House of Lords - lords of the blog

When people think of the UK House of Lords, some might use words such as traditional, hidebound, conservative, outdated or even irrelevant.

However these terms don't apply to the latest initiative from the House - lords of the blog.

Members of the UK's upper house of parliament (equivalent to Australia's Senate), are now writing a regular blog about the business conducted by UK parliament and the role of the House of Lords.

The blog was set up as an experimental project to;

encourage direct dialogue between web users across the world and Members of the
House of Lords. Commissioned by the House of Lords, the pilot project is
conducted by the Hansard Society who are working directly with Members of the
Lords to bring their blogs to the wider online audience.

Avoiding the seven deadly sins of social media, most posts are written by members of the House, with at least ten members contributing at least semi-regularly.

It's the only blog I've visited where almost every author has a 'Lord', 'Baroness' or similar title before their name.

As one of the best written blogs I've encountered, reflective of the education and experience of the writers, it provides a fascinating insight into how the House of Lords operates on a day-to-day basis.

The blog also links to the blogs of a number of other UK parliamentarians.

Observing how actively UK and US politicians and senior civil servants are engaging their constituents via the internet brings home to me how far Australia is behind in the egovernment space.

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Tracking customer sentiment in real-time - a revolution for government communicators

This post is based on my reflections on the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 that I've been reading, which looks at the use of online social media in monitoring customer sentiment in real-time for organisations.

Having been a marketer for more that 15 years, I have a degree education in Marketing that effectively predates the internet.

What I, and most other communicators my age and older were taught was to periodically survey customers and string the results of those surveys together to track customer sentiment, detect trends and identify opportunities.

Today this approach still guides the allocation of billions of marketing dollars across the world.

Balance sheet approach
I consider this the balance sheet approach to customer tracking.

Each period (year, quarter, month) an organisation surveys the market, plots the results, compares customer sentiment across periods, reviews its strategy and makes appropriate communications expenditure decisions.

Fifteen years ago this was the only approach available to communications, and it had worked well for many years, particularly in slower moving industries.

However as change has increased tempo, some flaws have appeared.

Rapid changes are undetectable
The balance sheet approach only detects changes occurring across multiple survey periods. Any changes within a period are undetectable.

This leaves organisations at risk of missing opportunities arising in shorter time frames. An example is the rapid adoption of digital cameras. Film camera leaders lost enormous market share and shareholder value to industry newcomers who were faster to react to the trend.

Film camera makers were aware of the trend to digital. However their customer sentiment balance sheets did not provide sufficient information for these companies to be convinced of their need to change direction quickly. As a result it has taken years for them to recover.

Poor communications effectiveness tracking
Secondly the approach does not effectively support tracking of marketing and communications effectiveness.

If you survey your customers twice a year, and in that period run six different campaigns, place 40 advertisements and 100 news articles, how can you really determine which campaigns, advertisements or articles were most effective in causing a positive sentiment change?

Without being able to track effectiveness, how is it possible for an organisation to improve it's allocation of resources and communications dollars over time?

Does not scale - more surveys do not improve analysis
If change increases page, the logical step under the balance sheet approach is to hold more frequent surveys.

This reduces the time between data points, helps organisations to catch major shifts in sentiment sooner, and allows them to detect smaller shifts that could become major opportunities.

This approach works to a degree. However it increases the cost of research and customers begin to chafe under the burden of surveys - lying or lowering their view of the organisation.

As a result over time the approach results in diminishing returns - it simply doesn't scale.

Instead new approaches are necessary.


Revolutionary change - real-time monitoring, the cashflow approach
Since widespread adoption of the internet and the introduction of social media tools it has become possible for organisations to track customer sentiment virtually in real time.

Rather than surveying at set intervals it is now possible to continuously monitor customer sentiment, detecting smaller shifts across smaller audience segments.

This allows organisations to respond in shorter-timeframes, exploiting opportunities, influencing shifts and measuring communications effectiveness for each communication.

This is a revolutionary change for communicators and can be difficult for those my age and older to frame within our past experience.

To help with this I call it the cashflow statement approach to customer sentiment.

