frank: authentic branding + organizational courage through social media

frank's enterprise 2.0 bound!

It's happening June 22 - 27: JP, Elissa, Charlie and I are headed to Boston to learn lots at the enterprise 2.0 conference. We'll also launch our new "frank / inside" product: an online toolkit and community that empowers people to leverage the human and business benefits of social media within organizations.

Good timing, we think: of all the barriers you can think of, the conference white paper identifies the following as the greatest challenge in adopting or deepening e 2.0 technologies: resistance to change. We think it's the frank conversations not taking place in organizations that is the main saboteur! More on that later ...

Search  #e2conf on Twitter to join the conversation.

Check back here for sneak peeks of "frank / inside" coming soon!

- John

Twitter means business

In the spirit of sharing what we're learning, we've been emailing our favorite Twitter-means-business sites with clients & friends. Here's the list ...

So much exposure in so few characters: stay creative & stay in touch!

> visible Tweets

> add your name to the Tweeters Directory

> find people and bios on Twitter

> 50 ideas on using Twitter for business

> Twitter for Business conference

> 4 Twitter business case studies

> How a local coffee shop used Twitter to double its customers

> blackberry geeks Twitter case study

> Comcast Customer Service on Twitter

> weirdest use of Twitter I've seen so far: booked & tweeted in Denton, TX

- john

From Nike dunks to organizational culture: Zappos gets it

How do you go from zero to $1 billion in online shoe-sales revenue in eight years? In the current issue of BusinessWeek, "Game Changing Ideas for Business," Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh sums it up this way: "If we get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like the brand and the customer service will just happen."

Sound too easy to be true? Check this out: Hsieh is revealing Zappos' secret recipe through Zappos Insights. For $40 / month for an online subscription to their new site, you can directly tap into the culture and leaders of Zappos to pick up a tip or two for you own business.

I love it: transparent delivery of their transparent strategy.

These guys are not your average shoe salespeople.

- john

BE 2.0

On her site at Small Company | Big Image, Cynthia Trevino recently posted a great 3-part interview about Burns Engineering going viral with their temperature measurement expertise.

Congrats to Jim, Chuck, Jeff and the entire Burns team!

Burns Engineering is a frank client that has really opened up to the rewards that a rich, 2.0 B2B marketing campaign can deliver. As temp talk about secondary standard platinum resistance thermometers can sometimes make my head spin, I know a lot of the 2.0 marketing jargon over the past few years made you guys a bit queasy, too.

Thanks for setting clear business goals, trusting the marketing plan we co-created and having the courage to stick with the swirl and continue to lead the temp measurement conversation – and now, how that conversation is taking place in your industry.

All evidence of a great B2B 2.0 brand in my book.

- john

Millennials: Menace or Mavens?

When it comes to discussions between Millennials and their IT Managers, "open" vs. "closed" is not just about technology any more, it's about mindset.

A new article in Accenture's Outlook magazine, "Does Your Company Have an IT Generation Gap?" lays out all the ways Millennials (the generation born between 1980 - 1995, 80-million strong, many of whom are now in their 20's at work) are seriously messing with the organizational status quo.

The zinger for me: "The way they use technology causes them to think and act differently." They're the first "entirely technologically savvy generation, " says consultant Cam Marston. "They act as if they were born with a new strand of DNA."

All of which old-school managers find pretty challenging. It's not that they're not smart, old-school managers. It's just that many of the systems, structures, protocols and policies that they helped create are now getting in the way of Millennials' nature to work faster, smarter, more creatively.

Time to get over it.

Most aren't, however, which may be the explanation for so much of the Millennial reporting being filled with scary scenarios and adversarial headlines:

Washington Post: "Boomers Had Their Day. Make Way for Millennials."

60 Minutes: "The Millennials Are Coming" (story opens with "Stand back all bosses!")

Radar Online: "A Call to Arms Against the Millennials"

Who's writing this stuff? Definitely not the leaders trying to create "The Enterprise of the Future" as we wrote about in our last post. They know you have to disrupt to innovate and there's no question Millennials are willing to oblige.

