Reaching Your Audience 2.0

The Web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing the way the enterprises used to communicate with their employees, partners, suppliers and most importantly the customers. I had started my professional life at the beginning of Internet proliferation (1999-2000) and witnessed email (push) and WWW websites (pull) taking over notice boards and snail mail as the primary communication mechanisms in the corporate world. However, today, we are witnessing Blogs, RSS readers, social networks, wikis, podcasts and videos communications taking over the email and WWW (non-RSS) websites.

Though, the new mechanisms still rely on the Internet (same as email and WWW), they do require some fundamental changes in how the communications are conducted. The new communication channels are highly collaboration, highly interactive and some times contain user-generated content and comments. The most important aspect of these communications mechanisms is the viral nature of spreading any kind of news.

Let’s see how few corporate communications have been transformed through the use of these new communication channels.

Communication of Public Meetings

Today, the online videos and podcasts have totally revolutionized the communication of these public meetings. A perfect example is of Google’s Analyst day last month. I had not known about the meeting in advance. However, I do subscribe to the Google’s youtube channel that listed the videos just hours after the meeting. If there were no online videos and RSS feeds, I would have missed out on the information regarding Google’s products. And Google would have missed out on its audience.

Communication of a Product Launch

When it comes to a cool product presentation, no one can match Steve Jobs of Apple. However, not all of us can afford a ticket to MacWorld or are important enough to be invited there. So, how could you experience the magical iPhone announcement delivered by Mr. Jobs? Welcome, online short videos. Within the minutes of Mr. Jobs’ actual iPhone announcement, my RSS feed from News.com provided me a link to watch the announcement. I got to listen to the announcement without leaving my desk and spending a single dollar.

Viral Communication

Kindle. Does that ring a bell in your mind? Well, it is a new book reader that was announced by Amazon just a few weeks ago. The Kindle is already out of stock. However, a Google search on the word "Kindle" brought back 23,800,000 results yesterday? That is 23 million references of Kindle? How can this be possible? A product announced few weeks ago has 23 million references already? The answer is the viral nature of the new communications mediums - Blogs, videos, news, RSS feeds, social interactions, chat logs – that link everything to everything else. All of these links result into a viral communication of the subject, which in this case was a new product. What a powerful new way to communicate breaking news, product announcements, crisis communications and many other types of communication.

I would end this Blog entry with a note there are many companies that still are against these new mechanisms of the communications. But this behavior is not new. We all know change is always hard because it requires people to learn new things. Change is hard because it sometimes results into a power shift. Change is hard because it requires people to go out of their comfort zone. Personally, I am able to embrace change whenever I interact with a diverse set of people who can give me new perspectives. Therefore, to learn about these new communication channels, please don’t contact the communication department in your company. Find some teenagers in your neighborhood or ask your own (if you have any) on what they think about these new communication channels. They will explain the excitement of a user-generated content, the profound impact of a candor communication from a company, and the power of social interactions to spread the news (good or bad). Once you listen to them and think about it for a while, I bet your perspectives will change.

The Changing Roles of Enterprise Technology Leaders

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair..in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted being on its received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

I recently read a CIO magazine article that had the above paragraph as a metaphor to describe the current state of an enterprise IT. It struck a chord with me as I could totally relate to the same metaphor. I believe we are living in a time of fundamental shift in how enterprises are using the technology to run the businesses. This fundamental shift is resulting into both confusions and opportunities in the contemporary organizations. The roles of enterprise technology leaders are changing. Though, we have a diversity of opinions on what enterprise technology leaders should or should not do, there are two common themes in all opinions.

First, the enterprise technology leaders have to transition themselves to be enterprise innovation leaders who can work side-by-side with their business colleagues. They help formulate the business strategy. They take the business ideas and execute on them using technology. They participate in all critical business meetings. They help organizations in not only cut costs through productivity improvements, but also increase market share through a superior use of technologies. They are a partner to the customer service organizations to create end-to-end customer interaction experiences. All of this is hard work and requires them to create a balance of priorities between the existing systems’ operational improvements and execution of the new ideas. Therefore, enterprise technology is increasingly becoming an art instead of a science as it requires more creativity and business insight on the part of its technology leaders.

