Web Social Architecture

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

Our social media engagements typically start with some kind of assessment, with varying degrees of formality and scope. We have an internal list of questions we use to plan these assessments, some of which are more relevant and important for a given engagement than others. Here they are:

 

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

Most (though not all) companies I’ve worked with have a general sense of what’s being said about them online. Typically, the past year, this sense is mainly anecdotal. In the next year I expect to see much more systematic, sophisticated, and analytical listening. But if you’re not there yet, you’re not alone.

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

Yes, this begs the question of whether a business is responding at all. For those who are, the question of degree of effectiveness can be a stumper. The real question here is: How do you know how effective you are (see #1)?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

People really are surprisingly resourceful when it comes to using free tools to listen online. Even for businesses without a sophisticated listening platform in place, a conversation about the tools they’re using tells us a lot about what they care about and are (or aren’t yet) able to measure.

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

Once you start walking around asking people, the variety here can be surprising. Typically corporate social media efforts emerge out of PR, Marketing, or Customer Service. But ad hoc efforts are very common, and there’s usually something important driving them. Building out a strong program requires accommodating, supporting, and enabling ad hoc efforts.

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

As you might guess, the answer here last year was very often “nobody.” Next year we’ll see a shift toward the guerilla social media people formalizing their roles and management recognizing the need for coordination and leadership. And yes, this question can set off turf wars. Tread lightly.

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

This always yields surprises. “None…. Well, oh yeah, I guess we do have the Facebook thingie. And someone in marketing has been posting our ads to YouTube.” Or: “Marketing is in charge of our Twitter accounts. Except for the ones they use in customer service. And Dale down in R&D is a total Twitter fanatic.”

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

This one is a great conversation starter. It’s really about understanding how to show up in social media (hint: not with offers, and not with campaign messages). This topic is really about starting to think about how the people representing the brand should show up in social settings—authentically, as people, but as people not only representing but also enacting the brand and its character. I like to use the example of our client NAU. They make sustainably-developed clothing, and they blog not about their clothing products but about sustainability, outdoor recreation, and social action—the passions that are at the emotional core of their brand. A while back they posted, for example, a video of people moving an entire Portland, OR household by bicycle. Awesome. You want to subscribe, to follow, to befriend them.

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

Market research typically tells us a lot about where customers spend time online. What it typically doesn’t tell us is very much about what they’re doing—So 40% of your customers check Facebook daily. That’s good to know, but to really drive action, you need to understand whether they’re there socially, professionally, or both. Whether they’re using it to market their services, keep in touch with Granny (oh yes, Granny is definitely on there), or what. They’re on Twitter, good—but what are they talking about? Whom are they following?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

What’s the information ecosystem your customers tap? Who are the influencers? What do they read? Blogs, newspapers, Digg? Are they looking at web pages, RSS feeds? Are they reading on mobile? Are they sharing things they find? Which things? With whom?

14. Where are their relationships?

Whom do your customers interact with online? Through what channels—IM, email, blog post commentary, Flickr photostreams? On social networks? Twitter? Do they use different channels for different kinds of relationships? Which ones, and what kinds?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

Do you have an email contact form buried in your footer? Or a p2p support forum? Corporate blogs? Can customers comment? Review? Rate? Can they interact with each other? Create content and add it? Suggest or vet ideas? Do they have a stake in your next version? What value can they create for each other, and how can you enable it?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

Can your customers contact you? How? Simply being reachable is a great first step. The next step is to proactively engage customers who need support, to reach out to your customers for feedback and ideas, and to create opportunities for customer collective intelligence to create business intelligence.

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

Social media listening has a major difference from behavioral web analytics: It’s a two-way conversation, and it’s not just about what people do. It’s also about what they say, and how they feel.

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

Intelligence is useless without action. But the challenges in actionablizing (ha!) business intelligence are often really substantial. How do you get the right bits and pieces to the people who can take action? This question is really about escalation, delegation, roles and responsibilities, and workflow. To make the most of what you know, you need definition around how you’re going to do something about it, who’s responsible, and how success gets measured and reported.

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

I’ll be honest. The answer here is always no. Social media ROI is one thing, and monetized estimates of the impact of social media activities are another. ROI is great, and showing ROI in social media is absolutely possible to do. The problem is that a large portion of the payoff in social media happens over the long term and is measured in, for example, lifetime customer value and word of mouth—neither of which show up on your quarterly balance sheets.

