Working smarter among distributed teams
My coworker and friend, Wayne Kurtzman, who is a veteran of South by South West Interactive events told me long before we came to Austin for SXSWi 2012 that there is great value in dropping on panels you were not originally planning on attending. All right, I thought, there are plenty of panels I want to go to at SxSW. Why would I go to something that does not interest me while there are lots of events that are very relevant and, frankly those are the events my company expects me to attend while I am here. Feeling confident in my decision I opted to fill my schedule to capacity with relevant panes and felt good about taking advantage of every little panel, meetup or presentation in the area of social media for big brands, social marketing for(particularly for B2B) and social content creation. While I did not leave room for serendipitous findings, serendipity found me! The late afternoon session I chose to attend on day three was titled “ 4-hr work Week is BS – Truths of Working Smarter” and it proved to be that serendipitous moment I needed to truly understand what my colleague meant during our session planning back in Connecticut. Why? Well, I expected a session filled with tips and tricks on how to become more effective and efficient “worker bee” That’s not the topic panelists had in mind when preparing content for the panel. They chose to focus instead on a significant phenomenon that is greatly impacting corporate America: the rise of a distributed (aka mobile) workforce. Did you know that 20 million Americans work from home at least 1 day a week (up 75% since 2005) and coworking has doubled in size every year worldwide since 2006? These stats alone a worth a pause if not deeper exploration of this phenomenon.
Did I leave or did I stay?
I am proud to report that I was not among a few that left the room once they realized that they will not get what they came here for. I stayed thinking about the serendipity of great discoveries that my colleague promised I would encounter. Boy, am I glad I did stay. As a “hybrid” worker myself (I work three days at the office and two days from home) this session proved to be a gold mind of ideas I can share with my team helping everybody to improve our collaboration skills and develop a stronger sense of teamwork among distance employees.
Here are my learnings:
Developing team/organizational culture with distributed workforce
The panel tackled a difficult question of developing/maintaining an organizational culture among distributed teams. All experts on the panel agreed that you don’t have to be co-located to develop that culture, but you do have to develop a set of values and principles that defines you as a team. Regular (not necessarily frequent) in-person meetings that are focused on team-building are also key.
The biggest challenge of being remote is working with non-remote team members.
I am a one of two hybrid workers on my team. Some of my colleagues work in the office all the time while some are at remote locations most of the time. Being both in the office and working remotely in the same week gives me a unique perspective on evaluating both work environments. I was glad the panelists recognized the importance of non-mobile workers who need to master the technology, processes and often the etiquette of working with their mobile colleagues. In my opinion this is a key point for making distributed and traditional workers collaborate with minimal friction. Traditional cubicle workers must realize that they are NOT immune from the major shift that is happening at their workplace and they, just like remote workers, need to be comfortable with video streaming, screen sharing, instant messaging and all the other tools that eliminate geographical barriers.
Collaboration etiquette for teams
Identifying your team etiquette designed to bridge the divide between mobile and non-mobile workers is key to change your team’s culture. For starters, making it possible for folks on the phone to be on equal footing with those participating in a meeting in person. This might include having you and the remote team member share a video stream making it possible for both of you to see each other’s non-verbal facial expressions. If video streaming is not an option making sure that you take the time to explain what’s going on in the meeting room (e.g. Joe just entered the room. We are passing printed copies of the report, etc.). Don’t forget to insist on all members of the meeting to state their name before speaking so that folks on the phone are aware of who is talking in the room and vice versa. Finally developing patience and empathy for folks on the phone every time the technology is not working and it takes longer to set up the meeting in the first place. I think this basic set of guidelines is just a beginning and I am sure you can come up with more that are relevant to your teams. I would add making sure that all of your meeting invites are remote worker friendly including a conference call number, screen sharing methodology and details or soft copies of any documents sent to remote workers before the meeting while the folks on the phone receive their documents as a hard copy. Do you have any additional items to be added to the etiquette list?
Your manager: I don’t know how to manage remote teams
Panelists spent quite a bit of time speaking about managers are uncomfortable to let employees become remote workers simply because they don’t know how to “keep an eye” on them if they are out of the office. Panelists argued that this behavior is just your boss’s excuse for having poor managerial skills and has nothing to do with successfully managing remote teams. Research shows that remote employees are more accountable than in-house workers and they seek ways to prove their accountability to make sure their work is visible and accounted for. If you are a manager seek to educate yourself on how to manage distributed teams and PLEASE do not use it as an excuse to keep all of your workers chained to their desks.
