William Buist

Government proposals to monitor social networking sites centrally fail to consider the impact of such action on businesses that now use these tools as an integral part of their marketing strategy and could result in some businesses abandoning social media altogether, according to a leading social media consultant.

William Buist, MD of Abelard Management Services and a regular user of social media for business purposes says that the new proposals ‘have not been thought through fully’ and will cause some businesses to cut back on making valuable connections online through fear of reprisal in the future.

“For an increasing number of businesses, social networking sites serve as a means to gather connections as part of an integrated marketing strategy and is not necessarily about creating close, personal relationships which are more akin to personal usage of sites like Facebook and Bebo,” says Buist who last month alone made more than 1,100 new connections via social network members from across the globe.

“Business social networks like Ecademy and LinkedIn work on the premise of embracing random connections as a way of extending your network and your sphere of influence,” says Buist. “On my Ecademy account, for example, I have over 17,000 connections to people, but I do not know them all personally. At the moment, I actively encourage people to connect with me and my business has benefitted as a result. But once networking activity is subject to national scrutiny, many businesses may opt to simply cease all online activity to avoid any unwanted comebacks in the future.”

Amidst recent news that Councils in England and Wales have used controversial spying laws 10,000 times in the past five years, Buist is concerned that this extension into the social media world will not be welcomed as people simply won’t believe that their information is safe and is being used properly.

“Whatever safeguards the government promises they make it harder for them to be believed when misuses of powers are reported regularly. Whilst all businesses support measures to reduce the risks of organised crime and terrorism the measures used need to be collaborative and transparent, and built on a relationship of trust. Sadly, we are a long way from that,” says Buist.

ENDS

Introduction

In 2001 on the 31st August, I left Lloyds TSB Insurance for the last time after a successful seven years working for them. A further seven years on it’s good to look back with some pride at how I’ve built a successful consultancy practice. There was much I didn’t know, (and some things that I don’t think you can know until you need to know them) and much to learn and improve. Building a business from scratch may be a good option for some, and I hope that my experience will be of benefit.

There is so much that could be discussed about why the business has succeeded, so I’ve chosen to focus on one aspect, and that’s getting more business, new clients from the marketing, advertising and particularly networking that we have done.

Setting up

I used an agency to do the setting up, recognising that although some things have an avoidable expense in that you could do it yourself, utilising experts at the right time is lower risk and more efficient. The real cost of doing it yourself rarely factors in the cost of messing it up! This was a decision that I would repeat many times as the business grew.

So, the business is set up, the stationary is printed, the business cards are ready and the phone is firmly on the hook. Most of your old network aren’t your potential customers (probably) and they aren’t calling anyway. People need to know that you exist. Suddenly you need visibility.

The Web is a great place to gain visibility but it’s a massive sea, you are simply not visible unless you can define the people who you want to be finding you and understand what they will be searching for. Understand that better than the rest and you can be the most visible in the world (in time).

Finding the gaps

It wasn’t long until I realised that all the jobs I’d never really understood when I was working in the big organisation still need to be done in a small one. Marketing, Sales, Product development, Accounting, Taxation and so on. Whatever your skills you don’t have them all.

Success can’t happen without clients, so any strategy that doesn’t have gaining clients at the core might mean you run out of financial resources to realise all the things you want to do. A key element of my success resulted from getting new clients.

Attracting the best clients.

Marketing and Advertising are important, and difficult to get right from a standing start, marketing tends to evolve. Networking offers an alternative that is more adaptable, simply because it easier to understand how the message is being received and adapt it quickly. Visibility is the key. Marketing/Advertising makes you visible to those who read and see the relevant material, Networking gives you more reach. On-line networking gives you access to a global market and the possibility to communicate at a personal level with thousands of people.

One early lesson was that networking wasn’t how it had appeared when I was in a large Insurance Company. Then, people were more attracted to who I represented than who I was. Now I represented a much smaller business I was much less interesting to many. Recognising that contributed to a step change in how well networking worked in helping the business to grow. Any successful business has fans, people who tell others about the good service that they have had. People who know, like, trust and respect you will tell others about you, and introduce you to them. I knew I had to embark on a journey to advocacy.

Finding advocates.

Building Awareness.

Nothing can happen until people are aware of you. Only by building awareness can we hope that others will get to know us and start the journey to advocacy. Most won’t stay with us for the whole journey, but none of the people who don’t start will be there at the end!

Building awareness is about being visible, for the right things when others are around to see your contribution.

This is about quantity, whether people link up with you or not, this is about broadcast, big potential audience with a transitory attention span. Be good, be noticeable, or be missed. Some, though, choose to be noticeable for any reason, you still have to be consistent, people will judge you in the first impression you leave. Visibility brings a responsibility for consistency, and taking responsibility for the actions that you take.

Letting people choose to engage with you.

Once people start to become aware of your existence, both as an individual, and your business, then they will start to approach you, to find out more about you. You’ll recognise the success of building awareness from the fact that individuals, whom you have never heard of, contact you out of the blue.

What’s happening here is that other people are beginning to talk about you. They are not yet introducing you to others for business, they are not promoting you, but they are mentioning you, your business, your products, and your services at (some of) the appropriate points in (some of) the conversations that they are having.

Building rapport and shared vision.

Through the one-to-one meetings, the continued discussions via e-mail, telephone and more general meetings, and discussions that others have with their network about you, they’ll learn progressively more about you and your business. As they learn they will start to understand the way that you work, the people you work with, the needs that you meet, your target market and the associates that you work with. As people really understand your business they will start to acknowledge it, in their conversations with others. You won’t simply be mentioned, or talked about, but you will be introduced where those who have reached this stage believe you could provide help or add value.

