Today, it was made very clear, again, the importance of “conversation”. On one of the social sites, which features blogging, I frequent now and then a post was made regarding the “relevancy” of web conversations. The writer used several corporate luminaries to make the point that corporations should engage their audiences in an ongoing conversation, to which I whole heartily agree. He went on to describe a conversation that he was having with a “$60 Billion” global company which wanted assistance with education and related issues.
“The executives were surprised (that their Alexa score was lower than the social site that the post was made on) and indicated they needed to work on Search Engine Optimization to increase the traffic to their web site, so the blogger wrote. The blogger in question then responded “no, you need to learn how to have meaningful conversations and create relevant content that appeals to your customers, suppliers and employees.”
What makes this so serendipitous for me is that I recently read C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy’s “The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers”. Their book’s purpose is to establish a “…guide [for] business leaders in their search for new strategic capital, helping them to break out of their old entrenched ways and discover new ones” through conversations with the same audience the blogger in question suggest.
In addition, I am in the process of writing on the subject of how authentic leaders should establish both a comfort in social media conversations personally (which might include blogging or might not, but surely includes joining or even forming social networks that they participate in fully) and a framework for them to adopt. Therefore, this opportunity regarding conversations is a perfect topic for me to posit some of my ideas for testing.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
It is traditional to categorize enterprises as business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), decidedly putting "business" first and taking a firm-centric view of the economy. This premise – firm-centric- is what makes the above mentioned executive’s surprise understandable. Many people in decreasing number of firms still believe in just the same way – firms produce value and the consumer exchanges money for the value. So the phenomenon of consumers and the firm involved jointly creating value that is unique to the individual consumer and sustainable to the firm still has some more convincing and spreading to do before it becomes a “given” such as the firm-centric idea has.
The challenge to this traditional notion of value creation - namely that firms create and exchange value with consumers - I am suggesting that, increasingly, the joint efforts of the consumer and the firm - the firm's extended network and consumer communities together - will co-create value through personalized experiences that are unique to each individual consumer, and this outlines the conversational stage that I believe the blogger is suggesting that the firm needs to engage.
This does not suggest, at least from my perspective, that one day all firms’ will simply “flip the script” – not by a long shot. What I am suggesting is that situations and certain leaders will emerge so as to affect the change positively as it is taking place. This view underscores my rationale for linking leadership to the production of social media – developing a strategic personae and corporate stand. Hence, educational programs that produce outcomes that are purposed to the ends stated in the corporate stand and by leadership through an authentic voice.
Why Should A Leader Develop A Network?
Networks deliver three unique advantages: private information, access to diverse skill sets, and power. Executives see these advantages at work every day, but might not pause to consider how their networks regulate them.
Private information, the currency earned from your reputation, is gathered from networked personal contacts – virtual or otherwise, who can offer something unique that cannot be found in the public domain, such as the release date of a new product, unpublished software code, or knowledge about what a particular interviewer looks for in candidates. Private information, therefore, can give a leader an edge, though it is more subjective than public information because usually it is not verified by an independent party, such as Dun & Bradstreet. Consequently, the value of your private information to others—and the value placed by others’ on that private information depends "your reputation" which can does meet expectations can affect your reputation and creditability. Following the "law of reciprocity" this in turn affects who exists in your network, therefore, can help you develop more complete, creative, and unbiased views on issues. And when you trade information or skills with people whose experiences differ from your own, you provide one another with unique, exceptionally valuable resources. So in this regard you have to with hold some the more speculative information.
Linus Pauling, one of only two people to win a Nobel Prize in two different areas and considered one of the towering geniuses of the twentieth century, attributed his creative success not to his immense brainpower or luck but to his diverse contacts: “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
Leaders don’t demonstrate power head-to-head anymore; they go network-to-network. That makes each role more complicated, as the ancient Chinese board game Go demonstrates. The object of the game is to occupy territory and capture your opponent’s stones by surrounding them and removing them from the board. The board on the left shows a traditional grid; the board on the right shows a grid hypothetically designed for a complex network, with large hubs, small clusters, and long-range links. On the left, traditional strategies call for economies of scale, or deriving advantage from a greater number of adjacent stones. On the right, new strategies call for economies of scope, or deriving advantage from long-range connections between cleverly placed clusters.
So what is the Social Media platform actually?
A “social network site” is a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile.
To clarify:
1. Profile. A profile includes an identifiable handle (either the person’s name or nick), information about that person (e.g. age, sex, location, interests, etc.). Most profiles also include a photograph and information about last login. Profiles have unique URL s that can be visited directly.
2. Traversable, publicly articulated social network. Participants have the ability to list other profiles as “friends” or “contacts” or some equivalent. This generates a social network graph which may be directed (“attention network” type of social network where friendship does not have to be confirmed) or undirected (where the other person must accept friendship). This articulated social network is displayed on an individual’s profile for all other users to view. Each node contains a link to the profile of the other person so that individuals can traverse the network through friends of friends of friends….
