Sensei Blogs

Announcing New Book: Influence Marketing, by Sam Fiorella & Danny Brown

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The hype around social influence has been circling around me like a cyclone for a few years now, online, in-print and in-person. I’ve been open and honest with my views on the challenges with the current methodology being used by marketers and software providers alike until someone asked me to “put your money where your mouth is.”

And so I am.

This spring Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson, will release Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing coauthored by Danny Brown and me!

Danny and I will move the conversation beyond social influence scoring and give you a start-to-finish blueprint for making influence marketing work in your organization.

Featuring case studies, empirical evidence, digital workshops and much, much more, Influence Marketing is based on successful campaigns that Danny and I have jointly and independently executed in this space. We look forward to sharing more with you in early January!

In the meantime, you can take advantage of the Cyber Monday week-long offers on Amazon.

Reserve Your Copy Today!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Can You Be Influential While Under the Influence?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The debate around influence scoring and measurement has once again reared its ugly head with a new series of articles written in Wired Magazine, Forbes and Social Media Examiner, among others. Mark Schaefer also published a book recently titled: Return on Influence, which presents the online influence tracking service Klout.com as the future of marketing: low-cost, high-speed, influence driven, and powerful.

I’ve now had a well-documented history of highs & lows with Klout that eventually led me to declare my freedom from the self-serving, vanity-driven business and more recently, to create a public awareness campaign for those afflicted from fallout of opting out of Klout.

As many have already quipped, there are few businesses or social media-related subjects that generate the amount of hate and public debate that Klout seems to inspire. However, this post isn’t about loving or hating Klout. It poses a question to those brands who have or who are considering paying Klout for access to their top ranked “influencers”.

Can an individual influence others while they’re “under the influence” of Klout?

The business of Klout.com is monitoring the quantity of social interactions one has with others, the nature of those online interactions and predicting the impact these individuals have on their social graph. Online interactions are churned through their proprietary algorithms to produce a ranking of Klout-decreed influencers on various topics using a score of 1 to 100. Brands then shell out top dollar to access these people and reward the elite with product trials and offers in hopes that the chosen will promote and encourage purchase of the brand’s product among those they supposedly influence.

In other words influencer marketing; a concept and tactic that pre-dates Klout and even the Internet and social media for that matter. Now, I’ve been at the enterprise marketing game for almost 20 years and so this concept of engaging influencers is not new to me, in the offline or digital space. Yet I don’t understand the current fascination and blind trust that brands are placing in Klout.

What happened to accountability?

What I do know is that before Klout and their ilk became water-cooler fodder, influencers were held to a different standard. Their selection process required more accountability. CMOs demanded empirical proof of the candidate’s influence – and in many cases actual guarantees of the impact they’d deliver.

I suspect the renewed fascination in influencer marketing – and specifically online influencer marketing – can be attributed to:

The public’s mass adoption of social communications and networking
The brand’s lack of understanding of social media nuances
The brand’s continuing struggle to monetize social media
The marketers need for quick fixes and quick results

Klout plays on these trends and promises brands they can connect them with those who will positively impact their business’s sales and profitability. If not, why would anyone pay top dollar to access the Klout-annointed?

Is that blind faith well placed?

Even if you would accept that the social concept of influence can be accurately and scientifically measured with limited or sporadic data points (and let’s face it, it can’t), please consider:

1. Klout is a game. Klout plays on the vanity of individuals through various gamification techniques, which encourages those individuals to change their social behaviours in order to receive the perceived clout and “perks” awarded to those who play the game well. The fact that the game can be, well, gamed should raise serious questions in the minds of brand marketers when considering this channel for their marketing strategy and budget.

2. Undefined Context. The context of the influence is loosely – if at all – defined. Of bigger concern, the fact that who is being influenced is even less defined. For example, the king of all influencers on Klout is Justin Beiber with a perfect game score of 100. Brands are rewarding high-scorers like him with upgrades on hotel accommodations or special privileges on airplanes. Upon receiving such a perk, the hope is that The Biebs will Tweet: “This is a great hotel, you should check it out” and his followers would flock. Given that his followers are predominately pre-teen girls, the likelihood that his advertisement will have his audience pulling out their credit cards seems unrealistic. Granted that Justin is an extreme example, the point is still relevant. Where’s the audience context that is demanded in any other form of marketing plan or budget allocation?