However, people won’t yet be doing this proactively, and your name will only come up where you are the most obvious person for a particular need that has been expressed.

Advocacy

Advocacy comes from confidence, deep knowledge, and absolute trust between the people. it’s the last leg of the journey and the longest one. Building sufficient trust to ensure true advocacy requires both people to understand each other on many levels, to be open and to share a mutual respect.

Once the trust exists it’s likely that a small referral will be made, and the results of making that referral will undoubtedly be checked with all the parties involved. If the referral is being well handled; if the person referred feels that they have been extremely well looked after; and if the approach taken met (in almost all respects) the expectation then it is possible that they will become an advocate.

As an advocate you can expect them to be thinking about you in many, even most, conversations that they have with others. You will be mentioned regularly, promoted to others. Pro-activity is regular, and referrals are strong, and pre-sold.

The journey to advocacy is complete, but the journey to profitability over many years is just beginning.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a consultancy specialising in improving team dynamics and performance. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com

Ends

There is no question that we are currently living in challenging times and in every recession there will always be some businesses that continue to grow and develop and others that will fail. In difficult times, perhaps more than at any other time, staying as we are is no longer an option if we want to survive and the reality is that we are left with just one choice, either to actively seek to continue to grow, or capitulate and see our business fail. It may be tough and we will have setbacks, but those who will succeed are those that can work collaboratively with others, achieving greater resiliency and opportunity.

Winston Churchill famously said “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”. Similarly, building businesses virtually with a background of recession may be difficult, but it has plenty of opportunity.

What does ‘virtually’ really mean?

Businesses that have been built virtually don’t use a single physical location for their people to work. In virtual businesses, technology provides the infrastructure to define the operation of the business. Members communicate electronically as well as face to face, and technologies like social networking sites, project collaboration sites and so on, provide a framework in which to work. Telephone answering may be handled through an agency with calls off flowing to people in diverse locations using fixed and mobile equipment seamlessly.

Marketing, sales, advertising, operational activities, delivery, administration can all be passed between people (who may or may not be employees) automatically and the virtual companies prime role becomes one of co-ordination. Ultimately, though the virtual company still delivers a real product or service to a real customer.

The evolving business model

Success means that you have more clients, or more work from your existing clients, more pipeline, more administration, more need to support the delivery of your products and services. Generally this means that you need more people working for you, in your business, and delivering to your clients. When considering what you need to be doing to help your business grow virtually, a clear picture of what it will look like when you have achieved that is critical to making good choices today.

Creating a virtual team

Virtual businesses don’t necessarily do all of this in-house though. One way that you can resolve increased administration, for example, is to outsource it to virtual assistants, on-line book-keepers, design agencies, PR companies, whatever it is that you need. The web enables you to use tools to share files securely, video conference, share project plans and messaging and so on with a variety of tools that vary from entirely free to still very cheap.

The advantages of virtual employees is that they manage the administration of employment, as you don’t employ them, and you pay for the services that you use, not a salary that means you need to generate work when times are quiet. The hourly rate may be higher, but every minute is spent working for you and adding value to the business. Cost for output is usually much lower.

In the client facing roles, and dealing with delivery, a virtual team requires some infrastructure (branded emails, business cards and so on) but these costs are trivial. With a wide team of partners it’s possible to compete with big competitors by being agile and cost effective, using the skills of your partners when you win business and providing skills to others who win business for you.

Of course, you have to know that the partners you choose will deliver the level of service you expect and there are cash flow issues to manage too. When you win new business and use partners to service that work, who is carrying the credit risk of the ultimate client defaulting? There should be a premium for that risk, but if you are carrying it, you need to account for the possibility that you won’t be paid, but your suppliers still need to be. These are business elements that need to be factored into the arrangements up front.

We have always had written contracts with our partners, even those we trust explicitly, in order to avoid confusion, and this is no different for a virtual partnership.

How can you save costs and be more resilient

Smaller businesses and the self employed have taken to Social Networks for support and help and gradually also to enhance their marketing. Even if the business is currently small it needs to compete in the marketing pool for the attention of your clients, particularly in a recession. Right now, we have the tools to do this and we have the knowledge, and we have it way ahead of those focused on ‘old’ non-virtual marketing. It’s the best time ever to drive personal brand to the forefront.

I’m a great believer in doing the things that you control yourself, for example, I can’t control how many referrals I receive, but I do control how many I give. Measuring what you don’t control is interesting, but hard to influence, measuring what you do control allows you to change the things you do and measure the results, changing the activity until you get the results you want.

Making the world aware of you through virtual tools means that people become aware of you. In that pool of aware people are both potential customers and potential partners. Get it right and the partners will approach you as a result of becoming aware of you. It’s so much easier (and cheaper) to have your partners seek you out than it is for you to find them one by one. Through conversation and interactions you’ll build trust with some of those who approach you and over time begin to find that they advocate you and your business.

In that group you’ll find the suppliers and partners that share your own goals and ambitions, that want to help you succeed and will work closely with you to achieve those goals. Collaboration means that you’ll bring significant skills to bear on your clients needs, the right skills at the right time. From a customer point of view there’s real strength in being able to do that, in terms of retention and referral to others. In a recession when decisions are made more slowly, and with more care, personal referral becomes ever more important in being considered for the product or services you sell.

Creating a virtual team around you enables you to outsource those activities that detract from your ability for focus on your core value in the business, and provides you with instant access to the resources you need to respond to rapid changes in market demand (both up and down) seamlessly and effortlessly, and this is what will give you the real competitive advantage in a recession.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a consultancy specialising in improving team dynamics and performance. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com

Ends

Over the next ten years, we will begin to move towards web 4.0 and the emergence of the ‘societal web’. Publishing will move from telling to listening, from informing opinion to collaborative insight, from one to many and from mono-media to infinate-media. The challenge for publishers during this inevitable transition will be on how they can continue to maintain the income stream and adapt to the changing world of media.

