All I want for Christmas is ERP and social media data integration

Seems like SAP is on the road to giving me exactly what I want for Christmas, starting with their own Social Media drill down tool:

SAP Invades Radian6 Territory with Social Media Drill-down Tool - ReadWriteCloud.

With SAP entering the fray of Social Media analytics, and already being so deeply embedded with so many customer's internal information (such as HR, Org Management, Customer Relationship Management and Sales and Distribution, to name only a few), can the integration of these two data sets be far behind?

As an internal communicator, this is what I've longed for for years - the ability to use employees' social media habits, both internally and externally, to engage and inform them better. Imagine being able to cross-check employee chatter trends, whether you're using Yammer, Lotus Connections, Microsoft Sharepoint or something else entirely, with organizational information. Is our business transformation seen as a positive effort in Finance but not in HR? Is our sales force frustrated by the implementation of our new mobile sales app? Are employees more satisfied in the UK than the US?

If SAP can track social media trends externally, I can't imagine it will be far off before they make integrating the same information internally that much easier. I envision a communications dashboard where I can analyze which trends are most common among whom in my enterprise, and use that information to target further communications. Perhaps the CEO needs to fly to Chicago to better explain, in person, why we're going forward with a particular project. Or maybe my CIO needs to communicate directly to our Directors and VPs to rally their support for our new strategy.

The more specificity I can get to who's saying what the better, and SAP, or any ERP for that matter, has the most accurate and up-to-date information about my enterprise.As a communications guy, my mouth waters at the possibilities. Can't wait to see where this goes.

Have social media statistics and authority lost their value?

After reading an interesting blog post in the Harvard Business Review titled "Return on Influence, the New ROI", I was feeling quite proud of myself for actually keeping up with the HBR.

I was taken in by the author's claim that she had created a new metric ("Return On Influence", or ROI - I know, it's confusing), whereby she identifies the value of a single fan/follower of her client, which can in turn be used to demonstrate the value of investing in said client to potential advertisers. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Then I read the comments. Yikes.

I kid you not, the first line of the first comment reads, "Respectfully, this is complete nonsense."

He goes on to express his disappointment in HBR for publishing the article at all.

As I scrolled through the nearly 50 comments posted at the time, I was not surprised to see a familiar debate unfold - questioning the process of determining statistics, accusations that the statistics are valueless, stating that this is nothing new, and so on. Eventually the comments question the validity of the author's professional credentials, and finally HBR for even allowing the article to be published.

For me it begs the question - have statistics as they pertain to social media, and to some degree, the notion of "authority", virtually lost their value?

Don't get me wrong, I understand there must and always will be value in measuring statistics... I mean it's not as if I don't track how many readers I get on this blog. But some of the other statistics - the fancier, more compounded ones (ie, Return Of Influence) - are always so debatable. And the more that social media flatten our world such that more opinions are heard, does that threaten the whole notion of authority? 

For example, we have blogs, both liberal and conservative, dedicated to exposing the bias of the mainstream media (MSM), however both sides insist the bias is in the opposing direction. Is that even possible? But I digress.

My point in this post is to pose the question - would we do better to collectively acknowledge that there is value in social media, and stop searching for that "perfect metric" that proves exactly how valuable it is? 

I don't have the answer to this question, but I must say, I think about it a lot lately.

Ironically, one of the commentors on the HBR post referenced a website called ROI of Social Media. I'm pretty sure their "ROI" is the one most of us are familiar with - Return On Investment. I'm going to read it now to see if they're onto something.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts. Do you have a standard set of metrics you find convincing? If so, why? And if not, why not?

Society for New Communications Research Launches Study To Examine the Use of Social Media “Behind the Firewall”

Here's something that's well timed:

Society for New Communications Research Launches Study To Examine the Use of Social Media “Behind the Firewall”.

It's about time we get some numbers pertaining to how companies are using social media and technology internally. I was just reading a recent Pew survey regarding usage of smart phones and "apps", and couldn't help but notice that, while 38% of those surveyed indicate they use their phones or tablets to access the internet, none listed "business" as a use. This got me thinking... isn't anyone out there using mobile apps to improve their employees' connectivity?

I can't be the only one who's thought of this, especially for environments where employees aren't in front of a PC all day. Wouldn't it be common sense for, say, plant managers working in a manufacturing environment to have custom applications on their phones that enabled them to access internal tools to report incidents or submit timesheets? These are just two obvious uses that come to mind.

What about sales teams or consultants... wouldn't mobile access to company resources, either through their smartphone or tablet, be an obvious value?

As I said, this must be out there, but despite my research I have yet to find any concrete examples of this happening. And assuming it is, I'd really like to know how well it's going. Hopefully the SNCR's study will shed some light, so I'll follow those results and comment on them here.

Are you or anyone at your company doing this? And if so, how's it going for you?

Technology doesn't engage people, people do

I recently rolled out a social media platform for a client to improve internal communications and, among other things, further engage employees with senior leadership and the company overall.

After a couple weeks of limited responses from employees, one leader asked me, "Why aren't our people getting more involved in the blogs?"

I quickly responded, "Because blogs don't engage people, people do."

After weeks of pushing and prodding these leaders to post to the new blogs and initiating discussion threads, it became clear to me that I had overlooked a critical misperception by leadership - that the technology alone would be sufficient to get their employees "engaged".

Furthermore, when pushed to leverage these new tools, many of my clients (the very leaders wondering why employees weren't participating) passively resisted with responses like "we can't say that", or worse, "can't you draft it for me first?"

As the author of this blog, I'm obviously a huge proponent of leveraging new technology to improve internal communications. Yet the slickest tech on earth isn't going to do much if leaders aren't actively using and advocating it. Their participation is critical, not only to show their support for the new media, but also to demonstrate through example that they sincerely want to engage with employees.

Technology is a useful tool through which leaders can connect with their people, but it's not a magic bullet. It can't do the work for them. Business leaders who are serious about engaging employees will put forth the effort necessary to do so.

That means taking risks by being more honest than they've ever been before. It means allowing employees to disagree with leadership in a public forum, and allowing those disagreements to stand in black and white. It may even mean changing course due to valid opinions expressed by those who disagree.

But this is also the advantage of the technology. If leaders are willing to take those risks, they can reap the benefits of the collective knowledge and thinking of their employees, and that is truly engaging.

Anything less, and you might as well not bother.

Have you faced these or similar challenges in your work? And if so, what do you think are the major roadblocks preventing leaders from trusting your advice and participating actively?