Making Sense of Social Messiness

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Making Sense of Social Messiness Guest was Francois Gossieaux of Human 1.0

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Making Sense of Social Messiness

Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Francois Gossieaux is co-founder and partner at Human 1.0 (Beeline Labs), a marketing innovation strategy firm, a Senior Fellow and a Board Member at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR).

In The Hyper-Social Company, Ed Moran of Deloitte and Francois Goissieaux of BeelineLabs identify how (and which) social media are fundamentally changing core business processes and the way businesses and customers interact. These changes are being driven by what the authors call the “Hyper-Social Shift.�

Through interviews with more than 500 companies IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Marriott, Eli Lilly among others and studies of social media, Moran and Goissieaux have gained radical new insights into the advantages many businesses have derived from new technologies and practices. From these findings, the authors have developed self-analysis tools including the Hyper-Sociality Index (HSI) profiled in this book that leaders and mangers can use to assess their enterprise’s HyperSociality; pinpoint which parts of their organization are ready to make the leap; and benchmark their progress against competitors, or against their industry as a whole.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Francois Gossieaux: Companies that are looking at this, their first reaction is to be thinking about what tools we are going to be using, and that's the wrong thing to do as a first step. It's not about the tools, it's about humans, and it's about the social, and it's about understanding how to engage with those groups of humans that might be beneficial for your business. The other thing to understand is that this is not a fad. This is sort of an anti-fad. Humans have been hard-wired to behave the way that they're now behaving on a large scale for tens of thousands of years, and that's not going to go away. Twitter might go away tomorrow, Facebook might go away tomorrow, and I'm sure they won't, but this will stay. This social way of business is here to stay, and you need to understand the humans more so than the tools.

Joe Dager: I think your book did an excellent job of it, and like I said, when I first got the bookt, I thought, "Oh, here's another book about social media, that's all I need. I looked at it, and the first thing I did was I went through the summary of each chapter. I read those and I thought, "These guys are making some sense. I like this!" I picked out a couple of the chapters, I read like two chapters in it, and finally I sat down, and I read a third of the book before I sat it down. Afterwards, I read it cover to cover. I've read so much about social media and am so intertwined with it, that it's starting to come kind of blasĂŠ to me, that when I pick up social media books, it's not... I'm not excited anymore for someone to tell me that...

Francois: I know. I think a lot of people are like that. I wish we wouldn't have had the subtitle that says it's a competition by leveraging social media, because that's what people think: "Ugh, there's another social media book," and it's so not a social media book, it's really a business book.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: Yes. And it's a human book, it's very good on where sales and marketing should be headed and it gives some good concrete examples of companies because that's the question everyone has: "Well, who's doing this? Are we just back over here on Cloud nine or something, talking about what the future holds?" No, Francois, I wanted to compliment you, because I did enjoy it and, like I said, I feel like I've read it twice now.

Francois: Thank you, Joe I appreciate the compliment...

Joe: This is Joe Dager, the host of Business901 podcast. With me today is Francois Gossieaux. He's the co-founder and partner at Beeline Labs, a marketing integration strategy firm, and a senior fellow and board member of the Society for New Communications Research. Francois, you're the author of, it's not quite all that new. It was published last summer, but of "The Hyper-Social Organization." Could you start out the podcast and tell me, what is the Hyper-Social Organization?

Francois: Thank you Joe, for the opportunity to be on your podcast. Yes, we published "The Hyper-Social Organization." And the premise of the book is that if you truly want to understand the underlying drives of this current wave of innovation, which is brought by social media, you're actually better off understanding what we got to term the Human 1.0, which hasn't changed in the last ten thousand years, than you are understanding the Web 2.0 tools. So, we go through quite a bit of examples of what those human characteristics are that we should be focusing on, and two of the most important ones I think are: reciprocity, which is actually a reflex that humans developed. So what reciprocity is: I will help this community, knowing that when I need help in return, I will get help back from this community. And so, you see that in business everywhere, when even in boring Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems customer-support communities, where you have people helping others as if it's their full-time job and yet you know they're not being paid by those people and not affiliated with the company and they have another full-time job.

