Month: May 2012 (Page 2 of 2)

I love communities and I am thrilled with the new research from Rachel Happe on Community Management!

First, a community is a group of people that join together around a common interest or goal. It provides an excellent way to connect members of a team and help them to stay in touch and share information.   Communities can be public or restricted, allowing community owners to control who can join the community and access community content.  They provide a central place where individuals new to the organization or discipline can quickly find others or conduct events and training course designed to bring people together and make them aware of individual and collective experience.

A success factor for communities is having a great community manager!  A question I get all the time is Who do you hire?  My advice?

Jeremiah Owyang initiated Community Manager Appreciation Day in 2010. People are encouraged to send  “Thank You” notes to their online community managers. People using Twitter include the #CMAD and #CMGR hashtag in their tweets about this event. Many online community managers and vendors in the social media marketplace post blogs in appreciation of their community managers. Cities with large concentrations of Social Media focused businesses hold in-person meetup events to celebrate and honor those who represent and support their online communities

The top lessons for communities are to

1.      Set clear goals and metrics
2.      Be there for the community – listen and be honest!
3.      Network and train!

Rachel has a new maturity model for building a community.

Key themes from the Community Research which Rachel will discuss on Wednesday during Brainyard’s Seminar are:

Today at IBM’s IMPACT conference, Wendy Arnott, VP Social Media and Digital Communications at TD Bank, will speak with me at 10:45AM in Delfino 4105.

Wendy is so dynamic!  Her story at TD Bank equally dynamic!  Wendy and TD Bank set out on their internal Social Business journey by focusing on /three key imperatives:  1.  aligning to TD’s core values,  2. delivering real business outcomes, and 3. acknowledging and facing the risks head on.

Along the journey that question became, can a bank be social? And so today she will answer that question!  Going social inside gave TD the know how, experience and confidence to take greater leaps outside.  They have a growing presence on many key social networking sites.  Excited about the future, but that’s another story for another time!

Their story started while they were trying to decide if they should keep their branches open on Sundays – a big step in the Canadian marketplace. It made sense to provide a competitive advantage.   However, their employees were a little less keen on the idea.

They leveraged Social to listen and act.  How did TD get 25,000 people to warm to the idea of working on Sundays?    They made their employees part of a highly transparent decision making process.  She told me, “Believe me, our employees didn’t hold back their opinions – but we were able to surface and address their concerns early on.  In fact, through social, many employees joined in the conversation, advocating the change – very helpful. And by the time we launched seven-day banking, the sentiment had shifted to pride and excitement about being open on Sundays for our customers a fantastic business outcome, achieved by encouraging transparency and asking for feedback.”

Focus on business outcomes. But the aim was not merely to communicate more clearly with the employees.  It is to create and improve business outcomes — and embedding social capabilities in the business processes makes that possible – and maybe even expected.  For exampke, their Customer Experience.  Everyone knows what a suggestion box is, and they always used that approach to find out from front-line employees how to improve processes

For example.  We added social to the suggestion-box to address a long-time pain-point. A customer service rep, in a small town miles, from head-office shared an idea to transfer a paper-based process to online. He got hundreds of supporting votes from across the country. Before you knew it, that idea was on the radar of senior executives. It’s now implemented and is delivering impressive productivity gains and most important, a much better customer experience.  The idea wasn’t revolutionary, it had come up before, but until social amplified it, there was no business case.  And this is just one example of the opportunities we anticipate by embedding social in business process.

Another good example happened when TD was  introducing a TD mobile banking app –they first launched it to the employees. They tested it and rapidly leveraging social, identified opportunities. Their feedback allowed us perfect the app before it app reached customers.

Another example Wendy showed me was their Women in Leadership work, and their WOW Board, where their employees post their best stories helping clients out!

WOW moments.  Wendy has been collecting WOW moments of success!   Check it out!

Wendy shared her 5 practical things learned from my social business experience at TD:

1.  Leadership commitment is crucial.  Without strong support at the top, this can’t be done. In our case, the entire Senior Executive Team believed in and supported IBM Connections from the very beginning.
2. Dedicated social business team.  Someone should be waking up every morning  thinking about how to make this a success.
3. Great partnerships. Things don’t just “happen” at a large organization.  Many groups need to be at the table — including Legal, Compliance, HR, Communications, Privacy and Marketing.   And one of the biggest and most important partners is IT
4. Know it is about transformational change. It will rock the boat, you can expect resistance. To build support and foster lasting adoption devote resources. Get into the weeds with some business teams – help them discover how social will address business challenges and how to get started. Then showcase their success – so it can be leveraged by others.
5. Leverage your employees. They get it and they can advocate on a larger scale more quickly. TD Bank created a volunteer Connections Genius team and provided them with special resources. They helped lead the change.

I am a very happy person!  Is part of that because I am a social business evangelist?

Consider these facts!

1. Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego concluded that happiness is also a collective phenomenon that spreads through social networks like an emotional contagion.  In a study that looked at the happiness of nearly 5000 individuals over a period of twenty years, researchers found that when an individual becomes happy, the network effect can be measured up to three degrees. One person’s happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not only their friends, but their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. The effect lasts for up to one year.
2. Blue Shield discussed recent research that showed the power of social connectedness in improving health outcomes.   They found that gamification Boosts Employee Health Behavior.

3. People are  16% more productive browsing Internet social sites for 10 minutesthan taking a personal rest break.  According to a new study, Web browsing can actually refresh tired workers and enhance their productivity, compared to other activities such as making personal calls, texts or emails, let alone working straight through with no rest at all.  (The study, “Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement,” by Don J.Q. Chen and Vivien K.G Lim of the National University of Singapore, presented at the Academy of Management)

4. Accordinging to Framingham Study, happiness spreads through social networks.

5. And the Virtual Happiness Institute, there is a strong association between “social community” and helping with psychological well-being.