The Past and the Present

Web 1.0, was a read-only, publisher led world. The role of media was to broadcast and for the reader or listener to be informed passively, without any real ability to comment or give a response. Whilst some reader interaction existed it was generally through ‘Readers Letters’ which were both selected and edited to ensure that they fitted the culture of the publication.

Web 2.0 was a more public author led environment, where people were empowered to read and then write, expressing their views, thoughts and opinions. Publishers chose either to heavily moderate user generated content or to lose some control. Some rely on the cultural reach of the publication within its readership to keep things in ‘style’. Users became engaged as part of the opinion forming process.

Web 3.0 will be a user-led experience. Consumers now extract content through the semantic ability of the Web as it begins to understand the context of content. Consumers now pull detail from one site and reform, transform and re-present it in other websites where the content is no longer culturally consistent with the source. It’s the equivalent of being able to read, write and execute the content.

Losing, or sharing, or empowering control

New technologies means publishers may lose control of the look and feel of their content. However, don’t engage and there is a real risk that your reach and visibility of publications will remain small. High visibility, extensive reach, deep brand recognition are all key features of the successful publishing, and it’s reasonable to assume that they will also be needed in future, irrespective of the media of delivery, too. Content will remain highly traceable though, at least thus far.

Web 3.0 also raises Intellectual Property and content ownership issues. The development of ‘Cloud’ computing where the data and the processing of the data are conducted in the ‘cloud’ means that you can’t ‘own’ the processing, and the data passes from one machine to another without reference to either ownership or geography. Data has become both ubiquitous and permanent. User generated content can be searched, found, quoted and reused, without reference, and without context.

Is this a recipe for anarchy? or a building block of collaboration that leads to shared knowledge and improved insight?

In our opinion this leads us to a development of sharing, of collaborating, in a community environment, by all, for the benefit of that community. It’s an environment where providing the knowledge, the means of understanding it (the semantic descriptions), and the facility to manipulate and re-present it enables the community to gain new insights and grow and develop as a society, a community. Those who gather around your ideas and subject matter become your society, your community, but they set the context and the culture, it’s no longer defined by the owner of the infrastructure.

This is the societal web.

Changing Face of Media

Advertising are having to adapt to the change from broadcast to narrow-cast. Permission Marketing is something Seth Godin wrote about in 1999, but it’s still not that common. Permission advertising is now beginning to develop and becoming more innovative. For example, Carling’s iPint application for the iPhone has been outstanding at getting the Carling brand into millions of eyes through a game.

As an example of ‘old style’ advertising designed for Web 1.0 and holding on in web 2.0. Banner adverts are becoming less noticed, and even blocked, by many. Click-throughs are declining; Advertising Monitoring firm EyeBlaster reported that click though rates declined from 0.75% to 0.27%, a 64% reduction.

Many are searching for new ways to follow their customers, particularly through social networking sites. Facebook, recently announced that it was opening up key pages to allow for contextual (semantic) advertising, and that will, increasingly, be how all content is delivered to consumers. By studying the buying habits of consumers and matching to reading, writing and interaction on the measurable parts of the multi-(infinate)-media experience, media companies can deliver targeted, relevant, context driven content that’s much more likely to meet the personal needs of the individual.

The point of all of this is that whilst printed media is not about to disappear, it is geographically limited. Online, however, geography has less (perhaps no) meaning so the right titles can grow globally. To do so you need the right people to be talking about you at the right time to many.

Why do people talk about you?

There are primarily three reasons for media companies engaging with social environments and these are;

• Knowledge
• Entertainment
• Product/Brand empathy

As we move from Web 1.0 where people ‘consumed’ (i.e. read) your content one or two of these was often enough to attract people to visit, and the commonest measures was ‘traffic’. Advertisers paid (and still do) for page views, so high visibility and frequent ‘attendance’ was important. In Web 2.0 engagement became important; advertising became more contextual. In Web 3.0 we’ll see a stronger drive to contextualization of content and advertising, matching to meaning. We’ll measure relevance.

From there, the buying habits of the other members of the community, of the ‘society’ will drive the content and advertising that we see. After all, if those we know (and like) are consuming something, we’re likely to consume it too.

Perhaps the biggest impact on a publication of losing control is what place the editor has when the content is provided by customers. The answer lies in the actions that they’ll take, in the way that they interact. The successful become guardians of the ethos not controllers of content.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, recently announced Facebook Connect, which encourages:

• Trusted Authentication – Connect your site to the consumer via Social Media Authentication
• Real Identity – Take your identity information with you wherever you go on the net
• Friends Access – Stay connected to your friends wherever you go
• Dynamic Privacy – access privacy controlled in one place

But is that what social media sites want? Or is it what they have to accept?

The biggest question for publishers is how will you use the data you get access to? For example, will you advertise differently to someone who is well connected than someone with few ‘friends’? Will you identify the things that your readers are reading and talking about elsewhere and present a different face of your product that is tailored to their needs? Targeting advertising becomes social recommendation.

Is it likely that those who do this the best will be the most successful? Could your niche reach a wider audience for whom your subject is an occasional interest? Could it then make it “sticky”? If an article in your publication is commented on by two or three of my friends then it’s likely to be of interest to me too. Media companies that present that story first make their site instantly more useful. I save time searching for the good stuff, because you’ve delivered the identification of relevance to the ‘social cloud’, do it well, and I’ll keep coming back.

Examples of this already happening are sites like Last.fm where the music that is played next is identified from those who like what is being played now. What you listen to is captured too and can be fed back via your social network.