Whereas balance sheets measure an organisation's position at set points in time and assist strategic level decisions, cashflow statements look at the organisation's daily or hourly position, supporting tactical decisions as well as testing overall strategic approaches.

As described above, I see the two approaches working hand-in hand.

• Regular surveys detect larger sentiment changes over time,
  
• real-time community monitoring detects smaller, but no less significant, changes and provides an early warning for large, often abrupt, market shifts (discontinuities).

Impacts for government communicators
Framing this for the public sector, public consultancy has for a long time been a key consideration for government policy and decisions.

Online conversations are another channel now available for the government to understand and track citizen sentiment.

It is an avenue whereby the government can engage more broadly - at lower cost - with community groups, individuals and corporations.

Best yet, it's not a one-way mirror, as is market research. It is a conversation that the government can participate in.

I'll explore approaches for how the government can effectively engage in this conversation in other posts.

For now, have a read of the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 for more information on how to use online channels to monitor the conversations already in progress.

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Open innovation - building engagement between governments, companies and citizens

The McKinsley Quarterly has published a very interesting piece on the future of innovation, The next step in open innovation.

This explores the concept that companies - and government departments - have traditionally been 'closed shops' for innovation. All their innovation has occurred internally with few linkages to the work underway at other organisations.

However this is changing as organisations realise that collaborative innovation, across organisations, reduces waste and stimulates new concepts.

Anyone who has ever sat down and written a report on their own has probably experienced this at a personal level. Bouncing ideas off others triggers new directions and leads to new insights.

With the internet, a global participatory environment, we're beginning to see organisations work more co-operatively with their supply chains, with players in other markets, with the public and even with competitors.

McKinsley gives examples such as:

• LEGO - invited customers to suggest new models interactively and then financially rewarded the people whose ideas proved marketable.
• The shirt retailer Threadless sells merchandise online—and now in a physical store, in Chicago—that is designed interactively with the company’s customer base.
• Open-source platforms developed through distributed cocreation, such as the “LAMP” stack (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python), have become standard components of the IT infrastructure at many corporations.
• Peugeot invited customers to submit car designs and built and exhibited the winning entry at a car show and integrated it into a PC game.
• The Missha cosmetics brand in South Korea has reached 40% market share on the basis of cocreated cosmetics products.
• Wikipedia has grown to over 9.25 million entries (2.44 million in english) in over 250 languages in under ten years (the English wikipedia alone has over 1 billion words - 25x the size of the next largest English encyclopedia).
  

Why would private organisations wish to co-operate? Because it gives them a competitive edge, as discussed by Harold Rhiengold in his fantastic TED presentation on collaboration.


This isn't purely a private sector development - it is also occurring in the public space. I can think of examples such as New Zealand's collaborative police wiki legislation, or the UK government's mashup competition.


Back to the McKinsley article, one of the points raised is that traditional media and organisational sites are growing in usage at a rate of 20-30% per year.

However sites focused on user-created content are growing at 100%.

The public has demonstrated that it is ready and able to engage organisations in productive discussions - co-developing concepts, products and policy - with suitable incentives.

The article's recommendation is that;

Even the most advanced businesses are just taking the first few steps on a long path toward distributed cocreation. Companies should experiment with this new approach to learn both how to use it successfully and more about its long-term significance. Pioneers may have ideas about opportunities to capture value from distributed cocreation, but fresh ones will appear. To benefit from them, companies should be flexible about all aspects of these experiments.

Where does your department stand?

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The seven deadly sins of social media

For a good summary of how organisations should not use social media, check out The Seven Deadly Sins Of Social Media from DJ Francis.

This approach applies as strongly in the public sector as it does in the private.

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A guide to engaging social media for government communicators

Last week the Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 was released by Phillip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group.

I've been browsing the book for a few days and have found it a very coherent view of the development of the online channel and the approaches now available to communicators to listen, engage, influence and be influenced by their customers, stakeholders and community.

In particular the book focuses on how to locate and monitor the conversations even now going on about your organisation, to more fully understand community views and trends in real time.

It's written at a level where beginners or those experienced with social media will still get value out of it.

I recommend it to any government communicator seeking to make sense of what is going on in the online world.

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