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

We do have a very advanced approach to this, but it’s a subject for another post. Essentially the idea is to be really smart about some monetized estimates of the value of certain measurable activities, then validate and refine those estimates over time.

 

Naturally, we don’t typically get these questions answered by sitting down with the marketing people for an hour and just asking. We basically never ask these questions in these words. A huge part of the assessment is getting time in conversation with the right people in the first place, and talking with them about their jobs, their goals, satisfactions, and frustrations. We use a combination of interviewing approaches including contextual inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and a fair amount of intuition and sneaking around. In other words, it’s not a mechanical process.

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

Innies vs. Outies

A colleague sent this awesome email the other day, from the outer reaches of darkest Portland:

I had carrot sticks with <famous Internet guy> and Portland's IxDA group last night.  He was *going off* on how ineffective the agency model is for creating and sustaining great, long-term interfaces/software/websites.  He called us shortcuts and a guaranteed method for design failures and that the only way to get the quality of, let's say, Netflix is to go in house and never use an agency. And while I agreed with him on several fronts, I was most impressed by this entertaining and horrifying quote he spat out:

"Agencies are the liposuction of the design world."
-<famous Internet guy>, Feb. 17, 2009

You heard it here first. Are we just a pack of sexy, short-term solutions that leave our clients temporarily svelte if they have enough money to afford our, um, procedure? Do they go back to their bad bloated selves as soon as we leave? Are we preventing them from regular exercise and a healthy diet?

 

And another colleague sent this awesome response:

 

Well, I think <famous Internet guy> is right on at least one point – we are sexy.  

However, apart from that - although I can see where he’s coming from, I respectfully disagree.  The problem he’s describing is not unique to design/ux/creative/whatever.  Innie v Outie is a classic conflict.  Are we sustained organizational change?  Hell no.  Can we make something better, faster, and stronger than institutional Innies can make?  Hell to the yeah we can.  Will the elegant solutions we deliver be bastardized and Frankenstein-ed after we leave?  It all depends on the client. We are not a guaranteed method for failure, but nor are we for long-term success.  We are less like lipo and more like Jenny Craig, we can give you the tools to succeed, but whether you keep using them after the program is over is up to you.  

 

Personally, I'm in both camps, and I don't mean that as a cop-out. I see a symbiotic relationship between clients and agencies where the agency can provide leading-edge, broadly-informed, and swiftly-executed online strategy, and where clients can provide depth of expertise and long-term accountability.

But I think there's a huge gap today, which has to do with the way budgets are structured in the marketing world: Innies tend to have funding for a project, which they hire Outies to execute, and once the budget is gone the concept languishes.

The gap, in other words, is operational. Agencies can provide vision, but we can't, even on retainer, provide true follow-through. Nobody can get in between businesses and their relationships with their customers. (And that's just as it should be.)

Your thoughts?

Leadership in Three Easy Steps

I was on the road a lot in the early and late parts of 2008, which is fortunately not something I have to do a lot most of the time. I am not a fan of business travel. But there's a single note I took during all those road days that sticks with me still. I'd almost say it made it worthwhile. (But, let's get real. I missed my kids.) I'll share:

Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the parent company of the company I work for, said something that was well worth the 18 hours of travel to get to a conference in Athens. Yes, Athens Greece, not Athens Georgia. Long flight(s).

Leadership, he said, is three things:

"Vision, alignment, and execution. That's it."

I take it as a given that we all lead, as well as follow. So this isn't about rank, seniority, or the org chart. It's about effective leadership, period. And it's clear that the best "anointed leaders" in effective organizations know how to "follow" their most junior colleagues at the right times.

Vision. Alignment. Execution.

I could expound for a while on each of those, and end up with a nice, meaty blog post, but I give you more credit. What a great, simple way to encapsulate such a difficult practice! Sorrell said it well.

Consulting Skills: What Is the Difference Between a Consultant and an Enthusiast?

I feel compelled to add a disclaimer: Long-winded philosophical rant ahead! I have a long flight tonight--I'm giving myself permission. Read on if you're up for that.

 

Where do you fit on this graph? In more than one place no doubt. The question is probably more about your tendencies and your preferences, and maybe your thinking, learning, and communication styles. Here's my best guess about where I personally fit:

 

Hmmm.... This suggests I should look into consulting! Oh wait--I already am a consultant. Good. I would be a terrible client!

