Embracing Hyper-Sociality as part of your business strategy can be scary. After all, social environments aren’t limited to nice people who are motivated by reciprocity; they also have freeloaders, bullies, sociopaths, and even nasty people. Those social detractors can do a lot of damage to your organization. Unfortunately, those people are already in the mix. They may be employees of your company or employees of your customers. And if they haven’t already started to hurt you, they will do so soon—whether you embrace Hyper-Sociality or not. The difference is that if you do embrace it, chances are that the Hyper-Social champions among your employees, customers, and prospects, motivated by their Human 1.0 characteristics, including altruistic reciprocity and a deep sense of fairness, will keep those social deviants in check, or at least help you do so.
It’s not just socially awkward people who will try to hurt you with an online smear campaign. Sometimes angry customers and employees will use their newfound Hyper-Sociality to punish you if you screw up. As we saw in Chapter 1, humans are hardwired to punish and take revenge against people who (they feel) have treated them unfairly. In fact, they will be willing to pay a personal price to punish you. That means that if your customer service department wrongs a person, chances are that he will join a community like Planet Feedback (http://www.planetfeedback.com), or Who Sucks (http://www.hoosucks.com), where he can go out of his way to bad-mouth you. Worse still, he might use his own megaphone, as Jeff Jarvis did when he created Dell Hell, or set up a site and create a vibrant community at “yourbrand”sucks.com.
Just like everything involving social environments, the Hyper-Social shift includes some messiness. You can choose to embrace it or fight it—but as you may have guessed, we strongly encourage you to take the first option. In order to embrace it and fully capitalize on the Hyper-Social shift, you will have to let go of some hierarchical command-and-control structures and top-down processes.
Companies and markets are not just made up of individuals; they are also made up of tight-knit communities and tribes that have come together because of a shared passion or pain, a shared sense of belonging, or in some cases a common enemy. Their contract with one another is not a monetary-based contract—it’s a social contract. And yes, even within your employee base, you have tribes that are bound together by social contracts (hopefully not because of shared animosity toward management), and the bonds that result from those social contracts are much tighter than the bonds that these employees have with the company itself based on their legal contract. So if you want to innovate or solve problems within your company, you are far better off tapping into those tribes and their social framework than focusing on their sense of responsibility as employees or customers based on their actual contract with your company.
Fixed hierarchies and processes tend to clash with Hyper-Sociality and the messiness that comes with it. As Professor Patrick Cohendet, Professor of Economics at the University of Strasbourg, France, said,1
A too strict control of hierarchy enforcing members to follow the rules decreed by the “visible structures” would prevent the firm being able to benefit and derive value from the knowledge accumulated by the “invisible communities.” Such decisions certainly would not eliminate the functioning of community (people would continue to talk and exchange ideas), but the useful knowledge accumulated at that level would presumably be hampered from flowing to the rest of the organization. The hierarchy cannot influence the internal functioning of communities, but it can and should find ways to let the knowledge accumulated by communities flow and bring value to the firm.
So how do you embrace social messiness? How do you let go of hierarchical structures and processes enough to enable the Hyper-Social shift and to stimulate innovation without having to kill the corporate culture that took decades to establish itself? And what can you expect from fully embracing it? What might happen if you resist it? These are some of the topics we will tackle in this chapter, showing you real examples to help you figure out how much you should embrace social messiness and how to do it in the first place.
Some great companies have been able to embrace messiness without too much pain. One such company is JetBlue. When we spoke with Marty St. George, its CMO, he told us about the values-based culture that drives everything at JetBlue. The company’s original mission was to bring humanity back to the airline industry. So how can you humanize a brand when there are so many employee touch points that can make or break that brand promise? It turns out that for JetBlue, the most important ingredient for success is having a values-based culture—one in which every single employee bases her actions on those values. Not surprisingly, the values that drive the JetBlue culture are fairly straightforward and easy to live by: safety (the most important, of course), caring, integrity, fun, and passion.
All employees are screened for those values during the hiring process, go through extensive training on them after being hired, and are constantly reminded of them for as long as they are with JetBlue. The end result is that everyone at JetBlue feels part of a big tribe, single-mindedly focused on improving the customer experience and by proxy JetBlue’s business. Front-line crew members are empowered to make independent and human decisions based on those values.
