Archive for January, 2011

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Points of View is our blog dedicated to exploring the critical corporate communications issues of the day through insights and videos of Fortune 500 business and communications execs, industry insiders and our team.

Brittany Aguilar

Extend Social Media Beyond Communications and Marketing


January 31st, 2011

We’ve seen many companies struggle with the question of who “owns” social media. In one sense, you are communicating to customers, so it must be a marketing function. But, isn’t marketing usually “paid” and communications “earned?” If so, most social media profiles are “free,” so it must be a communications function! Well, we’ve seen the most successful social media companies embrace both and use cross-divisional teams to find manage the space.

who-owns-social-media

This struggle, though, may actually be less important than previously thought, as social media is quickly becoming relevant to much more than communications and marketing. In fact, the next wave of the social media revolution will likely be in customer service and sales.

Imagine that you’ve just tweeted that you are tired of your current vehicle breaking down, and you are ready for an upgrade! What if a car company saw your tweet and someone from their sales team reached out to you with information about their latest models in your price range?

Sales teams have gotten pretty good at e-mail marketing, but I see a real lack of innovation in sales social media. Social media can give you a tremendous amount of input and insight on your prospects; you could even catch a lead in mid-status update. Imagine a time when all of your CRM databases include Twitter and Facebook profiles. You’d be able to really get to know your prospects and tailor your sales pitches to their specific needs. You might even be able to insert your brand for consideration with a prospect that wasn’t even going to look at you. There’s nowhere better to learn about your customers than from their own, hand-selected social networks.

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Jesse Jacks

Crowdsourcing, Innovation, and… the Home Shopping Network?


January 28th, 2011

Anyone who watched the President’s State of the Union address this week may have noticed the many times he used the word “innovate” throughout his hour-long speech. The morning after, many op-eds complained that for all the talk of “out-innovating” the rest of the world, the President didn’t provide any concrete examples of how he envisioned America achieving this. According to a new article on Mashable, 2011′s focus on driving innovation may have an unlikely leader in the Home Shopping Network (HSN), as their new crowdsourcing project suggests.

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Looking to disrupt the online retail market, HSN has announced an ambitious crowdsourcing project, in association with “social product development” firm Quirky, that allows its shoppers the opportunity to not just engage in the submission of ideas, but even share in the profits should the HSN online community push their idea to the sales / manufacturing stage.

The idea isn’t necessarily new, as many good companies listen and act on what their customers want to buy in a product. But when HSN’s CEO Mindy Grossman decided that her company would focus largely on curating a shopping experience from within, and combined that idea with the business’ longtime emphasis on product storytelling, a hybrid model for leveraging, and (potentially) selling, products the community has committed to purchase was born. The process is an ambitious one, however, leveraging their massive and loyal community, HSN might be one of just a handful of businesses in the retail industry able to pull it off.

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Grant Toups

A Case for Social Media Access at the Office


January 27th, 2011

It’s an oft-discussed question in many IT departments and beyond: should employees have unrestricted access to the internet (including all the social networking they can get their hands on) while at work? A recent SocialCast report suggests that there might just be a productivity bump to be had from such access.

fb-at-work1

The SocialCast argument seems logical and intuitive, though almost certainly not the final word on the topic.

The crux of their point (available here) is that access to personal social networking as a bit of downtime to clear the head, can actually improve employee productivity. And it’s a valid point but the concerns about such a move are very real, from productivity losses to compromised corporate security. I’d like to add a couple more ideas to the mix.

I’d argue that social media is, especially with Gen Y’ers and younger, becoming more than just a tool. It’s an essential part of everyday life.  And as that evolution continues, employee pressure (from current employees and potential recruits) on companies to open up the proverbial social networking doors will likely increase.  The companies that do it before feeling the pressure are likely to be called “cutting edge, innovative leaders.” Those that do it after run the risk of seeming “behind the times.”

Further, almost every social media team I’ve come across feels under-resourced for the sheer volume they need to monitor.  So why not give employees access and ask them to watch out for the company that helps them put food on the table?  If your company has 10k employees and 10% actually keep an eye out, you’ve just built a network of 1k watchdogs capable of monitoring far more than even the largest, most well-resourced internal social media team can likely hope to.

