Social Media Customer Leaders: Some Early Performance Data
H. James Wilson
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We found that tweeting is both common and encouraged among a select group of companies we call Social Media Customer Leaders, or SMC Leaders for short. We identified these companies in our new Babson Executive Education survey of over 900 global executives, managers, and individual contributors. (Special thanks to colleagues Elaine Eisenman and PJ Guinan for their ongoing input to this research.)
SMC Leaders are the companies where employees “strongly agree” with the survey statement: “our organization has embraced social media (like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook) to improve its responsiveness to customer needs.” At the other end of the spectrum are SMC Laggards, who strongly disagree with that same statement.
[There are some] noteworthy performance results when comparing SMC Leaders to Laggards:
Only 21 percent of SMC Leader companies have flat or declining sales over the past year compared to 31 percent of SMC Laggard companies.
While just five percent of SMC Leader companies had higher than 25 percent growth over the last year, that’s two-and-a-half times more than the 2 percent of SMC Laggards that could say they grew that much.
Two-thirds of respondents from SMC Leader companies strongly agree with the statement, “We are more effective meeting customer needs today compared to 18 months ago” when the recession began. That’s three-times the rate of SMC Laggard companies.
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Correlation isn’t causality, of course. Aggressive adoption of social media can be a signal that an organization is more dynamic and innovative in the first place. For instance, SMC Leaders are two-and-a-half times more likely to strongly agree with the statement, “My company puts more emphasis on innovation and growth today than before the recession” (43% vs. 17%).
As we suggest in the title, we are still in the early stages of looking through our survey data. Of interest next is the performance of the 38 percent of SMC Leaders (compared to 2 percent of Laggards) that also use social media internally for CEO-employee and employee-employee interaction, such as strategy communication and knowledge sharing.
Have you ever wondered whether your boss’s boss recognizes you from your company’s internal Facebook account?
H. James Wilson is a Senior Researcher and Senior Writer at Babson Executive Education (BEE) in Wellesley, MA. At BEE he is a contributor to an ongoing Social Media research study led by Dr. PJ Guinan. Wilson has written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, and HBR Online where “Innovation Teams Lack Data, Structure” appears.
Richard Tedlow on “searing” business insights
In Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built published by Harper Collins (2003), Richard Tedlow devotes an entire chapter to what he characterizes as “searing” business insights. These are comparable with religious epiphanies, what George Fox described as an “opening” and what John Wesley described as a “shock of recognition.”
As Tedlow explains, the power and value of a “searing insight” are most evident when “one looks at the true giants of enterprise in the history of business in the United States…one sees repeatedly the central role played by visionary leadership with a crystal clear commitment to a corporate mission.” For example:
Andrew Carnegie: “Cut the prices; scoop the market; run the mills full.”
George Eastman: “You push the button. We do the rest.”
Henry Ford: “It takes you there, and it brings you back.”
More recently, consider these:
Coca-Cola: “The Pause That Refreshes”
Intel: “Intel inside”
Johnson & Johnson: “Doctors Recommend Tylenol”
McDonald’s: “You deserve a break today…at McDonald’s”
Miller Lite: “Tastes Great!…Less Filling!”
The New York Times: “All the News That’s Fit to Print”
J.M. Smucker Company: “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.”
Southwest Airlines: “THE Low Fare Airline”
Walmart*: “Always the Low Price, Always.”
Now consider this excerpt in which Tedlow discusses Lou Gerstner’s insight, one that saved IBM after he was named chairman and CEO in 1993:
“Gerstner’s insight was fundamental. It is one from which every great company that finds itself in deep trouble can benefit today and tomorrow. He implicitly asked himself: How does IBM have to change in order to survive and prosper? But he also asked himself second, more profound question: What does IBM have to keep in order to survive and prosper? Gerstner’s searing insight was that there was rock-solid muscle under the fat of the company. That muscle had been developed during decades of Watson management. The muscle had to be further strengthened while the fat was worked off. To get rid of everything in a company that had dominated its world, which is what the pundits were urging, would have killed IBM.”
Do you have a “searing insight” that will guide and inform your company’s decisions and initiatives during the months and years to come?
Chris Anderson: Atoms are the New Bits
Atoms are the New Bits — The Next New, New Insight from Chris Anderson
Bob Morris told me about this a few days ago. (I don’t know how I had missed it. Thanks, Bob).
Chris Anderson is at it again, explaining the way the world is changing. Anderson introduced us to The Long Tail, and then argued for the arrival of Free. (I’ve presented both of these books at the First Friday Book Synopsis). Now he says that the industrial revolution is upon us in a whole new form. The article is: In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits and it basically says that big is going to lose to small, and small is definitely the future.