Conclusion

So, in summary, we are heading to a society led world online, a societal web, where content will be collated and drawn together as much by the collective actions of the communit(ies) in that society as it will be by providers of the content. Publishers have always gathered content and re-presented it in their house style and with their “house” opinion. Increasingly they have to provide the means of gathering it and empower their communities to use the developing semantic tools to guide the presentation. In future that empowerment will lead to the most successful being those who serve the needs of the communities they gather around them, leadership will become a skill that derives from concensus and influence, from collective recognition of the benefits you bring. Media will become very diverse, and the successful will be present where their audience want them, rather than trying to attract their audience to where they are.

Important activities will no longer be selection and editing what to publish (think Wikipedia), but how to engage and embrace others views and opinions. Presentation won’t be controlled as it is now, and the look and feel of the content will depend on the devices used and the approach taken in software that you no longer control. Skills to contextualise material effectively are key.

Understanding the audience, always a key requirement, becomes essential, and more, it’s no longer enough to understand your customer, but also to understand those that they know, like, and trust, and those who influence their behaviour and activity.

Change is a constant, and much is, and always has been, changing in the field of publishing, in its widest sense. Those who embrace change, who take courageous steps to reach the future, will gain the trust of those they support and they can then ensure that they remain in the forefront of their markets. It’s an exciting time.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a consultancy specialising in improving team dynamics and performance. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com
Ends

Forget price cuts, special offers and other short term gimmicks designed to bring in more business during the crunch, the biggest asset for any business in the coming year will be its ability to influence others, says business specialist William Buist.

Rather than focusing on price-led tactics, Managing Director of Abelard Management Services William Buist believes that smaller businesses in particular should be focusing on engaging with their audience through the art of conversation. Success in 2009 will come to those who can learn how to use debate to influence rather than to defend.

In order to help people to develop these much needed communication skills, Buist launched The Debating Society earlier this year on popular social networking site Ecademy (www.ecademy.com) and the club now boasts over 1200 members, who recognise the value to their business of perfecting the art of debating for influence and of being able to clarify their messages and thoughts to a wider audience.

Buist, a specialist in the Societal Web, collaboration and building business by word of mouth says “The biggest problems facing businesses in the current economic climate is poor communication skills and the ability to separate personality from principle when it comes to dealing with objections or simply another point of view. Mastering the art of debate is something that has been lacking on the business scene in recent years. It is an incredibly valuable skill in 21st Century business, especially with the increase in online conversations where people have no visual or verbal clues and have to rely on words alone to understand meaning and context”.

The Debating Society has also proved that providing an environment which encourages stimulating and lively debate actually works to eliminate negative banter and instances of online bullying which can sometimes occur in social networking sites and forums and Buist claims that this is why The Debating Society forum needs very little moderation.

“The Debating Society is working proof that it is possible to have good, robust, and open conversations with many alternate, and often opposing viewpoints expressed online. Give people the opportunity to discuss their point of view without fear of attack or rebuke and they will show the same behaviour to others. The result is an opportunity to gain valuable thoughts and opinions from a large group of people who are actively engaging, collaborating and building deeper, more meaningful relationships with each other, based on mutual respect for their differences as well as similarities”, explains Buist.

To find out more information about The Debating Society visit www.performing-teams.co.uk

ENDS

In previous articles for we have introduced and discussed social networks and how to tap into the resources they contain (Spring 2008) and how to build a following on-line (Summer 2008).

In that latter article we discussed the things that can be done to attract people to build your following, that is, the group of people who are interested in what you are doing. They are talking about it, with you, and amongst themselves, and to others who have not yet connected.

Here, then is the challenge, you’ve attracted people to get involved, but until you engage with each other they’re just spectators, watchers on a distant shore. From the charities point of view, without that engagement you can’t react to the information they hold and they won’t provide you with the support that you seek. When you do engage those things will start to happen, and that’s when things begin to get exciting.

Starting to Engage.

We discussed in the previous article that engaging followers in conversations that draw on their experience and skills, building a deeper and stronger relationship with them will help to ensure that they remain loyal to you over the longer term. We highlighted that followers are waiting for you to take action. In general they will not be proactive, so you must be. In general there will not volunteer information, knowledge, skills and experience, so you must ask for it. They will expect you to recognize the help that you have been given, so don’t forget to thank and support followers at every opportunity.

Let’s now go into more detail about how to do that.

When we look at how people search on-line for information they tend to either ask questions or search for keywords. They follow the most likely looking links and they read a small amount of what they find. Often, if those first few sentences and items don’t catch the eye they’ll return and re-do the search. If this is generally true then we only have a few moments to initiate the engagement, and once we have done so we have to make the engagement strong.

There is a risk that we think only of ‘sites’ here but this is equally true off-line a well as on-line.

The reasons to do this have been covered in other articles, but it’s worth re-iterating that those that are the most successful have supporters who become advocates, who talk about what the charity is doing, who bring it new donations and friends and help to ensure that resources are used in efficient and effective ways. Once the charity is being found, then people will get in touch on it’s website, on its own social network, (or it’s own presence in existing social networks), through the charities offices and their staff. In all these places we can engage with them, but they’ll also talk about us where they are talking already, and we may not know where those places are. We can engage with them here too.

The question we are really asking is when have brought people to the door, what will make those people stay?

What do others do?

A key part of engagement is interest, we all only stick with conversations that we find interesting, and this is just as true on line as it is off line. Websites that have succeeded in creating the buzz needed to truly engage include Wikipedia, the BBC and some social networking sites such as Facebook and Linked-in, but they have all approached the issue in a slightly different way.

