Social Capital Value Add

Thank you to @sagenet for turning me on to the #smfail twitter thread that was streaming out of today’s Why Social Media Marketing Fails  - and how to fix it panel at the Web 2.0 Expo.  Industry thought leaders - Peter Kim (Dachis Corporation), Charlene Li (Altimeter Group), and Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research) led the discussion.  UPDATE:  Thanks to Peter, Charlene & Jeremiah for linking to this post.

My comment on a post by @miaD on her Marketing Mystic blog has turned into this post here.

Mia reported “Keeping true to the spirit of social media, Peter Kim invited input for this session before the show, on his blog where folks respond to what they wanted to see at this session. Not surprisingly, it was standing room only for this brilliant panel of former and current Forrester analysts.”

Here are my thoughts along the themes established by the panel:

1. How to get culture to adopt & get C level buy in:

Demonstrate the link between corporate value & social media the way that the link between brand & corporate value was established in the late ’80s.  Brand value is now the 3rd most monitored benchmarks by CEOs (can someone help me find the link to where I read this factoid?).

2. How to make “campaigns” work:

I agree with the panel, the campaign model is wrong.  It leads to the wrong metrics (CPMs, web analytics), wrong strategy, etc.  However, cycles of activity tied to a good strategy are required.  “Campaigns” will work if they are part of corporations mobilizing their internal & external networks toward the creation & defense of enduring value … not about going viral, not about views or meaningless registrations.

3.  What Measures Matter (are right for social media):

Measures should be derived from the academic work that has been done in quantifying social capital.  Nan Lin’s network theory of social capital is a good place to start for a definition.  Social network analysis is also an important place to look for meaningful measures (see @barrywellman and INSNA for more).

4. Does social media matter?

Oh yes.  It is very critical.  That is like asking is it important that major American corporations maintain market share that is disproptionate to population as China, India and the developing world begin to project their power into global culture.  The shift to common perception shaped by broadband empowered networks is accelerating (as opposed to broadcast networks).   Broadband connectivity is set to triple every six months and it is the key driver.  The broadband trend, along with mobile communications & GPS integration is eliminating the boundary between the virtual worlds & the so-called real world, establishing the link between broadband empowered people and stable future earnings.  Ultimately the ability to maintain margins is dependent on a shared perception of sustainable difference between price and costs.  So yes - social media matters, very much, to every publicly traded corporation … in fact to everyone & it will only continue to increase in importance.

Here are some of the other recaps of the panel …

• Susan Etlinger from the Horn Group
• Jennifer Leggio, Zdnet
• Holger Nauheimer
• Shanee Ben-Zur from Voce
• The Four Fail Whales of social media, CRM Magazine

And Kate Brodock did a good wrap up of the Business of Community Networking conference where we covered similar issues last week in Boston.

Below is the news release from Value Networks. I am looking forward to this event. Thanks to John and team for making the trip to Toronto a reality.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 19, 2009 — ValueNetworks.com® — a leader in organizational network visualization and analysis applications — announces the Value Network Analysis Workshop: Optimizing Business Performance.

The Value Network Analysis Workshop will be held at the MaRS Collaboration Center in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on 20 March 2009. This workshop develops leadership, fluency and visualization expertise for value networks. It offers a hands-on introduction to social, organizational and value network analysis (VNA) application technology.

http://www.vncluster.com/YYZ09.htm

Value network analysis is a superior method for understanding, visualizing, optimizing and leading complex organizations and businesses. It applies to both internal and operational value networks as well as industry value networks and business webs. Value networks fundamentally expand and redefine the scope, value and importance of networks to business, economies and civil society.

Value network tools are redefining operations, tactics and strategies in the smartest organizations. They provide a powerful road map to the network-centric future. Value networks and value network analysis are becoming commonplace in top global firms. Value networks drive improvements in resource utilization, productivity, innovation and bring sharp business results overall.

Firms like Wal-Mart [NYSE: WMT] have discovered the spectacular business advantages of transforming from a supply chain mentality to sustainable value networks mindset. “Value Networks aid our understanding and ability to address key issues and opportunities in our business,” says the Wal Mart Corporate Website.

Giant ERP vendor Oracle [Nasdaq: ORCL] is urging customers, “…to evolve their companies’ supply chains into value networks…”

SAP AG [NYSE: SAP], the central nervous system of 47,000 companies worldwide is leading dozens of industry value networks. Dr. Henning Kagermann, Chairman and CEO of SAP, is transforming the firm and its software offerings to master, “…not only value chains but entire value networks.”