But maybe I'm taking this work-style personality typing a little too far.

A smart person pointed out to me recently what I think is one of the core truths of good consulting: That a consultant is not the same thing as an enthusiast. I've been chewing on that for weeks, and I'm still really struggling to put it into words that express why I think it's kind of a big idea. It's one thing to recognize the difference between a consultant and an enthusiast,  and it's another to say what it is exactly about a consultant that's different.

The thing is, if there's one thing the good and great consultants I've known have in common, it's enthusiasm. Consultants, when they're doing it well, do what they do out of passion. But there's also a quality of fair-mindedness providing balance within that passion. Otherwise the consultant is what my colleague Pam Shales calls "A solution looking for a problem."

Most basically, there's a simple quality among good consultants of integrity--you can't assume your preferred solution, or even a solution you're selling, is the right one (see my post on tendentiousness).

But there's more to it than that. Let me illustrate: Being a passionate user of and enthusiast about social media doesn't make you good at developing social media strategy. You can use every social network on the web and not necessarily have a clue how to think about the functional elements of social networks, let alone know how to design one--especially a successful one, and especially ESPECIALLY a successful branded one aligned with overall corporate marketing objectives.

You could be a hard-core user of social networks, a blogger, a Twitter maniac, have an iPhone AND a G-Phone, use Pownce and Brytekyte for goodness sake, and Jaiku, and Reddit, Ma.gnolia, and so on, without knowing how to create a plan to engage customers online.

See what I mean?

Here's what I think I'm getting at: Having a strong capacity for abstract thinking is a key consulting skill. You need to be good at digesting experiences, abstracting them into concepts, and adapting the concepts to new situations. You need to build an understanding of broad principles from the accumulation of narrow experiences.

So here's one way to tell a good consultant: Ask about mobile design, and they should mention location-awareness. Ask about social networks, and they should mention trust. Ask about product reviews, and they should mention affinity. But that's not enough: They should be able to talk about how exactly to apply the concept, tell you when it is and isn't important, and give you some specific examples to illustrate their points of view.

I think that's one of the differences, and maybe it's the key difference, between enthusiasts and consultants--or for that matter between users and designers. It's how they add value. It's the skill the designer uses to create something better than the user could have asked for, and it's the skill that enables the consultant to understand the challenge the client needs solved and find a solution the client isn't in a position to see.

What do you think?

Winning with Logic, not Bullets

Boy howdy, do I ever love the header on this post!

What I'm actually thinking of is an approach I use to prepare presentations, which I learned from the best presenter I've ever worked with. He said something to me along the lines of, "Don't present the work, present the rationale for the work." And from, I think, that moment on, I broke free of the much-critiqued built-in rhetoric of popular presentation tools, which fragments when it should elaborate, reducing arguments to discrete, disconnected points, fragments the points into sub-points, and so on. The typical presentation relies on overviews and summaries to hold its rhetoric together, when it should be building and refining a cohesive point of view you can read, start to finish, and feel like it makes sense.

The fact that Tufte's classic lambasting of PowerPoint has become a cliche makes perfectly clear how much pain and suffering presentations cause. And the proliferation of books on the topic also makes clear how difficult it is to actually make good presentations. But I don't think it should actually be that tough.

In the consulting world, you have to go fast, and you have to collaborate. What ends up happening a lot of the time is that you divide up the work, and everyone goes off and makes some slides, then the account director puts them all into a "deck." (And the very word "deck" hints at exactly what's wrong with this approach.) When you present, the meeting is full of uncomfortable moments where someone says, "Justin, I think this is yours. Did you want to talk this slide?" But the problem with the deck concept isn't that labor can't be divided, it's that decks can be shuffled, and logical arguments can't.

So, If your slides make just as much sense almost no matter how you order them, go back to the drawing board. Simply put, if you can easily reorder your slides, their rational threads have frayed.

So here's my presentation tip: Approach the outline for the presentation as you would a persuasive essay. I think of it as outlining the presentation's rhetoric, as opposed to outlining the presentation's slides. Like so:

1. Your brand sits at the convergence of high trust and personal passion. Your customers are most likely to participate online in venues they trust around topics of great personal interest. Your products serve your customers passions, and your brand is highly regarded.

2. So the opportunity to build a customer community is there. This isn't true of every brand. Your great relationships with your customers are hard-earned, and the next logical step is to extend them online.

