Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Not too long ago, as I was putting the final touches on a client presentation, I stumbled across a surprising observation. The best insights in my report didn’t emerge in my office, during conference calls, or at meetings. They somehow appeared in the bathroom.

Research on the nature of creativity suggests my experience isn’t all that unique. Often, the most effective way of solving a difficult problem is simply walking away. The moment we allow ourselves to disengage from the individual pieces of a puzzle is the moment a solution appears. It’s why Albert Einstein regularly went sailing and why Charles Darwin planned his day around a countryside stroll. Thomas Edison simply napped.

In many ways, problem solvers are like artists. Taking a few steps back provides painters with a fresh perspective on their subject, lending them a new angle for approaching their work. Problem solving follows a similar recipe, but it’s not always the physical distance that we need. It’s psychological distance; mental space for new insights to bloom.

In a world where finding solutions makes up the crux of a typical workday, we are all artists. Cognitive artists. And to deliver our best work, we need revitalizing breaks. Distancing ourselves from our work grants us a broader view, activating a global perspective that precedes breakthrough.

So, why the bathroom?

If you’re like most office employees, access to sailboats, the countryside and a relaxing couch is in short supply. A walk to the bathroom is one of the few opportunities you have for disengaging, letting go of trivial details and refocusing on the bigger picture–even Steve Jobs recognized the bathroom’s potential, insisting that Pixar only build two in its studios, to provide employees with maximum enforced mixing. Neurologically, it is during these moments away from your desk the right hemisphere of your brain comes to life, making you more appreciative of the forest and less sensitive to the trees.

While most of us give little thought to our workplace bathroom, there’s good reason to believe it can have an impact on the quality of the work we produce — especially in organizations that rely on creativity and problem solving to stand out. Over the past decade, studies have shown that both our thoughts and behaviors are heavily influenced by our surroundings, in ways we often fail to recognize.

A few examples:

• The sound of classical music makes consumers spend more money
• The smell of cookies makes shoppers more likely to help a stranger
• The sight of red hurts intellectual performance but improves physical performance

Psychological findings like these are now commonplace, pointing to one irrefutable fact: Our environment shapes our thinking in powerful ways.

Which brings up some intriguing questions: How can we make the most of our time away from our desks? Is there a way of designing bathrooms to make them more inspiring? And what can organizations do to maximize the insights its employees get out of each bathroom visit?

Recent research on the science of creativity provides some helpful suggestions.

Rethink Muzak

One of the ways we become more creative is by exposing our minds to a broad variety of stimuli. The wider the selection of information you mentally digest–whether it be foreign movies, experimental novels or exotic travel–the more remote associations you’ll have in your arsenal. Or, in laymen’s terms, the more creative you’ll be.

Hearing unusual music primes us to think different–inspiring ideas, emotions and experiences that increase the associations active in our brain.

Surprise The Senses

 Another creativity nugget: We tend to find more insightful solutions to a problem when we’re in a good mood. One method experimentally proven for improving people’s moods is enjoyable scents. Positive scents don’t just make us feel better–they lead us to set higher goals for ourselves and experience a greater sense of self-efficacy.

Now, if you’re like most people, the restroom isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of positive scents, and partly that’s because of how hard custodians work to mask negative smells, leaving most bathrooms feeling like an assault on the senses. But in our case, that’s a good thing. It means the bar for surprising people with positive scents is that much more accessible. A few opportunities for enhancing the scent of a workplace bathroom: unusual soaps, exotic candles, and the hallway outside a bathroom, boosting people’s mood before and after a visit.

Encourage Mental Stimulation

Part of what makes bathroom visits a boon to creativity is that they represent one of the few times during the workday when our physiological attention is directed inward, mimicking the psychological experience of insight. But it’s not just inward attention that’s needed–it’s inward attention in the context of fresh ideas.

