The fuel of change (Feb 6, 2011)

Technology has continued to improve the Internet and the Internet continues to change us; the millions of people connected to it. Over the past 10 years we've seen huge improvements in web technology and I'd suggest this has resulted in the rise of people power.

Internet reach

As an early adopter, I had access to the Internet at home long before the work place. Since then, its reach has extended from home, to work (or in some cases the reverse) and now to smartphones and iPads. You can carry the Internet in your pocket! And many do: there's an estimated 1.5 billion 3G handsets out there.

Websites have changed beyond recognition

Ubiquitous broadband, mega-pixel screens, improved browser technologies and sophisticated software developments have all combined to change today's web experience beyond recognition. Here's a couple of examples:

  1. Apple's homepage 10 years ago
  2. BBC's homepage 10 years ago

The Internet delivers a richer visual environment but it's not a passive broadcast space like TV. Many Internet users expect some degree of 2-way interaction, especially the generation that grew-up with it — Generation-Y. The Internet didn't replace TV in the sense that it gave more of the same, but it has equaled if not replaced the TV as the medium by which Values and Opinions are transmitted. And because it's a 2-way medium, the bigger voice is the audience not the broadcaster. And this simple numerical superiority has led to the rise of People Power.

What fuels People Power?

In a word: ideas. You might have thought I would say: social media! No, it's ideas that resonate and reach millions of readers in near real-time that has promoted People Power to king of the hill. Social Media is the meeting space where ideas are shaped and formed, where they gain inertia and are given momentum. Social media is the catalyst of change.

The new dynamic

Governments and organisations are aware of the power social media can exert upon them. Unlike advertising campaigns which were carefully constructed, impeccably timed and designed to travel in the top-down direction, *ideas* are expressed in the reverse, bottom-up direction. They arrive without notice and packaged in a transparent container labeled *brutally honest*.

Top-bottom

To play or not?

Some organisations worry about participating in social media. To not is no longer an option. It would be as absurd as not having a website or phone system but to play brings introduces its own issues. Direct and public feedback has a subtle way of enforcing quality of service and/or product — audiences trust the values and opinions of their peers. If your organisation is trustworthy, open and proudly stakes its reputation to all it says and does online it's likely to do well. If reputation is what you worry about and the idea of playing in the social media space keeps you up at night, your audiences will be talking about you anyway. Sooner or later, you'll have to join the party.

What is the fuel of change?

Ideas that resonate with people get carried on channels such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter. When there's a strong desire to change something, anything from a poor service that's affected thousands to an oppresive regime that's affected millions, these ideas gain momentum and are given velocity.

The fuel of change = problem + idea + social media + will

Is WEM for Local Gov? (January 4, 2011)

I've been thinking about this WEM stuff (Web Engagement Management). And I want to know more: what is it? and who's it for? 5 May 2010, Brice Dunwoodie defined WEM this way on CMS Wire's website.

The 5 Pillars of WEM

Web Engagement Management is a composite concept. These are the 5 parts we consider its core:

  1. Content Optimization
    This include native or tightly integrated analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing and optimization and SEO.
  2. Multi-channel Management
    Consistency is important and WEM maintains it by delivering the same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline.
  3. Conversational Engagement
    WEM supports this through communities, user generated content, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.
  4. Demand Generation
    Targeted marketing is huge. With an overall goal of increasing the number and quality of relationships, WEM comes to the aid of demand generators through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.
  5. Sales Automation
    Love isn't the only two-way street, and as social media analyst Jeremiah Owyang put it, "real-time isn't fast enough." This idea is manifest in WEM in areas like two-way CRM integration, social CRM and e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.

Let's do some analysis to better understand if WEM is for Local Government.

Scenario 1

North Somerset Council, my local authority want web-engaged audiences because these audiences can self-serve and therefore reduce contact costs.

Content Optimisation

— Web analytics will confirm what the council knows to be the busy, useful, frequently-used parts of the site.
— Personalisation won't be terribly helpful as assumptions made about my visit could be wildly inaccurate.
— Multi-variate testing? Well this ain't no Tesco or ASDA website and anyway, MV testing is seen as an ongoing exercise, not just a project. And budgets won't stretch even if the benefits were proven.
— SEO? Well North Somerset doesn't have any competitors so SEO, though important, isn't going to get the lion's share of budget.
— UX is not listed under content optimisation, yet it can be treated as a project cost and will yield useful results even if the study is heuristic.

