Jerome Pineau on #socialmedia

As some of you know by now, I am leaving Switzerland after three years and moving back to my original stomping ground in the NYC area. Noo Joyzee to be precise :) I’ll also be leaving my position as Social Media Strategist for Autodesk in the process.

There are several reasons for this. Not the least of which is a woman who understandably got tired of riding the Newark/Geneva/Newark pond shuttle every couple of months. I hope United stock doesn’t tank on this news :)

The other reason is a NYC company called Sprinklr. Sprinklr is a Social Media Management System (SMMS) vendor. And as they shepherd a community of enterprise social media practitioners, I gladly participated in the recent version of their Social@Scale best practices eBook.

I first met Sprinklr early last year in the context of an evaluation pilot my social service team was driving. I could tell you a bunch of stories about their efficiency, straight-talking, and relentless 24/7 support. I could go on about Sprinklr features, usability, metrics, and all the usual jazz. Yeah, they had all that. Most vendors in this category have a pretty extensive set of social bells and whistles.

But what really made a difference for me were two things. One, during a crisis point early on, their CEO Ragy Thomas got personally involved and gave me his private cell number to use anytime I needed. Then calmly, he made us a promise. And his team went out of their way to deliver on it, and on time. I don’t know too many CEOs who do this kind of stuff except this one of course :)

Second, Sprinklr listened to us from day one. I know this sounds like a “duh” moment, but it’s amazing how many vendors actually don’t. Many places talk up a lot of “partnership” benefits. But if you don’t listen well, and act on what you learn, you can’t become a true partner. And what I was looking for went beyond a feature-loaded tool. I was seeking a social media partner to evolve and grow with. Someone we could rely on. You help me out, we’ll help you out. 

Because a really effective social-enablement partner in this business must have the right technology and features, the right listening culture, and the right vision for being - not just doing - social at enterprise scale. And in my book, Sprinklr has the magic three. 

There’s a real proliferation of social platform vendors in the market right now. Picking and choosing is almost more art than science. And part gamble. Talking with peers on a regular basis, our community is almost always abuzz with asks and recommendations for the “right” social platform.

Confusion, uncertainty, and doubt are frequent. What works for one industry doesn’t necessarily work for another. Social channels proliferate then evolve and change almost weekly. Vendors get bought or taken out. What’s a social practitioner to do? Me, I tend to focus on the following things.

Adaptability: how quickly can a vendor handle change? Add features? Add channels? Languages? BRIC support? The next social channel API?

Versatility: Can the platform serve multiple corporate groups or is it geared towards a specific domain - like Marketing or Support? Can it listen, engage, and publish? At the same time? Will the platform help “glue” the business? A platform should drive internal unification and cooperation. And remain cost-effective. It’s what I call the “one umbrella” principle.

Ease of use: how long does it take to onboard the platform? Is flying it rocket science or can anyone drive? How intuitive is it? How fun is it to use? How customizable is the user interface? Is the design intuitive? 

Performance: Velocity is key for social engagement. A slow or unreliable social platform is not useful.

Metrics: How customizable are they? And does the platform create the “illusion of simplicity” when it comes to generating and interpreting metrics for multiple business divisions?

Scale: Can the platform absorb massive growth in both traffic and internal users without a hitch? And within budget?

Failover: What’s the strategy - and technical implementation - for catastrophic fail over? Are real-time global network statuses reported?

Support: does the vendor provide 24/7 support? How quick are reaction and resolution times? Is support provided over social channels? - You’d be surprised :)

Over months of working with Sprinklr to fine-tune and tweak the product for our needs - both generic and specific - how many times did I think to myself, “Man, if I were building this thing, I’d sure love to have this and that feature. This or that capability. How cool would it be if…How unique if we could do this…Why didn’t anyone else ever think of that?” — Well now as Director of Product Management for Sprinklr, I’ll get to influence the product’s growth and evolution.

And short of going out and starting my own company to roll out what I consider a “perfect” social media management platform - the product I wanted to have! -  this is about as good as it gets! :)

And that’s why helping a company like Sprinklr build the ultimate Social@Scale product for my peers and friends in the industry was an opportunity I couldn’t pass by.

Helping really large companies stay social my friends. And making a ding in the universe. That’s where it’s at! :)

I like Mark Yolton’s social media SAP presentations because I feel SAP has consistently “nailed” social to the point where it’s almost become a “best practice” kind of resource in the industry. One of several companies out there who really get “being” social as opposed to just “doing” social.

In so doing, they validate what we all do publicly on a daily basis. And I like that brand of “been there done that” show-me-the-money evangelism.

Slide #7 in particular caused me to pause and think. Why? Because it depicts a new “chutes and ladder” customer sales journey. And I agree that the traditional linear customer journey model no longer describes the buying process in a socially-flavored universe.

