Archivi autore: Rosario Sica
30 giovedì Mag 2013
Business, Harvard Business School, Social Business Manifesto, Social Business Transformation, Social Innovation
Complex markets and the challenges of change
The scenario that companies are facing is the result of a fresh series of irregularities. It is perhaps the first time that – in the brief history of organizations – such an important sequence of transformations has occurred simultaneously.
Turbulent economy
The speed with which companies over the last few decades have altered their ranking (topple rate) is the effect of sudden and unpredictable changes: new competitors from other industries, disruptive technologies and business models, ever more global markets, and a strong interdependence among systems (not only financial ones). Just twenty years ago, many of today's leading companies simply did not exist.
Social & empowered customers
The market has truly become a conversation, as the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto had suggested in 2000. Consumers have been able to utilise the power of the internet much better – for now – than brands and marketers have. The power that consumers have taken on in reputation mechanisms and in the formation of purchase behaviours is unprecedented.
Service economy
Product economies have definitively transformed themselves into service economies and any product incapable of generating a strong service component is destined to exit the market. The service economy – based on the interaction/integration between the organization and system-customer – is far more complex and requires the entire organization to be ready to expose itself and be resilient to new demands.
Customer relationship at risk
Ever larger organizations and those ever more structured by silos are tending to lose contact with the consumer. Few results have produced decades of innovative policies on more up-to-date systems of customer care, call and contact centres. In this way, organizations have lost the ability to build close and long-term relationships whilst new players are conquering this role.
Data intensive age
We live in a data intensive age. Never before have our lives as consumers or citizens generated quantities of data growing exponentially at an ever-faster speed and from a multitude of sources (structured and unstructured). Current organizations are not ready to handle this vast amount of information, and they are suffering from background noise, disorientation, and an information overload.
Social Business: a definition
Social Business is a new enterprise organization system that centres on collaborative and networking relationships (employees, partners, customers, suppliers, etc.) to face and generate value in complex markets.
Social Business is building an organization that is more suited to the challenges of the change:
More efficient in managing the collaborative mechanisms that characterise our working method but that are not supported by the current systems;
More reactive and resilient as it is based on continually reconfigurable networking mechanisms;
More intelligent in increasing the value of resources already present within the organization;
More capable of innovation;
More open and connected to the market and to customers.
The implications of this new paradigm:
The borders separating the company's inside from the outside are called into question;
Processes that were once assigned to management or to a decision-making centre tend to be redistributed according to widespread empowerment criteria;
The exchange process between inside and outside is made possible by a participation (and co-creation) approach and not just a communication approach;
Emerging and cloud technologies support collaborative and co-creation processes, opening a new phase in the role of technologies in organizations (not of process optimisation or information archiving).
Social Business Transformation
The evolution of the approaches to the use of the 2.0 paradigm inside organizations has had different seasons that we can summarise as follows:
Web 2.0: term coined in 2004 by Tim O'Really to indicate the new participative course of social web;
Enterprise 2.0: Andrew McAfee (then professor at the Harvard Business School) in 2006 published an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review (vol. 47 no. 3) in which he illustrated for the first time the term Enterprise 2.0 as a process of the entry into companies of social technologies (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.);
Social Business: the pioneering vision (technological and merely implementative) is surpassed in the concept of Social Business that is more systemic and broader than its predecessor was. Social software suites, at the same time, mature and acquire a space of recognisability;
Social economy: a McKinsey report (07/2012) quantified the values in play in different industries in the application of collaborative methods in company development. It highlights the advantages both from the recovery of efficiency and from the creation of new value;
Digital Transformation: MIT Sloan (10/2012) published research focused on social media and on the opportunities offered by new media, analytics and mobile technologies. The focus is on the transformation process in the adoption of new technologies;
Social Business Transformation (2013): the awareness that the process of Social Business is a true transformation – also disruptive and not linear – that surpasses the current structure and culture of organizations.
OpenKnowledge has been active on these topics since 2008. The experience and reflection that we have gained cause us to see the transformation process according to a distinctive approach. The characteristics of our approach include:
Keeping together the focus on the outside (marketing, communication, etc.) and the focus on the inside (operation, HR, R&D, etc.): social media strategy projects imply interventions on processes and on internal competencies;
Building a new working business model that is more meritocratic and more open, including reviewing positions of power and breaking up restraining hierarchical logics;
Integrating technologies and business lines: creating working tables between CTO and CMT, CTO and HR, CRO and R&D, etc.;
Attention to the culture and organizational aspects: working not only on new behaviours but also on the underlying mindsets and creating new centres of excellence that support the change;
Harmonising the old with the new: paying attention to cultivating innovation and change, guaranteeing commitment and engagement;
Transformative and sustainable approach: creating systems of real use both for the organization and for the people and ensuring sustainability over time.
Social Business Toolkit
Following the publication of the Social Business Manifesto (HBR, June 2012; http://socialbusinessmanifesto.com/), today we are offering the community this Social Business Toolkit. We have made the effort to explain clearly the 59 actions that an organization can put into place in order to change. Each action is represented by a card. We intend with this toolkit to move from a phase of sharing a vision and intervention models to an operational and transformative action phase.
The cards are organized into the three macro areas on which an organization is called to start its own process of Social Business Transformation:
Transformative strategy: a complex change, from the business model to the operational organization, from the new interpretation of its own business ecosystem to the diagnosis of its readiness.
Adaptive implementation: the planning and execution of transformative projects both inside the organization and in its relationship with the market and external partners.
Organizational learning: the activation of an ongoing process of monitoring and analysing the data produced by the new systems, generating feedback and organizational learning.
The actions explore these three macro areas considering the four steps a system approach has to anticipate (as shown by the "Social Business Toolkit" table). The steps are as follows:
Understanding: building new maps and compasses considering the informal, collaborative and network sizes not previously captured by traditional systems of analysis;
Planning: designing and planning the intervention actions, involving the different departments and company stakeholders;
Execution: carrying out the interventions, supporting the change process that these projects involve;
Governance: defining the new company dashboards and harmonising – where possible – old and new systems.
