Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Guest post by Danna Vetter, VP, Consumer Strategies, ARAMARK

People laughed when we began talking about putting resources towards building a social structure for a company like ARAMARK. We heard it all:

The standard -
“We can’t open ourselves up to this kind of risk.”

The mean -
“You’re just trying to manipulate company perception.”

The ridiculous –
“No one wants to read tweets about hot dogs.”

If you don’t know, ARAMARK is a private, $13 billion global company that provides managed services (food, facilities, uniforms, etc) for clients in just about any imaginable environment and industry, including sports and entertainment, higher education, healthcare, as well as other general businesses and beyond. You might know us as the people that run the food service at your kid’s school. Or help manage your stay at a conference center. Or clean your room when you stay at the hospital. Or maybe you just know us from that aforementioned hot dog at the ball game.

In whatever the case, our employees work day and night to meet the needs of our clients and we meet them well. Sometimes we are tested by natural disaster or human tragedy like the trapped Chilean Miners. Or it could be any old fire drill our clients run us through –we are there for what our clients need and we make sure it happens. And as an “ingredient” brand that constantly works to get it right, we blend into our client’s environment and deliver on their mission with service results.

While our level of commitment has never changed nor has the expectations of our clients, what has is the consumer. Providing for the needs of today’s Connected Consumer has turned the service game on its head. It’s unlike any challenge we have ever seen. Sure, our businesses had dabbled in social media. Facebook page here, Twitter account there. But by not having a concerted social media effort and structure, we were striking out with an important segment of our consumers without coming to the plate. Ignoring the Digital Age, which has the consumer connected 24/7, would represent a huge opportunity cost. As Brian Solis often says, Digital Darwinism looms for all businesses. And by not connecting with this new consumer, we would be failing to deliver on those client expectations.

Coinciding with all this is the large, complex structure of our businesses, which are organized by industry segment. We have thousands of client locations and over 255,000 employees that work in different environments to meet different client goals and objectives. To create an enterprise strategy to connect with our consumers through social media would require a very thoughtful approach.

Social media, by nature, is alive, personal, and engaging. Anyone who has worked at a large, multi-business company knows that those descriptors of social media sometimes fly in the face of the more formal corporate culture. We are innovative, sure, but it’s a structured innovation. So, ARAMARK was never going to adapt to social media. We were going to have to adapt social media to ARAMARK.

And that’s what we did. We created a team that leads social media from the center of the organization. Our goals are to connect users managing social, consolidate resources, and share information. As you start to think about how you can fit social into your large organization, here are five areas to concentrate your efforts:

1. PEOPLE/COLLABORATION

Many of today’s corporations present fewer gaps of need wider than the one of collaboration. Getting internal employees to communicate and share information with each other is essential for success in today’s global workplace. To help champion social media across our organization, we turned to collaboration by creating a team of “social delegates” from across our businesses. The delegate was made responsible for helping draft their business’ social strategy, act as a point person for their community managers (those responsible for managing our social presence at each location) and become a social media expert.

We regularly hold social delegate meetings to discuss what is going on in social media across the company, what big industry issues have arisen, and to just connect and communicate about what we are all working on. To further the communication, we also have workspace on an internal social collaboration network that allows us to blog about best practices and thought leadership, share files and information, and create wikis to build a library of knowledge about this ever-changing media.

By having our social leads in tune with each other, they can work together to help solve problems, come up with better strategies, and learn new and important skills.

2. OBJECTIVES AND STRATEGIES

Social is not a one size fits all initiative. And a social media strategy, like any campaign effort, needs to be tied back to the business needs and objectives.

We started getting our businesses aligned with this thinking through needs assessment meetings with each of our business’ marketing leaders. As they built their objectives, we had them consider the audiences they are targeting and the goals they’re trying to meet. What comes out of this is the strategies needed to implement a consumer campaign, and then the social channels best capable of achieving success.

