The Wayward Celt

… and here’s what my numbers show thus far:

Yup, I received nearly twice as much email in week 2 as I did in week 1. And I sent four times more email. That’s actually not a failure to me though. It is expected that in the beginning of trying to reduce your inbox, your outbox may suffer a tad as I am ignoring step 2 (Stop Replying!) in favour of replying with guidance to better alternatives. Mind you I haven’t had much opportunity (contrary to the ‘opportunities’ line above ) to reply like that, but one of my colleagues has, and it seems to be catching on as others are starting to see the value with communicating in forums and wikis to solve problems across teams.

For me, however, this week saw a huge win:
I have been working off-hours (after “work” but before Jean gets home, that no-man’s land of time when I am normally sitting at my desk and working anyways) on a small javascript tool to generate URLs based on user entered variables. Thanks to one of my colleagues who did all the heavy informational lifting over the past nine months, I was able to dig in and get this javascript tool working initially just based on the fact that he had shared this information on a wiki already, allowing me to work when he wasn’t necessarily available… and here is where the really big win was seen for me (aside from the tool itself which will be a huge benefit for me directly):

I was able to collaborate, test, validate content and sanity check with five other colleagues, then roll out the tool to an internal webserver all without sending a single email. Zip. Zero. Nada. No email was harmed in the creation of this tool!

Think about that for a moment. Over the course of two weeks, we went from concept to delivery of an internally deployed tool without sending any email. This includes all the testing cycles where bugs were found, corrected, retested, and other changes were updated and re-deployed to a test server. How did we do it? Easy. We used two wiki pages, our SameTime instant messenger service, and a total of 3 phone calls (one of which was to show another colleague what it does before we roll it out to a larger audience).

This little side project just inadvertently proved to me that projects CAN be run from start to finish with a minimal amount of e-mail exchanges. I say minimal here as this was a small scale proof of concept, and presumably larger more complex projects may require an e-mail or two… but I’ve shown that our alternative tools do a much better job of getting the job done, and therein lies the huge win.

We moved “working outside the inbox” from concept to reality for this project… and that excites me even more than being able to create a useful tool for me and some of my colleagues within IBM (which is itself rather exciting)!

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 Today my colleague, cohort, and WonderTwin(tm) Kelly Smith posted an announcement on our work blog launching our mission to reclaim our lives and work back from the in-box of dooooom. She and I, along with at least two other colleagues are tackling these beasts we call our in-boxes.

Ok, so maybe we’re not being quite as provocative as it sounds, but we ARE jumping on board to what we see as some rather revolutionary thinking: starting today we are working outside of the inbox. (#WOTI is the tag and acronym for “Working Outside The Inbox” and one you’ll likely be seeing a lot of in the next year…)

We adopted the idea from our hero, Luis Suarez, and decided to follow in his footsteps this year. Still sounding too provocative for you? It really isn’t… everyone can play along, it’s THAT easy.

Don’t get me wrong, email is indeed a great tool for 1-1 discussion in a transactional format; that is, someone gives information or asks a question, and in return another person gives or asks as well. Email is decidedly not the best tool for many things that we use it for today: discussions, decision-making, file sharing, file repositories, knowledge sharing, newsletters, and announcements.

As Kelly notes in out work blog: “We have the collaborative technology. We have the skillz”. And she’s right. Over the past few years she and I have adopted a much more collaborative focus to our work, using the various tools at our disposal to ensure we can accomplish tasks with as much efficiency and effectiveness as possible and have both been preaching the word of transparent collaboration for quite a while now.

The difference now is that we’re more focused, more structured, and will be tracking our progress. I KNOW my incoming email had reduced significantly over the past year, but this year we are going to be able to quantify it and show solid results… starting today.