The old model is about sequential pipelines, funnels, and pyramids. All basic FIFO stack models. Confused prospects come in, go through well-defined sequential steps with our help - research, discovery, trust, purchase, provision, use, recommendation - and come out as satisfied customers. Right. Now enter a social media-driven world :)

And social precludes linearity and predictability. Synchronous, sequential pipelines and living adaptive networks are incompatible. Best case scenario, you have controlled chaos. So to me these customer journey milestones have really become inflection points in a sea of network “blips”.

Customers (and prospects) consume and pollinate from point to point unpredictably. They enter and exit the network almost at random. The brand itself has little say in the process. Best case scenario, it is socially present at each inflection point - right place, right time, right message and delivery. 

Each engagement with a customer is a “blip” - an opportunity to gain, keep or lose a customer. To acquire or lose loyalty. And mind share. To make or break a sale, or a lease renewal. These happen all the time 24/7.  Often simultaneously. 

If you’re a social strategist, you need to figure out where and when these blips occur. And to come up with a consistent scalable approach to managing the ensuing chaos. Easier said than done.

But fundamentally, it’s all about managing social engagement. Content and conversational. Mapping out, controlling, routing, adapting to, and scaling the chaos of this new age customer journey maelstrom is a large part of what we must do to sustain social businesses.

I almost fell off my chair when reading this a few hours ago. I know, I know, but I get excited about this stuff!

I don’t know if it’s just a “gimmick” as a “retail expert” claims here, but to me it’s brilliant. This whole concept of automating robotic tasks - like taking orders, handling payments, or providing customer service (hint, hint) - is close to my heart for two reasons: scalability, and ROI. 

On the customer service side, I’m convinced there is real ROI in what I call social bot services. Case in point would be this Twitter bot account run by Virgin Atlantic. It launched in 2011. You tweet your flight number and departure information at it, and within seconds it spits back flight status information! Look ma, no hands!

A long while ago, I suggested we do this at Autodesk. Why? Because in most large organizations, significant percentages of service requests are very “mechanical” ones — therefore “automatable” via software using web services.

And web services can of course be front-ended by social channels like Twitter via API. Or something like ifttt until recently when Twitter cut off their oxygen (I wept on that day).

Similarly, a large proportion of requests are repetitive “always the same answer” kind of requests. The same requests you get all the time, year-round. The same questions the same people respond to the same exact way time and time again. Business service questions (not tech support obviously) as in product keys, supported operating systems, or asset entitlements.

Not only is this mechanism relatively cheap to implement (design and development costs), but it’s also inherently scalable. Added bonus: it generates tons of precious 1:N content benefiting many people at the same time. 

This all means you can offload a good proportion of all these “daily grind” questions to your Twitter bot. And have your CSRs focus on other more important things. You might even give your service bot a hip tone and voice! 

Why every large company with a social presence doesn’t invest a little time and effort in setting these up escapes me.

I’m sure there are other automated service bots like Virgin’s out there but I’ve never found one. Then again, it’s Richard :)

But hey, if you know of another, please share the love. In the meantime, do remember to fasten your seat belts and stay social my friends :)

Influence is a hotly-debated topic in my line of work. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately watching our Advocacy program unfold at Autodesk. It’s one of the most fascinating subjects in the industry. Unfortunately, as evidenced in reports like this, it would appear not too many people truly grasp what social influence is about. 

I don’t claim to have any more brilliant social reputation insight than someone like Brian Solis, to say the least. But I do believe that in this case, once again, we tend to over-complicate things. That happens a lot in our industry :)

Influencers in real-life communities have certain traits, namely they are:

• known and respected in the community
• good communicators
• prolific value content producers
• empathetic
• passionate
• loved

Applying these to social media, you’ll be looking at followership, reach, and virality (RTs, comments, shares etc.). Then publishing frequencies, and content quality/relevance. Finally, evidence of being a “mensch”, and living and breathing one’s domain of expertise. All of which can be measured digitally.

Several times in past years, I had to quickly pinpoint influencers in different industries. And every time I started with blogs. Influencers always have blogs. Generally, their blogs reference other influencers’ blogs. Short of that, a simple technique is to simply ask them who their peers are! Influencers always boost their peers.

Some influencers specialize in a given media. For example, forums rather than Twitter of Facebook. It’s a mistake to assume influencers are present on every channel known to man. Some are. Some aren’t.

Influencers always communicate quickly. They answer emails and tweets in near real time. They never bill themselves as “experts” either. They tend to be very humble.

Influencers love to help others. They prefer giving over receiving. And I’ve never met one without a good sense of humor. They tend to be prolific writers. They comment on other people’s content. Their community participation is orders of magnitude above others in terms of monthly activity. This directly correlates with passion.

Their influence is not based on always being right, or smarter, or more “Liked” on Facebook than others. It’s based on simple trust. And truth be told, no one can exert influence unless he or she is “loved”. People don’t trust those they don’t like to begin with.

I know “love” is a big mushy word too often thrown around. But what I mean by that is if you were devastated to hear that someone in your industry passed away, then you e-love him. You can count him among your influencers. 