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PulsePoint Group

The Weekly Pulse: 1/26/11


January 26th, 2011

A recap of the previous week’s POV posts:

1/26: PulsePoint Group Corporate Communication Index Series Part 5: Managing Talent (video): Bob Feldman, partner at PulsePoint Group, provides commentary on the firm’s recently released Corporate Communication Index Study. This is the fifth in a series of videos where he provides insight into the findings.

1/25: LinkedIn Maps: Your Professional Universe Visualized: Have you ever wondered what your personal network looks like? Well now you can see it. Yesterday, LinkedIn launched InMaps an experimental project that creates a visualization of the connections within your business network.

1/24: Foursquare Grew 3400% Last Year: Foursquare had a big year in 2010. The company experienced 3400% growth in “check-ins” with a total of 381,576,305, and there was at least one “check-in” in every country in the world, including North Korea. We even saw the first “check-in” from space at the International Space Station on October 22, 2010.

1/21: Placing Open Innovation in the Professional Services Industry: A clear trend emerged in business over the last decade: the rise of “open innovation.” Forerunners in the practice of utilizing third parties in creating, developing, and disseminating innovative business practices and products include Dell, having introduced and successfully integrated their IdeaStorm platform to drive new product development, and Starbucks, which followed suit with My Starbucks Idea, garnering yet more feedback from customers looking to enhance their personal experience with the company.

1/20: The Continuing Evolution of Employee Engagement: Mashable recently featured a piece by Soren Gordhamer, founder of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, on the evolution of the enterprise in the age of social media. It’s a fascinating read, here, but there were two things I wanted to point a spotlight on here.

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Bob Feldman

PulsePoint Group Corporate Communication Index Series Part 5: Managing Talent


January 26th, 2011

Bob Feldman, partner at PulsePoint Group, provides commentary on the firm’s recently released Corporate Communication Index Study. This is the fifth in a series of videos where he provides insight into the findings.

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Renée Francese

LinkedIn Maps: Your Professional Universe Visualized


January 25th, 2011

Have you ever wondered what your personal network looks like? Well now you can see it. Yesterday, LinkedIn launched InMaps an experimental project that creates a visualization of the connections within your business network. InMaps technology filters through your connections to see how everyone knows each other and then groups people together into network clusters based on their associations.

InMaps provides visual insight into who the major connections, bridges and influencers are in your network. People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections, and typically more influence.

Let’s say one of your executive’s wanted to raise his or her personal thought leadership profile within a certain network cluster. With the help of InMaps, you can make a more targeted recommendation based on the most influential people identified. Perhaps the results come as no surprise, however my personal experience with InMaps revealed a great number of insights.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think about InMaps. Did anything surprise you about your own business network?

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Brittany Aguilar

Foursquare Grew 3400% Last Year


January 24th, 2011

Foursquare had a big year in 2010. The company experienced 3400% growth in “check-ins” with a total of 381,576,305, and there was at least one “check-in” in every country in the world, including North Korea. We even saw the first “check-in” from space at the International Space Station on October 22, 2010.

Foursquare published an infographic summarizing their accomplishments and a few fun facts from 2010.

From a strategic communications perspective, the tremendous growth of Foursquare means that the collision of online social media and the offline physical world has truly become mainstream. For many consumers, there is no more “offline” world; even when we are nowhere near a computer, our phones give us access to the “online” world, and technologies like Foursquare provide meaningful ways to integrate the two.

Leading brands like Starbucks are finding simple, but creative ways to use “check-ins” to boost sales. For example, Starbucks gives discounts to customers who “check-in” frequently.

This meeting of the online and offline world represents a huge opportunity because it brings people to a physical location – a huge first step towards making a sale. This could also give brick-and-mortar stores a tool in the battle against the growing world of e-commerce.

I expect 2011 to bring increased integration between physical locations and the online world, and as communications professionals; we’ll all be looking for ways to capitalize on this growing trend. One thing is for sure – discounts and giveaways will continue to encourage foot-traffic.