Multi-channel Management

I take issue with the assertion that WEM delivers consistency of message/experience both on- and off-line. Please tell me how that's going to happen? Unless organisations adopt a web-first publishing model I cannot understand how WEM will orchestrate offline publishing or say, an above the line campaign.

Conversational Engagement

The statement: WEM supports this through communities is woolly. Would a WEM solution involve building a community? Or, is this a Facebook connector for example? Put this issue of community definition to oneside and I have to say the remainder of the list is bang-on. For me, conversation is the central pillar of Engagement. The term engagement should as much about conversation as it is about conversion if WEM is to benefit an organisation as much as its audiences. I'd like to think of this pillar as *real conversations between real people* and I hope they occur where the people choose.

Mchannel

Demand Generation

Don't know about this one. Anyone from local government care to comment?

Sales Automation

In a local authority context, Sales Automation could be renamed integration. Systems such as WCM, CRM, Email and Analytics need present a dash board of information about the #topics being discussed, about the citizens involved in discussion and the sentiments of conversations.

Qs

Conclusion

WEM is relevant to local authorities in part. These organisations don't sell and neither do they compete for your business. But they do provide vital services funded by tax payers and they are accountable for the services they provide. A joined-up engagement strategy, under-pined by a sensible collection of joined-up systems will help local government engage with its citizens.

Further scenarios to follow…

 

Selling Futures — when will "then" be "now"? (December 29, 2010)

The software world has built a long and successful track record by selling *the next thing*. It's a practice designed to keep buyers and shareholders interested in the otherwise tedious and rather expensive business of software development. And it reminds me of this amusing clip from Spaceballs the movie.

There's so much excited chatter about Web Engagement Management (WEM) at the moment and I wonder if it's vapor-ware? Is WEM a realisable promise? Web Content Management (WCM) vendors are all banging the WEM drum while analysts and pundits write reams, describing the features and benefits of WEM solutions and the technology-pillars required to realise the WEM-dream.

Vendors view of WEM

Most of what is written about WEM is framed in a marketing context. And an old world one at that. Old world marketing spends most of its time *telling and selling* and its idea of modern one-to-one marketing is to know (read: smoke and mirrors calculation) its audiences' preferences and to then tailor propositions and push these to individuals and tighly defined groups in a targetted fashion. Engaged audiences in this context amount to segmented audiences that can be monitored (Social Media Monitoring and Web Analytics), measured (LTV) and generally sold to.

What others say about WEM

— Ian Truscott of Gilbane wrote: Into the Engagement Tier... and Introducing the Web Engagement Capability Model
— Brice Dunwoodie of CMSWire wrote: What is Web Engagement Management (WEM)?
— Irina Guseva wrote: WEM Market: WCM + Ricotta

These well informed folks base their discussions around technology and what marketing wants. Perhaps we could look at WEM from the audience point-of-view? Switch this discussion around and look at what people want. I know…commercially naive…. Well, perhaps some further reading on this subject will help:

— Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger
— Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs by Guy Kawasaki

The Cluetrain Manifesto states "markets are conversations." Guy Kawasaki says outbound marketing is old-expensive-style marketing, while inbound marketing is more efficient and aligns with audiences expectations. Hold those thoughts for a minute. You see, over here we have vendors promising one-to-one marketing with engaged audiences, while over here (many foots steps tailing off into distance) we understand that one-to-one conversations are useful and are wanted by audiences wishing to participate in sharing values, opinions and ideas. Are they not the same thing? No. The former is old-push, the latter is new-pull.

People want conversations with people. They want organisations to respond to them and they want responses from people that are empowered to discuss *stuff* without being bound to a script. These conversations will traverse organisational strata and structure because people want to talk about more than just what's on offer. People want to converse with other people and organisations with whom they identify. This is significant!

Generation-Y expectations

An organisation maybe able to personalise its offers but it cannot personalise its values and opinions to match those of its audiences. Generation-Y is heavily influenced by company type: good, bad and ugly. Organisations have felt little of this effect to date but Gen-Y is becoming more significant in numbers and therefore importance. And Gen-Y's approach is spreading to the rest of us. Audiences now want to know what organisations stand for? what's their customer service record? are they green? are they lean? is their pay-structure fair? Audiences want to identify with organisations' values and opinions before they friend them or buy from them. And people now expect to do this with large organisations as well as small.

Convo

 

What is WEM?

It's more than a technology or collection of technologies. It's bigger than marketing and the CMO.

It starts with an organisation defining its values and opinions, what it stands for and what it does to make the world a better place. (Shareholder value has to take a backseat but ultimately will be bettered by this approach). Engaged audiences will not remain engaged when they sense their *one-to-one* conversations are being driven by machines with repositories of pre-built replies and pre-baked propositions.

