Talk about how social media is gaining traction often focuses on the hard data that prove business value, or focuses on case studies and research that demonstrate best practices or key trends.

In my role, I’m privileged to interact with people from across North America who are thinking about how best to evaluate and deploy the new social media tools, which provides a useful set of anecdotal experiences to complement the data.

And three recent exchanges demonstrate very encouraging signs about how people are using the efficiencies of social media to create value; how consumer applications are revealing business value; and that grassroots knowledge is receiving support by enlightened leadership.

Social value

One of the truly exciting features of social media is that it provides easy-to-use technology that enables people to be much more efficient at interacting with one another. It’s a simple concept, but every day brings a surprising new example of how it works.

For instance, the other day a colleague showed me Trapster running on his iPhone. Trapster is a mobile application that lets you see and share the location of speed traps right on your mobile phone or GPS device. When you see a trap, users report it by pressing a button on their phone, or calling a toll free number. Other user's phones will alert them as they approach the trap. Trapster incorporates crowd sourcing principles by learning the credibility of traps based on how many users agree. It also learns the credibility of each user, over time.

Is this a new way of interacting with one another? No, motorists have flashed their headlights to alert fellow drivers to speed traps for decades. But now a socially-minded driver can reach potentially millions of other drivers rather than a handful.

It also demonstrates how social media creates a value proposition that vastly exceeds the older technology it replaces. In this case, Trapster is not only more effective than a radar detector, it’s also tolerated by the police. The application’s website quotes Bill Johnson, Executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, as saying: “If someone slows down because of it, it's accomplishing the same goal of trying to get people to obey the speed limit."

Consumer apps reveal business value

One of the genuinely fascinating aspects of our projects that focus on bringing social media into the enterprise—often called intranet 2.0—is observing how consumer grade software is challenging organizations to improve internal functionality for their employees.

Last week, I conducted a business requirement interview with a Vice President of one of our clients, a multi-national financial services company that is assessing how to improve their intranet. “Building in the capability to add widgets is smart,” he observed. “I would take advantage of that, but I have an iPhone with 24 apps. If we advertised internally that there are 24 apps, that would engage staff, even if it was a simple weather forecaster or what’s for lunch in the cafeteria.”

Not that along ago, a common complaint from younger workers was the executives don’t “get” new technology because they don’t use it. Increasingly, executives are starting to use the technology, and rapidly perceive how it can add value to their businesses.

Grassroots knowledge, enlightened leadership

Successful social media deployments require knowledge and commitment at the grassroots level to understand the technology and put it to good use. My experience, supported by data, suggests that the grassroots is often ahead of the organization’s leadership, which causes that important energy to be dissipated.

Last week, I met an IT Director with a large healthcare organization that is developing a new web strategy to support an important development in the organization’s direction. Healthcare entities often perceived to be trailing their users in the utilization of innovative online technology, but this Director was already anticipating how the organization’s clients would want to interact with them using mobile technology, and showed me how he uses Digg on his iPhone to follow the Linux community in which he participates.

The organization was also experiencing a common phenomenon for large entities: an employee had started a Facebook group in which employees were discussing the organization’s new direction.

A new, 50-something CEO had just come on board, and there was curiosity about what tone he would set for the web strategy. The questions were answered when he requested a blog on his first day, and joined the Facebook group.

A boomer CEO of a supposedly conservative organization participating actively in social media is an anecdotal data point that promises we are about to see some exciting new developments in the deployment of social media.

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With all the hype created by the Internet, it’s easy to forget that web technology rarely creates something new. It enables people to do the things they’re already doing, but do it more effectively. So in many cases, successfully utilizing web technology doesn’t require technical knowledge alone; it requires a commitment to accomplish a business goal.

In the web world, the winners aren’t those with technology—because everyone has access to the same tools—success is driven by leaders who focus on a business goal and understand how to use technology to achieve it.

Amazon didn’t create an interest in buying books; it allowed the transaction to be more efficient. And people were finding buyers for stuff they no longer wanted before craigslist came along. Jeff Bezos and Craig Newmark didn’t create the need; they had insights into how to use web technology to meet the need more effectively.

