ting input from the groundswell gave them con­fi­dence to make changes happen.

Strat­egy: Plan for how rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers will evolve.

Lionel Men­chaca, Dig­i­tal Media Man­ager, Dell.com, is a prod­uct tech­nol­o­gist, a prod­uct rev­o­lu­tion­ary, some­one who knows every­one. Basi­cally, Dell went from “Dell Hell” in 2005 to cre­at­ing a blog res­o­lu­tion team to go and solve prob­lems. Per­son by per­son, they started to change inter­nal atti­tude towards things. They first started a blog, but it didn’t get off to a good start. It was very dis­cour­ag­ing, because com­ments were neg­a­tive. And then he got a com­ment from Mchael Dell, who said “keep doing this, it’s what we need.” So a cou­ple of days later, he made the “flam­ing note­book” post, where he spoke of the bat­tery recall openly. This set the tone for the blog going for­wards (ie., acknowl­edge that peo­ple are talk­ing). This made a huge dif­fer­ence inter­nally and exter­nally for Dell. Dell’s IdeaS­t­orm, where Dell exec­u­tives review and imple­ment cus­tomer sug­ges­tions. For exam­ple, they set up Linux Ubuntu servers in two months, based on cus­tomer requests. Dell also uses a blog to talk to investors, Dell­Shares, infor­ma­tion and insight for the investor com­mu­nity. So Dell went from the depths of despair in 2005 to poster child of social strategies.

Find and sup­port your revolutionaries:

- find the peo­ple most pas­sion­ate about devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships with the groundswell.

- edu­cate your executives.

- Put some­one impor­tant in charge.

- Define “the box” with poli­cies and process.

- Make it safe® to fail.

Tech­nol­ogy: Decide which social tech­nolo­gies to use.

Final words of advice:

- Mak­ing rev­o­lu­tions stick will require frame­works and process.

- Start small but think big. Start small, fail often and iter­ate over and over again.

- Make social strat­egy the respon­si­bil­ity of every sin­gle employee.

- Be patient, cul­tural change takes time. It took Dell two years.

Q&A

How to show results? The ROI of blogs depends on your objec­tives: is it about insights, research, talk­ing, ener­gize, sup­port, and/or embrac­ing? It’s like say­ing, how to mea­sure the impact of a web­site. There is no sin­gle way.

What about indus­tries that are restricted in BtoC, like Pharma? There are many com­pa­nies try­ing to exper­i­ment with this any­way, for exam­ple, in pri­vate com­mu­ni­ties requir­ing reg­is­tra­tion to make it work.

Tips for star­tups? The flip side is also BtoB, because it’s about being focused on a par­tic­u­lar tar­get. Start a blog and bring in experts from the com­pany to show exper­tise. Also, for SEO.

What about 3D vir­tual worlds like Sec­ondLife … inter­est­ing? Actu­ally, it’s a place to be avoided for big mar­ket­ing spends, because the peo­ple are not there.

Mar­ket­ing? Mar­ket­ing depart­ments keep things at a dis­tance because they want to keep things pris­tine. But cus­tomers are messy! They inter­nal­ize things, they take pic­tures, they make wid­gets. The ideal stereo­type of the cus­tomer does not exist! If the mar­keter does not feel queasy, they’re not doing enough.

Thoughts on how to con­vince inter­nal stake­hold­ers about social strate­gies? The chal­lenge is get­ting peo­ple to let go of con­trol, to reduce email com­mu­ni­ca­tions, to stop the old think­ing. What are you afraid of? It’s inside a fire­wall. Why wouldn’t you want free flow of infor­ma­tion? Focus on the ben­e­fits rather than the tech­nolo­gies. Also, it’s so low cost and you can start small. It should be quick and easy to get these things going.

Expand on ben­e­fits of SEO? Search engnes look for inbound links. You can raise the good­ness of a page by get­ting links, putting key­words, refresh­ing con­tent often to shoot the site up.

What about Twit­ter, Flickr? They’re all good, but one of the best are forums. This is a real good robust tool. Forums and wikis have been around for a long time … it’s not about the tech­nol­ogy, but about how they are used. Com­pa­nies some­times are scared about going into “peo­ple” spaces for fear of wreck­ing them. But how dare you not help a cus­tomer who’s hav­ing a problem.