WEM is the process by which conversations are conducted, whether across Twitter, blogosphere, Facebook it's of no consequence. The machines behind WEM help organisations by allowing joined-up conversation to be converted into joined-up audience information. Who are our advocates? where do people complain about our products or services? what do they say about us? and how do we engage with them to fix their issues? and how do we improve our organisation in the process?

WEM is therefore underpinned by a collection of software-building-blocks: CRM, analytics, Content Management and Social Media Monitoring. It doesn't have to be big expensive blocks either, nimble open source technologies can be just as effective. The point is, no one supplier will deliver the whole solution.

As ever, don't buy a technology and expect it to deliver the end game of its own accord. Engagement is something that happens between people, the technology is merely the delivery layer.

WEM is a collection of ground-breaking strategies and sets of actions:

— empowered staff; *thinking* replaces scripts
— V&O established and understood by all
— conversations are allowed between audiences and customer representatives of the deepest darkest recesses of an organisation
— people from across the organisation Tweet and Blog — not just the C-level directors and the marketing folk

In the past big companies had the advantage of money to invest in technology. WEM swings the advantage to small to medium sized businesses. Small budgets don't limit the possibilities because it doesn't cost lots to build social media channels with friends and followers and it's far simpler to orchestrate across an SMB.

When will this new future be here? A long time after the technological capability has arrived. Why? Because WEM is all about organisations being social, and not even the purveyors of WEM know how to implement/practice all that that means!

Related blog post: http://johngoode.com/open-for-business

Postscript:
Social commerce in 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/dec/30/facebook-2011-sophy-silver

Local Authorities on Facebook (December 13, 2010)

Since my last post on this subject I thought it worth revisiting the data. Why today? Today (13 December 2010) was the day English Councils discovered just how much they had to save as the waves of cuts begin to hit. Local government is required to deliver services, some funded by central government, others through community initiatives. And it's the latter a.k.a, Big Society or pay-for-it-yourself that means these organisations need to engage with citizens to:

— sell ideas
— explain choices, cuts and options
— ask for input and help
— gain commitment

Today was the day some lost their jobs while others had budgets cut to such an extent it will make tomorrow's challenge a whole new ball game. An interesting side effect of hard times is that strategic intelligence is driven up as hardships increase. This is the age of austerity, the age of doing more with less. And it's the age where councils seem to be engaging with their citizens using with social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Will it enable them to do more with less? Only time will tell…meantime, some have joined the race to be liked.

In this post I've refreshed the date and concentrated on PERCENTAGE INCREASE IN FACEBOOK LIKES since my last post. Coventry County Council is still the notable leader in terms of Facebook success with more that 16,000 Likes!

Local Authority
 Pos. FB Likes (orig.) FB Likes (current) Incr. %
Darlington BC
 1 427 2,977 597%
Belfast CC
 2 611 2,565 320%
Tameside Metropolitan BC
 3 114 316 177%
City of Edinburgh
 4 171 438 156%
Brighton and Hove CC
 5 220 560 155%
Stratford-on-Avon 6 94 240 155%
Manchester CC
 7 172 425 147%
Sunderland CC
 8 577 1392 141%
Carmarthenshire 9 171 391 129%
London Borough of Brent
 10 118 264 124%
Wrexham County BC
 11 156 344 121%
Torbay Council
 12 387 814 110%
Bracknell Forest Council
 13 294 602 105%
Cambridgeshire BC
 14 92 186 102%
London Borough of Lewisham
 15 139 271 95%
Stockport Metropolitan BC
 16 138 269 95%
Stevenage BC
 17 141 262 86%
London Borough of Barnet 18 351 647 84%
Wakefield City Metropolitan DC
 19 109 192 76%
London Borough of Southwark
 20 432 738 71%
Rotherham Metropolitan BC
 21 104 175 68%
Maidstone BC
 22 158 258 63%
Allerdale BC
 23 140 218 56%
Coventry CC
 24 10,896 16,589 52%
Hart DC
 25 89 129 45%

How social is your Local Authority? (November 22, 2010)

This is more of a discussion document than a social version of the Sitemorse league table. There are 2 comments to make immediately:

1. The data is out of date already
2. The calculation method needs much refinement

For now it's a bit of fun and may get conversations going.

SF = Social Factor
FB = Facebook
TW = Twitter
YT = YouTube

Method:   ((Facebook Likes + Tweets) * 1.1)
[10% added to fan+tweet if YouTube channel present]

Read the rest of this post »