During the Snow Storm in October of 2011 both utility companies were widely criticized for delays in restoring power to Connecticut residents. With significant push from CT state government both utilities promised to work on improving their power outage response plans including customer communications during power outages. In fact, representatives of both companies stressed their efforts in this area during multiple pre-Hurricane public appearances including Gov. Malloy’s press conference.  Curious about how both companies have been utilizing social media for crisis communication during hurricane #Sandy I decided to take a careful look at their  efforts in key social media channels.

WEBSITES

Both CL&P and UI use their website’s home pages to prominently display links to their key social media channels.

While CL&P continues to carry links to their Social Media channels on their Storm Center page  UI’s storm center page does not, making it much harder for customers in distress to find ways to communicate with the company in social media. Strike one for UI!

TWITTER

Both CL&P (@CTLightandPower ) and UI (@UnitedIllum ) have been utilizing twitter very actively (tweeting every 1-3 hours) and providing timely customer updates,  tips for staying safe in the dark and most importantly sympathizing with their customers.

The difference between @CTLightandPower and @UnitedIllum is quite evident when it comes to utilizing Twitter for two-way conversations.

Here is the latest twitter steam coming from CL&P’s twitter account. Notice something? Yes, it is full of tweets in response to questions and comments coming from other Twitter users.

Not only is CL&P actively responding to customer tweets no matter how angry those tweets might be, CL&P  is also recognizing their advocates who are spreading important news and good will on behalf of CL&P.

What about @UnitedIllum? – you ask. I did searched their Twitter stream all the way back to  pre-hurricane days and found plenty of tweets directed at @UnitedIllum, none of which have been addressed by UI. Not even a tweet coming from the Mayor of Bridgeport himself! Ok, that’s enough for strike number 2.

FACEBOOK

I decided to begin my Facebook assessment by looking at  how easy it is to find both companies’ fan pages using Facebook search. CL&P Facebook page has been set up using the exact same name CL&P uses outside of social media and it is easy to find. All I needed to do was to type Connecticut L… in Facebook’s search form for it to appear as number one in search results. Their Facebook vanity URL is also easy to remember: http://facebook.com/CTLightandPower.

Let’s look at UI now. First thing I did was to type in the word “United Illuminating” in Facebook’s search field to discover that at the bottom of the search results there is a page wit UI’s logo.

To my surprise the page turned out to be a disappointing miss. Instead of a brand-controlled fan page it was a link to a static organization page displaying UI’s description on Wikipedia. Not quite what I had in mind.

As it turns out, unless you know what to type in Facebook’s search form  you are going to have a really hard time finding UI’s Facebook fan page using the company’s name. Instead the page is available under “UILholding” name (UI’s parent company’s name). Not sure how a customer is supposed  to know that.

Now that we finally found the United Illuminating page let’s take a look at the two company fan pages side by side. Both of them are doing a  good job updating customers with their power restoration efforts. Kudos.

The difference becomes quite evident though once we discover how different the two company’s approaches are with respect to dealing with customer posts and comments.

CL&P is respecting their fan’s posts by displaying them in the “Recent Post by Others” area at the top of the page.

This area includes both positive and negative comments. Despite what you might have expected I did count 14 positive and only 6 negative posts int he first 20 mentions in this area. CL&P understands that there is no way you can hide away from customers in social media. Best to  address their concerns and thank them for their positive comments in the open.

What did UIL decide to do? Well, they decided to hide the “Recent Posts by Others” panel all together effectively removing any posts other than their own from appearing on their Fan page. In addition, UI has chosen to default all of their fans’ comments to “hidden” and review each comment before it’s published. Instead of dealing with their fans’ opinions in a transparent way and building trust they opted for opacity in a way they chose which comment gets displayed and which one remains hidden from public view.   That’s definitely strike 3 in my book.

I understand that United Illuminating may be a much smaller company with fewer resources, but for a company whose VP touts communication as one of their key improvement after 2011 #Snowtober they still have a long way to go before understanding and harnessing the true power of social media for crisis communications. Time to take it to the next level guys.

On the other hand I am quite impressed by CL&P’s crisis response in social media. Congrats guys and keep it up!

And yes, I am planning on observing and comparing both utilities during the next storm!

Google Campus in Mountain View, CA (image by Yang and Yung on Flickr)

Following the advice of one of my colleague I just finished reading Steven Levy’s “In the Plex,” a comprehensive look into one of the most unconventional companies of our lifetime – Google. While the book was not as entertaining as Steve Job’s biography I read a few months ago, it left me wondering how would it be to embrace a culture where change is the norm, where data rules and where failure is described as “not attempting the audacious.”

Here are a few tips that I picked up that can help you Google-ize your job.

Questioning the status-quo.