Another one is status. We like status. We like it because it's used to get us access to better mates and better foods and so you see that in business when you run communities, for example, where you have the leader-boards, where it's sort of showing who is the biggest contributor, or the most liked, or something like that. Those communities will typically take up faster than programs where you don't have it. So, that's sort of the first part of the book.

The second part of the book talks about how companies that are successful in leveraging this change, how they, this social media, how they think differently about their business.

And to give you one example of that is, they stopped thinking about market segments, which is based on my personal characteristics, and they instead start focusing on tribes, which is based on behavioral characteristics. Who else do I want to hang out with?

So, a good example of that is, you could say, OK, I'm going to start a health club and who do I want to attract to my health club. And I'm going to have an online community for my health club or social media, another social media program. How do I do this? And one way of looking at it, traditional marketing way is of course, saying, "Well kids, people who go to health club are in this age bracket, they have so many kids, they live in suburbs and this and that. But, that's really not going to help you get those people together. What you in fact need to look at it is: "what kind of tribes do I have?"

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems When you think about health clubs, there are actually tribes. There are, you know the weight lifters, who love to compete with one another, showoff - they love when loads of people come and watch them and, you know, they are very competitive.

On the other hand, on the other side of the spectrum, you have stay at home moms that go to the gym and they don't like to have anybody else watch them. They like to talk about, you know, what other stay at home moms. They like to talk about school issues and town issues and stuff like that. They like to hang together too but not like that first group.

When you are leveraging social media online environment as part of your business, so if the health clubs were to have social programs, they would have to think about it in terms of the tribes and not in terms of market segmentation which they have done before. We list a few more things in which the companies are thinking differently about the business.

Then the third part of the book basically talks about - OK, well, companies that are successful, what did they do differently and what we found is that the companies that are successful, they turn their business processes into social processes. Turning it into social processes and not just taking it and slapping it on top of social media, it's truly anchoring those processes, into the Human 1.0 motivators that we have.

Joe: I think that's a great synopsis of book that you did there, and I was very impressed because it was more than few books I got to read about social media and how to use a book from the human side of it and how humans interact with it rather than just the tools of social media. I want to compliment you on that because it was refreshing to see that.

You talked a lot about, you know, the typical marketing things and the sales of marketing ideas that we have that are ingrained, especially looks like the marketing segments that Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems we have to start looking at more than as a social community. But, how do you start with a tribe? Sure I am going to put a window in my weight rooms, because the guys want everybody to see them, they are weightlifters I should say guys, but the weightlifters want everybody else to see and so my health club would be built that way, but how do I start a social media? How do I go about something like that?

Francois: Well, the first thing to do is really finding your tribes and you know finding your tribes is sort of - when you find them, hindsight it always looks like "but of course," you know. When you have to start on the other hand, it's a daunting task sometimes. I give you two examples - one, that your listeners probably were hurt before, but I think it's one of the best examples and which is why I want to run through it again, which is Fiskars, about a billion dollars Northern European scissor manufacturer. At some point in time, they decided we are going to be developing a community around... you know, to support our scissor business. Of course, they didn't build the community around scissors. They went and recruited three passionate scrap bookers. Then asked those ladies, "Would you like to create a community around scrap booking?" Those ladies said, "Oh yeah, that would be great." "We'll call ourselves Fiskateers." If new members have to come in, they have to talk to one of us before they can be admitted. We're going to have parties and waves and demos and how to do scrap booking and all that good stuff.

So Fiskars decided to set that up. They had a goal of 250 Fiskateers in the first six months.

They got that within 48 hours. In the first six months, they had 5000 Fiskateers.