So go ahead and use Klout, PeerIndex, Kred, and all these influence gauging tools. Nothing wrong with them. They will give you an idea of someone’s social “juice” for sure. But finding digital influencers is no different than finding them in our daily lives and communities. And then applying the same criteria to their online behavior. You can’t change a leopard’s spots :)

Well the cat’s out of the bag! Okay maybe not the cat, but at least Sprinklr’s second edition eBook of Best Practices from the World’s Most Social Big Brands. You can download the full PDF eBook here.

It was amazing enough to grab an opportunity to speak to the SocialService@Scale we deliver at Autodesk. But to do so in the company of such industry giants is truly humbling! These are all people I’ve admired, learned from, and tried to emulate for years! I can only hope to fly at their altitude someday!

More importantly, the story of what we built and do daily at Autodesk to help our customers imagine, design, and create a better world is being told. And it is a compelling story.

For that I want to thank our friends at Sprinklr who had a large part in this success. They built a great platform no doubt, but more importantly they did what they said they would, and they stood by us when we really needed it.

In this business that’s not something you forget easily. It’s in part thanks to them that AutodeskHelp will indeed stay social my friends! :)

“Eat shit and die” - we’re all familiar with this common place insult. But amazingly enough, it’s what half the world spends its life doing. And the other half? Well they’re busy starving. So what’s my point?

You know me. I’m far from being a tree hugger. I love a noisy V8. I grok mass consumption, and the need to scale food production to feed hundreds of millions at a time. I’m a huge Target and Walmart fan (although convinced these places are more about show business than retail). I love shopping Sam’s Club and Costco. 

And I don’t think people should “go back to their roots”, organize in communes, parade around half naked, and start growing carrots for a living. Our “roots” involve fighting saber tooth tigers for a weekly meal. So thank you very much. I’d rather call in for reservations. 

That being said, I hate mass chicken “farms”, fast food chains, industrial wines, bio-engineered meats, mercury-loaded fish, and pesticide-washed vegetables and fruit that taste like stale cardboard - cancer included. Just add water. Our mass-produced foods are an aberration of the above. What to do?

Enter New York City-based Farmigo. A startup I’ve been following for a while now. These guys are building a connected social network of consumers (you and me) and food producers (local farmers) meeting at dedicated exchange points (businesses). Right now they only function in selected US major cities. But they’re out to scale this thing globally. By building a social networked community. Sounds funky enough - some would say idealistic - but I’m pretty sure these ex-SAP dudes are on to something pretty significant. Here’s why.

We live in an age of uncertainty and danger - insert doh moment - bobbing in very unstable and choppy seas. And two solid anchors remain: family and land. The only “genuine” staples left. Social media can help connect both.

The strength of the “clan”. And the life-sustaining safety of land. Family, food, and water. Whoever owns, controls, influences, and connects these is assured success and longevity. Not to mention riches. It’s that simple. 

It wasn’t possible to pull this off before the age of social. And the Con Agras and Frank Purdues of the world ruled the land. Rightly so. But it’s a different ballgame now. 

In 2005, I was telling anyone who’d listen that the future wasn’t in bonds, sub-primes, or other Wall Street hokus pokus of the day. I was preaching about people owning their own chunks of land to farm and then distribute locally. At one point I sought out acres in the Coachella valley, around the Salton Sea, and in Idaho (great wine-growing dirt out there).

Maybe it came from living in the California desert for several years. But I learned something really important back there. Whoever owns the means of food production and water rights rules the world. One day, fresh food, water and rights to it will be more precious than diamonds. 

So I’m pretty big on farmers. Some of my best friends are farmers. Farmers are wealthy. Real wealth. Most wouldn’t know it. The guy in the picture above is Arthur Wilson. He owned a bean farm in Yellow Jacket, CO. I spent some of the most precious moments of my childhood on his land. I discovered farming there. And what real food meant and tasted like. I was barely 10 years old. Starry eyed kid from NYC thinking food came from Dagostino’s :)

And I’m pretty jazzed at the concept of connecting these unsung heroes with regular folks. And saving countless colons in the process. 

Here’s a clip of Scobble interviewing Farmigo’s CEO Benzi Ronen. Check it out. Then stay social my friends. And eat healthy thanks to it!

Yes, I know what you’re going to say. Can’t believe this guy is talking about Jean-Claude Biver again. Enough already! Fair enough. But there’s a video nugget that came up on my radar recently I felt compelled to share. Why? Because it’s the longest Biver clip I’ve ever seen. 

Matter of fact it’s so darn long (1:13:41 to be precise) I doubt anyone will watch it in its entirety. A mere 38 views adorn the clip.

Over 3 minute video? Not in an age of Vine for sure :) Nonetheless, I thought I’d extract some of the most salient points and share with folks because, honestly, some of this stuff is pure gold.