3. TRAINING

Developing social media strategies for all of our businesses made obvious a wide range of learning needs. So you can imagine how difficult it can be to train employees across the dispersed enterprise, considering we’re looking to empower thousands of employees from VPs of Marketing to front line managers, cashiers, cooks, etc. What we did was bucket the organization into three categories: Awareness users, Active users, and Expert users.

Awareness users are primarily the highest and lowest ranking members of the company that need to know the company is using social media and how and why this is becoming a part of the way we do business. Active users are the community managers that will represent the company on social channels. And Expert users are our social delegates, who represent our businesses in social and help develop social strategies.

We are working towards a comprehensive online library of “101” modules that focus on general social media and the primary social channels that make sense for our company (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). Our initial module, Social Media 101, was used as introductory training for all members of the company. More in-depth training, including live sessions, is developed based on the individual strategies and needs of the business. But we try to sustain the materials we create and use as much content across the enterprise as possible.

4. TOOLS AND RESOURCES

For a large segment of our company, social media was something they wanted to get involved in – they just didn’t know where to start. As we formed our center-led team, one of our primary goals was to provide the tools and resources so that the businesses could concentrate on doing their job, specifically creating the content that was going to help drive engagement within social channels.
We created a handbook on how to use social media for the organization, developed guides to build a social voice, and also put together a listening framework that identifies and manages conversations from the top to the bottom and vise versa.

We also got an enterprise license for a social media management system that allows our businesses to publish content, access analytics, and simultaneously manage multiple social channels. For the businesses, this really helps them manage their social users and campaigns. For the community managers, it allows them to operate their social channels in one place as well as share content, develop content calendars, and work within a hierarchical structure.

But the key theme here is rather than having multiple businesses in our company create their own resources and purchase their own licenses, we are able to centrally develop sustainable tools and resources that everyone leverages.

5. TEST AND LEARN

In a large company, you may only have one chance to prove a new idea is worthy. If it doesn’t meet or exceed expectations, that may be it. And as social media constantly evolves around us, getting it right is that much harder. At ARAMARK, we are a big believer in testing through pilot programs before larger rollouts. It’s not just the technology or the strategy that you’re testing out – it’s how your employees are able to adapt and implement those strategies with those technologies.

Once you find the right people to test with, create the goals and benchmarks that will give you the information that will demonstrate you met or fell short of success. And when the pilot is complete, you need to document your learnings and make adjustments to your strategy before you’re ready to launch.

That’s just a quick overview of the way we approached tackling the difficult process of organizing social media for a large company. We’ll go deeper into each of those five targeted areas in future posts here.

Always remember, if it is the right idea for your company, there’s a way to make it happen; no matter how crazy the idea or challenging the environment.

Building image credit: Shutterstock

After a mere 6 months on the market, Google released their first major redesign of Google+. If you check your profile now, you should see the latest version. And if your taste is anything like ours, you’ll agree that it feels better in just about every way.

Yes it’s on purpose. Yes we have things coming.

So what did the designers at Google actually do not just to make their product so much more beautiful, but so much more beautiful than Facebook? Co.Design talked to Google+ lead designer Fred Gilbert to unpack the subtle brilliance behind their awesome redesign–a redesign that was completed in less than two months–and his notes are are full of lessons that could hone the experience of almost any product.

“This is probably one of the most unflattering images of our site,” Gilbert tells me, referencing the old Google+ screengrab you see here. Gilbert had just snagged the image, literally as the company was pulling the aging pages from their servers. But it was worth sharing this unadorned before shot to prove a point.

The old Google+

The redesigned Google+

“There are blue links everywhere on the page. It’s very distracting. Also notice how all of our actions except for the +1 are all text. We’ve had users tell us, it looks like we’re doing math. It’s easy for the user and the content to disappear under all of this metadata.”

