Albums - not just for the music.

I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard.

It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline.

It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote.

It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you want a job. Or a sale. Or anything at all. Social systems sniff out those who are out for themselves. They can detect them like a gas leak. And they’ll leave your house posthaste.

So how do you demonstrate the value of the social web in a culture with competing priorities?

Make no mistake about it: Building an effective social web presence is big change in many organizations. It’s hard work to change a culture into one that values online time to listen, converse, and add value for free. It’s also hard to make the kind of sustainable change necessary to do it again and again and all the time.

It’s a cultural issue as much, if not more, than an execution issue. The questions that need to be asked aren’t tactical: What Shall We Tweet or What Shall We Post. They’re strategic: How Shall We Connect and What Shall We Give Away.

For many, that’s a big cultural change that represents a disciplined approach to something very new.

Culture of Discipline: Disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action — operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities — this is the cornerstone of a culture that creates greatness.

- Jim Collins, Good to Great. Stage 3 Input Principle

So it’s best to find small wins when developing a social web presence, and build on it (yes, another leadership principle.) Have a grandiose goal, but start by finding a purpose that adds value to your organization and build on small wins. This is a sustainable approach based on your strategic context.

It seems to me that one of the most potent small wins for an enterprise lies in the very nature of social web itself: You can use the social web to connect. Forget forward facing campaigns, forget ROI. Use it to connect to people doing stuff in your space, and learn.

We forget about this, I think. But it can be just the toe-hold into the social web that enterprises can use to demonstrate value and build upon.

Boil it down even further than large-scale listening. Approach it simply. Like we use album liner notes.

Remember albums? Time was that we’d buy an entire collection of music from an artist who caught our attention via a single song. The album would include liner notes about other projects the supporting musicians, producers, engineers, or others had been involved with. We’d read these liner notes, and we’d buy another album based on what we learned from them. This process would branch us into all kinds of related but ever-growing experiences.

Follow your favorite author, journalist, CEO, or idea person on Twitter (you’ll be surprised who you’ll find on Twitter using Google). Watch those people’s re-tweets, then follow the people attributed. Watch their links (the things they’re finding value in) and subscribe to those blogs. Follow the links in those blogs and subscribe to those podcasts. Start small and manageable, and before you know it you’ll be sending company-wide emails with a relevant piece of industry news, competitive intelligence, or inspirational thinking.

At a former job I used to send out weekly internal email blasts called “Competitive Flash Reports.” It was a simple thing with blurbs and links to relevant industry and competitive news. It became very popular. People referenced bits of information from it in all kinds of meetings and planning sessions. If the social web was around then, it would have served as a veritable advertisement for the power of the social web. If I did it today, I’d put the source (or source-of-the-source) with the blurb. Demonstrating the social web’s value in this way could change the conversation from “I don’t care what people are having for breakfast” into something meaningful.

Small win. Value to the enterprise. Building blocks based on your strategic context.

Like the artwork around its vats, the New Belgium brand is made up of many individual parts, while well considered and considerately crafted.

Craft beer on a Wednesday afternoon. One of the perks of working for yourself.

OK, so we didn’t drink beer. But a prospective client and I spent the better part of the day visiting the New Belgium brewery in Ft. Collins, Colorado yesterday. I’m recommending some branding initiatives for this prospective client, and New Belgium provides an excellent analog to what we’re after. (We’ll see where it goes.)

The New Belgium brand is special on many fronts. But one dynamic we saw first-hand stuck out above all the others.

If you haven’t heard about the New Belgium approach to running a business – and their branding work that seamlessly integrates with it – you owe it to yourself to check it out. Writings and studies are all over the place. Here’s a more academically-minded one (PDF – © O.C. Ferrell 2006), here’s a local b-school video, and here’s a nice write-up from Elephant Journal.

I’ve been to the brewery before but with friends. I’ve had to constantly control my urge to be the wet-blanket marketing weenie among these fun-seeking groups that aren’t the least bit interested in things like holistic, values-based, integrated branding. So it was refreshing to be there purely to experience New Belgium from a business perspective.

We arrived around 11:00. We were just about the only non-employees meandering about. We interrupted someone working on a laptop behind the bar in the Liquid Center (New Belgium’s remarkable name for the tasting room) and asked if we could see a certain area of the brewery I had remembered as particularly impressive during a past tour.