3. Semi-persistent public comments. Participants can leave comments (or testimonials, guest book messages, etc.) on others’ profiles for everyone to see. These comments are semi-persistent in that they are not ephemeral but they may disappear over some period of time or upon removal. These comments are typically reverse-chronological in display. Because of these comments, profiles are a combination of an individual’s self-expression and what others say about that individual.
At the same time, it’s critical to point out what social network sites are most definitely NOT. They are NOT the same as all sites that support social networks or all sites that allow people to engage in social networking. Your mobile phone, your email, your instant message client… these all support the articulation of social networks (address books) but they do not let you publicly display them in relation to a profile for others to traverse. MUD s/MOOs, BBS es, chat-rooms, bulletin boards, mailing lists, MMORPGS… these all allow you to meet new people and make friends but they are not social network site.
While it’s great to talk about all of these things as part of a broader “social software” or “social media” phenomenon, there are also good reasons to have a label to address a subset of these sites that are permitting very particular practices. This allows academics, politicians, technologists, educators, and others discuss how structural shifts are prompting different kinds of behaviors. (What happens when people publicly articulate their relationships? How do these systems change the rules of virality because the network is visible? Etc.) Because of this, I don’t want the slippage to be too great because people are using terrible terms or because people want their site to fit into the category of what’s currently cool.
What’s the currency in this Social Media stuff?
The well springs of influence initially arises from a cohort that recognizes your name or handle. What we learn quickly is that who we are is, in the virtual world as in the physical world, the sum of whom or how many others describe us as being. You wonder from one site to the other displaying this feature or that, but never “you” – never how the selected interest operates in relationship with other interests to compose you: the art piece!
Oh my, but do you fear that if they saw the complete picture, would there be more or less creditability in your account. Are you Dorian Grey, Medusa, or some other monster? Would you rather leave this image to chance, never known or stood for, but only inferred? Or are you prepared to work with and incorporate your cohort in the establishment of a lasting reputation – this you can do in a combination of either hard tactics (coerce – bribe, tic-for-tac, market share dominance, … etc) or soft tactics (conversation – mutual interest, collaboration, friendship, …etc) or, as I think prudent some mixture between these two tactical options.
What is the definition of reputation according the Corporate Reputation Review?
• Derivative, iteratively between you and the organization you represent
• External reflection of an individual’s internal identity - itself the outcome of how others make sense of your activities from their worldview.
• Developed from prior resource allocations and histories and constitute mobility barriers that constrain both the individual’s own actions and rivals' reactions
• Summarize assessments of past performance by diverse evaluators who assess individual's ability and potential to satisfy diverse criteria.
• Derive from multiple but related images of the individual among all people with a stake, and inform about their overall attractiveness to employers, consumers, investors, and local communities. Simplifying the complex construct of performance helps observers deal with the complexity of the market place.
To summarize: reputation is embodiment of two fundamental dimensions of individual’s effectiveness: an appraisal of the individual's economic performance, and an appraisal of individual's success in fulfilling social responsibilities.
Standing for the Organization and It standing for you
So your role as leader is entwined with the organization you lead. The way it behaves reflects on you and what you do is reflected on it. Now we can return to our earlier concern for organizations engaging in conversations with its customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. No longer random talk about matters of little consequences for the leader him or herself but immanent to the formation of their personal reputation.
The first issue for the firm is to establish a base case to satisfy – the traditional reputation notion states:
1. When the quality of a company's products and services is not directly observable, high-quality producers are said to invest in reputation-building in order to signal their quality.
2. In contrast, low-quality producers avoid investing in reputation-building because they do not foresee repeat purchases.
This leads me to suggest that there is a threshold of value that has to be crossed before an organization leaves the view of low-quality to explore other options such co-value creation. Even after crossing this imaginary line what’s the point that a conversation should produce. It is said that when a product brand is tightly associated with the job for which is meant to be hired its called purpose brand.
In this sense the purpose brand directly relates the reputation of the firm and its leader. So the conversation, if it is an aspect of the marketing program, then also needs to be judge by this standard. The beauty of the internet is that metrics can be measured in real time. So if marketing, product development, or some other department needs to test this idea of that it can learn from the social media strategy what it needs to know.
In summation, the conversation that we begun with can be justified based in a leader’s reputation with the stakeholder’s of the firm and his or her own personal state of value as well as in the firm’s attempt to improve its products purposing process. In either case, the leader needs to be secure in the approach.
The next step in this process is to define the process that the leader can have confidence – that’s providence of a strategist, such as my self. If you have an interest in pursuing such a strategy conversation I invite you to send me an email and we can explore the opportunities for conversation that makes sense for you and your organization.
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