How, I can hear you ask, do we intend to accomplish such a hefty goal? Easy I say: we’ve absconded with Luis’ Magic 3 step program, and added a fourth step of our own:

1.  Stop replying to email. The more email you reply to, the more email you will receive. It is a never-ending cycle. Mind you, this doesn’t mean I won’t reply to ANYTHING that comes into my inbox, but rather that I will be much more focused and judicious as I implement step 2 before I reply:
2. Use the right tool for the right conversation. This means identifying conversations/tasks (use cases) that can be accomplished more easily, more transparently, more efficiently, and with less cost, using a more appropriate social tool. Sometimes that will be email. Most of the time, it won’t.
3. Start moving those conversations/tasks to their appropriate home. This won’t be a light switch situation, rather it will happen slowly and surely.
4. Record progress, set an example, evangelize and act as a change agent. This is the one we added on… because without monitoring progress, it is very difficult to show tangible value. Additionally, without evangelizing and acting as change agents, we’re just doing this in a silo with no further effect, which isn’t our intent at all…

So what IS our intent if it isn’t to just reduce the amount of email cluttering our respective in-boxes? Again, another easy answer: we intend to act as examples and agents of change to help show our organizations how much more efficient and effective we can ALL be by using the *right* collaborative tools.

We intend to do this mindfully and conscientiously; to drive change for the benefit of us all, not just the individuals jumping on this project… given Luis’ data over the 4 years he’s been doing this, he’s proven the value and effectiveness of such an undertaking.

Want to join us? Its easy! Just start following the four steps above!
We’ll be posting periodic updates over on our “Notes from Rational Support” blog so you can see our progress. Feel free to comment there with your own progress as well and before long you’ll start seeing marked improvement. In fact I’ve heard told that your hair will be more luxurious, you’ll become more attractive, you’ll be promoted to executive status, and money will fall out of the sky for you…

Okay, that last sentence may not be entirely (at all) true, but I can assure you, reducing the amount of email coming to your inbox will make you a much happier person.

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  Following is the start of a conversation between me and my dear friend and published author, Mr. Anthony Cardno. I encourage you all to read through my comments to Anthony below and jump in the conversation with your own suggestions, insights, and experiences. This is, of course, a discussion, not the end all be all of twitter etiquette. In fact Anthony is even running the same post over on his blog here to garner other insights as well!

Getting right to it then… Anthony pondered on Twitter: “Wondering what I’m doing wrong that even when I ask for a RT, very few of them happen. Am I missing something RT-etiquette-wise?”

Not surprisingly, I have some very particular ideas about this specific behaviour (based on my experiences working in social business) and quickly replied with the following:

Jason to @talekyn Yes. Don’t ask. If your content is compelling, RTs will happen. Asking is seen as intrusive.

Anthony to @acdntlpoet Makes sense. And you know I very rarely ask. Which means apparently most of what I tweet is not compelling.

Jason to @talekyn kind of. Also depends on your audience, reach, etc… We can take this to a much more in-depth conversation

Obviously, that’s nowhere near the end of the discussion. Simply said, there is no single answer to this question. People are making their living as consultants telling you how to do just this. Not one of them has the right answer in a an easy to distribute formula; because the answer isn’t really formulaic.

As I noted above in my initial reply, the key to seeing your content re-shared is to put forward compelling contents. Oh, but if only the answer were so easy! While I can tell you at a high level what will get your content shared out, it all falls apart in the details and subtleties and actual implementation/ practical application; because not all content is created equal.

But let me step back for a moment and address etiquette before moving on into some best practices: Asking via Twitter for others to retweet you is seen as bad manners, neediness, and laziness. More to the point, it is a bit more indicative of immaturity in the space, or evidence of the size of your network (add totally inappropriate size queen joke at will). By immaturity in the space, I mean that coming from an individual I will see these requests in the same light as I see forwarded emails asking me to “keep the chain going”, or Facebook status updates asking to “post this to your status if you agree / just for one hour”, etc. From a corporate account, it just comes off as poor marketing strategy.

Exposing the size of your network isn’t really a big deal in and of itself (I can see your numbers in any space I play). Rather, asking for RTs presents the impression of a smaller and/or less engaged network, minimal confidence in your message, and generally short selling yourself. Now, I am not saying that asking for a RT is going to leave people with the impression that you are just a speck in the world, but I AM saying that it is one small action which builds how people perceive you when combined with other small actions and methods of presenting yourself.

Yes, I am talking from a more marketing centric approach, with a few assumptions in terms of how you use social media to connect with your audience and spread your message. The assumption is that you are a different type of user, one who is building a personal brand and using social avenues to build up your name and digital eminence. Obviously, if you are just using social media to stay in contact with friends and family, then the concern over perception won’t really apply. But, perception is big for driving and motivating others to share your content.