Mobile employees = always reachable = always working ?
Dealing with a boss that expects their agile employees to be connected and ready to contribute 24×7 only because he or she knows their mobile number and pays for their cell phone is also a common problem. What was panel’s recommendation to tackle this problem? Don’t be afraid to have a frank discussion with your manager to establish what’s expected of you being an agile employee. If you address these issues outside of a crisis situation chances are high your boss will respect them and will leave you alone on weekends and holidays.
How to be a great panel moderator
I cannot finish this blog post without mentioning Kevin Purdy who served as a panel moderator whose moderation skills were exceptional. He was not only witty and funny (which the audience appreciated at this late afternoon panel time slot), but was quick to realize that the greatest value for a moderator on this particular panel (where all panelists had similar points of view) was not to ask a bunch of questions that all panelists were all going to agree on, but to play the role of the antagonist role-playing the “traditional” boss who wants to keep his workers shackled to their desk at the office simply to “keep an eye” on their productivity or the “progressive” boss who now has your cell phone number and is not afraid to use it at all times of the day (at night) because you are his/her “mobile” worker. Well done, Kevin and big thank you to panelists: Doug Marinaro, Georgia Collins, and Kate North
The Austin Convention Center ballroom is huge and it was filled almost to capacity when Vic Gundotra, VP of Social Business at Google [G+ profile] and host, Guy Kawasaki [G+ profile], author and CEO of Alltop took the stage on Friday, March 9th, 2012 for a fireside Chat about Google+ (part of SxSW Interactive 2012).
Neither the host not the audience were going to let Vic get away with carefully prepared formal statements about Google’s strategy towards the social network and how it was going to affect Google’s search algorithms. Of course Guy Kawasaki made sure of that by challenging Vic to uncomfortable questions and pushing him to give strategy insights that were not previously revealed.
You can read many reviews of the fireside chat done from the online privacy perspective as well as the strategy perspective. What I can offer here is my interpretation of where Google is heading with their social media strategy which certainly improved following Vic’s chat.
GOOGLE+ IS NOT A SOCIAL NETWORK
It’s interesting that Vic did not use the word “social network” at all when describing Google+. Instead, he described it as a social layer across all of Google services. As a user of Google+as well as multiple other social networks it was helpful to understand that Google was not out there to replace Facebook or any other social network. What they are after is much larger than that and can be described best as an ambient layer of social data following you while you go about accomplishing everyday tasks online such as looking up an address in Google Maps, finding a local plumber to fix your sink through Google Places or choosing a life insurance based on a socially annotated ad. That social data is there to help you make better decisions in terms of how you consume content, buy products online, find places to eat and much more. That’s an attractive value proposition that goes far beyond offering you yet another social network.
SILOED VS. INTEGRATED GOOGLE SERVICES WITH A SOCIAL LAYER ON TOP
During the fire chat Vic Gundotra contrasted the “old Google” where services were soloed with the “new Google” where products are interlinked, able to share data including the social layer that makes all applications more customized for the user based on his/her social behavior and the behavior of his/her friends.
LATEST GOOGLE+ USER ADOPTION STATS
Vic referenced a stat that Google released in February when it was announced that Google+ hit 90 million registered users. During the SXSWi fire chat Vic announced a change in a way Google was going to provide Google+ user stats that would be more in line with how other social networks report on their user activity. Vic revealed that Google+ has 100 million registered users who performed an activity (logging onto Google+, watching a YouTube video, etc. ) as a result of their Google+ circle recommendations at least once a month. The name Vic used for that stat was “monthly actives.” He also revealed there were 50 million Google+ daily actives. Vic refused to comment on the number of active users that simply go into Google+ to perform an activity such as posting a comment or sharing content. I now understand why Google avoids using that stat as their KPI (however it would make it much easier to compare Google+ with Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter). Google is not after measuring activity on the Google+ network, but is more interested in measuring activity across all Google services that has been influenced by social data accumulated in Google+
WHEN WILL GOOGLE API BE OPEN TO DEVELOPERS?