• Why doubt should be your friend
• How he got his first job
• Selling the Biver way
• Don’t be a dead fish
• Explaining Hublot magic to the LVMH stiffs
• Why eyes can never lie
• The “little” bit of thinking that made Hublot 
• Going to a soccer game with Mr. Coffee
• Ah ha! moment for soccer sponsorship
• Stupid answer for LVMH
• They said “Don’t advertise with black people”
• Those folks at LVMH
• The Y-gen doesn’t care about opera
• Bonding with Ferrari
• Having children after 50

It’s funny because, after having followed and worked with the man - albeit a short time - I thought I’d heard it all and yet, I learned a lot of interesting stuff in there. Stuff he doesn’t tell everyone everywhere all the time. 

What can I say. I’m a sucker for Biverism. Too many precious things I learned from this guy. Not the least of which is that social media isn’t necessarily for everybody everywhere all the time. That was a hard lesson learned but well applied since then…

So stay social (when applicable) my friends! :)

Ed Koch passed away today at the age of 88. This is a very sad event for me. You’re probably going to wonder what the heck an ex New York City celebrity Mayor has to do with social media. Stick around and I’ll explain. 

I was seven years old when I moved from Paris to New York City in 1974. Ed Koch was the first US personality (any personality for that matter) I had ever met live. I was walking downtown with my mom one day when we came upon this guy, all by himself, hanging out in public with his constituents asking “How am I doing?” — No bodyguards, no press, no speeches, no bullshit. Just a genuine - yet powerful - leader mixing it up with normal people chewing the fat, and asking them for feedback.

Coming from Europe, this was a total shock for me. Imagine a powerful politician actually lowering himself by engaging with the masses! Mano a mano. Unthinkable in the old country where such folks live on pedestals in glass houses. And their shit don’t stink.

During the short fray, at some point, my mom and I came across him and he shook both our hands. Like everyone else’s. I was speechless and in heaven. I never forgot that moment. 

Throughout the years, I didn’t always agree with his policies or opinions. But fact was, with Ed Koch, what you saw was what you got. And he listened. And when he made mistakes, he fessed up. I never met anyone, regardless of party or politics, who didn’t at least like Mayor Koch the person.

Those days are long gone for public figures and brands. Much like the Twin Towers in the picture above. But I’m hopeful that can change. Matter of fact, I’m pretty sure it is changing.

Because nowadays, with the scalable, conversational, and 24/7 features of social media communication, it’s become easier than ever to re-engage with people one-on-one, globally, and ask voters or customers “How are we doing?” - There is no excuse to not do it anymore. Unless of course, you don’t care about the answer. In which case, guess what? People will notice.

When Mayor Koch went out in public to gauge his popularity - which he did regularly - he was simply communicating. Nowadays, he’d be on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, you name it. It’s such a simple and obvious concept.

I’m always surprised to notice how many institutions or companies still don’t get it. Especially now that all the tools are at hand, essentially free to use. And the only reason not to use them is if you truly don’t give a hoot. And if you really don’t care, you’re irrelevant or soon to be.

The advent of social media brings us back to “How am I doing?” communication. That’s the hope. The ROI. I believe it’s inevitable. And Ed Koch was “social” way before his time - one manly handshake at a time.

The sad news of Ed’s passing comes at a strange time for me. As I’m heading back to my New York City roots after a long long time away from home. What goes around comes around. The important thing is to stay social my friends :)

Maybe it’s the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword. Or a picture being worth a thousand words. Or the fact I’ve always had a passion for writing - everything from poetry to short stories, technical documentation, and blogs of course. Not sure what it is but the more time I spend doing social media, the more I realize that in the end, it’s really all about connecting people to content.

I know there isn’t much of a scoop here. A simple glance at Coke, Red Bull, or Nike, to name a few, suffices to convince anyone that for many major brands content has, in fact, become strategy. Everything else is second place. I’m pretty comfortable with that. Zen.

And we’ve taken a pretty significant tack towards content as strategy in 2013 at Autodesk on my team. Somewhat early on, I realized there were some thing that weren’t working for us. But I wasn’t sure. I saw effect but not cause. So I did the only thing I knew would work: stop assuming, and start asking customers!

My guys went out and talked with our most fervent supporters (and detractors). We asked them point blank: what are we doing right? What are we screwing up? And to my great joy, they all answered! Some more brutally than others but to me, brutal honesty is pure gold. So I knew we were on to something. Every content strategy change we implemented was based on these conversations.

The feedback was inherently simple: your support content is too shallow. It’s not different enough from other Autodesk content. We want to participate a lot more and hear from our peers. But we do love your human side content (because that, in turn, is quite unique and different).

So we re-designed our content strategy to address each of these points. We deepened support content quality and frequency. Modeling this feature on a news network “stream” rather than periodic static content. We “absorbed” responsibility for promoting product knowledge content - so people can find tutorials, training, and how-to material to get up to speed with our products as efficiently as possible. 