This Social Business Transformation scenario is build on:
59 actions that represent the ingredients of Social Business Transformation. They are grouped into five sections:
Social Business Transformation strategy & consultancy;
Employee empowerment;
Customer engagement;
Social technologies;
Social dynamic dashboards
The ROI of Social Innovation
19 lunedì Nov 2012
ONA, SNA, Social Innovation
From Social Business Manifesto
In a previous article ("Verso il Social Business", HBR Italia, May 2011) we showed how social capital present within every company (informal networks made of trust, cooperation, auto-activation, etc.) can – if correctly understood and integrated into formal processes – be an important source of improvement to company performances. In this follow-up article we will look at the case of an early adopter that applied typical Social Business philosophies and technologies to the management of innovation processes. What we have discovered is although social technologies have been able to significantly increase the level of collaboration within organizations, this aspect is only a small part of the true return on investment (ROI).
The ideas that come from crowdsourcing or feedback from customers truly translate into ROI only when the changes are effectively implemented. Many social innovation adopters that we have observed have in fact been able to successfully apply open and collaboratively approaches to the collection and creation of new ideas; however, these high-potential ideas are then forced through a traditional top-down process to receive an approval that allows their implementation. The resulting deceleration of the innovation process not only puts the potential ROI at risk, but also has a demotivating effect on all those who contributed to and participated in the collaborative innovation process.
We are of the opinion that in order to reach a significant ROI, the social approach has to permeate the entire innovation process, from the idea exploration stage, to the involvement of management, until the implementation of the ideas. Being "social by half" simply does not work. The contribution that the approach based on networks and community strength can give to innovation processes extends to all its stages, as the "4E" Establish model shows in Figure 1 "The innovation process from a network perspective".
This approach – very integrated with Organizational Network Analysis and with the informal roles codified there – highlights the features and specific dynamics of each stage from a network perspective. Experience in the field shows us that each stage has specific players and dynamics:
Explore: in this stage the ability to intercept innovative proposals and bring them into the system depends on factors such as
Weak links (the more stable and lasting links in fact tend to confirm paradigms and established beliefs) both inside and outside the organization;
Variety and diversity of points of view, very relevant to surpass the system of values and meanings that have been established[H2] and open the road to new perspectives;
Ability to listen/integration towards nodes/subjects that are less integrated and central in the system, often more exposed to the outside;
Ability to connect and contaminate apparently different ideas (idea brokers, idea connectors);
Ambiguity and redundancy, which in complex systems are the breeding ground for the new.
Evaluate: the evaluation of ideas is a critical moment of traditional innovation processes; the more sensational the proposals, the more the evaluation standards tend to reject them; from a network perspective the evaluation stage is effective if:
The perspective of the decision-making roles matches that of the less central and integrated nodes;
The emergency mechanisms bring to attention the level of activity that is underneath each proposal (comments, rankings, visibility, endorsements, …) and they allow the system to reconfigure itself in a dynamic manner;
The explorers that have proposed, made evolve and supported the ideas can bring their energy to the innovation process;
Contributions from outside the system support the decision makers in making evolve the evaluation standards and criteria and more generally the managerial culture (risk, error, planning, tradition, etc.).
Engage/Exploit: the implementation of new proposals can be greatly accelerated by adopting a Social Innovation model, provided that:
The team of exploiters has links and overlaps with the team of explorers;
The team of exploiters works in order to implement an innovation from which they will greatly benefit (the "pull" logic) and not only as an initiative to take forward (the "push" logic).
Social innovation platforms have proven to be very valuable for those organizations that first turned to Social Business. The promise of involving employees in an open, collaborative process of research and development of new ideas is certainly compelling. Some of these platforms, moreover, include innovation engagement dynamics (gamification) that represent real added value to increase the participation and involvement of users.
The observations that we have conducted on different initiatives have shown how users are in fact initially enthusiastic to participate in and explore these platforms by collaboratively developing new ideas. ROI, however, is not realized until the ideas are concretely put into practice (exploit).
In this partial application of the social innovation model – solely focused on the generation of ideas – we end up repeating the same approach as the "selection committee" typical of the "idea box", thus closely following the very classic patterns that social innovation platforms should have replaced. The result is, in short, the same: a small group of "winners" emerging after a complex evaluation process. Even if the number and quality of the ideas developed in a collaborative and open manner may be higher, in the end the result does not appear to be very different, with consequent doubts on the effective ROI of social innovation platforms.
The case of a UK public company
The 4E model of innovation suggests that the shift from exploration to implementation of ideas is often mediated by some key individuals who are able to successfully bridge between the communities of explorers and those of exploiters. From a network point of view, we expect the communities of explorers to be dynamic, emerging and open, with participants who experiment with every opportunity in the most creative way possible. The communities of exploiters – on the other hand – are characterized by much tighter and more closed articulated connections , a fundamental requirement in order to rapidly and efficiently take a product from design to market.
We are convinced that, as much as committees concentrated on the approval of ideas are institutions with clear intentions and methods, they are not able to bring all of the intelligence present within their organizations into the evaluation process. The amount of information and evaluations that can be moved with a social innovation model is far more useful and effective than that of a restricted group of experts. In our experience the two components (concentrated evaluation and distributed evaluation can co-exist with a great return.
In particular, we have observed that by reorienting the role of the selection committee from gate keeper to idea broker, the speed of adopting ideas can be accelerated. This is what happened in a social innovation experience at a public service company in the United Kingdom.
In the first year of activity over 1,000 people registered and commented, sent or participated in approximately 700 ideas. What we discovered is:
During the launch of an idea, the activity generated by users (comments, "likes", etc.) was equally as intense both for the ideas that would have subsequently been approved and for those that were later rejected;
As time went on the activity gradually reduced for ideas destined to be rejected, until reaching activity levels that were on average three times higher for the subsequently approved ideas compared to the others;
The ideas destined to be approved share very similar network features (see Figures 2 and 3, Egonet of an approved and rejected idea): it is possible to create a model of links for each idea with the system nodes (Idea Egonet), which is especially interesting for its predictive value.
The central node represents the idea. The other nodes represent the people that have interacted (comment or vote) on the idea. The line that joins two people together indicates a shared comment or a discussion on the idea.