So the team focused on the absolute core of the Google+ experience, the users and the things they share. That might sound like generalized corporate cheese, but their solution was tied intrinsically to these two topics. Everything on Google+ is now rendered in black and white, except for user avatars and their media. “The only things that are colored on the page are people and their content. They’re the only things that should pop out to you,” says Gilbert. In this regard, Google+ becomes a tabula rasa for the things we value most.

But you can’t just create a minimal interface that’s soulless–not on a site intended to be social. While the Google+ team was removing link clutter, replaced a lot of blue text with iconography–all of which saw an overhaul to become more inviting than it had been in the past.

If someone wants to share that their mom has cancer, it has to work for that.

“You notice, all of our shapes, all of our logos, have been softened,” says Gilbert. “There’s a difference between building something like an appliance and building something for people. For people, you want to build an environment that’s friendly. To do that we made icons that were fun.” You’ll see it in more than the iconography, though. Even within the feed itself, Google+ created a subtle but powerful shift in tone by adding word bubbles around each story. They basically lifted an idea from comics, but presented it with enough formality that it’s casual without feeling hokey.

“You can go too far with this,” warns Gilbert, “because you want it to be a space where people can share things that are good and bad. If someone wants to come on and share that their mom or dad has cancer, it has to work for that.”

The new Google+ has larger photos and videos than before, which span almost edge-to-edge across user posts. People like pretty pictures, so the idea works. But in light of that fact, why not go even bigger with images? Google’s servers could easily push 800 or 1000-pixel-wide photographs to users across the world. So why didn’t they?

“We mocked up column designs that are wider than what you’re seeing,” says Gilbert. “There are problems with that. People write a lot on Google+, and when you pull text out too wide, it gets harder to read.” In an oversaturated market of social media networks, Google+ only has a few core features that make it truly unique. One of those features is most certainly the option to share just about however much text you like. Facebook and Twitter both impose substantial character limitations, but on Google+, users can publish longer, richer content.

Google+ would likely be more beautiful with larger images, but preserving the integrity of a core experience (fast scanning of potentially vast amounts of information) was more important than layering another layer of icing on the cake. Or, as Gilbert explains, matter-of-factly: “To optimize for quick consumption, this is the size that works for us.”

No online product will look the same in a year as it does today. That’s a good thing: The digital space iterates quickly. But how do you manage users who will be perpetually upset by change? How can you manage comfort alongside progress?

Don’t fear being incomplete. Your work will never be finished.

In anticipation of more changes to come, Google+ has started buying pants in a size too big. With their redesign, they moved core navigation from a squashed bar at the top of the page to its own massive ribbon on the lefthand side. “We had like five things at the top. These photos, profiles, circles, there was no way that could grow across the page. We couldn’t add newer features, all these cool things we have coming,” says Gilbert.

Yet, if there’s one thing that defines the Google+ redesign, it might be all this spaciousness–empty air–namely a massive, unbalanced void of white space on the righthand side of the page. “Yes it’s on purpose. Yes we have things coming,” laughs Gilbert. “And we’re moving as fast as we can to make those things happen.” In the digital world, there’s no reason to fear being incomplete. Because, if you’re doing your job right, your work will never be finished, anyway.

Image: NatUlrich/Shutterstock

NASA is planning to test a GPS-based system that could rapidly pinpoint the location and magnitude of earthquakes across the western U.S.

The Real-time Earthquake Analysis for Disaster (READI) uses real-time GPS measurements from nearly 500 stations in California, Oregon and Washington to quickly calculate the location, magnitude and other details about an earthquake.

The same system could also aid in faster disaster response for tsunamis, since it provides exactly the type of detailed data about an earthquake that’s needed to calculate the strength of a tsunami.

The system, which was first introduced in 2004, works by measuring ground displacements with high precision using GPS. The result is a far more rapid and accurate estimate of the earthquake’s strength compared to conventional seismic networks.