Rather than continuing to focus on the negatives of asking for RTs, let’s rather focus on what you CAN do to get people to share your content. There’s a great presentation here (http://nytmarketing.whsites.net/mediakit/pos/ ) on the psychology of sharing. From this presentation we can see that one of the biggest factors is determining how the information we are sharing will be useful to the recipient. Take this the next step and you can translate this into your own content by providing that clarity to the person you’re sharing with, so they can in turn re-share easily.

Let me take an example:

@talekyn: Two medical causes are important to me: Cancer and Juvenile Diabetes. Read my diabetes interview with 9yo Frank John:anthonycardno.com/?p=276

Good content here, and likely worthy of a retweet, but I have two problems:

1. It is passive… ok, so these are important to you. They are indeed important issues, but I am not compelled to RT immediately because there isn’t a real message here.
2. I have to click and read to determine if I want to RT. That is going to take some time, and I may lose the originating tweet before I am done with the interview.

Presuming the interview is compelling enough for me to want to RT it, I now need to go back to find the tweet to pass it on (or, one better, tweet/retweet from within the blog post itself). Most people won’t go back to twitter to retweet unless the content is REALLY moving. A well composed tweet that will compel a stranger to read your content will also be compelling enough to garner retweets without specifically asking for them. Compelling content which resonates with others to the point where they want to share with their own network is what you’re looking for here; adding social sharing buttons in your blog will also help enable users to easily share out your content to the spaces and networks where they play.

Let me see if I can “re-swizzle” (yep, I said it) your tweet above to something which I may be compelled to click into and retweet:

@talekyn: How Frank John, a 9yo living with Juvenile Diabetes and fund raising for JDRF, is putting me to shame: anthonycardno.com/?p=276

Forgive the forced self-deprecation, but I think this will work in your favour here: I switched it up a bit, made the reader curious as to what a 9 year old is doing better than you. Because if they can do it better than you, they can do it better than me too, so now I am intrigued and want to read more. It is a more active voice, but not demanding; compelling me to look further. Plus, the tweet provides me with the key points before reading more into the blog: this 9 year old is doing good work for diabetes awareness/cure. I am both compelled to read AND pass it on now, because there is a story here beyond the normal “please send money” charity call. It is interesting, much like your earlier tweet:

@talekyn #LifeWouldBeBetter if my 9 year old cousin didn’t have Juvenile Diabetes. Meet him on my site: anthonycardno.com/?p=276

The tweet above also has that hook, but unfortunately Tweeting this out at 11:30pmEDT on a Friday night means very few people in your particular audience will be seeing it, and you need visibility in order to glean retweets. So, now that you have the compelling content, let’s look at targeting the right audience…

Who are your followers? Are they cast amongst disparate time zones, or predominantly in one? What ages? Nine-to-fivers or in school? By example, I am at my computer from 8amEDT until 8pmEDT M-F, because of that, I am more likely to retweet something posted in that time frame than I am other times since my usage of twitter is heaviest during work. Weekends and other times when I am outside the house, I’m far more likely to miss content because I tend to turn off most social channels when not at work. Conversely, my fictitious high school aged neighbor may be more likely to see and subsequently retweet late on school nights when s/he is finally back home from school, extracurricular activities, and is “wasting time” on the internet.  Not to mention that demographic has a much different usage style of social channels as direct, near-real-time communication and may not be as inclined to retweet blog content outside of some of the more viral types of content.

Having a sense of your follower’s schedules / behaviours / demographics will help guide you towards those ‘sweet spot’ times to post for the greatest impact and visibility. If you use bit.ly or some other URL shortener, or use google analytics on your site (WordPress makes this stuff very easy), you can track some basic metrics and see when your audience is most active and more likely to marketing out your links. Also, keep promoting your content (with appropriate pauses in between duplication) until you see a drop off in click-throughs. Duplicating content isn’t a bad thing on Twitter as most people don’t see everything unless the spend time going back in their timelines up to the last time they logged in. Unless your users are all like me with a stake in the social business game, they are most likely missing a ton of stuff posted when they aren’t watching. Heck, I even miss stuff, and I am watching like a hawk and make a point to go back in all my timelines to ensure I don’t miss things!

Here ends the first round answer as to why you aren’t seeing a good amount of retweets, even when (or because) you request them. With your following of 490 users on Twitter, I’d predict you’d garner maybe around 10 retweets for some good content if you market it more than once. Until you are a celebrity and people hang on your every word, I’d not expect more than that…. unless of course you happen to stumble on that next bit of viral content and it spins out of your control… but we can only hope for that

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Yes, this was a rather lengthy post, and not intended as the end all be all to explaining social behaviours. I am sure many of my own readers have their own ideas and experiences to share, which I fully encourage! Please feel free to comment here, on Anthony’s blog where he is running the same post, or in any of the other channels which you may have found this post shared out… the key to being social on the internet is, of course, engaging in good discussion! So whether you agree or disagree, please let me know

image credit:  Some rights reserved by Ford Buchanan      

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I’ve noticed a great and very intentional practice boiling up over on G+ when it comes to re-sharing, and have adopted the same principle of behaviour to help promote it: “A good social steward acknowledges the person from whom they shared”. This is a great practice because, by default, G+ only notes the *originating poster’s* name, not whom you shared from.

But why is this important? Three reasons: the first, and most simple is that it provides direct feedback to the person who reshared that you find the content engaging enough to share it to your circles as well. Secondarily, this also allow extended networks to have visibility to other people around G+ whom you may find interesting. (I’ve personally found a number of very cool people to circle and follow using this method, as they are already up a rung of trust as an extended connection, plus they MUST be cool if they are sharing content which I also find useful and interesting!)

The third, and more global reason, however, is the sense of social stewardship. In this ever increasing global community where we’re all more connected, we’ve also become more striated, more detached, and more insular in our networks. A simple “hat tip” to the person you reshared from builds a deeper bond across the social web. Call it a form of social currency, if you will: where a link noting “Thanks to +Joe for the share/re-share” acts as payment for being able to reshare it yourself… which of course makes an unacknowledged reshare a bit like taking a cookie from the break room but not leaving your fifty cents in the honour jar; not quite stealing, but not exactly in the spirit of things either.

I’ve seen both behaviours in the extreme on G+, as well as Twitter and Facebook (admittedly Twitter can be rough to retain the amount of info in just 140 characters). You don’t have to go overboard and thank the entire chain of people who reshared before it got to you, but it IS good for to at least acknowledge the person you shared from, and if possible the original poster too. Who knows, leading by example may just pay off in a larger, more connected social network able to help you succeed beyond your wildest dreams… or maybe good karma is enough to make it worth your while.

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It’s been less than 24 hours since WCPDX wrapped up, so I’m still processing a lot of what I heard over the course of the weekend. Still, it was within the first hour that I knew my time would be well spent here. Thankfully so, too, as I was fresh off a PDXWhisky tasting event from the night before (in bed around midnight and up at 6am for WCPDX made for a bit of a rough start Saturday morning…. thank gods for five-hour energy drinks and social anxiety induced adrenaline!).

The biggest takeaway for me was actually specific to running ‘barcamp’ style events: motivating people to lead sessions isn’t something you can control or drive, the participants need to be passionate about a topic and self motivated to put their session on the board.

The second takeaway was much more WordPress focused: “Child themes” are apparently not WordPress themes for children, but rather a more development focused capability for further customization of your site. Who knew?

Over the course of the two days, I jotted down notes on my iPad to log some of the bits that stuck out to me about the entire event. Oddly, none of these were really WordPress specific… though that is likely since I didn’t come in to the conference with specific WP questions or goals… that in mind, here are some lessons learned from a participant’s point of view. Some off these were learned because of perceived failures, some because of successes, but all are lessons we can bring back and implement to improve and maintain success… please forgive the disjointed nature:

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WCPDX: Unconference best practices / lessons learned / general notes and observations: 