3. Troubled History. Their self-professed “standard in influence measurement” is based on experimental and frequently changing algorithms (anyone see the contraction here?) that have caused scores to dramatically jump or decrease over night. Just the fact that we’ve proven you can game your score would have scientists releasing their rats and refocusing on another hypothesis. Yet marketers continue to believe, or maybe it’s hope?

What I believe this all boils down to is: if the individuals that Klout is selling access to are playing the game, tweeting whenever and whatever it takes to increase their score, limiting their conversations to only those that are more influential than them…are they really influencing anyone? Can you count on those people to be honestly and genuinely influential if they’re “Under the Influence” of the Klout game?

What do you think?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Image Credit: The Aminated Woman

Brand Communities - Your Sandbox or Mine?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Community: a term that has been given new life in our vocabulary of late. The common connotation today is a collective of enthusiastic people organized around the lifestyle, activities and/or ethos of a brand in an online channel(s).

The term “community” has been anointed with a multitude of mystical powers thanks to Web 2.0 and Social Networking. For Brands, communities have become a new ecosystem to cultivate for both customer acquisition and customer development campaigns. For individuals, communities are represented by one’s personal “social graph”.

These communities have created the necessity for corporate community mangers and fuelled blog content from the Rules of Community Management to proper etiquette within them. Yet, there’s one fundamental question that seems to have been mostly overlooked in favor of technology and rules.

My Sandbox or Yours?

Brands create communities where customers, employees and other stakeholders are encouraged to engage the brand and each other. The promise is that these connections will provide crowdsourcing for new product ideas, increase brand awareness or cultivate loyalty. Whether they admit it or not, most executives look to these channels to become prime hunting grounds for sales opportunities.

So is creating a brand community the best strategy? Consider:

1. The Development Costs & Effort

A community isn’t built over night and with the wave of a magic wand. It requires investment of time and money to develop the communication strategy, the infrastructure and marketing efforts to attract members.

2. The Maintenance

Once developed and critical mass is achieved, you have to maintain interest and participation. For every successful brand community, there are dozens that fizzled out soon after their launch because they could not sustain interest or provide ongoing value to their members.

Big investment. Big Risk. And possibly long-lasting brand damage since a community with little-to-no engagement is a black eye on brands.

The alternative? Instead of creating an ecosystem to which you pull customers, create a strategy that allows you to connect to – and through – your customers’ individual communities. Allow your message to surf the customers' social graphs, which have existing, well-formed connections, built-in trust and don’t require your effort to maintain. If successful, this approach has the possibility of dramatically increasing your reach through their online and offline pathways; a spider web of instant connections.

The rewards earned by this strategy are tenfold; however, creating it requires true marketing innovation and possibly a complete rethink of your marketing strategy. It requires the courage to put the customer at the center of your communication ecosystem as opposed to your own properties.

Watch for an upcoming post where we'll outline some of the strategies and tactics.

What say you? Wishful thinking? Or the future of community outreach?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The Seven Rs of Modern Day Communications

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Each year sees a new trend in the evolution of business communications. Over the past years people have called out Unified Communications, Cloud Computing and more recently Mobility and SIP-Enabled Infrastructure. Most predictions focus on the evolution of the technology rather than the cultural changes that impact how we communicate within our organizations and beyond.

Have technologies evolved to meet the changing needs of business communications or has technology inspired shifts in communication patterns? Whichever camp you’re in, it’s important to take a breath, look up and scan the landscape so that you can best understand your employees' and customers' motivations, experiences and communication expectations. It is this realization that will enable you to improve how your business communicates, not an in-depth understanding of the underlying technology.

I took my own advice recently and looked up and across the communication horizon. What I saw is encapsulated in my Seven Rs of Modern Day Communications. They’re listed below for your consideration.

1. Rapidity
Speed is the hallmark of today’s business communications. Due to social networks or mobile technologies, the expectation is clear: I want answers and I want them now. Haste is challenging quality at every turn. Finding the balance is the corporation’s next big trial.

2. Relevance
Technology has spurred on the Big Data phenomena and crammed data stores with transactional, social and profile data on consumers, employees and other stakeholders. So much so that software (and budgets) cannot adequately mine the horde of data sets for nuggets of insight. On-demand contextual data will be the focus of productivity and strategy sessions in boardrooms across the country. Meta-information will supplement voice, video, chat and text communications to provide greater context for customer experience design.

