Don’t Silo Your Social Strategy

Statistic: 94% of business leaders are looking to include social media as part of their growth strategy and 61% consider it a high priority.

Even without the statistics, the talk undeniably continues to revolve around the social enterprise and how the social web is changing the way we collaborate, communicate and interact with customers across the organization. So why, in most organizations today, does social media reside in marketing?

Sure, the social web offers marketing teams new and awesome tools for brand awareness. It creates a lot of ‘activity,’ which is always good. And then there’s all the talk about how ‘social’ can be more effectively used for sales enablement, lead generation, improvement of metrics, etc.

Don’t Silo Social Media in Marketing
But, if we keep looking at social media only in the context of marketing, we lose tapping into its greater potential. “Social media enables: the ability to collaborate in new ways — which is particularly important for business leaders interested in creating more collaborative, innovative, and engaging organizations.” - HBR Blog Network

Social sharing is contagious. It has spurred and sped knowledge transfer and ‘ideation.’ Looked at in this perspective, why wouldn’t you want that environment to exist throughout your entire organization? But, how do you make your entire company social? How do you get everyone to engage? Often, an effective use of social media within an organization requires executive management support, an owner, and ambassadors.

• Executive management support - if getting social across an organization isn’t supported by the top, then there’s little chance of transforming into a social enterprise.
• Owner - someone should be responsible for creating a social media policy or guide for personal communication by employees.
• Ambassadors - to get the ball rolling themselves and encourage widespread adoption.

Let’s look at the company that has successfully made this transition: Zappos. At Zappos, social technologies are not just used for selling or for customer support. ‘Social’ is ingrained throughout all their practices and processes. They personally connect internally and externally, between and amongst customers and employees using many of these technologies. Beyond being early adopters of Twitter, their success at ‘becoming social’ ensues from their company culture. An off-shoot of Zappos success, Hsieh’s book and movement ”Delivering Happiness” provides a fascinating example of this belief.

The best way to grasp how social is a ‘mindset’ at Zappos, listen to CEO Tony Hsieh talk about the culture of his company in which he touches briefly on how social technologies are used to foster dialogue, share ideas and build transparency. Hsieh represents how executive leadership and vision is critical for company-wide adoption. But, the Zappos example also lends itself to the importance of company culture in becoming a social enterprise.

Why should you make social media a part of your core vision?

1. In a social enterprise, companies can ‘mine’ the knowledge of its employees, clients, and customers to create greater value. And, in turn, as our Zappos example shows, you’re creating a happy workforce with a higher purpose – propagating further innovation and collaboration. There’s a snowball effect that will lead to greater impact on your overall business.
2. Social can benefit every department. Besides marketing and PR, customer service is another department that has been swept up in the social enterprise wave. Capitalize on this. CRM tools like Salesforce have integrated key social networks so that customer service cases can be created based off interactions on the social web.
3. Avoid the social disasters that result when social is siloed within your organization. The Quantas social disaster is a perfect example of a marketing team (responsible for social) that was out of touch with what the company was doing, and what it was going to take from a PR perspective to get past the original obstacle (the grounding of the Quantas fleet).

This isn’t meant to undermine social media marketing. Be proud of the results in that arena. But, as a C-level, recognize that being ‘social’ means much more. When you’re using social technologies to produce innovation and business impact based on customers’ and employees’ collaboration, that’s a good clue that you’re on your way to a social enterprise.

Originally posted here.

5 New Features To Power Chatter Collaboration

Those who attended Dreamforce this year will agree: we were educated by Marc Benioff on the Social Enterprise so much so that we could probably add Dreamforce to our alma mater. The whole concept may have its roots in the 2009 release of salesforce.com’s Social Network for the Enterprise: Chatter. Transitioning to a Social Enterprise is something that’s now been added to most business agendas. In true form of practicing what one preaches, salesforce.com has powered Chatter to keep up with all the Social Web has to offer. With some of the key Winter ’12 features revealed at the Dreamforce Day 1 keynote, it’s looking like Chatter will become the new base camp for most companies.

So what are the new features that will increase the collaboration and integration (and all those other words ending in ‘ion’s) within Chatter and the overall Salesforce platform?

1. Chatter Now - integrated instant messaging into the Salesforce platform. With this real-time chat, employees can see who’s in the app. Chat or even share your screen.
2. Workflow approvals - integrated Chatter approvals. From right inside your chatter feed, you can now streamline your work-flow processes. Managers can now approve things without leaving their Chatter feed.
3. Customer Groups - invite and bring your customers into a private chatter group (without letting them see other groups or objects in your org). Share files, proposals, meeting agendas and comments. Additionally, your customers can use Chatter mobile for the process.
4. In-line Filters - easily get to the feeds that matter most to you because now you won’t just be following the activity of your colleagues, you’ll be following pieces of data and business processes.
5. Chatter Connect - allows you to easily scale and collaborate using your existing tools like Microsoft Sharepoint.