1. Be crisp. Start session with topic explanation in 3 words, then poll attendees for expectations and what they want to know.
2. Agenda organization is frantic from the start, but settles down later. Minimal topics in the first 30 minutes into the first session, but builds momentum with the day.
3. During first session, rest of schedule builds out heavily. If you want to present, don’t wait.
4. On the fly schedule updates via web / twitter were brilliant. Define single online and single physical location to find schedules. Set centralized twitter account to help users enable text notifications for schedule changes during conference. Be mindful of using this account for things other than scheduling updates during session hours.
5. Participation is a lot of question/answer collaborative discussion; not a lot of push presentations, but there was a good balance of presentation to collaborative engagement.
6. Finding people to lead seemed like it may have been tough at times but there was no real lack of desired topics. (how to identify SMEs?)
7. WCPDX 2011 was heavily developer driven, which will likely be useful to me down the line. 50% plus in the audience make-up. Appreciated addition of scheduled keynote overlap when main was dev-centric.
8. First session seems like a rough start/just getting the feel.
9. Felt bad for not coming with a topic to lead. Will need to prepare for future camps. I had ideas but nothing solid to present, just general topics and didn’t want to cram the schedule with a nebulous idea… wondering how to motivate people like me to lead not just attend.
10. Topics shift quickly based on attendee feedback; some sessions were listed as one thing and quickly changed to something connected but generally different.
11. At one point I realized was in wrong session (I had forgotten the right room number and went to the wrong one), but found leaving to be difficult due to the perception that simply leaving would mean I was unhappy with a session which simply wasn’t relevant to me… Need to define an unconference better in the beginning, define etiquette and level set from the start, make it easy for participants to navigate and engage without feeling as though they are being rude.
12. Need multiple text editor capabilities to easily switch note taking topics and ideas. iPad multi-task capabilities came in handy for this.
13. Prepared sessions are good, but I found open dialog and conversation on guided topics are better. Facilitator vs. Presenter.
14. Free rooms are essential to allow for people to ad hoc hack, blog, etc. Make space available with tables.
15. Bring business cards.

All in all, the event was an outstanding success for me as a participant. Like after most conferences where you are focused and learning about specific topics that challenge your current skill sets or provide new exciting ways of accomplishing your goals, I am on a high and excited to make some changes to my sites. I am sure the euphoric buzz will wear off soon enough, but the stuff I learned won’t deteriorate with it.

I am once again re-invigorated with desire to improve my WordPress driven sites (I own and maintain 3 of them), and am looking to revamp at least one of them to make it more functional for the user base. I even found some great tools over the weekend (like the EditFlow plugin from http://editflow.org/) to really help bring my sites up a notch and ensure that my content is the reason people don’t stay on my sites, not the site itself Yes, that was self-deprecating humour to make a point, I really hope my content isn’t that bad!

I also found that my iPad was the perfect tool for a conference event like WordCampPDX. It is light and nimble and easily woken from sleep. Having it at the ready-made keeping up to date on the unconference scheduling easy, and checking out resources mentioned during session allowed me an efficient way to set the content for later review, or even just install a them or plugin on the fly as we were discussing it. Brilliant.

Plus, I was able to easily follow the conversations occurring on Twitter under the #WCPDX hash tag, which allowed me to connect with a few of the event attendees in the same sessions or conflicting sessions I couldn’t get to. While that made for a very busy day in terms of communications, it really skyrocketed my experience at WCPDX by enabling two-way real-time feedback in sidebar discussions concurrent with live sessions, or off in ad hoc meet ups for more in-depth conversations. I can’t imagine attending any conference without my iPad and constant twitter feed going. Not only did it make the conference more efficient and effective for me, but it also allowed me to discover and connect with some cool new people!

For those of you I met at #WCPDX: thanks for making it a great weekend! If you haven’t already, check out www.acdntlpoet.com and connect with me in the other social web spaces so we can continue the great conversations!

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The past week has seen an amazing buzz surrounding Google+ as serious competition for social networking tools. Most people seem to be comparing it to Facebook for some reason. Personally, I think that is rather short sighted. G+ is not really a direct competitor to Facebook nor Twitter. Rather, G+ fills a gap which exists between those two monoliths. A comment on one of the various G+ conversations I’d seen over the week likened this to the game of thrones, wherein the result will not be a single victor, but rather the demolition of thrones  at all, where no one site will be dominant. I think that is the likely outcome to all of this… as I’ve said before, use that which works for you. I am on nearly every site for varying reasons, as I find value in each. I won’t be leaving one for the other until such a time as there is no value for me to gain form it. Much like my reasons for dropping MySpace, I simply got no value from my account on that site, so I finally let it go.