3. Relations
The phrase “Content is King” was prevalent throughout 2011 and if it was accurate then, in 2012 Context is its Queen. Social interaction and customer care have become completely intertwined. Big Data requires a new understanding of the relationship between the content generated and collected among sales, marketing and customer service teams.

4. Reach
The proliferation of screens, especially mobile devices including smart phones and tablets, has added a new dimension to content creation and display. Multi-device formatting is quickly becoming the war chant of Customer Experience strategist globally. Blog posts for example must be written in various formats to ensure proper engagement across different platforms but this is no longer limited to text. Content translation to sensory preferences such as visual and audio mediums including podcasts, videos, audio, etc. is a newly mandated content strategy.

5. Resonance
“Cutting through the clutter” has been a catch phrase since the 90s but it’s no longer sufficient. Yes, content must be visible and stand out from the plethora of mixed media messages we’re bombarded with daily but it must now also impact the reader on an emotional level if it is to solicit any advocacy through sharing, commenting, tweeting, etc.

6. Responsive
Related to point #1 above, our 24/7 connectivity will increase the demand for unique content creation and content support. Front line customer service teams will have their hands full identifying, qualifying and addressing the flood in incoming messages that they’ll require 24/7 support services from content producers and eventually content analysts. Same applies to the sales and marketing teams.

7. Results
Lastly and maybe most importantly, will be the shift in focus to Content ROI. As businesses move along the strategy continuum from social media to social business, CEOs and CIOs will demand a demonstration of the financial value that social communications drive to the bottom line. “Measurable Content” and “Profitable Content” will be new buzz words shortly.

Content Marketing has hit the big leagues. And with it comes added pressure to perform, complete with greater risks and even greater rewards.

Do you agree with the Seven Rs listed above? Others you'd add? Some you'd challenge? I'd love to hear from you.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Join us Wed, May 2nd, 2012 at 8 PM EST for the #bizforum Twitter debate where we’ll explore the future of business communications. Follow along on TweetChat or your favorite Twitter application.

Is Niche the new Big in Social Networks?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

How big is too big for a social network before it loses its value to the community?

Clearly investors and maybe even advertisers will argue that it can never be too big. Certainly the valuation of social media behemoth: Facebook supports this argument. But wasn’t that what was said of MySpace before Facebook? At some point a network becomes too big to provide a valuable customer experience, thus setting itself up for other smaller networks to step in and glamour members into switching?

There are lessons that can be learned by considering parallels in other areas of our lives. Cities, for example become too big, too noisy and too crowded, eventually pushing residents and businesses out to the suburbs in search of a better quality of life. Initially a city grows out of necessity and opportunity which quickly turns to greed at which point consideration for the resident’s experience in living and working there becomes a secondary priority.

Larger businesses who establish market dominance and/or monopolies of sorts eventually become slaves to profit generation rather than customer experience and customer value building – the strategies that initially drove their success.

They rest on their laurels and downplay the threat from smaller competitors and bank on the established loyalty of its customers. We need look no further than the recent fall of Research in Motion (RIM), which once owned the smart phone market and enjoyed fierce loyalty from its users, to understand this universal truism.

So is bigger really better when it comes to social networks?

MySpace, which once enjoyed the “behemoth social media” label that is now owned by Facebook, has been left for dead by the side of the road. While the business of MySpace continues, when compared to the reigning king of social networks it might as well be dead. Or is it?

MySpace may once again prove to be a case study and leader in the social networking space. Under its new ownership, the original “big social network” is reinventing what it invented so many years ago: a focused community of like-minded people connecting with each others who share their interests. It claims to now be a music and entertainment hub, streaming music and video and providing artist pages and radio stations. A hub? Isn’t that simply a new word for social network? A rose by any other name…

MySpace once again re-inventing the model?

Regardless, reverting to its original niche focus has seen MySpace’s fortunes change. There are now 40 million users visiting the site monthly in the US alone; a far cry from Facebook’s numbers but enough to sustain a valuable service to its committed community and a profitable enterprise for its owners.

I argue that behemoth social networks will eventually implode under their own weight and, like MySpace’s refocus on their original niche customer experience , a multitude of smaller, more focused networks will rise in their wake. Simply look at the growing popularity of niche networks such as Twitter, Twitpic, LinkedIn and Pinterest. They’re growing – and thriving – despite the growth of Facebook. In fact, I believe they are growing in popularity because of Facebook. People are overwhelmed with the information, media and entertainment overload that Facebook has become and are gravitating to narrower communities.

