Video Clip of the Month: Concentrate on Relationships

February 1, 2012 by

Groundswell is so far the best book on social media I’ve ever read. Written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (and recently updated), the book is a must read for anyone who pieces together coherant communications strategies.

My favorite quote — “concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies” — supports the book’s four steps for social media planning: (1) people, (2) objectives, (3) strategy, and (4) technology. It also sets the stage for a brilliant section on engaging audiences online based on the communications problem you face:

  • Awareness (people don’t know about you): Try a viral video, assuming you can come up with a brilliant idea that grabs your audience’s attention.
  • Word-of-mouth (you need people to talk to each other): If you want to be hot and have people talking about how hot you are, go with Facebook, Twitter, or other appropriate social networks.
  • Complexity (you have complicated problems to communicate): Start blogging to reach multiple sets of customers or explain your complex products or services. As an added bonus, blog posts often get featured in traditional media and web searches favor them.
  • Accessibility (your audience members are stubbornly insistent on listening to each other, not you): Create an online community where your audience members can support one another or join one they’ve already created for themselves.

Naturally, when I ran across a video interview of Ms. Li about focusing on online relationships, not technologies, I had to pick it for February 2012 video clip of the month. As an added bonus, the video ends with practical advice for parents raising children in the digital age. Enjoy it below (and read or reread the updated Groundswell if you haven’t already)!

You turn! Do you think concentrating on relationships is good advice? Please share your comments.

Filed Under: Books, Communications, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Understanding Values from Around the World

January 29, 2012 by

Ronald does the wai.Today, every organization is a global brand. Thanks to Web 2.0, people from around the world can access your content, discover and interact with other members of your online communities, and add their own voice to the conversation.

This is exciting but also a little unnerving. How do you relate to people from another culture? What do you say, or not say, to start a conversation off right? Are there cultural taboos you need to be aware of?

Fortunately, a psychologist named Dr. Geert Hofstede set out to answer these types of questions for IBM in the 1970s and his research on cultures and their value systems remains an enormous help in understanding cultural differences. Because even genuinely small cultural mistakes can have enormous consequences, his dimensions of culture framework should be required reading for all social media practitioners.

The dimensions of culture are:

  • Power distance: This dimension reflects how a society handles inequalities among people. People in societies with a high power distance (e.g., Malaysia, Guatemala, the Philippines, etc.) accept a hierarchical order where everybody has a place, and the hierarchical order requires no justification. In societies with low power distance (e.g., Austria, Israel, Denmark, etc.), people strive to equalise the distribution of power and demand justification for inequalities of power.
  • Individualism vs. collectivism: Societies on the high side of this dimension (e.g., the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, etc.) believe individuals should take care of themselves and their immediate families only. Societies on the low end (e.g., Guatemala, Ecuador, Pakistan, etc.) prefer tightly-knit social frameworks where individuals can expect their relatives or members of a particular in-group to look after them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
  • Uncertainty avoidance: This dimension is about how a society deals with ambiguity. Should people try to control the future or just let it happen? Societies exhibiting strong uncertainty avoidance (e.g., Greece, Portugal, Guatemala, etc.) maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour and are intolerant of unorthodox behavior and ideas. Societies on the low end maintain a more relaxed attitude and value practice over principles (e.g., Denmark, Jamaica, Singapore, etc.)
  • Masculinity vs. femininity: The masculinity side of this dimension (e.g., Japan, Hungary, Venezuela, etc.) represents a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material reward for success. Society at large is more competitive. Its opposite, femininity (e.g., Norway, Sweden, Costa Rica, etc.), stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak, and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.
  • Long-term vs. short-term orientation: This dimension is about a society’s search for virtue. Societies with a short-term orientation (e.g., United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela, etc.) strive to establish absolute truth. Their people exhibit great respect for traditions, save little for the future, and focus on achieving quick results. Societies with a long-term orientation (e.g., China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.) believe truth depends on situation, context, and time. Their people adapt traditions quickly to changed conditions, tend to save and invest money, and look to the long term for achieving results.
  • Indulgence vs. restraint (the recently added sixth dimension): Societies with high indulgence (e.g., Venezuela, Mexico, El Salvador, etc.) believe in enjoying leisure and allow relatively free gratification of human drives. Societies with high restraint (e.g., Ukraine, Latvia, Egypt, etc.) suppress gratification and live under strict social norms.

Pretty enlightening, huh! When you grow up in a culture, it’s pretty easy to take your norms of behavior for granted and not realize there are so many completely different ways to perceive things. Check out the free online tool at the Geert Hofstede website where you can compare two cultures against each other and learn more.

Which dimension of culture do you think sparks the most cultural misunderstanding?

Filed Under: Communications Tagged With: , , ,

An Influencer Is an Influencer Is an Influencer?

January 16, 2012 by

Roses“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” is a Gertrude Stein quote we’ve all heard reminding us things are what they are no matter what you call them.