Wikipedia is a mass collaboration masterpiece whose success has been driven through the actions of a readership that are also authors, proofreaders, correctors and readers. They have created a collectively written document, anyone can edit it, and so anyone can in theory damage it, but it is self-healing. Contributors can easily replace flawed content. People engage because the site meets an altruistic goal of many to help others through sharing their knowledge. This is shared purpose.

The BBC has a dynamic site that is written by many contributors within the BBC’s own resources, but the rapidly changing nature of the site and its ability to keep up with events mean it’s a regular port of call for visitors. They don’t just provide their own content though; they also have links to related material. A key factor here is that it’s now relatively easy to monitor and link to real time content through automation. The BBC does this well and so is seen as a content hub as well as a content source. This is shared knowledge.

Facebook takes a different approach again, most of its content is user generated and by allowing others to develop code that can be integrated in the site it’s created many different ‘widgets’ some with serious purpose, and some for fun. For visitors the experience is primarily social and often unexpected. The key learning here is that Facebook provides a place but it doesn’t define the conversations, it creates a real sense of shared experience.

Linked-in shows us a fourth way to engage, it provides users with an easy means to find and engage with other users, its become a place to find others to help with specific projects and work, and so, too, it has become a place to be found for specific projects and work. This is a form of common need.

These four routes to engagement highlight the principle routes that, I think, drive a desire to return, again and again, to the conversations and interactions. Shared purpose, shared knowledge, shared experience and common need are all contributory factors in creating, building and developing community.

Community is key.

Creating a community of supporters will bring advocacy and a much wider conversation about the charity itself, its aims and concerns, and bring conversations about how to better apply the limited resources available to bear on the issues that are faced.

Whilst on-line brings an immediacy and conversational approach to engaging with supporters it doesn’t change the nature of the conversations, and it removes much of the ability to control them. The most visited, most engaged people visit with a purpose and find like-minded conversationalists with whom to chat. The subjects inevitably wander from the initial aims, but the organisations that embrace that diversity tend to be more successful.

Communities also tend to have pioneers, who take the conversation out to the other places they are chattering, and so the word can spread, but organisations that also engage in other places than their own, become attractive to others to.

It is not just about finding people to contribute to you, but also about finding places where you can contribute to others.

When you decide to do this you start a journey, and it’ll take you to new places. You probably won’t stay on the route you planned, and you will be surprised by some events. The prize is a dramatically expanded base of supporters who will work with you to create the environment in which you prosper and grow; an environment more likely to meet and exceed your aims and goals faster than ever.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a consultancy specialising in improving team dynamics and performance. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com

In the spring 2008 edition of Charities Management I discussed how to tap into the resources contained in social networks. I talked about creating a shared passion, about collaborative working, and about the conversations taking place between those that support charities and those that need the output from them.

If charities are to really engage the social networking revolution is taking place online in order to engage in conversations with those that seek to support them (and those benefiting from that support) then the skills required to create a following will be essential.

Creating a following.

Moving activity online creates an opportunity to reach a much larger audience than can be reached through face-to-face, local, or off paper advertising and promotion. Reaching a much larger audience, however, is not sufficient to create any significant change in the engagement with the charity. Engagement comes from a shared interest, not just in the activity of the charity, but, also, in other interests discussed in the conversations seeded by being in the same ‘space’ within the same following group. As people they’ll talk about their interests, not yours. They are there because at least on interest, in the charity and what it is doing, is common to the group.

Followers take an active interest in the activity of those that they are with in the group. They are seeking information, knowledge, and, they seek that, across a wide range of interests.

Imagine for a moment that you found a website which truly engaged to in a conversation. You decide that the website is sufficiently interesting to encourage you to return the next day. However, when you get there a conversation is identical to the day before. You come back again the next day, and the conversation is again the same. Soon you will no longer return, where you were once following you are now indifferent. Yet, to the website owner you may still appear to be following, after all, why would you undertake the effort to leave, when the transactional cost of staying is zero.

Followers talk about you.

People who have run across your online presence, and engaged with you, become followers, and who enjoy the time that they spend on your site will talk to others about it. That will attract others to come and visit your site and form their own opinions, deciding whether to follow you.

Incidentally the places where this may happen, may not be your main website, but it could be true free sites such as twitter (www.twitter.com) which allows you to post short pieces of information and collect a following who “watch” what you are saying. These short snippets of information can be automated from digital feeds (called RSS) from your site(s), and thus require little maintenance effort once the original operation has been set up.

A significant user of twitter is the BBC who to provide news, sports and other items and links to their main site as “tweets”. Other sites offering similar functionality exist there are also a number of sites offering services to aggregate and collect common information.

If you provide valuable material that is multidimensional, rather than focusing solely on your one main area of interest, then those that follow will find the information useful, will talk to their friends and invite them to join the group.

Now you have them, what can you do?

Whilst a large following is nice to see, unless you can leverage the opportunities from that group then there is little point in undertaking the effort to build the group in the first place. However, engaging the group in conversations, as I discussed in my previous article, allows you to be much more proactive in providing the services and support when it is most needed, and much more successful at ensuring that others understand how the support they gave is being utilised effectively.

Engaging followers in conversations that draw on their experience and skills, building a deeper and stronger relationship with them will help to ensure that they remain loyal to you over the longer term. Some of the followers will always be just followers, but others will become advocates for the work that you are undertaking. The more that you engage with your followers in a manner that resonates with them the more likely they are to advocate, perhaps even eulogise, what you do.

Followers are waiting for you to take action. In general they will not be proactive, so you must be. In general there will not volunteer information, knowledge, skills and experience, so you must ask for it. They will expect you to recognize the help that you have been given, so don’t forget to thank and support followers at every opportunity. If you do this well, they will not just reach out to you when you reach out to them, but they will reach out to their networks and spread your message further and faster than you could achieve by other means.