Potentially, the typical metrics of Social Business – such as the convergence of different idea supporters, together with consistent activity levels around an idea – can be used to monitor the entire idea evolution process. Unlike the traditional stage gate selection process, the social approach to involvement and to realizing ideas and improvement projects sees teams of managers who activate themselves in facilitating and bridging between "those with ideas" to "those in the best position to realize them". Instead of acting like a restraint or an approval gate (as they would under traditional evaluation methods based on committees), the team has to act with the role of broker, a key figure that supports and accelerates implementation and, therefore, the ROI. Ideas therefore proceed or fail based on the level of involvement that they are able to reach in the network of exploitation.
In this way, successful ideas are brought forward through the network by those who most benefit from their implementation (the "pull" model), contrary to the traditional process of pushing the idea forward (the "push" model). Ideas unable to earn sufficient support are "naturally" discarded. Transparency in the process provides a greater sense of ownership for realized ideas and, perhaps, less disappointment for the rejected ones because of the lack of visible support.
Social Business has matured to such a level as to raise important questions on the return on investment. The first to adopt these business approaches adopted an incremental approach – in small steps. Inevitably, when Social Business practices encountered traditional top-down management processes, the potential results were weakened or even stopped.
Unfortunately, being "social by half" cannot work. In order to obtain ROI, Social Business practices have to be maintained through the entire value chain, from creation to final implementation and realization of the related benefits. This means rethinking the role that a manager has within the innovation process: from gatekeeper to broker. This is in fact the line separating "non-returnable investments" from initiatives that successfully pay off.
The innovation process from a network perspective
Egonet of an approved idea Figure 2
Egonet of a rejected idea
Innovation Today
17 mercoledì Ott 2012
Posted by Rosario Sica in Uncategorized
What is innovation? If we take the dictionary definitions, we find things like "introduce something new" or "a new idea or method, or tool". In short, a novelty. So then, if one morning you get out of the wrong side of bed, have you been innovative? If you find a new way of using a document are you creating innovation? We believe that this ends up trivialising what is truly innovation. Let's try to start again from the definition of innovation. From our point of view innovation regards problem solving. It consists in finding new solutions to present problems, or even in discovering problems that people might not even know they have, thus improving their lives.
One of the biggest problems that we have noticed over recent years in innovation concerns the spending and investments that are being made in research and development, expressed as a percentage of the gross domestic product: they have continued to decrease significantly as shown in the table below:
Country R&D (in billions of euros)
USA 368.8
GB 35
Taiwan 16
Source: Main Science and technology indicators, OECD
We have less research and development. All the resources are in fact concentrating on development, which means that we are developing products and services for which we know a market already exists. The majority of research laboratories that once existed now no longer exist. All of them, without exception, have cut out projects in which they were investing, in order to concentrate on the four or five projects for which they are certain there is demand. In other words, they are only creating what is commonly called incremental innovation. If we think of the size of problems that the company is dealing with (energy, economic crisis, environment, etc.), these are not problems that will be solved by choosing the colour of an iPhone. These are fundamental problems that have yet to be solved, and we cannot solve them if we remain anchored in what we already know. We need new knowledge, we need to explore new intervention paradigms, and new research, that allow not the expected results, but the unexpected results, and that as a result are capable of changing things.
A search in Google for books with the word "innovation" in the title finds 120,000 books. Just five years ago there were only a few hundred books with the word "innovation"! There are too many books on innovation and too few on real innovation.
Potentials of the Social Web
Where can we find true innovation over the last few years and what are the new paradigms in line with the "network society"? Think about the internet and how it has profoundly transformed our lives. Think about how much time it took for the internet to be successful: 30-40 years for it to become what it is, for it to have such a profound effect on our lives. The internet came out of the Bell laboratories of General Electric. There they invested in pure research, without the slightest idea of what concrete results would have been obtained. The internet itself was an unexpected result, among many, of a great amount of intense research driven by military needs. Where is the research that may generate unexpected results with regard to media communication, new materials, and new energy frontiers? Where is investment being made today to achieve these critical results for our future? We have not seen many initiatives going in this direction.
We are at a turning point, a consequence of the internet: social web. We are starting to see that there are strong possibilities that collaboration will become a fundamental driver to accelerate processes and information exchanges. The possibility for billions of people to start to connect and communicate in new ways has never been possible in the past; it is a significant step forward and offers enormous potential.
The true challenge is how to seize this potential, both as companies and as a society, in order to change the way of innovating. We see two different types of companies: one includes those that we call "winners", i.e. those companies that are willing to take risks and therefore to upset the market by making things that previously did not exist; the second type includes those companies that we'll call "losers", those who are afraid of changing, i.e. companies that have a strong position and are trying to defend it, rather than create new positions for it.
Let's take the case of Apple: did it listen to its customers, and use an "open" process, when it was thinking of creating the iPhone? No, contrary to what we usually hear, it was a completely closed process, based on the quality of internal Apple resources that carried out research, investigated the problems experienced by people, and had the vision of how a new service could have been. They had the leadership, ability and willingness to take risks. They had the courage to say: "People have never heard of an iPhone, but everyone needs one", and they created it. We can't go to customers and look to them for answers, or get a concept of a new product from them when they don't even have an idea that the possibility of it exists. These are the limits of crowdsourcing.
Leadership and social capital
The heart of the question is leadership. We remember Kennedy's speech when he announced to America that a man would have been sent to the Moon: it was a risky challenge, but taking this idea forward meant discovering and finding solutions to many of humanity's problems: this extraordinary vision ruled American society, dragging everyone behind it, because in taking man to the moon America created new industrial sectors, it created innovation, and Silicon Valley was in large part driven by this research. The spin-offs generated by the technology developed for this venture were numerous, but when the space program began no-one could have imagined what the developments would have been: new materials, new technologies for calculation and communications, etc.; or that companies would have been created that today have an annual turnover of billions of dollars and that these new activities would have given jobs to millions of people throughout the world. These results after the fact did not drive the action. People developed the space program because they believed in a problem-solution process that would have allowed them to discover new areas of knowledge.
Now the situation is completely different: there is no driving vision; everything revolves around cost-cutting, and that is a very serious problem. Companies like Nokia, who had dominant positions on the market, are very cautious, and do not want to squander the advantage and destroy or deteriorate the ecosystem around them in which many benefit from the value chain they created. Take what happened, for instance, with the arrival of IP voice servers that made the voice nothing more than another Internet application: everything that the business had been built on, and everything that had been defended for years by keeping others out, now seems like a common commodity, because anyone can create a voice application. Thus, these companies end up adopting very defensive behaviours, which in fact become major obstacles to innovation: the people inside these companies are isolated and the chance of them being able to do things that are truly new is becoming all but impossible.