Of course, this increased effectiveness can be transformative. Amazon not only trashed the model by which books were sold, produced and inventoried, it created an opportunity for the company to gain unprecedented customer insight and sell more than books. And then trash other companies’ business model. Craigslist evaporated newspapers’ classified advertising revenue, causing them to lose a crucial source of profit and accelerated their decline in the digital era.

One of the most hyped benefits for the latest Web trend—social media—is the competitive advantage being gained by companies that embrace innovation through collaboration.

There is no doubt that social media delivers important business benefits, and it’s important to understand the technology such as wikis and social networking that allow collaboration to take place more effectively.

But we can’t forget that, just as people bought books before Amazon appeared, some companies have always innovated through collaboration, and enjoyed a competitive advantage as a result. And they didn’t do it because of technology; they did it because they had leaders who established a culture of collaboration, and saw past the risks of allowing their employees to engage with each other and focused instead on the benefits.

While preparing a recent webinar on integrating social media into an intranet strategy, I was reminded of one such company I visited in the mid-90s while working as a magazine editor. It was a new entrant into an established vertical, and had succeeded in introducing disruptive technology well ahead of the established players.

The visit finished on a Friday afternoon, so we were invited to participate in their weekly “beer day,” when one department bought beer for the company. I complimented the CEO on allowing his people time to relax, and he responded by saying it was all about facilitating collaboration, observing that their meeting rooms were usually booked on Monday because teams of engineers realized they were working on projects that could benefit from knowledge sharing. No wiki needed, just old school silo-erosion through socializing.

One of the key findings emerging from Prescient’s Intranet 2.0 Global Survey is that some of the main barriers to implementing Intranet 2.0 is securing executive support and complying with corporate policies. For example, leaders who ban Facebook because they think it allows staff to goof off, or Legal Departments that won’t allow blogs because staff may say something inappropriate.

It’s not hard to imagine how these same groups would react to “beer day”: don’t allow it because an engineer might drink too much and say something rude, or the company could incur liability from drinking and driving.

For those who grasp the business benefits for Intranet 2.0 but struggle to figure out how best to introduce them to their company, rather than trying to choose the right technology, maybe they should ask if their CEO would buy the company a beer. If the answer is no, sharpen the argument on business benefits and get ready to focus on cultural change, not technology selection.

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One of the essential lessons delivered by successful implementations of social media is that leadership sets the tone.

This week, Canadians experienced first hand the tone set by one of the highest profile social media success stories: President Barack Obama. The integration of social media into his campaign has been well documented, famously broadening his capacity to make a powerful connection with people.

His desire to touch hearts and minds was captured by a quotation splashed in several Canadian newspaper headlines: “I love this country.”

One of the experts on Obama’s use of new technology is Barry Libert, co-author of Barack, Inc. Libert was a presenter in a webinar hosted by enterprise social media vendor Mzinga the day before Obama’s Canadian visit.

Libert noted that Obama frequently tells adoring crowds that “I love you back,” recognizing his responsibility to make a personal connection with the multitude that follows him. He knows that touching their hearts and minds is necessary in order to build a culture of connection.

Obama’s success demonstrates that successfully utilizing social media tools requires that culture, strategy and technology integrate seamlessly, observed Libert, meaning that social media is fundamentally a leadership issue because it’s not about enabling technology, it’s about building a culture and assigning strategic goals.

While it would be inappropriate for most business leaders to say I Love You to the people they lead—the statement could potentially result in remedial diversity training—every business leader should be thinking about the culture of connection they must establish with their employees, and evaluating how emerging technology can enable them to do so more efficiently.

Are they taking on this responsibility by setting an affectionate tone toward social media? When it comes to measuring attitudes of IT leadership, the answer is no. A majority of CIOs are ignoring the potential benefits that Intranet 2.0 offers their organization.

Obama’s campaign redefined political leadership, and business leaders are absorbing the lessons provided by Libert and others. While we shouldn’t expect them to lead off meetings by declaring their love for staff, we shouldn’t be surprised if more of them establish a connection with their own blog, or even allow staff to connect with each other through a social networking tool.

