The framework has been designed to help advertisers and agencies apply clarity, structure and standardization to social media measurement.
Broadly speaking the framework suggests that you should first establish Intent (I) . This element demands that a set of objectives be established, which can then determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most relevant to success.
When we talk about our democratic principles and working practices at NixonMcInnes, the common misconception is that we do this at some kind of traditional business cost.
The logic is that involving people in the whole management and direction of the business must be slower and poorer, but somehow ‘nicer’.
Kinda..’That’s nice dear – how much did it cost?’….
Yet we believe that we can win at the traditional business game, and reinvent that game, AND do all of this our way – having fun and being fulfilled at work.
Quick recap on some of the ways we work
With open book accounting – everyone knows the bank balance, the performance against budget, and what everyone else earns
With decentralised decision-making – a Rewards Team assess and approve all rewards proposals (including mine), when we moved into our new office the first time I saw it was the day we moved in because a team to manage the move had successfully owned and managed it, there are two guest seats for team members at every board meeting, we vote on all ethical decisions including new client opportunities, lots of people get involved in each hiring process, we set and agree objectives for the year as a team (not as a board)
With personal development – we believe hugely in the development of our people and selves, and invest in these, especially in listening and communication skills, which we feel can unlock huge potential
With the whole person – we don’t expect people to leave their soul and personality at home every day, and we expect and work with the challenges that life throws up, in HR speak this means totally flexible working, and lots more authenticity
And more – and the above are merely the outcomes, powered by much-more powerful principles that we hold dear
It’s not always easy, nor is it for everyone
We’ve had many bumps in the road as a young developing company – we’ve changed and learnt along the way, going through a round of redundancies as the company fundamentally shifted from one generation and focus to another, being involved in unhappy projects, had many tough times.
We’ve also found that our approach and culture isn’t for everyone – it is demanding and can be uncomfortable, and for some people the fit is not good.
And finally, there’s a risk of becoming a tall poppy – putting ourselves on a pedestal of our own making, being perceived as arrogant, self-loving positive hype-rs. I’m very conscious of this, which limits how and where I talk about ‘us’ in terms of approach and culture.
But I do believe passionately in the power and inevitability of democractic principles in the workplace.
And I do believe that it can be a competitive edge, not a quaint ‘nice to have’.
So here’s a raised glass for the sceptics:
We grew turnover by 23% in the financial year just closed
We created healthy six-figure profits
We shared £10,000 as a team in the form of profit-related pay
Tomorrow we are celebrating our 10th birthday as a team with some of our clients, partners and friends.
With that in mind, I celebrate my co-founder and the only guy to have been involved for the full ten years Tom Nixon, and the team of smart, decent, real and talented NM people – a great, great team that I am delighted to be able to work with :)
We believe the future needs different ways of working; all we’re doing is trying to find our own.
According to Wikipedia (!), a couple of guys Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 as:
the use of “web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”.
Perhaps it could be simpler, something like:
Enterprise 2.0 is the harnessing of social web platforms and behaviours to improve how the people in big organisations manage and communicate within themselves.
But I hope you get the gist (if you’re not already ahead of me on this :).
So to me, Enterprise 2.0 is utterly irresistable – it cannot be resisted. And it feels incredibly simple and right.
Not everyone sees it so simply. The trigger for writing this was a brief conversation on Twitter between Euan Semple and Alan Patrick, two solid smart thinkers and doers, that I joined in with. As you can see, Alan summarises his (and many others) reticence as:
“thats what I’m grappling with re E2.0 – given its all been known for so long, why will things change now?
Here’s the conversation (read it from the bottom up!):
You can see that my input is flippant, naive, lacking in proof. But it is bourne out of an unshakeable conviction I have, based on what I see everyday in our work with some of the biggest organisations in the UK.
They are changing towards an Enterprise 2.0 tinted-future (often whether they like it or not).
In my opinion no organisation can resist the influence of the social web as a driver of change upon its internal management, structure and communication, just as – regardless of the thickness of its skin or the stubborness of its culture – it cannot resist how the internet has evolved and disrupted its external environment and how it now needs to engage with the outside world.
Here’s why:
People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
Global competition is ever-fiercer
1. People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
For a selection of loosely related mini-trends in how we’re all adjusting, see variously:
2. We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
This distinction between inside the ‘enterprise’ and outside the organisations we work in is both useful and not useful. Yes, there are big, vital differences. But one of the constants is us, the people. (By the way, in my opinion the distinction between B2C and B2B is also helpful and (increasingly) not helpful – they are all people, just with different hats on and found in different decision-making settings – the family, the procurement team – but fundamentally people all, exposed to the same changing media landscape).