“By using GPS to measure ground deformation from large earthquakes, we can reduce the time needed to locate and characterize the damage from large seismic events to several minutes,” said Yehuda Bock, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Orbit and Permanent Array Center in La Jolla, California.

READI Mitigation Network will undergo testing throughout this year; if it proves to be successful, it will be used in various natural disaster detection agencies in the U.S.

The digital landscape continues to undergo a significant shift that will have profound effects on business this year. The challenge is that hardly any business leaders noticed. That’s not their fault however. Even through the impact of technology on business and consumer behavior was widely reported, in depth reports on what to do next or how this will affect their business specifically were scant at best.

I’m sure you heard it from “experts” everywhere, “You need a Facebook brand page! Why are you not on Twitter yet? Have you checked-in on Foursquare? Hurry up and get set up on Google+. If you don’t get on social media, you’re going to go out of business!”

And, here you are…still in business I presume. But like any keen business leader, you’re avidly thinking about your next move. You already know that running the show in a mode of “business as usual” is not only limiting, it’s terribly complacent. But if you are to change, you need to better understand exactly how technology is influencing the behavior of your customers and why.

The truth is that you can create brand pages on every social network you can imagine and you won’t succeed unless you know whom you’re trying to reach and where, what it is they expect and value, and how these channels represent a meaningful opportunity for you and your consumers to connect. You first must answer what’s in it for them and what’s in it for you.

What the social media gurus aren’t telling you is that the landscape for business isn’t changing because of social media, it’s changing because consumer expectations are evolving. Your customers are empowered through technology where social media becomes only part of the disruption. Social networks, smartphones, tablets, review sites, gamification, geo-location, et al. are producing a new breed of consumer and businesses are largely missing them altogether. In fact, the emergence of this more “connected consumer” is forcing the end of business as usual. And at the same time, the pattern of decisions these connected consumers make usher in an era of risk where any business, large and small is vulnerable to digital Darwinism – the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than the ability to adapt.

Your job is to not embrace new technology with arms wide open, but instead understand it and learn which disruptive technologies separate you from existing and potential customers. What’s unique about connected consumers is that they find and share information differently than their more traditional counterparts. They make decisions differently than the everyday consumers you’re used to engaging as well. But this part is the key, the connected do not displace your traditional customer, they simply expand your opportunity to grow your business. How you’re marketing, selling, and servicing customers today are largely missing this new breed of consumer and thus limiting your overall opportunity for growth.

To reach the connected consumer, you must first walk in their footsteps. It takes research not guesswork. It takes understanding not skepticism. And it takes a dedicated not generic or approximated approach. Why? Because while your traditional consumer relies on tangible media such as TV, radio, newspapers, direct mail, email, Google search or static websites, the connected consumer is not blindly seeking information, they are reliant on the right information finding them in the right places.

For example, your new prospective customer lives on their smartphones and tablets. They network with friends, family and the businesses they support in mobile and social networks. They check in to locations to signal to people nearby that they’re in the neighborhood and to alert businesses that they’re ready to interact live. Consumers install apps to better make decisions and to broadcast those decisions to their social networks. What’s more, they research products and services based on the experiences of their peers in real-time and in turn share their experiences with everyone else to shape and steer the experiences of others. In doing so they expand the idea of audiences to something far more efficient and expansive, an audience with an audience of audiences.

While it seems foreign or dismissible to those who are not actively embracing or even dependent on disruptive technology, connected consumers are only growing in size, magnitude and influence. Ignoring them is a step toward digital Darwinism. Understanding them and their behavior is a step toward relevance. In 2012, consider yourself a digital anthropologist or sociologist as you immerse in a day in the life of your connected consumer and seek to close the chasm between you and them. There are many professional analysts, researchers and strategists who can help you find the answers you seek.

Starting now and lasting well, forever, technology and empathy are now part of your business strategy. To what extent disruptive technology impacts your markets, will depend on your industry and the rate of adoption within it.