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Most business people understand that they can never stop learning and seeking new ideas for their business. And the most successful ones grasp the need to seek those learning opportunities from expected sources—such as conferences and business journals—as well as from unexpected ones, such as other industries. They also know that in today’s economy, the Internet will play a vital role in that learning process.

I was reminded of this lesson while preparing my presentation for last weeks’ International Prepress Association’s Technical Conference in Chicago. In a session called “Leveraging Technology to Grow Your Business,” I’d been asked to provide business owners and senior technical managers with ideas on how to do exactly what the title suggested. That could sound like a challenge, if one’s understanding of the growth opportunities for output service providers stops at the headline: “Print is Dead! Long Live the Internet!”

To help prepare for the session, I dusted off the March, 2005 copy of Harvard Business Review, which contained an article called “MarketBusting: Strategies for Exceptional Growth.” The article featured a small case study on a printer called Madden Communications. That company had pursued one of the article’s suggested strategies—changing its unit of business from selling a product to selling a product-service mix—and had achieved great success.

The magazine described how Madden used a combination of customer insight, strategic planning and operational execution to make the transition and achieve impressive business results: “Madden’s revenues grew from $10 million in 1990 to $133 million in 2004, in an industry thought by many to be hopelessly mature.”

The last line, of course, is an elegant way of saying “Print is dead.” But HBR was able to look past that simple statement and see a company that had a lesson to offer for any businessperson willing to learn.

And anyone who wants to learn more about Madden can check out their website, which offers a strong example in how to connect a company’s online presence to their business strategy, notably the core competencies page which states: “Madden has transformed what were transactionally siloed steps into an integrated retail solution that we manage better than anybody else. This integrated solution process is our service.”

(Washington, DC) The inaugural Transformation + Innovation finished here yesterday. The event, organized by Nathaniel Palmer, promised that “participants will learn the most up-to-date strategies, techniques, and technologies for SOA, Leveraging Open Source, Enterprise Architecture Modeling and Modernization as well as Best Practices for BPM and Process Optimization.”

Given the event’s strong attendance, that promise resonated with its audience, and more importantly, it was delivered according to the attendees with whom I spoke. They also credited Nathaniel for ensuring that the senior IT staff attending the event had the opportunity to understand the management implications created by collaborative technology like blogs, wikis and RSS.

Attendees could learn about these issues in my presentation, “Leveraging Social Software and the Technologies of Web 2.0.” We enjoyed lively interaction in the session, especially around the generation gap relating to the usage of social software.

A number of heads nodded when I put up the famous quotation by Max Planck, father of quantum physics: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Planck’s observation is relevant to social software, because as Prescient’s President, Toby Ward, has blogged: CIOs don’t respect social media. Their adoption rate and, more significantly, personal usage of these tools trails that of the MySpace generation, who now spend an average of 1 hour and 22 minutes a day using their computer for social networking. This usage contrasts to the 51% of CIOs for whom social networking has “no interest/not on radar screen,” according to the CIO Magazine study that Toby references.

A participant in the session provided an excellent reason for why this generation gap must be taken very seriously by the senior IT people who decide what technology an organization’s employees can use within its environment. Not only was she a senior manager in a large high tech firm, she also lectures at an engineering college. Each year, she hands the graduating students a form they can use to evaluate prospective employers, with a key criteria being the technology they make available for online learning and social networking.

Every manager is, or should be, aware that winning the competition for talent is a critical success factor today. It would be a shame for an organization to lose this battle because its CIO is ignoring the world outside her server room.

Credit goes to Nathaniel for keeping social networking on the radar screen for attendees at his conference, and to the participants in my session who are deploying the technology to good use in their companies, but always looking for ways to do it better.

One always has to be careful when using the word “never,” but I can say with confidence that our clients never initiate an Internet strategy without considering how they will manage the groups of people who will be affected by the initiative, particularly the team developing the plan and the users of the sites.

Given the wealth of information about the role people play in developing the Internet—notably usability studies and the detailed metrics generated by all sites—everyone understands the need to factor the human element into their Web strategy. Likewise, books like The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy and Performance have ensured that very few organizations undertake any critical strategic process without incorporating people into the equation.