With these features, Chatter has extended its capabilities to match other project management and collaboration tools - all while residing in the CRM tool. And with over 100,000 active Chatter networks and salesforce.com’s thought leadership around CRM, we’re predicting a good year for the private social network.

Originally posted here.

The Consumerization Of IT: Resolving IT’s Love-Hate Relationship

The need for innovation in IT is always in demand. Unfortunately, IT spends so much time reacting to changes that few resources are leftover for innovating. Add the arrival of the consumerization of IT – in the form of smartphones, social media and increased collaboration – and IT is left in a serious paradox: loving technology, but hating the way and the rate it’s hitting them.

As the lines between business and personal communication continually blur, what can IT pros do to mitigate their troubles and power these new modes of communication to their advantage? Here are 4 ‘counseling’ tips to help resolve IT’s love-hate relationship and allow the changing landscape of social communication lead to business growth:

LOVE
First things first: don’t just embrace the change, love it. Love the new modes of communication and the leveled hierarchical structures that they have nurtured in. Many younger workers accept sending thank you notes via text message though this may horrify older workers. With the generational gap in mind, consider how the older generation is accustomed to a more rigid hierarchical structure while the generation born on the web grew up at a time when hierarchies weren’t really in vogue. So while they might not think anything of texting the CEO, this kind of casual interaction with top leadership isn’t acceptable for the ‘old school.’ However, flattened structures of communication can drive innovation and keep the leadership in touch with the pulse of the organization.

PASSION
Lead social communication innovation internally. CIOs and IT pros should not only embrace the changes, but they should be passionate about leading the innovation. Figure out how social communication impacts your business and how it is used from day-to-day. Then develop a strategy to cohesively incorporate it. A good example of this process is demonstrated in how businesses are leveraging Chatter.com sales cloud and service cloud technologies to harness their creative power and drive innovation.

UNDERSTANDING
Help your organization understand the power of interpersonal communication. The digital tools of social networking that influenced the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ are excellent examples of how ‘social’ has fundamentally changed communication, and how that change can have profound impacts. If social communication can topple dictators, imagine what it can do for your company.

SUPPORT
Once you’ve helped your organization understand its power, get buy in for IT-led communication innovation by garnering the support of your key business stakeholders. Demonstrate the value of collaborative communication by showing how increasingly open communication will benefit the company by facilitating higher quality and more efficient communication.

Keep these counseling tips in mind in order to remain open to the constantly evolving tech trends. Check out our Bluewolf blog What’s Hot and What’s Not in IT to learn more. Or, get the whole picture with our Technology Outlook to learn more about the Consumerization of IT and how it is affecting IT pros and their expectations in the workplace.

Originally posted here.

A Must-Have For Content Marketers

Marketing content is not a novel notion, but the last couple years has seen the development of content marketing as a kind of new discipline in the constantly evolving arena of B2B marketing.

So first, what do we mean by content marketing? It refers to the idea that disseminating relevant and rich information to potential customers generates profitable consumer action. By simply ‘informing,’ businesses can improve their brand loyalty and their positioning as an industry expert.

Content marketing believes it can influence customer behavior without deliberately gushing on its products and services. Its educational, subtle, and places the buyer, rather than the vendor, at its center. It’s taking the traditional dialogue between a potential buyer and a sales guy and giving it to a marketer – who breaks up the discussion and then disperses its bits in different forms through various channels.

Eloqua, a leading marketing automation company, took this analogy and visualized it. In collaboration with data visualization firm JESS3, they created an infographic for the budding content marketing industry last year known as The Content Grid. It mapped content type and social channel against its ‘owner’ or ‘creator’ (the entire staff versus an individual) and manner of distribution for greatest impact on the sales funnel.

Eloqua joined with JESS3 again this past month and followed its award-winning infographic with an update: The Content Grid v2. While still visually presenting the content type with it distribution channel, The Content Grid v2 is more informative with greater ease of use. It’s moved beyond addressing the earlier questions of how to approach content marketing and aims to help marketers visualize how to operationalize its content marketing programs.

More specifically, the infographic plots what content type should be produced and through which distribution channels they should be delivered.  It then matches the content and channel to the prospect’s stage in the purchase process along with your ‘big picture’ business objectives.  Lastly, and very usefully for the marketer, it points out which metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be tracked for each piece of content, channel, and objective.

We hear a lot of talk about content marketing strategy - how it’s a process of planning for the creation, delivery, and management of useful and desirable content that drives a deliverable result. The Content Grid v2 can be your guiding blueprint for its governance and delivery. That way your business can focus more on the creation of unique content and its desirability amongst your customers.