It increased their online sales by 600 percent. Those ladies are doing parties and all that.

When the big box stores started seeing, you know, what those ladies were doing, they Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems invited them to come and do it within their stores. Stores that did that increased their sales by 300 percent.

Now, I went to see some of those ladies and they are like, "this whole program changed my life." You know, one Fiskateer offered a kidney to another fisketeer who she didn't know. So, you know, when you find your tribes, you can create a movement like that and it's unstoppable. If Fiskars were to close down that community, those ladies would pick up and go to Yahoo group or Google group or something else, but they would continue as a community.

That's a great example, I think, because it shows another thing that companies who were leveraging social media need to do think about differently if they can't think about their business or their social media sort of programs in a company of product centric way. Most companies when they use social media, the way they do it is, they who would build a community around scissors, and that wouldn't, of course, not work, you know. So, the first thing is finding your tribe.

You know, another example of that is, we have a client one day coming to us and say we want to build a community around the aerospace. I was like "Oh God!!"

We did some research and we found two characteristics in the market. One was, there is a tremendous, you know, drain of senior leadership within the company, within the industry.

So, you know, the leadership is aging and retiring. Then the other thing is a lot of senior leaders are actually jumping back into government jobs for end of their career and so that makes the drain in leadership even bigger than just because of the age. Then the second factor that we found in the market is that there is an unbelievable sense of pride in the Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems market place. If you're friend with me and you're losing a promising leader to me, then you're going to be bumped. But, if you lose that promising leader to Google, somebody outside of the industry, we're all going to be bumped, we lost the promising leader. And so what we did is we created this community around up and coming leaders.

People that joined the community to be a director or boss, or they had to be sponsored by two people within the community. Then what we did was, we went and recruited some of the senior leaders in the industry to be coaches and to help those young people, sort of do the right things to become senior leaders within their companies faster.

We were able to recruit from NASA to be coaches, chief knowledge management officers, senior program managers with Boeing, and it just worked, the older people were eager to help the young ones and the young ones were eager to join this elite club that sort of indicated that you are one of the players, as one of the future leaders of the industry. So, the first thing you need to do is find the tribes. Second thing you need to do is, you need to understand where your tribes are hanging out.

The two examples that I gave you were, where the company had an opportunity to create a new tribe basically. But, in the majority of the cases, tribes already hang out with one another somewhere; you need to engage with them where they are. You need to understand their culture, their language. Another very important thing to understand is, most companies do not do is, you need to understand their leadership structure and you need to understand whether or not there is an opportunity for you to engage with those leaders and have them be helpful to you. So, that's sort of how you go about it...

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems So, it starts out by listening. You know, you listen to what people are saying and we have the tools to do that now. If you find the conversations that are relevant to what you are looking for, then you start zooming in. and then you start using principles of anthropology to understand the culture to find, and etc., etc.

Joe: What I tell a lot of clients and tell me if this analogy hold true. They always want to advertise and I say, the people that are looking at your ads are just your competition. If you're going to advertise, you have to understand your customer well enough to advertise where he advertises. If you're going to advertise downstream to your customer, or upstream whichever way you look at it, versus doing it where all your competitors are and get into that community that your customer is in. Is that a fair analogy; is that a good way to look at it?

Francois: It totally is, yeah, it totally is. I agree with you, although I am not a big fan of advertising, I think a lot of advertising is sort of interrupt driven and customers are no longer willing to put up with that. I think this study from McKinsey that says that 60 to 80 percent of all buying decisions are made, without anybody from your company being involved and without any from your company being used. So, they are made by people asking their tribe's members - their friends, their colleagues, and experts that they respect, that's how they make their buying decisions. You need to go a step beyond thinking of advertising and start thinking about how can I make, how can I develop content that people who are already making recommendations about my products and services are going to use to make better recommendations. So, it's sort of, how can I develop recallable sort of content that people will use to make their case with their friends and colleagues Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems when they are being asked what they should buy when they buy a car, or press or whatever it is.