Increasingly the clients we work with at NixonMcInnes (who are pioneers in their organisations and industries) are finding their efforts welcomed internally in unexpected quarters, because the internal environment, the staff and people that make up their businesses, are catching up.
So businesses may find themselves turned inside out if they try to resist. It is happening – like it or not. Employees are choosing their hardware, publishing information outside of the firewall, formal control is melting away.
Although the definitions above, both the formal and my own plain English attempt, describe Enterprise 2.0 as about tools and stuff, the codeword ‘Enterprise 2.0′ actually means something much bigger and broader (and more exciting) to me.
The magical bit of Enterprise 2.0 is not the systems and platforms, but what they mean for the people, the organisational DNA, the culture.
3. Global competition is ever-fiercer
So combine the above two ingredients, and marinade them in an increasingly ruthlessly competitive global marketplace, and I think you’ve got change or die.
Thanks to the growing supply of competitors for many companies it’s getting harder and harder to win business – margins are being eroded by offshore lower cost alternatives, services are being commoditised by technology. The internet demands instaneous responses to market changes, news, customer service issues. This exacts Darwinian forces on the business community. How quickly an organisation can discover, understand and repond to these forces will determine its future.
To win, the modern Enterprise must act fast. To act fast, it needs to smooth and connect up the conduits and flows within itself. That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is to me.
In my mind Cisco are the kings of B2B technology marketing, and are also organising themselves in some very interesting networked ways to compete in the internet age. At their recent Cisco Velocity Partner event I offered my thoughts on 8 key principles for B2B tech marketers engaging with social media.
After my talk Alexandra Krasne, who is a cool Cisco video person, made a quick video.
I say the word network too many times (note to self!) but it might be offer one or two useful snippety thoughts if you are involved in B2B social media shizzle.
My thanks as always to Cisco – who are also a NixonMcInnes client – for involving me.
A question we’re often asked by clients is whether organisations should mandate that employees who tweet and blog should set up a profile dedicated to their ‘work persona’ or whether they should use their own personal accounts. I don’t think there’s a simple answer to this, so I thought it would be interesting to discuss it here. Here’s my take on it, but please let us know what you think in the comments.
As an example, I only have one Twitter account – @tomnixon. There’s work-related social media stuff on there, plus tweets about running and at the moment, having a cold. If you’re a client or someone from the Digital world, you might find me a bit off-topic and ‘noisy.’ You might be more inclined to follow me if I had a separate work-related Twitter account with just the social media stuff, perhaps @NM-tom. We could use this convention for Twitter accounts for everyone else on the team: NM-ross; NM-will; NM-steve and so on. People would be able to follow these accounts knowing that they’ll just get the meaty goodness relating to what NixonMcInnes does. The organisation can give guidelines about what’s acceptable, and might be more comfortable that the brand is not getting diluted by talk of vodka jelly.
I can see the appeal of work-specific accounts, but I think that having just one profile that combines personal and work personas is the way to go for two main reasons:
1. Personal brand
Social media gives individuals the opportunity to build a personal brand. For example, look at Jeremiah Owyang. While he worked at Forrester, he built a large following on Twitter. He’s now a partner at Altimeter Group and takes his personal brand, and Twitter following with him. He doesn’t have to start again from scratch.
If an organisation opts for company-specific Twitter accounts then you will miss out out on the benefits of the personal brands that new starters bring to the organisation. But what about Forrester? Have they lost out on ownership of Owyang’s following now that he’s left? Would they have been better off getting him to purely build Forrester’s brand and not his own? Perhaps yes, in the short-term. But now that they’re hiring for his replacement, they are actively seeking someone who also has a personal brand that can then be associated with Forrester. And even if he did have a company-specific @forrester-jeremiah Twitter account – what would happen to that once he left? It’s not something that can be handed over to a replacement because people have (mostly) chosen to follow the individual, not their employer. The account would probably just fester which is real waste.
2. People don’t fit in boxes
It can feel like there’s a clear line between our work and ‘real life’ persona, but I would argue that the line is becoming increasingly blurred. We all talk to work colleagues about what’s going on in the rest of our lives, and we often open up the ‘real us’ to clients. I don’t think we should avoid this online. I love it when I discover that someone I know originally through a work context is into mountain biking, running or DJing. It builds stronger relationships when you connect with people about more than just work and it can get messy if you have to switch between two different accounts.
What do you think? Should we keep work and play separate, or is your presence in social media just ‘you’ in all your guises?