Think about the last time you saw graffiti in the bathroom. Chances are, not only did you read it, you probably thought about the person who wrote it, perhaps wondering what (the hell) was going through their mind. We can’t help but think about the things we see, but we can choose what we look at. Providing a diet of mentally stimulating material in workplace bathrooms can be done in a number of ways: posting unusual artwork, leaving out thought provoking magazines or using digital picture frames to keep the imagery fresh. The key is for the material to be stimulating and indirectly related to work you do.

Once upon a time, going to the bathroom was a distraction. Something that kept us from work; an unfortunate bodily shortcoming that compromised efficiency. But that world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, our economy is powered by an engine of insight. Creativity in the workplace isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s what keeps companies in business. Which is why it’s ironic that most office bathrooms offer a bleak and unwelcoming environment. One that discourages insight and implicitly chides us to get back to our desks.

There’s just one problem. Creativity doesn’t work that way.

And if the science has taught us anything about the creative process it’s this: Finding unexpected solutions often requires an unexpected approach. Why not start in the bathroom?

Image: Flickr user Christophe Verdier

I’m a self-confessed entrepreneur with all the trappings of bootstrapping, scaling grand ideas, and being an early adopter. And I am also a big believer–in interns.

Internship programs have gotten a lot of flack of late. They are not free labor. They shouldn’t be treated as such, and quite frankly, they aren’t anyway. Management is time, which equals money. ”Returns” (people seeking second careers) and interns can be an amazing, long-term asset to your company. They can save you thousands or even millions of dollars.

We have more than 10 returnships and internships at UniversalGiving, and we’ve found it to be a very positive experience. It’s our goal to provide them a great work environment, ownership, management guidance and a positive atmosphere. We also achieve many of our goals through them. It turns out to be very productive for both.

First, interns are not about age or recent grads. These days, people are soul-searching. We’re talking about forty- and fiftysomethings wanting to find a way to contribute with impact, and ideally meaning, at your company. We call these “returnships.” Some are not sure what they want to do and would like to try out a new skill. Others are trying out our industry. Some simply need a kind, structured, productive environment while seeking employment. Some just need a break.

Our solution: We give them all great experience and put them right to work. Even if they eventually decide it is not for them, they have learned a lot, and we have benefited. We organize the tasks so that they build to our goals. Those who move past “Level 1″ of marketing research, for example, might be advanced to handling marketing partnerships. In essence, whether it is employees, interns, or volunteers, good management and proper delegation per each skill level is essential.

Yet what’s really critical is that often our interns are a feeder to employment: They might “graduate” to consultant and then to employee. We see this often, and it’s mutually determining the following: Is this a good “professional marriage”?

It allows both parties to see if the skills fit, and if the values fit. Someone could be talented yet not enjoy our culture, or we might not feel alignment. Rather than try to determine a good fit by interviews (and some people are great at interviewing, but not necessarily great for the job), we both get practical experience working together.

If you aren’t convinced interns are the way to go, or you think they are too much time, you might want to rethink. The cost of a wrong hire can be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars. You’ve spent the time training, then there is a vacuum in your organization when they go. You’ve spent 3, 4, 6 months of your employees’ time (= expensive) getting someone up to speed. Then your employees need to get someone new up to speed. But first, they have to begin the rehiring process, again. More money. More time. More weight on the organization.

And don’t forget the morale cost. This is where it is most heavy on the team, and we have to be considerate of our people. We should respect the energy and investment of their time.

To spell it out, the typical costs of recruiting and hiring, according to GradStaff, are:

$5,700 – $8,900: Average amount to recruit for an entry-level position

$1,000 – $1,500: Average amount to train a new employee

$5,700 – $8,900: Cost of second recruitment round

$1,000 – $1,500: Cost of second training round

The total morale cost depends on how many people were affected, but suffice it to say it’s significant.

So contribute to the bottom line by cultivating returnships and internships as part of your team. Grow these contributors, embrace them, and help them succeed. Within a matter of weeks, they can be inspired and reach their goals, while also making a measurable impact on your work. For proof’s sake, our top two leaders started out in “returnships.” They were seasoned executives returning to a new career path, and are now fully on staff.

