Change Agent

What Stage Is Your Company In With Social Media?

2012-02-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

We at Franny Knight, Inc. are working on a Ethnographic Study of what stages are companies at and going through with the use of all Social Media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogging, et....
Here is what we have so far:

Stage I: Blocking Social Media platforms like Facebook from all employees, i.e. head in the sand approach - hoping it will go away. Guess what, 800 million users on Facebook over 50% of U.S. population - over 75% who have a computer and growing. Its not going away! And...you are being discussed on Social Media both negative and positively - one bad comment on Twitter or Facebook could cause a very messy crisis management issue - just ask United: www.unitedbreaksguitars.com. BTW just because you block it on your company computers doesn't mean your employees aren't on it all day on their SMART phones.

Stage II: One Person Has Been Assigned to Deal With It. Its usually an intern or the youngest person on staff, which is a recipe for disaster. Not having a more seasoned employee working with social media messages from your company is just not smart. It is no longer going to work to have one person working on a Communications Platform that is the largest, fastest moving shift in communications we have ever seen. All employees should be using Social Media on behalf of your organization - you do this through creating a Social Media Policy and train employees. If you are afraid of what your employees are going to say - then you have hired the wrong employees.

Stage III: Marketing-PR Department are Handling It: At least its a department and not one person. Still this a very naive and beginners way of using a Very Large Shifting Communications Tool. And...its not designed to be a Traditional Marketing Tool. Traditional Marketing is like a Megaphone and it is Interruptive. Social Media is more like a telephone, conversation - not interruptive. You can't just plop your Marketing Messages, Videos, Annual Report, etc....onto Social Media. You ask anybody on Facebook or Twitter if that is what they are using it for - they do not want to be sold to.

Stage IV: Marketing Department Understands Its Traditional Marketing Limitations: The Marketing Department gets it has to be done differently - that a community has to be built, interaction, trust and participation from customers or followers. Their Social Media Marketing Campaigns are designed correctly with no Traditional Marketing plop ins.

Stage V: Entire Organization is Involved in Social Media as a Communication Tool: The company has in place a Social Media Policy and Strategy. Employees have been trained on how to use the tools and encouraged and rewarded to do so in the correct way. It is used for all departments, sales, product development, customer service, employee relations, teams, pr, marketing. Two great examples are Ford and Zappos.

We are in the same place companies were when the telephone was invented and salespeople were trying to sale companies on buying them to use in their operations. Companies originally resisted the use of them because they were worried that their employees would use the phone to call all their friends and family memebers and waste time. They were also afraid it would allow for more release of trade secrets than without it. But just as it was then, companies cannot ignore new communication tools that are powerful and creates a shift in communication in very big ways. They will lose market share eventually because their competition is using the new tool and gaining and retaining more customers.

How Much Does It Cost Companies Who Don't Have a Creativity & Innovation Strategy: Millions

2010-08-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

Most companies do not train their managers and leaders to:

a: understand creativity, how it happens, is encouraged - we have operated companies based on analytical, concrete, command and control, if it ain't broke don't fix it, path of least resistance - not on creative processes which is opposite of all these things.

b: understand group dynamics and how to lead-manage people to foster creative ideas and then picking and implementing them. Here is what happens in most work place meetings. The manager has a meeting and goes over problems that need fixing. She asks for ideas from the "team" and if the manager is new or the team is new, she will get some ideas, then if they are not ideas that fit within her realm of possibilities she won't try them out. She will typically go try out a variation of what has already been done in the past - path of least resistance. Anything too new and different there is a perception of being very costly if the idea fails. Depending on who she is reporting to and how much leeway is given to trying new things and being okay with failing - will she try anything new. So after ideas were given at the meeting and none of them were tried and most likely the people with the new ideas given any encouragement for them - the next meeting when she asks for ideas, she will not get any. People begin to dread coming to meetings. People start leaving (mentally at first then actually leaving the job). Those who don't leave are okay with not having their ideas heard and implemented and are okay with just doing whatever they are told. So overtime you get more of the same and innovation is reduced to nothing.

c. employees are not trained or encouraged to understand how to be more creative (most come from other workplaces that didn't encourage creativity and innovation) and fall right into just doing what they are told, not to rock the boat, just do what is necessary. in orientation-training - they should be trained on creativity skills and on group brainstorming and on communication skills to get their ideas across and how to get them implemented. in these orientations the managers should be present during these training sessions so the employees see that they are supporting these processes.