Originally posted here: http://www.bluewolf.com/blog/must-have-content-marketers

Women Innovators Network

On the Wednesday of Dreamforce this year, the Women Innovators Network held a luncheon at the St. Regis Hotel to further its aim to celebrate, encourage, and support female leaders driving business success at all levels and industries. As many of its members are leaders within IT, it was an appropriate time to have the event during the largest enterprise tech conference of the year.

The idea behind the network is to help bridge the divides between different corporations and generations of women. The luncheon highlighted women’s leadership through a keynote and panelist discussion. Carolyn Feinstein, SVP Global Consumer Marketing at Electronic Arts, delivered a thoughtful and humorous keynote about her career amongst men: working in sports marketing and electronics. The keynote was followed by a panel discussion with honorees Nancy Fernandez, Senior Manager Expert Sales, TeleSales & Deployment at GlaxosmithKline, Joanne Stamper, Director Customer Support at Compuware, and Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales at salesforce.com.

Corinne Sklar, VP of Marketing at Bluewolf and moderator at the luncheon, emphasized the continuous need to connect, “We’ve come a long way with the important movements in the 60s and 70s, but what does it mean now?”

As Sklar pointed out, leadership is an adjective often tied to masculinity. In fact, in popular culture and everyday life, we unknowingly associate positive attributes (such as strength) with masculinity and negative characteristics (such as weakness) with femininity. Sexism is an old system that lingers well beyond our vocabulary; it has left women still striving for legal and social equality. Today, women make up the majority of the labor force, but are less likely to get promoted and earning 25% less than men. Therefore, while we can certainly celebrate how far we’ve come, we need to keep the end goal in mind: equality.

So, in terms of leadership and driving this change, perhaps the questions to pose are how do we take our big ideas and bring them back to our organizations? How do we affect change within our organizations, and power policies that favor equality and support women’s leadership?

Luckily, we have communities, such as WIN, as outlets to continually encourage and affect these changes. Check WIN out on Facebook.

Twitterati

Following a 4 month ambitious and incomprehensibly awesome backpack trip from South Africa to Ethiopia, I returned home just in time to welcome in 2011 with friends and family. The month of March took me back to my beloved Mali and a different sort of exploration of the north of the country that I didn’t know so well. Back in the US again in May – and this time more permanently. Joined Bluewolf, a young, fun, growing tech consulting firm, in a dynamic marketing position as the Editorial and Community Coordinator. My motivations leading up to this: explore the world of marketing, reside on the cutting edge of the technology world rather than on its outskirts, and embrace something that I’d always rebuffed: the social media universe.

Our Bluewolf MarComm and Social Media Strategist recently wrote this blog: Twitter and Our Three Marketeers. Check it out – I’m one of the twitter marketeers!

FGC

In French here, it’s ‘l’excision.’ Most people know what we’re talking about when we say female circumcision. In academic discourse, the practice was referred to as female genital mutilation. More recently, this was redefined with the conscientious term of female genital cutting (FGC). In Mali, the practice is widespread, concentrated among certain groups (Bambara, Maraka, Nomo –the blacksmiths, Mandinka). My region, the Bambara heartland, is where it is practiced most intensively (usually surveys say 98% of the population). It’s an ancient tradition in Africa, predating the arrival of Islam by a long shot. FGC is practiced in a variety of ways from a small nick of the clitoris to the stitching together of the inner or outer labia (infamously practiced in Somalia and Egypt). According to health-related NGO’s working in Mali, there are four classified types of FGC (Type 1 – consists of cutting a part of or removing the clitoris and/or the hood of the clitoris, Type 2 – cutting a part of or removing the clitoris and labia minor, with or without harming the labia major, Type 3 – infibulation, reducing the vaginal opening – may include modifying clitoris as well, Type 4 – any other practice that modifies the female genitalia for non-medical purposes). Most Malian women undergo Type 2 according to information dispersed by health organizations. From what I understand from personal discussion on the topic, the practice performed here usually involves a cut or partial to complete removal of the clitoris.

I recently read a CNN article about how the American Academy of Pediatrics had rescinded ‘a controversial policy statement raising the idea that doctors in some communities should be able to substitute demands for female genital cutting with a harmless clitoral “pricking” procedure.’ This change was made to appease advocacy groups and the Western international community. I was struck by the blatant Western bias and found myself in a kind of no man’s land on the issue. It left me with questions such as ‘Where does this obsession with FGC come from in a place where it’s not even practiced? Why do we ignore other types of body modification? And what is so deeply unnerving about ‘medicalizing’ a pricking procedure that would satisfy cultural requirements and remove the very concerns the international community has raised?’ Perhaps, these questions have obvious answers, but they are worth illuminating.