Value networks are popular in diverse institutional settings such as the European Commission, Geneva-based NGOs, the Red Cross and global health organizations.

The Value Network Analysis Workshop is sponsored only by participants. The workshop tuition includes a full-privilege, 90-day subscription to ValueNetworks.com™ Professional Edition. It provides a foundation for immediate application of value network methods to everyday business issues. It is designed both for people who are new to value networks and for those who would like to expand their methods and tools.

The venue is the stunning MaRS Collaboration Centre in downtown Toronto.

The Value Networks Analysis Workshop is open, low-cost, practical and conversational. It is for executives, directors, experts, researchers, scholars, consultants and practitioners having immediate needs for improved performance, greater effectiveness, faster innovation, customer delight and mastery of network-centric business models.

Pricing and Availability:

Registration for the Value Networks Analysis Workshop is open and available now. The event tuition, 90-day subscription to ValueNetworks.com™ Professional Edition, meals, refreshments, parking, materials, and registration is $499.00. Secure online registration in advance required. All are welcome.

Visit: http://www.vncluster.com/YYZ09.htm

Contact:

Sarah V. Jones, Event Director
ValueNetworks.com®
1072 Folsom Street, #386
San Francisco CA 94103
(978) 468-0267
http://www.valuenetworks.com/

I received a little good news last week. Social Capital Value Add was selected as a finalist by WeMedia from a field of 379 entries from 48 countries. Details here: http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/powerofus

Thank you to everyone who supported my entry. Don’t forget to let me know if you clicked through. You might win the ticket.

I know that the rules say that the judges make the selections, not the voters but feel free to try to add comments or rate my entry here: http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/node/14479

@BeCircle tweeted this about the SCVA entry:

“@memeticbrand only after reading this http://bit.ly/14kAM did I ‘get’ SCVA. SCVA.com needs this front and center”

You see competition can make things better.  I will amend the “about” page here to incorporate the language from the submission.

They gave Al Gore more than 12 minutes when he took the WeMedia stage, but then again that was before we knew it takes just 4 minutes.

Is anyone else going to be in Miami for February 24th to 27th?

I discovered this slideshare presentation by the folks at Acando via a tweet by WeaRo. Its a good one …

I just started following Dr. Robin Teigland on Twitter.  Get ready to be blown away … check out her slide share presentations.

She is an Associate Professor at the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) in Sweden.  For more than ten years, she has researched and lectured on social networks and their relationship with strategy and performance.

You MUST take your time and view this presentation.

I just posted her presentation of Fad or Future: Second Life & Virtual Worlds over at www.memeticbrand.com.  It is spot on.

One of the central concepts of Social Capital Value Add is the Individual as Medium (IAM).  I also considered using the more anthropological “Social Media Man” but wanted readers to steer past the buzz words and/or gender concerns.

Which one do you like better?  I don’t care what you call it, as long as the dog brings back the bone.

I am realizing that the IAM concept may not come across very strongly in the e-book.  I dripped references to IAM throughout the e-book.  Let me try to draw them together in this post.

Perception is reality.

Shared perception requires some form of media.  I.e., thoughts must be communicated through some form of artifact whether fleeting or more resilient.  Examples include gestures, words, text, audio and visual … anything that can be sensed among parties.

For most of history, our ability to communicate was relatively geo-spatially limited.  We could communicate as far as our voices could be heard (town criers) or our eyes could see (smoke signals). Perception was very locally oriented.

Then along came technologies that Marshall McLuhan taught us to understand as Extensions of Man.  The printing press, radio and television are a few of the biggies.  These are essentially one way, broadcast forms of media. The telephone is another biggie, it is interactive & reaches far, but does not scale well to large audiences and requires synchronous connection.

McLuhan explained to us that “the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

He also said, “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The ‘content’ of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or speech.”

When digital media started to really emerge with the introduction of the browser in the mid-1990s, it naturally incorporated many previous forms media.  But bandwidth, computing power and storage were still scarce and expensive.  A lot has changed since Netscape came along.

We have arrived at a point in history where the effect of IAM has been made the strongest and most intense form of media we experience because it has been given all other media as its content. The movie, the play, the opera, the newspaper, the television, the radio, commercial music, print and photographs, even the brand (a broadcast concept), have all been given over to the Individual to be reincarnated as the YouTube video, the prosumer indie, the blog, the blog comment, the forum, the Tweet, the IM chat, rating & review, the Flickr album, the podcast, the viral email and the mashup.