When it comes to G+, I’ve also seen a very disparate view of the party. In my experience thus far, there has been immediate and dynamic conversation sprouting up and gaining serious traction. For others, however, I’ve noted them likening their experience to entering an empty room. I attribute this directly to how actively those people have added to their circles, and how active the people in their circles at posting. In my case, I now have 137 people in my circles, a solid 20 of which are fairly active at posting. Because of those numbers, I am immediately able to see value in the space since there is activity in the space. Much like real life relationships, you get out what you put in. The same is true for G+, Facebook, twitter, Tumblr, and any other social network you join… after all, relationships are the basis of social!

For me, G+ is quickly becoming a widespread network of connections with whom I can globally collaborate, engage, and learn. Posts in G+ thus far seem to be more substantive, richer, thoughtful, and of higher quality than those coming across my Facebook news feed. While I -think- my twitter feed is just as substantive, the quality of those posts seems to be inhibited by the 140 character limitation, whereas G+ takes a long form approach and allows for those posts to be fully expressed not truncated. Plus, the multimedia aspect of G+ is implemented far better than in either Facebook or Twitter.  Oddly, this is the only area in which I think Tumblr may have a leg up, as tumblr does multimedia VERY well. The downside of tumblr, of course, if the conversation aspect is disjointed, difficult, and even hidden. So, while Tumblr may present multimedia content in a better fashion, I really am just a consumer, not a participant. G+ takes the cake again when it comes to enabling good discussion surrounding the originating posts.

When it comes to controlling and organizing how you post content to your streams, Circles are brilliant. I have even more ideas about how Circles can possibly be improved, but for that conversation you’re going to need to head over to Google+ and read my public post on the matter:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/104543811989174059883/posts/DgtYDeNMpQ7

While you’re there, feel free to add me to your circles if you’re also on G+… if you aren’t there, feel free to ping me for an invite so we can continue this conversation and/or engage in others! You can find my profile at: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104543811989174059883

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It is no secret that anyone working in the social business world struggles daily with how to measure value and return on their investment (ROI) in the space. If we can figure out how to effectively measure our work and translate it into monetary value, we’re golden. Come up with a nice easy formula in the support space to show avoided cost, something like: “total clicks to payload x success indicator x %clients who would call = avoided call ticket x cost per case = avoided cost”  and you’ve got your end of story, right?

Well, not so fast (you knew I wasn’t going to let you go that easily right?). What about measuring those intangibles I spoke of in my earlier post here? How can you effectively measure thought leadership and eminence in the industry? Or rather, and perhaps more importantly, is the value of being a thought leader more important than the simply monthly indicators of engagement and content consumption?

I’m fairly certain you can see what I’d argue here…. that thought leadership, that digital eminence is actually the primary purpose of social business, everything else we do is secondary to supporting that higher goal. Sharing our high value content? Sure, that’s an essential part of what we do…. which goes to support the end result of raising our place in the digital world and the ultimate perception that we are indeed the thought leaders in our industry.

Let me take an exampled approach here, and bear with a few assumptions along the way:
You all know I am passionate about whiskies. No arguments from any of you on that point I’m sure. Amongst my friends (outside of the actual industry) you may possibly consider me as a burgeoning thought leader when it comes to topics surrounding whiskies. But why is that? Is it simply because I consistently post a measurable number of links to quality whiskies related content? Or is it because over time I’ve consistently provided quality content related to specifics of whiskies in conjunction with other efforts I make in other spaces to learn and help teach others about this water of life? I’ll bet you’d tell me the latter of the two choices. But which of the two is more important to you? Is just receiving the content enough to warrant me as a thought leader when it comes to whisk(e)y? Again I’d wager to say, no, it isn’t. Thought leadership is critical to what my boss recently described as “compounded interest”. Which makes perfect sense to me.