We kicked off a curation program on Google+ and Scoop.it. Including a feature dedicated to 3D printing - one of the most significant industry evolutions in recent history. We added a weekly community content (UGC) best-of venue (in concert with our new Expert Elite advocacy program). And we amplified our human side features to fold advocates, support crews, and product managers into our customer digital events and Hangouts. 

Although feedback’s been positive, it’s still too early to gauge the effect these changes had on customer satisfaction with cold hard numbers. In a short while we’ll go out to our public again and ask the same question: how are we doing?  And if customers sign off on our progress, then we’ll keep moving in the right direction. Otherwise, we’ll keep changing and improving as needed until we get it right for our audience.

This, to me, is the best content strategy anyone can have. Never assume. Shut up. Listen to your audience. Do what they tell you. Make them happy. In the end, they’re the ones driving. We’re only along to make sure the ride is pleasant, comfortable, and memorable.

There’s been a lot of noise lately about the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer Report. One good analysis I read was from Olivier Blanchard. Everybody’s up in arms about it. There’s talk of “failure of leadership” and other grand rallying cries. But in the end, it’s just business as usual isn’t it? What do these statistics really mean?

The results in themselves are neither surprising nor interesting. Most people don’t need an official report to know that trust in companies and governments has plummeted in the last few years. I don’t agree with Olivier that “people are no longer blind to it” — they never have been.

Do we have a global leadership problem as Olivier concludes? No kidding! But can social media affect the cause, as many pundits seem to conclude (or hope)? I think yes and no. 

I think yes because social tends to lift veils and impose transparency. And it’s a lot harder to mislead a constituency in sunlight than it is in darkness. But not impossible. Social media is a powerful mass manipulator as well.

I think no because the fundamental reason for this is the way people - politicians and executives alike - have been trained to think for decades. It’s what I call the “spreadsheet syndrome”. And it has invaded virtually every industry, and every government in the world.

In life, some leaders make decisions based on spreadsheets. And some decide stuff based on heart. When the former greatly outnumber the latter, you have a global leadership trust crisis. Government, corporations, you name it, doesn’t matter. It’s all the same principle. Here’s why.

Spreadsheets don’t carefully weigh the human consequences of daily executive decisions. They don’t agonize over the human impacts of mass layoffs. They don’t assign responsibility, or guilt. They don’t warn against tarnishing legacies, against negative campaigning, lying, misleading, or prioritizing bottom lines over human welfare.

Quite the contrary. Spreadsheets are two-dimensional decision trees. They absolve their users of all human responsibility. Left you live. Right you die. Bureaucratic leaders sleep on their two ears at night.

Heart deciders, on the other hand, have a much tougher life. They’re intuitive leaders who agonize over human-side effects of their decisions. They typically have a moral compass. They’re empathetic “social” beings, good listeners, superb communicators, generous sharers, and team builders.

Their ultimate quality lies in their authenticity. Because you may not always agree with them, but you’ll sure as hell know why and where they’re coming from. Heart deciders are inherently trustworthy - what you see is what you get. Good and bad.

And that, my friends, is a lot more reassuring - to me anyway - than depending on spreadsheet jockeys for life or business outcomes.

The problem with global leadership these days is neither new nor worsening. It’s the result of having trained generations of leaders and CEOs to govern via spreadsheets. They don’t know any better!

Enter social media. Ever wonder why so few CEOs actively participate in social? Can you converse with many politicians online outside election time? Well that’s why. 

So my theory is simple. If you want more accountable, more “human”, more trustworthy leaders, request that they become “social”. Don’t work for CEOs who don’t participate in social. Don’t invest in their companies. Don’t vote for folks who still can’t figure out Twitter. Don’t support institutions who remain silent on social media. Heck, even the Pope’s figured that one out by now! :)

Simply put, don’t let the spreadsheet jockeys get away with avoiding social media any longer.  Better yet, stop producing spreadsheet jockeys. Our new social age will likely close that factory anyway. Spreadsheet jockeys are incompatible with social media. Bureaucrats don’t do social. Thank God!

And that, my friends, is one major contributions social media can bring to humanity!  Sol lucet omnibus :)

Really interesting article from Eric Pratum rounding up social ROI opinions from several industry experts. Could have used more concrete examples IMHO, but good stuff nonetheless.

For many still, social ROI is little more than voodoo. And I think one of the best ways to demystify it is to share experience with peers. I don’t claim to know more than the next social strategist about ROI, but I’m sure happy to share what we’ve done with ROI at my work place to gauge our SocialService@Scale efforts.

At Autodesk we measure against several “center of mass” KPI across the entire support and service division. Social is no different. These KPIs and associated desired outcomes are as follows:

• 1:1 contacts -> 0
• TTA -> 0
• NPS -> 100
• EE -> 100

These outcomes are of course desired trends rather than hard targets. The idea is to reduce 1:1 contacts by disseminating and amplifying 1:N content via self-help (scaling goal). To increase response and answer time velocity (efficiency and flow). To increase customer satisfaction (brand perception goal). And to increase employees social engagement (cultural goal).