These heritages are becoming serious obstacles; we have business models that are no longer up to date, that no longer allow us to generate past earnings: the CEO of a telecommunications company must think in the short term, three or four years at the most, trying to maximise the value of shares in that restricted period. This means that what the company can do is limit itself to what it already has, to what can give in the short term a certain return – even if small – and what it cannot do is invest in long-term research, necessary in order to have a future.
As a result, the staff within an organization end up destroyed, as they are deprived of an environment of exploration, of reasons to take risks, to do something truly new. It is no coincidence that the breakthrough innovations of the last 15/20 years did not come from telecommunication companies.
It is time to talk about social capital and innovation. Today we have real possibilities of creating great innovations if we are able to combine two things: the vision and leadership of a Steve Jobs with the potential of the people within the company, or rather its social capital. If a company can do that, it can take assume a dominant position on the market.
Social innovation: building communities for innovation
To focus on social capital, a starting point is the digital generation: a generation of young people have grown up with this technology and no longer consider it "technology", but rather their way of being in the world. They are not digital children because of digital technology, but because they were children when this change happened. This technology has been internalised by them because it allows them to carve out spaces for themselves, where they can do the things they need whilst growing up: create their own identity, have fun, do crazy things. MySpace or Facebook were not successful because of the technology, but because there was a new form of expression by this generation, in which they could express and acquire knowledge or simply act like kids. The crucial point of all of this is that new generations are established on social relations, and their way of existing in the world is today mediated by this technology. When individuals from this generation start working at an organization – such as a large company – they feel suffocated if people start telling them what they cannot do, and if they are isolated by those social tools that have made them what they are. These tools, instead of being seen as a threat (as many CIOs do), should be seen as opportunities: the consequence of social networking that these individuals experience and that has created their identity, is that in this way they have created collaboration without wanting to, they are collaborating in ways that were inconceivable in the past. This is the potential that is found in what they do, but how can it be exploited within companies?
The social capital or, in other words, the network of formal and informal relations existing within the company, represents how the company itself truly works. Each organization has a formal structure, from which it can be deduced who holds what positions and who reports to whom; but when we try to understand how things really work, we discover a completely different network: people know who to turn to in reality to make fast and effective decisions, regardless of what the organization chart says. Each person knows who to turn to if he/she has to collect up-to-date information on a technology or on the product market. This relation network – the social capital – is what we must free up today if we want to exploit it to our advantage. So, how can we make it grow?
Today platforms exist that allow people to find others like themselves, who can be found in parts or roles that are very different from the company, but who share the same passions or the same experiences. For the first time people are allowed to discover and rely on this sort of intangible network within organizations, whose existence was not even known about before. It is a way of seizing the possibility for these people to find each other and start working together in ways that were unimaginable up until now. Organizational silos are bypassed. These platforms also highlight the contribution that the individual can bring to the group.
Should we tend towards incremental innovation or towards radical innovation? We believe that this is the wrong question, and that the right question is: can we have both? Is it possible to have the leadership, vision and culture that allow an organization to take risks, at the same time allowing people within the organization to come together in completely different ways than in the past, in order to use this strength to guide the change? It is possible if we are able to create the right motivation and the right context.
The answer is not just in the technology. Everything depends on the organization and its culture. It is not about "capturing" ideas, but rather about building communities. The fundamental point is that key players be identified, the right people at the right time, to transform their network and their informality into a business value. From these assumptions – of social capital as a true element of a company's distinction and advantage – approaches such as Idea Management and Social Innovation are born.
Enterprise Strategy, Policy and Governance for Social Media
01 lunedì Ott 2012
The fast-approaching threshold of one billion Facebook users is the most striking sign of the unstoppable spread of social media worldwide: social media is coming out from the circle of web enthusiasts to conquer an ever more relevant portion of the population, influencing their tastes, purchase intentions and expectations. Today more than ever, for the brands of any sector, it is important not only to understand this phenomenon but to know how to use it to establish more significant and lasting relationships with customers and consumers that are able not only to reinforce purchase behaviours but to more widely involve the entire business ecosystem (suppliers, employees, consumers and opinion leaders).
A recent Nielsen study [1] shows how the so-called "web 2.0" is today appreciated by three quarters of users, occupying 22% of their time online. Much of this time is spent playing an active role within groups united by an interest, a need, a passion so strong as to make communities the fastest growing sector of the whole Internet [2] (+5.4%) and capable of reaching a larger number of people than email (66.8% against 65.1%). These networks are now "seen as special" by companies because 70% of users have a lot more confidence in the opinions posted by their own peers than in the messages of traditional advertising (steady at 14%). This percentage increases to 90% when opinions and recommendations come from people they know. The opportunity inherent in social media is even more evident when adding that, for example in America, as many as 93% of interviewees would like the companies they have contact with to be accessible on social media [3] in order to provide better services (56%), solve their problems (43%) and collect feedback on products (41%), including on the move. In line with the international framework, Italy is among the most evolved European countries as regards the use of social platforms, especially Facebook.
The customer has changed: the social customer
A revolution in methods of communication has followed an even more relevant revolution in behaviour. What is emerging from the data is a new type of consumer who is extremely active on social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr, and interested in a more lasting, transparent, deep and joint relationship with the brand. Thanks to the quantity of information and the possibility to connect with millions of people online, the social customer:
is more demanding because it is more expert and constantly updated on the latest product characteristics;
believes little of advertising messages and before purchasing prefers to form a personal opinion online;
loves sharing feedback and comments, in particular when the experience has been highly negative;
expects its point of view to be listened to 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, regardless of the channel chosen to express itself;
asks to see its own feedback included in the evolution of products and services;
uses smartphones and other mobile devices to track down at any time the indications it needs, especially through the networks it belongs to;
knows it has a voice with which it can speak directly to the brand, not only as a customer, but also as an ambassador and influencer (for better or worse);
wants to be respected and treated transparently strong with the weight taken on in its own circle of contacts.
The diagram in figure 1 highlights the characteristics of the Social Customer, who is more knowledgeable, more prepared and who holds a constantly growing power in relation to the brand.
