Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Guest post by Scott Forshay, creator and editor of mobi.luxe. Follow him on Twitter @scottforshay

There is no first, second, or third screen; there are only screens. Regardless of their uniqueness in form factor or function, these connected screens are simply humanized interfaces allowing us to communicate with and experience a digitally optimized world.

While much has been made of defining the distinctions between the various connected interfaces, be they mobile devices, tablets, connected television, etc., what’s been lost in the debates over how best to utilize each distinctly is how best to address the radical shift in digital user experience expectations and screen agnosticism. How do we address this fundamental shift from a technology-centric marketing model to one of experience centricity?

In ignoring this experience-driven (r)evolution, marketers and technologists alike have chosen the path of least resistance and created additional siloed channels for consumer engagement, dismissing the subtly nuanced gray matter that exists between disparate channels made up of situational determinants and connected consumer behavior.

Existing models of ‘cross channel’ engagement, from a user’s perspective, render no more than a dizzying array of disconnected experiences, like random staccato plots on a digital map void of navigational directions for how to get from one point to another. Connected consumers require a seamless transitional experience from device to device, from interface to interface, therefore marketing strategies employed specific to a single device are fundamentally flawed. Each device sojourns the journey between consumer and brand, but this momentary device-specific experience does not define the experience.

Marketers in this new order of constant connectivity must devise strategies for a multi-screen consumer experience, allowing for the narrative of the brand to be transported from touchpoint to touchpoint in a transmedia engagement model where the technologies utilized are no longer the focal point. The consumer experience is the primary consideration and that experience is, by its nature, transitional. The success or failure of any future marketing effort will be defined in the execution of transitions; the transitions from medium to medium, dialogue to dialogue, and from context to context.

This new model of transitional marketing is dependent on accessibility and anticipation. Accessibility is the foundational concern addressed by mobile sites, tablet apps, optimized campaign microsites, etc., but the key to successful transitional marketing is anticipation. Anticipating that a consumer is on her tablet device when your commercial airs. Anticipating that the needs of consumers before 8:00am and after 5:00pm are more time sensitive and experiential in nature. Anticipating that entries in a consumer’s calendar could benefit from an additive offer. Accessibility requires an understanding of connectivity and content. Anticipation requires an understanding of character and context.

To flourish in this new transitional multi-screen environment, marketers must be prepared to provide the tools to allow consumers to pull information from them when required, but they must also be prepared to initiate engagement with contextual relevance and personalization. Anticipating transitions and communicating with consideration of context is where the battle for consumer hearts and minds will be won. Technologies and products can be commoditized, experiences cannot.

It is important to remember that experience is not a product of technology; it’s a product of emotion. From positive emotions come connections, and from connections come relationships. And isn’t building relationships with consumers the end goal anyway?

I woke up thinking about labels this morning. I thought about how strange they are, how limiting. And I realized yet again that despite some people’s disdain for the concept of personal branding, we need to be mindful of what others label us.

The early days and what sparked me

When I got into the online world way back in the 80s, it was for a simple reason: the people around me were into talking about the Red Sox and cars, and I was into Batman and Star Wars. Folks on those first bulletin board services and later on platforms like AOL and Prodigy could align by interest instead of geography, and that was cool to me. Before that point, we were mostly forced into geography-centric, work-centric, or family-centric social groups.

Years later, when I got into blogging in 1998, it was because the tools let me express my interests and gave me an audience (pitifully small for a long while) for my writing. I didn’t need permission to publish. I just put my work out there for people to see. Eventually, I got the hang of it, and connected with others who wrote work that I found personally interesting. Instead of having to stay slave to whatever the tastes of mainstream publishers were at the time, I could find someone writing something of interest via the web.

Listening to podcasts brought about a huge realization that knowledge was power. I often tell the story about hearing information from then-CTO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz that led to a significant savings on a purchase my company was making. Getting immersed in that world the first time led me to cofound PodCamp, and it’s what led me back to podcasting most recently with my new show.

Six years ago, when I joined Twitter, it felt like a super fast personal news service. I remember the moment that I knew it was valuable. I was at the CES event in Las Vegas, and Apple was having a big event (Macworld, I think) in California. I was roaming the floor with Jeff Pulver and he asked if maybe we should hop a plane to see what Apple was doing. I said, “We don’t have to: I’ve got all the news right here in real time.”

I wasn’t all that fussy on Instagram when it game out. I used to tease people who used it, saying that it’s a tool to turn people’s lame life experiences into a bunch of fake album covers (for those of you under a certain age, albums are these weird square cardboard covers and vinyl discs that transferred music to our homes in the age before Spotify). I now think that if Facebook hadn’t bought it, Instagram would have proven a huge threat to Zuckerberg and company. Why? Because it allows people to share personal experiences in a very simple way. There’s not a lot to the product, and that’s why it’s exciting. Oh, and I use it all the time now.