As a 45-year-old co-creator of frank, I'm learning to let go of a lot of my traditional ways of doing things and creating space for the emergence of bright people and their ideas.

Manage. Control. Direct. Supervise. Those are verbs I've ditched from my old job description.

Bottom line: You have to transform yourself before you can allow others to help you transform your business.

Vision-setting. Letting go. Listening. Inspiring. Challenging. Tweaking. Supporting. Those are the characteristics I'm honing as I collaborate with talented people of all ages in this new economy who have new ways of thinking, doing and creating.

The Accenture article also reminds us that "high-performance businesses see uncertain economic times as an opportunity to tap into new sources of talent and to equip their people with the right capabilities to anticipate and satisfy changing customer needs."

Next to compelling business objectives and a clear strategic map, maybe the best capability senior leaders can offer Millennials is an open mind.

It's easy. Be transparent (post graphics courtesy of Norton's – very cool!). Be available for flat, frank conversations – online and off. Become aware of your own tech resistances and gently let go of them. Tinker with the most interesting stuff at midnight. And most importantly, learn to laugh at, value and leverage M's new of ways of working. As Robert Lanham describes in his above Radar Online piece: "They think updating a spreadsheet while posting to a Twitter account about gossip on perezhilton.com is an essential corporate skill."

Could be. I've been doing a lot of things the same way for a long time, so it's worth the shot.

- John

It's official: CEO's don't view demanding customers as a threat, but as an opportunity to differentiate.

Download the 2009 IBM Global CEO Study, "The Enterprise of the Future" for all the insights. And here are some biased highlights to ponder ...

CEO's are finally admitting that there's value to this whole "transparency" thing. I'm not sure they're ready to go all the way with a concept frank calls "C2C" marketing, (CEO to Customer), but hey, openly admitting that passionate, vocal, viral customers can be allies vs. enemies is a good thing. (Like they had a choice anyway.)

The study also reports that the "change gap" tripled from 2006 to 2008, that is, the difference between a CEO's expected substantial change in their organization over the next three years vs. his / her perceived ability to successfully manage that change. The numbers: 83% of CEOs expect substantial change, yet only 61% of them said they've had success with change in the past – thus a "change gap" of 22% compared to 8% in the 2006 study. In short, they've got their work cut out for them.

And three of the five characteristics of "The Enterprise of the Future" that most interested me were:

- Hungry for change
- Innovative beyond customer imagination
- Disruptive by nature

Nice platitudes. But how do you actually kickstart this kind of mindset and behavior within an organization? You start cultivating "user participation systems" (as Intuit co-founder, Scott Cook,dubbed them in his HBR 10/28 article) inside and outside of your company. And in frank lingo, you aim for an organization that shines from the inside out: leverage enterprise 2.0 technology to empower employees to naturally collaborate among themselves and with their best customers.

Co-creating with your best customers can be very rewarding. They don't work at your place. They don't play office politics. They don't care about year-end bonuses. They're just incredibly passionate about your product and service and are always willing to tell you about the pros and cons of your stuff straight up, real time, with amazingly intimate detail.

(Exactly how to prioritize and channel all that input is another new 2.0 skill leadership and managers need to learn.)

Yet a few companies in the IBM report are listening to their customers and leveraging what they're hearing, allowing "customers to swap roles for much deeper involvement." (The report features the story of how Nintendo tweaked the Wii with "gamer Sages," for example.) Now that's a way to surge ahead of the competition during these fascinating times. In a 12/08 MediaPost article, Diane Mermigas introduces a new KPI to quantify this strategy: ROI (Return on Involvement). Definitely something to tinker with.

Then last week I heard about loyalty clubs and member events (lush environments for gathering rich customer insights) being trimmed and killed altogether by a major automaker and an RV manufacturer. I'd call that a foolproof way to becoming a non-existent enterprise of the future.