But while all organizations think about managing groups, the Internet is increasing the need to think about managing individuals. Organizations must be aware that a single customer can spark a raging customer service firestorm with one well-written blog. They must also challenge and engage each knowledge worker, who works on a computer linking her to the addictive wonders of the Internet or, even worse, job search sites.

Whenever we talk about individuals, of course, we have to start with ourselves, which Peter Drucker did when he wrote his excellent article on managing oneself. In it, he puts the Internet into humbling context for those of us who make our living by singing its praises.

“In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”

After frightening us in the opening lines, Drucker offers reassurance by providing insights into how to become prepared for the challenge. And interestingly, one piece of advice forms a strong backbone for initiating an Internet strategy, because it describes how to combine both the effective management of human resources with the opportunity to challenge smart people with the phenomenal appeal of Internet technology.

“Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good,” writes Drucker. “They place people—and allow people to place themselves—according to their strengths. The historic shift to self-management offers organizations four ways to best develop and motivate knowledge workers:

• Know people’s strengths.
• Place them where they can make the greatest contributions.
• Treat them as associates.
• Expose them to challenges.”

Like most great business advice, this is simple to say and hard to do. But we can only hope that after receiving this counsel, organizations never initiate an Internet strategy without considering how they will manage the groups of people who will be affected by the initiative, but also understanding how best to follow Drucker’s four tips for developing and motivating knowledge workers when creating the plan.

During my summer vacation this year, I enjoyed two seemingly unrelated activities that rolled into one important strategic lesson: I did a few dives in British Columbia, and re-read Larry Bossidy and Ron Charan’s outstanding book Execution. The lesson came together from a phrase that is drilled into scuba divers: “plan the dive and dive the plan.”

The slogan is important for divers to remember when entering a dangerous element in which their survival depends on a limited supply of air and the fact that the deeper they go, the faster they deplete air and the slower they need to ascend. The environment also contains numerous distractions, which can either draw you deeper than you intended or make you lose track of time. Hence the need to plan carefully—factoring in the planned depth and the number of safety of stops required on the ascent—and the discipline to stick to the plan, regardless of the interesting marine creature you might spot, 20 feet deeper than planned, when your air is running low.

The connection to Execution? The great value of their book is that Bossidy and Charan stress the importance of a rigorous strategic planning process, which must result in a clear and realistic plan, as well the corporate-wide discipline to execute the plan. In other words: plan the dive and dive the plan. The book’s sub-title is “the discipline of getting things done,” and Bossidy, the CEO of Honeywell, explains why he places a premium on accountability and the role it plays in creating a culture of discipline: “I start with the premise that your higher quality people want to be held accountable, because it gives them an opportunity to display their performance. To do that, I try to give them clear objectives and goals, so they can be measured against those objectives and goals at the end of the period, and they can demonstrate that they've been accountable.”

For divers, the pressure gauge on the air tank provides the measurable statistic and the water supplies the accountability. For business people, there is no equivalent leading indicator to a pressure gauge nor are there business penalties similar to running out of air 60-feet below the surface. The absence of such incontestable metrics and consequences may be why we’ve all experienced “deadline creep” or witnessed plans re-written mid-way through the quarter because none of the milestones have been attained.

Of course, there are consequences for companies who fail to achieve their objectives, and in Execution Bossidy and Charan point out that many organizations struggle with the gap between goals and results. They develop great ideas and bold plans, but then don’t follow through properly. In other words, they plan the dive and then don’t dive the plan.

In the author’s view, planning the dive requires a great strategy that comes together block-by-block and is in synch with the realities of the marketplace, the economy, the competition, and the company's resources. Diving the plan means creating a realistic operating plan, with specific programs and actions and clear accountability. Such a plan breaks down the long-term goals into short-term targets that will force hard decisions to be made across the organization.

In Prescient’s experience, exactly the same process and discipline applies to creating a great Internet strategy. We provide our clients with rigorous methodology to plan their site, and clear milestones to follow in order to achieve a great site. In other words, we help them plan the dive, and show them how to dive the plan. But the sites have turned out to be great because the clients had the discipline to execute the plan, despite interruptions and competing priorities. That’s important because just as a diver can’t deny that she’s out of air, a company can’t deny that its highly visible Web site is underperforming.