3. But it's not enough to build it and hope they will come. The Internet is full of empty, static communities that make perfect sense on paper. In truth, the social web is a highly competitive arena, and just showing up won't be enough for to realize the full opportunity.

4. You therefore need to think beyond innovation and create uniquely relevant customer value. Innovation is important, but it's not enough. You need to create value not realized elsewhere on the web or off--value your customers will wonder how they ever did without.

5. We have the chops (and the rigorous methodological foundation) to help you create a community where your customers will rush to engage, then discover on arrival that they already feel at home.

Not bad for completely generic copy! Reading back through that outline it almost feels like it... uh, makes sense, even though it's not about anything. The reason for that is the rhetorical connections across the paragraphs. Words like "so," "but," and "therefore" are like signposts, guiding the audience through the logic of the argument and connecting each point to the previous.

Now, this only works when you can torpedo the presentation-by-committee approach and put one person in charge of the outline. In my experience, everyone appreciates the person who will step up and figure out how to tell the story. Done right, with input from everybody, this approach ends up making everyone look better.

It's important, once you've created the outline, to stick with it. The random informational slide someone wants to drop in at the last minute has to inform the presentation's rhetoric or go into an appendix.

In practice, I usually end up putting the bold text on slides and using the rest as talking points. The last thing you want to do is read your slides. I'm lucky to work with top-shelf designers who contribute layers of visual meaning to the text, and frequently the text ends up getting replaced with something visual. That's fine, because the outline ensures that the final presentation holds together.

So there's Ryan's Ten-Cent Presentation Tip. Try it out!

Getting It Right: Designing Community to Support Your Core Offering

These days, there's a huge amount of interest among corporate marketers about how to "tap into," "harness," or "ride the wave of" online community, Web 2.0, and social technology. And, despite the metaphors, despite the herd-like hype-chasing, rightly so. ("Herd-like," by the way, isn't a metaphor; it's a simile. A world of difference, if you're asking.)

The truth is, the widespread adoption of social technologies, including on the Web, are absolutely changing the game and creating new markets. Companies getting left behind on the Web are getting left behind in market share. For that reason, one recent survey indicates 90% of businesses will add Web 2.0 features to their sites in the coming year. (See Burby's ClickZ article for some caveats about that survey.)

But social technology is tricky to get right for companies who aren't selling social technology. The tendency is to implement a community that's either trivial, fails to produce business value, or simply fails altogether because nobody wants to use it. And failure hurts: Just ask Wal-Mart.

 

No, I Don't Want to Be Your Friend

There's an assumption out there that people "want to connect" with each other online. After all, people are increasingly connecting online, discussing topics of shared interest, getting dates, keeping in touch with friends and family. But on sites offered by companies that aren't in the business of connecting people online, in highly branded spaces in particular, this couldn't be further from the truth.

We do a lot of user research at ZAAZ, an increasing amount of it around social technology. Participants, when asked whether they want to connect with their fellow customers online, collectively say something along the lines of "absolutely not, no way, what do you want from me, what a creepy idea."

But changing the question changes the answer. When asked whether information or content provided by other customers in the context of a specific need would be of interest, the answer is, increasingly, yes, I must have it, it's crucial.

So what's the difference? Simply put: People aren't on your web site to make friends. They're there to get something done, and using community to help them get that thing done is a huge value, because it promises responsiveness, detail, honesty, and affinity.

 

Don't Just Build Community for Community's Sake

If you're in, say, the sailing equipment business, selling boat parts, life jackets, apparel, accessories, navigational charts, electronics, and so on, it might be tempting to create, say, a discussion board for your customers. Don't do it. It will fail.

I'm not saying nobody will use it. Sailors, after all, probably have stuff to talk about with other sailors. They might show up, possibly even in numbers to sustain a thriving discussion setting. Properly managed, a nice little community could emerge.

More likely, however, usage will be sporadic, volume low. You won't have the level of value needed to encourage repeat and sustained use. Your logo in the upper left-hand corner of the page will reduce the sense of authentic passion behind the community site, and users will wonder what your motives are. You'll moderate and be called a fascist. Threads will veer off course, so to speak, and topics will list hard a-starboard. You'll spend money keeping the thing afloat for a while, then late some Super Bowl Sunday, when nobody's looking, you'll quietly jettison the whole thing.

