Rowan's blog

Engaging and enabling IBM's Brand & Communications teams around the world (CEB Awards)

The 2016 CEB Internal Communications Summit and Awards is on in London at the moment. 

My colleague Nicky Parkinson and I submitted an entry (below) in the 'Innovations in Digital, Social, and Mobile Communications' CEB Award category, for our next-to-no budget work engaging and enabling IBM's Brand & Communications teams around the world. 

We were delighted to have been shortlisted, the competition was tough!

CEB AWARD SUBMISSION - Innovations - IBM - June 2016 from Rowan Hetherington

IBM on Brand

What is IBM's brand strategy? IBM's Jon Iwata explains it in two minutes:

“IBM on Brand” by Jon Iwata from VSA Partners on Vimeo.

 

I think the logic applies well to 'branding' a career too, i.e. a career is not defined by the various roles you have been in, but by your character - the values, beliefs and skill sets that make you unique.

 

Skills gap highlighted in the 2012 IBM Tech Trends Report

Continuing the theme of my previous post, you may be interested to learn that only 1 out of 10 organizations have the IT skills needed to harness the benefits of business analytics, mobile computing, cloud computing and social business. This data comes from a new survey from the IBM Center for Applied Insights. Nearly 50 percent of educators and students surveyed indicated major gaps in their institution's ability to teach the right IT skills.

This survey of more than 1,900 technology professionals, academics and students has been alarming to CEOs, CMOs and other C-Suite leaders trying to gain new insights into changing customers demands and buying trends.

 

While IT skills and digital skills are somewhat different, they are becoming increasingly interconnected as marketing becomes more technology focussed. The most significant skills gaps I have encountered while trying to implement the Integrated Planning System are:

1. Social (listening) research. How can organisations engage or respond effectively if they cannot hear the conversation going on?
2. Content. By content, I mean social content and curated content as opposed to paid content, which we know all too well how to create and implement. These first two skills gaps connect to 'social business'.
3. Analytics. This is the same as 'business analytics'. This is different from the metrics - the skill required is analysing the results and creating meaningful insight that can derive new behaviour and future iterations.

 

Does your organisation suffer from similar skills gaps? What have been the most successful methods you have found to address them?

The digital skills gap

One of the big challenges I encounter in my efforts to enable the Integrated Planning System is that existing staff often do not have the skills required to implement the steps.

Even if there was budget for agency resources, many of the tasks involved cannot be effectively delegated to an agency, because that generally adds to the silo effect (as opposed to having one integrated team focussed on the client experience for each constituency segment). This becomes troublesome if:

1. the agency is not an integrated part of the team throughout the process of planning, implementation and iteration, or
2. multiple agencies are competing for budget by recommending engagement tactics that fit into their capability areas (rather than contributing to a neutral planning process based on Steps 1 & 2 of the Integrated Planning System).

 

My experience is that this digital skills gap is pervasive around the world. At IBM, this is something we work to address internally as we have many internal experts. I recently met with Patty Keegan from Digital Chameleon, which helps
companies mainstream digital knowledge & skills across their business. It was interesting and validating to learn that many organisations in Australia are going through the same challenges I have been working to address through the internal Digital Strategy Enablement program at IBM.

Patty was recently interviewed on Sky News about the digital skills gaps in Australia. I thought you may find this interesting.

View on YouTube (incl. full screen option)

The Integrated Planning System

I led the 'Plan' stream at the FUNNEL Sydney event on Monday with a presentation titled, The Integrated Planning System: Five steps to ensure your marketing plan remains effective within the evolving digital environment. 

The Integrated Planning System - Presentation for FUNNEL B2B Marketing event, Sydney 2012 from Rowan Hetherington

I have been working on this system for a couple of years now. We used it in IBM's Digital Strategy Workshops, designed to enable IBM's global marketing and communications practice on digital, which have now reached 1,500 team members. It is also a key part of our corporate digital guidance materials. An earlier iteration of the work is shared in this earlier post.

Many of my posts on this blog touch on elements within this Integrated Planning System, including digital specialty areas and also the overall change management effort involved in adoption of this type of approach within a large, globally integrated enterprise. This topic fascinates me -- I welcome any thoughts, ideas questions or comments. 

 

Speaking at the FUNNEL Sydney event

I was very honoured to speak at the FUNNEL B2B Marketing and Sales event in Sydney on the 19th Nov. It was the first time this event had been run in Australia (it is well known in the UK). 280 delegates attended, from around Australia.

I enjoyed many of the other speakers' presentations and met interesting people - most of whom were there to discuss and learn about the impact of technology; digital, big data and analytics on the profession. 