Marketers must be cognisant of the trend currents in this space. There are no sacred cows in social media and Facebook is certainly not an irreplaceable deity (sorry Zuch). The point being that social networks, like cities and big businesses before them must not lose sight of the customer experience in their never-ending quest for lower costs, bigger margins and greater profits.

What do you think? Is niche the new big in social networks?

Sam Fiorella - Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Social Business. Enter the Matrix.

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You have a choice. Take the Blue Pill or the Red Pill.

Take the Blue Pill and Run on the Corporate Wheel.

Acme’s Sales Executive Ted has a conversation with a prospective customer about industry needs, which sparks an idea for an innovative product upgrade. He e-mails the idea to Susan his Sales Manager, who likes the idea and suggests it to Sam the Sales VP at the following month’s regional sales meeting. Sam, knowing the corporate policy well writes a brief and “inter-offices” the document to Sheila, the Chief Operating Officer who files it with her assistant for inclusion in the quarterly product review meeting…

…fast-forward 12 months and that idea was downgraded into obscurity because of current product development issues and priorities or won favor but is in “committee planning”, waiting for systematic review, comments and rebuttals throughout the corporate chain.

In the meantime, an upstart competitor is winning market share by bringing the new product to life and hired Ted, who was “unsatisfied with the responsiveness of his former company” to sell that product to the business who inspired it in the first place.

[All names changed to protect the blissfully ignorant.]

Take the Red Pill and enter the Matrix.

Acme’s Sales Executive Ted has a conversation with a prospective customer about industry needs, which sparks an idea for an innovative product upgrade. Ted posts the idea onto an internal social network, which is read by Justine, the Product Manager, Tanya, the Customer Support Operator and Trevor, the Marketing Exec. The four exchange similar insights and their own discussions with various customer contacts. They post links to each the work each had begun.

Trevor invites his boss, Lucas the CMO into the discussion to get a reality check on what this ad-hoc cross-silo team has been brainstorming. Lucas quickly understands: the need, the opportunity, the challenges in bringing the product to market and the solutions, which he gathered from reading the team's discussion. Lucas opens an online collaboration room with the these participants and crowdsources a formal marketing plan that he presents at the next product development meeting.

…fast-forward 12 months and Acme is reporting a spike in category sales spurred on by the reintroduction and rebranding of an old product with new features. Ted receives a bonus for his efforts, additional commissions for the lift in sales.

And the upstart…oh, wait…what upstart?

Social business requires employees and managers to enter the matrix. The corporate matrix is both a culture and technology that encourages and even rewards open sharing of ideas, experiences, project statuses and, dare I say, opinions from every employee and across every silo regardless of hierarchy.

Next, it must enable on-demand committees to form around ideas not hierarchies.

Imagine. Open communication for the betterment of the business.Social Business. Revolutionary.

You have a choice. Take the Blue Pill or the Red Pill.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Follow on Twitter

The Inevitability of Google+ for the Enterprise

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Every evolution of Web technologies, applications and devices has seen businesses try to leverage the platforms to fatten their bottom line. While visionary early adopters are quick to see and jump on new trends, conservative businesses eventually – maybe reluctantly – join the fray.

As devices and technologies continue to morph and evolve at a faster and faster pace, reluctantly joining in is no longer an option. The ability to ride what my friend Steve Woodruff calls “Trend Currents” will make or break businesses.

I see Trend Currents as evolving methods of human communications and behaviors that follow technological advancements. Some will argue that technological advancements follow changes in human behaviour, but in either case seeing the Trend Current isn’t easy for most business leaders. They miss the proverbial forest for the trees. The point being that technology has increased the rate at which our communication practices change and businesses who refuse to embrace or even gamble on new innovations, channels and technologies will yield their leadership position or never achieve it.

Consider:

The World Wide Web gave us instant access to information that was previously difficult or impossible to acquire. We gained knowledge in a fraction of the time - and with much greater ease - than ever before. The Age of Information was born and changed how businesses operate.
Web technologies evolved and gave us the opportunity to instantly publish content and feed it back into the World Wide Web for others to access. Web 2.0 was born and changed how businesses communicate.
Technologies continued to evolve and we were given the option to share and discuss the content we were reading and publishing with each other. Social Media was born and changed how business MUST operate AND communicate.