Your priority areas include understanding…

1. Social Networks from Facebook to Twitter to Google+ and how they’re connecting to influencers and businesses

2. Geolocation check-in services such as Foursquare and Facebook location updates to share locations and earn rewards or opportunities for discounts

3. Crowdsourced discounts and deals including Groupon and LivingSocial and what’s valued and why

4. Social commerce services like Shopkick and Armadealo and how they create personalized experiences that are worth sharing

5. Referral based solutions like Yelp, Service Magic, and Angie’s List to make informed decisions and how shared experiences can improve your business, products, and services

6. Gamification platforms such as Badgeville and Fangager, and why rewarding engagement improves commerce and loyalty

7. How your consumers using mobile devices today and what apps they’re installing. Also, how they’re comparing options, reviewing experiences and making decisions while mobile?

8. The online presence your business produces across a variety of platforms such as tablets, smartphones, laptops and desktops. You must realize how consumers are experiencing the online presences you create and whether or not they deliver a holistic and optimized experience for each platform.

9. The consumer clickpath based on the platform consumers are using. Are you steering experiences based on the expectations of your customers? And are you taking into consideration the device or network where the clickpath begins and ends? Are you integrating Facebook F-commerce and m-commerce into the journey?

10. The expectations of connected consumers, what they value in each channel and platform, where they engage and how your business can improve experiences and make them worthy of sharing.

This year and next are formidable years to solidify your position in how you compete for the future. Nowadays, no company is too big to fail or too small to succeed. Simply knowing your customer is one thing. But, understanding how they make decisions and participating in that process influences behavior while building meaningful relationships. Regardless of technology, the future of business isn’t created, it’s co-created. To succeed, it takes a culture of customer-centricity and the ability to recognize new opportunities and adapt based on what they present.

As Leon C. Megginson once said in paraphrasing Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

#AdaptorDie

Image credit: Shutterstock

Forget what the competition is planning: Apple does not envision the iPad and MacBook Air converging at any point in the near future.

Today, the company released its second-quarter financial results ($39.2 billion in revenue, $11.6 billion in net revenue), and despite selling 11.8 million iPads, Cook took time during an earnings call to discuss the potential threat of the PC and tablet spaces converging. Many expect Microsoft’s latest offering, Windows 8, to unite these two sides of the spectrum, making the tablet not a post-PC device, but just a PC in a different form. But Cook didn’t sound too concerned. “Anything can be forced to converge,” Cook said. “”You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are not going to be pleasing to the user.”

An analyst on the call broached the subject with Cook, suggesting that it’s almost inevitable that ultrabook and tablet experiences will be combined going forward. It’s a notion Microsoft has long subscribed to. “We view a tablet as a PC,” then-Windows Phone president Andy Lees said in July.

Apple, on the other hand, is living in the post-PC world, and fully expects the iPad to eclipse sales of the PC in volume. Cook boasted that the iPad has already sold 67 million units since launching in 2010; by comparison, it took Apple 27 years to sell that many Macs, five years to sell that many iPods, and three years to sell that many iPhones. In other words, the market for iPads is huge–just as Cook expects it to be for Macs for sometime to come.

Combining the two products–as is Microsoft’s aim with Windows 8–has its downsides. “The problem is that the converged products are about tradeoffs: You begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of day is not pleasing to anyone,” Cook said. “The tablet market is huge…I also believe that there is a very good market for the MacBook Air…But I do think it appeals to someone who has different requirements. You woudln’t want to put these things together because you are compromising both, and not pleasing either user.”

“Some people will prefer to have both together, but to make the compromise of convergence–we’re not going to that party,” Cook continued. “Others might, but we’re going to play them both separately.”

Despite the gloom surrounding its stock price of late, Apple delivered another blowout quarter on Tuesday, thanks in large part to iPhone sales. But if you took the iPhone out of the equation, the overall numbers were just OK as Macs had a so-so quarter and iPad sales fell on the low end of estimates.

