Social Media

“Enterprise Social Technology” Book Review

January 2, 2012 by Ryan Stephens Leave a Comment

“Enterprise Social Technology” is a book that flew under the radar in 2011.

The book aims to be “a how-to manual that will teach you a process for implementing social technology in its most powerful form.”

It wants to give you and your organization a leg up on leveraging social media, social networking and social relevance to change how your business operates and give you a leg up on the competition.

And I genuinely feel like it does just that. There’s 12 steps (chapters) in the book and I’m confident that if you read and take action on each step your organization will be more social and better off as a result.

Here are some things I especially appreciated:

The emphasis on ensuring social tech goals are intertwined with your organizations’ overall goals and that social tech isn’t a magic bullet
Building a cross-discipline team approach and ensuring each team member has specific responsibilities they’re held accountable for
The notion that policy documents should be updated every 6 months or so in such a fast-paced and fluid environment
Embedding sales professionals into online communities where socially facilitated selling can enhance a company’s profitability
Establishing measurement baselines, measuring results and then comparing results to overall business objectives while continuously adapting accordingly. I also like the idea of creating and sharing a metrics dashboard organization-wide.
The importance of pilot projects and the application of consequential thinking during the development of said projects
The “key points” at the end of each chapter. This makes it very easy to go back and review the over-arching points when you actively try to implement the book’s advice.
A fair amount of relevant case studies littered throughout.

And a few things I didn’t love:

The fact that this book was crowd-sourced (different authors wrote each chapter) likely ensured that the book got finished quicker than an ordinary one-author book and it enabled the reader to get some different perspectives from various professionals. However, I do think at times it hurt the continuity of the book, created a bit overlap (not to be confused with reinforcement of key ideas) and some chapters were definitely stronger than others.
I believe that there are some limitations to crowd-sourcing, especially for bigger companies and organizations and I wish some of those concerns would’ve been disputed or at least mentioned.
The ROI chapter had some solid takeaways (see above), but not all measurement is ROI and I think the author of that chapter could’ve benefited from Olivier Blanchard’s Basics of Social Media ROI presentation.

Bottom Line: An underrated guidebook for implementing social technology in your organization and a resource that you can come back to after the initial reading.

2011 in Review

December 27, 2011 by Ryan Stephens 5 Comments

Disclaimer: The following post is self-indulgent. Most end of the year round-up posts are. Despite that fact, I felt like this was a good way to pay respect to the work that went into this year and to provide a review of content you may have missed (or have never seen before). Should you decide to keep reading, I hope that it will give you a foundation for where we’re headed in 2012.

Last January I wrote that I wanted 2011 to be about you. It wasn’t.

I wrote that I wanted to read 52 books. I read 27. I only reviewed 3.

I wanted to write more posts and ship a couple of projects. I wrote 47 posts this year, and only 5 after after July. I didn’t ship either project.

And yet 2011 was one of the best years of my life. It was *easily* the best of my professional career.

I fell more in love with a job that affords me the opportunity to leverage social technologies and my knowledge of integrated digital strategies to market the nation’s #1 ranked cancer hospital while simultaneously broadening my overall marketing knowledge and picking up skills like video editing along the way.
I spent a lot of time with my buddies drinking cold beers, listening to live music, hanging out by the pool, grilling, dancing, and watching sports.
I visited with my family. At least one of my parents every day. I grew even closer to my sister. I absorbed lots of wisdom from my grandparents.
I found an incredible woman who somehow puts up with me despite my desire to frequently say and do things that are “in the box.” (Notice where the post volume started dropping off…)
I spoke at a really cool online conference to some very intelligent people about the foolproof way to overcome fear and complacency.
I stimulated my mind and body almost daily. (Which included running my first half marathon with no competition, just for fun in 1:49).
I started saying “no” more often and I stopped doing things I wasn’t intensely passionate about.

What You May Have Missed in 2011:
22 Key Mentoring Messages – Mentorship is a great way of growing and progressing your career. This post features some awesome insights from my organization’s C-suite on the basics of mentorship, embedding it into your organization’s culture, approachability and more.

Reasons Your Employees Are Running for the Door – It amazes me how many organizations don’t “get” why their turnover is so high. Here’s 8 reasons that shouldn’t surprise you. And here’s me angrily ranting after a I read a tweet an executive sent about all her employees getting poached.

American Education: You Deserve Better – One of my favorite posts from 2011. I genuinely believe that modern day education is severely broken and this post details the change I’d like to see. Some people smarter than me chimed in as well. And here are some resources that initially sparked the discussion.

Carving Your Own Path – Carving your own path isn’t easy. You will have to think for yourself. You will invariably call attention to yourself. People will hate you if you’re successful. This is why most people yearn to be led. This is why most people spend their entire lives following.

Forget Social Media – There’s significantly more noise than ever before. Trying to keep up with all of it and be everything to everyone is a waste of time. It’s just fear manifesting itself through excuses and procrastination and we’re all guilty of it.

Why Being a Thought Leader is Boring – This post totally contradicts the predominant advice that you should try to be an expert in one, narrow niche. While many people successfully employ this strategy, I think it’s boring as hell and this post attempts to explain why I’d rather be well-versed on a variety of topics.