Joe: The way I picture what you are saying then is that we have this organizational structure, but really decisions are made from all these influencers around the people versus through the normal organizational structure.

Francois: That's correct, yeah, and that's another way in which the companies that are successful are thinking differently about their business. They are allowing, they embrace the messiness that comes with the social, and they are allowing communications to happen across organizational structures. I'll give you a couple examples of that. A good one is Best Buy, even though that part of their business I don't think is doing that well. But, the principles are still good. They were entering the high-end music instrument business.

Instead of relying on traditional sales and customer service people to help customers, what they did is they asked people within their company, "Who here has a passion for music?"

And whoever raised their hand, they said, "Why don't you engage with our clients and with customers in our online communities when you're trying to make decisions around which instruments to buy?"

So now what you have is somebody at Best Buy in finance, who freelances maybe on weekends as part of a band, who is now making recommendations to customers in their online communities about what type of high-end guitar or drum set to buy. So, that's truly allowing and encouraging communications across organizational boundaries.

Another one is Humana and Xerox, they both did this. They went around the company and looked at who within their company were very active social networkers or bloggers. I think Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems at Xerox, they found 1800 or something. At Humana, they found 15,000 or something. And eighty percent of those people were talking about things that had nothing to do with the company.

So, they were talking about fly fishing, or whatever. What they did is they started briefing those people as if they were press. They would brief them like two days ahead of time when there was a new product launch or something like that. When I was interviewing Christa Carone, CMO at Xerox, she said, "The first time we did that, I saw an amplification effect like I've never seen in my life."

Because even the guy that is talking about fly fishing would go on his blog and say, "You know, I don't usually talk about work, but I'm really proud about what my company has done here." He talks a little bit about it and then he goes back to talking about fly fishing.

Not only does that give an amplification factor at the moment of the product launch, but in the future if somebody from his fly fishing community has a recommendation to ask about imaging products, who do you think they will go to? They'll go to the Xerox guy of course!

What they achieved is to plant the seeds at those conversations where those buying recommendations are being made. That's what they were able to achieve.

Joe: I think they do a good job of it. Any of the followers of my blog knows the relationship that I have with Xerox. I get, on like once a quarter, someone from there and we talk about what they're doing in development, what they're doing in Lean, Six Sigma, Agile and things. We don't talk about the printing industry, but we definitely do talk about their application and how they're applying it. I think that's good for them to do. It builds a lot of strength into their organization by doing that.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Francois: Exactly.

Joe: Are corporate blogs very good? I really don't find good corporate blogs out there. Do you find them?

Francois: No. I think a lot of corporate blogs are really not working. The reason is that often times they're just another corporate mouthpiece. It is a brochure put into a blog, and customers are not interested in that. In other cases, they might have some good thought leaders within the company that have interesting things to say, but they just don't have the resources. Meaning those people are too busy so they update their blogs once every three months or whatever. Again, if you want to create a good corporate blog, I think the way to do it is to think about the tribe again. Who is it that you want to engage with? And then, once you know who you want to engage with, try to find some of those people from those tribes, from outside of your company, to see if they want to help you. Because those guys might actually be willing to help you create an editorially independent group blog around a category that would be of interest to your tribes.

Now, all of a sudden, you have something that I think is much more viable. A good example of that is a bit self-serving because we are running it for Microsoft. It is a fast forward blog, which is an Enterprise Tool blog that Microsoft is sponsoring. It is editorially independent, where we have six, seven, eight, nine, ten, depending on the time. Very-well known bloggers write about adoption issues of Enterprise Tool tools.

Joe: You talk about how you measure this stuff. How do you measure it? Do the sales and marketing guys have to be collecting data all the time for this? Or is this can be something that can be internally done in an organization?