Your web site.

Although I’ve talked about using other freely available sites to collect a following, the central hub of your operations, your face online, remains your primary website. Having created a following through your activity online it becomes possible to integrate elements, of what the followers are talking about, into your main website. Any such activity makes your website more relevant to other followers. Relevance encourages interaction.

Progressively tools to enable you to search the conversations that your followers are having on their websites, their pages, their blogs, their conversations, and so on. Searching and filtering that data can provide you with significantly valuable insight about how to interact more effectively, more relevantly, with them, in future. This information provides you with context, feedback, and the opportunity to identify shared and common purpose.

Groups bound by common purpose sharing a journey together, will be significantly more effective than groups that are simply bound by common interest.

Conclusion.

Most, if not all, charities already have a significant following. That following comes in the form of supporters, people seeking to help you to collect the funds, support, and assistance that is required to provide the things that they enable the charity to deliver. Much of that following is probably already interacting online. Charities can’t afford not to be a part of that interaction, or the attention of their followers will drift to those that do.

By building an online following you build an opportunity to engage in your followers conversation, and then to influence it, to learn from it, to develop it and to enhance it.

By building an online following that is as passionate about what you do, and what you say, as you are, will enable you to extend your reach further and faster than if you simply seek to build a following to traditional, offline, methods.

Much of what I talked about may appear to be both a labour intensive and technically tricky, neither need be true. Existing tools are available either free or low-cost, and integration into your existing websites should be straightforward.

Sharing the passions, beliefs, vision and Mission with your following, and ensuring they align behind it, will enable your message to reach many more people on a much deeper level than was ever possible before.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a company which specialises in building trust in teams and communities. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com

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The success of any charitable organisation depends on its ability to engage its supporters and create a shared passion for the cause with them. Charities must look to find common collaborative ways of working that maximise the impact of donations and ensure that they have delivered the right things with the limited resources at their disposal. William Buist, director of Abelard Management Services explores how charities can capitalise on the growth of social networking and collaborative working by using tools now commonly found on the internet.

The social networking revolution

Over the past four or five years a significant change in the way that most people interact with their friends, colleagues and others in their wider networks has taken place.

The growth of sites like Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Myspace (www.myspace.com) along with business networking sites like Ecademy (www.ecademy.com) has revolutionised the communication style of many people, allowing individuals to source knowledge and information from others – who are experts in their field. Is this relevant to charities?, Should they be engaging in the conversation?

I am not going to spend too much time here exploring the social networking revolution but its important to recognise that, increasingly, groups of people with a common interest are discussing aspects of business, social life, hobbies, and indeed, the work of charities. Engaging in those conversations allows a dialog to develop, helping with the understanding of perceptions as well as allowing communication flows to open up. Passionate people with a deep understanding tend to be the biggest advocates, with the widest reach.

Immediately after the Tsunami that affected a number of towns and villages including a significant part of Sri Lanka one of the networks which I belonged to was notified, extremely quickly, of the situation on the ground in Sri Lanka. A group of people who knew each other well and knew colleagues and friends living in Sri Lanka were able to provide targeted specific help to a particular community in a particular place affected by a tragedy that was very broad, and was able to do so both quickly and effectively.

Through a combination of conversations and feedback from those on the ground at the sites affected it was possible to ensure that communities did have access to resources sooner than those of the organised and governmental interventions that took place albeit only a few days later.

This is not to say that the work of the charities that followed on was less effective or less valuable, far from it,

I tell the story merely to highlight the speed and impact that social networking sites now have in crisis situations. The ability to be engaged in a conversation with people who have the knowledge and skills – who are experienced and experts in the issues faced, enable more effective and more targeted application of effort with limited resources.

Of course, for many charities, “crisis” is not the issue that they resolve, nor will it ever be. Does that mean that those charities do not need to engage in conversation with a wider audience? My sense is that whilst they do not have a requirement to do it, they could significantly benefit from doing so. Why? Because it enables each charity to really understand the passion of its supporters and ensures that they communicate the information their audience wants in a personal way. It builds knowledge and passion, and locks in shared experience to all.

The Charities Commission

The Charities Commission mission includes the following key phrases:

• enabling charities to maximise their impact
• encouraging innovation and effectiveness
• championing the public interest in charity.

The Charities Commission vision is for charities to work at the heart of society.

It is my belief that the heart of society is best reached through a mutually rewarding conversation between equals. Achieving that is where I believe the new tools create an opportunity that should not be missed.

Creating a shared passion

Many people engage with charities from the passion that they have for the things that the charity is involved with. They often provide funds and assistance in other forms over many months and years. For some their chosen charity is a lifelong companion and, like a marriage, the relationship needs nurture and reinforcement to grow. It happens because of a (shared) passionate belief in the work that the charity is undertaking.

Historically, the opportunity to engage in personal conversation (but with everyone) was both costly and time consuming. Today’s internet based world enables those conversations to be both self sustaining, cheap to initiate, and wide ranging in their extent. Conversations between large groups of people are taking place and the issues and passions of the individuals are gravitating to groups of like minded individuals, Charities have much to gain from being at the heart of those conversations, at the heart of (the on-line) society.

The provision and distribution of information about the work of the charity, their plans for the future, the impact of their work on others and on societies as a whole can all help to build the shared passion of both those involved with delivering the charities work and of those providing the resources for them to do so. Shared passion in itself may not create a dramatic change in the behaviour of those involved with the charity, but by increasing the level of knowledge and information, and increasing the effectiveness of those communications, enables others to assist in spreading the word.

