Why I love working in Seattle

Pioneer square

Originally uploaded by gregmeyer

Working in the city of Seattle in the Pioneer Square area is a bit gritty. It’s nothing like gliding to work in the gleaming eastside office towers of Bellevue, pulling into the parking garage, and going up 16 floors of a LEED certified building. Instead, it’s a bus ride filled with people of all walks of life, a walk from the bus stop through a vibrant area of the city, and a reminder that a 100 year old building can be useful again in a web 2.0 (3.0?) world. It’s a bit of a romantic notion, and I love it.

Cities have been around for thousands of years because there is a certain critical mass required by (and inspired by) trade, commerce, and people. Even in the age of the Internet, it’s a great reminder to walk around in the downtown core of a city and see that location does matter. You can surf the internet from anywhere, but you can’t always walk around the corner and find a great restaurant or a place to hang out or see people who aren’t just like you alongside people who might be just like you.

I love the city, even when it’s a bit grungy and smelly. Pioneer Square reminds me that the industrial core of Seattle has come back to life with the information industry of the 21st century, and I’m glad to be a part of that (it also helps on the days when it’s sunny.) Working in other parts of the city might have been an easier commute, but now I feel like I’m part of the neighborhood.

Find the Trust Agents in your organization, and Explain them to Everyone Else

Organizations are getting social, whether they like it … or not. In their report “Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management“, Altimeter Group’s R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang detail 18 use cases to help businesses react to the advent of social media into business process and suggest ways for these businesses to move forward in a brave new social world. Wang and Owyang take a pragmatic, stepped approach to adding social capabilities in the organization, advising businesses to start slow, compliment existing processes, and to focus on business value.

I think that the Altimeter Group and others are making great strides at describing what businesses and executives should do to learn about the landscape of the Social CRM space, understand the vendors, and identify which areas would benefit most from a “social” overlay on traditional business practice. Yet I think that these analysts could be even more accurate about the challenges and opportunities facing businesses who seek to implement Social CRM (and indeed, customer-centric business practices of all types) if they focused on the identification, cultivation, and motivation of the Trust Agents in their organization, and figured out how to explain them to everyone else.

By Trust Agent, I’m referring to Chris Brogan’s concept that people succeed inside of organizations by mimicking the same skills they would have to use on the outside as freelancers and solo practitioners. In short, the success of Social CRM depends upon understanding the social dynamics within your own company as much as it does the social dynamics of your product and brand as expressed in the marketplace. That sounds challenging — and it is — but there’s another thing too. If you want that DNA to work and your employees to express it out in the world, it means that anyone who has customer insight and customer impact also needs to understand those Trust Agents in your organization who are engaging with customers.

(A disclaimer: as a practitioner of CRM — having rolled out a Knowledge Management suite at a Fortune 500 company — and as a vendor of Social CRM, as the Customer Experience Manager for a vendor in the field, I’ve been the Change Agent, the person who explains the change agent to C-level execs, and the frustrated internal resource wondering why consultants can solve a problem when the internal resources aren’t trusted to do the same thing.)

This sounds like a bit of a contradiction, as many of the internal corporate communications personnel and other folks who manage social media and CRM efforts are probably reading the Altimeter group’s report and wondering: “How can I write policies that will support my employee efforts in social media, promote and understand my brand, and not look silly?” Enabling Trust Agents within the company and trying to explain them to everyone else must sound a little crazy. Yet it’s working already. Look at Zappos. Look at Best Buy. Look at Comcast. These are organizations where the brand has become exemplified by individuals trying to provide service in the right way to customers. These companies don’t always get it right. But they’re trying.

So what’s next, and what should analysts like the Altimeter group be working on for their next report? Quantifying the behaviors that result in measurable change and meaningful increases in customer satisfaction, correlated to the behavior of representatives of a company in social media. I’m not trying to suggest that a multi-variate regression is going to account for all of the crazy noise out there in customerland: I am trying to suggest that there are specific people in your organization who are engaging with customers right now. Understanding the positive aspects of this interaction and building a new set of skills around networking and engaging with customers (and quantifying how you can track these interactions through your CRM system) is key to future success. Some of your employees will embrace this change — but many will not, thinking and feeling that their social media outlets are personal and not professional — and we’re all going to be building a new vocabulary and set of business behaviors around adding social media to traditional business process. I’m happy to be along for the ride.

Creative Process #1: Why Whiteboard?

What’s your creative process? Reading Tyler Cowen’s “Create Your Own Economy” and Temple Grandin’s “Thinking in Pictures” has inspired me to look at my own creative process and to examine the ways in which I do and don’t think like my peers. Let me start by stating that I think that a diversity of views is essential and that I don’t have the monopoly (or even the best) method of creating — but it is my own — and that I’m going to use blogging as a method of exploring that process.

One of the best ways that I create is on a dry-erase whiteboard. Whether the whiteboard is small or the size of a wall, there’s something about the surface that challenges me to think big, to fail quickly and fast, and to collaborate easily with others. In short: whiteboards give me all of the qualities of a successful entrepreneur or project leader. So what it is it about whiteboards that makes this process possible?