Statistics Source: GradStaff

Image: Flickr user Blip ou Bruno Veloso

When you wake up in the morning, you check your emails, probably from your phone. First thing. Yes? Why?

There’s no good answer to why. Even brain surgeons can wait until they’ve done other things before checking in on the world outside of your immediate proximity. So why do you do it? Because it’s a habit, a pattern.

Do you read the top tech and marketing blogs? Why? Why do you read this blog? Because you’re subscribed? Are you getting something from it? If no, then why are you still doing it?

Twitter and Facebook are hugely pattern-driven. They thrive off the same game dynamics as slot machines. Hit with even a small win every once in a blue moon, and you’ll reinstate that pattern incessantly. In the slot machine and gaming industry, they know that they can bleed you out of all the money you might spend with this method. They even have a term for it: “time to expire.” They look at you as a clock running down.

Breaking Patterns Is A Starting Point to Success

If you want to find great success, learn to recognize your programming, to assess whether it’s actually doing something useful for you, and then to break the pattern. This works with all things. Julien Smith asked me why I blogged daily. I said something lame and forgettable. He asked me to try blogging less than daily. Result: just as much traffic, just as much engagement, and probably better posts for you to read.

I’m moving my pride and joy, my free newsletter from Tuesdays to Sundays, because I’ve decided that I like the concept of the intimacy of being in a conversation with you on Sunday. It’s a break from my previous pattern, and I will see whether it yields better results for my goals.

Deciding to unfollow most everyone on Twitter was a huge shift and a break in my pattern. From it, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve reclaimed some needed cycles.

What Are You Missing?

One of the biggest reasons we do a bunch of the things we do, especially online, is for fear that we’ll miss something. When eBay first came out, its explosive growth came from the ability to watch auctions spool out in real time. Twitter is like that, and so is Facebook and Google+. We love watching information roll past in real time. Further, we really love it if people reply to us, or share our stuff, or like or whatevers. We crave it.

When we are alone, we start worrying that we’re missing something. We check our phone for phantom texts. If nothing we regularly follow is updating fast enough, we might go off and scan things of lesser value, just to see something new.

But why? What’s the big value in that particular kind of “new?”

There are so many patterns you can break. Your choice of snack. Your choice of after-work activity. Your choice of online haunts. Your reading materials. Your target goals for your efforts. Your lack of planning. Your over-abundance of planning. Your reliance on the calendar. Your disregard of the calendar.

What patterns could you break? Which patterns are you missing? What are you doing on autopilot and is that serving you? How much time and opportunity can you get back by breaking some of these patterns?

There are an estimated 1,000 vacant buildings in the Netherlands. For a small country, that number is massive and has sparked debate among Dutch architects for years. In fact, the country’s contribution to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale was a massive model of the thousands of empty buildings that dot the country’s landscapes. “Why is there so much unused architecture in the Netherlands?” asked the curators.

When Rotterdam- and Paris-based firm Ooze accepted a commission to build an addition to a suburban Rotterdam home in 2009, they hoped to address the debate animating their peers. Their client’s existing home, which was built in the early 20th century and added to in 1991 and 2003, was a Frankenstein of styles and structures. What would have horrified many architects struck Ooze’s partners as an opportunity: to utilize pre-existing architecture, while pushing forward their goals as contemporary architects.

Strict limits on the footprint of Ooze’s expansion meant they were forced to consider unusual paths toward increasing the home’s square footage. Instead of building up a new structure, the addition wraps around the load-bearing members of the original house, increasing the home’s volume while controlling the footprint. The new volumes sit atop the old home like a faceted hat.

Ooze’s client, Gaby, was concerned with preserving what she called the “soul” of the original patchworked house. The language of the addition–prefab timber faced with stained black panels and sedum green roofs–is a deliberate mashup of Dutch farmhouse vernacular and new generative techniques. But the architects claim the folded structure is anything but formal. “It’s not an object,” writes photographer Jeroen Musch. “It’s a collection of very comfortable spaces.”