Did you know that Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both attended the Montessori School, an early childhood education program that focuses on child empowerment by letting children pursue their own interests & filling their day with activities they choose rather than following a rigid program set up by others. According to Levy, a Montessori upbringing is directly responsible for the way Larry and Sergey went about building their business. You probably heard about their unconventional behavior including rollerblading to meetings or getting rid of their administrative assistants so that they would retain full control of their work schedule. While you might not have the freedom to choose what meetings you attend/don’t attend there is always room (however big or small) to introduce change in your workplace. In my career it was possible to implement change from below through a grass-root campaign to introduce my employer’s first internal social media network. Today this vibrant social channel is responsible for ongoing internal collaboration and minimizing both geographical and business unit silos among distributed teams. Who says change cannot come from you?

Data-driven… goals everything

All of us are involved in the process of performance evaluations at work. Most of us dread the moment of writing our own self-evaluation. Talking about successes feels like bragging and describing shortcomings or failures can greatly affect your career and in some instances can even get you fired if you are working for a company that is extremely risk averse. What’s the answer to your performance analysis? Google says: DATA. Google adopted their performance measuring system originally created by Intel’s Andy Grove and called it OKRs which stands for Objectives and Key Results. During OKR’s goal setting activity Googlers break a major goal into a series of measurable steps and proceed to report on them on a quarterly basis instead of waiting for an annual review. The sweet spot for any Googler is to hit 0.7 or 0.8 out of 1.0 OKR (1.0 = 100%). The worst is exceeding your OKR by a large measure which indicates that you are gaming the OKR system and trust me you don’t want to have that on display next to your biographical info on Google’s intranet. Yes, your employee page on Google’s intranet includes your OKRs and performance data for all to see! The OKR process at Google is a highly anticipated activity. Why? Because data does not lie. Googlers’ goals are highly data-driven and there is no other way to interpret success other than looking at data.

Setting up measurable goals can minimize the pain of going through your own annual performance review. What if you don’t have access to data? Well, find access. Invite your Google Analytica guru for coffee. Educate yourself on the basics of measuring the tasks you are responsible for delivering. As an online marketing pro I look for measurement advice coming from Avinash Kaushik and Katie Paine.

If you work with projects where you rely on people’s opinions to evaluate your tasks. Don’t despair. Instead, learn how to use Survey Monkey or other survey programs to help you evaluate your project’s performance. In the past two years I created and deployed over 30 surveys to help me evaluate performance for a Social Media training program I administer at work. Data-driven goals is what makes it clear to my management that what I do works. You should do the same.

The right-culture

From the very beginning of Google’s existence Page and Brin (both computer science majors) favored other engineers and their opinions above everyone else’s at Google. Engineering minds formed what we refer to today as “the Google culture.” I never worked with engineers directly and I was interested to read about the struggle between Google engineering and product managers as both wanted to be in charge of making major product development decisions. The result of that struggle was the birth of the Associate Product Managers (APM) program. Marissa Mayer who was in charge of the program said the following about the program:

“We take people who we think have the right raw skills and insights and we put them into roles with lots of responsibility.”

Mayer was looking for CS majors with ambitions to become their own CEOs. The very first graduate of the APM program was Brian Rakowski who was assigned to managing …. the Gmail project! Yes, Google believed in shaping their own employees so that they would fit within the Google culture of… well, attempting the audacious.

Regardless of what company you work for or what corporate culture you are a part of, remember that mindless complacency will not help you realize your dreams neither professionally nor in your personal life. If you don’t like the culture look for like-minded individuals who share your values. Is there a chance you can build a start-up like culture from the grounds-up right where you work? Are you looking for more transparency? Is data-driven decision making at the core of your management philosophy? Who says you can’t be the change agent others will align behind?

Remember when social media made its debut in late 1990s and early 2000s it was mostly about self-publishing and conversations between friends and peers. GlobalWebIndex Research shows that social media usage is changing from peer-to-peer conversations & sharing to more of a listening channel where large numbers of mainstream users configure their social media channels to hear from and only occasionally interact with public persona, organizations and companies whose products and services they use. Surprised? I am not since I have been seeing this trend in social media programs I administer.

If social users are becoming increasingly passive ( shown by 16% decline in users utilizing the messaging capabilities of social media between Q1 and Q2 of 2012) and users are focused on consuming information they find of value, the importance of using your company’s social media properties as a sustainable broadcasting channel should be at the forefront of your program’s strategy. This of course does not mean spamming everyone who subscribes to your channel with the same message, but segmenting your followers to deliver the right message to the right fan at the right time. That’s value.

Should this shift in social media usage have an impact on a way we are measuring our social media programs’ health? I think that if your audience is increasingly listening and consuming content and decreasingly commenting and engaging back you should re-visit and possibly re-align your social media metrics, but I would be cautious to make sudden and major changes to your measuring strategies based just on this report. I also think that it’s time to pay more attention to your “attitude” metrics. Let me explain. We’ve been conditioned to focus on the engagement metrics including # of comments & likes and the overall viral spread of information on the social web. These metrics alone my not adequately represent the health of our social program in the era of passive social consumer. It will be interesting to see if this trend affects the “action” metrics (measuring actions your user takes as a result of consuming your content, e.g. clicks on a link which results in a lead or a sale) and attitudinal metrics (measuring change in your users’ attitudes as a result of your social media engagement.

