Small World Labs

 
OVERVIEW
This chapter inaugurates Part II of Open Leadership – Crafting Your Open Strategy - and provides a framework to go about answering the question “how open do you need to be?”.
 
First you should start by identifying what you are trying to accomplish by being open.  The four most common objectives of an openness strategy are:

• To Learn
• To Engage in Dialogue
• To Facilitate Support
• To Foster Innovation

 
To Learn
Learning drives the other three strategies.  Organizations must first learn from their constituents (e.g., employees, partners, customers) before they can do anything else.  With social technologies, learning is transformed beyond simple surveys and traditional offline focus groups of 20 people at a time to the utilization of monitoring tools (e.g., Google Alerts, Shoutlet, HootSuite, Radian6) and online community platforms.  The benefits that these social technologies

OVERVIEW
We understand the call and need to be more open.  But… what exactly does that mean?  Openness is “having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control … while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals,” writes Charlene Li while proffering her opinion on the subject.  However, an abdication of control without acute focus on its impact towards goals leads to ineffectiveness.  While it may sound like a paradox, an organization that desires to be open and still accomplish its goals requires a set of controls to be in place.  This seeming paradox drives the organization of openness into two types, with ten elements between them.

OPEN INFORMATION SHARING

Explaining
Explaining is used to share information about and the logic behind decisions, direction, or strategy with the goal of gaining buy-in to the idea so everyone is aligned.   Mullen Communications shares quarterly financial information as well as the AAAA’s industry salary information with employees.  Sharing financial information builds trust and buy-in with employees.  Sharing industry salary information combined with a policy of paying within the inner-quartile removes distractions.

“There has been a fundamental shift in power, one in which individuals have the ability to broadcast their views to the world.” - Charlene Li
 
OVERVIEW
This fundamental shift in power is occurring primarily because of the following three reasons:

• More people are online
• A widespread use of social sites
• The rise (and facile nature) of sharing

In the past, private channels were utilized and necessary to resolve issues.  However, today social technologies, like social networks, ratings & reviews, wikis, online communities, and micro-blogging, have made it easier for individuals to express their opinions publicly.  Companies have begun to realize this and some are attempting to leverage these social media platforms to their benefit.  Early research by Charlene Li concludes that the most significant driver of a companies' nascent attempts to employ social technologies successfully has been: having an “open mind-set,” and the ability of leaders to let go of control “at the right time, in the right place, in the right amount.”
 

I received an advance copy of Charlene Li’s new book Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead while at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies conference in Boston last week.  I read half of it on the airplane ride back from Boston and the second half yesterday after having fulfilled my inaugural Mother’s Day duties.

Given Charlene’s position and insight into the social media market, I thought this would be an important text to read and understand.  Why does this matter to the CEO of a social networking platform company?  Because at Small World Labs we firmly believe that to create a successful online community, you need:

If you've read The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown, then you are likely familiar with the Scottish Rite (also known as The Supreme Council). They are the top organization for freemasons.

Things have been great as usual during SXSW Interactive. We've met some great people and attended some really smart panels. You can follow our updates on Twitter @milessims, @wilsonmichael and @andynpjones.

You can also follow our company account @smallworldlabs.

Small World Labs is looking for a client focused social media and social networking expert to help lead our Community Solutions team. You can see the full job description here:

VP or Director of Community Solutions - Social Media

We're excited about this role within Small World Labs and the growth we've seen from a customers and strategy standpoint!

Just a quick post to invite you to join Small World Labs tonight at the 501 Tech Club Austin monthly meeting. We'll be going through some community building best practices for non-profits and overall social networking strategy.

501 Tech Club Austin - January 18th

Topic:
Community Building Best Practices: Real World Examples

Description:

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Scottrade User Summit in San Antonio. These are online trading education events that Scottrade conducts on a fairly regular basis in person at various cities around the country. Scottrade has been a customer of ours for a while so when Scottrade’s community manager, Nina Card, let us know that a User Summit was taking place down the highway, I jumped at the chance to check them out in action.

Remember that old saying "Do right by a customer and they'll tell a friend. Do wrong and they'll tell 100 people."? Well, in today's social media world there seems to be a 1000x multiplier.

Case in point, professional musician David Caroll had a guitar broken by an airline baggage handler (witnessed by everyone on his side of the flight) a year ago. 9 months of back in forth with the airline resulted in no help. All other courses of action stripped away, David took to YouTube to air his grievances via a music video.