Tours start at 1:30, he said. We looked at each other, trying to decide if we had the time to come back and if it was worth it. We did this because like most consumers we’ve been conditioned to accept policies, and we’ve been further conditioned to understand that employees at this level aren’t empowered to work outside them.

Instead, our man in the Liquid Center took advantage of his moment of truth: I can’t leave the bar unattended, but let me see if anyone’s available to take you.

A few minutes later we were immersed in a conversation with Andrew Lemley about the company and its brand. Not a tour-guide script of New Belgium beer, not why we should buy it. But responses to our questions. Things we were interested in.

Of all the impressive tactics New Belgium employs to build and manage a values-centric brand, the fact that an employee felt empowered to work outside the norm was the most remarkable.

At the end of our “tour” my prospective client pressed Andrew about his role in the company. You’re in sales, he said, you just don’t know it.

You’re right, Andrew responded. I sell an experience with a story.

Straight from his mouth, not a marketing professor or blogger.

Well-crafted beer and well-crafted branding on a Wednesday afternoon. One of the perks of working for yourself.

Have you ever experienced employees empowered to act outside their policies or job description? What kind of impact did it have on your perceptions of the brand you were experiencing? Did it cause you to act differently?

It supports points I make about social media being new tools that require the same fundamental strategy and approach we all know how to do in traditional networking spheres. Namely (and simply):

• Find communities that are right for you.
• Be nice, ask questions, and be authentic.
• Look to give more than you receive.
• View it as collaboration, not promotion.
• Do it even when you don’t feel like it.
• Do it even when you don’t feel like it.
• Do it even…etc.

The same applies to companies struggling to understanding how to leverage it while afraid of the possibilities if they do. The same questions companies deal with in other areas of their operations apply to the strategic approach they should take to social media.

Culture

• How do we view customers?
• How transparent are we?
• Do we want to have discussions?
• How do we use information gathered?
• Do we believe we can control messages?

Public Relations

• Do we look to add value above and beyond what we charge for? Is everything billable?
• Do we believe that we control messages?
• Or do we believe that we facilitate discussion?
• Do we believe that 5,000 views of a blog is as valuable as a New York Times placement?

Risk Tolerance

• Do we try things to develop context, or do we exhaustively plan before getting involved?
• Do we reward failure?
• Do we have recovery acumen?
• Is believe ever a part of our planning?

Diversity

• Do we seek to incorporate differing backgrounds into the status quo?
• Do we recognize the value of different cultures?
• Do we have a servant leader approach to finding ideas?
• Are we humble enough to listen?

A friend of mine made the point that in the 90’s, companies were worried about what would happen if they allowed anyone in the organization to have an email account. The new tool, it was feared, would generate widespread power of communications, making it impossible to control corporate messages.

Social media isn’t anything new from a strategy perspective.

Apple helps make this point with these two ads.

Ed Stein, EdSteinInk.com, reprinted with permission

If the current dialog about health care reform can teach us anything, it highlights the importance of figuring out our values.

We all know the importance of inside-out strategic planning (and brand development, for those who consider them separate). The enterprise values, vision, and mission (brand) should be a collective exercise. Involve as many people as possible. Hold retreats, perform exercises, play games, put the words of participants on giant sticky notes. Transform the more insightful quotes into pictures on the graphical strategy map. Include verbatims in the final deliverable. Stage-gate the process by communicating back to the larger enterprise during development.

And we’ve all seen the process devolve and the gears grind. Collaboration turns into open season across units: operations launch scuds at market verticals, marketing challenges revenue models. Anyone can write copy — wordsmith-ing hijacks strategy.

Then at some point getting the damn thing done trumps involvement. Can we just move on already? I’ve got work to do.

How to avoid this in strategy and brand development? It’s probably in the values.

I was lucky enough to work with ethicist and educator Dr. Buie Seawell* for many years. An important mentor for me in many ways, Buie was the first to introduce me to Values Based Leadership, a term coined by another colleague, thought leadership guru Dr. James O’Toole in his seminal book (I’ve had the pleasure of crossing paths with O’Toole a few times as well). Values Based Leadership was a centerpiece of the brand I was charged with developing, providing me the opportunity to dig into it a bit.