I’m not a social media guy

Having a lot of domain knowledge about these social media tools has labeled me a social media guy. I understand that. I’ve been a cheerleader for this or that tool for quite a long time. But the truth is, the tools are just that. They’re interesting insofar as how they can deliver value or not. In and of themselves, I’m not all that interested in them.

When I am thinking about business, I’m rarely thinking, “How can I help a company better use Pinterest?” Instead, my thoughts are more tuned to, “This business wants more buyers. How do I facilitate that?” Quite often, I use the social tools to bring some kind of benefit to a company (or an individual), but they’re not a default.

My favorite social media right now? Email. I am in love with my newsletter experience, and how the interactions with people can be so personal and intimate and customized. Email’s been around for decades. See?

I’m a business designer

In reworking what Human Business Works does for the world, we decided to focus on publishing and educating around a set of core concepts that we feel will help professionals do the work they want, only better. Business design is holistic. I don’t help people with marketing. I help them with improving their business. Should marketing be the missing piece, I’ll work on that. Should people need more exposure, we talk about how to get it. Should they need sales (usually a “yes”), we walk through ways to improve that process. Customer service? My favorite.

But labels are used whether or not you want them

But the labels are for other people any how. One realization I had early in business is that if you don’t have clear and obvious interface points, people don’t know how to interact with you. If I say I help with marketing, sales, and service, then people understand where to slot me. But there’s always a slotting. It’s why I get to keynote the annual PRSA conference for PR professionals *and* an annual Coldwell Banker conference for real estate professionals *and* events for the marketers of the world. Because what I have to share relates to humans in all aspects of business, and not just one.

A Recipe for Labeling Yourself

Realize this before I give you the ingredients: no matter what you call yourself, what others perceive will be different. Just the same, you should do what you can. If you don’t help people understand what you represent, others will fill in their own blanks.

Ingredients

• Simple words (fewer syllables)
• Customer-facing explanation
• Ties back to “the real world”
• Repetition
• A body of work

Preparation

In working out what HBW and I do for people, I settled on the term “business design.” The words are easy enough, and people can grasp what I mean when I put them together. Choose simple words to explain what you do, even if it’s tricky. My former CTO, Bill Wessman, used to introduce himself at client meetings like this: “I’m Bill. Tech” He’d say almost nothing else. Those who needed to know who he was knew what he did, and those who just needed him in a bucket knew he wasn’t the finance guy, the CEO, or the sales guy.

Sometimes, people have incredibly flowery labels for what they do, but not such that people understand how they can interact with you. I’ve talked to “chief dreamers” and many “divas” and it’s hard to understand what they intended to do for me. “Professional declutterer” is understandable. “Interpreter” would be a swell name for a pastor, right? (Though they do a bit more than that.) Make the way you talk about yourself define the value others would get from working with you.

If you go too far afield, people won’t know how to engage your services. Tie your description back to a real world interface. Business design focuses on sales, marketing, and service elements of a business. I won’t be as helpful for the CIO (though I’ve worked with a few). Make sure this is clear in how you talk about yourself and how your website talks about you.

They say repetition is reputation. True that. And the phrase means “what you do is what people will know you for.” I agree. But I also mean to say that the more times I say “business designer,” the less people will call me social media guy.

At the end of it all, if you’re not doing what you say you do, no one cares. I called myself an author for decades before I had published a proper book, and years before I even wrote regularly. I loved the label more than I loved the work. Thankfully, that has changed. But what you do is what you are. I meet lots of people who are the “Dream Lifestyle” guy, and who live in a one-bedroom in Scranton. No matter what you say you are, you are what you do most.

Identity Matters More to Us Than to Them

At the end of it all, it doesn’t matter who you are to the person you serve. What matters is that they derive a benefit from their experience with you. That’s what they want. What attracts them to you in the beginning isn’t what will land the deal to keep you coming back. Results are what bring people back.

But don’t shrug off the work of being clear about who you are and what you stand for, because it matters. Those labels can limit others’ perspective of you, and that limits your opportunities. Be vigilant, and you’ll find your place.

Isn’t it time we started telling bigger stories than this?

When Julien Smith and I wrote The Impact Equation, we had a very specific goal in mind: help people get attention, understanding, and eventually a relationship of value. We built the book around the premise that well-defined goals were needed to craft ready-to-understand ideas, and that people could build a platform to spread those ideas to a network of people who cared enough to share those ideas with others. That’s the simplest possible summary of the book.