There was a heated exchange between Guy and Vic re. the timeline for opening Google+ API to developers so that users could finally utilize 3rd party apps such as Hootsuite for daily Google+ posting and commenting rather than going to Google+ directly to do so. Guy Kawasaki argued that lack of open API is actually hurting Google in terms of number of active users. That did not seem to sway Vic who stood firm by his belief that Google is just not ready to release public API because there is still a very significant amount of changes that Google is working on which would greatly affect developers forced to continuously update their apps. I happen to disagree with this view. The era of constant change that we live in requires developers of all apps and services on line, social or otherwise, to accept change as the new normal and their apps or offerings being in constant beta release. I don’t buy Vic Gundotra’s explanation and would appreciate more emphasis on user experience coming from Google in this case.
GOOGLE+ USAGE HABITS
Vic and Guy spent a fair amount of time discussing the habits of Google+ users. Vic emphasized the versatility of Google+ circles for segmented sharing. One of Vic’s statements really stuck a cord with me “Google is as good for a whisper as it is for a shout.” Don’t assume that Google+ users are not active on Google+ only because they have not posted anything publicly. Over 50% of Google+ users shared content privately with their circles. It is catch-22 though in terms of making it easy for new users to find quality Google+ members who participate without being faced with multiple profiles where no posts were being shared. This is definitely an issue for Google that they will need to resolve to help make new user experience more satisfying.
IMPACT OF GOOGLE+ ON GOOGLE SEARCH ALGORITHM
To make the conversation complete Guy Kawasaki had to raise the topic of Google+ impacting Google’s search algorithms. To answer this question Vic did not reveal anything we did not know already, namely the details behind “Search plus Your World” that changes the way Google serves search results by adding content your Google+ circles identified as valuable by hitting the “+1” button. Vic did allude to additional changes in the future, but was not willing to give any details keeping us once again in suspense.
A few kudos I’d like to give. Firstly, I need to recognize the host, Guy Kawasaki who utilized Google+ to crowd-source questions for Gundortra’s fire chat. Nicely done!
Another big thank-you goes to to Ogilvy whose visual artist worked throughout the session on putting together this awesome looking visual notes of Vic’s firechat. You can see this note and other Ogilvy Notes from SXSWi 2012 courtesy of OgilvyNotes.com
Google+ Chat with Vic Gundotra (SXSWi 2012) - Ogilvy Notes
Vic Gundotra SXSW 2012 fire chat (1 hr.) has been recorded as a Google+ Hangout and now available on YouTube
Finally, Guy Kawasaki has an ebook about Google+ titled “What the Plus” Have you read the ebook? What do you think?
Newsjacking with David Meerman Scott
Day 1 of South by South West Interactive 2012 welcomed its attendees with the expected long registration lines with an added bonus of torrential downpours and unusually cold weather in Austin. However, because of a great advice from a colleague of mine, Wayne Kurtzman, I arrived a day earlier and avoided all this registration madness and instead caught a session with David Meerman Scott who was there to promote his ebook on Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage
David is a seasoned presenter who knows how to tell great stories. In fact his entire presentation was based on examples that drove home his overall message of the importance of listening and reacting to news in real time.
Why it’s so important to listen in real time?
In case you have not noticed the news cycle has changed and a life a news story has shrunk dramatically. By the time you get to the office at 9 am a story that broke right after you left the office the night before might be old news and in case of a business it might be too late for you to steer your way out of a brand reputation crisis.
David shared multiple examples of newsjacking, but the one that resonated most with me was a B2B example of Eloqua, a marketing automation company, that took advantage of a scarcity of information following an acquisition of one of their key competitors, Market2Lead, by the technology giant Oracle. The news release put out by Oracle included a carefully scripted, short paragraph that announced the acquisition, but did not provide any context behind it.
Joe Payne, Eloqua’s CEO saw the announcement that Oracle made at the end of the day and knowing that online you are what you publish he quickly realized the opportunity to shape the conversation Eloqua-way. He ended up writing a blog post titled “Oracle Joins the Party” on Eloqua’s corporate blog “explaining” what this acquisition meant to the marketplace. Remember, Joe works for Eloqua so the positioning of the blog post reflected that
Since Oracle did not provide any additional context behind the acquisition other than a short press release, the media turned to other sources to find relevant information about the acquisition. Yes, you guessed right. Joe’s blog was the piece of content journalists turned to for additional info. resulting in multiple mentions in key news media that covered the acquisition such a Bloomberg Businessweek, PB World, InfoWorld who quoted the CEO of a competitive company when explaining the news and sent traffic to Eloqua’s branded corporate blog. Not the type of coverage Oracle expected, right?
What did Oracle miss? Firstly they were not monitoring online chatter and had no idea that Eloqua posted the blog and secondly and most importantly they did not provide relevant context necessary for journalists to cover the story in a way Oracle expected them to cover.
What to do to avoid being newsjacked?
So what do you do to avoid being newsjacked the same way Oracle has been. David listed a series of tactics to help companies quickly discover opportunities and threats coming from social channels. These steps included
- Robust REAL TIME monitoring program
- Monitoring keywords, phrases & trending word clouds
- Tracking journalists & media outlets
- Following Twitter hashtags
- Engagement guidelines that make it clear how to handle various brand reputation management situations that come up in a course of a real time dialog. This is key for being able to respond to issues quickly and take advantage of a short news cycle to get your brand’s story referenced in news. Trust me, you don’t want to wake up your legal and compliance department every time you engage in real-time conversation may it be with journalist or a customer.
- Processes in place to enable corporations to develop a “real time mindset” in a sustainable way. That includes ensuring quick discovery and response to brand mentions including maintaining channels to allow for real time online publishing may it be in a form of a blog post on your corporate blog or a tweet coming from your branded twitter channel.
What do you think? What else do companies need to develop a “real time mindset” to avoid being newsjacked? Have you been newsjacked?
Three leadership qualities I learned from Steve Jobs
“Here’s to the Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world – are the ones who DO!”
~ Apple Computers ~
The 1997 quote from the famous “Think Different” marketing campaign for Apple products might have been conceived to represent the elusive qualities of Apple product users, but it is also a very good description of Steve Jobs himself whose business philosophy and colorful life has been described in his biography written by Walter Isaacson.
Yes, I did read the 600+ pages of Steve’s life including the proud and not so proud moments both as a leader and as a family man. I saw him as a youngster who thought the rules did not apply to him, a young college drop-out who chose to study Buddhism rather than finish Reed College. I saw a young entrepreneur whose way to get what he wanted was by either yelling or sobbing uncontrollably in front of his business partners and finally I saw him as a powerful CEO whose way to approach difficult problems was to avoid them all together including avoiding his early cancer diagnosis that might have cost him his life. Was Steve Job’s way to get what he wanted right? Not exactly. Was it successful? You bet.
Knowing his unconventional way of management here are three leadership qualities that made me appreciate Steve Jobs regardless of his self-centered way of managing Apple as a business.
VISION
His early life experiences as a Zen Buddhist with a strong belief in the power of sublime minimalism contributed greatly to his understanding of himself as an artist and subsequently shaped his positioning of Apple as a company at the intersection of technology and humanity. His vision for Apple was to develop products whose simple user interface and graceful design would delight users of all ages. He witnessed how companies such as Microsoft were able to dominate the software market by developing and subsequently licensing their operating system to run on multiple 3rd party platforms. Jobs was firmly against that approach. He wanted end-to-end control over the user experience which he achieved by limiting his software to run on Apple products and retaining full control over user experience both in terms of hardware and software.
Jobs not only believed in his vision but truly lived it through his actions: the way he build his team at Apple, the way he chose his business partners, the way he advertised his company…. heck, even the way he dressed and conducted himself at business meetings. There was no going half way. The way Jobs stood by his vision inspired his employees and commanded great respect from his business partners and even his competitors. We need more leaders able to develop a clear vision and stand by it the way Jobs did.
FOCUS & DETERMINATION
“Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”
– Nolan Bushnell who founded Atari, Inc.
Once Steve had his vision he was able to filter out distractions to make the path to success perfectly clear. When he took over Apple in 1997 and the company was on the brink of financial disaster he knew to eliminate all but a handful of key products & projects that matched his vision. That freed up resources and funds for Apple to survive and turn its finances around.
The book makes it obvious that Jobs did not tolerate “velvety” leaders that were afraid to offend others. He was direct and unfiltered which took some getting used to. He blamed President Obama’s unwillingness to upset others as his greatest weakness. He was equally direct and unfiltered with his top hires as he was with rank and file Apple employees.
Being a very intense man (at early age he thought himself how to stare at someone without blinking) he demanded nothing but full devotion from his employees that he hand-selected and considered his A-team. While his determination was widely considered extreme and even nicknamed Steve’s “Reality Distortion Field” most of his employees were willing to put up with it because he made them believe in things they never thought were possible and most importantly he helped them achieved the impossible.