And when you dig into it, you find more than a little in common with branding. In fact I’ve often made the claim that Values Based Leadership is really the first treatise on branding. Marketing folks, in my opinion, have re-branded concepts from leadership scholars like O’Toole.

In the end, branding is really about aligning the values of stakeholders. Internal, external. For purposes of talent management strategies, for purposes of selling something by adding value. To empower internal brand ambassadors, to facilitate external buzz through respect for your customers. To guide discussions and build your reputation in an aligned, focused way.

Among the more important things I took away from my time with Buie is an enterprise, unit, or team that’s interested in leading with aligned values has to agree on their values before moving forward with strategic (or brand) planning. Nothing is more important. Hard to dedicate yourself to, but primal.

The first reason is the most obvious: How can you possibly align values if you don’t know what they are?

The second reason is a bit more subtle, but illustrates the utilitarian reason for discovering and articulating values. Buie used to cite a research study that found, despite the hours and days enterprises spend in coming to an agreement about their core values, the same set of values bubble to the top almost every time. (The point of the study is that it isn’t necessarily the outcome of such exercises that matters, but rather the collaborative process.)

In the top five of every company’s list is almost always Trust. Differently articulated and manifested, but primal to the core values of almost every enterprise. In my opinion, this is at the crux of why strategic and brand development can devolve, and why discovering core values has a utility beyond the altruistic.***

At some point an enterprise simply has to trust those who are charged with certain areas of the execution if they want to move forward. Operations has to let go of markets. Marketing has to let go of financial logic. The copywriter has to be trusted with the wordsmithing.

Seems to me that the health care debate (such as it is) is devolving because it’s running into these two problems: we’ve skipped the dialog about our values (thus we can’t figure out how to align them) and we haven’t developed the trust necessary to feel good about the decisions that are about to be made.

I wonder what the town hall meetings would have looked like if there were no strategy or tactics on the table. Instead, what would the dialog have looked like if we spent our time asking questions like Should all people, regardless of past behavior or plain ol’ bad luck, have the same access to care? Do we value profit as the impartial equalizer of our society, even when profit is derived from disease? And at what point in the process—if at all—do we trust those we empower to represent us in going about the work of making values-aligned decisions?

Then figure out how to go about addressing the problem.

Another important point that Buie left with me: Values Based Leadership is time consuming business. It sacrifices efficiency for sustainability. Put in the time to do it collaboratively and you’ve a better shot at an enduring strategy (brand) because you aren’t setting it, you’re discovering it. Leave it up to a smaller group and you’ll get it done quicker, but you risk loosing the engagement and buy-in of the stakeholders responsible for executing it.

I’m sure we’ve all seen down-and-dirty, small-group strategy and branding work well in situations where values are articulated and trust is established and nurtured. It can (and does) work in the right contexts. And with a little luck.

But have we established our values enough for the strategies and tactics of health care reform to succeed? And are we ready to trust our representatives?

What about the strategy and brand planning within your or your client’s enterprise?

I come from the client side of this relationship. I’ve hired and managed agencies and have only run a small in-house shop. I won’t pretend to be an expert in their business, and can’t offer any fresh insights to what’s ahead for them.

I also have extremely valuable relationships with agencies and their talent. Mine is a creative background, and I see tremendous value in the contributions agency talent will continue to offer the world.

But clearly there’s a long-running virus in agencies that should be mitigated if they want to stay relevant. The virus has been around as long as I’ve been involved with them, and probably much longer. A virus you can’t find in any meaningful degree within other industries like law, consulting, or financial institutions.

The virus attacking their relevance is an open and blatant disdain for clients. 

Below are four links that demonstrate the problem (all of them, by the way, came to me – I haven’t searched for any of these). Seems to me that especially today – as agencies face a tumultuous and unknown future – agency folks should actively troll blogs to put an end to this kind of chatter. Inside humor (at best) that clients won’t ever understand but – make no mistake – will and do find.

(Those social media, everyone-tells-brand-stories, new-world principles agencies claim to be able to help their clients embrace and leverage? They apply to the agency world, too.)

Four examples of the chasm between the agency world and the world in which their clients live. Attitudes that will surely drive clients away from hiring traditional agencies (I know it drove me away toward other solutions at one point in my career).

———-

Advice from an ad agency on how to be a good client

Business people (clients) deal with aligning values of stakeholders every moment of every day, within relationships much more sophisticated than those of their agencies. It’s a core business competency in fact. More listening and less dogmatism might help better client relationships.