Characteristics of a good Social Media Strategy plan
Where should we begin in order to devise a strategy for a company's presence on social media? Let's start with some indications taken from our projects:
The strategy is a "tailor-made suit", no scalable strategies or packages valid for every company exist: the creation of a strategy should always be preceded by an accurate assessment, to properly understand one's own market and customers, and by an internal analysis concerning the problems that could hinder the correct development of the strategy itself.
A good strategy is always co-created: Social Media Strategy is a mix of objectives, rules, values and guidelines that are impossible to identify without close collaboration with the company itself. The role of the consultant is to put the company and the brand in the position to have the best exposure on social platforms, without replacements. In order to work well, a strategy needs a strong commitment from above, the consent of the various departments and managers concerned, and of the various stakeholders.
The strategy must be accompanied by a governance plan that can govern the daily management of the social platforms.
The entire company is involved: a good strategy passes over existing silos, involves and holds together the objectives of communication, marketing, customer care, HR, sales, the product and innovation. In this sense the strategy (and governance) must be accompanied by a Social Media Policy aimed at providing operational advice to all the people within the company who operate, whether officially or not, within the social platforms where the brand is active. A good strategy does not stop at providing indications regarding individual platforms, but is able to communicate the company's real objectives, including long-term.
The starting point: listen, listen, listen
A Social Media Strategy is based on a fundamental process that starts with listening, by monitoring online conversations to understand how consumers perceive the organization. The diagram in figure 2 shows the process leading from active listening (Social media listening or monitoring) to the customer to a wider involvement, highlighting how Social Media Strategy is simply the end of a very precise journey that in turn is placed as the starting point for new activities in relation to the customers, in an active and recursive mechanism.
Prospects of social media strategy
The value that Social Media Strategy can bring has different possible deviations. In our experience there are at least five scenarios to work on, which are listed in figure 3.
Examples of metrics for different Social platforms
Platform Brand Awareness Brand Engagement Word of Mouth
Number of applications installed
Share of Voice
Number of active users
Number of discussions started by users
Number of contents published by users
Frequency of presence in users' timeline
Number of contents shared in personal profiles
Sentiment +/-
Number of tweets regarding the brand
Number of followings
Number of @replies
Number of DMs (Direct Messages)
Number of retweets
Number of visualizations
Number of registered members
Number of embeddings
Number of incoming links
Number of shares on Facebook
Number of shares on Twitter
By describing in an operational manner how to build a Social Media Strategy we can identify a series of questions – shown in figure 4 – that it is useful to ask and that can guide us in creating what we want to obtain.
The work process
As already shown, it is important to define the listening process: who are we listening to? Which public are we interested in involving? Where online is our brand being talked about? It is essential that a strategy defines clear business objectives that connect it to a very precise executive plan that also provides KPIs able to measure any success of the implemented activities. As regards the definition of KPIs, it should be underlined how each platform has fairly different metrics and logics. One example and a summary, by way of illustration, can be taken from the diagram shown in Figure 4 that highlights some of the successful metrics of a brand within social channels.
It is then necessary to anticipate a co-design phase and a period of experimentation in which the strategy is put to the test in the field to understand where to intervene and where it is possible to make improvements. A useful piece of advice could also be to start with some channels and gradually broaden the approach to other platforms.
The web as a mirror
Interview with Giuseppe Cerroni (Head of Communication and Institutional Affairs at Autogrill)
Why does a company like Autogrill have to be interested in social media?
Whilst tradition mass media is tending to assume more and more of an "institutional" nature, becoming tools for a communication limited to certain respondents, on the web we witness an opposite process, so much so that today if a company wishes to examine a realistic image of itself it is preferable for it to use the web as a mirror rather than printed paper. Our interest in social media comes precisely from this, from the wish to listen and monitor what happens in this less and less virtual universe. It is a complex listening process, because it involves, for example, redefining the parameters of authority and impact of sources.
How are you planning to do this?
The first step was starting up periodical web and social media monitoring. After this came building a social media strategy, a social media policy and social media governance. The objectives and rules with which the company will manage its social presence have been defined in a collaborative manner, by building a wide range of work teams made up of the different company functions involved in the subject. It is characteristic of social media, on the other hand, to make the boundaries flow and to reduce them, both the internal ones among the various company functions but also those between the company and consumers. Our Group is also present in 35 countries and there's no doubt that the experience already gained by our business units in the USA and UK spurred us on.
What are the areas of resistance and complexity that have been faced in order to do this?
Whilst in the English-speaking world there is a greater facility to meet the consumer on social media, in Italy, in our experience, we are faced with people who are more oriented to critical attitudes. Some social media end up channelling a type of questions that evidently have no outlet elsewhere. This seems to me to be another interesting challenge that certainly needs to be dealt with, as does the challenge of transmitting complex company identities, both local ones and global ones simultaneously.
Conclusions: connect Social Media Strategy to the organization and the workflow
As we have seen when talking about Social Business, the traditional separation between the inside and outside of the company – with the new social tools – is lost. The split is made much less evident and it therefore appears necessary that, as external brands put a specific strategy in place to engage consumers, so too must internal strategies and policies be put into place that can allow the company to respond to requests coming from the outside.
It is therefore essential that when transforming a company into a social business and creating a Social Media Strategy, the company must also be equipped with a social media governance and a social media policy that clearly explain to employees how to use the new social channels and how to behave when on the various social platforms.
Social Media Listening – Example sections of a report
The SOV helps us to better understand where our company is being talked about and how frequently this is taking place. It is a simple count of mentions but it represents a first, fundamental step to understanding how much material on us is online and in which online places interactions are most frequent.
The trend provides an indicative measure of the tendency of conversations in the period of reference. By tracing a trend it is possible to understand if the specific initiatives launched by the brand in that particular period have attracted a certain amount of interest or not, or if some facts have caused a stir online and affected the company's image.
Categorizing messages and assigning sentiment
Within a good report, that offers a snapshot of what is being said online about a particular brand, there must always be a strong contribution from expert analysts able to determine the sentiment of messages, understand the deep sense and reposition it within the broader vision of the entire report. This is as if to say that it is not enough that there are data and numbers but that the good "assessor" must always translate those data and values into suggestions and specific indications in order to set up a more complex strategy.