We’re now trending the next evolution, what Deloitte’s Chris Heurer calls the Post-Digital Era yet I still know many businesses that are still trying to figure out how Web 2.0 can be adopted in their online communications. They're all mucking around in the weeds, playing catch up and never stop to look up and see where the currents are taking them.

The de-evolution of the Social Network

The more things change the more they stay the same. Fast forward to today and most business leaders are still so focused on catching up to the now that they are not seeing the Trend Currents.The recent Facebook vs. Google+ debate is one such example.

The focus has revolved around the question: how can any social network beat Facebook at its own game? It’s so large, so ubiquitous that no one will ever dethrone them? Even Mark Zuckerberg recently quipped: Google+ is the “little Facebook”.

What they’re not seeing is that Google+ is NOT a social network at all. People, including Mr. Zuckerberg it seems, are so wrapped up in the now that they are not seeing what’s coming. Social Networks will de-evolve from a closed “networks” to open all-encompassing communication “platforms”.

And that’s exactly where Google+ is going. It’s will be completely embedded within our daily Web & Mobile communications, not a destination where we go to grow fake vegetables and livestock or voyeuristically peek in on the lives of our old high old flings.

Google’s Chief Business Officer, Nikesh Arora describes this best: “It is a platform which allows us to bring social elements into all the services and products that we offer. So you have seen YouTube come into Google+; you’ve seen Google+ with “direct connect” go into our search business. We are trying to make sure we use social signals across all of our products... It’s not just about getting people together on one site and calling it a social network.”

Even if we were to believe Mr. Zuckerberg’s position that Google+ is a “little Facebook”, that little network controls the world’s most popular web and online marketing analytics platform and video network (to name a few) and of course the world's most used search engine….the Web’s gateway. And as it continues to merge all its properties into one highly connected online infrastructure – through every communication device we own – it will become “the air we breathe online”. Yet most businesses are still trying to figure out Facebook and have barely given Google+ a second thought.

What can a business learn from this?

Your corporation’s online presence, the entire Web in fact is no longer information-based but social-based. And the implication for business is huge. The Web is rapidly becoming less about data and more about connections. Corporate blogs are already on track to replace the corporate Web site as the brand’s most visited web property.

The way customers search the Web has evolved. Increasingly, they are searching for opinions, points of view and recommendations beyond static information. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making way for Social-SEO, which references the inclusion of our social graph’s actions, history and comments in Google’s ranking algorithms.

Lastly, consider that it took Facebook 10 months to reach 1 million users. Analysts predict Google+ will reach 100 million users by the end of the year.

Still think Google+ is a gamble?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Follow on wwww.twitter.com/samfiorella

Check out some of the early-adopter brands banking on Google+ in my post here.

Does Your Business Speak the Technological-Native Tongue of your Employees?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Businesses are undergoing a forced shift towards the Social Enterprise; one where personnel, communications and operations are no longer siloed into departmental functions but organized on-demand around ideas, issues and opportunities that collaborate across silos.

Employees, especially Millenials (now the largest workforce population in North America), are accustomed to “speaking in headlines” via Tweets, status updates and TXT messages, comprehending complex concepts by scanning bite-sized information vs. whitepapers, and crowdsourcing decisions through family, friends and colleagues via the Web.

The rapid adoption of social communication channels by customers has forced their collective voice into the Enterprise’s operations. Some analogies have even been drawn that demonstrate the customer’s voice equal to managers around the boardroom table. “Business must speak the language of the customer” is the cry of many marketers today, but what of employee’s language?

Surely no business can successfully open itself up to the customer’s voice in business operations if it doesn’t first consider the changes in how the employees communicate? The new native tongue of employees is technologically and socially based and so future enterprises must realign their operations around its people and how they communicate vs. the traditional operational functions.

The Cultural Impact on Employees

Aside from the proven efficiencies that such an organizational structure could deliver across the entire corporation, think about the psychological impact on employees. An internal communication structure formed to mimic how employees think and communicate in their personal lives will impart a community feel that is current and comfortable to them. It will encourage employees to communicate openly across silos and hierarchy instead of fuelling generational divides.