In the communications world, however, the term “influencer” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing. One communications practitioner may define and apply the influencer concept in a way worlds apart from a second practitioner, though both are trying to harness influencers to change ideas, motivate new behaviors,  reach potential buyers, etc. one of three ways:

  • Communicating to influencers, to increase awareness of a brand or cause within the influencer community
  • Communicating through influencers, using influencers to increase awareness of a brand or cause amongst focal groups/target markets
  • Communicating with influencers, turning influencers into advocates of the brand or cause

Obviously, strategies to harness influencers would be very different depending on how you intend to tap them, not to mention who you think they are. Nevertheless, the term influencer seems to be thrown around indiscriminately these days as communications practitioners adjust to changes in technology, especially social media.

My personal take on the influencer equation is definitions/contexts generally lump into three broad categories:

  • Household names: celebrities, musicians, artists, and politicians who are assumed to drive thought and action of people they have no direct association with.
  • Thought leaders: networked, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable people who can ignite passion for your brand or cause in your community (otherwise known as tastemakers, social precincts, opinion leaders, uberinfluencers, 1 percenters [but not in the Occupy Wall Street context], 10 percenters, focusers, etc.) These people personally know the people they influence, although the ties that bind them may be weak.
  • Interpersonal influencers: people who focal groups/target markets regularly interact with and who influence their decisions (e.g., neighbors, friends, parents, teachers, coworkers, religious leaders, etc.). These people may live in relative obscurity within their communities. They, however, know well the people they influence and the ties that bind them are strong.

Bottom line? Influencers are not the same, even if communications practitioners refer to them with the same name.

What do you think of influencers? Are they the best route to a focal group/target market? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

Filed Under: Communications, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

HOW TO: Unleash the ‘Crowd’ to Create Change

January 12, 2012 by

Crowd close-upA Communications 301 rule of thumb is “information alone doesn’t change behavior.” You might have brilliant left-brained arguments about why people should do something, but if you don’t touch them emotionally, they won’t be swayed.

O.K., maybe they’ll give you a thumbs up, but they won’t act.

Raising awareness is only effective in changing behavior when you have the time and resources to reach the saturation point of “everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows.”

Almost always you do not.

To inspire action, you need to unite an idea with an emotion.  Then you need to make sure people have the necessary tools and community support to carry out your vision.

Success involves the following six principles:

  • Personal: People have to have a reason to care about your cause. You need to explain what the cost of failing to act will be on them as individuals and on society as a whole. Make sure to highlight real people and real stories.
  • Direct. You have to explain how people can help, tell them what you want them to do and when, and give them the tools they need to do what’s needed easily.
  • Transparent. If you share enough information about your cause—that’s personal and direct (see above) and transparent—a community can develop around it. Not only will this community give your supporters a sense of solidarity and connectedness, it can achieve something great that they couldn’t achieve through individual effort.
  • Hubbed. To grow your community and spur productive collaboration, you need to cultivate and connect social precincts, enthusiastic, networked, and knowledgeable people who can ignite passion for your cause. Only 3 to 5 percent of your community, these leaders are the hubs connecting and inspiring individuals and settings direction for the collaborative effort.
  • Independent. Independence means individuals can have the freedom to choose the task that suits their ability, time, or interest—no matter where they are or whoever else may be posting content at that time. No coordination or pre-existing relationship is required.
  • Close-Knit. Remember it’s all about connecting people to your cause, building relationships, and sharing and improving ideas. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of focusing on technology and forgetting about humanity. The technology you use doesn’t matter as long as it allows your community to create a group identify, a culture of sharing and trust, and appropriate cultural norms.

What do you think about my post above? What do you think about unleashing crowds to create change? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Filed Under: Communications, How to Tagged With: , , , ,

Video Clip of the Month: Leading Online Communities

January 1, 2012 by

How can you turn a leaderless communications swarm into a collaborative online community that achieves results? That’s the zillion dollar question for 2012. As my runner up for January 2012 video clip of the month below shows (and anybody who has been following the news knows), self-directed communications swarms fueled many of the top news events of 2011.

While my runner up for video clip of the month above is inspiring, especially on the New Year, my main pick is enlightening. It features Roan Yong, a social collaboration expert from Singapore, on why online collaboration fails and how gamification can help.

Yong argues a leaderless communications swarm is a great starting point, but a leaderless swarm can’t think strategically to solve a problem. To turn collective action into productive collaboration, he says you need to tap and connect the tribal leaders: the 1 percent. To empower them to lead the communications swarm, he argues you need to gamify collaboration. In a blog post Yong wrote about his presentation, he explained:

“To gamify collaboration, we need to make collaborative task visible so that people can have the freedom to choose the task that suits their ability, time, or interest. We need to make collaborators’ strengths and weaknesses visible so that people can form collaboration team with complimentary skill set. And we need to give fair incentives based on contributions.”

Yong also shared his PowerPoint from his presentation online, which (along with his blog post) is also a great read if you don’t have a half hour to absorb the must know information in the video.

The Game of Collaboration

Fascinating stuff. Does Yong have “the answer” to leading online communities? Time will tell. Either way, 2012 definitely belongs to organizations and causes that can tap online communities to solve problems.

What do you think of using gamification to make online collaboration work? Do you think communications swarms need a leader to produce results? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Filed Under: Communications Tagged With: , , , , , ,