At best, your thriving discussion boards will give you a little brand boost. At worst, you'll end up a cautionary tale on some consultant's blog.

 

To Win with Community, Support the Core Offering

So instead of simply throwing open the gates to a discussion forum, think carefully about your real offering. How might your customers create more value around that offering?

Step 1: What do you sell?

Sailors, all of them, are gearheads. They love their gear, and because boats need a lot of maintenance, they're constantly tinkering with their gear. They read your catalog in the evening after work. They talk gear with their sailor friends. Other than sailing, talking about sailing gear is their favorite thing to do.

And hey, you sell sailing gear. So creating a venue for sailors to talk gear has the potential to not only appeal to your customers' enjoyment of gear talk, it also can drive sales. So create discussion forums, yes, but structure them around a taxonomy of sailing gear, and most crucially, tie them into your product pages. Excerpt discussions about products on product pages, and link to products from pages where people are discussing them. Add ratings and reviews for your products. Invite outstanding community content contributors to write posts for a group customer blog.

If your products are complex or require special knowledge to use, provide space for customers to support each other.

Step 2: Is what you sell the real offering?

If you're in the sailing equipment business, your offering might not be gear alone. Do you sell, for example, gear of a certain quality, at a certain price? What's your real brand promise? It's probably not "We sell sailing gear." It's probably something more like "We take the hassle out of boat maintenance, so you can get out on the water."

Another way of saying this is, What differentiates you from your competitors?

Step 3: How do you improve the core offering?

Without losing sight of the thing you're actually selling, think about the core offering of the business, and architect community to do more of it, extend it, complement it, enhance it, improve it, or fix what's broken with it. Providing highly-responsive technical support through community is sometimes a no-brainer, but there's always more you can do.

Imagine, for example, your sailing community offering a space for sailors to share their efficiency tricks. If your brand is about making sailing less fussy, you can offer a community site that promises not just gear, but the collective knowledge of the sailing community about how to get out there more and fuss with gear less.

Step 4: Tie Your Community to Your Product or Service

Remember, the core offering isn't always the thing that's getting sold, but that doesn't mean you can ignore the need to sell. And you don't have to feel bad about it! It's really tempting to want to adopt a perspective along the lines of "It's not about selling, it's about people." The truth is, it can and should be both. People aren't going to hate you.

I've been surprised many times by community participants' willingness to accept. selling within the community, as long as it's done right, without hard sells, and the community is providing value. Your customers know you need to make a living, and they'll find it perfectly normal for you to see a direct business return on your community site.

Think of it this way: If you were hosting a speaker at your sailing gear store presenting a slide show about a solo voyage around the world, folks wouldn't resent the visible presence of your products at the event. In fact, they'd appreciate it. You could even announce an upcoming sale or special deal for attendees, if you did it with taste and sensitivity, respecting the fact that people came primarily to hear the speaker and only incidentally, and only in some cases, to shop. Doing something analogous in your online community space is perfectly acceptable.

Don't be afraid to be in business. And don't be afraid to measure your community effectiveness in dollars--after all, if you're making money, you must be offering something of value! Without a doubt, branded communities require a different kind of thinking. But it's worth the investment. When community is working for you, you're not only running a cool web site that brings you cachet--you're co-creating, in partnership with your customers, a stronger realization of your brand promise.

Consulting Skills: Word of the Day is Autopoiesis

My colleague Aaron Louie busted out this unpronounceable mouthful in an instant message the other day (I wonder if he knows how to pronounce it). Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

Autopoiesis literally means "auto (self)-creation" (from the Greek: auto - αυτό for self- and poiesis - ποίησις for creation or production) and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.

Here's what I love about it: You can think of the "dialectic between structure and function" as a relationship between tool and purpose, what and why, technology and value, system implemented and need answered.

To me, this is a great expression of the basic challenge of consulting. To be effective, we need to maintain a value-adding, strategic point of view, fastidiously avoiding the easy tendency to focus on tools, technologies, and systems. Simply put, if we're focused on tools, we're fooled into thinking we understand the need, because the need is an element of the tool. If we're prejudiced to implement a blog, for example, we naturally see the problem in terms of the solution provided by blogs.

Even further: We need to resist approaching problems from the point of view of solving them. Why? Because the problems we're assigned to solve aren't always the problems that need solving. Instead, try to understand the shape of the need first, arriving at the tactical solutions as reflections of the need.