Foursqaure infographic:

foursquare_2010-1

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Jesse Jacks

Placing Open Innovation in the Professional Services Industry


January 21st, 2011

A clear trend emerged in business over the last decade: the rise of “open innovation.” Forerunners in the practice of utilizing third parties in creating, developing, and disseminating innovative business practices and products include Dell, having introduced and successfully integrated their IdeaStorm platform to drive new product development, and Starbucks, which followed suit with My Starbucks Idea, garnering yet more feedback from customers looking to enhance their personal experience with the company. But far and away the greatest example of a Fortune 500 company embracing open innovation over the past decade to drive everything from product development to revenue growth has been Procter & Gamble with its Connect & Develop initiative. P&G was successful in leveraging third parties alongside their core internal capabilities to reduce R&D costs by nearly 60% while simultaneously increasing the amount of new products it sent to market.  All this was done in a cost-efficient, time-saving manner that has resulted in Connect & Develop being hailed as one of the most successful open innovation initiatives ever.

But in a global service economy, what does open innovation look like?

Henry Chesbrough wrote an interesting article this week in the Harvard Business Review posing this very question, alongside investigating collaboration as an increasing source of innovation.

As we move towards a reliance on services to drive our economy, the service companies that can master the art of open innovation will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors and realize a compelling competitive advantage.

Read the full post here

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Grant Toups

The Continuing Evolution of Employee Engagement


January 20th, 2011

Mashable recently featured a piece by Soren Gordhamer, founder of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, on the evolution of the enterprise in the age of social media. It’s a fascinating read, here, but there were two things I wanted to point a spotlight on here.

happy-office-275

First, he quotes a Towers Watson (formerly Towers Perrin) study that found:

  • Companies whose employees report high employee engagement realized a 19% increase in income and nearly 18% rise in EPS
  • On the other hand, companies with low levels of engagement saw income drop 32% and EPS decline more than 11%.

The data is from 90k employee interviews in 18 countries, and it seems a staggering endorsement for an increased focus on employee engagement.

Gordhamer also recounts a meeting he had with Zappos CEO Tony Hsiesh

” … the[n] Zappos realized that trying to force unhappy staff to treat customers with respect and joy was a losing battle. You cannot ask staff to give what they do not receive.”

Zappos, widely considered as a model for employee engagement, loyalty and morale, seems to succeed by living this mantra in everyday, very real sorts of ways. Which made me curious, is this evolution making its way to the pavement elsewhere? In what ways are your companies living this paradigm shift?

The original Mashable post can be found here.

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PulsePoint Group

The Weekly Pulse: 1/19/11


January 19th, 2011

A recap of the previous week’s POV posts:

1/19: Grammys Go Social – Will It Improve Ratings?: The music industry continues to be at the forefront of social media innovation and excellence. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Rhiana are Twitter legends and music videos continue to be the most-viewed videos on the web.

1/17: PulsePoint Group Corporate Communication Index Series Part 4- Governance (video): Watch Bob Feldman, partner at PulsePoint Group, provide commentary on the firm’s recently released Corporate Communication Index Study. This is the fourth in a series of videos where he provides insight into the findings.

1/15: Eight Communication Traps that Foil Innovation: Clients often ask us about best practices in corporate communications and for examples of how best-in-class organizations implement them. These engagements vary depending on the client’s needs and their industry, but one constant is the need to benchmark those organizations that are among the first to transform emerging communications practices into core competencies.

1/14: Trendstream Study Finds Consumer Trust in Social Networking Contacts on the Rise: Trendstream, the UK-based digital consultancy, has released its 2011 Web Index, available here.  It provides a thoroughly interesting, in-depth look at the evolution of social media engagement that observes a growing trend toward social networks and users as qualifiers and distributors of “professional” content, with individual content creation on the decline. I wanted to take a minute to point out one thing that really jumped out at me.

1/13: Tips on Writing Strong Social Media Content: There is a lot of social media advice out there and it can be tough to know where to start. You should definitely develop a strategy and do some planning before launching, but don’t let extensive planning and the need for perfection prevent you from getting started. Here are five tips that you can use now to create content for a social media program, even in a large organization.

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