A good reputation analysis is based above all on this point which is unlikely to be able to be entrusted to a tool (as valid as it may be).
Wherever possible it would always be important to try to identify who are the opinion leaders, the most important sources and the people who move information on our brand around online.
Engagement means the relationship between the interactions of users (comments, likes, shares) and the total number of views.
Conversation Reach
This means the relationship between the users participating in the brand's discussions/initiatives and the total audience exposed to the brand's communication.
[1] See http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/social-media-accounts-for-22-percent-of-time-online/.
[2] Nielsen, "Global Faces on Networked Places".
[3] "Cone Finds That Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media," http://www.coneinc.com/content1182.
OpenKnowledge Company profile June 2012
21 giovedì Giu 2012
Social Learning: the organization that learns to learn
59 tesi, Social Business Manifesto, social learning
With George Siemens & Stefano Besana
A theoretical framework. We begin with a fundamental premise: Social Learning is not a new trend. Learning models such as those of corporations, guilds and apprenticeships invoked long ago what we now call Social Learning. Going back further in time, the first philosophers practised Social Learning almost exclusively, as the stories which are still told about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle remind us.
What is really innovative, today, is the scale on which we can be involved in a process of social learning. Web-based technologies greatly reduce the barriers that learners were forced to face in the past (time and geography are just two of many possible variables that can be used as an example): the development of social networks and tools such as Skype, Google Talk and mobile devices, the level and scale at which we can be "social" has increased consistently and substantially. In this sense, Social Learning is a return to our more natural way to learn and interact with others.
As regards the relationship between Connectivism1 and Social Learning activities we can see Social Learning as part of Connectivism. Both concepts refer to how knowledge is distributed and emphasize how complex problems can be solved by assuming a network and systemic perspective.
The point at which Connectivism differs from Social Learning is the access to resources and sources including non-social ones. For example, new ideas, very often, are simply reworkings of ideas that followed one another in past centuries. William Rosen in his book The Most Powerful Idea in the World, highlights exactly this point, i.e., the way in which people connect to each other's ideas is not always Social. Furthermore, the way in which organizations create their managerial structure influences the way in which information flows within the organization itself. Connectivism is linked to (the question of) how this information, these techniques and social structures have an effect on and contribute to innovation, invention and dynamic adaptation of the individual and the company. The biggest developments in the near future – in terms of emerging learning systems – will above all be in the domain of analysing knowledge: in fact, we produce huge flows of data in almost everything we do (a process amplified greatly by mobile technology). Our ideas, our positions, what we read, with whom we interact. Everything is captured forever on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and our blogs. Many companies are fumbling in the dark in terms of knowledge and organizational learning.
Recognizing and using wisely the huge amount of data and flows of information that are produced is the first step to moving towards an analytical approach as regards the goals and objectives of a company, as well as being a good way to build competence. Through the analysis of information flows companies can understand how knowledge moves in networks, how people work together, which people should be working together based on the activities they have previously performed and how to deal effectively with complex problems (such as entry into a new market, acquiring a new company, or launching a new product). Analyses of these data – in essence – can help companies better understand themselves.
Most experts and consultants emphasize the social dimension and the way new technologies – Facebook, Twitter and blogs – contribute to making people "social". They deal with the social aspect as the most critical element within the internal process of learning. We instead believe that people are motivated primarily by information. We constantly process information. From childhood, we try to make sense of the world by attempting to think about it, to evaluate it, to connect the pieces of information we encounter. It is an evolutionary trait: we are living beings based on information. We develop in relation to the information around us.
Looking back at the time when man was a hunter-gatherer, those that survived were those who were able to make sense of the information in the context in which they lived: which plants to collect, which animals to avoid, what to eat and so on.
Our starting assumption is that the dominant trait of humanity is the acquisition, processing and creation of information. We employ social approaches that allow us to manage information better. Too many people discussing Social Learning see the social dimension as its final goal. We see it rather in the search for meaning and a way whose primary purpose is to use social approaches to assist us in personal evolution and survival.
In the early '90s Lave and Wenger had already intuited the pivotal role of communities of practice and informal exchanges between people in organizations. After more than twenty years from their early work, the organizational landscape has evolved considerably, but the importance of the role of informal communities in building knowledge has not only remained unchanged but also benefited and been strengthened by the great evolutions – both technical and cultural – of all that vast sea that may be labelled as Enterprise 2.0, where the role of the community has become dominant and paramount.
In this sense, Social Learning fits into the organizational dimension connected to learning, the exchange of knowledge, training and the management of human resources that has become fundamental important in all businesses, both more or less complex.
The evolution from the '90s to the present of the conceptions of training in terms of the technologies they employed, from simple systems and approaches to basic distance learning up to blended learning and building environments that allow a degree of interaction and an ever-increasing number of functions.
In trying to give a concrete definition of Social Learning, however, we could argue that it is an emergent phenomenon (not predetermined or planned) that originates from knowledge networks and information flows, both formal and informal, within organizations. Social Learning is, moreover, the reliance on social networks and interactions for help in our own search to give meaning to the information around us. Today "knowing" means to be connected: knowledge is moving too quickly because learning can be considered simply a product that comes at the end of a process. We need to connect to networks of information and "deposit" knowledge in relationships rather than in our heads or in knowledge management systems.
We are not dealing, therefore, with the simple application of social technologies (or 2.0, according to by-now dated label) to the context of learning, trying to evolve the classic logic of LMSs (Learning Management Systems) towards models similar to those of well-known social networks. Rather, we need to rethink training and learning development in a way that integrates more with the flow of operating activities. We need to think of the learning organization as a living organism that is constantly evolving.
Let us understand better the context of referral and the principles of Social Learning through the analysis of a case study.
Applying Social Learning: a case study
We will try to explain the basic concepts of Social Learning with a practical example related to a situation in which many organizations may find themselves: a large multinational company needs to review their Learning Management System, which is becoming obsolete. The portal that delivers training content was based on a platform whose functionality is rapidly declining. In addition, the company also needs to move towards a system with lower maintenance and management costs and that can be maintained independently, without relying on external vendors for every need, even a small one. The project, then, started with the aim of porting all the historical data and SCORM/WBT2 packets so as to be able to continue to offer the training program to all the company's. (We are talking about a population / user base of more than 5,000 people).