We then apply these to social metrics. On the 1:1 contact deflection/self-help, we measure the effectiveness of our publishing efforts, CTRs, reach, post views, etc. via link tracking and Facebook insights (we use Bit.ly and Omniture).

The support knowledge content folks also measure solution “quality”, stickiness, and bounce rates. Then we know how effective our publish/promote tactics are for a given set of support content and community links. And based on that week over week we can track 1:N effectiveness against normal and campaign-driven content pushes.

On the TTA (time to answers) side, we measure how quickly we respond on social channels. We do this by pulling thread deltas from Radian6 data using their API. 

We then compare weekly to our channel-specific SLAs and adjust if and as needed. It’s a well-known fact that velocity in social service directly affects customer satisfaction. Not only that, but consider that average social service resolution (non-technical issues) is measured in minutes versus days for traditional channels.

On the sentiment side, the company is aligned around NPS but NPS is neither sufficient nor clearly applicable to social service channels. I prefer to measure efficiency and friction (how easy was it to deal with us), accuracy of information, and resolution time — all of which move the needle on overall satisfaction.

Another sentiment index I strongly believe in is what I call the #GI (gratitude index) of a channel. Namely, what percentage of your traffic contains posts expressing any form of “thank you” gratitude? We hit 20% in 2012 at AutodeskCare. Only one other brand surpassed this with 24%. Can you guess? It’s Citibank run by Frank Eliason :)

On the EE (employee engagement) side we measure staffing levels and engagement frequencies. Load bearing, and a bunch of other interesting behavioral aspects for each geo. One interesting metric is the size of what we call our “network map” — a dynamic internal system we created to tally social service “contact points” throughout the company as we encounter them. The thicker, wider that network graph gets, the more efficient your social business gets.

So at the end of the day we look at these metrics and ask the following questions: Have we made an impact on traditional support pipelines (phones, email, chat, etc)? Have we increased our response velocity? Have we improved customer satisfaction and gratitude? Have we pulled in more colleagues and groups into the corporate social service graph? A positive on all of these justifies our existence and, to the executives, the social and community investment they made.

And that’s how we get to stay social my friends! :)

Jeremiah Owyang penned yet another home-run post recently mapping differences between strategy and tactics.

This is a topic dear to my heart because too often, when people ask me what I do for a living, and I try to explain it to them, they look at me with a blank stare and conclude “oh, so you basically manage Facebook and Twitter accounts…” — Humm, well not exactly, no :)

The problem with “strategy” and understanding it, is that quite often, when done right, it is indeed, as Charlene Li points out, “often what you don’t do”. To me, social strategy needs to meet several criteria.

First, it has to be expressible in a single sentence. If it’s complicated enough to require two or more sentences, there’s your red flag. 

Second, it has to be understandable by your peers, kids, parents, or grandparents. If it’s too complicated to explain to a lay person or a kid, that’s an alarm bell. 

Third, it has to be measurable. If you cant attach metrics to strategic objectives, they’re likely not tied to real-life business objectives. Then you have a problem.

Once (and only if) these conditions are met, then you have another advantage: the ability to create and lead “vision” around the strategy. Because that’s a huge part of success. You can have the noblest strategic goals. But if no one buys into them, you’re up shit creek.

Strategy is what you should use to gauge against every action you take or mandate. Is this action, or tactic, or communication, or directive in line with one or more of our strategic “buckets”? If not, don’t do it. Do no harm is the first rule of social.

The etymology of the term “strategy” is clearly militaristic: 

strategy (n.): “art of a general,” from Fr. stratégie, from Gk. strategia “office or command of a general,” from strategos “general,” from stratos “multitude, army, expedition,” lit. “that which is spread out” (see structure) + agos “leader,” from agein “to lead” (see act (n.)).

The leadership part is important to a strategic role. Which makes it more than a pure intellectual undertaking in my opinion. It’s about stewardship of a brand, of customers, of internal teams as well.

Never take anything for granted, trust but verify, and always be willing to question one’s certainties. Pawn to King 1 - That’s how this board game is played. One move at a time :)

Stay social my friends!

I know it’s trendy to talk about social media trends at the end of the year. It’s the Big Social Crystal Ball season. And everybody’s an instant expert - just add water :)

Almost every article you read the last few weeks has been about predicting 2013 social trends. What will work, what won’t, trends on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube. You name it.

I find all this social trend talk tedious at best. Every time I see a trend header, I think to myself “what about sticking to basics?” Anyone remember basics? How about we get the basics right first, before worrying about the next Gangnam Style social hit? Fundamentals you say?

Things like engagement - actually responding to customers and conversing with your audience instead of just talking at them. Things like velocity. Striving to operate social channels in real time, as per customer expectations. 

Or content. No trend needed there. Just start producing compelling, value-added content for customers. The kind that reaches their hearts, minds, and pocketbooks. Dump the marketing gibberish.

How about an iron-clad crisis management plan? Or training and hiring only top gun social people. Or metrics that make sense? And socially-engaged CEOs? 