Real world social networks (and social network applications like email and MySpace that facilitate) are the infrastructure of these new forms of media that emit from the Individual.

SCVA argues that the effect is a new scale of social capital that marks a point of inflection for business and it is this new scaled-up version of social capital that SCVA is determined to highlight the value of.

Whereas, the network infrastructure to shape shared perception could be rented with great flexibility in the broadcast era (i.e. the 30 second spot), access to social networks is a function of social capital.

This new scale social capital is a critical corporate asset.

I spent the first half of the e-book illustrating how these entirely new scales of social capital are evidenced by new scales of the intrinsic elements of social capital which are individual assets (remember, the corporation is a form of individual).  These include: information flow, exertion of influence, certifications of social credentials and reinforcement of identity and recognition.  These are observations that are consistent with Nan Lin’s network theory of social capital, whose approach enables us to link the thinking to social network analysis and economics.

Technologies have evolved and mapped so tightly to the way humans transact, form relationships and create self-identity that it is time for business management to adopt the thinking of leaders in social network theory, such as the University of Chicago’s Ronald Burt.

Like it or not, the shift from broadcast media to IAM has implications throughout the corporate ecosystem.

Almost all of the changes highlighted in the illustration above have occurred exponentially, which is why we experience them as a sudden shift.  The “more of the same”, “everything that changes, stays the same” mentality will not derive competitive advantage from change like this.  It may not even survive change like this.

Does it not seem natural? Project and scale up the power of the individual, and that value of human connection of which we are all so instinctively aware, emerges in amplified forms as well.

In addition to the new scales of intrinsic social capital elements examined in the e-book, I would like to study further the extrinsic variables of social capital that aggregate into collective assets such as trust and network structure.  I am sure that there is similar evidence of new scale that would shed more light on social capital formation, access and use.

This is a guest post authored by John Maloney, you should check out all of his work …

Last month I agonized though a lofty lecture on “Change Management.” It was from a slick consultant who assured us with his shiny loafers and PhD. Problem was, it was positively identical to one I heard at Ford Motor in 1988 while participating in a senior management offsite. It was extremely painful, wrenching, and, well, foolish. Ironically, even after a generation, change management hasn’t changed!

Change management is the biggest management and development farce ever known to business. If you have ANY change management or often worse ‘cultural change’ programs in your organizations immediately kill them or resign your post. They won’t work and you will be badly victimized.

Here, for example, is GMs response to change. It is from the BW Article below, ‘The GM Solution: Life Boats, Not Life Support.’ http://tinyurl.com/5qpk7o

And in 2007, with over a million unsold cars in inventory, Mark LaNeve. GM’s head of North American sales and marketing, protested the need for change. “It’s not like we have some crisis,” he told the Wall Street Journal in its Feb. 9, 2007 edition.

If you ever hear the specious change management change mantra, ‘senior management sponsorship,’ run, don’t walk for the exits. If you hear the dopey, ‘change is the only constant’ calmly pick-up your notepad, pen and find a new role.

Change does not originate from the top or the middle. Please. These structures were specifically invented to eliminate change.

(Years ago I rallied against command and control. I was ostracized. GM is now headed to the ash heap of history on their confident rails of command and control.)

Begin to recognize loopy change management experts lament the failure of change management that THEY perpetuate! Woo-hoo! What a $$$ racket…

Here is how friend Shoshana Zuboff in says it in Business Week this week, exactly concerning GM.

“None of this is exactly “rational” behavior, but it tracks with what institutional economists have observed: The more a practice is institutionalized (history, legitimacy, interdependence, codification), the more it is taken for granted, the greater the energy that goes into maintaining it, and the more relentless the resistance to change. In 2006, GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner responded to the call for “new blood” in GM’s leadership with this screed in Newsweek: “These are sophisticated problems with historical tails that run back 80, 90 years. The chance of someone coming in and understanding our business…is absolutely microscopic.”

Today, business and economics is in a headlong flight to value networks and network intangibles.

Toyota, Nissan and Honda get it and helped invent it vis-à-vis TPS & Lean. See: http://valuenetworks.com/public/item/209498

The focus on value and network intangibles allows the new “Big 3” to account for 52% of the US car market. Flatly rejecting the vulgar UAW makes them produce products that are  enormously popular and profitable. Toyota’s annual profit is more that GMs market capitalization!