This is a classic use of this platform, based on precise and concrete learning objects in which the e-learning part is used in a very traditional way, as a simple static content provider and file repository. In essence, the mode of learning underlying the platform is based on a very simple concept: users of the platform access training courses they are assigned to and training is performed in a passive manner, limited to observing the explanation shown on the monitor and completing a comprehension test at the end of the trail.
The challenge in this project was therefore to provide customers not only a mere porting content from one platform to another, but integrate the four dimensions of learning, which we consider indispensable in the design of a Social Learning environment:
Training & LCMS (Learning Content Manage ¬ ment System): a company – small, medium or large – needs to provide courses for which tracking is required (we are only looking at those required by law: 626, Privacy, etc) and a tool that will be a classic LMS must be present in a Social Learning environment.
Creating a Social Learning project doesn't mean throwing away years of experience and knowledge about the e-learning world, but rather means to valorize these experiences in a changed context. Another topic to cover is assessment and reporting which very often need to be produced and cannot be left uncovered. Introducing a platform which covers these needs within the context is certainly important and useful in order to deliver more traditional training.
The Content Management System: This deals with content management and its delivery/presentation in an as user-friendly way as possible, with appealing graphics and meeting the classic user-experience principles: it is not uncommon to find company training management platforms and learning courses provided with interfaces which are not in line with these considerations: user-unfriendly and complicated environments with a very bad user experience are unfortunately quite common. It's better not to underestimate the way contents are delivered, because learning can only be effective in an environment provided with good cognitive affordance. Moreover – considering the basic project idea – a CSM is aimed at allowing an easy upload and sharing of contents and – secondary but equally important – at supporting an extremely wide range of formats. Here's what makes things much easier for people dealing with training: creating modular and specific learning paths.
Self Learning: companies' repositories abound with contents that can enrich and integrate training paths. When planning new learning platforms it is necessary to expect the integration of more sources – both internal and external – in a self-service way. Moreover, being fully consistent with the lessons of the previously mentioned 2.0: relying on folksonomies, on modular and customizable paths and focusing on the single user's needs today more than ever form the winning keys in a learning process/path.
Community & Social Network: communities – the "social" aspect – are the real cultural, social and technological revolution that has involved us over these years. Being able to valorize practice communities and related networks is a distinguishing crucial point when it comes to creating a learning environment which can generate value for the whole business ecosystem.
New formats: wiki, social bookmarking, storytelling, gaming and micro-video are just some of the tools that users should use in order to generate contents to feed the platform in a bottom-up way. The goal should be to feed a repository to create a Youtube, a company Slideshare or something else, and provide learners with all the necessary tools to share learning-related contents quickly and easily.
To make a comparison, the environment should be able to allow the maximum level of presence3 inside, at least. Only in this way will the users really be free to experiment with new formats and get a true benefit from them in terms of significant learning.
For example, for the project we talked about initially, the four dimensions have been integrated by using OpenSource technologies which covered different themes and needs. With regard to LCMS management they chose to use Moodle which has become a point of reference, especially over recent years, in the LCMS field. It just takes a look at the statistics on the official website http://moodle.org/stats/ to realize that. Nevertheless Moodle is still bound – by choice and by necessity – to a classic view of learning and is missing most of the functions found in more social tools (just think about the tool that manages learning, Schoology (www.schoology.com/home.php)). So how can we meet these limits and customize the Moodle interface more effectively? An integration process with CSM and Social components has started. Now all that is needed is to define an environmental integration process, most of which we have discovered to be already provided for and implementable through a plug-in.
Yet we still haven't dealt with the management of informal aspects, which we have covered also in this case by a special plug-in to create internal communities in Joomla: this plug-in is JomSocial (http://www.jomsocial.com). By integrating this plug-in all the development areas have been covered. The case above is meant to be a starting point to understand how to build up an as rich and stimulating learning environment as possible with a few simple tools, which could take into consideration all the needs of the actors involved.
The technical difficulty of creating an environment like this is modest. Besides the planning, the real challenge lies in the maintenance and involvement of learners. In any case the idea remains that a Social Learning project – and, generally speaking, every Social Business project – is to be planned as a tailor-made project based on the different and specific needs for each context and case.
By forcing ourselves to try to extend what we learned from the example above to a general context, we underline how social technologies can guarantee the possibility to create wide and articulate training and learning paths. The application of social technologies to training in classes can later evolve the mature considerations made about blended learning so far by taking it to a new level which can valorize different contents. In this sense in fig. 3 we have included the diagram shown in Scotti and Sica (Community Management, 2007-2010). It clearly shows how the planned and catalogue training is only able to cover a part of the mare magnum where learning takes place.
In this sense the creation of communities that support knowledge is a fundamental requirement in order to facilitate those silent aspects that couldn't be valorized otherwise.
Assessing Social Learning
Even when assessing learning it is necessary to review and rethink methodologies and technologies: it is clear that old logics cannot be used and applied to new paradigms, but the whole framework of learning processes, of the individual and – more in general – of the company, must be reviewed. A large amount of research is heading in the direction of using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to assess training and learning.
In the early 2000s, we used a Social Network Analysis project involving a department of a large University in the US to assess over 100 people. We tried to understand how these people collaborated with one another, where they would go to ask for help and how they used social networks to solve their everyday problems.
Understanding the essential nodes of the department network was an important starting point on the path to an organizational change. In a very similar way, today's companies need to take in consideration new analytics and innovative assessment models to reconfigure their structure. The knowledge lying in most companies is not properly connected. Very often certain people work on some problems without knowing what others are doing, without any awareness. When analyzing the results of learning on both an individual and organizational level, we need to rethink the way in which we identify and analyze the results of the training interventions. Analysis tools play an important role in the mapping of organizational knowledge. In this sense, the analyses provide us with a model to start from to reconfigure our company. In the past, leaders have sometimes taken decisions blindly. For example, the joining of two departments was carried out because it made sense financially.
Very little attention has therefore ever been paid to knowledge and to how learning and the building of knowledge could be influenced. With this type of analysis we can better understand these "blind spots" and eliminate the risks in reconfiguring the departments in our company.
In this sense the Kirkpatrick model (based on an individual assessment of the impacts of training) – well-known to those in charge of assessing learning – can be revisited and evolved into a wider assessment approach extending the analysis levels to a larger and "network" dimension, also able to assess the most widespread organizational impacts that involve the communities found within the company.
