I'm an avid fan of Mad Men. The story architecture, dialogue, and 'look' of the show instantly fascinated me, but there seemed more to it than that. I've often tried to figure out why. I know now. My Dad was Donald Draper.
I've spent a fair bit of time with Darryl lately, who for his age (71) is trim, still tall, dark (a little Metis blood) and handsome. His hair, (with the help of a long-forgotten hair product that would get you "2 minutes for looking so good") is mostly jet black. His voice a lovely baritone. His recent anecdotes have been omniscient, imparting solicited and welcome advice.
My Dad now dresses like a complete and embarrassing slob...is the Tilley hat really necessary? I could relate a story about a Maui beach involving 20 year-old swimming trunks, white tube socks and black shoes, but that's for another time.
In the day, Darryl was slick. Shiffer-Hillman suits (the 'Euro cut' sharkskin type that were en vogue in the 60's, made in Montréal), white French cuff monogrammed shirts, cuff-links, skinny silk ties, half-wellingtons. The WHOLE deal.
Thoughts of my Dad, coupled with my grandfather's teachings about how to tie a bowtie, have certainly lead me to the nostalgic and practical. I learned a valuable lesson from them both: dress the part, and when in doubt, wear a suit.
I grabbed this picture today of him a little more casual in 1968, but you get the idea. Years after this, I remember being in the same room listening to "Earth, Wind and Fire" on the stereo.
A DRAFT of my AIIM conference slides:
The caveat is that this will all change by the time I talk. There is no audio context, so you'll have to use your imagination.
With the exception of slide 5 (from my own imagination), much of this thinking has been mashed together from the likes of Dave Armano, Jeremiah Owyang, Josh Berman and others. They're all smarter than me, so credit where credit is due.
In a recent Forrester article and blog post, Jeremiah Owyang talks about the 5 ways companies are participating in Social Web. Although he's mostly speaking to the inside-out communication aspect of this phenomenon, the model is still applicable.
1. No clue: It's a complete free for all, it puts the organization at tremendous risk of Intellectual Property leakage and regulatory non-compliance, often without the firm knowing until it's too late.
2. The Corporate Representative: This is analogous to the 'tower' model where a silo of representatives, often senior leadership, are responsible for all Social corporate communications. This is safe, but doesn't truly embrace true sharing or collaboration. The analogy here is the 'Message from the President' newsletter.
3. Common Employees Blessed for Social: This model lets a few more trained people within the organization behind the velvet rope to act as Social Media ambassadors. This, and 4 below, follow the 'hub and spoke' model. The challenge here is that you're creating two classes of workers and it is still more of a push model rather than true collaboration and sharing.
4. Everyone is Encouraged: Again the 'hub and spoke' model, with a cross-disciplinary team in the middle acting as a conduit between various business stakeholders. From a brand communication perspective: "This is ultimately going to be the future, but having a free for all isn't an excuse for having a strategy, guidelines and resources to support the brand and employees". For a regulated entity, it may take a long time to get this far, both externally and internally.
5. Shut it down: The pendulum swung to the other extreme of the free for all, this is analogous to organizations that block Internet access to Webmail and other 'non' work sites. This happens more often you might think, particularly in regulated verticals like Finance and big Pharma. (I once built a clinical trial portal for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer. It failed because the clinicians using the site couldn't use it to 'talk' with each other. Legal, Medical and Regulatory got a hold of it and were so concerned about Adverse Event reporting they shut down all community elements, including hard coding email addresses so they weren't clickable!). This doesn't work because employees will use their mobile devices or just surf from home.
So, which one makes the most sense? It depends. Maybe a checklist:
1. Involve your Regulatory, Legal and Privacy people early.
2. Do a POST analysis on your organization or team. It will vary from Marketing to Operations to Sales, so it's important to do more granular analysis.
3. Don't forget about your company's Intranet and email client. Your organization's Intranet can (and should) be the primary information sharing and collaboration space if it's easy to use and addresses the needs of workers.
4. Get Identity Management working - fast. My experience with regulated entities is that some employees have access to things that others don't. This is typically managed by multiple passwords or the user having to 'ask for permission' (via telephone or email) to gain access. With single sign-in and Role Based Access Control Lists, access to information is based on your role within the organisation. This leads to a better end user experience and improved information control. This can then be extended to the personalization and customization of the Intranet and in-house Social Networking applications.
5. Start small and practical. A blog or wiki? For one department? Yammer.com for your sales department? Perhaps start a 'Social Media Sandbox' with a pilot group or team?
I'm certain there are others. Any thoughts from the 'community' would be most welcome.
So, we've looked at definitions and have now answered the question about why Social Networking is important, both from an external marketing perspective and as an internal information sharing and collaboration tool.
Next is whether an organization should entertain it in the first place. In his 2007 bestseller Groundswell, Josh Berman proposes 'a systematic approach to social (media) strategy'. It's called the POST Method. It breaks down like this:
People: Assess your customers' Social activities. As mentioned earlier this has to do with your organization's demographics and culture. A company full of Gen Y workers is, in general, more likely to adopt than one full of Boomers.
Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish as an organization. Better collaboration? Better information capture and sharing? Also decide on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) before you start. This drives the technology choice.
Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers (in this case internal) will change. This is critical, particularly in a regulated environment. You have to plan for what could go wrong and mitigate it with safeguards.
Technology: Decide which Social applications to use. A common axiom here is 'don't let the technology tail wag the dog'. A good example is MOSS. It used to ship free with Windows. So, guess what? The IT guys played around with it, and to quote Greg: "spun it up and called it an ECM strategy". I recently completed an Enterprise Content Management engagement for a large Oil & Gas company. They literally had hundreds of SharePoint sites running. And the majority of business users had no idea where to look for information...
Let's look at a simple example. Where I work:
P: Mostly Gen Y with some Gen X. Open, collaborative culture. Everyone is on FaceBook, most are on Twitter. The leadership and senior client service and strategy folks can all Tweet on the company's behalf.
O: One objective was to improve internal communication in a secure environment. Another was to have a information repository that is editable and accessible to all - it was about knowledge capture, management and transfer.
S: The strategy was to get individual workers to keep their conversations internal and work-oriented and to have a one-stop shop for all information.
T: We implemented Pandion as our in-house IM application and it is heavily trafficked. Our internal wiki is in huge demand, particularly among our development team who use it as a code-base repository.
How do we know they are working? We measure.
This isn't rocket science, but it is a simple and elegant way to determine how Social Media fits into an organization's marketing mix as well as it's internal communication and collaboration strategy. After determining the 'if' it's now time to explore how we are going to go about it.
I'm an avid fan of Mad Men. The story architecture, dialogue, and 'look' of the show instantly fascinated me, but there seemed more to it than that. I've often tried to figure out why. I know now. My Dad was Donald Draper.