- John

frank's out there!

It's happening everywhere: fewer people are being asked to deliver more than ever. People in organizations of all shapes and sizes, in all industries have to rally and come up with creative, cost-effective, revenue- generating ideas to keep their companies (and themselves!) as competitive as possible during these challenging times.

Enter Enterpise 2.0: organizations defined by Andrew McAfee as "freeform, frictionless and emergent," leveraging new technologies to "create brands that shine from the inside out," as we like to say.

Given the internal turbulence of so many corporations, frank's out there sharing what we're learning about how to thrive in these times and beyond. Here's where we'll be ... hope to meet you soon!

   February 5/09: HR Executive Forum, Minneapolis

  March 11/09: OD Network, San Diego

   March 25/09: Biz Behind The Buzz Workshop, Minneapolis

- john

What's the business behind the buzz? Organizational leaders will find out 10/28 in Minneapolis.

Just popped up the new registration site for the enterprise 2.0 workshop we're co-presenting with Zanby in Minneapolis on Oct. 28th.

Our gut is that organizational leaders are about 3 - 5 years behind marketing folks on leveraging technology to meet their organizational objectives. That's why at Oct. 28th, we're going to make social media answer to real business needs. Yes, it can do that.

In fact, attendees can take their pick: depending on what folks tell us they want to focus on that day, we'll have in-depth sessions covering these vital HR/OD topics:

- employee engagement

- leadership communication

- knowledge retention

- recruiting and new employee retention

- training and development

- project collaboration

Lead presenters will be Jacqueline Meyers from frank and Stacy Starkka from Zanby.

Hope you can join us. It's a cool opportunity (with happy hour to follow!) to learn about enterprise 2.0: the web for grown-ups.

- John

Members of MN OD Network avoid buzzword brain freeze!

So many buzzwords ... so many possibilities!

But at last night's MN OD Network meeting, JP and Elissa avoided the jargon and focused on the business benefits of enterprise 2.0 (wait – is that a buzzword?).

Instead of flinging around techie buzzwords untethered to a vision, strategy or big-pic understanding of where all the new social media tools fit, JP and Elissa shared frank's integrated perspective on how to leverage all the new stuff to help organizations reinforce their culture and foster collaboration.

Thanks to all who joined the conversation and asked the tough questions!

Top-of-the list concerns and inquiries by MN OD members?
- will this stuff ever be obsolete?
- how do I set up a wiki?
- how do I use the right stuff and not confuse employees?
- what's the right mix of traditional communications and emerging social media mix? (good one!)
- what's the value proposition of all this?
- are there legal concerns to be aware of?
- how to I get started and drive sustainability?

Lucky we had two hours and 70 slides! No doubt it was a diverse audience of OD experts with a diverse knowledge of enterprise 2.0 opportunities – pretty representative of the national audience in general.

So how about you? What's your social media savvy?

Have fun taking the quiz we shared with members of the MN OD Network last night:

Download frankQUIZforMN-ODnetwork.pdf

And if you're stumped by any of the questions, email us at info@areyoufrank.com for answers or catch us presenting at the American Marketing Association meeting in Minneapolis on Nov. 13 or at our own frank / zanby full-day seminar we're planning for mid-October. (again, email us at info@areyoufrank.com if you'd like to join us!)

- John

Podcamp Buzz

My two cents: Podcamp Boston needs to be a week long. A weekend is just too danged short for connecting with all the cool folks doing all manner of fun and innovative stuff! The focus is (understandably) on the technology -- a deep dive into the "how" of each vertical area of social media. frank's interest is more in the area of user adoption, and so far there's not a lot of conversation in that arena. It'll be interesting to see how the conversations evolve in the coming years. Meanwhile I plan to keep in touch with lots of new Twitter friends!

If you're interested in tech strategy or adoption, or if we didnt' get a chance to connect at Podcamp, let's keep the conversation going!