Here quite a few excerpts, with a couple of my observations at the end. (the full article is definitely worth reading).
Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.
This story is about the next 10 years.
Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.
Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.
The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop.
Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.
“Hardware is becoming much more like software,” as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it. That’s not just because there’s so much software in hardware these days, with products becoming little more than intellectual property wrapped in commodity materials…
We’ve seen this picture before: It’s what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.
The result has allowed online innovation to extend to the real world. As Cory Doctorow puts it in his new book, Makers, “The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”
Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.
In short, atoms are the new bits. (emphasis added).
This means that one-person enterprises can get things made in a factory the way only big companies could before.
Everybody’s garage is a potential high tech factory. Marx would be pleased.
Bill Joy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, revealed the flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he rightly observed… With the Internet, you didn’t have to settle for the next cubicle. You could tap the best person out there, even if they were in Dakar.
Not all US manufacturing is shrinking, however — just the large part.
It’s the ultimate virtual manufacturing company: Aliph makes bits and its partners make atoms, and together they can take on Sony.
Welcome to the next Industrial Revolution.
In the article, Anderson tells the story of the man who invented the intermittent windshield wiper (an idea that Ford stole – he ultimately was awarded nearly $30 million). Today, he could have turned the idea into product on his “own,” much more quickly.
As I pondered this article, these were some lessons that I saw about the new future that has arrived/is arriving
1) Collaboration has always been about collaborating with the best/smartest/cutting edge people. Now, the tools of the era allow us to collaborate with those people regardless of where they work or live. It will be collaborate with the best, or die.
2) The future will be owned by individuals – “you (whoever you are) will own you.” Your ideas, your innovations, your concepts, will increasingly be owned by the individual who came up with them. And that individual will find the workers to turn the ideas into products on his or her own. The idea person will not have to build a factory.
3) The changes will keep coming. This new chapter in the industrial revolution is only that – the new chapter, the latest chapter. There will be others to follow.
What are they? We don’t know.
Great career advice from Roger Ebert
Great advice from the master, Roger Ebert – forget career, just keep getting better
I now follow Roger Ebert on Twitter. He linked to this article, My Roger Ebert Story by Will Leitch.
When a young Will Leitch wrote Roger Ebert for advice and counsel, Ebert wrote back:
He emphasized that such ephemera like “career” and “success” were mostly beside the point. “Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It’s the only thing you can control.”
Just keep getting better. That’s the challenge, in any and every endeavor, and the greatest advice of all.
Does your company/organization communicate clearly?
Does your company/organization communicate clearly? (lessons to learn from successes and failures in signage)
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
Cool Hand Luke, 1967
There are a lot of lessons in this article from Slate.com: The Secret Language of Signs: They’re the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention by Julia Turner. Here’s one:
from Spain -- clear, not confusing
Consider Leslie Gallery Dilworth, a Philadelphia architect who took a road trip with her husband through Spain in the 1980s. Throughout the journey, they’d marveled at the simplicity of the European road signs, which were easy to use even though neither of them spoke Spanish. Upon their return to Philly, they got lost on the way from the airport to their house, when a bad set of signs directed them to a local dump. Dilworth was so struck by her own city’s inhospitality that she spent much of the next decade working with the city and local stakeholders revamping Philadelphia’s sign systems. Today, she’s the CEO of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, the premier American professional group for sign designers.
This article contains stories about bad signs. The most tragic was the bus crash three years ago with the Bluffton University baseball bus from Bluffton, Ohio, which crashed in Atlanta, killing seven people. The accident was caused significantly by bad signage.
But it is also an article about how valuable helpful signage can be.
But, even more so, it is actually a reminder of this lesson: communication really is key to success. And a failure to communicate leads to… failure!
The clear and simple lessons are these:
#1 – Businesses, organizations, companies, governments need to be crystal clear in their communications with their citizens/customers. Ambiguity, a lack of clarity, can confuse people, harm people, and in the worst cases, even kill people.
#2 – People need to pay attention to all attempts at communication. If it is clear, follow the directions. If it is unclear, scream, and cajole, and work and think like an activist, in order to compel clearer communication.
If you ever write an article, send a memo or e-mail, design a web page, and the people reading can’t figure it out (or, it’s a hassle to figure it out – remember, people hate hassles!), then it is your fault.
I remember my experience of reading the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, and thought that one point they made was this: every time a customer has to figure out “what do I have to do next?” on their own, when a company fails to give clear direction, is a bad communication moment for a company.
Clear communication. Easy to figure out. No confusion. That is the goal.
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