These are some of the fundamental social media things that make sense. Year in and year out. So let’s focus on those for 2013. Because trends, you know, they come and go :)

I sometimes hear people say that providing customer service over social channels is no big deal. That doing so merely adds new digital channels to the same old thing. Just as email took over from phones, now Twitter or Facebook takes over from email.

This is sheer nonsense. It fails to recognize the nature of a channel “carrier medium”. And more importantly, it fails to understand that traditional support mechanisms and processes are inherently orthogonal to social service. Why?

Because social channels each have unique flow patterns and “heartbeats”. I like to think of it like radio waves carrying sounds, music, information. And if you provide service in tune with this “wave”, without friction, in the direction of the grain, that is how you enchant customers. With flowing, real-time, friction-less experience. It’s just how social hearts beat.

In this modality - whatever the social channel may be - the support issue, the customer pain point, is ephemeral. It’s a passing annoyance but no more. It’s part of the “flow”. You fix it, and just move on. The Twitter life cycle is super fast. A good social service experience on there shouldn’t be rememberable two hours later. A mere glitch in the flow. Noise. Life goes on.

Anyone who’s ever gone scuba diving in strong current understands this concept. It’s like surfing. You have to “go with the flow” — and fighting it is not only futile, but often deadly. 

Social service is the same way. But if you use traditional tools and processes to handle these “cases”, you’re swimming against current. I’m thinking big-ass CRM systems, case management kahunas, complex escalation processes, endless approval and escalation levels, and pretty much any of the IT and procedural junk associated with classic service pipeline processing. The kind of stuff that makes service reps rip their eyes out.

All that stuff does is yield 3 day resolution times versus 20 minutes on social channels. And it pisses off customers. And it goes against the natural flow of social service channel heartbeats. That’s why providing social service is indeed a different animal than traditional “case management”. Mixing the two is incompatible and painful for all involved.

Which is pretty normal if you ask me. As these case management and CRM systems were all designed to please businesses and their IT people. They’re “stop and go” step function systems. Not flow-based ones. And worse yet, they’re all about corporate users, and not customers. Wrong place to be.

So stay social my friends, and swim with the current :)

The picture above was drawn by one of our customers’ four year old daughter using Autodesk Sketchbook. This little girl and her dad took the time to draw this and then tweet it to us last week. Why? Just to thank us and wish us good season tidings.

A lot of corporate folks like to look at boatloads of social data, KPIs, metrics, and trends. They agonize over ROI for marketing, ROI for service, ROI for mind share etc, etc. And truth be told, they’re absolutely right. I do the same thing weekly.

But nothing screams social ROI to me as loud as this gesture of love from a four year old kid and her dad. It was spontaneous, and from the heart. This is relationship.

I don’t know how many other social service teams on the planet get stuff like this come Christmas time, but I can’t imagine they run the streets. And that makes me kind of proud because, at the end of the day, this is what this stuff is all about, right?

So stay social my friends. Remember why we’re in this business. And keep safe during the holidays!

I have to be honest - and this is admittedly weird for someone working in the tech and social media space - but Google always kind of spooked me. I love their stuff. I’m a voracious consumer of all things Google. But I always felt a little “uneasy” around them. When I hear “do no evil”, I’m immediately reminded of the Comfort Inn principle. Ever have a comfortable stay at a Comfort Inn? Me neither.

Having now read In the Plex, I have to say I’m way beyond spooked at this point :) Making matters worse, I also consumed #digitalvertigo not long ago.

For a while, I’ve been saying that political parties as we know them will cease to exist in the coming years. Instead, we’ll mandate either Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, or entities like Walmart to manage and govern society. Ok Microsoft might be a stretch :)

Because when you read about how Google came to be, and the awesome wealth, power, political clout, and execution capabilities they wield, it doesn’t take a genius to realize these behemoths are way more capable and powerful than most existing governments. Heck they already influence major elections with money and brain power.

In fact, I’m pretty sure Google could run a country way better than most traditional governments can (or currently are). It’s probably true for Facebook as well. These huge conglomerates have more power, brains, and resources than most national governments.

Are you scared yet? Or just relieved? I’m still trying to pick a camp :)

Stay social my friends!

Careers have a lot in common with sponges. When you’re starting out, in order to be successful and happy, you need to be able to soak up everything worthwhile that comes your way. It’s the absorption mode.

Then after a while, when you’ve gained enough experience, screwed up enough times, built stuff, done tons of different shit, been around enough folks, rolled with the punches, swung some pretty good ones yourself, seen and learned from some of the best — well then it’s time to give back and squeeze the sponge out. It’s the squeeze out phase.

If you’re not out there in your daily job giving back, sharing, coaching, comparing notes, huddling close to your markets and customers, moving around, learning still, but giving back a lot more in the process, then you’re missing out.  And maybe - just maybe - you’re in the wrong job! :)

So please pass the sponge. And stay social my friends :)

It’s been all about content for me lately as we’re spending time evolving our publishing strategy at work. First I hit upon this really compelling article by Scott Monty. Which in turn pointed me to this one from Edelman’s David Armano. 