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Francois: Well, you should always collect data, because there's a wealth of information in there. Unfortunately, often times, people collect data and then don't do anything with it. All that being said, “I do think that there is an opportunity for marketing to be more efficient in what they're doing.� When it comes down to measuring the impact of what they're doing, what we found as part of the research that led up to the book is that companies that are the happiest with their results are companies that are measuring the impact of the social the exact same way as they would measure the impact of other programs on that same process. So, I'll give you a couple of examples.

If, for example, the major goal of your social program is to generate leads, then you should measure the impact of your social programs the same way that you measure the impact of a direct mail campaign on your lead generation process and not measure it by looking at how much time people spend on the side and how many page views they do.

Yeah, that's irrelevant. It's interesting data, but at the end of the day, it doesn't show you what the CMO wants to know.

The same is true, if I can give you another example, is customer support. You have a customer support community. You measure the impact of that customer support community the exact same way that you would measure the impact of the call center. And if your company measures the impact of the call center in terms of customer loyalty, then you measure customer loyalty.

If they do customer satisfaction, then you measure customer satisfaction. But, you measure it the same way as you would do any other program in support of that same process.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: You quote Drucker at the very beginning of the book and his famous saying that there's only really two things that a company exists for: marketing and innovation, or how to create a customer I should say. When you look at sales, what is Sales 2.0?

Francois: Well, it's funny. Geoffrey Moore, who I think we quote in the book as well, I think said it the best: Sales is social networking. Or it should be social networking, OK? So, we have a whole chapter actually in the book about Sales 2.0, but I think Sales 2.0 is a lot of things. And it's very different from Sales 1.0. The first thing is that you have to realize that the social has fundamentally changed the buying process, OK? It's no longer a funnel.

It's sort of a swirly mess, and oftentimes, nobody from your company is involved. People continue to do research after they bought products.

You have to put yourself in a position to be able to see what people are looking for, to understand what problems they are having as they're making buying decisions, and to be able to help them at that particular moment when they do that.

An example of that is a program we did for EMC where they were trying to generate lead, so it was not directly related to sales. It was only through lead generation, but hopefully lead generation would lead to sales [laughs] or amenable software components. So XML databases, XML content management pieces and things like that.

We looked for tribes and we couldn't find the people that they would normally sell to, which are the highest level BP development in an application development company. But instead, what we did is we found the developers themselves that were charged with going to find those best components to make recommendations back to the company.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems We found them on Twitter. They're very, very query driven. They help one another. "Hey, I've been asked to look for this XML database. Can anybody make a recommendation here?" So, we hired two application developers to be on Twitter, and they were identified as EMC employees, of course.

They would just help others that were looking for help, and in 80 percent of the cases they were recommending things that had nothing to do with EMC. And yet within two months, it became the best lead generation program they had ever had.

It's a matter of putting yourself in a position to help others as opposed to trying to interrupt them and shove something down their throat.

The other big change that I think companies need to do when it comes to sales and marketing 2.0 is, they need to stop trying to be the product's advocates or the company advocates within the marketplace. Instead, what they need to try to do is they need to become the customer advocates within the company, and they need to let their customers be the product and company advocate within the customer base because that's how the process is changed. So, you need to leverage this changed process in order to capitalize on it.

Joe: I can't agree with you more. I think that's really the whole point of it. Listen to the marketplace rather than creating more content and pushing it out there. I mean everybody hears about blogging. They hear about content generation and content marketing. Well, it is, but it's having the content there for instant access of the customers that you're listening to be able to direct them to it. How does that play in development? You have a chapter in there, "Development and Innovation." How does a social medium play into that?

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Francois: Well, it's the same thing. Companies that are successful, they turn their innovation process or their product development process into a social process. Turning it into a social process means getting people whose job it is not to do so, to help you develop your products. So, it's getting ideas from customers, whose job, it is obviously not to build new products or it's getting ideas to build new products from other employees who are not in product development or product management or whatever else or whatever other group is involved in product development.