Collaborative working

In many social networks, groups of individuals are now coming together under a shared banner, a common interest, a desire to collectively work to achieve a specific end.

Often those collaborative groups come together without a formal agreement or the need for contracts or principals of engagement. They come together simply to share their knowledge and experience and to help each other develop a stronger more robust result. Charities who engage with the groups of people who are interested in their work, be they people who donate, or those who implement the work of the charity, or those who are affected by the implementation of that work, enable a collaborative solution to be found that may be significantly better than that determined by one or other group in isolation.

Collective and collaborative working provides the opportunity for the experience of many to be applied to the problems of the few.

Money well spent?

When those who are donating to a charity consider the impact of the donation, they often seek a reassurance that their money will be well spent. Conversations, discussions and collaborative working with the supporters of the charity can help to ensure that the prioritisation of monies given and the applications of those monies is well considered and robust. In making choices about the use of resources within a charity (and that includes resources other than financial resources) it’s important for a wide range of possibilities to be considered.

There is a danger that charities (and indeed any organisation – be that a business or even an individual) will spend lots of time (and money) considering multiple options. The cost of indecision may even be higher than the cost of a poor decision, and in my experience it usually is. Making better decisions through accessing better information, quickly and at low cost is one key benefit of greater engagement.

The opportunity with social networking (and with the changes in the way that people are now working within them) is that expertise can be accessed on a voluntary basis and extremely quickly to enable a greater depth of understanding of the information and data that is available. Greater analysis of the opportunities and a greater collective decision making prowess can be developed at very little, or even no, cost.

Collectively we are more likely to do the right things with limited resources than we would do without that consultation.

Creating the environment

One concern that is often levied is that the requirements of new technology to build communities (to engage with many) will just use up significant resources and require a significant ongoing investment. That would be hard to justify against the aims and values of the charity itself.

Until quite recently I think that this would be seen as a fair concern, but over the last two or three years a number of platforms have emerged which enable collaborative working to develop in a more open and a much cheaper environment.

Wikipedia – A collaborative runaway.

Perhaps one of the biggest examples of collaborative working is Wikipedia which has grown from small beginnings to a massive collaborative document encompassing much of the knowledge of the entire human race. In fact, it is now developing in multiple languages and across an ever wider sphere of subject.

It demonstrates how documentation can be developed collaboratively and with accuracy that tends to improve continually over time. Don Tapstock in a book called Wikinomics describes the development of Wikipedia and other similar mass collaboration efforts using the internet and concludes that we are in an “age of participation”. I agree with him.

Extending this analogy to charities enables us to consider whether the analysis of their operation and the application of the resources in a similar manner by volunteers with a shared passion would enable charities to improve their efficiency and effectiveness faster than by any other means.

Conclusion

The ability to exchange knowledge has created an environment in which collaboration with a mass audience is becoming the norm. Charities, by the nature of their operation, are likely to engage in this arena, sooner or later, the question is whether they should engage in now, or whether, for those who have not yet done so, it is already happening in the social networks without their knowledge.

Having been involved with social networking for a number of years I have learnt that it is inherently the power of the people in the network, enabled by the technology, to collaborate in new and efficient ways that has freed individuals to both give and receive of their knowledge in a way that lifts all of them. By engaging with all of the stakeholders of the charity, the passions, beliefs, vision and mission of those charities will ultimately reach many more people on a much deeper level than was ever possible before.

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William Buist, director of Abelard Management Services explains his top ten tips on how to make the most from Social Networking

1. Pick your site
There are lots of networking sites, so chose one that fits with you. You need to spend time in the network so be sure you feel comfortable and enjoy what you see and will feel comfortable contributing and being involved.

2. Build a good profile
Your profile is what people will make a first impression from, and things like a picture need to be relatively up to date and show you as you are. In your profile don’t just talk about one or two things, you need to show yourself as others find you. Social networking is about trust, so be honest. .

3. Become a connector.
As you get to know people you’ll be able to connect them with others that you know. As they learn about you, the connections will start to be made to you by others too. Great connectors tend to be sought out.

4. Write to be read (and that means knowing your audience)
When you write in a social network about 10 times as many people read what you write as comment directly, yet readers will talk about what they read to others. Headlines sell newspapers and bring readers to your content too; content should stand out in a quick glance.

5. Keep to what you know and be yourself
When you write about what you know you demonstrate your expertise, doing that in your own style helps to ensure that people recognise your expertise in the same way when they meet you.

6. Help others and learn from them
When you can help someone who is seeking advice and guidance in your area of expertise you demonstrate that you are the expert in that field, and attract others to you, when you see others helping you learn about their expertise.

7. Ask better questions
Even if you understand a subject really well asking questions elicits a conversation in which everyone learns, whereas articles that make statements tend only to be read. Stretch your knowledge by questioning other experts and the better the question the more engagement you’ll see

8. Do what you control.
You can’t force others to do what you need, but you can choose to do what they need, Whatever your goals from Social Networking other people can’t help you unless you help them to choose to do so. Set goals for what you do in the network, not for what you want from it.

9. Learn from everything, and be bold..
Social networking is a new phenomenon and many people are now engaged, Lot’s is being tested and tried out, so look for opportunities to incorporate the things you see others doing into what you do and don’t be afraid to experiment.

10. Take your time
Social Networking doesn’t change one basic ground rule. Relationships take time and visibility, trust and trade come from spending the time to make them happen.

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The ability to communicate via email has led organisations to believe that they can communicate effectively with a much wider group of people, and much faster. But all too often ease of use, and speed, lead to organisations becoming less capable of creating and maintaining the right context for the conversation with the audience. So how can you ensure that your internal communications across a virtual team are effective? As a specialist in building community spirit in teams, William Buist highlights the common pitfalls in virtual communication programmes and explains how to engage people in conversation that guarantees higher success.