What you see above is a graphic rendition of what David calls the enterprise “social-creative newsroom”. This really speaks to me because it’s what I’ve been calling a “publishing factory” for lack of a better term (now I have one).

The whole “companies must become media” theme is by now hopefully well established in social circles. It is one of the essences of doing social isn’t it? 

The friction with companies “becoming media” is that doing so requires seamless and timely integration inside the enterprise between groups, divisions, and people.

It requires company organs to “pulsate” together orchestrated by a single heartbeat. And that, for many large organizations, can be Utopian at best. 

It’s a political and structural mutation hopefully driven by ”social business” evolution. But I do feel it has to be mandated from above, and constantly preached from within. And there are many moving parts to this equation. 

The concept is not only great but also necessary. But it’s just so darn hard to implement. It takes a very long time. And in most cases, time is a luxury a lot of these companies no longer have.

If anyone’s figured out how to do this quickly somewhere, do share the love please :)

Stay social my friends!

In the “This is so freaking brilliant why isn’t everyone else doing it” category, I submit to you today: Keljob video recruiting! 

Keljob is a French job-hunting site. And it lets hiring managers post videos pitching the positions they seek to fill. Keljob only has eight such clips so far but I suspect this amount is going to grow hard and fast.

Overall, the videos seem pretty home-grown and genuine. I think seeing a quick video job pitch from a potential boss is simply precious. All you get besides the quick video is an email address you can apply to. Which turns out to be a classified ads address at the Figaro - I don’t know why it doesn’t point directly back to the employer, but that’s another story.

Given the sad state of the recruiting industry when it comes to using social media effectively, I can’t wrap my head around the following question: why on earth isn’t every job hunting site in the world doing this? We had to wait for a French recruiting site, of all things, to come up with this? Mon dieu! :)

You know what? I’m particularly grateful for my Autodesk social media crew this Thanksgiving season. That would be my community managers Camilo Lemos in Neuchatel, Switzerland and Philip Schmelzer in San Rafael, California. I’ll tell you why.

I think back to when we started together a year ago. From scratch. Our mandate: find out where we need to be out there, and how we can provide “social service” at scale on multiple channels simultaneously 24/5 and in real time for millions of customers. Then go “spread the social love” across departments. Figure it out with little resources. Just make it happen. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.

And I look at what we’ve accomplished since then with AutodeskCare. And I think to myself, man, was I lucky to score these dudes!

You pick a couple real sharp guys with no social media experience. And you hope at the very least, that with training and experience, they’ll do OK. Only to realize right away that in fact, you hit the jackpot with natural-born digital and community top guns.

And then it’s not about just “doing OK”. It’s about excelling at your trade every single day of the year. No exceptions. About growing, learning, and adapting on the fly. And sharing a work ethic, a passion for quality, attention to detail, and a customer advocacy spirit like I have seldom seen (or experienced) in the industry.

So together with ^PHL and ^CAM (their handles on Twitter), we built and staffed our Twitter customer service channel. Then we injected ourselves and trained numerous colleagues to engage inside our Autodesk Discussion forums. Then we did the same thing on Facebook. And Google+. And Youtube. And the blog. And numerous external communities. And we’re still growing the social service beast by leaps and bounds. Talk is cheap. Check out what we do every day of the year uncut and live. And if you’ve gotten any sort of service or support on any major Autodesk Facebook product page lately. Well that was us as well :)

My guys listen, engage, create, produce and publish content, train, monitor, and nurture our online community like they owned it. Because actually, they do. And every day, you’re damn right it’s personal.

And truth be told, I’m not always easy to work for. If you know me, you just got a chuckle out of that one :) Although I’ve gotten mellower over the years, I’m still a perfectionist, fundamentally impatient, and not much of a word mincer. I like to get shit done. And to succeed in social service, often enough, you have to be pretty good at excelling within controlled chaos. There’s little time for niceties, mistakes, or hesitation. 

There aren’t too many teams who can sustain this kind of pressure 24/7. Lucky for me, I picked a couple superstars who don’t mind doing this for a living. And we’ve grown into this kind of organic synchronized entity - like a well-oiled watch movement - where the whole is better than the sum of its parts.

Hardly a day goes by where I don’t think to myself “Wow, these guys are f’ing awesome!” - And whenever I think there’s no more room for surprises - there comes another one my way.

There is nothing better for a manager than to be surrounded by people he can trust blindly, who have each other’s backs, who can be consulted and relied on any time of day or night. There is nothing better than working with people who are  inherently smarter, better, and faster than you can be - and are only getting started at it.

So that’s what I have to be grateful about this year. Because I’ve been around a lot of places, and I’ve worked with a lot of folks over the years. But better than my two guys Camilo and Phil on our social media crew at Autodesk — well I had yet to experience. 

Respect man.