The addition is sweetly unapologetic for its alien appearance, as if it alighted on the site after taking a shine to the pre-existing home. “We’re convinced that reclaiming the past is a form of discovery,” say Ooze principals Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg, “away from the tabula rasa, towards a more sustainable way of enriching our environment.

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

More than ever, innovation is a real, tangible competency at many Fortune 500 companies, which are investing substantially in their innovation capabilities to build new businesses, explore new technologies, and find new avenues to creating value. However, for every company that has produced substantial impact through innovation, there are many others that have struggled to produce real results. Tempted by the hope of disruptive products and beyond-the-core growth, less successful business leaders discover that making innovation happen at a large company is harder than they imagined. After a few years–usually three–they find that their budgets are dramatically cut and their priorities realigned. In some cases, their entire innovation structures are eliminated.

What separates the great innovation organizations from the good ones? Simply put, it’s the ability to account for what I call the “pipeline paradox.”

The Innovation Pipeline

The traditional graphical depiction of an innovation pipeline is a funnel. The wide end is filled with lots of different ideas, which through a series of stages and gates, get distilled down to just a few worthy ones–the ones that emerge at the end of the funnel.Because of this mental model, innovation leaders tend to place disproportionate emphasis on finding the big idea. They hire staff with fuzzy front-end skillsets. They do cross-company brainstorms and buy market research. They may even buy a dedicated idea-management system to collect ideas.

After substantial time and effort, these idea-focused innovation leaders eventually alight on a few concepts with great potential. But then what happens? These same innovation leaders discover they must overcome the pipeline paradox.

What Really Happens

Once a company decides on the ideas it wishes to pursue, it must invest more time, people, and strategic thinking to get them to market; this inverse relationship between number of ideas and the amount of resources is the pipeline paradox.

Too often, companies make substantial investments in finding new ideas but fail to allocate enough resources and staffing on graduating projects beyond the funnel and ensuring they can be easily integrated into a business unit. As a result, a lot of ideas get suspended in the middle of the pipeline.

By the time an idea leaves the innovation pipeline, it should be market-ready. The marketing plan needs to be established; details around manufacturing and operations must be aligned; partner and channel implications need to be addressed. Failure to account for this transition increases the likelihood that an innovation group identifies great ideas but produces few tangible results.

A Path Forward

To better account for the pipeline paradox, corporate innovators should follow these steps:

1.) Begin with the end in mind.

Over 20 years ago, Steven Covey stated in his first Seven Habits book that starting with the end goal is crucial for highly effective people. This is equally true for successful innovation pipelines. From the very beginning, think about what it will take for the idea to become a business. Which functions need to be involved in scaling the business? Where will the staffing and resources come from?

2.) Be clear about the goals of your pilot.

Although all innovators know the value of piloting, truly savvy innovators are explicit about the goals of their pilots. They know what assumptions they are testing for and they are thoughtful about building the pilot around those assumptions. The next time you set up a pilot, be sure to ask yourself, “What is the smallest, lowest cost way to obtain the greatest validation about my key assumption?” By answering this question, you will build a great pilot; or even better, you may discover that a smaller-scale (and lower-cost) study is more appropriate.

3.) Figure out a way to turn a profit in the short term.

As a corporate innovator, it can be very tempting to say to yourself, “In five years, this idea could be a $100 million business.” Avoid this type of thinking. All companies, especially public corporations, are judged by quarterly results. Your boss won’t have five years to show results, and neither will you. As you build out your innovation and get closer to the end of pipeline, be proactive about identifying near-term ways to monetize the innovation. Making money in the near term is a sure way to earn your group the right to think about the long term.

And One More Thing . . .

Steve Jobs famously said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” When it comes to creating breakthrough products and services, corporate innovators can be great at designing the ideas. In many ways, the idea generation and screening is the more exciting part of innovation. But a lot of hard work is required to figure out how the design should work, and that means devoting time and resources to guarantee its success.

