I just contributed a guest-blog post to the Citizen IBM blog about the volunteer work I am doing at P-Tech. The post is called Volunteerism and Citizenship: One mentor’s story.
The BrainYard interview on social media
The BrainYard interview on social media policy went up last week (I missed it because I was at the Think Forum). http://ow.ly/6GqN5
Talking with kids about the(ir) future
I’m starting as a mentor at a project IBM is doing with the City of New York called P-Tech. It’s a highschool in Brooklyn that goes for six years — at the end of it the kids earn an associates degree as well as the high school diploma and they are first in line for IBM jobs. One of the main aspects of the program is a one-on-one mentorship with IBMers for each of the kids in the school.
The New York Times wrote a concise piece about it when the school opened a couple days ago.
I’m really looking forward to doing a little more for the community — this is a small thing to be sure, but it is something. I am, after all, a Brooklyn citizen and proud!
When I was living in East Harlem I participated in the East Harlem Tutorial Board — a great program. However, I found it really tough for a bunch of reasons…I’m much more optimistic about this program, especially because (having just gone through the initial training) it seems really well organized.
Chatting with one of my colleagues who is also a mentor, he said “the mentoring dimension of this feels key to me — the primary difference between kids who make it and those who don’t is whether there’s an adult in their lives who cares whether they live or die.” I couldn’t agree more. Looking back at my life there were a few key individuals who propped me up at some rough times — same is true for me as an adult too, really.
So! Fingers x’ed…I just might be able to prop this kid up when he needs a grownup to lean on.
Digital listening versus digital talking
One of the things rattling around in my head these days is the emerging importance of the democratization of digital listening. Publishing (or, talking, if you’ll go with the metaphor) has been thoroughly democratized. That is, blogs & wikis & video-sharing & podcasts etc have been made so simple that just about anyone on the planet with access to a cheap PC can do it. Meanwhile, it seems that really sophisticated “listening” systems are still rare and/or expensive and/or delivered by a cadre of professionals who require significant training.
Somehow digital listening and analysis is still a specialized skill and therefore the business model for those who do it is intact.
But, this is going to change fast — just as self-publishing swept onto the scene (and disrupted the business models of those who owned great big expensive channels) so too will tools for digital listening sweep in and sweep out some established players. I mean this will happen when it is relatively easy for individuals to get significant insights from crowds of publishers at low or no cost.
We’re already seeing free systems emerge for establishing who one should pay attention to (for example, Klout, which is flawed, but at least they’re giving it a go.) And of course increasingly intelligent recommendation-engines built into feed readers like Google Reader etc are giving us better insights into what we should be paying attention to. Meanwhile, tools like ow.ly and bit.ly built into platforms like Hootsuite etc are giving us some sense of who is listening to us (well, basic traffic reports etc.)
The integrator who comes along and combines a decent set of these capabilities with some machine-based sentiment analysis (even English-only so long as it is somewhere north of 75% accurate) is going to have a hit on their hands.
Anyway, that’s all I got before before my 9am Monday morning conference calls. Cheers!
I can’t lie, I’m flattered to be quoted at length in Fast Company
I can’t lie, I’m flattered to be quoted at length in Fast Company’s “Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business” http://ow.ly/6t4a2
Social Media Identity Crisis: How do employees and brands avoid a personality disorder?
The title of this post refers to a session I led last week with my pal, Howard Pyle who has just started as the acting director of digital platform integration at IBM (or something like that). We were both at WPP Stream in Athens, Greece last week and over the weekend (Article on Huffington Post). The conference itself was really remarkable — WPP invites a bunch of advertising folks, digital people of all sorts (startups, innovators, VCs etc) and runs an O’Reilly-style unconference at a lovely beach-side resort in Marathon, Greece (about an hour outside of Athens.)
Moreover, the running joke during our session was that it could just as easily be titled “Does your boss want you to be a social media d’bag?” That is, are you an SME or an SMD? (Subject Matter Expert or Socila Media D’bag?)
In our discussion we opened with a handful of assertions. Namely:
1.Firms are increasingly calling upon their employees to “be” the brand. That is, represent their employer’s brand in new and increasingly personal ways through social digital expressions of themselves.
2. Meanwhile, there is a “social media miracle” mentality out there that needs to be debunked. Most people don’t want to be “brand ambassadors” for their firms — it’s simply a fallacy that you can somehow easily convert them just by asking nicely. And when you engineer programs based on the social media miracle mentality it will inevitably flop due to a lack of authenticity, participation or both.
3. The method by which companies select their social media spokespersons is often random. Typically it’s ill-defined, undemocratic and –worst of all — lacking in mutual benefit. Meanwhile, the traditional means to identify experts and spokespersons (through a PR department…an approach I call “editorial selection”) doesn’t scale to the demands of the social-internet
So the name of the game is this — can you (as a manager of a brand or someone interested in switching on the social-ness of your business) shape the culture, policies and platforms etc within your firm without alienating individuals? Afterall, social media or social business inherently demands the participation of some people (um, “social” right?) so you would think your employees have to be there, no?
There was a good deal of discussion about managing identities — in one case, a communications director from a large pharmaceutical company told us about one of the “rockstar” scientists at his firm who had four LinkedIn profiles. She was exasperated, but being a very busy scientist, didn’t have the time to deal with it. A senior strategist from LinkedIn who attended the session said this is a widespread issue (an “edge issue” she said, but an issue nonetheless) where rockstars’ — like Obama or certain CEOs etc — profiles become essentially fanpages. Again, this is a tension point that I think many of the people we would most like to activate on behalf of our firms confront (and retreat from.)