Here is an example of how this has happened to me (has actually happened many times both in jobs and in committees in my social activist work). When I was working at National Seminars in the Onsite Department selling Onsite Programs to Companies I suggested a new idea of getting business. I wanted to take the very popular Creative Leadership Camp Brochure send them out to potential cleints and tell them they could attend the program for free. I would fly out to one of the seminars where I would have these clients attending and chat with them at lunch or after the program to see if it would be a program they would like to bring to their company. When I suggested this to my boss, he said that I needed to prove myself first in the old way of making phone calls to people and just trying to sell over the phone. They couldn't pay for my travel expenses until I proved myself. I was also confronted at a team meeting by senior employees that we were not to be making cold calls because that makes us look cheap. We were supposed to just wait for the phone to ring. The problem is when you are a new consultant you have no clients and the phone never rings. So I was being shut down from the boss, my co-workers. I soon got very frustrated, bored and gave up on the job and went back on the road as a speaker for National.

I still to this day, 10 years after I suggested my idea, think it was a great idea that would have really got the company a lot more business and money. I would have loved my job and stayed longer. So what was the cost to National Seminars for this situation? In their minds nothing because they don't track turnover and its costs and put it into their expenses! What it actually costs was approximately $120k: $20k is an average number of a turnover cost for a new employee that leaves within the first 6 months. How much would it have cost them to let me try out my idea? Let's see each trip would have been maybe $500. I could have made 40 trips and gained lets be conservative 20 new clients at $5000 a client which equals $100,000. $100k + $20K - $20k (travel expenses) = $100k profit. I'm not a mathematician so you might check my math. What a waste!!!

And that's just me. How many other employees not just in my department but across all departments was this going on. All of them. If there is not management training on creativity, creative team building and implementation, or a Innovation-Creativity Strategy, or Orientation Training on Creativity (there wasn't any orientation training at all - very very bad sign) then there is not Creativity and those who try to be creative will be shut down! Most people begin to hate their jobs if they are not engaged in the company, its processes and future - if they are only doing the technical aspects of their job. And what do employees do that hate their jobs? Leave, maximize sick time, and just do what they are asked to do and nothing more.

How much is this company losing every year because of their lack of Creativity & Innovation Strategy? Last I knew they had about 150 employees x $100k (rough guestimate at the loss of a good creative idea) = 1.5 million a year. Hmmmmmmmmhhhhh..........

To train their company to have a Creative & Innovation Strategy I would only charge them $100k. That would include the implementation of the Orientation Training and Training Their Trainers, Hiring for Creativity, Performance for Creativity, Management & Leadership Creativity, Team Creativity, Communication Skillls, and Process for Implement Ideas to be followed with an Employee Survey to see how employees felt about their jobs and the company after the program was implemented. Most companies do not train their managers and leaders to:

a: understand creativity, how it happens, is encouraged - we have operated companies based on analytical, concrete, command and control, if it ain't broke don't fix it, path of least resistance - not on creative processes which is opposite of all these things.

b: understand group dynamics and how to lead-manage people to foster creative ideas and then picking and implementing them. Here is what happens in most work place meetings. The manager has a meeting and goes over problems that need fixing. She asks for ideas from the "team" and if the manager is new or the team is new, she will get some ideas, then if they are not ideas that fit within her realm of possibilities she won't try them out. She will typically go try out a variation of what has already been done in the past - path of least resistance. Anything too new and different there is a perception of being very costly if the idea fails. Depending on who she is reporting to and how much leeway is given to trying new things and being okay with failing - will she try anything new. So after ideas were given at the meeting and none of them were tried and most likely the people with the new ideas given any encouragement for them - the next meeting when she asks for ideas, she will not get any. People begin to dread coming to meetings. People start leaving (mentally at first then actually leaving the job). Those who don't leave are okay with not having their ideas heard and implemented and are okay with just doing whatever they are told. So overtime you get more of the same and innovation is reduced to nothing.

c. employees are not trained or encouraged to understand how to be more creative (most come from other workplaces that didn't encourage creativity and innovation) and fall right into just doing what they are told, not to rock the boat, just do what is necessary. in orientation-training - they should be trained on creativity skills and on group brainstorming and on communication skills to get their ideas across and how to get them implemented. in these orientations the managers should be present during these training sessions so the employees see that they are supporting these processes.