Good examples of that, of course are... Dell is a good example of that with their IdeaStorm where they have both an internal and external IdeaStorm. It's not just a matter of opening up a community and turning it into a suggestion box. That is not turning the process into a social process. It's much more complicated than that.

Companies that are truly successful, like Pfizer in leveraging that - and Dell now too, they've just recently made some changes in their IdeaStorm - are companies that realize that if they want to have good ideas from people whose job it is not to develop new product and come up with good ideas about products, they need to do it in such a way that it is well timed with their product development cycle.

If I am in the middle of doing my new product launch on laptops and you are coming with ideas at that particular point in time about laptop improvement, it's too late for this release and it's too far away for the next release.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems It's not good for me, I have an idea I really can't do much about and it's not good for the person who brought the idea because another person will get frustrated, "I gave pretty good ideas and I never see you implement them."

You need to make sure that you have time based activities within your online communities.

So, this week, guys, we are looking for ideas about power supplies or about batteries or whatever and you also need to make sure that you report back to the customers as to here's what you gave us and here is what we did with it and here is why we didn't do certain things with ideas that might have had merit but that we didn't act upon. It just didn't fit in this release cycle.

You have to have this ongoing communication with the people who are helping you. Again, it is understanding the Human 1.0 characteristics when you do this.

Joe: They restructured to what, we calling the social messiness?

Francois: It is totally. If you are familiar with complexity theory, it's what they call the edge of chaos, that's where you need to be, right? If you are in the edge of chaos, you are perfect, right? If you go on one side of the edge of chaos, the system freezes, when you have too much structure. The system freezes up and nothing happens. If you are on the other side of the edge of chaos and you have chaos and nothing happens with chaos either. You have to have the right balance between structure, prophesies, hierarchies and embracing the messiness of going across all these things.

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: One of the terms I use and you touch upon in the book, sales and marketing is really about knowledge creation for the customer and for the organization. I think you have a chapter on knowledge in there, don't you?

Francois: Yes, we do have a chapter on knowledge. I think you are totally right, it is about knowledge creation and I know knowledge management is a loaded term, but I do believe that companies that are going to be successful are... As one of the foundations or one of the supporting infrastructures that they're going to have is going to be a social knowledge management platform, and I think there are already companies that have that.

One of them is IBM, where they are allowing every single employee to create a community about whatever they want and with whomever they want, using whichever tools they want.

So, even though, some people might be on Facebook and others in private communities and others in big public communities and both are important and all that, they still manage to capture and make all the knowledge that gets created in this whole diverse universe, available to everybody else.

Joe: All this is great and everything, but how do you I start this process because where I see people coming into social media now, they grab hold of these tools and people say, I've got a blog and Twitter and you got to get on Facebook and then about half of what I am seeing is just the old, what I would call the old marketing messages like I said, the old platforms just moving over to the new tools.

Francois: Yeah, that's what a lot of companies are doing. A good example of that is company Facebook pages, "Oh look how many fans we have on my Facebook page" and then you go look and it is like, yes, but you are giving them coupons. That's why they are Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems on your Facebook pages. There's nothing social about this. It's plain old couponing. You are totally right. It's a combination of things. I think that you need to have a cross-organizational view of this. You need to bring everybody from your company together and you need to look at what are customers doing as it relates to customer service, as it relates to new product development, as it relates to marketing, as it relates to sales.

Are they engaged? Are they hanging out with one another? Are they passionate? Are they angry? The first thing is sort of, find the areas where your customers are most likely to be active. Second thing is do an internal audit and find the departments where you have the most suitable culture to embrace those new tools. It's not just the tools, it's embracing the social.

That could be in engineering. Find those places where you're most likely to have people that are tuned with this new way of doing things. Then start engaging in those areas where you have the most passion, the most pain, whatever, and the best culture to sort of take advantage of that. In the book, we also have a chapter, which we're starting to do with some clients now, which talks about the hyper-social index. What we're doing there is we're trying to help companies benchmark themselves against the industry as to how ready they are to embrace the social.

