Rowan's blog

Will companies that use social succeed?

There is a lot of talk on the interwebs about how "Companies that use social will succeed". Frankly, this talk gives me the jitters.

Why?
Social is just another communication tool. Like the telephone. Or email. Would we say 'Companies that use the telephone will succeed'?!

Succeeding is of course dependent on ensuring you use the most appropriate communications channels to reach and interact with your audience, but it's also about:

1. knowing who you're trying to interact with
2. understanding that specific, defined audience and having something of genuine value to provide to them
3. having clear goals / objectives for your interactions
4. making a good plan that's intended to help you reach those goals
5. implementing the tactics using the relevant tools for your audience (including social if applicable)
6. tracking, analyzing and figuring out what works and what doesn't for your specific, defined audience in your market
7. tweaking, iterating and continuing to improve on your plan and implementation

Social media is transforming the ways people communicate - and it is and will continue to be a relevant way of engaging with many audiences. But it is just a communication mechanism. The other factors need to be in place.

Thanks to listening to my Thursday morning rant.

Have I have missed anything in the list above? I'm Interested to hear other's thoughts and comments.

As the world urbanizes, will the most successful cities result from top-down planning or bottom-up innovation?

A debate has started on McKinsey's 'What Matters' site.

The question: "As the world urbanizes, will the most successful cities result from top-down planning or bottom-up innovation?"

As a change management student, interested in 'smarter cities', I had to have a go at an answer:

 

As with management of any major change, I'd argue that the best results are likely to come from a combination of top down and bottom up approaches.

The 'top' will have access to the strategists/architects, funding, resources etc. However, for the project to be a success, it ultimately needs to work for the residents. These residents' insights and proposed solutions to current problems based on local knowledge (i.e. ideas from the 'bottom', including design innovations from the slums and feedback on implementation obstacles) may be invaluable input to a realistic, implementable new strategy - as well as important in generating buy-in and support for adoption of it from the residents.

If the people at the 'top' are the architects (and the financial sponsors of the project e.g. government), then I think another role is necessary; specialist change managers, skilled in research and communication who would liaise with residents and connect the 'top' and 'bottom' to best effect.

Too often (esp. in government), the 'strategy' team is far removed from the realities of implementation, which leads to less than ideal solutions.

Agreeing on a strategic intent / measurement criteria upfront would provide a tangible way to assess the merit of new design and implementation strategies - this would facilitate agreement on which ideas (from the 'top' and/or from the 'bottom') have most merit. Measurement criteria could include specific objectives for each of the triple bottom line measures (Economic, Environmental, Social), incl. things like; energy efficiency, water & waste management, air quality, transportation solutions, community building (e.g. creating social areas for 150 people, if you use Dunbar's number as a guide) etc.

If no measurable criteria is set, how can the work ever be deemed a success? David Gurr, in his comment on the McKinsey question, described Canberra (in Australia) as a "charming and liveable city, with character and style". As a newish resident of Canberra, I agree it is liveable, but disagree that it has charm, character or style (for many reasons I won't bore you with here)! Clearly he and I are judging Canberra based on different criteria.

 

Following this logic, I imagine the first steps in a large, successful town planning / city design program could include:

1. Hiring a change manager skilled in research, facilitation and communications to liaise between the architects and the residents (i.e. the top and bottom)

2. Collaboratively defining the strategic intent (vision / objective for the city) via inputs from the top and bottom and solidifying this into specific measurable objectives, to be used as criteria to assess the merit of ideas.

3. Working with the architect to define a strategy that meets the strategic intent & specific objectives/criteria, gathering and taking into account the 'bottom up', broad based strategic ideas & inputs from residents.

4. Finalising the strategy/plan, ensuring that implementation obstacles residents raise are taken into consideration.

5. Over time, the change manager could engage with the residents to ensure the implementation of the finalised strategy/plan goes smoothly and the items implemented (whether they are recreational facilities, cable cars etc) are adopted by the residents.

 

Clearly, this collaborative approach would take much more work than a top down approach that assumes what residents want. My opinion is that a city that is likely to last for many generations is worth that investment.

Interested to hear other's thoughts.