We know that employees engage in social networking and gaming activities in their personal time, which includes down time while at work; if not on company computers, certainly on the increasing number of mobile phones and tablets they own. The traditional communication workflow is now foreign and forcing them to communicate in a language that is not their “technological-native tongue” is counter-intuitive to employee learning and business productivity.

Bringing the Technological Mountain to Mohammed

The Social Enterprise understands that employees think and work differently than when Boomers entered the workforce. It adapts its training and internal business operations to the employee’s physiological and social way of thinking and working, not vice-versa. It brings the technological-mountain to Mohammed. Below are 3 examples to illustrate this concept.

Social Networks
Internal social networks mimic the communication style and technologies that Millennials are accustomed to and promotes greater cross-functional communication while keeping the legal team happy. For example, Telus, a telecom giant in Canada deployed “Telus Buzz” a Twitter-like internal micro blogging application that allows employees to share the status of current projects, initiate brainstorming sessions and alert teams across multiple departments of opportunities or issues as they arise.

Continuing its effort to communicate across silos, it developed “Telus Tube”, an internal You-Tube-like video network used for training, ideation and customer experience sharing. Along with the option to rate, comment and share internally, these internal networks create a knowledge center that is built from real-time customer-to-employee, employee-to-employee, and employee-to-management engagements.

Gaming

Gaming is no longer the domain of Gen X males holed up in their parent’s basement. Mobile and Social Networks have expanded the popularity and use of online games to both sexes of all ages (can you say Farmville?). Further, the psychological triggers and motivations used in these games to increase participation (read: addiction) has crossed over into main-stream marketing and operational practices, now referred to as “gamification”.

Imagine the impact of applying gamification to internal, social-based training games that provide user- and industry-specific context, challenges and motivations for individuals and teams. Many Enterprises including IBM are now using web-based games to train employees with greater results than traditional methods.

Mobile

The one truism in the new Social Enterprise is that solutions and content must find the employee, not the other way around. Content, training and information must be available on-demand, wherever employees are, whenever it’s needed. Employee hours are less 9-to-5 and more “as/when needed”. Customers, vendors and C-Suite executives alike expect immediate feedback and response to their every query or issue. The concept of “real-time” has been altered dramatically by social networking and mobile technologies.

Hilton Worldwide, for example, shipped iPads to their managers, pre-loaded with a variety of updatable and interactive training materials and podcasts for on-demand support. Mobile is morphing training programs from curriculum-based courses to issue-specific and available “in the field” just as the employee requires the info.

The Future?

The evolution of social, gaming and mobile technologies will continue to shape not just how people communicate, but how they think. In turn, Enterprises must continue to evolve their operations from a business-centric to employee-centric communication infrastructure if they wish to adapt. Change-averse corporations are increasingly joining the business dinosaurs in history’s timeline.

Do you see a different future for the enterprise? Can corporations function in employee-centric mode? Join the community by discussing your ideas below.

By Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Follow on Twitter

The Business Value of Proficient Tweeting

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I was recently categorized as a “social chatterbox” by a colleague, referencing my frequency of tweets and engagement with followers on Twitter.

…I’ll give you all a few moments to nod your head in agreement…

I’ll admit that for a split-second my reaction was to be insulted but that quickly passed since I’m not hung up on what people think about me but more importantly – and frankly – because being a social chatterbox has improved my business skills. Yes, Tweeting has improved my business skills, which both I and my clients benefit from.

How you ask? (OK, pretend for a moment that you asked)

Speaking in Headlines

The 140 character restriction of a tweet forces you to edit your thought down to its core meaning; the nucleus of your argument. While some call this “speaking in headlines” and criticize the medium and its posts for having little value as a result, I argue that those who learn to do it well provide more insights than those who require a 2,000 word blog post to convey a sentiment. And with the often-cited “content overload” that is modern day media, the ability to convey an impactful message in the fewest words possible is a definite virtue and business asset.

You know when you’ve been successful: a well-written Tweet elicits an intellectual and/or emotional response within your audience base, which results in replies and re-Tweets. Ambiguous Tweets fail to impact your audience and drop with a resounding thud.

The exercise of creating a tweet that connects with your audience forces you to think and re-think your understanding of the subject. It’s not uncommon for me to edit a tweet 5 or 6 times before I publish it. In each edit, I have to carefully select the words that convey my intentions in the limited space available. The act of determining appropriate wording challenges me to clarify my real thoughts on the subject. In fact, at the risk of sounding schizophrenic a Tweet has often had me

arguing with myself in order to debate what I really wish to convey.