Apple sold 11.8 iPads during the quarter, which was lower than the 12.3 million to 13.5 million units that analysts had been expecting. During Apple’s earnings call with analysts Tuesday afternoon, a few took the opportunity to grill Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and CEO Tim Cook on the matter. One question was whether the introduction of the $399 iPad 2 had hindered sales of the new iPad.

“We’re just learning about elasticity of demand,” Oppenheimer said. “The $399 iPad 2 is doing well, but the new iPad is on fire.”

Cook said he was “thrilled with the results we’ve seen,” since lowering the price of the iPad 2 to $399, though “it’s too early to come to a clear conclusion.” The cheaper iPad unlocked some education demand, Cook added.

Nevertheless, the numbers were a comedown from the 15.4 million sold in Apple’s fiscal first quarter, which benefitted from the holiday season. Cook and Oppenheimer didn’t offer any more reasons for the perceived shortfall. “The new iPad is on fire. We’re selling them as fast as we can make them,” Cook said. One possibility is that analysts based their estimates on the new iPad’s opening weekend, in which it sold 3 million units.

To be sure, Apple is selling a lot of the devices. Since debuting the iPad in early 2010, Apple has sold 67 million of them. As Cook noted, it took Apple three years to sell that many iPhones and 24 years to sell as many Macs.

Speaking of Macs, those sales were also on the low end of estimates and grew just 7% over the year-ago quarter. Cook said one major reason was that Q2 2011 was a big quarter for Macs. Sales grew 28% in that quarter as the rest of the PC industry posted single-digit gains.

“Yes, I think there was some cannibalization from iPad and the market is slow,” Cook said of Mac sales in the latest quarter. But the “primary factor,” he said, was those year-ago sales.

PowerPoint can be incredibly convincing when done well, but sitting through the much-maligned scourge of presentations is, all too often, mind-meltingly, sleep-inducingly, soul-crushingly, dull–not to mention completely ineffective. What makes this basic medium so difficult to master? Ravi Mehta, CEO of recently launched Slidevana, believes it’s a matter of understanding the format. “Unless you’re a graphic designer, you’re generally used to thinking in words and prose. PowerPoint is a type of visual communication; a lot of people go into it without shifting their perspective, which is why they can end with something that looks more like a teleprompter,” he tells Co.Design. His company aims to take the guesswork out of creating slides with a set of 150 templates–”a complete toolbox”–that will, in theory, help direct users to a more compelling means of getting their message across.

Mehta designed all the slides himself, but he is not a designer.* Instead, his experience comes from years in the tech industry, both giving and observing presentations in all their glory (or infamy). As for the design of the slides themselves? Well, they look pretty standard-issue. The key for Mehta is ease of use. “We present prefab slides so people can dive right in and start working on telling their story,” he says, stories that will either appeal to emotions, with image- or quote-based slides, or reason, with data-centric diagrams. In a conscious choice to cut down on unnecessary clutter, only two themes are offered: Dark, which suits dramatic keynote addresses in large, dimmed rooms, and Light, a better choice for more intimate roundtable talks or printed presos. Inserting your own content is done with an easy drag-and-drop, and it’s possible to customize throughout a deck.

One-time customers are able to access any new additions to the collection, and the service is offered for PowerPoint for both Windows and Mac, as well as Keynote. It would have been interesting to see what Mehta would have created in collaboration with a design professional to refine the format, because there’s certainly ample room for these PowerPoint presentations to improve their aesthetic appeal. And ultimately, to achieve the kind of professional transcendence implied in Slidevana’s company name, you’ll have to really distill your mission statement. “The most important part of the presentation is the moral,” Mehta says, and no pie chart in the world will help you fabricate that.

*Our advice: Hire a designer. Quickly. Because these things need a ton of work.–Ed.

Image: Jiri/Shutterstock