JetBlue did not develop a traditional rule book, a huge manual full of rules and legally reviewed processes to prepare employees for every possible scenario that they may encounter as they interact with their tribes. Instead, it developed five core values that form the social contract among its employee tribe and then let those employees be humans in dealing with all customer situations. The power of this approach is obvious, as Marty told us: “I think 95 times out of 100 we can predict what a crew member’s going to say in a situation because obviously the values are very important, but also because there are certain pieces of our contract of character with our customers that we know are going to be interpreted the same way pretty much every time.”
Do you suppose JetBlue could have developed that high a predictability of response with a rule book? Of course not. This values-based approach, which is actually built on Hyper-Sociality and shows the power of letting go of fixed processes, also ensures a self-enforcing culture with built-in organizational learning. Marty further talked about the importance of transparency in forming a cohesive workforce, one that focuses on them (the customers) and not on us (the employees). For JetBlue executives, briefing employees on how the business is doing and addressing their concerns in a timely manner is just as high a priority as briefing and informing investors.
Contrast this approach with that of another airline company whose CEO recently was recognized as one of the worst CEOs, partly for not treating employees respectfully. When executives manage their employees without respect, their tribes start operating at what Dave Logan categorizes as level 2 in his book Tribal Leadership2—driven by the motto “My Life Sucks” and resulting in very Dilbert-like behavior. People take long breaks, there’s no innovation, there’s no collaboration, and they do the minimum required not to get fired. Does this sound like the experience you’ve had with businesses you’ve used recently? According to Logan, 25 percent of all companies operate that way.
JetBlue is a relatively new company, so you could argue that it had the opportunity to design its processes from scratch and that it would be much harder for existing organizations with deeply entrenched cultures of command and control to achieve the same results. Think again.
The poster child of process-driven organizations and the beacon for Six Sigma quality control programs, GE, was able to embrace it. When we spoke with GE’s global CMO, Beth Comstock,3 she told us how the firm was able to embrace social messiness on multiple levels. On the innovation side, it created an online employee-based imagination network to complement its formal innovation processes. To stimulate innovation in marketing, it set up a team of “rogue marketers” whose job it is to come up with rogue marketing techniques—and in the process also serve as catalysts to make marketing people think differently about how to market.
NASA Langley is a 92-year-old government agency. It is probably the last organization you would expect to embrace messiness. Think again! Under the leadership of its chief technologist, Richard Antcliff,4 the Strategic Relationships Office did just that. Not only did it embrace Hyper-Social messiness, but it ditched its hierarchy and its formal processes altogether. Imagine trying that in a 92-year-old government agency. Based on the lattice management structure popularized by W. L. Gore, of Gore-Tex, it created an environment based on “cloud leadership,” with no titles, no formal job descriptions, no bosses, and no rules, and where people can work on whatever they want. The work gets done by enlisting people from throughout the organization who share a passion. Even contractors can spend 20 percent of the time they were hired for to work on whatever they want. The results: unbelievably high morale among the employees, who can now work on whatever they are passionate about instead of specifically what they were hired for.
Embracing customer and prospect Hyper-Sociality should not hurt, either. Let’s take the example of Fiskars and the Fiskateers one more time. The folks at Fiskars and Brains on Fire (the agency that helped them build the Fiskateer community) focused on a lot of things right in building this community—they found an area of passion (scrapbooking), and they put the customers and prospects at the center of their community, not the company or its products. A community centered around scissors probably would not work as well, but that is exactly the kind of community that most companies are trying to build.
In a nutshell, the Fiskateer community is a community of passionate scrapbookers who are helping one another in every aspect of the hobby, from providing social interaction guidelines for the community to finding the right tools for the job. A handful of community leaders are paid by Fiskars; all others are volunteers. What started as a modest PR project, with a goal of recruiting 250 community members within 6 months, ended up with a movement of 5,000 passionate Fiskateers in 18 months. In fact, the community achieved its original goal of 250 members in less than 48 hours. Another goal was to increase chatter by 10 percent; it increased by 600 percent. The company also blew past its original goal of increasing store sales by 10 percent and instead increased store sales by 300 percent. What’s even better is that the program, which was originally funded by Fiskars to the tune of $1 million per year, is now fully paid for by the big box art stores.
As we found through our own Tribalization of Business Study, there were also unexpected benefits from the community. Many new product ideas have originated within the community, the community helps Fiskars cocreate its advertising, the community members took over the primary role of customer support within the arts market, and the community rallied to help Fiskars when it came under attack for supposedly shipping products using cancer-causing materials.
“The key to success,” said Fiskars’s CMO, Jay Gillespie, “is to keep yourself accountable to the fans—not the company.” And if you have doubts about the commitment and passion that Fiskateers have toward one another, check what Debby Lewis had to say after we interviewed Jay Gillespie:
Being a Fiskateer has changed my life. The social networking that takes place on the message board—sharing about our family and friends through the gallery and meeting other Fiskateers—makes an impact. I have very close friends now in IL, FL, SC, CT, PA, and the list goes on. Fiskars as a brand has been supportive of the community members and of all the Certified Fiskars Demonstrators. The blog, to me, is the lifeline of the Fiskateers with our Five Leads. Fiskars products are innovative, designed with the consumer in mind. It’s not about the product, it’s about the people who will own the product to enhance their stories.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is game-changing!
Many people, especially people from traditional advisory service providers, will recommend that you get started by doing what you’re already doing, except with a social media twist. Ad agencies will recommend that you focus on engagement through multiple media, or start a Facebook fan page that is powered by couponing instead of by Hyper-Sociality; new media consulting firms will recommend that you start communities, but will build nothing but fancy Web sites with lots of bells and whistles; and some PR agencies will push you to approach social media the same way you approach traditional media. All of these are bolt-on strategies for existing programs and processes, some which have been characterized by decreasing returns for the past few years, if not for decades. On the other end of the spectrum, you will get the self-anointed social media gurus, who will gladly sell you Twitter feeds, blogging programs, or grand social media strategies that have no connection to any of your business processes.
What you need is a process that is grounded in the traditions of business change management, one that has a high likelihood of success and little chance of causing you or your organization unnecessary losses. Fallout associated with change, after all, is one of the top reasons that change management programs fail. We refer to this process as “embracing social messiness at the SEAMS.” If you think that innovation happens at the edges, think about what is on the other side of those edges, and you will have to agree that what is really happening is innovation at the SEAMS. OK, so we are marketers and love acronyms, and like all Human 1.0–wired marketers, we fall in love with our own inventions. Make fun of it if you will, but what you won’t do is forget it!
When you are embracing social messiness by the SEAMS, you are implementing the following steps: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, and storytelling. But before you can start with SEAMS, you need a tribal ecosystem map, showing both internal and external tribes. You need to figure out where those tribes hang out, what motivates them, who their leaders are, and what stage they are at. As we have seen before, finding out some of that information will require both ethnographic and netnographic research.
The SEAMS process starts with sensing—sensing what is going on in your various environments. Sensing needs to go beyond merely listening for what is being said about the things you care about. It’s about understanding what is being meant and mapping that knowledge to the relevant business processes within your company, e.g., product innovation, customer support, knowledge management, human resources, marketing, and sales.
The next logical step is engaging—going beyond sensing and starting to engage your various tribal constituencies (e.g., customers, prospects, promoters, detractors, employees, partners, and so on) on their own turf. This step is not about engaging them through your advertising, corporate communications program, and other marketing campaigns; this is about good, old-fashioned engagement. That means talking with instead of at them. If they do not have a vibrant existing place to hang out, there may be an opportunity for you to host a virtual watering hole for them (as we discussed in Chapter 5). Based on the sensing and engaging stages, you should be able to identify those tribes that are the most ready to help you. So, for example, you may have vibrant tribes externally that hang out with one another, tinkering and inventing new uses for your product and helping newbies use the product properly. Internally, you may find advanced tribal stages in product development, but have a really rotten culture in customer support (we know, it happens). This knowledge will help you move to the next stage.
Next up is activating. Once you get a better handle on the new dynamics of the social situation out there, you need to devise a plan to activate some business processes with these newfound capabilities. Product innovation, customer support, PR, lead generation, talent acquisition, and knowledge management can all be transformed into social processes. Once these processes are activated, these social tribes will get involved through their social contract with one another rather than any contract they might have with your company. Based on which tribes are the most ready, you will be able to set priorities on which process will go Hyper-Social first.