Consolidating a sentiment down to 140 characters or less generates an internal dialogue that has been the genesis of many of the articles that I've written. Participating in Twitter conversations and chats has been the best education and inspiration for defining my point of view and advocating it on behalf of my personal and corporate brand.

And in the end that’s what it comes down to. What do you stand for? What is your point of view? With so many voices and “noise” out there, differentiating yourself and getting your message heard is becoming increasingly difficult. Proficient tweeting is an excellent resource for both sharpening your message and sharing that message with a greater audience.

What say you? What is the business value, if any, of proficient tweeting?

By Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Follow on Twitter.

Employee Brand Fumbles

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been exploring corporate risk in employee social media engagement lately and the concept of “employee brand fumbles” keeps popping into in my head. Without the proper training and support, an innocently-intentioned Tweet or Facebook status update by an employee can cause brand or financial damage to the corporation.

I’m reminded of a friend (a nurse) who posted how much he dreaded going into work one day because “the doctors hate everyone”. A simple post in a “somewhat” private network. Now consider:

3 months after that post my wife and I (both his "friends" on Facebook) were scheduled to have a baby at that hospital…we didn’t
In the same circle of friends was a union representative (also his "friend" on Facebook) who started “an investigation” into the conduct of doctors with the nurses at that hospital…it made the newspapers

Fast forward and it turns out he was just venting about one doctor who he had had some words with the day before (about a mistake that he had made).

A Brand Fumble

A fumble in (American) football occurs when the player who has possession and control of the ball loses it before being tackled or scoring. If the defensive player is successful in picking up the ball, a turnover occurs and the opposing team can take possession.

This is an excellent analogy of the social media risk employees pose to the enterprise when management does not take an active stance in educating and supporting them. Thus failing to leverage the brand’s greatest social media asset and expands their social risk gap.

The brand fumble allows competitors to "scoop up the ball" and run with the opportunity. Unwittingly, these fumbles create a corporate sieve, which allows prospect leads and existing customers to seep out.

Most employees, like my friend the nurse, don’t wish to harm the brand they work for but “fumble the brand” when not focused or trained.

A Forced Fumble

Back to Football rules: a fumble may be forced by a defensive player who either grabs or punches the ball or butts the ball with his helmet ("tackling the ball").

This is the another dynamic at play that can force brand fumbles when critics, competitors or disgruntled customers push corporate staff into online discussions they are not equipped or trained to have. Footballs tend to bounce in unpredictable ways and it’s the same with Tweets or status updates. Well-intentioned and loyal Customer Service or PR reps (for example) reach out to satiate unhappy customers or influencers, but without the proper training and content support, they could trip into a dialogue that simply fuels the fire.

The Recovery

Trying to recover a fumbled football is risky business. There are many famous examples where the player attempting to do so fumbled the ball back to the other team. (example: Dallas Cowboys defender Leon Lett fumbled during Super Bowl XXVII while celebrating during his own fumble return).

In the corporation, employees require the guidance of a social media support team to recover the fumble properly (if the ball remains loose, all players on the field move towards it creating even more chaos and more difficult for the original player to recover the ball).

In many organizations, this is being done by big-brotheresque software such as Hearsay Social, which claims to exist to “keep corporations and their employees out of trouble on the internet and turn social media into a source of brand engagement, not embarrassment”. The company reports that the software monitors employees’ engagement on Facebook and Twitter and then trains them how to send out brand messages at a local level.

In theory, this is a good idea but creates the impression among employees that they are being “watched”. And we all know perception is reality. Management must encourage employees to build their brand and customer relationships socially but must start with proactive training and guidelines, not reactive monitoring.

I’m not advocating that brands don’t monitor social media channels; clearly this is a critical PR function for brand reputation management. However, Big Brother software like Heresay actively targets employees, which discourages social engagement for fear of employer retribution. Employees can be your brand’s strongest advocates but will only do so with encouragement and training, not monitoring and policing.

In Football, "ball security" is a term used to describe the ability of a player to maintain control over the football during play and thus avoid a fumble. This is a valuable business lesson. For the enterprise, "brand security" in the employee’s social media engagement is maintained by awarding the employee your trust, encouraging them to reach out and manage online conversations – promote them even – with adequate training and policies that empower and guide them.

By Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
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*Image Credit: Max Waugh