What people maybe thought they were getting was a book about social media and social networks, about marketing and campaigns. Some people believe that’s what Julien and I do. Social media are a set of tools. They’re not all that interesting to talk about in and of themselves. The “gee whiz” has left the station. We want to talk about action– or if you’ll pardon the self-reference, impact.

There are details and technologies you must master if you want to succeed. But that’s the keyboard-level and tactical part of what you’ll do. We wanted to give you something more encompassing.

The strategies around and behind The Impact Equation boil down to 5 Cs.

Communication

If you can’t convey your ideas in a way that stands out (Contrast), that are simple (Articulation), and that resonate with an audience (Echo), the game is over before you begin. So, The Impact Equation is a book about communication.

Content

If you don’t start building a platform of value around ideas that are easy to share (Reach), those ideas won’t get around and get a lot of attention (Exposure). The Impact Equation is a book that talks about how to tell bigger stories.

Community

Where people have the most ground to make up is in nurturing a network of people who care about what you choose to share. Without relationship-minded effort (Trust and Echo), you won’t likely get beyond capturing people’s attention for a little while. Meaning, people won’t be inclined to share. The Impact Equation is definitely a book about community.

Commerce

We don’t write much about how to make money in this book. Both Julien and I have ben successful in our businesses, and we’ve both helped other companies succeed with a lot of the tactics and strategies covered in this book. But this is a book about business and leadership and value-generation and extraction. Make no mistake, The Impact Equation is a book about commerce.

Customer Service

I believe in the principle of Service Craftsmanship, that service begins before a prospect has even become a customer. We talk a lot about how to nurture relationships (Trust) and how that sets you apart from people who don’t treat every touchpoint as a chance for service excellence (Contrast). There’s also the realization that if we treat people the way we want to be treated (Echo), we will earn more of an opportunity to serve. The Impact Equation is most definitely a book about customer service.

Why Talking About Social Media Got Boring

It’s boring to talk simply about the tools because the tools are just a way to reach people. We can argue the details endlessly (I don’t believe much in Klout, for instance), and we can announce the premature death of Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook and whoever. But it doesn’t matter. When we talk about restaurants (the tools), we mostly talk about the food (the content). When we talk about bands (tools), we talk about whether the music resonates (the content). When we talk about a good book (the content), we never ask what type of computer it was written on (the tools).

Should you put ads on Facebook? If that’s the worry point, you’ve got bigger worries. Is Pinterest worth your time? Who knows? Should you schedule your tweets? (Some of them!) What’s the company comment policy? Well, okay, that last one has some merit, but put it to rest and move on.

How I Apply The Five Cs and The Impact Equation Mindset to My Business

In all I do, I use these five concepts above as guideposts to approach success. When I’m working on a new product, like a course on writing, I think about how to communicate about the course before, during, and after the experience. I consider what kind of content will be involved. I determine how to build a community around each product experience, especially because Human Business Works believes that we need to deliver a vision, a plan, and a community of support for you to be successful. I consider how this product or service I’m creating should be priced and what value is reasonable to extract for the amount of value I’m creating. And I have very strong principles around how we go about customer service for each project.

When approaching business-making, I’d say these are the five aspects I work on the most. I look at marketing, sales, and service as a shared/hybrid role, where everyone has a part to play in the experience. I’d also say that these are the business aspects that we’ve tucked into The Impact Equation underneath it all.

How You Apply That Mindset to Your Business

From figuring out how to better articulate a contrasting idea that encourages trust and echoes the feelings of your prospective buyer to understanding how to get more exposure and reach from the platforms you choose to create or utilize, our premises line up nicely to marketing, sales, and service. Is it easy for people to contact you? Do you make it easy for them to buy from you? What have you missed in the process of shaping your ideas to fit their language and mindset? Do you have a plan for when and what and where to share your information? Whether you’re pinning or tweeting or poking or just putting a chalk sign out on a street corner, the attributes that make up The Impact Equation, are about delivering value.

Oh, and We Believe in Recipes

Both Julien and I set out to write a book full of actionable takeaways. We believe that there are lots of great books that stop right after the ideas and theories come out, but that don’t push you to take some actionable steps. Given Julien’s work on The Flinch, a book dedicated to getting us to take action, we both felt strongly that The Impact Equation should be written with a strong eye towards encouraging you to make something happen.

You can get the book in hardcover and digital formats, and the audiobook is almost ready to come out (really any day now), and I should let you know that the majority of my 2013 plan involves helping professionals from companies of all sizes to get more leads, sales, and satisfied customers via the principles in this book (and a few other concepts that make up the Human Business Way). If you want a head start on your success in the coming year, consider picking up The Impact Equation.