Top image: Volodymyr Krasyuk/Shutterstock

This post was written in April 2012. I’m just dating it so we can check in later and see if it’s still good. Yes, like a freshness date.

If I were a business person looking to understand how to use various digital channel making tools to build up my business, where would I start? What’s the right mix of tools to make this all make sense and work? What would I be able to accomplish? How would I work it all together? What would I do with my time?

Starting: Goals

For most businesses, I recommend using the human digital channel to promote media making, sales or memberships, and community/customer service functions. No matter the size of your organization, these are three baseline functions that should matter to you. The goals, then of those three functions are: exposure/awareness/helpful information, more sales or potential future sales, and any functions that will improve an existing customer’s experience with your business.

I’ll recommend some starting points for technology to point you in the right direction.

Starting: The Ecosystem: A Blog-Based Website

For media making, a blog makes a great tool for creating organic search engine optimization. It makes for a good “home base” for your online efforts. It provides a simple site infrastructure to let you build a website. You don’t HAVE to use your blog to write periodical updates and posts. I run several websites built on blogs that aren’t at all for posting or writing. They’re business sites for sales and sales only. But technology-wise, the blog software I recommend is an inexpensive/easy way to get onto the web. And in this case, I’m recommending a blog for media making.

I’d start with a blog running WordPress. Over the years, I’ve used several other platforms, often times the free ones where I just show up, pick a theme, and get going. I no longer recommend that. Here’s what I’m running on my sites and projects right now.

I highly advocate a simple custom theme like those provided by StudioPress (affiliate link). This site’s theme is Generate theme. I would pay for hosting based on the quality of service. For most of my sites, I use InMotion Hosting (affiliate link), who fixed a problem for me about an hour before I wrote this post. Inside of WordPress, I’m also running the Premise sales page maker (affiliate link). This helps me make very simple sales landing pages when I need them, and saves me a lot of time. One quick thing about setting up a blog: immediately make sure it’s equipped with either a dynamic mobile html theme (Genesis has many of these) or use some kind of plugin to ensure a great experience on mobile. I use wptouch on this blog to allow for that.

I would set up accounts to host and post video and audio. At present, I recommend YouTube primarily for video, because it’s not only simple, but it’s the #2 search engine in the world. If you want a second recommendation, I also really like Vimeo. For audio, I really like Soundcloud. I’m using it mostly for my music right now, but I also have used it for recording spoken word bits about business, and it works well, embeds well, and exists on several mobile devices.

Starting: The Ecosystem: Email Service Provider

Now that we’ve got the blog mostly set up, I want to move on to email marketing. I use InfusionSoft (affiliate link), which is a very robust and powerful email service provider. It might be a bit much for most people starting out. At the starting level, I’m a fan of both Constant Contact and Mailchimp. Many other people swear by Aweber. I think they’re great, too, but haven’t used them much personally.

Why have an email solution? Because it’s more intimate than interactions on social networks. It’s a way to maintain relationships with people. And no matter what you read about people switching more and more to social networks and SMS as a means of communication, email is still the backbone of the internet. Swing by chrisbrogan.com and you’ll see my email capture form top and FOREMOST on my site. I live by this.

Starting: The Ecosystem: Outposts

I consider the social networks to be outposts. By this, I mean that you do a lot of communicating and connecting on these sites, but never should you consider them primary to your business assets. They are tools to help you do many things, and though you must keep a gentle hand, your foremost goal is whatever you’ve mentioned above. Is it sales? Then sales might START on a social network, but you need them back to the home base to have that transaction.