Second, the enterprise technology leaders must be technical enough to learn and incorporate the consumer-oriented technological innovations into their enterprises. The Googles, Yahoos, FaceBooks and YouTubes of the worlds are raising the customer expectations to a higher level. The services of these consumers companies are simple but yet very innovative. The enterprise technology leaders cannot dismiss these services as “consumer” space anymore. These consumer services have become part of the lives of both generation X and generation Y. These new generations expect all enterprise services to behave in the same way. They expect enterprises to provide free-of-charge trial or advertisements-supported product use. They expect enterprises’ products support to be web-enabled, chat-enabled, and voice-enabled. They expect enterprises to be responsive and do not tolerate any wait time. They expect enterprises to be candor during the critical situations. They expect more and more communication from enterprises’ leaders over the electronic mediums such as web blogs, online videos, and podcasts. To enable such a change, technology departments have to deploy a layer of communication, interaction and collaboration channels on top of the existing very complex enterprise systems. It requires a careful balance between revealing dirty secrets vs. the candor that would boost customers’ confidence on the enterprise. It requires an understanding of different technologies available to handle different situations. Therefore, enterprise technology leaders must step-up and learn all of this if they want to capture generation X and generation Y customers.

I strongly believe that we are living in the best of the times of technology and its impact on our businesses. It is impossible to precisely define the new roles of enterprises technology leaders but an understanding of challenges faced in and skills needed for the new roles is a good start.

Innovation and Contemporary Hierarchical Organizations

Large enterprises are like battleships. They have hundreds of thousands of employees using thousands of resources to create hundreds of products and services. Therefore, to manage these large battleships in a controlled manner, hierarchical organizations were put in place. These hierarchical models have been a great success and have produced great economic results, too. However, enterprise innovations face significant challenges while working under these traditional hierarchical organizations. The enterprise innovations require collaboration and expertise across organizations. The enterprise innovations require product or service improvements that span multiple departments. However, the contemporary hierarchical organizations allocate these diverse resources in many departments such as sales, engineering, finance, operations, IT and marketing. The traditional ways of interactions among these organizations silos stifle the innovative ideas that require commitments and collaborations from multiple departments of a company.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the contemporary hierarchical models. However, a company must ask itself following questions to see if its culture fosters innovations or not. Do departments’ leaders mark their boundaries so that no one is allowed to do anything except what is in the process? Are they willing to take risk that might lead to a greater reward for the company? Do they contribute their resources to work on cross-company experiments that may or may not work at the end? Do they rotate their resources across departments? Do the people in each department understand why other roles are as important to the company as their own roles? Do people go out of their organizations without any fear of the upper management?

Only five-ten years ago, marking the boundary, not allowing anyone to do anything non-standard, no risk-taking strategies and a defined work-day were the behaviors that got the most reward and produced good numbers, too. However, this is changing because the business environment is changing. It is no more possible for a contemporary organization to rest on its past laurels [inventions or first time innovations] to keep generating profits. New competitors are popping up everywhere in the world. These competitors can create better or same quality products at a much less cost. The companies need to continuously innovate to fight these new global competitors. And they have to do it with both speed and quality. The challenge? Doing all of this while not creating an un-manageable enterprise.

I have come to a conclusion that to make this happen, a company has to start with the people. Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of HP, says in her book, Tough Choices, I paraphrase “Products and numbers are produced by the People. Therefore, change the people and it will change the products and financial numbers”. It struck a chord with me. What it comes down is the people including leaders and employees of a company.

The leaders have to champion a culture that fosters continuous improvements. The leaders have to motivate people to work across their boundaries and their daily jobs. They have to reward risk. They have to educate people on the company’s direction. They have to move strategy from the charts to the real actions. The have to rotate people across departments. And to reward such leaders, the companies have to create company-wide performance measurements for these leaders.

Does your company do that?