Holding the right mindset opens up the possibility of real insight. When we see opportunities to create value, the way to execute arrives with the insight, as naturally as leaves arrive to the tree.

Consulting Skills: Winning before Starting

A while back, a colleague described to me a business practice in which "the meeting is a formality." What he meant is that every stakeholder has already had a chance to weigh in, every conflict among priorities has been resolved, every concern addressed, reviewed, and confirmed--before the review meeting. The meeting itself is the handshake at the end of the meeting.

This idea has stuck with me for years and served me really well. To be truthful, I hardly ever do actually get to the point where agreement has been entirely reached behind the scenes before the meeting, but I do manage to avoid a lot of pitfalls by understanding everyone's perspectives ahead of time. I give a lot of courtesy pre-reviews, ask a lot of questions, and so on. When I can't get time with a key stakeholder, I talk with people famililar with their thinking to try to anticipate their concerns, avoid their hot-buttons, and speak to their agendas.

Important conversations can easily be derailed by issues that could have been avoided. Doing legwork in the background accomplishes two things: Avoiding mistakes first of all, but more importantly focusing the conversation on the stuff that really needs to be discussed.

When things are really working right, the client doesn't just feel like you're on the same page--you are, actually, on the same page.

Consulting Skills: Hiding

I left the world of independent consulting for the agency life because I wanted stability as my family prepared for our second baby. I thought: Enough feast and famine! Enough 12 hour days! Enough wondering where next month's dinner is going to come from.

Little did I know how crazy the agency life is, and little did I know how much fun it would be. It's both, and I don't think I'll ever give it up.

All consultants share one thing: Passion for the work. So avoiding loss of productivity (I'd call it smolder-out rather than burn-out) is a crucial skill. Your colleagues can reach you any time, anywhere. So can your clients. People want to know your opinion, and you'd better, by gawd, have one. You're only as good as your last meeting, your last launch, your last deliverable. Keep up. Stay sharp.

I do a few things that help. I work from home a couple days a week, and I'm careful about whom I tell how I can be reached. I put on my headphones at the office, sometimes with no music so I can concentrate on work without being interrupted, sometimes with music so I can concentrate without being interrupted by work. I start early and leave early or I start late and leave late. I hide.

On that note, I'll disappear through the new year with these last few words. No more posts, no more responses to comments, no email, no SMS, etc. Don't call me.

But if you're reading this because reading blogs over the holidays relaxes you, drop me a comment with more ideas about how to take time off, how to refresh your brain, how to stay sharp. I'm really curious!

Just don't expect a response from me before January 2nd. Enjoy your holidays, and for goodness' sake read, if you aren't already, The CHO at http://positivesharing.com/

Cheers!

Consulting Skills: Word of the Day is "Tendentious"

From dictionary.com:

tendentious \ten-DEN-shuhs\, adjective: Marked by a strong tendency in favor of a particular point of view.

Over the years I've known a few consultants who embody this word. They've mastered a topic area or a toolset, and they seek ways to apply it in every situation. Need to improve brand perception? You need a corporate podcasting program. Need to reach loyal customers with product updates? You should think about podcasting. Need to reach 200 million impressions for your product launch? Do it, do it, do it with podcasts!

Don't be like that. Don't be a solution in search of a problem.

Saying don't be tendentious is just another way of saying DO be open-minded. So the real message is that good consulting is about good listening and creative problem-solving. This is hard to do, because when we get good at something, or have a success, we tend to want to repeat it. The trick is recognizing the problem and developing a repertoire of solutions, and the flexibility to invent new solutions, that can be applied as appropriate. Whether they know it or not, your clients need you to be a strategic partner. You're the one with the expertise.

It works the other direction, too: Clients hiring consultants sometimes do so precisely because they've prematurely settled on a solution and want a consultant to help them implement it. In those situations, consultants sometimes need to help define the problem and work through the solution.

As a consultant with a focus on social media, I field a lot of questions about online communities. When folks talk with me, they very often have already decided that what they need is some kind of online community, and very often they've started with the tool they envision implementing. ("We need a wiki!) Very often, I find myself redirecting those requests.

For one major client, I'm working on a community strategy pitch presentation that basically says their brand is the very opposite of community, and they should be thinking about word-of-mouth instead. It's possible I'll get eaten alive. That's consulting--light a candle for me.