Which networks do I find work best for business? Your mileage will vary. Here are some thoughts:

• Twitter – this is the serendipity engine. It’s brief, weird, shouldn’t work, and yet, it’s brought me more business than any other platform.
• Google+ – the new guy on the block. I read more blog posts telling me this network is failing. It’s growing daily, backed by a vastly wealthy and interested-in-its-success company, and widely integrated into several of the top 100 visited websites we all use. I wouldn’t bet against it.
• Facebook – I have never ever been successful selling on Facebook. It makes for a good community management page. There are many customer service functions that it can do well. I’ve never moved a single dollar from Facebook into any bank of mine.
• Pinterest – talk about bleeding edge. This is a visual bookmarking site, widely reported to be unique because it’s very heavily adopted by women (a first in social networks). I think there’s a lot of there there. I’m not an expert on it yet, but especially if women were a key buying element of my business, I would learn fast, were I you.
• LinkedIn – I’ve come to this: LinkedIn has about 150 million users, of which maybe 5 million use the service well. So, I think it’s a great tool used poorly by over 90% of its users. It doesn’t work well for my business, but I’m told that a steady hand and patience works well here.

That’s it for the “primary” social networks, but know this: to me, the magic these days is in finding niche networks that might serve your business well. If you’re selling hammers, hang out with the contractors and don’t worry about Facebook. Where are they? Google away. That’s what we do.

Starting: The Ecosystem: Listening and Analytics

I believe that the bigger opportunities in developing the digital channel into a human digital channel that promotes relationship-based business comes from the proper use of listening tools and analytics packages. In the case of listening, there are hundreds of systems out there. The current industry standard, I would say, is Radian6. It’s out of some people’s price range, so I’d also recommend Trackur, which is pretty decent, too. For analytics, I really haven’t found the best tool. Most people give me tools that let me count worthless things like views or likes or retweets. I need something more meaty than that. Maybe you’ve got recommendations.

Starting: Wiring This Into Your Organization

First, no matter the size of your business, align the use of these tools with your goals. Then, align those goals with who within the company is responsible for satisfying them. If you have a few employees, and one is responsible for marketing, while another is responsible for customer service, be clear who then touches what to get which results. It’s strange to say, but where many companies get this all wrong is that they put “one phone on one desk” and think they’ve wired up an office.

While we’re on this, realize that you have to have a conversation about what a salesperson will do with a comment found or a tweet or whatever that points to a customer service issue. Likewise, if a customer service person hears a potential sales lead, have the explicit conversation about next steps. This is the kind of stuff that wrecks it all. If you’re a company of one, this won’t be so hard (tee hee).

If you track sales leads, make sure to add spots for things like “blog, twitter,” and whatever else you want. If you are measuring handling times on your customer service calls, or time to resolve, etc, then make sure you account for these new channels. In short: wire it all in.

Starting: Strategy

Simple strategies are all I’ll give you here. For instance, if you want to promote your great home improvement company, then shoot video walkthroughs of before-and-afters on homes you’ve worked on. Write up a blog post, inviting people to contact you for a free 10-point checklist blah blah blah. Promote the post on the social networks you’ve selected. Use your listening tools to see if anyone’s seeking out what you sell. This is the basics of the homebase+outpost strategy.

Another strategy is the “keep community warm” strategy. Maybe this comes in building out a Facebook presence, backed with an email list. In this, you create interviews with people in your buying community. You follow their successes. You praise them. You write posts that help them do even more with your products/services. You answer most comments. You respond to emails via your email list. Your “calls to action” are minimal, but maybe you track sales by region, and/or use your customer relationship management software to match people on the social channels with buyers.

Another strategy is the “fill the funnel” strategy. Whatever metric you use to get more sales, use your digital channel to get more people into that funnel. If people buy based on referrals, then get more referrals. (Read The Referral Engine to do this better.) If people respond after a 30 day trial, then guide people to that 30 day trial.

Beyond that, my company offers strategic advisory and we’d be happy to talk with you about your business needs.

Just the Beginning

This post is already pretty long. Let’s make this a good ending point for now. We’ve talked about some tools, some strategies, some potential stumbling points. You’ve got a lot to chew on, maybe a lot to start learning about.

But what did I miss? What are you wondering that I forgot to cover? What else can I do to help you paint this picture more vividly?