I’m a designer. Initially I designed the way interactive products (like CD ROMs, kiosks and later websites) looked. Then I started focusing on how they worked – how they were experienced by the people who used them, and how that reflected on the business or brand providing the product.
Doing this properly required me to really get under the skin of my clients’ businesses – their products, their internal processes, their ethos. As more and more of our clients recognise the need to be more social – in the way they communicate and in the tools they use to do so – it’s become clear that in order to fully respond to the feedback these new communication loops encourage, most businesses need to redesign themselves internally.
This calls into question the general understanding of the remit of social ‘media’. As David Armano wrote in a recent blog post over on HarvardBusiness.org:
“Media” limits our view of the movement, and brings with it the baggage of decades of advertising. Marketers are only too happy to view the social web as a new array of channels to market their goods in some shape or fashion. That’s because it’s a model they’ve used since the beginning.
He (and the majority of the commenters on that post) believes that:
It may be time to approach social business by design. This means moving beyond our current definition of “social media” as a PR tool and thinking of it as something that can evolve the way we work, communicate, interact and collaborate at a core business level.
This is certainly borne out by our experience as we help clients find their way in the social realm. It isn’t simply a matter of starting a Twitter account – for businesses to really engage with their customers they need a sound strategic approach to enable them to embrace the feedback culture that Will outlined recently. This can be a challenging process, one that needs to be recognised and afforded importance from the highest levels of the management team.
In effect organisations need to redesign themselves strategically and functionally to make the most of the new opportunities afforded by the socialisation of customer (and employee) relationships.
Helping our clients successfully make this transition is my new design challenge – and the reason I’m sporting a shiny new job title :)
If you’re going to the Online Marketing Show on Tuesday next week (30 June.) at Olympia, come along to the Olympia Room at 9:45 where I’ll be on a panel discussing how you can get a social media strategy kicked off. My angle will be based on our experience with large brands.
If you can’t make it but would like to find out more then please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.
Hitwise data released yesterday shows that Twitter has continued its inexorable rise in popularity, with UK internet visits to the micro-blogging site up by six times since the beginning of the year – leading to its entry into the top 50 UK websites for the first time.
Whilst the name Twitter and all its related Tweet-isms might be breeding ennui in some jaded marketers, it’s also the case that according to Hitwise this site is receiving
‘more UK internet visits than the Daily Mail, RightMove, MSN UK Search, Directgov, and all retail websites – with the exception of eBay, Amazon UK, Play.com and Argos’
- all of which probably pay large parts in many traditional online media plans.
Not only is that a whole lot of eyeballs but Twitter is also proving to be a valuable referrer of traffic. Hitwise reports:
‘As well as being the 50th most visited website in the UK, it was also the 36th biggest source of traffic to other websites in the UK during March’.
All this activity has lead to a rapid growth in the amount of attention paid to Twitter in companies’ marketing strategies, according to Econsultancy’s UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report, released last week. Compared to last year’s 3%, this year 49% of marketers cited in the report are including Twitter in their social media marketing mix.
Ideally this new focus on Twitter would be part of a holistic social media marketing strategy with the tool being chosen to fit the target audience and set objectives – not just a bit of ‘me too’ activity. Sadly the same report carries evidence that this might not be the case – 19% of respondents aren’t tracking their activity at all and 49% have admitted that they have no idea how successful or otherwise their campaigns have been.
So, we can see that there are sound reasons for brands to engage with Twitter – but it’s essential to first identify a clear purpose for the activity, alongside a set of objectives against which you can then measure your success and justify your investment.
Do you have a project that you would like to discuss with us? Or perhaps you know someone who is thinking about how to implement their digital strategy for 2009 and could do with some useful, actionable input and direction?
If so, we are running a limited edition special offer to help you shine online. Check it out.
If we can’t be of assistance or if you are not satisfied with the results then we will send you a delicious cake from the lovely Brighton cake boutique Choccywoccydoodah. Mmm, how can you refuse such a tasty proposal?
“And if you want to know a little bit more about our practice areas and service offerings then check out our “What we do page”. This will give you guys, the wonderful NixonMcInnes audience, a little more information about the kind of work we are helping folks with.
Just so you know in case it is still not clear; we are a full service agency; this means that not only can our skilled social media consultants help you apply social media to your marketing strategy and help you use this medium to plan specific campaigns, but the consultants are backed up by a fully formed delivery team made up of talented developers and designers able to make your ideas for websites, widgets, applications, blogs, social media press rooms and anything else web wise a reality. You can even get to know the team in advance.
So go on, book your conversation with us now, we are ready, poised to listen to your challenges and lend a hand; guaranteed!