Why the fixation? It’s a cultural practice that runs so counter to ours. In the Western world the practice is a seen as a complete affront to feminism. It demonstrates a will to maintain control over women’s sexuality, recapitulating the existent patriarchal system. As any other young, feminist Westerner would be, ‘I’m against FGC.’ I am personally outraged by the practice. Experiences, such as having to pay my neighbor a visit to wish their daughter healthy again (a girl of 5 years who had just been ‘cut’), have only reinforced my disapproval. But, my experience here has undoubtedly made me more attune to Western biases. And I fear that we often become so impassioned by our own goodwill that we end up crusading on behalf of a disinclined people. Adding to the cross-cultural misunderstanding, I believe our benevolence is misconstrued as cultural imperialism.

So why is FGC practiced? From personal communication with Malians, the most predominant response I receive is it’s performed to moderate the sexual desire of women. Women are believed to be naturally more sexually-driven than men (converse to popular Western belief). I’ve had many a person tell me that even if they have doubts of the utility of the practice in this sense today, they will have it done to their children as a precaution. Furthermore, it’s an important expression of cultural identity.

What are Western objections to FGC based on? I think it can be summed up by pointing to the concern of ensuing health problems, as a human rights violation, and, from a feminist angle, as sexual oppression.

1. I believe long-term health concerns (such as infections, painful or prolonged menstruation, fistula) are related to Type 3, not Type 2 as practiced here. For Type 1 and 2, health concerns are based mostly on the immediate act…e.g. infection immediately following the procedure or the same blade being used on a group of girls. My friends who have undergone FGC say they don’t experience any health-related problems in the present.

2. As a human rights violation. Put simply, it boils down to a girl not having a choice on the subject. But, recall that human rights are a Western creation. And the parents making the decision for the girl are most likely making it with her well-being in mind (in addition to the reasons noted previously, she risks being ostracized by her community). Furthermore, it’s about maintaining a long-held tradition, a cultural requirement. It’s not supposed to be an act of cruelty; it’s an expression of cultural identity.

3. Feminist angle – does it limit sexual fulfillment? A topic I’ve only discussed with a few close friends, but they say, despite being affected by FGC, they derive sexual fulfillment from intercourse.

Despite my friends’ claims, I imagine that physiologically FGC must diminish sexual fulfillment. However, a woman’s sexuality is also psychological and sociological. Not undergoing FGC may cause a sense of shame, which could be just as detrimental to sexual pleasure for psychological and sociological reasons. Is it then possible to view FGC like other body modifications (e.g. breast augmentation, nose jobs, tummy tucks)? In the example given above, does FGC not fulfill a culture’s beauty-femininity requirement, as any other body modification?

Malians, in the course of discussion on the topic, will tell me that their ideas on FGC (and female promiscuity) don’t apply to me. They assume that ‘chez les blanches’ (where the white people live), it’s not a part of our culture and must not be necessary. Is this a naïve point of view, or is it incongruously open-minded? On the flip side, there has been Western financed advocacy against FGC in Mali for decades. The efforts emphasized health concerns posed by FGC. But, when this simply led to the increased medicalization of the practice, the debate shifted towards the human rights aspect. And I think this is where it gets tricky. There’s a philosophical choice that must be made between respecting another’s culture (and not imposing your own system of beliefs, customs, and values) and accepting the universal idea of human rights transcending cultural norms. I don’t think in this case you can reconcile cultural sensitivity and cultural relativity with the Western notion of human rights.

Also, I don’t ignore that there are many Malian voices that speak out against FGC. But, at the same time, even those who take part in the anti-FGC marches, don anti-FGC apparel, work for organizations that disseminate information on the danger of FGC, will often have FGC performed on their daughters.

Today, the ritual has changed in many areas of the country (I think particularly in cities). Traditionally, the rite was practiced on a group of girls at a similar age from the same village at the same time (20-30 girls being ‘cut’ at one time). This probably served a social function of creating a kind of bond between women, or a source of group solidarity. Today, it’s done secretly and individually. The male circumcision rite is still performed in groups and much more visible (afterwards, they dress up in a color denoting their class and clap broken pieces of calabashes together demanding money on the side of a road. This is the only occasion you can cast money at people. I’ve literally chucked coins out of a moving vehicle to a group of these boys).

In conclusion, I recognize the importance of awareness/advocacy – of the potential health risks and against stigmatization. It’s unfortunate that this notion was first planted by the West, which continues to the present to view Africa through a paternalistic lens – it’s the ‘dark continent’ that needs our help and support. It’s evident to me in my personal interactions and even in the media (Malian popular music always tends to be feminist and socially critical) that Mali wants to deal with its own issues. They don’t want their discourse steered by ‘l’occident’ (the West).