An open dialog revealing where an agency’s focus is

I was surprised to find this argument taking place in such an open forum. An art director and copywriter bicker back and forth, revealing where exactly the client’s needs fall in relation to their own (nowhere, if I’m reading the dialog correctly).

What would an agency do if it was their money?

This blogger openly demonstrates his disconnect with his “spineless wonder” clients by suggesting agencies should only present ideas to clients if the ideas are worthy of an agency’s own money. Not a bad litmus test for a services industry, but shouldn’t ROI for a client’s budget be the baseline? Shouldn’t all ideas that are presented be worthy of the costs associated with them as opposed to a radical and innovative approach to adding value?

Ideas after they leave the confines of the brilliant agency

Another common approach to humor among agencies: muse about what happens to ideas when the other interests involved in the marketing chain put their values on the table. Instead of understanding the need in business to align multiple stakeholders, these types of comments demonstrate a lack of understanding to how the business world actually works.

And a community center in the middle of it. The gathering place for middle management to vent frustrations of Denver senior leadership, share stories of near mishaps, talk about home.

It was here, drinking beer and eating bar-b-queue, when a concept that’s been bouncing around in my head finally settled.

Months later back in Denver, I met with a friend who’s an executive coach. We were talking about marketing, branding, reputation management and how the best executed plans have little to do with good marketing, and everything to do with how well the marketing consultant understands the culture of business.

She said: “As a CEO once told me, culture eats strategy for lunch.”

There are no power point slides here in the community center-cum-bar. No memos. Top to bottom, with a bit of alcohol loosening the corporate line, Newmont employees talk about their larger purpose convincingly. They truly believe that the gold they’re mining is turning a nice profit, yes. But it’s lifting people out of poverty. It’s making a difference in people’s lives. And improving Ghana for the long term.

As he ordered another beer, the guy in charge of training told me:

“Our job is to work ourselves out of job. Ghanaians can do this. We’re teaching them to fish.”

It’s hard to find organizations with this kind of consistent messaging. It’s hard to pull off. Newmont is either really good at message control, or authentic.

When you’re anxious to go on a tour of an African mine site, sitting in a florescent lit room listening to presentations makes you a little jumpy and inattentive. Even so, when Jay Bastian started talking about the mowing operations at his mine, my ears perked up.

In a way, Randy Barnes and Jay Bastian’s relationship is a micro-reflection of Newmont Mining. Randy is the External Affairs Manager at Ahafo. Jay Bastian is the General Manager. Randy, citizenship and social affairs. Jay, operations. Randy, keep the peace. Jay, make the profits.

A few years ago, former Newmont CEO Wayne Murdy approached Scott McLagan — lead professor on this trip and director of Daniels’ executive programs — to help him change the culture at Newmont.

“We’re really good at operations,” Scott will tell you Wayne said. “We know what we’re doing behind the fence line. But I need our people to be spending more than half their time thinking outside the fence line.”

Academics call this focusing on your social license to operate. Newmont calls it profitability.

Newmont engaged Daniels to deliver custom corporate programs on team building, ethics, and sustainability. Multi-week programs, delivered multiple times over the course of several years for all management-level employees flown to Denver from around the world.

Daniels will have you believe that these programs contributed to Newmont’s cultural turnaround. A turnaround that resulted in Newmont’s media placements moving from arrests and water contamination in Indonesia to being placed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (the first and only mining company with such a listing).

As they say in PR, that’s much better ink.

It’s a turnaround that began by placing Newmont’s Environmental and Social Responsibility managers at the decision making table with operations. They’d have to work hard to align values. A risky proposition for a company (in an industry) that’s always been all about operations.

Jump back to Ahafo. Jay tells our group that it would easier and cheaper to not hire so many people at the Ahafo mine. They employ less people, he said, for much larger operations and more production at their Nevada, U.S. site.

“I could do mowing operations cheaper, faster, and at a higher quality with a tractor than I could hiring a dozen guys with machetes.”

Randy interrupts to remind us that it’s a payoff against being a good corporate citizen. A valued member of the community.

Jay looks at Randy as if to say “That’s nice. Can we get back to operations?”

I wonder how many Newmont shareholders, way back in the comfy environs of the west, have had the same sentiment.