The way we do that is by using four characteristics which we think have to be in place for the social to be totally successful, which is an ability to understand tribes instead of market segments, an ability to understand that it's not just a channel of communication but that you need to sort of get at a feel that the knowledge network, where those decisions are Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems happening, an ability to get rid of company's simplicity and product's simplicity, and then the degree to which you can embrace messiness and go across organizational functions that is needed in order to make this happen.

If you can benchmark yourself, then you can say, "Oh, well, we are totally ready, we should go all the way right away" or "We're not quite ready, we have to make some changes to culture." Then you might need some organizational development change management projects first.

It depends on the company. But, at the end of the day, when I interviewed Erin Nelson, who used to be the CMO at Dell, she said "The best thing that ever happened to me is Dell Help. The reason it was the best thing is because it forced me to go all out." She said "In these days, if you want to succeed, you've got to become part of the DNA of your company. You can't just tip-toe in the water and see what happens. You've got to go all out."

So at the end of the day, that's what companies need to do. It has to be part of the fabric of the company. But, how to get there is a different path for different companies.

It's like two individuals that need to lose 50 pounds, right? One might be super motivated and you can tell them "OK, lose 50 pounds in 50 days" and the other one might not be and it's a total different path for that person to lose 50 pounds. So, it's the same for companies that are trying to embrace the social.

Joe: I think, we go back to the Sales 2.0 when you say that and I think about it because the transparency that we've always heard about in social media, it's the old T-word that's Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems kind of old news now, but it's really true in the values and the passion that you have about your business, it comes true in social media, doesn't it?

Francois: Yes, and it's not just transparency. I think it's more emotional than that. It's fairness. It's doing stuff in a fair way. Because people do not want you to be transparent, they want you to be fair with them. They know that in some cases you can't be transparent because there are regulations; there are legal issues, and all of that. But, as long as you're fair, that's what's going to motivate them to continue to support you.

Fairness is another Human 1.0 trait, right? It's the counterpart of reciprocity. Reciprocity is reflex and humans live in a reciprocal society, right? I'm helping the community because I know I'm going to get help. The reasons we did that is, if I can get you to care about my child as if it were your own while I'm going hunting and gathering, I have a high likelihood that my gene will survive. It's that simple, right?

But, if you live in a reciprocal society and you have someone that comes and takes from a society without giving back that could bring down your society. And so which humans have done, is they've developed this innate sense of fairness. Humans are willing to pay a personal toll to punish someone who you'd consider inferior.

So, to give you a little test on that, there was a guy, I forget his name now but he wanted to know the price in economics. He did this little test all over the world. He would select a random group of two people and he would give the first one 50 dollars and say, "You share with the second person. And if that second person accepts your offer, you can keep the money. If that second person refuses your offer, you have to give it back."

Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems An economist would say, "Humans are rational, therefore, the second person will take one dollar or more because it's otherwise one dollar he doesn't have." In reality, if it's anywhere below $23, most people will refuse it and in fact pay a personal toll of $23 in order to punish the first person for being unfair. It's another one of those hard-wired things that we have.

So, if you have a customer and you're trying to help him and you can't, but it was done in a fair way, that customer will stay loyal to you. If you're trying to do something that seems to be unfair, that customer will go out of their way to hurt you. They're going to go buy your company sucks.com and put a lot of efforts to make you suffer.

So, transparency is part of it, totally, and we talk about it in the book. But, the more important one is I think fairness.