Of course, you will have to justify all these new programs to your management team, so after activating, you must measure them. It is more critical than ever to understand what to measure and what goals to set. Unlike more traditional business change management programs, in which measurements do not interact with the actual programs, launching Hyper-Social programs with misaligned measurement goals can maim or even kill the program in the long run. We will discuss how to measure the impact of Hyper-Social programs and what to measure in Chapter 11.
This being a Hyper-Social environment, you cannot, of course, forget the storytelling. Regardless of what you officially call it, storytelling is important in all aspects of the SEAMS methodology. However you decide to engage with your tribes or get them involved as part of activating various business processes, you need stories that will be compelling and can easily be retold. Stories are how humans have passed on culture from generation to generation, and while your company has product and service stories that you want to see travel in the tribal networks that matter, you also want others to know, write, and care about stories about your Hyper-Sociality. You need to shape and share those stories and find a voice and an angle that differentiates your efforts and gives customers, employees, partners, and media an avenue into what makes your Hyper-Social projects tick. Even when you are measuring the effectiveness of your programs, you should always be on the lookout for interesting anecdotal stories—they will gain a life of their own and sometimes do more than stats in conveying the importance and success of your efforts.
We can hear the nagging question in the back of your head right now: “How the heck am I going to get the people in my legal department to agree with all this soft Hyper-Social uncontrollable messiness?”
For some people, the answer might seem obvious: don’t tell them about it.
But seriously, now, we know that your legal department is out to protect the company’s and its shareholders’ interests; we also know that sometimes it is doing that through too much process and cocooning of the company—protecting the interests of the company, but stifling the Hyper-Sociality and all the innovation that can come with it. There are some serious legal issues involved when you are trying to leverage Hyper-Sociality as part of business, including privacy matters, copyright issues, sexual harassment complaints, equal employment opportunity issues, and, of course, labor laws that were conceived in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and have no bearing on social tribes.
One way to begin introducing Hyper-Sociality to the legal team is by putting everything that is new in the context of what you used to do in the past, and explaining how Human 1.0 behavior hasn’t changed. Sure, your employees can now connect more widely with other employees using online environments, but how is that different from their connecting in smaller groups around the watercooler or at your annual sales kickoff? Your existing employee policies and procedures may be providing employees with useful guidance about behavior in online environments, as this forum is not all that different from face-to-face situations, or when people use e-mail and telephone to connect with one another.
When it comes to customers and prospects, what’s so different about having more employees interact with them in online communities and other social environments compared with having your salespeople and customer service reps interact with them over the phone and through e-mail? Again, your existing policies and guidelines may provide you with a solid platform from which to expand your new ones—if you even need new ones. The other good news is that if you feel that you need new and expanded policies and guidelines, there are many companies that have developed them before you and made theirs available for others to study. By bringing your legal team to the Hyper-Social discussion earlier as opposed to later, you stand a much better chance of rapidly developing necessary new policies, guidelines, and training that will permit your organization to act more Hyper-Socially.
The issues related to labor laws can be a bit trickier. While some companies, like Best Buy, can serve as best practices examples (it has hourly wage workers who participate in its Blue Shirt Nation employee community), some legal departments won’t allow you to move forward until controlling legal principles are well settled. As a last resort, and if your company culture lends itself to these sorts of arguments, you could suggest quantifying the risk and the cost of doing nothing, or of having your closest competitor acting before you. If you do that, again make sure to involve your legal department in the exercise, as some of the data needed to make your case may be protected by privacy laws and policies, and you will need your legal team to help accurately determine the risks.
We have covered quite a bit of ground in this chapter, and as usual, doing so triggers a lot of questions that you should be asking yourself and your team as you embark on developing your Hyper-Social programs.
Does your organization have the right balance between fixed hierarchies and processes and self-organized activities and processes? Do you know where your internal tribes are and what social contract binds them? Do you have a true values-based culture that people buy into? Is your organization getting the right advice in terms of how to move forward? Is your legal department being open-minded and collaborative? Do you know what part of the SEAMS process your organization excels at, and what part needs improvement? Do you have great stories to tell?