Here is a reinforcement of network intangibles from Shoshana.

The car is becoming an expression of identity, values, and personal control in ways that move far beyond traditional segmentation and branding. For example, fuel efficiency will be only one consideration for a socially responsible vehicle (SRV). What percent of the parts are recyclable? What is the vehicle’s total carbon footprint? Are there child labor inputs? Toxic paints, glues, or plastics? How transparent is the supply chain? Is the seller accountable for recycling? What methods are used? Are fair labor practices employed?

The new demands for an individualized driving experience at an affordable price require a fundamentally new business model—a discontinuous shift from economies of scale and push marketing to distributed networks of enterprises that cluster around individuals. The single most important factor for competitive advantage will be a brand’s ability to forge durable intimate relationships with customers based on trust, dialogue, and transparency. Similar skills will be needed at the enterprise level, as carmakers collaborate with other entities to support diverse customer needs.

Value networks and VNA are highly instrumental in defining this new business logic and putting in-place “…distributed networks of enterprises that cluster around individuals..”

Sure, it is possible to kick-back and not activate in value evolution of business and the economics of intangibles. That will only prolong and perpetuate our dire situation and put all solidly on the path to oblivion like GM.

Here is the article link. Please read and comment, here and at Business Week.

http://tinyurl.com/5qpk7o

Can’t really say ‘happy reading’ at the moment. Rather, it is time to act decisively.

(Note:  John, thank you for this guest post.  You are a real leader in this movement.  All - please go to the BusinessWeek article and add your comments. sincerely, Michael)

As I sort through the after math of SoCap08, I think that you might want to check out this post entitled, The Silver Lining in the Market Collapse: Social Capital.  It seems that the theme that Jonathan Salem Baskin & I were trying to highlight last week with our co-authored, co-posted piece entitled Looking for Leadership? Invest in your Networks? was resonating at the conference.

In short, this time of crisis in confidence is a time when business leaders are looking for answers.  It is a time of opportunity for advancing social capital thinking that so many of us are dedicated to.

I am picking up that most felt that the conference captured a gritty optimism, as signaled by the attendance of more than 600 to a first time event that was planning for 300.  While it is clear that Katherine Fulton’s presentation on the state of social capital markets was well received, I am wondering if the observation that social capital markets are at a very early stage of uncoordinated innovation was out of step with the enthusiasm of the conference?

In particular, I am wondering if there was sub-context at the conference about the forces driving a revolutionary rise in social capital that is breaking down the silos between value based management (i.e. the quest to manage sources of stable future earnings, over and above the cost of capital), social capital and social network analysis.

While there were discussions about breaking down silos, I am not picking up any thread extending Nan Lin’s network theory of social capital, that is so useful in connecting social capital to market thinking IMHO.  The money quote from Nan Lin … “social capital, as a concept, is rooted in social networks and social relations, and must be measured relative to its root . Therefore, social capital can be defined as resources embedded in a social structure which are accessed and/or mobilized in purposive actions .”  A merger between individuals, social networks and media has taken place.

In short, since broadband internet connections became more prevalent than dial up in 2004, the dominant media paradigm is shifting away from broadcast towards the Individual as Medium.  Increasingly perception and therefore stable future earnings emanate from IAM instead of broadcast or offline word of mouth networks.  Whereas time on broadcast networks can be easily rented with financial capital (i.e. the 30 second television or radio spot), access to social media networks will only be granted through social capital.

This means that managing these scaled up forms of social capital is at the heart of every enterprise right now.  Not two or three stages of maturity in social capital markets from now.

Were you at SoCap08?

Am I picking up on a missing thread to the conference?  Can you help me elaborate this?  This blog post is unfinished without the input of the organizers and attendees ….

UPDATE: Here is a great overview of the SoCap08 conference from SocialFinance.ca.