Respect the Competition

Andre Agassi’s run at the U.S. Open has provided a topical reminder of a key strategic lesson: never underestimate your competition.

In an interview, Agassi recalled preparing to meet a then-19-year-old Pete Sampras in the 1990 U.S. Open Final. Having beaten Sampras easily in their previous encounters, the brash Agassi told his coach: “I feel sorry for him. I’m going to keep making him hit balls until he implodes.” As all tennis fans know, Sampras demolished Agassi to win his first of 14 Grand Slam titles. And as even casual sports fans know, Agassi has since lost that cocky attitude, along with his mane of hair, and is now an intense competitor, but one who always respects his opponent.

A Safe Little Experiment?

With Steve Jobs announcing the new iPod nano and Motorola Rokr E1 cellphone, we have another topical reminder of the same lesson, but this time from the business pages.

In a useful discussion on Apple’s strategy, Business Week On-line notes that: “When Apple unveiled its first iPod in Oct. 2001, the market was a smattering of little-known devices used mostly for playing songs illegally downloaded off file-sharing Web sites. That's one reason why the music labels agreed to CEO Steve Jobs' plan to sell their music for just 99 cents a song. Besides, with Apple's anemic 3% PC market share, few record execs figured Jobs would be able to win over anyone other than his loyal base of Mac buyers. It would be a safe little experiment, letting music execs learn about the market while Apple picked up most of the tab.”

To paraphrase Business Week: Ooops.

Apple has sold half a billion digital songs and now claims 85 percent of the world market for digital music sales. As a result the record executives are suffering from the inflexibility of the 99 cents pricing model and cheering for other players who might be able to knock Apple off its leadership perch.

It’s easy to understand how a cocky young athlete could dismiss a competitor, especially one he’s easily handled in the past. But should we be surprised that seasoned executives would make the same mistake? Not really, because it happens all the time.

In the case of the record executives, it’s easy to understand how the error happened. Apple wasn’t a traditional competitor, so they lacked the insight into the computer manufacturer that they would have regarding players in their own market. For example, they did not grasp the significance of Apple’s strong competencies in usability, elegant design and great advertising, and the impact that strength would have in a market dominated by hip, tech-savvy consumers. Instead, they took a cursory look at easily accessible data—i.e. marketshare—and dismissed Apple as a threat.

Gain the tools to evaluate competitors

Unfortunately, we constantly see examples of business leaders who either fail to analyze their competition at all, or only give them a superficial glance. It’s a surprising error, especially when developing an Internet strategy, because competitors make all the necessary information readily accessible on their own sites!

Much like the record executives who lacked the methodology and knowledge to assess thoroughly the risk posed by Apple, many companies don’t have the tools necessary to properly evaluate competitors when developing an Internet strategy.

The thorough competitive benchmarking methodology and SWOT analysis that form the basis for our strategic recommendations, for example, consistently elicit positive feedback from our clients. They not only receive valuable insight about how they stack up, they often appreciate the reminder that they need to evaluate the competition.

For example, The Ontario Realty Corporation (ORC) strategically manages one of Canada’s largest real estate portfolios: over 6,000 buildings, comprising more than 50-million square feet of space, and 95,000 acres of land on behalf of the Ontario government. ORC has moved away from providing direct services to becoming a strategic manager of services with web-enabled communications being a key enabler. Therefore, their website needed to be able to fulfill this mandate, and they retained Prescient Digital Media to assist with the strategy.

ORC saw tremendous value in our competitive benchmarking strategy, which enabled them to make improvements to their strategy and incorporate valuable enhancements to the resulting site. Their Internet strategy has played a key role in attaining their overall objective  of becoming an innovative, service-oriented and customer-focused organization; in essence, becoming a “digital enterprise.”

For organizations like the ORC, the intent came before the methodology. Unfortunately, too few organizations have the intent and, unlike Agassi, learn to respect and truly analyze their competition. This is surprising when you consider that they don’t have the option of staying fit and waiting for their nemesis to retire, an approach that has allowed Agassi to continue his remarkable career. Along with his mature respect for the player across the net, of course.