 

Japan

This time last week I was en route from Australia to Tokyo, where I joined IBM and agency colleagues from the USA, Singapore, HK and of course Japan, for the Japan Digital Strategy Lab. I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop and meeting our 70+ Japanese colleagues during Day 1. The photos are up here.

Some of the team at end of Day 2:

NB. If you're ever in Tokyo, I recommend the Green Tea flavour KitKats (but not the French Cheese flavour so much, eew). I was upset not to find the Wasabi flavoured ones. Pocky sticks were nice too.

Of course, the sushi was to die for (thank you, fish)

:s

 

Brain size correlates to size of social network

Lets start with the monkeys...

I've just been watching David Attenborough's 'Funky Monkeys' documentary on TV. I learned that monkeys brain sizes directly correlate to the size of their social group, or social network.

One explanation is that the larger groups, (for example a hundred monkeys living together) are more complex, therefore a monkey must be exceptionally smart and politically savvy to rise to become an effective group leader. Groups that become unmanageably large split into smaller groups. Scientists can accurately determine the size of the monkey's social group directly from its brain size, before even knowing what kind of monkey it is.

How does this correlation between brain size and social network size relate to humans?

According to Dunbar's number, the size of human social networks has been approx 150 for at least tens of thousands of years (incl. today's online groups). Our brain sizes have also stayed much the same. Dunbar theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, which limits group size ...the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." David Wong wrote a pretty entertaining article about it.

However some humans social networks are much larger than average - and some people care about far more than 150 people. Based on the thinking in David Wong's article, that would be a good thing!

One factor that could explain this is that some people are extroverts (as opposed to introverts), so they might naturally hold more information about 'people' in their brains (instead of other kinds of knowledge).

Another idea is that some humans have 'outsourced' a large quantity of information (potential extra brain size?) to collaborative information storing and sharing facilities on the internet (e.g. storing / relying on knowledge in Wikipedia instead of trying to remember it in our heads, or storing information about people in databases or sites such as Facebook). Might this be our way of evolving faster than standard biological evolution (our brain size) permits?

Yet another factor might be that some people choose to believe in all people being equally important, even the people we don't yet know. In other words, choosing to see the humanity in, and therefore have consideration for, every person in the world.

So, I am pondering whether the combination of: a. an individual's biological brain size/intelligence + b. their personality type (extrovert or introvert) + c. the amount they leverage the 'global outsourced intelligence' of the internet + d. the degree to which they choose to be considerate of every human  correlate to the size of their social network?

What do you think? Are any assumptions wrong/debatable? What other factors would be involved? Wouldn't it be good if humans perceived all humans as being a broader, but equally important part of their network? Will tools like Facebook and LinkedIn help?

The evolving nature of how companies organise for social

Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group recently posted results of a survey on how social strategy programs are organised.

How is IBM's social strategy program organised? I'd say it currently looks like this:

Based on the Altimeter Group graphic, my guess is we will see an evolution in the nature of how companies organise for social from:

1. 'Decentralised' or 'Centralised' to
2. 'Hub and spoke' or 'Multiple hub and spoke / Dandelion' to, finally
3. 'Holistic'.

Having said that, I don't believe social can be separated from digital as social is relevant to all digital content (and digital, in turn, cannot be separated from marketing, communications and support - in fact all functions that touch the client / customer). Changes driven by technology are necessitating change in (and integration between) each of those department structures, so I think it would be more holistic to look at the organisation of social in relation to those too.

Do you agree / disagree / see an alternate option?

 

ADDED 22 Oct 2011:

If you've read this far, you may be interested in IBM's journey:

IBM's journey to social business

View more presentations from Rowan Hetherington

Photos from 2010 Digital Labs

Photos from the 2010 IBM Digital Strategy Labs are up on Flickr. I can't seem to work out how to embed the collection into this post, so you'll have to click this link to view them.

One more Digital Lab to go this year; Japan. We will be there two weeks today. I'm looking forward to it (and the food in Tokyo)!

Google, can you find my slippers?

I've been really busy lately. Not just like the 'busy' I was before.

I guess this is what happens when you set yourself a big mission at work, (which recently turned into an official global role) involving lots of o'seas travel, start a part-time post grad course and commit to moving house from Sydney to Canberra (for my husband's work).

