Innovators in Social Media

BusinessWeek published one of the first articles we have seen about a trend we commented on last year - social media inside the enterprise.  Social Media will provide a powerful new way to enable organizational development and change management inside companies, particularly those with borders created by siloes.  No World Borders has been following these trends for years and it is gratifying to see main stream media cover them and legitimize them now.

"At Ford, Scott Monty is using social media to remake the automaker's image—and reinvigorate its culture 

It started out with a simple question, on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter: Who should we profile as a Voice of Innovation for social media? Names poured in. Some commenters treated it as a vote, some as an essay contest. Others, including marketing maven Seth Godin, objected to the whole exercise. "Sorry to be a curmudgeon," he wrote. "But I really like BW best when they lead the discussion, not referee it."

Still, this process was bringing in names—lots we'd never heard of—and telling us about people doing all sorts of things with social media. What was wrong with that? Only one thing. As some commenters pointed out, we cast too wide a net. Social media, after all, extends from freewheeling entrepreneurs who build new software applications to consultants laboring inside giant corporations. It includes people who use it to push a product and those who use it to further an idea or just themselves. How could all of these innovators fit into a single category? They couldn't.

So we divided social media into four categories and picked a representative of each. They are:

1) Toolmasters: Imaginative techies whose schemes and applications open new doors and lead to insights. Our toolmaster is Noah Brier, who works days in New York at Barbarian Group, an interactive marketing shop. By night, Brier, 26,pieces together new social-media apps, including Brand Tags, a Web page that shows brand names and invites visitors to describe each with a single word or phrase. The more a word is repeated, the bigger its type, making it simple to see what folks think.

2) Eyes to the World: People innovating with social media to help others. Beth Kanter is our pick. She uses every avenue on the World Wide Web to raise funds for Cambodian childrenthrough her own charity, the Sharing Foundation. And she shares what she learns with nonprofits everywhere. Kanter, 52, is also a Net pioneer. A longtime employee of the Boston Symphony, she plunged into the Internet in the early 1990s. She started tapping friends—and friends of friends—through her blog while adopting two Cambodian children in 2000.

3) Crowdstrappers: Entrepreneurs or consultants who harness new approaches in social media to reposition or invigorate businesses—either their clients' or their own. Here we selectEric Brown, who has turned his apartment business in Royal Oak, Mich., into a social media laboratory. Brown, 49, has no training in social media. But he believes in openness and hopes that the ease of communicating through blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, can turn him into a better landlord.

4) Hidden heroes: These are people working inside old-style enterprises and use social media to change the culture and operations. Our choice is Scott Monty, who heads up social media at Ford Motor (F).

You'll see more on the first three nearby. Meantime, here's a fuller story on Monty.

When Ford came looking last year for a social media maven, Scott Monty had an answer for the auto giant: No. Monty, a consultant in Joseph Jaffe's Crayon consulting company, had been living in Boston for 20 years. He got to work with lots of blue-chip clients, from Coca-Cola (KO) to American Airlines (AMR). Why move to work inside an auto company—in Detroit?

Then he started thinking. "Here was one of the most storied brands in American culture asking me to do what I liked doing specifically for them, and I said no. I'm still shaking my head about that." When he reconnected with Ford, he said yes—and since July, Monty has been busy on blogs, on Twitter, and in the hallways of Ford trying to revive the culture of a suffering industrial giant. His boss, Chief Executive Alan Mullaly, compares the transformation of Ford to "changing the tires on a car going 60 miles per hour."

Monty's challenge, as he sees it, is to communicate to the rest of the world the same lesson that he learned himself: that Ford is not a stodgy company tied to the past. "I realized that I'd fallen victim to the very thing that Ford was trying to combat," he says. "There were assumptions I'd made that just weren't true anymore. These are the things I struggle with every day. We've got a big perception problem to overcome."

His first goal is to "humanize the brand, giving Ford as many faces as possible." The most prominent face, of course, is Mulally himself, who appears to be a willing experimenter. Last month at the Detroit auto show, Monty says, he collared the CEO coming out of a meeting and asked if he would answer some questions on Twitter.

"What's Twitter?" Mulally asked.

After Monty explained, he asked his followers on Twitter for questions for the Ford CEO. Mulally stayed with him and gamely answered a few. (True, there's no sign of him yet on Twitter, but that could be a good thing: The guy is dealing with 2008 annual losses of $14.6 billion, and sales that fell 40% in January.)

Monty says he wants to "democratize social media" within Ford, deputizing tens of thousands of employees to represent the company. They have blogs, of course, and have reached out to all tech and green bloggers. But the challenge is less about technology, Monty says, than changing the culture of an organization, making it so that people aren't afraid to speak up. "It's like being at a dinner party," Monty says. "If someone says something derogatory about Ford, do you just sit there? No, you respond."

Twittering in Politics, Building Constituencies Online with Texting & Social Networks

Big companies are good at innovating within silos, but woefully bad at combining creative energies across divisions to build new businesses. As securities analyst Jessica Cohen once asked, "How is it possible that Time Warner owned both Warner Music and AOL and didn’t create something like iTunes?"

We couldn't agree more. However, here is an example or two of innovation in an unlikely location: the U.S. Congress. Some chambers are so creaky they still look like they did in 1955. On the other hand, one congressman is using such new technologies as Twitter to have discussions directly with constituents as debates are rolling in the House. Fast Company.TV interviewed Tim Ryan, D-OH* about FISA laws and how he used Twitter to message people. (Bipartisan note: See our prior blog regarding Senator John McCain's questions on LinkedIn. Senator McCain asked another question on that business network today, August 6, 2008).

Click below to watch the video.



Since the Congressman is not a reporter, he uses Twitter to build a constituency and help have two-way conversations that are not 30 second sound bites. If the information is too complicated and the constituent wants a 3 minute answer this may be a vehicle to provide more detail.

According to the Harvard Business review (July, 2008), "The problem, we believe, is structural: Business-unit boundaries exist precisely because they create efficient structures for executing strategy. But silo focus and ruthless efficiency come at the cost of cross-divisional collaboration, so some innovation opportunities are either poorly executed or not seen at all. The solution, we think, lies not in reorganization but in informal communication through the social networks that exist throughout the company. These networks must be shaped and cultivated to efficiently find and exploit innovations."

* Note: we do not intend this to be an endorsement of the point of view presented on FISA by the Congressman. We do see a future for text messaging in politics and a way to reach and broaden dialogs.

Applications of social networks you might consider (we can help):

1. External - Open innovation - use of the right networks for your audience to enhance or create new products and services
2. External - Customer feedback regarding existing products and services
3. External & family - Connecting with and marketing to kids [or, your own kids?] who don't email - they text each other.
4. Web synergies - Building web traffic for specific interests, refine content, enhance feedback.
5. Blog synergies - Building blog traffic and understanding what's important
6. Internal, Innovation - Breaking down boundaries that stifle innovation (company silos, geographies, applications, etc).

No World Borders' expertise in social networks for business is unsurpassed. Contact us if we can help you reach new constituencies in your market.