Continuing with the example…  let me ask; is my thought leadership in the whiskies world of benefit to you? My guess here is that it is, but only when you need it. I am often asked by friends and family for recommendations of whiskies to give as gifts; and I am happy to oblige, especially since answering those questions typically helps me learn and stay up to date on pricing changes and allows me to hone my skills at choosing decent drams. But it is only important to you because the issue on your plate is what bottle to buy for your friend. If you weren’t in that predicament, my thought leadership in the space wouldn’t be of value to you. This exemplifies my point about thought leadership; that there is value there, possibly great value, but only in a ‘just-in-time’ ad hoc model. Right now, as I write this entry, my eminence (bear with me on that assumption) as a whiskies subject matter expert is irrelevant since I am neither posting specifically about whisky, nor is anyone presently utilizing my knowledge about the topic, so I’m not seeing value right now, nor have I over the course of this month. Last month, however, my thought leadership WAS valuable as I was able to recommend a moderately priced bottle as a gift, making a big impact upon the recipient from what I hear, but also not breaking the bank to do so. In that case, I’d say my eminence could have a direct monetary value had I not been asked and had a higher priced bottle been purchased.

My point in this is to show that thought leadership can only be built over time, and the value only seen at the whim of the client with no way to predict how or when that value will be recognized. Perhaps, in the technical support world it will be in avoiding a call ticket because a client remembered a blog post on the topic which included the answer, or perhaps it will be during a sales call when a client signs a maintenance agreement because they recognize our eminence in the space and know we can help them effectively and efficiently when they encounter difficult issues….

Thought leadership is potentially VERY valuable in these instances, but (like the above example), is not solely a product of just work in social business, rather it is a holistic drive connecting all sorts of activities which combine to build that eminence over time. Eminence which can show value in varied, unexpected ways, which can often skirt any potential to accurately measure and connect effort to value.

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Having troubles providing ROI for your social business efforts in a client support context? Yeah, you’re not alone. As support workers, we deal with intangibles every day. It is actually a big part of how we solve problems at times; using that support intuition and gut feelings which come from experience and a roll up of all the differing variables at play, not to mention some well-implemented educated guesses. But how do you quantify all that into a reportable metric to show the value returned from the efforts?

Martin Hill-Wilson over on TheSocialCustomer.com had some great insights to share as they relate to ROI and Customer Service. He makes a point of showing that the intangibles of support can’t be measured, yet are still as critical (a fact which those of us working in the space already know):

“… the inability to directly measure something does not mean it is worthless. Quite the opposite. In fact the most abstract topic that has continued to evolve up the greasy pole of corporate favour is culture. This is illogical from the perspective of corporate Vulcanlogic. You can no more directly show me culture that I can show you that unicorn. Yet huge amounts of cash are invested by the C-suite to improve corporate cultures.”

Everyone who is working today in the social business spaces knows there is value. We feel it in our bones with as much certainty as there is coffee in our mugs (which is to say, a lot). If we were not so convinced of the value and need to be social, to engage with our clients and colleagues in these spaces, you can rest assured we’d not be spending time here. But we’ve all been tasked to find that one thing that evades us, the holy-grail of social business: tangible metrics to show real returns on the time, energy, and capital we have invested to be engaged in the social spaces.

In the marketing worlds, these intangibles are a bit easier to quantify through what Martin calls ‘proxy metrics’; linkages between tangibles and intangibles that indicate correlation if not causation. Imagine a television ad running for a week’s time, and measured sales increasing over the same period. You could make the correlation there that the campaign had a particular return on investment.  And while, yes, we do have proxy metrics in the support world, connecting these linkages from investment to returns is a far greater leap. In marketing, there may be a three jump difference from a campaign to sales increases. But what about support where we aren’t focused on driving revenue?

In client support, the number of jumps grows exponentially from any given activity to revenue recognition, be it direct product sales or maintenance renewals. Does a single tweet containing an FAQ solving an issue translate directly to revenue recognition? No, no more than a television ad for a new car can translate directly into a sale. Both provide the potential, but with so many other factors in play, how can you say that this one piece of content made the maintenance renewal sale? I imagine even ad agencies and dealerships find it difficult to prove that TV ad was the deciding factor for that new car purchase!