“Our dream is to empower yours.” In any other context, the message printed on Ilan Moyer’s business card would read as cliché. But in Moyer’s case, it’s simply the truth. The recent MIT graduate is the founder of “personal fabrication” startup CTMTM, where he is developing inexpensive and portable fabrication tools aimed at helping people manufacture objects in their own homes. Like a foam core 3-D printer, for example, which can even print ketchup and chocolate pudding. “Personal fabrication is about empowering individuals to express themselves and to shape their own worlds,” he says, “independent of the mass-manufacturing system.”

Moyer’s latest project is PopFab, a tiny fabrication multi-tool that he developed alongside MIT Center for Bits and Atoms PhD student Nadya Peek. PopFab packs a CNC mill, 3-D printer, vinyl cutter, and drawing tool into a briefcase, letting designers carry a tiny, nomadic fabrication workshop with them wherever they go. The duo call it “a multi-tool for the 21st century.”

As Moyer and Peek demonstrate, PopFab is fairly simple to set up. Inside the suitcase sits a computer-controlled motion platform, which serves as the work stage. A mechanical arm hangs above it, connected to a detachable head. You hook up your laptop and choose which printer head and material you’re going to use, and the machine whirs to life. In their introductory video, they start small by printing a little plastic goldfish–but it’s easy to imagine the broader implications of a portable fab lab, especially in remote undeserved parts of the world.

PopFab is the result of years of research and prototyping. Moyer and Peek are strong believers in DIY fabrication, active in the Fab@Home open source movement. In 2009, Moyer built a personal fabricator called FabMate with Indian engineering students. At MIT’s CADLab, he developed a CNC mill that could be built at home for less than $100. At MIT, Peek’s advisor Neil Gershenfeld teaches a class called “How to Make Something that Makes Almost Anything.” It was there that Moyer and Peek built the current prototype, which they say owes much to Gershenfeld’s Machines That Make project.

What’s been made with PopFab so far? Moyer recounts one great example over email, remembering when he and blogger Christine McLaren found a lost bike helmet in a Berlin park. Someone had tied the helmet to a lamppost, hoping to attract its owner. “Christine suggested that we turn the lamp post into a lost and found. So we went to a nearby cafe, plugged in, and 3-D-printed some hooks and vinyl cut the words Fundbüro (lost and found office).” They attached the hooks and signage to the lamppost, and voilà: an impromptu lost and found.

Looking at the wire-filled metal suitcase, it’s tough to imagine that the TSA would allow PopFab through security. But the team has already carried it onto several transatlantic flights. In fact, the machine was partially designed in Saudi Arabia and Berlin, where Moyer finished it before presenting at the now-infamous BMW Guggenheim Lab. “We’ve only run into trouble at security once, and that was departing Saudi Arabia,” Moyer remembers. “The language barrier made it difficult to explain what the device did, so the airline staff ended up padding the machine with thick foam and stowing it below. Generally, the machine sails through security without raising any eyebrows or even being opened by security.”

Moyer and Peek are devoted to the concept behind PopFab, which is autonomous, self-sufficient creative production. “A large motivation for this project has been the fact that as engineers we are tied to the tools which we use to manifest our designs in the real world,” Moyer says. “This generally means that we’re tethered to the electronics benches and machine shops which house these tools. Our goal with PopFab is to break these chains and permit a lifestyle where adventure and travel can co-exist with our need to design and create.” Over the next few months, they’ll create a few more demo videos showing PopFab’s capabilities. “We hope that this is only the beginning,” they say, though they’re mum on details about when (and, indeed, if) it’ll be available to the public.

This year marks the third anniversary of the Rotman Design Challenge. It started out as a commendable experiment by the school’s Business Design Club to expose MBAs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to the value of design methods in business problem solving. This year, the competition drew teams from a few other MBA schools and some of the best design schools in North America. As a final-round judge, I had a front-row seat to the five best solutions to the competition’s challenge: To help TD Bank foster lifelong customer relationships with students and recent graduates while encouraging healthy financial behaviors.

Designers fared significantly better than MBAs because they shared real user insights.

Both this year and last–the two years that Rotman invited other schools to participate–business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and the University of Cincinnati), design teams scooped the top three places in the competition, doing significantly better than their MBA counterparts. So what does this tell us?