Organisations are progressively working with suppliers, customers and staff who are distributed across various locations and opportunities for an entire project team to meet and discuss matters is becoming less frequent. As a result of tools which allow instant communication, team members lose the benefit of receiving visual and oral feedback during the conversation to enable them to check understanding about the perception of the message received.

The challenge with any form of communication is, of course, ensuring that it is both understood, in the manner of which it was intended, and perceived in the context that was intended too. This can be achieved by engaging people in the conversation from the onset and managing risk by focusing people to work the right way at the right time.

Engaging people in a conversation

In order to be sure that the understanding of an issue, or the needs of a project team are clear, communication must be two way and feedback is essential. Validation of the perception of individuals is just as important as often the feedback itself can be misunderstood.

Misunderstandings between individuals who are well known and liked by each other are much more speedily resolved than those between strangers – who often fail to even reach a resolution at all. The same is true in business teams, so one of the key areas to help ensure misunderstandings are minimised and resolved quickly is to ensure that team members know each other well and, as far as is possible, like and respect each other too.

CASE STUDY: MANAGING CHANGE

In the financial services sector a requirement arose for all the companies in a particular market to make simultaneous changes in their infrastructure to meet regulatory reporting requirements imposed by the government.

A virtual team with representation from organisations within the market, the organisations implementing the change, trade associations integrating the feedback from those organisations and the government bodies themselves, along with a number of associated organisations needed to be co-ordinated and managed. Engaging all of these different bodies in a common conversation to ensure a universally understood project goal would have been a challenge at the best of times.

It wasn’t enough for the conversation just to take place on an adhoc basis; they needed to be co-ordinated and garnered in a framework that enabled the right things to be discussed at the right time.

to facilitate meeting and discussing not just the project but areas of individual interest, understanding personal goals and how those aligned with the organisational goals for each individual in the team, and creating an environment in which those goals were aligned were all critical success factors in bringing this collective delivery to fruition.

In fact, throughout that project one of the key things that people commented about was not the level of communication, or, indeed, the quality of it, rather it was about the level of collaboration between members of different organisations whose only reason to collaborate was the relationship that they had with each other, and with those involved at the centre of the project.

The central team was tiny, its primary role was only to facilitate the relationships to enable the conversations to take place, and to ensure that when those conversations took place that they took place with a purpose and in a frame work that enabled the right discussions to take place. When things went wrong, rather than blaming people, they drew on the relationships to resolve the issue.

The techniques used to do this are now becoming much more widely known.

Don Tapscott (Wikinomics 2006) talks about four principles of mass collaboration, Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally, and these elements are key to building a team that uses communication as the glue to enable mass collaboration. In that sense ‘global’ does not have to be interpreted in a geographic sense, rather it can be seen as the widest possible extent for your team.

Risk Management

Another of the key areas of any conversation within an organisation that is designed to facilitate the delivery of a project or resolve an issue is that the future events are inherently linked to elements of risk and uncertainty.

Misunderstandings cause the wrong things to be done, lack of experience or skills cause the right things to be done in the wrong way and an uncertainty of direction or strategy can lead people to feel unwilling to do a task which does not appear to be aligned to a central goal.

Taking those three things together, a conversation that helps people to understand what to do at the right time and how to do it in the right way and demonstrating to them the alignment to their own personal and the organisational goals can dramatically reduce risk by focusing people on the work in the right way at the right time.

Business leaders are gradually changing the approach that they take in terms of directing the work that is required to be done. Successful leaders are engaging and building relationships with their staff in a much more open and transparent way and progressively conversations are taking place not just between people in the office but also using online tools such as instant messaging, telephone, text message, Skype and Social Networks. Conversations can continue in all of those forms, and in, whichever is most appropriate at the time.

Risk management through regular communication (conversation) and constant feedback is likely to lead to significantly lower and better managed risk but in addition the visibility of those risks will be much higher. Just that they are being talked about, keeps the risk in people’s minds.

The conversation reminds people to keep their eyes open and look for the problem. Talking about what could happen and what is happening enables you to see a much better picture from a risk management point of view.

CASE STUDY: REDUCING MISUNDERSTANDING TO MINIMISE RISK

Using the same Financial Services Sector example, conversations took place with the suppliers on a regular basis to ensure a clear understanding of their progress and the issues that they were facing. When an issue did arise where there was a lack of understanding, the depth and trust in the network that was available to both the supplier and the co-ordinating organisations at the centre enabled them to have fast conversations to resolve the misunderstandings. The development never progressed far down the wrong road.

Of course there were occasions when misunderstandings passed unnoticed for some time however, the uncertainty and the strength of their relationship to the centre enabled them to raise the issues without fear of being seen as either trouble making or unwilling to support the main project.

Again the common goal, the understanding of the individual’s goals and the way that the interactions between the organisations were working through strong and developing relationships enabled trust to be built quickly and maintained even in the most difficult times.

One question to ask the internal team in any organisation (to assess their readiness for building relationships of this kind) is how well they know their clients, suppliers and peers at a social level, how they understand their needs, aims and concerns, rather than simply the business matters.

The opportunity for big wins is significant. The opportunities to make a dramatic advance over competitors, to become the supplier of choice to your clients, because you engage with them in a way which they like and respect and because they have a relationship with you which means choosing a different supplier over you is much harder.

It’s not simply a matter of changing supplier; it’s now also a matter of building a new relationship from scratch. It’s no longer merely a matter of cost but also one of time and effort and those factors enable you to both gain new, and maintain, existing relationships in an ever stronger communications environment that builds strength and trusts over time in an increasingly important way.

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