Of course rewards and recognition for participation also came up — most organizations do not expressly reward or recognize brand-building for individual employees in a meaningful way. Even those in the session who said their firms had built social media participation into some of their employees’ goals said that it was basically an empty gesture or a very peripheral activity.
Finally (well for this blog post anyway) there was a great deal of discussion about the portability of reputation. Who exactly owns the individual’s professional reputation? The answer seems obvious at first, the individual, right? But what if the firm has invested significantly in developing that reputation by allotting time or other resources (like building technological platforms that enable an individual to enhance and retain reputation etc)? The investment implies, I think, some stake on the part of the firm in the outcomes (good or bad.)
Anyway, many of the ideas are captured in the mind-map that you can see attached here. Have a look and let me know what you think.
I’ve been nominated for a #SXSWi panel
I’ve been nominated for a #SXSWi panel about business-to-business social media…but I need a few votes. Hook me up? http://ow.ly/65l93
The future of biznology (circa 1982)
My friend (the great creative mind, adoring father, Frisbee ultimatum-maker and total mensch,) Eli Neugeboren sent me a link to an article from 1982 in the New York Times entitled “STUDY SAYS TECHNOLOGY COULD TRANSFORM SOCIETY” on the occasion of my recent Social Media Today interview about IBM’s social business and digital strategy efforts. In the 1982 article (written when I was in, I think, third grade) the author cites an NSF study that asserts:
“…that one-way and two-way home information systems, called teletext and videotex, will penetrate deeply into daily life, with an effect on society as profound as those of the automobile and commercial television earlier in this century.”
Yeah, you got that right! The article also correctly predicts the privacy issues that would emerge as well as the emergent norm of working from home and e-commerce among other things.
The part that is a little creepy — is that the right word? maybe just ‘prescient’ — is the short section on ‘Opportunities for abuse’ that asserts that adoption of ‘videotex’ systems (aka the internet) will be predicated on the willingness of advertisers to embrace the systems thus laying the groundwork for an inherent ethical conflict in the system.
“‘ ‘Videotex systems create opportunities for individuals to exercise much greater choice over the information available to them,”the researchers wrote. ‘Individuals may be able to use videotex systems to create their own newspapers, design their own curricula, compile their own consumer guides. On the other hand, because of the complexity and sophistication of these systems, they create new dangers of manipulation or social engineering, either for political or economic gain. Similarly, at the same time that these systems will bring a greatly increased flow of information and services into the home, they will also carry a stream of information out of the home about the preferences and behavior of its occupants.’ ”
So yeah, it turns out that advertisers were willing adopters of videotex — here I am working from home, sharing data about myself and (as it happens) my job is to take advantage of the “complexity and sophistication of these systems…for economic gain.”
Hmmm. Beats driving to a factory every day to manufacture widgets. (So far.)
But still…makes me wonder if the whole notion that “information wants to be free” was a bill of goods. The internet is, as predicted, transformational in how it allows broad swaths of society access to more information and decision-making power. But it’s hard to say if we are sophisticated enough (as individual netizens) to contend with the organizations aligned to sway us and impose their will for their own gain (economic, political, etc).
The question is: do individuals stand a chance to preserve their individuality (and by extension, the responsibility for their own actions) in a world populated with such sophisticated actors aligned to persuade them to do otherwise?
Digital strategy labs in Mexico, Milan and Madrid
I’ve been bouncing around the world with my team a bit lately conducting digital strategy labs with IBM’s marketing and communications teams. We did a bunch last year and plan on doing some more this year. It’s been a great experience. One of the people on my team, Rowan Hetherington, has posted a description of IBM’s digital strategy workshops and some photos on her blog (including one of me posing as a Spanish business man).
Mobile noodle
No, the title doesn’t refer to FourSquare-enabled bowl of Ramen…rather, I was just noodling on an idea for a mobile strategy…er, a way to prioritize mobile strategy anyway.
Last week I was talking with a few colleagues at IBM about mobile advertising strategies and it occurred to me that if I were making a mobile marketing/communications strategy for IBM I would probably prioritize three areas (below.) There are so many things you can do with mobile and I see so many companies making strange decisions, one-off experiments etc that I came up with this short list of priorities…what do you think?
1. Mobile enablement for your sales force: basically, the idea here is to untether the salesforce from their PCs. Give them access to the experts in your organization, accurate product information, a way to be found (for their clients to find them and connect with them personally, that is)
2. Light n’ easy way to declare you connection to your brand: this is essentially the idea of making sure that it’s super easy to connect with your brand (e.g. register for offers, sign up for events, get help etc) on a mobile device
3. Innovate on the go: This one might be more for technology companies…but could be a good one for consumer companies of all stripes. Lots of great product ideas come from clients/customers/employees etc. And the ideas don’t necessarily come when your clients/customers/employees are sitting at their laptops. So design some light-touch way to improve your products by gathering insights from mobile device owners who also interact with your brand.
So why would I prioritize these three over all the other zillions of potential applications for mobile? Well, for my company anyway, I think these three areas would unlock the most potential energy and investment. It would be fairly easy to prove returns on investment across these areas (especially #2, which would generate leads etc for sales.)
What do you think?
Ethan McCarty 