PASSION FOR GREAT USER EXPERIENCE
“Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
– Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs did not invite users into his design studios. He never relied on market research and never crowd-sourced the ideation process. Instead, Jobs surrounded himself with top designers (incl. Pixar’s John Lasseter and Apple’s Jony Ive ) who appreciated his minimalist esthetics and followed his design simplicity. He and his team relied on themselves and their gut feeling to develop products that users did not even realize they needed such as iPod or iPhone.
“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary.”
– Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs believed he created a company with “a deep current of humanity in [their] innovation” where “simplicity was the ultimate sophistication” and where great engineers similarly to great artists had a deep desire to express themselves. Because of Apple’s out-of-the box design approaches Steve was able to change entire industries: the music industry with iPod (1000 songs in your pocket) and iTunes that included pay-per-song music selling, the phone industry with iTunes store with 3rd party apps, the retail industry with Apple stores and finally the publishing industry with iPad. Was it easy? Not at all. The book describes in great details the struggles Jobs went through to convince the music industry to break records into individual songs and to agree to sell them for 99 cents. There were other projects ready to be worked on including Job’s desire to re-shape the textbook industry by offering electronic versions of texbooks that were more interactive, easy to update and ultimately less expensive to purchase. Unfortunately he ran out of time to complete that project.
It was refreshing to see a CEO so focused and determined to make great user experience the leading theme in Apple’s vision. It paid off immensely with Apple becoming the most valuable brand in the world.
STEVE JOBS’ WINNING LEADERSHIP COMBO
1. Clear vision, 2. unwavering determination to execute on that vision and 3. great appreciation for top-notch design – this was Job’s winning leadership combo that caused a start-up in his parents garage to grow and change the world of business. I recommend for every business leader and aspiring entrepreneur to pick up Walter Isaacson’s book. There is plenty to learn from this iCEO.
No need for a lab coat when using social media for research
I recently had an interesting exchange with an acquaintance of mine who is in charge of multiple customer research initiatives that are based on traditional research methodologies including surveys and focus groups. He openly expressed his disapproval of using social media for any type of statistically valid research due to his inability to control where his social data is coming from. While he continued to list all important points that make traditional customer research far superior from what I can gather through social media monitoring service I could not help, but notice a bigger point that he was missing entirely: ubiquitous access to social data that anyone (with or without a research lab coat) can begin to manipulate and analyze for relevant insights. This creates opportunities for anyone (and marketers in particular) who are willing to learn a few tricks of the trade to use social media data not to replace but to supplement their formal market research initiatives.
Jason Falls and Erik Deckers in their recent Entrepreneur.com article “How to Use Social Media for Research and Development” take a similar stand on empowering everyone marketers, product managers and small business owners to take advantage of data from social media conversations. How? They lists two major ways:
1) REACTIVELY by using free or paid social data monitoring and mining tools to access, analyze and gather insights from existing conversations
2) PROACTIVELY by seeking customer answers to direct questions posted in social channels.
Let’s analyze both from two different perspectives: a small business owner’s point of view who often needs to rely on himself to perform all relevant research activities as well as a marketer in an enterprise setting who has an ongoing need for relevant customer insights that limited corporate market research resources cannot satisfy. Read more…
What’s the future of the “social strategist” position?
I am a proud parent of a UCONN freshman (go Huskies!). Recently my son and I had several conversations aimed at helping him figure out how to get the best of his early college experience. He quickly ventured into bigger questions about discovering his life passions that will hopefully change into a fulfilling long-term career. Just like I was several years ago he is questioning his course selections and doubting his original major choice. He is anxious to get it all figured out regardless of the fact that he has been attending college only for the past couple of months! What’s the rush? – I ask. Isn’t college supposed to be a place for exploration? Read more…
How to spruce up your Social Media 101 presentations
I am in the process of talking to a whole bunch of social media practitioners-in-training about the value of social media and I am constantly looking for ways to spruce up these Social Media 101 presentation aside from just having a bunch of PowerPoint slides to walk folks through. Here are some ways I broke the monotony of “death by PPT slides”
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VIDEOS
You cannot go wrong energizing your participants with some upbeat music & cleverly along with visuals. Here are the powerful three I keep on using over and over
Social Media Revolution -the basics – use these powerful stats to explain the basics concept behind social media
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Social Media Revolution in Business – yes, it has the powerful ROI stats there Read more…