It might tell us that MBAs significantly underestimate the skill and expertise a designer brings to the table. After all, about 80 MBA students volunteered their evenings and weekends, believing they had a chance of winning a design competition with minimal, if any, design training. Would you go toe-to-toe with even a purple belt in jiu jitsu having never taken a lesson? While the typical design-school competitor has (at the least) studied the design process in depth for several semesters and practiced it in co-ops and internships, for many MBA students, this was their very first exposure to the discipline. So while we should applaud the organizers’ efforts to open MBA eyes to the importance and value of design in solving business problems, it seems that even its most forward-thinking students may not have fully digested that design is a serious pursuit that requires serious training.

The competition outcome might also tell us that designers have reason to be encouraged. With only 15 minutes to convince a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today, they fared significantly better than their MBA counterparts. Why? Because they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making.

Design should not be tacked on to business education but infused throughout it.

Finally, it tells us that we still have a long way to go to develop business professionals who both appreciate and can engage the tools of design effectively. Rotman gets kudos for taking a step in the right direction. But a few workshops and an extracurricular competition won’t produce business leaders with real design-thinking skills. Business education must be completely redefined to include the best, most appropriate principles of design in every curriculum. Marketing classes should teach a deep reverence for the user in context and the power of observational research methods. Finance classes should teach the art of storytelling and information design. Strategy classes should teach systems thinking and synthesis. If the goal is to create great “hybrid thinkers” who will have real impact, design should not be tacked on to existing business education but infused throughout it.

I’m not letting design schools off the hook either. While design students fared much better than their MBA counterparts that Saturday afternoon, I should point out that only the winning team from the Institute of Design at IIT actually charged a fee for the service they developed (a fact that was not overlooked by my final-round co-judge Ray Chun, the senior vice president of retail banking at TD). Some competitors were able to offer a vague notion that their ideas would generally create economic value, but crisp articulations of a profit model and underlying assumptions were hard to come by.

Design education needs as much of an overhaul as business education.

And I was less than impressed with the business-thinking skills of designers the following Monday morning, when I interviewed 10 of them at the Institute of Design in Chicago for jobs at Doblin. To most candidates, I asked of the ideas they presented in their portfolios, “But how does it make money? Who will pay for that? How much would you need to sell to be profitable?” and was met with far too many blank expressions when I did so. Design schools have a long way to go to integrate good business thinking into their programs. In order to make their value known to the world, designers need to speak the language of business–that’s where great ideas get funded and developed. Design education needs as much of an overhaul as business education if we are to benefit from the talents of design thinkers in the business world.

I hope that we see meaningful reinvention of both design and business education so that the business world can realize the true value of design thinking. Until that happens, Rotman’s Business Design Club would be wise to require challenge teams to comprise both designers and MBAs. At least it would level the playing field, and it may improve the educational experience for both–assuming each can decipher what the other is saying.

Image: Morphart Creations Inc., sextoacto and ueapun via Shutterstock

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

Facebook defended its support for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a controversial cyber security bill critics often compare to the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

In a Facebook blog post, Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s Vice President-U.S. Public Policy, explained the difference between the two bills and how CISPA would protect Facebook and other websites.

Most importantly, Kaplan says Facebook or other companies would not be required to share its users data with the government or any other site under CISPA. Instead, the cyber bill allows the government to pass along cyber threat data to companies like Facebook to better protect their sites. He explained further that CISPA would not require Facebook to share more information with the government than it already shares, which does not include user’s private data.

“One challenge we and other companies have had is in our ability to share information with each other about cyber attacks. When one company detects an attack, sharing information about that attack promptly with other companies can help protect those other companies and their users from being victimized by the same attack,” Kaplan wrote a blog post on Friday. “Similarly, if the government learns of an intrusion or other attack, the more it can share about that attack with private companies (and the faster it can share the information), the better the protection for users and our systems.”

The post was prompted after several privacy and civil liberties groups have opposed CISPA and asked Facebook to not support the bill. CISPA bill sponsor Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said CISPA is not another version of SOPA, but that hasn’t convinced the critics.

“The concern is that companies will share sensitive personal information with the government in the name of protecting cybersecurity,” Kaplan wrote. “Facebook has no intention of doing this.”

CISPA differs from SOPA in that it protects computer networks from being attacked by hackers, while SOPA focused on intellectual property and copyright protection, Rogers has said. SOPA bill sponsor Lamar Smith (R-Texas) withdrew the bill in January.

Kaplan doesn’t want critics to worry about CISPA having any effect on Facebook users’ privacy. He explains there is still time for the bill to be modified and that Congress is working with privacy and civil liberties groups to address questions and privacy concerns about CISPA.

“We hope that as Congress moves forward in considering this and any other cyber legislation, the result will be legislation that helps give companies like ours the tools we need to protect our systems and the security of our users’ information, while also providing those users confidence that adequate privacy safeguards are in place,” Kaplan said.