For many of you, this is the “main dish” of our web site – letting you find out what we can do for you.
The Elevator Pitch: We help you turn your customer-facing processes into social processes.
What does it mean?
We have found that companies who are successful in leveraging social media and communities have one thing in common – they turn their business processes into social processes. Our research identified examples of business processes being turned into social processes for every single business process save two – finance and legal.
When companies turn their processes into social processes, they enlist the help of people whose job it is not to do so, to work as part of those processes. Like Intuit, they get customers, prospects and detractors to help them build better products. Or look at Best Buy, they let every single music enthusiast within the company help out customers and prospects who are looking for high end music instruments.
What are the benefits?
The results are pretty straightforward. Companies who can tap into the social framework of employees and customers to get things done achieve scale that could never be achieved through conventional budgeting and management techniques. Think of having every single employee and customer help you come up with better ideas. Or to have every employee become a sales and marketing representative. If you can make that happen you will not only scale your business by a factor X, you will also tap into the passion of your employees and customers – thus increasing the level of passion that they have for your company and the level of buzzing that will do on your behalf.
Those two factors deliver game-changing results – game over.
The Human 1.0 approach.
To guide you through the process of leveraging the social as part of your business we have developed a method which we call innovation at the SEAMS (give us a break on using acronyms, we are marketers after all).
You can find a more detailed description about the SEAMS method here, but for now, know that it can comprise any of the following six steps:
Taking an inventory of the cross functional PARTS of your business. We look at who the players are, what the added values can be, what rules we will want to follow, the tactics that can be executed and the scope of the projects that we will tackle – together.
Next we move into the actual steps to help you leverage the social. During Sensing, we listen to what is being said about you and make sense out of it. In the Engage portion we decide which consumer or employee tribes to engage with and how. We Activate things when we scale the programs to the point where they become part of the fabric of your entire process or business. Of course, you should never do anything without Measuring it, and as humans we always like and learn from Storytelling – and that is true in business as well.
So what is it that we actually do for you?
Let’s start with a disclaimer: social can be messy and if you don’t find what you’re looking for here, chances are that we can do it anyway – so please contact us!
We have offerings in three main areas: Education, Audits and Diagnostics, and Execution.
Education
Clients and prospects consistently give us high marks for our educational programs. We have experiential workshops and educational programs at very strategic levels for executive teams, as well as, more tactical “how-to, nuts and bolts” workshops on how to leverage social media as part of your business.
Our most popular workshops:
- The Tribalization of Business – based on our popular yearly research project on how companies leverage social media and communities, we review industry best and worst practices and help you bring some of those findings within your own business context.
- Hyper-Social Organization Mini-Summits – during these day-long experiential workshops we review the principles of the Hyper-Social Organizations as well as the data from the Tribalization of Business Study. We also conduct brainstorming sessions on the impact of the emerging hyper-social customer and hyper-social employee on your business. And we host a closing networking dinner so you can continue the conversation. You can attend one of the public Hyper-Social Mini Summits, or we can customize one for your organization.
- Marketing in a Social Media Age – realizing the possibilities; burning down the obstacles; learning from emerging best and worst practices.
- Developing Successful Online Business Communities – whether you just started thinking about deploying communities as part of your business or you have just completed a successful pilot and wonder how to scale the initiative, we come in and help you guide through the process.
Audits and Diagnostics
Recommending “social” business solutions without a fundamental understanding of the true drivers of your business and the challenges that you are facing is akin to prescribing drugs with severe toxic side effects to a patient without first seeing her.
Trying social programs are not the same as trying direct mail or advertising campaigns – you are asking your employees and customers to invest part of their social capital with you. If you screw it up, it could rapidly become ugly. No we are not trying to fear monger you, we hate that as much as you do. We just want to make sure that you understand the differences between what led to “Dell Hell” as opposed to what made Dell a poster child of proper social media and community adoption.
Our most popular audit and diagnostics offerings:
- A Hyper-Social Audit – besides taking an inventory of your business rules and challenges, we also look at how human-centric your culture is, how social some of your processes already are, who your internal/external tribes are, where they hang out and who their leaders are, and how hyper-social-ready is your technology infrastructure. We also use the Hyper-Social Index to benchmark you against industry peers and to make recommendations on where and how to start.
Sometimes we will tackle just one aspect of business and apply the same principles as the one described in the Hyper-Social audit. Other, more focused audits that we routinely perform include:
- Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Audit – who is saying what about you or things that you should care about in the marketplace and what does it actually mean for your business? What listening platforms should you evaluate and how should you develop an active engagement strategy? We answer all those questions and develop actionable recommendations with workable measurements platforms for monitoring progress and success.
- Tribal Audits – in here we just focus on finding the tribes that matter to you. Where do they hang out? Is there an opportunity for you to host them on your platform or will you need a federated model of engagement? Who are their leaders? Can they be turned into “ambassadors”?
Lastly, and leveraging our Human 1.0 Network of really smart people, we have the following very popular offer:
- Business Challenge Diagnostic – first we work with you to describe the business challenge that you are facing e.g., growth issue, customer acquisition/equity issue, product innovation challenges, etc.). We then anonymize your statement and put it up to the network for a crowd-sourced highly interactive diagnostic. Based on that exercise, you can hire us for the actual implementation of the project, or decide to reframe and address your problem statement internally. One way or the other, this social process of opening up your problem definition to a very diverse group of people is highly valuable.
Implementation Services
We firmly believe that most consulting projects fail because the consultant is not responsible for or part of the actual implementation process. We don’t want that and if you let us we will actually participate or lead the implementation of our recommendations.
Wherever we found the tribes, we will help you recruit or train the right people to engage with them. If there is an opportunity to host them on your platform, we will set up the community, hire and train the moderators, and develop the measurement platform to monitor progress and success.
Some popular solutions in this category include:
- Social Lead Generation programs
- Social Thought Leadership and PR programs
- Social New Product Innovation programs
- Social Customer Support programs
- Social Sales and Sales Support programs