What do you think? How will the passive consumer trend affect your social media strategy?

1. Slide 4: If you are looking for most up-to-date global social channel adoption rates, here you have it. And yes, Google+ is growing rapidly!
2. Slide 6: LinkedIn and Google+ are still male-dominant channels (Surprised? I am not). On the other hand, males are quickly catching up and now represent 46% of all Pinterest users globally.
3. Slide 7: Very interesting stats re. mobile usage of social platforms with Google+ being access through mobile apps the most while Twitter accessed via mobile the least. Surprised? I am re. Twitter!
4. Slide 8: Fans and followers are becoming more passive with respect to brand engagement in social media. However, one type of activity is still widely used: sharing photos from a brand. So keep your visual media  center-stage of your social strategy.

Did anything surprise you?

Related Blog: Sandy Carter’s 5 New trends from the Newest GWI Report

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

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?

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

1. Robust REAL TIME monitoring program
   1. Monitoring keywords, phrases & trending word clouds
   2. Tracking journalists & media outlets
   3. Following Twitter hashtags
2. 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.
3. 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?

“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 3^rd 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 3^rd 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.

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.

SOCIAL MEDIA DATA MINING

For access to social media data Jason & Erik give two examples of relevant tools: socialmention.com, a free social media data aggregator and uberVu.com a low cost social media engagement tool. Both of them allow you to type in a keyword or a keyword string  to pull out relevant conversations from a water hose of social data.

How successful you become with this data mining approach depends on your ability to refine your keywords to get relevant results and to look for patterns that might translate into future product improvements or a new product ideas. What are you looking for? Customer pain points & problems incl. existing product complaints, unmet needs and desires, behavioral patterns and solution inquiries. This data could be used to help understand customer behaviors that help you design a better product, develop a more relevant marketing campaign and proactively answer most common product questions that result in costly customer service inquiries.

In addition to the two services and approaches that Jason and Eric mentioned in the article I would also recommend services that allow you to set up alerts and receive notifications of relevant conversations on a regular basis so that you can continue to keep tabs and build on the original insights that you’ve gathered on day one. You can set up alerts in Socialmention.com as well as in google through google alerts.

If there is a particular social channels where your customers are more active in e.g. twitter vs. blogs or facebook vs. linkedIn there are specific channel-focused monitoring tools incl.

• technorati.com for blog searches,
• tweetgrid or advanced twitter search for twitter searches,
• Quirk.ly & Openbook for Facebook searches
• Boardtracker for user forums and board searches

Just keep in mind that social media data mining is not a short process. Defining and refining your keywords to get to relevant data takes time so don’t be discouraged when your early search results include lots of irrelevant content. If you are not familiar with how to use Boolean search operators to tighten your search queries here is a helpful Boolean operator tutorial (PDF) and another one that is a bit more advanced.

If you are a marketer in a large organization that has implemented a social media monitoring program you are already ahead of the game. How to gain access to the tool? I would start by inviting your social media monitoring program administrators for coffee and discuss your specific needs. Keep in mind that you are not looking for a branded company or product mentions that are customarily monitored as part of a brand reputation management program. You are looking for a different set of data which in many cases will require setting up new search queries and working to refine them to make sure data is relevant to your needs.

PROACTIVE ENGAGEMENT TO SEEK CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

Seeking customer feedback in social media is not as easy as sending a question out and expecting multiple responses in return. In order to have your customers or prospects willing to provide feedback you must have a pre- established relationship with them that is based on mutual trust established as part of a long term social media engagement strategy. Those of you who are already out there conversing with relevant audiences about their needs and pain points should adjust their social media tactics to make feedback giving a natural part of the engagement process. Think about questions you want to ask your customers ahead of time and include them in social polls, blog posts or tweets. Keep at it until you get the right amount of feedback to recognize patterns that can be further validated during a formal customer research.

If you are lucky and work for a company that actively crowd-sources their customers for feedback on product ideation you might have a public or private online forum with formal tools to make it easier to solicit customer feedback. These tools help users comment on ideas  and  help  “promote” or “demote” with a simple click of a button. Here are a few examples of such communities you should visit to understand who is talking and what the major data patters are.

• B2C
• My Starbucks Idea
• Sara Lee Open Innovations

• B2B
• Salesforce Idea  Exchange
• Pitney Bowes Business Insight Ideas Community (disclosure: I work for Pitney Bowes)

• B2B and B2C
• Dell Idea Storm

Regardless of what company you work for and research resources you have at your disposal keep in mind that social media is the world’s largest focus group and it is to your advantage to learn the basics of social media listening and social data mining. As Jason & Eric smartly point out you must start with the basics:

1. Have  clearly defined research goals  (what are you trying to find out),
2. Think of a strategy for getting you there (incl. questions you need to be asking to elicit the right type of feedback)
3. Determine free or paid tools you’ll need to gather and analyze data and that will allow you to receive that data on a regular basis.

Good luck!