Here is an example of how this has happened to me (has actually happened many times both in jobs and in committees in my social activist work). When I was working at National Seminars in the Onsite Department selling Onsite Programs to Companies I suggested a new idea of getting business. I wanted to take the very popular Creative Leadership Camp Brochure send them out to potential cleints and tell them they could attend the program for free. I would fly out to one of the seminars where I would have these clients attending and chat with them at lunch or after the program to see if it would be a program they would like to bring to their company. When I suggested this to my boss, he said that I needed to prove myself first in the old way of making phone calls to people and just trying to sell over the phone. They couldn't pay for my travel expenses until I proved myself. I was also confronted at a team meeting by senior employees that we were not to be making cold calls because that makes us look cheap. We were supposed to just wait for the phone to ring. The problem is when you are a new consultant you have no clients and the phone never rings. So I was being shut down from the boss, my co-workers. I soon got very frustrated, bored and gave up on the job and went back on the road as a speaker for National.

I still to this day, 10 years after I suggested my idea, think it was a great idea that would have really got the company a lot more business and money. I would have loved my job and stayed longer. So what was the cost to National Seminars for this situation? In their minds nothing because they don't track turnover and its costs and put it into their expenses! What it actually costs was approximately $120k: $20k is an average number of a turnover cost for a new employee that leaves within the first 6 months. How much would it have cost them to let me try out my idea? Let's see each trip would have been maybe $500. I could have made 40 trips and gained lets be conservative 20 new clients at $5000 a client which equals $100,000. $100k + $20K - $20k (travel expenses) = $100k profit. I'm not a mathematician so you might check my math. What a waste!!!

And that's just me. How many other employees not just in my department but across all departments was this going on. All of them. If there is not management training on creativity, creative team building and implementation, or a Innovation-Creativity Strategy, or Orientation Training on Creativity (there wasn't any orientation training at all - very very bad sign) then there is not Creativity and those who try to be creative will be shut down! Most people begin to hate their jobs if they are not engaged in the company, its processes and future - if they are only doing the technical aspects of their job. And what do employees do that hate their jobs? Leave, maximize sick time, and just do what they are asked to do and nothing more.

How much is this company losing every year because of their lack of Creativity & Innovation Strategy? Last I knew they had about 150 employees x $100k (rough guestimate at the loss of a good creative idea) = 1.5 million a year. Hmmmmmmmmhhhhh..........

To train their company to have a Creative & Innovation Strategy I would only charge them $100k. That would include the implementation of the Orientation Training and Training Their Trainers, Hiring for Creativity, Performance for Creativity, Management & Leadership Creativity, Team Creativity, Communication Skillls, and Process for Implement Ideas to be followed with an Employee Survey to see how employees felt about their jobs and the company after the program was implemented.

To Twit-Follow or Not to Twit-Follow Top 10 List

2009-04-28T20:46:00.001-07:00

I am just over a month into Tweeting on Twitter and really committing to it everyday, learning something new, following and being followed, RT (ReTweeting) and posting updates with Tiny Urls. Life is great! I have become mesmerized with Twitter in so many ways. But this post is about my current rules on whether to Follow somebody who has decided to follow you. There are many articles of advice on this subject by many Tweeters, but I finally have decided on my own Top 10 rules and they are pretty simple.

I look for and want to have something in common with you: if you are 20 (I am 44) a male (I am female) you love punk rock (i loved punk rock too when I was 20 in the 80's isn't it over?), you party and want to make money on the internet with nothing really to sell, chances are we don't have much in common.
I am not just looking for the numbers game. I really don't know what that does exactly for anybody except boost the ego. Therefore I have a tendency to shy away from those who have astronomical numbers of followers. This is not a hard rule, but a tendency for me.
You are Funny!
You are loving!
You are giving without expecting anything in return.
You have a well written bio or a well designed background - sometimes wins me over.
You have more than 1-5 Updates.
Your Are Green, Sustainable, Eco Oriented
Your Updates are not just @so&so over and over and over again with no meat of your own
Your Updates are mostly followfridays (especially when it is Monday, Tues. Wed. or Thurs.)

U. of Richmond Creates a History Wikipedia for College Students

2009-04-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia for students.

Wired Campus: U. of Richmond Creates a Wikipedia for Undergraduate�Scholars - Chronicle.com

When I grow up...