Here is the blog round up from Social Capital Markets Blog that I referred to:

• Securitizing Philanthropy, by Sean Stannard-Stockton
• We Are Jealous of Microfinance, by Francisco Noguera
• Pathological Collaboration, by Mark Beckford
• Plenary Tuesday Morning, by Lucy Bernholtz
• Day Two, from the Skoll Foundation blog
• Civil Capital Markets: Mike Lee on Riches and Meaning, by Haugelvin
• A Trade Association for Social Enterprises?, by Travis of the Great Bay Foundation
• Investing in Social Entrepreneurs, from the App Africa blog
• Notes, from the App Africa blog
• The silver lining in the market collapse: social capital, from the ecofrenzy blog
• Africa at the “unconference”, by Nathaniel Whittemore
• The future of social capital markets is, by Kim Wilson
• Charlene Chen on “Innovative Ways to Invest”, by Francisco Noguero
• Two Bucket Thinking - Two Bucket Standards?, by Rob Katz
• Roxanne Miller on New African Capital, by Francisco Noguera
• Conference Highlights, by Dr. Cindy Gordon
• Cindy Chen on Breaking Silos, by Rob Katz
• New Wealth Management, by Nathaniel Whittemore
• In the Hallways, the Beginnings of a Marketplace, by Sue Yun Chi
• Foreclosures, falling economies, and the Future of Philanthrpoy, by Lucy Bernholtz

by Michael Cayley & Jonathan Salem Baskin

Lincoln and Roosevelt are heralded as great American leaders in times of crisis, and their vision and fortitude are recognized as drivers of their historic accomplishments. However, we think their greatness had far more to do with their abilities to be catalysts for network effects.

UPDATE@Nov.20: More on Lincoln as master network weaver.

If we’re right, it reveals a very different interpretation of the calls we’re hearing for “leadership” to restore confidence in our economic system. In fact, there’s a good chance that no government policy gesture or announcement will mollify the worries of businesses and consumers, let alone stabilize the markets.

Confidence must emerge from the networks in which we all participate. We need to lead ourselves.

This raises intriguing issues and opportunities for corporate marketers looking to craft a way forward.

“In times of uncertainty consumers rely more on trusted relationships when making purchasing decisions,” says Dr. Brent Simpson, an expert at the University of South Carolina who specializes in understanding how social order is formed.

Stanford University’s Matt Jackson, a leading social network theorist, adds: “People’s friends and trusted social relationships are important in influencing their behavior, and people learn from and emulate their friends. Attitude certainly can play into that, especially in turbulent times.”

So what does this mean for businesses directly impacted by the financial crisis, like banks, brokerages, and insurance companies, as well as any consumer business facing the prospect of declining (or less profitable) sales?

First and foremost, you can’t brand your way out of it. You can’t rely spin doctors to declare your path through the crisis; your customers must see and verify it. While your hired guns are hatching ads and press releases to statically “position” the situation, your networks are trading information and defining it in real-time.

And that information, whether accurate or not, has absolutely nothing to do with how the brand has been envisioned, promised, or promoted. Every network is founded upon the tangible realities of action and reaction, just as the mechanism of their function is cause and effect.

How do you empower these networks to step up and lead?

* Know your networks. Invest in software to map connections between people and content.

* Move your enterprise closer to customers, employees, partners and investors. In the past we talked about flattening hierarchies; now it is time to integrate internal & external sources of value.

* Trust opportunities that emerge from the exchange (don’t just talk, and certainly don’t lecture).

* Make information a utility as ubiquitous as electrical light. If what you share isn’t affirmed and forwarded, don’t repeat it…instead, recast or reimagine it, and find new ways to prove it to your networks.

* Demand feedback and ideas.

* Stop looking for ‘home runs’ and play ‘singles and doubles’ by finding small wins, frequent trials. Make constant adjustments. Allocate resources towinners and abandon losers without blame.

The larger revelation of today’s various crises is that the era of symbolic branding is waning, if not over. The woes of the financial institutions have graphically illustrated to us why.

It was always untenable for lenders to ignore the details of weak/bad relationships and to expect instead that homes or property (i.e. commodities) would appreciate in value with no accord to the strength of home owners (i.e. the source of value that differentiated the commodity). Instead of accessing and fostering the relationship to make the loan a better product, the banker chooses to focus on the derivatives.

All businesses face similar risks. From toothpaste to software services, consumer brands invite significant downside threats when they focus on manufactured identify and perception, and not on the drivers of true business strength: connection, interaction, involvement, collaboration, consumption and the other aspects of human behavior.

There are no brands, or businesses, without the networks of people who make them real. It is in, and through, the behaviors of these networks that the Lincolns and Roosevelts for our business and social communities will ultimately arise.

Jonathan Salem Baskin and Michael Cayley met through the concurrent release of their manifestos in the 50th issue of ChangeThis.

Jonathan Salem Baskin recently released the book Branding Only Works on Cattle. This post also appears on Jonathan’s blog at http://dimbulb.typepad.com.