Specifically we ask ourselves: in what way are collaborative networks emerging? At the end of the training course, which networks have been improved and what new cores have been born? How is knowledge moving inside the company? Have internal affinities towards the course themes changed? How should work teams be organized to improve company efficacy and efficiency?
We can therefore identify four other dimensions to support those initially provided for by the model, in order to better assess the impacts that the training course has on the working network:
• Affinities: at the end of the course has the level of affinity of the participants changed towards to the themes dealt with and the more general goals?
• Social Knowledge: through the training course was knowledge spread inside the company by taking advantage of informal networks?
• Network Creation: have collaborative groups and new links within the course been created that can then be extended to the rest of the company?
• Network Development: have we developed the creative cores already present?
The integration of these "new" assessment methodologies and processes within the classic models that are already well-known to those in charge of training allows us to have a complete assessment framework of the company and fully understand the formal and informal exchanges within the company.
1. For references to the Connectivist approach please consult the George Siemens volume: Knowing Knowledge
2. SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) means a reference model which allows the independent exchange of contents on the platform. A WBT (Web Based Training) is a training package supplied on the web.
3. At the level of psychology of new media (Riva, 2008) we define the concept of presence as the feeling of being inside a digital environment given by the possibility of putting into practice our own intentions.
e-mail poco social
11 lunedì Giu 2012
Pubblico su questo BLOG una mail ricevuta ieri per condividerla con le persone che erano presenti al Social Business Forum #sbf12 promosso da OpenKnowledge il 4 e 5 giugno e per chiedere un vostro parere.
Il giorno 10/giu/2012, alle ore 13:18, Francesco Varanini ha scritto:
"Cari amici, nelle sale convegni di un certo hotel di via Washington, qui aMilano, la settimana scorsa c'era un incontro, interessante non lo nego. Ma tutto era scritto e detto in inglese, la scena tipica era questa: il keynote speaker con il simbolo del comando in mano, ovvero il telecomando per governare Power Point, passeggia sul palco illuminato, lui stesso lascia guidare se stesso dalla presentazione PowerPoint, la stessa che ha presentato, identica, in altri enne luoghi del mondo. Il pubblico sta al buio.Ora mi chiedo se è di questo che abbiamo bisogno, se è questo che ci serve per capire in che direzione andare, noi italiani, noi manager o consulenti o formatori. Noi sopratutto che ci occupiamo di persone, noi che abbiamo a che fare con ciò che possiamo chiamare Direzione del Personale. Credo che serva a poco chiedere lui a guru stranieri. Non dovremmo noi cercare la nostra strada? A me dicono poco frasi del tipo 'essere business partner'. Dobbiamo pensare piuttosto che ci compete essere costruttori di un possibile domani.Perciò -anche se probabilmente la notizia vi è già arrivata per altra via- vi ricordo che martedì 12 e mercoldì 13 in quello stesso hotel di via Washington ha luogo il Convivio Risorse Umane e non Umane.Nessun guru o keynote speaker, zero Power Point, e invece persone che si mettono in gioco in un colloquio, a tu per tu. http://www.francescovaranini.it/varanini/2012/03/convivio-risorse-umane-non-umane-il-direttore-del-personale-costruttore-del-domani-12-13-giugno
Cordialmente Francesco"
Il mio unico commento: devo dire che l'unica giustificazione all'email che ho ricevuto ieri alle ore 13:18 (insieme a qualche centinaio di persone) da Francesco Varanini è dovuto a l'ora in cui è stata spedita: domenica dopo pranzo! Molto probabilmente accompagnata da del buon vino.
@ Varanini By The way lo speech (l'intervento) di John Hagel era senza slide.
10 mercoledì Nov 2010
Posted by Rosario Sica in Appuntamenti
Innovation sica
View more presentations from Rosario Sica.
È online l'agenda dell'International Forum on Enterprise 2.0
L'agenda della nuova edizione dell'International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 si presenta davvero densa di sezioni e contenuti di alto livello. La lista degli speaker continua a prendere corpo arricchendosi di nomi di richiamo internazionale come Hutch Carpenter, Sameer Patel, Andrew Gilboy, Scott Gavin, Verna Allee, Esteban Kolsky, Laurie Buczek, Mark Tamis, Cai Kjaer e Mark Masterson. Le due giornate di cui si compone l'evento affronteranno a 360 gradi le problematiche della collaborazione interna, del coinvolgimento dei clienti e della open innovation attraverso sessioni gratuite e momenti di approfondimento a pagamento. Nella prima giornata (9 giugno) sarà possibile partecipare a 5 Pre-Workshop paralleli dedicati ai seguenti argomenti:
Migliorare i risultati di business tramite l'Enterprise 2.0
IT Governance: un approccio basato sulle reti informali
Innovation 2.0: sfruttare il potere delle reti sociali
Leggere e armonizzare l'organizzazione informale: la "Organizational Network Analysis" nuovo strumento manageriale
HR 2.0: la Direzione risorse umane nel nuovo scenario competitivo
La seconda giornata (10 giugno) sarà invece caratterizzata da una combinazione di sezioni gratuite aperte a tutti unitamente a una serie di track a pagamento a numero chiuso. I 4 keynote iniziali saranno infatti seguiti da 3 business track paralleli focalizzati ognuno su tematiche specifiche:
HR 2.0
Innovation 2.0
I track vedranno la presenza di professionisti e top consultant internazionali che parleranno singolarmente 0 all'interno di panel dedicati. Oltre ai keynote iniziali, chi non fosse interessato ad usufruire dei track potrà partecipare in maniera gratuita all'E2.0Camp, il BarCamp ospitato dal Forum e dedicato ai temi dell'Enterprise 2.0 e dell'utilizzo dei social media in chiave corporate. Altra novità di questa terza edizione è la presenza di uno spazio demo (Expo Pavillon), gratuito e aperto al pubblico, in cui sarà possibile assistere alle presentazioni dei principali vendor mondiali di software e applicazioni per l'Enterprise 2.0.
La giornata del 10 si concluderà con una sessione finale composta da 3 keynote e aperta a tutto il pubblico presente.
Vi invitiamo a registrarvi