If I have any available free time in Canberra, at least I will be able to entertain myself by suggesting to Canberians that polititians replace themselves with crowdsourcing (see my previous post). That should get some classic reactions ;-)

I have another idea on how to use the additional capacity of the National Broadband Network; augmented reality search engines. I've been complaining to Google for a long time that they don't help me find my lost horseshoes. Soon I will be adding plenty of household items to that list (e.g. the items hidden in box 38, located at the bottom of the pile of boxes in the storage room, waiting to be unpacked).

Given the world is becoming smarter with billions of data sensors in products, wouldn't the natural next step be to design tiny microchips (smaller than the ones designed to track rubbish) that could be placed on all your items (or inserted as part of manufacturing), then build an augmented reality app search engine to find them... Kind of like this app which IBM built for Wimbledon, but enabling us to find our kettles, misplaced iPhones, favourite slippers (which my dog likes to take into the garden) and keys...

Would this be useful to anyone else out there? Who do you think will provide this solution and how long do you think it'll be till we get it? Hopefully I will have had time to find my slippers by then...

 

Isn't it time we replaced political parties with crowd-sourced democracy?

ZDNet just revealed the Australian Lib's National Broadband Network (NBN) policy to be yet another half-baked, shambolic effort. Some of the background is in my blog posts from last year.

So much time has been wasted - as with almost all major government projects. The political system drives me nuts. So here is an alternate, half baked (but much broader) idea:

Why don't we create a new system for developing and managing Australian national projects whereby:

• Members of the Australian public who are qualified*, collaboratively co-develop policies/projects/solutions within their area(s) of expertise with the aid of neutral, monitored facilitation. *One idea would be to 'qualify' people via an online test, through which they must demonstrate balanced understanding of the points and history surrounding the issues.
• All the policy/project/solution initiatives developed collaboratively, nationally, could be submitted, presented and sorted by Australians via voting tools into a country priority list.
• The Australian public could then collaboratively vote in a Project Leader to implement each priority project (based on the leader's proven ability to successfully implement similar complex projects).

In other words, why don't we develop a system to crowd-source national policies/projects/solutions, so we can make 'politicians' obsolete?

Yes, that idea is half-baked - there would need to be a lot of detail ironed out behind how it could work... back-end infrastructure, privacy, making the collaboration & voting tools secure and facilitation neutral etc, but surely this is all possible now that we live in the time of the inter-webs?

Frankly, I think piloting this kind of approach, starting small and learning and refining it until it is workable on a broad scale would have to be worthwhile... Pretty much any system that focuses on developing an excellent end solution for the country would be better than having multiple competing parties made up of bipartisan politicians working on it?! 

What do you think?

(I have not missed the irony that we'd probably need the NBN to be in place to facilitate this kind of solution on a broad scale... ;)

Going global

I'm at the end of my whirlwind tour. In the past two months I visited cities in six countries for work (Hong Kong, Taipei, Dubai, New York, Bangalore, Seoul) and two for holidays (UK and Thailand, en-route in between the work trips).

The work I mentioned in my earlier post on managing change in the digital environment now has much broader (and much more senior) ownership, which is necessary and very exciting. Why? The second of John Kotter's change management steps is to develop a cohesive guiding team:

• Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort
• Encourage the group to work as a team

It was great to spend time with the big brained senior IBMers and agency leaders who hang out in the concrete jungle that is New York - and exciting to see the guiding team develop. The digital workshop has evolved and improved - it was wonderful to deliver the Bangalore and Seoul workshops as a part of this large, talented team. Pics are up here: HK, Taiwan, Dubai, Bangalore (no group pic), Seoul. See photos from all the workshops.

More workshops in more countries to come. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to humming along to the Qantas song "I still call Australia home" as I complete this trip today.

Exmoor

Exmoor is one of the last remaining 'wild' parts of England - and a remarkably civilized wild place it is too.

I spent many childhood holidays on a farm just down from the moor on the south side. Dad and I returned to visit the farm, farmers family, the rare Exmoor ponies on the moor (the oldest, purest breed and most primitive of the Brisish native ponies), Doone Valley (setting of Lorna Doone), Tarr Farm Inn, The Royal Oak at Withypool and other favorite haunts. 

The narrow, deep Devon lanes force you to slow down a bit. It was much needed.