2009-04-06T21:01:00.001-07:00

Franny Knight Imagination & Happiness Consultant

What Gmail does better than its competitors | Webware - CNET

2008-12-18T10:53:00.001-08:00

What Gmail does better than its competitors

What Gmail does better than its competitors | Webware - CNET

I love Gmail and if you are a Transformer at Work or in life, it is the best email server out there for so many reasons. Read this article, it says it all and if you haven't tried it yet, you are really missing out.

Blogged with Flock

Using Web 2.0 for Marketing - slow but hopeful

2008-12-17T11:46:00.000-08:00

It is such an exciting time for anybody who has been trying to promote their own business, whether you are an artist, creative thinker, writer, performer, small business owner. I just watched a webinar from Hubspot: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4454/Combine-SEO-Blogging-and-Social-Media-to-Optimize-Your-Marketing-Efforts.aspx
on using SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Social Media (like Facebook, MySpace), Blogging, etc... to do promotions - all free except the time it takes to learn how to use these tools and to monitor them daily.

I am pretty much a newby and learning and playing with these tools and ideas to promote my Real Estate business, our Obama Theme Song Downloads and my Training Consulting business. One step at a time! I have a Facebook account started groups and joined groups that are in my business area, I have just created pages on Facebook which are like websites (still need to work on them).

I have 3 Blogs: Ctrl/Alt/Del (Living the Life You Love) "http://frannyknightcontrolaltdelete.blogspot.com">Ctrl/Alt/Del ; Red, Hot & Green Eco Agent Blog: http://redhotandgreenecoagent.blogspot.com/ and Transformers for Creative Leadership, Training, Visionaries at Work: http://frannyknight.blogspot.com/. I am learning how to set up webinars, but haven't found the most cost effective service yet. I have just learned about Slideshare.com where you can post slideshows. I have videos uploaded on YouTube and a YouTube Channel (still needs a lot of work).

These are just a few things I have been doing, so much more to do. It is such a high learning curve. My biggest challenge, next to just the learning of it all, is to get past some of the Social Media sites bent towards just being social vs. using it for business. It seems that I get more of a response (not much of one at that) when I post things that are funny, cute, goofy, family oriented. Nobody every responds to my business postings, like my blogs and notes that are more business oriented - here on facebook??? Still learning how to get it to be more serious.

Is anybody else that is a Solo Business/Entrepreneur/Artist having any luck with promoting yourself in these new ways?

Generational Differences in Transparency: Wisdom of Crowds

2008-12-04T12:59:00.000-08:00

I went to a marketing roundtable group for the first time this morning with about 7 people who meet once a month (a good friend of mine has been getting a lot out of it in this last year and she invited me). I would say most of them were Baby Boomers and a couple GenXers. The leader was a Baby Boomer. Someone brought up using YouTube Videos as a marketing tool. I just so happened to have my mini video camera (a hybrid videocamera and webcam) that makes it easy to carry everywhere, take spontaneous video, audio or pics that then can be uploaded easily to YouTube. I told everyone about it and how easy it would be to start using YouTube.

Unfortunately, the first thing out of the leader's mouth was, "I just don't want to share all my personal stuff with everybody". I am not sure how she made the leap from what I said with using a minivideo camera and YouTube to her personal information being shared, but this is a typical response from her generation.

I believe without any scientific evidence that this transparency of our personal lives and the mixing with personal and business is a major shift we are experiencing that most Baby Boomers/Veterans do not like or get! Most Generation Y and some Generation X are pretty public and don't care as much.

When I talk about in my Virtual Training seminars and workshop with trainers and managers about using Web 2.0 applications (like YouTube, Blogs, Facebook, etc....) many Baby Boomers have heavy sighs and then voice their worry over security and proprietary information.

Fortunately (yet unfortunate for Baby Boomers) we are moving past being so private, secure, non sharing to more sharing, collaborating and creating across companies, entities, countries, groups etc... which is going to make us smarter, better at what we do. But most Baby Boomers will be kicking and screaming all the way.

You can check out my Google Doc that I am sharing with everybody on Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management. In this online presentation I also discuss the Wisdom of Crowd book which reiterates what I am ranting about.

Please do the poll on this blog so we can see who has visited and make a comment.

Tapping Creativity: Co-Creating :: The Power of Two

2008-03-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

Tapping Creativity: Co-Creating :: The Power of Two

Excellent article - it makes me think of my older sister and how she truly encouraged me in participating with me in the creative process like this person's grandma - learning early in our formative years makes a very deep impression. My sister was also very creative herself.