Why Whiteboard, Reason #1: Think in Real Time

The first reason I whiteboard is that it encourages real-time thinking. How many times have you started an idea, a blog post, or a project, only to find that when it came out of your head it was really only half done (half-baked, sometimes)? Whiteboarding gives you a safe space to work those ideas out as they are happening, to add from here and subtract from there, and to say the idea out loud. Sometimes it gives it more weight; other times, just helps you to realize the idea wasn’t that great after all.

Why Whiteboard, Reason #2: Pictures > Words

This one’s probably obvious, but pictures are much stronger carriers of emotion than words. The old saw not withstanding, a picture is worth at least 500 words if not 1000. If you can’t think about what you’re trying to say in pictures (and you’re a visual thinker like me) then you’re in trouble. For me, drawing a picture helps me to think about the problem in a different way and to abstract more complicated ideas in terms that are easier to explain. It also helps me/cues me to be consistent about the terms I’m using so that I don’t distract the reader/viewer with new ways to say/explain the same thing.

Why Whiteboard, Reason #3: Make Mistakes. Try Again.

Reason 3 is a pretty obvious corollary to Reason 1, but is different. Reason 1, Real-time thinking, implies that you’re going to keep working on a problem and solve it in the moment. Reason 3 is to remind you that some times you can just throw out your mistakes, erase the board, and start over.

So there’s the blueprint for my creative process. Think in real time. Pictures > Words. Make mistakes and try again. This actually maps well to other forms of making content, including writing, speaking, and collaborating. The better able you are to suggest the smallest big idea you know how to do, start working on implementing that idea, and then throwing out when it’s clear that you’ve measured it and it doesn’t work, the better you’ll be able to germinate and build new ideas, sparking your creative process. Give it a try! I’d love to see your whiteboard drawings.

Customer Service Lessons Learned from Twitterville

Shel Israel’s Twitterville gives an entertaining fly-through of the world of Twitter, from the beginnings of the service to its current state as a real-time news service for millions. Israel also profiles several businesses that have engaged customers on Twitter and their successes and failures there.

There are three key lessons that stand out from Twitterville: businesses need to respond to customers, acknowledge their problems or inquiries, and offer to help. These would seem to be elementary lessons for any business with customers, but Twitter enables this conversation to happen almost in real time, forcing businesses to be nimble and to speak to customers in the channels they prefer.

Responding to the customer need not be a difficult problem. Customers want to know that they’ve been heard. They don’t want to be referred to a phone tree, left on hold, or placed in a circular bin along with their paper-based complaint. Twitter gives customers a great way to ask directly to be heard — and companies that listen do better in Twitterville. Note that these companies don’t always offer to solve the customer’s problem immediately, but they listen, and respond appropriately. Some companies choose to do this from a corporate Twitter account; others, like Best Buy, coordinate the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of company representatives like an old-fashioned telephone company switchboard.

Acknowledging the customer is a powerful way to get the customer on your side and to turn a potentially negative conversation into a potentially positive one. How many times have you wondered how to get in touch with a large company to share your opinion (and be heard), only not to know where to ask the question? Twitterville gives you a way to ask that question. Companies that listen (zappos, comcast, and others) get a head start on their ability to solve the problem, and offer a venue for customers to ask questions that other customers might be able to solve.

Finally, offering to help brings the customer on your side. If you’re a patient at Swedish Hospital in Seattle and highlight an inefficiency in the way the hospital works from the patient perspective, expect a reply. Not only will you get a response that demonstrates that there’s someone there who listened, but you might also be responsible for improving the ongoing processes of the hospital. All the comment cards in the world didn’t have such a direct response as that.

Finally, the bonus lesson to be learned from Twitterville is that help can be local or global. In Twitterville, the offer to help might be as simple as a link to the right online resource or it might be a crowd-sourced effort to raise funds for charity. Twitterville takes Howard Rheingold’s concept of Smart Mobs and makes the ability to ask a question, get an answer, and rally people to action a reality. In Twitterville, you never know when the customers of today might be the advocates of tomorrow. So make sure you respond to the customer, acknowledge their issue, and offer to help. You might be on the other end of the Tweet tomorrow.

By the way, you don’t know all the answers

I used to be concerned with being right. I didn’t understand that there were many different kinds of being right, one prominent version of which was “it doesn’t matter if you’re right, if you bring it up at the wrong time or in the wrong way.” The key lesson to learn here was that I didn’t know all the answers.

I still don’t know all the answers, and one of the best ways that I know I’m doing well at a problem is when I hit a wall and realize that I don’t know something. It typically means either that I haven’t thought about a problem at all, or that I’ve thought enough about that problem to really dig in and find difficult things that can’t easily be solved. What I do know is that it’s important to try something rather than to wait until you’ve figured everything out. It often turns out, as my colleague points out in his post about business plans, that having the 80% solution really does work remarkably well.

What do I do when I don’t know the answers? Try something. Measure it. See if it works. If it worked, do more things like that. If not, see what you can learn from it and move on. I’ve decided that more important than being right is being authentic and resilient. I can’t control what’s going to happen, but I can control (somewhat) the way that I respond to it and the way that I try to learn from the unexpected situation, the (happy) accident, or the deliberate step that didn’t work out that well.