I Probably Un-Friended You Last Night – There’s so much noise, so many things to keep us utterly distracted from the things that really matter why do we insist on validating ourselves with excess “friends” who’s status updates we’re totally indifferent to? It’s time to de-friend those that no longer add value to your lives.

3 Things the C-Level Still Doesn’t Get About Social Media – This title is pretty self explanatory. And 6 months later I think all of these still hold true at most organizations.

Life is Adversarial Enough… – Don’t test people just to display your authority. Most of us (young professionals) inherently know that in the scheme of things we’ve accomplished jack shit. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to. That doesn’t mean that it’s not really hard to balance our desire to climb with the gentle reminder that patience is a virtue.

The Easiest Way to Evaluate Most Tasks – Time, not money, is my most coveted resource; therefore, I get really annoyed when my time is wasted. Here’s the strategy I employ to ensure I’m balancing the execution of a project vs. the resources (time + money) used.

Forget the Dream Job, Take the Money & Run – I don’t necessarily believe this (as evidenced by my career path), but the notion certainly challenges the status quo and I think it’s an idea that warrants some thought, especially if you’re still in college.

Creating Higher Quality Stimuli – Reading things that challenge the status quo and/or oppose my own core values/belief system/internal dialogue require me to re-evaluate where I stand on these issues. More importantly instead of just saying “That’s outlandish,” or nodding my head in quiet agreement, I’m forced into the process of absorbing a multitude of information, evaluating that information, and then evaluating what I think based on that information. I recommend you start doing the same more often.

Disruptive Social Technologies: How Your Organization is Missing the Boat – I wrote a lot about topics that go far beyond business/marketing/social media this year, but here’s one that doesn’t. I think it serves as a good reminder that more organizations need to use social technologies for tasks such as cross functional information sharing and internal networking.

If you’re a glutton for punishment here’s My Top 10 Posts of 2010.

I haven’t thought too much about where this blog is headed in 2012, but I encourage you to:

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Disruptive Social Technologies: How Your Organization is Missing the Boat

December 5, 2011 by Ryan Stephens 6 Comments

I recently attended our organization’s first town hall meeting under the tutelage of our new president. He spoke about the recent confluence of transformative identities and disruptive technologies that have come together over the last couple of years, leading him to believe that we will cure several major cancers in his lifetime.

I’m hopeful that I am a part of a place that can leverage new computational firepower, quantitative analysis of bio-specimens, and disruptive genome technologies to advance existing paradigms and cure this awful disease.

Your Organization Doesn’t Get It… Yet.

But in the interim, I’m rather dumbfounded and annoyed that more organizations aren’t leveraging disruptive technologies to enhance the way they communicate, organize and operate their businesses.

Even now, after all the hoopla around “social” has died down (a bit) and we know so much more, companies are still insistent about “integrating some of that social media stuff into our marketing.” Never mind leveraging disruptive social technologies to enhance business intelligence by listening to customers (patients in health care), conducting market research, solidifying customer service, managing a community and more.

I get it. I really do. I understand that your organization is big, siloed, doesn’t get social and so on and so forth. I also understand that most people don’t like change. Change is hard.

The Opportunities are Endless

But in a world where disruptive technologies give us the ability to potentially cure cancer, why can’t we leverage digital/social solutions to put an end to pointless meetings, collaborate across teams, dissipate important news or information, etc.?

Top-down hierarchical institutions wont always be the norm and the power of open source projects is becoming increasingly evident. Rule-followers and drones might keep their mouths shut and do what they’re told, but the industrial revolution is over and those people don’t impact meaningful change anymore.

Linchpins who ask hard questions, challenge the status quo, and demand to be pushed outside the comfort zone do. How do we scale the work that they do – the value they bring to the institution? How do we share it? How do we leverage it?

Oh, You Want Some Examples?

Cross functional information sharing – What if there was an easy way for front line people to communicate issues to upper management, and then for upper management to share noteworthy changes to the PR/Marketing department?
Increased Office Efficiency – What if instead of an hour long status meetings (# of people in meeting x how long meeting lasts) where people go around in a circle and say what they’re working on there’s a sharepoint employees keep updated where others can go and see what projects are relevant to them?
Internal Networking – Most companies organize employees in such a way that all the account executives sit together, the creative sits together, the IT sits together. What if there were internal forums where employees could bond not just over their job description, but other things that interest them. Wouldn’t something like that unlock new collaborations and opportunities to learn and become more well-rounded employees?

How about?

Increasing internal brand awareness
Idea generation (brainstorming via Google docs anyone!?)
Facilitating the spread of research, insights, etc. and making the information more accessible

The list goes on. And on.

What’s Next?

As we gradually come to understand how disruptive social technologies can enhance our own internal communications perhaps we’ll see forward thinking organizations take it a step further. Can you imagine MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan-Kettering all leveraging these disruptive social technologies to enable their respective physicians, physicists, geneticists and more to collaborate with the other institutions in an effort to cure cancer?

The future is now. Don’t let your organization fall behind.

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