Unless the clients are providing direct feedback, noting the explicit reasons for their maintenance renewals, or lack of need to open support tickets, we only have indicators at best to help guide any potential ROI measurements. Martin comments on these client-satisfaction proxies as well:

“But remember, at best these are indicators and should not be assumed to be true in every market. In some, the nature of the product, the price point, the availability of alternative choice, are stronger drivers as to whether customer are predisposed to hang around a brand for any length of time.”

Without that direct client feedback, within support we can only rely on indicators like “visits to content” and “audience base” (followers counts) to show us reach and potential for increased revenue or call ticket avoidance. While call ticket trends and content visits can be easily tracked, I’d argue that connecting the two directly to social business efforts is a dangerous practice. Like so many other aspects of business, trends in revenue and client problem tickets are not tied to a single variable. Changes in the economy, product stability, support staffing, along with any social business campaigns or overall program efforts can combine to drive trends up or down, or even cancel each other out of one effort is successful while another variable may be causing problems (think improved products in a down economy causing sales to plateau rather than increase or decline).

In most instances, de-constructing these trends into their various, granular pieces is simply not possible. You simply can not isolate the various trends and look at the measurable components in a vacuum. Each piece needs to be weighed against the entirety, as a collective effort; each portion doing its own work and supporting the other pieces at the same time. We do not live in a black and white world, why would we think our various efforts are effective in black and white ways?

What does that leave us to gauge our efforts? Transactional data; simple indicators of progress or failure which may, or may not, be entirely accurate or reliable. Yes, we should continue to track those quantifiable items like visits, click-throughs, and followers, but not to the detriment of longer term benefits. Taking the television ad analogy again: that ad spot may not directly impact a purchase decision tomorrow, but the benefit may be seen 6, 9, 12 months, or even years later as part of an overall affinity for the brand. How do you connect such a compound and complex result with a single ad or campaign to show direct value for that single investment? Translating back to the Support arena, how do you connect an intangible, something which doesn’t exist (like the lack of a problem submission), with an individual tweet or larger social program to show any causation and direct return on that social investment?

Let’s look at a shift in thinking for a moment: what if we use transactional data as simple indicators, and then reset our focus to work and efforts designed to build overall relationship value? After all, isn’t that the social part of Social Business? Building that trust, and personal connection with clients is a key part of ensuring not only their success, but our mutual continued business relationships. The trick, of course, is figuring out how to measure those highly valuable but intangible connections. Activities alone won’t show that value… sometimes a handshake is just a polite greeting, other times it is the start of a long term complex relationship with decided fiscal impact, but there’s no way to attach value on the handshake alone.

Obviously I don’t have the answers here. If I did (and I’ve joked to my boss a number of times) I’m quitting my job and going on the lecture circuit for 6 figures per engagement… because that is how big of a deal this is to the industry. Find that silver bullet, that perfect ROI formula, and you’ll be set for life. As it stands, we’re all inching closer, but we’ve still got a giant chasm of a gap to bridge.

Until then, we stand with the belief that within a support context raising visibility to our content to help prevent problems, and providing solutions just in time when problems do arise is one more way we can ensure client success through our social business program. But more importantly we believe that open, transparent communication is simply the right thing to do for our clients and our business.

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Martin Hill-Wilson’s source article, as linked above: http://thesocialcustomer.com/martin-hill-wilson/37698/customer-service-roi-provable?utm_source=tsc_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter
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Full transparency: I am an IBM employee. This post is wholly my own and does not necessarily reflect any official IBM policy, opinion, or position. Read more about the guidelines which I follow at IBM’s Blogroll Policies and Guidelines for Blogging

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… to do the same.
I had initially begun writing this blog post as a personal blog to guide and help us all (myself included) to re-evaluate all the meetings we host and attend, and adjust in such a way as to dramatically improve out productivity. A funny thing happened, though… as I was writing for this personal audience, I began to see a much more effective use of this post on my professional blog, “Notes from Rational Support”. After all, it IS a work issue, and likely more poignant to that audience than this one. So, I adjusted my efforts and worked up a post for NFRS instead.

Of course, I DO think that post is relevant to this audience as well and wanted to highlight it here. So go on, check it out and feel free to comment there, or here.

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