Joe: I have to agree with that explanation. It was excellent. One of the things that this reminds me of is in a podcast, Michael Balle’. He mentioned the Zen story. He said when you studied Zen, when you first start studying; you see the mountain as a mountain. When you really study Zen very hard, you no longer see the mountain. But, when you understand Zen, you see the mountain as a mountain. I always thought that was a great analogy, especially when you're looking at where we're at right now, is that when you first get into social media, you start with the tools. You see the mountain. Now we're at a point I think that maybe we got into the thinking and the philosophy of social media and we don't see the mountain. What do you think is next? When do we start seeing the mountain as a mountain? When do we start seeing that it all makes sense to us?

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Francois: Well, I think that there are companies that are already showing us the way of what's next - companies like IBM, companies like Best Buy, Xerox. There are a lot of companies that are showing us the way already I think. The other thing is we always overestimate the short-term impact of something and always underestimate the long-term impact of things, and so who knows what's going to be in the future? I think that what we're going to see moving forward is we're going to see companies that are not just embracing the social and trying to make it part of their DNA, but we're going to start seeing companies like Zappos, for example, that are actually building their business with social at the core of it. But, what's beyond that, I have no idea. But, I do know it's going to be very different.

I just don't know what it is.

Joe: Well, I mean it's like, I think we go back into is that every day we're creating more knowledge, and that knowledge is spiraling in. I mean it's actively getting more and more in the core and going faster and faster. When I look at a funnel, I don't look at your typical marketing funnel. I look at it as a knowledge creation funnel. As you're spiraling down it's going faster and more knowledge is created. Ultimately, where I think at the bottom of the funnel is most companies, which some of them are doing right now, is co-creating.

Francois: Yes. Joe: What have you learned from the book since writing it that maybe you wish you would have put in it?

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Francois: Oh, actually, from a business perspective, one of the things that we didn't touch on, which a lot of companies are actually tackling at this point and having a lot of difficulties with, is the whole area of risk management. When you look at the space, the whole risk management landscape changes. There are all kinds of new risks that are coming up, and there is unpredictable risks and stuff like that. How do you deal with that?

So, Ed and I wished that we would have done some more research and perhaps have a chapter on risk management. But, we'll have it in the next book.

Joe: Is there another book in the making?

Francois: We want to, yes. We would like to have another one that looks at hyper-social organizations in general. And then we were thinking of perhaps having one that would look at, "Let's be very specific now. Your customers are hyper social. What does that mean to your business?" Then maybe another one would be "Your employees are hyper social." And so go a level deeper in terms of what's the impact? How do you embrace it? How do you measure success? How do you manage your risks and things like that?

Joe: Would you tell me how someone might be able to get a hold of you?

Francois: The company name - actually I fell in love, Joe, with my own terminology, and I renamed the company to Human 1.0. So the website is www.human1.com. My email address is Francois@human1.com. We also have a Facebook page about the book, which is Facebook.com/hypersocialorg, all one word.

Joe, Thank you very much.

Francois: Thank you, Joe. Making Sense of Social Messiness Copyright Business901

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joseph T. Dager Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Ph: 260-438-0411 Fax: 260-818-2022 Email: jtdager@business901.com Web/Blog: http://www.business901.com Twitter: @business901 What others say: In the past 20 years, Joe and I have collaborated on many difficult issues. Joe's ability to combine his expertise with "out of the box" thinking is unsurpassed. He has always delivered quickly, cost effectively and with ingenuity. A brilliant mind that is always a pleasure to work with." James R. Joe Dager is President of Business901, a progressive company providing direction in areas such as Lean Marketing, Product Marketing, Product Launches and Re-Launches. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Business901 provides and implements marketing, project and performance planning methodologies in small businesses. The simplicity of a single flexible model will create clarity for your staff and as a result better execution. My goal is to allow you spend your time on the need versus the plan.

An example of how we may work: Business901 could start with a consulting style utilizing an individual from your organization or a virtual assistance that is well versed in our principles. We have capabilities to plug virtually any marketing function into your process immediately. As proficiencies develop, Business901 moves into a coach’s role supporting the process as needed. The goal of implementing a system is that the processes will become a habit and not an event.

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