The tweets flowed and a lot of great points were shared with the hashtag #funnel12. A few quotes that stood out to me from the day:

• "Inbound converts 300% more than outbound at SAP, which is why we're focussed on pull marketing" ~ Ray Kloss, SAP
• "Digital comms are about relevancy, not reach" ~ Benoit Droulez, Traction Digital
• "Begin with the customer experience & work back toward the technology" ~ Quote from Steve Jobs, used in a presentation
• "Stories are 6-7 more times likely to be remembered than traditional corp. messages" ~ Joanne Jacobs, 1000 Heads
• "I wouldn't call it social media - I'd call it digital relationships" ~ Ray Kloss, SAP
• And my favorite...?! "Lightbulb moment listening to @RoHetherington re Constituencies vs Audiences!" ~ Bronwyn Cook

Thanks to @greenhatmktg and @SocialSammy for taking these photos of my presentation:

I will share my presentation in the next post.

Many thanks to Brad Langton and the FUNNEL team for creating an enjoyable and valuable event.

 

Action Research Project: Enabling social listening at IBM

Earlier this year I designed and led a four week Action Research Project. The aim was to gather insight into how sustainable, pervasive social (listening) research could be enabled within IBM's marketing and communications practice.

This project was not about developing specialised, highly trained social listening teams within IBM -- we have those teams in place. This project focused on testing ways to enable social listening to increase the surface area of a function by allowing staff to identify and respond to opportunities themselves.

In July 2012, 16 voluntary participants completed guided action learning cycles. The participants were broadly representative of the marketing and communications function: from 11 disciplines across 10 countries, ranging from senior executives to recent graduates. Data was compiled, analysed and presented to the business in a research report with recommendations.

Listening Action Research Project Report from Rowan Hetherington

I'm interested to hear from anyone else who is conducting similar research.

This project method is being re-run within IBM as an organisational learning system for listening, with results backing up the findings from the initial action research project.

 

Case study: IBM's journey to becoming a social business

MBA, Change management, Communications and IT students around the world are learning about social networking tools and the potential benefits of applying these tools within an organisational context.

Articles on this topic quickly become out of date, due to the speed of progress in this rapidly emerging area.

This case study provides information, current as at September 2012, about IBM's journey to becoming a social business.

Case study: IBM's journey to becoming a social business (September 2012) from Rowan Hetherington

My thanks go to:

• Greg Cartan, Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), Graduate Certificate in Change Management (GCCM) Course Leader for 'Systems for Change'. Greg invited me to write this, as a way to update the existing AGSM course materials and provided helpful guidance on how to write an academic case study.
• Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager, Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, for content contributions.
• Karen Lilla, Manager, External Relations, Social Business for reviewing.
• Lena Lockhart, a wonderful friend, for lending her proof reading skills.

The Integrated Digital Plan

I have been noodling with Integrated Digital Planning approaches for around three years. I lead the digital planning effort for IBM Marketing and Communications globally which involves the ongoing creation and cross-functional coordination of methods, development of guidance and learning materials with stakeholders incl. discipline planning and skills leaders and the Talent and Learning organization.

The latest iteration of the 'Integrated Digital Plan' chart:

(View full size on SlideShare)

Some explanatory points:

• Listening, content, media selection, metrics and analytics are core pillars of digital marketing and communications.
• Other pillars listed (social engagement through to virtual events) to be selected as part of the Engagement Plan based on relevance to the Objectives, selected Constituents and their local digital usage behaviour (Insights). This list is not exhaustive, for example you could run a Digital Jam or use Collaborative Software. Technologies will emerge over time that facilitate engagement in new ways.
• Frequency of iterations to be decided (loop in orange along the base of chart). The more frequent the iterations, the faster the plan will become optimized.
• The Engagement Plan is required in order to define the Management Plan – and vice versa. Think of them as two sides of a coin.
• If resources are sufficient, more than one Business Priority (Input) could be addressed at one time.

 

First, thank you to George Gallate (Global Chairman Euro RSCG 4D) for tweaking my pencil drawing, turning it into the pretty colored chart shown above and creating a full sized billboard (for use at the Digital Strategy Workshops):

Second, I'd like input on this approach. Is anyone else out there attempting to operationalize this kind of planning process within a large enterprise / organization? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

IBMers can access the latest version of the Integrated Digital Plan here.

Many of my recent posts relate to this approach, including:

• a conversation with Tony Zambito
• my post on Building Constituency: A communications approach for open leaders which overlays the Constituents, Listening, Engagement Plan, Measurement, Analytics and Iteration portions of the Integrated Digital Plan, but through the lens of building relationship (rapport) and co-creating value with Constituents.

Other posts describe the business transformation challenges involved in implementing this kind of approach including my latest ramble, on the parallels between:

• the internal transformation organizations must go through to keep pace with the external technology revolution we are all experiencing with digital/social communications and
• the outstanding strategic change plan Major James Gant outlined in 'One Tribe at a Time'.

I'm sure my thoughts on this topic will continue to evolve, as the transformation within IBM gathers further momentum and results - and as I learn more from others.

Input welcome via the comments section below.

 

One Tribe at a Time

It is Remembrance Day. In line with my interests in change management and building constituency, I read "One Tribe at a Time: A strategy for success in Afghanistan" by Major Jim Gant. My understanding of the War in Afghanistan in 2009 when this was written is very basic... but based on the information presented, this is the most compelling strategic change plan I have read.

The scale and complexity of the challenges, along with the brutal realities of failure in a war environment, put the digital/social change project I spend time thinking about into perspective! The external technology revolution we are all experiencing with digital/social communications - and the internal transformation organizations must go through to keep pace (the subject of many of my posts) - now feels like a walk in the park on a warm spring day with an ice cream. Having said this, I do see parallels.

My take on it:

• The vision is; To disrupt, dismantle and defeat the terrorist network, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To prevent the return of al-Qaeda in either country in the future and to facilitate security and prosperity for the Afghan people.

• A key cultural factor is the fundamentally different structures of America and Afghanistan: a central governance model vs a distributed tribal system.

• Major Jim Gant's strategy involves working with Pashtunwali tribes; one 'Tribal Engagement Team' building constituency with one tribe, eventually scaling to reinforce existing tribal structures right across the country, to partner with them against al-Qaeda. This makes sense because the Pashtunwali tribal system is centuries old - it's all they know - and they are likely to resist foreign intervention (like attempted structural change) to the death.

Implementing the proposed strategy would require institutional change and a shift in leadership style:

• Approval to pilot the strategy would require imagination and trust from leadership.
• Aligning with this approach at full scale would require transformation of the US Army, including a significant paradigm shift.
• Communications would need to be overhauled from command and control to, perhaps, Social Architecture, slide 6.
• Approvals processes would need to change - some efforts would need to go ahead with no approval.
• 'Trust and approval' would need to be agreed upfront (sounds a little like having Social Computing Guidelines, e.g. my employer IBM's).
• The risk-averse nature of staff would need to change - they'd need to be willing to 'get out there', partner and collaborate with the tribe/constituency to co-create value.
• Staff must be allowed to go 'native' and interact with external tribes at all levels (can staff in your organization openly collaborate with people externally about their non-confidential work e.g. on a blog, LinkedIn Group or via Twitter).
• Funding models must be streamlined, so staff have the power to do what makes sense (to draw a parallel with digital marketing and communications, this might be investing in new listening capabilities, developing locally relevant content for a key constituency in market and funding ongoing metrics and analytics to derive actionable insights). 
• Likely resistance from US ground commanders (I think all change agents can relate to that one).

Major Gant listed this familiar sounding challenge: "Identifying, attracting and training personnel who could perform this type of mission would be a daunting task". This seems to come back to the need for a new (or, perhaps, old) predominant style of intrinsically motivated, transformational leadership:

• More parallels here: Finding leaders with integrity, 'Strength and Honor' who can 'build constituency': incl. building rapport across cultures / cross-function, listen, empathise, understand, learn, then 'influence without authority', plus continually assess the status against the vision and successfully iterate on the strategy and implementation over time.
• Initial leaders would need the imagination to go against the grain of what the institution rewards, be willing to pilot it (start small and think big).
• Importantly they'd need the commitment/perseverance to stick with it, to allow the project to benefit from the 'Chinese bamboo tree' style phenomenon described on p37 (little growth in first years, explosive growth / return in five years). They might need to influence up too, to ensure their project was provided ongoing support.

 

Major Jim Gant, you say you're not a writer, not a strategist, not an academic - but I found this very thought provoking from the perspective of strategy and change (and applied cultural anthropology). Plus I was compelled to read to the end. I hope others do too.

I'd love to hear what has happened since 2009 - and what was learned along the way. I vaguely recall hearing from David Meerman Scott that the US Army is transforming in line with the digital/social communications revolution, perhaps along the lines of parallels drawn above? I wonder if this might have helped.

 

Interested to hear others thoughts too.

 

P.S. Tip of the hat to Luc Galoppin (as he would say) for telling me about the ebook.