We generally have a disconnect between the person, business, or agency that we want to be and the reality of who or what we are today.  This disconnect is a great thing, an opportunity for growth an opportunity for improvement.  However, when not understood, it is also a major pain point, something that leads your customers, your citizens, to lack faith in your words and actions.

As you begin to make use of collaborative solutions, like social media, it is critical that you recognize the importance of being genuine.  This is hard, especially for businesses and agencies that enable multiple people to take part in conversations on your behalf.  So, as you review the strategies and tactics you have in place, take some time to clearly define:

Social geo data is cluttering the air waves.  People are constantly publishing their current location using services like foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter.  Are you leveraging this information to improve your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts?  Eh?  Yes, I am talking to you, don’t look behind you.  I saw you check-in at Starbucks and, while you’re drinking that extra large cup of coffee, staring at your iPhone, let’s chat.

My friends at Sysomos sent me a link to their simple Fourwhere application.  At the same time, my friends at Lithium shared with me a widget they are baking into their  software.  In both cases the solutions are extremely basic, for now.  In both cases the companies look poised to iterate quickly to begin turning these solutions into powerful solutions that will provide data to feed your CRM, to improve your business, and to provide real value for your customers. 

Here is a short list of items I want to see from both companies as well as thoughts on how I would like to see B2C and B2B companies leverage the information:

I live in a small town in Massachusetts (Winthrop), a town like many others across the country, one that is struggling through a rough economy like all others.  Yet, in this small town, the teachers have gone without a contract for two years while the Superintendent receives a huge pay raise, the football team has their uniforms dry-cleaned while the girls basketball team does not have enough shorts.

Okay, you get the point, right?  Things are clearly a bit upside down.  Leaders, instead of focusing on a culture of Me first, lets all step back and remember the importance of our teams (the teachers above) and our customers (the kids on the basketball team).

• Without a solid team no leader can ever be successful.  Before taking that large pay raise and claiming there is no money to go around, think of the people who are making you successful.
• Too many times, especially with regards to teachers, I hear administration, our leaders, blaming the workers for the failures.  In any organization you may have one or two people who do not understand, one or two people who fail.  When an entire company, agency, school system, fails, the fault begins at the top.  Leaders must remember to take ownership for the good and bad within their organizations.  Failure to do so is a failure in leadership.  Enough said.

John

One of the most interesting aspects of collaborative strategies and tools is the promise of co-creating solutions with customers, partners, citizens and anyone else that your business or government agency interacts with.  The promise, of course, can only be achieved when goals have been clearly defined and articulated to all involved.  Success is not guaranteed, hard work and careful planning is required.  For those who have their act together the benefits will be seen.

You might be asking yourself, what is John talking about when he says, “Ideation”.  Simply put, ideation is a strategy, leveraging appropriate tactics and tools, whereby the company/agency collaborates with its customers/citizens to decide what products, features, services, are needed and the relative priority of those needs.  Ideation can be accomplished on a small scale through customer advisory groups or on a large scale as the US Federal Government is doing with it’s Federal Agency dashboard (http://www.opengovtracker.com/).
 
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution the high-level approach will look something like:

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.  If I did I would really love to be a Perry Mason type of lawyer, the man was gifted…    Oh well, we’ll discuss my acting desires another day, for now, just a couple of quick thoughts on the legal side of your social media efforts.

The lawyers are working through the legal issues and a lot of it is still up in the air.  As you might remember, I asked a semi-random group of lawyers for their opinions and they shared their thoughts on who really owns your social media account.  While attending a Government 2.0 Unconference this past weekend I learned about the Massachusetts Legal Guidance toolkit, check it out.  Note:

There is a lot of discussion about the need for governments to become more open, more transparent, sharing data with citizens.  311 services, anything considered non-critical services, are getting a lot of publicity now with Washington DC and San Francisco making big public splashes around their open 311 efforts.  Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, said this about Open 311:

“Too often, people grumble that their complaints about government – be it city, county, state, or federal – get swallowed by the bureaucracy.  Open 311 is an answer to that problem, placing the role of service evaluator and service dispatcher in the power of citizens’ hands.”

These open datasets give opportunity for businesses to build applications around, for citizens to get more valuable information from their government, and for government at all levels to better manage individual and group performance.  That may sound like a lot to expect, but it’s a sunny Sunday morning and anything is possible.

Before the details John, why should I care?

RightNow announced a new licensing model today, one that is part marketing hype and part true value add.  I applaud them for both efforts and wanted to take a moment to highlight the good, the bad, and where I would like to see this go in the future.  Keep in mind that I am a CTO at a company that offers SAAS services and I have delivered on the SAAS model since the beginning of 2000.  In other words, I understand the challenges of the vendor side as well as of the buyer side.

What is the Cloud Challenge?

RightNow has clearly laid out the cloud challenge on its web site and I would urge you to read through it.  At a high-level, however, it addresses the following problems with SAAS pricing:

If you spend time on Twitter you should consider participating in the weekly chats that take place.  These chats, covering topics from Social Media to PR to Open Government, are providing a number of benefits, benefits you might be missing out on:

• Learning, of course.  I have been learning from thought leaders and visionaries around the globe on a variety of topics.  I have learned more from these conversations than I learned years ago in college.  Of course, it was hard to carry those rock tablets from cave to cave bck then.
• Learning about job opportunities.  These chats are focused but also allow for side conversations and banter with jobs occasionally being discussed.
• Finding mentors.  This chats include people who are at all stages of their careers, from the beginning to the end.

While this lt is far from a complete list, it does cover some of the chats I know about, what other ones should I add:

While I have known about this partnership for a while it was great to see INgage Networks and Michigan State University announce their partnership yesterday.  I asked Kim Kobza, CEO of INgage Networks, how the projects will be selected and how they will decide success, here is what he shared:

“As part of our agreement we jointly establish project goals and measurement criteria for all projects. The measurements are output driven (as opposed to simply measuring network activity).  Measurement is always put in terms of cost savings, continuous business improvement and building institutional memory that enables a clear understanding of solution possibilities that lead to better, more effective decision making.”

I am excited about this project for several reasons, including:

Comcast is one of those companies on the leading edge of leveraging social media for delivering high levels of customer service.  In fact, I recently gave them praise for quickly helping me resolve a networking problem in my house entirely through Twitter.

Sometimes, however, even companies that understand customer service fall down when it comes to the basics, as can be seen by what is taking place in my small home town of Winthrop, Massachusetts.  On Thursday afternoon my father in-law lost TV reception in his house.  We called and, after navigating through the IVR system, reached a message stating that there were known problems in our area, stay tuned.  It is now Sunday night, no TV service.  This, in isolation, is not a big deal, however, as you start to dig in, this is a major failure by Comcast, a failure that I hope is addressed both in restitution to the customers affected and also in the processes and systems where failures have occurred.  Lets dig in: