How to create customer engagement by providing a unique experience

In our saturated marketplace and overload information era, it is harder and harder to make personal connections and engage with customers. Customers are never more than a text, search, tweet, post or question to Google or Siri away from finding another option to fulfill their needs if you can't get it done. Same process if they're just not having the experience with you that they expected. Customers have become so volatile, unpredictable and their consumer behavior so hard to track. How do you get customers back to stick to your brand and buy your products? By creating a unique experience that will engage and connect them to your brand.

In one of his blogs, Harry Klein suggests companies should move from B2B and B2C to P2P (People to People).

Engage and empower your workforce
Good social adoption starts with a focus on people, not the technology. It is important to get your employees engaged because customer engagement is a shared responsibility across the organization. Great customer experiences come from great employee experiences. In order to engage customers with you brand, your people must be empowered to create a unique experience, across all functions. From R&D (designing or creating a new product – see Apple products), to production (manufacture zero-default product), to marketing (tell a story, create a unique message), to sales (sales people don’t sell a product, they must sell a vision and an experience), to customer service (your customer service staff must be empowered to resolve customers’ complaints themselves and instantly without escalating to a supervisor – the Zappos way)… Every employee must be empowered to recognize a customer engagement opportunity and act on it.
That means investing in people and processes, as well as technology. Finding ambassadors within your company to champion social media, and selecting tools for your business that your employees use at home, can help to promote social behaviors internally. Gamification principles are a growing way to encourage adoption and social-savviness within your organization. When implemented correctly, with added consultancy and strategy, it acts as an essential element to ensure adoption at all levels by addressing individual's specific drivers and needs.    

Get personal with your customers
To maximize customer engagement, it is important to nurture your prospects as individuals, with their own stories, rather than anonymous transactions. Social media channels are a key way to interact with customers and build those human relationships. A recent webinar titled High-Tech Tuesday Webinar: Profile of Marketing as a Technology Buyer hosted by Laura McLellan speaks to this point. Social media (84%), digital content creation (79%) and digital advertising (76%) are the three most common digital marketing strategies companies are planning on. The sample includes both B2C and B2B companies. Of these, social media is the most effective in creating and sustaining communication with an entirely new segment of customers that aren’t being listened to today.
Missed opportunities like these cost companies revenue in the short term and damage brands for the long term.
Customers are more informed and have more choice than ever before, so if their expectations aren't met, they'll move on quickly. Engaged customers, however, reward consistently strong service by spending more and becoming influential brand advocates on social channels.

The key here is to use all marketing channels (social media, customer service line, sales force…) to TELL YOUR STORY.

Why Storytelling?

• Storytelling is a proven way to develop brand identity, build your client base, and increase sales.

• "Humans remember stories," says Christina Cheng, area manager of the Chicago Magnificent Mile AT&T store. "So explaining things with stories instead of specs is a much easier way for people to understand how technology can help them."

• In this era of over flooded information, storytelling is the best way to differentiate your company from competitors, to create a unique experience for your customers.

• Stories immediately focus on engagement, experiences, and emotion – key customer touchpoints.

• Narrative makes your message relevant and memorable through personalization.

• Through narrative, you can create campaigns to challenge the big players, even on small budgets.

• Storytelling conveys to customers, the media, and investors the information, hard facts, and dry data they need in an easily digestible way.

• Creative narrative is guaranteed to get people’s attention and keep your business front of mind.

In short, narrative can be extremely powerful and can do great things for YOUR business. Every business has a story to tell. What is YOUR story?

Create advocates
When customers are engaged, you become their primary buying choice. They are loyal. They become advocates for your company. With social media, engaged customers can – and do – endorse your company to tens of thousands of people instantly.

By taking the time to listen to your customers across social channels, your organization can become empowered to turn a customer's negative experience into a positive one. A potential public relations disaster can become a positive story for if your company responds to customer complaints on social media (Twitter, Facebook) in a light-hearted and personal manner, winning your consumers back. The best way to turn your customers into advocates is to own mistakes, failures and successes. Be accountable. After all, we are all humans.

More than 70% of customers will spend more with a company because of a history of good service. That's where the real upside potential is for companies. And it's why customer engagement is set to overtake productivity as the primary driver of profitable growth.

Social media is a key channel for mobilizing customer engagement in this interactive economy.  Customers are truly engaged when they feel known and that is what the best use of social media can achieve.

The Whole Foods experience
Whole Foods is a great example about creating a unique experience. In addition to the in-store experience, the company has been successfully executing its social media marketing plan, playing a significant role in its growth, by engaging customers and turning them into advocates.
Its social media strategy is built around the company website and 6 additional social platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, their blog, and recent additions of Foursquare and Pinterest.

Its Twitter accounts are used primarily as a customer service tool, responding to individual customer questions and requests. Whole Foods even has several niche twitter accounts for such specialty topics as wine and cheese, as well as separate accounts for most of the local stores.

Whole Foods’ Facebook and blog platforms allow the company to promote widely its product information, health, recipes, or cooking tips, engaging as well as educating its customers. It also uses both platforms to develop its brand awareness.

Here are several key reasons why Whole Foods social media strategy is a successful difference maker for its marketing campaign:

1. Whole Foods, while a large, international company, puts priority on the local component of its strategy. There is a community manager assigned at every store, who manages customer engagement through multiple platform accounts. The company focuses on being where the customers are.

2. The company’s decision making process is decentralized, with very loose control from corporate headquarters. The HQ assist and collaborate, but the local stores are empowered and keep lots of freedom of initiative.

3. All of the efforts are continually focused on improving relevancy of customer engagement. Whole Foods is not afraid to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.

4. Each social media platform has its primary objectives – with some flexibility and adaptability maintained. All platforms are fully integrated in the social media strategy, each playing a different role.

5. The company believes in letting customer engagement and conversation occur as naturally as possible. Whole Foods listens, observes and applies new ideas from what it learns from customers.

Which ones can you apply to your business?  Share your experience.

Your brain is like a bottle of Orangina.

I grew up in France with Orangina in the 80s. But more than childhood reminiscence, it has become a mindset. Why? Check out this video...

The message is: your brain is like to bottle of Orangina. If you don't shake up your thinking, your creativity stays at the bottom, like the pulp.
The world as we’ve known it is upside down. It is out of whack. 

With all the new trends coming into place, how do we demark our services, our products from the competition? What do we need to do to keep them relevant and noticeable by the new generations and emerging populations? A product that is seen today as innovative will tomorrow be a commodity.

I remember the good old days when a blackberry was a fruit, when you did not need an emoticon to express your feelings. Things seemed to be easier before.  Nowadays, young children know to play Angry Birds on smart phones or tablets before learning how to tie their shoe laces. This is why my 6-year-old son wears shoes with Velcro, to have time to play Angry Birds.
The other day, my 9-year-old daughter spotted the old encyclopedias my mother-in-law had placed in the basement. “What are those”?, she asked me. I tried to explain the concept to her, but it just was not clicking. Finally, she said, “It’s like Wikipedia or Google, but in a book”.

You and the people in your organization must upgrade their thinking in order to master this new age. The design of your thinking determines all of your results in this whacky world, and the wilder, funkier and more unique your thinking, the better positioned you are for success.

Change happens. It doesn't care whether you like it or not. Change doesn't need your permission. Change is the one constant in business. What you decide to do with change is up to you. It is people, talent and their skills within your organization that are driving innovation, creativity and pushing the boundaries of business and the world as we know it.

“ . . . the idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behavior that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.” (John Maynard Keynes, 1937). This was in 1937!!

As Kelly Hipskind from Herff Jones put it at a recent Centric event, innovation is a mindset.

What can you do to shake up your thinking?

Consciously seek a different perspective. We humans are creatures of habit, we like the comfort of the routine, of what we are familiar with. Ok, we may slightly adapt the original way as we learn new things. But we are not fundamentally wired to look for the new and different (or better). The best way to do this is to create a new habit – the habit of pausing and questioning. As Doug McColgin puts it in a recent blog, in order to change our mindset, we flee our normal work setting and unlock ourselves in a creative space; we take offsite unstructured time to re-source ourselves, change our perspectives. 

You must collide your thinking with others, so that you don't lock yourself in the "we've always done it this way and it works" mentality. Because tomorrow, it will stop working. 

Beat the “Can’t” mentality. As Steve Jobs said, "the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do". Mark the "beat the "can't" mentality" as part of your metrics for the year. Every time someone in your organization says "we can't", it goes against his/her metrics. Or ask people to donate $1 to the charity of your choice every time they bring the "can't" word. You will make a charitable organization happy!

Make change an integral part of your culture. Few words strike error into the minds of humans like the word “change.” Yet change is the critical key to business success. Have you ever considered changing partners? Not changing partners in terms of swapping spouses, but changing your partners’ or co-workers’ mindset and behavior?  Have you tried to do that? Great businesses lead their markets by changing the game, changing the way we live, work, communicate, dress and eat. Changing the way we interact with technology. To win, we must create change. That means we need to accept change as part of our business advantage. So how can you create a culture of change? Here are some ideas:

• Start a change board (instead of a white board) where folks can suggest changes to improve your processes, products, team structure and anything else that contributes to business growth.

• Reward change thinking. Visibly reward folks for pushing the envelope, even if you don’t use the ideas. Reward the act of stepping into change and do it visibly. Thanks to the herd instinct, others will follow.

• Do the corporate shuffle. Change up your daily behaviors, move weekly meetings to different times and days every week. Get folks to sit in different places in meetings (not next to the same folks all the time). Do everything you can to shake up repetitive behaviors. 

• Inject the unexpected into your organization. For example, drop by unexpectedly for team meetings. Sit in on customer service and/or sales calls. Cross pollinate teams with each other and with external inputs to shake up the thinking. Energize your organization with the unexpected!

• Stop having managers manage your staff. Change managers into mentors, coaches, whose roles are to cheer their teammates to be creative, audacious, take action and ownership for what their believe in. Clue: if the present managers in place don’t grasp the concept, this simply means they are in the wrong place. Good leaders don’t manage, they mentor and develop their teams.

Don't focus so much on the competition. If you focus too much on your competitors, you will likely be an "-er brand". You will want to be cheap-er, fast-er, healthi-er, whatev-er than your competition. No kidding! It’s impossible to lead your market, to be innovative and a breakout business if you’re focused on your competition. By definition, you’re following. Instead, spend all that time and money focusing on finding new markets, new opportunities and new ways of seeing and thinking about your business. Work to uncover the un-met needs of your consumers, work to create a unique culture to attract top talents to your organization. That’s how to be a profitable market leader. Besides, the view never changes if you’re following your competitor.

Focus on experimentation. If you focus on immediate ROI, you don’t grasp the notion of “innovation”. Immediate ROI is about efficiency, not innovation. Innovation takes time, requirement many experiments before coming up with a final product/service. Stress the fact that “failure” is part of the experimentation process, that the “downs” are part of the steps towards success. Encourage experimentation, eliminate the fear of “failing”, “losing”, “taking risks”. Focus on the opportunities instead.

So, this week, go buy a pack of Orangina bottles and shake up your thinking!

FU#K IT UP!

The moment you invest a bit of yourself into something, you start overvaluing it. My personal experience started with IKEA furniture a long time ago. I’m not particularly good at assembling things, it takes me a long time, I make all kinds of mistakes. When I finished assembling the four truly mediocre pieces of furniture I had bought from IKEA when I was a student, I was actually incredibly proud of it. I kept moving it with me from city-to-city, apartment to apartment as I would keep on moving, renting a truck to carry all those pieces (still put together as I was afraid I would not be able to put them back together if I dismantled them), while the objective quality and cost of it did not support that. I started wondering whether my love of it was due to my investment of time and energy.

Let’s imagine another scenario. Imagine I come to you to ask you if you would sell me your kids? How much money would you charge me if I wanted to buy your kids, take all your memories, and I promised to give them a good home? As long as these are not teenagers, you would probably respond “lots of money”. Because you can’t see your lives without your kids. Now, imagine a different place. Imagine you don’t have kids. You go to a park, you meet two kids, you play with them for a few hours… they are wonderful little kids. After a couple of hours, you are ready to say goodbye, but before you said so, the parents tell you, “by the way they are for sale. Are you interested?” How much would you pay for those kids? Chances are that you wouldn’t pay much for the kids, because they aren’t yours.

When we get involved emotionally because of complexity, feelings, time or money invested, we lose our ability to think.

We have to disrupt the way we think. To keep up with this wacky, ever-changing world, we need to change and upgrade our thinking, we need to think funky.

Are we in control of our own decisions?

Let’s do a test. Look at the grid above. How many squares do you see? How you arrive at the answer can make a big difference in what you find.
In the first "systematic" analysis, we can find 30 squares. 

16 (1x1 squares) + 9 (2x2 squares) + 4 (3x3 squares) + 1 (4x4 square) = 30 squares.
The squares were always there, but you didn't find them until you looked for them. At first glance, you can easily see 16 squares. But the reality as it appears to be is often different from the reality as it is — 30 squares. You need to spend time and dig deeper to understand the reality as it is. Innovative solutions are always there for the problems we face, but you won't find them unless you look for them.

There is a method to the madness (systematically going through 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, and 4x4 squares in this case). It takes time to find the method, but when you do, it opens up many more solutions and opportunities for any innovation problem. We need to look beyond what meets the eye and what we are told, for more innovative perspectives both on the problem as well as the solutions born out of detachment to either.

But can we do even better than a systematic analysis? On a more creative note, there are 30 squares with black edges and 30 squares with white edges. We've now discovered 60 squares. Out-of-the-box thinking can open up even more solutions. The foundation of systematic method, combined with out-of-the-box thinking, can result in order-of-magnitude change in performance. There were several creative replies with many more squares, all the way to infinity. Thank you for stretching our thinking. There are no limits to out-of-the box thinking. Only our own imagination is the limiting factor. Don't think it's impossible, stretch the limits, bend the rules without breaking them — be curious — seek something new — think funky!

The question is: are you really into change? Change is constant. If there is one thing that does not change, it is change. Have you ever considered changing partners? Not changing partners in terms of swapping spouses, but changing your partners’ or co-workers’ mindset and behavior? Have you tried to do that? Not easy, right?

I have a firm belief that in order to keep up, stay relevant and be successful in this new, whacky and ultra-competitive era, we actually need to funk up the way we think. To think the same as you always have is to fall behind. The things that used to make you successful no longer work, your old thinking is now obsolete like a desktop computer, and your problem-solving abilities are now commoditized. Welcome to a whacky new world where all the old rules are defunct.

Among the plethora of apps available, I believe that your brain is the killer app in these crazy times. Your brain is an elaborate, collaborative network of 100 billion neurons, interconnecting with their mates via Instant Messenger (more precisely via trillions of synapses – but you get the point!). And just like you upgrade your computer software every few months to battle bugs, viruses and keep abreast of technological change, you also need to upgrade the way you think. The best way to outperform the competition is to out-think the competition. In this crazy world, the wilder and funkier you’re thinking, the better positioned you and your company are to prosper, self-actualize and grow.

FUNK IT UP!

Ways to create a culture of innovation

In my last post, I covered some of the main reasons why innovation fails in companies. In this post I want to focus on how to implement a genuine and sustainable culture of innovation.

How companies can nurture innovation and motivate their talents to bring innovations forward?Each company is destined to get the results it gets. What I mean by this is that poor organization, lack of solid and sustainable innovation culture lead to poor results, and more than before, to a company’s trouble or death.A perfect illustration is RIM, which brought the Blackberry to the world in 1999. At that time, BB was a revolutionary product. What happened is that the company lied on its laurels with its BB product, lacked of a clear strategy about where it wanted to take the product. However, according to data compiled by management software company Mindjet, the majority of businesses either don't have effective innovation strategies or don't effectively seek opportunities to innovate.
Smart business leaders shape the culture of their company to drive innovation. Success and constant positive results come from the implementation and execution of strategies, business models, structure, processes, technologies and incentive systems that encourage innovation.

1- Define your company’s mission around innovation. Many companies don’t have a mission statement, but for those which do, often times statements use generic terms, such as “best product in the world”, “best customer service”… They do not inspire employees to innovate. A strong and inspiring vision should be framed around how the company works to change its customer’s world, for the better.

For instance, Amazon’s mission is "Our [Amazon's] vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."
Coca Cola’s mission is to “refresh the world, inspire moments of optimism and happiness, create value and make a difference”. 

You build an innovation capability by changing your culture, which requires a lot of hard work. You only see the results of this hard work over time.

2- Create the structure to allow employees to experiment new ideas with unstructured time. Successful innovative companies give time to their employees to get away from their daily tasks, to work on personal or company projects not directly related to their work. Then tap into this creative process.Google is well known in the tech community for its "20% time," which gives employees a day a week to follow their passions, but it's hardly the first company to have done so. For decades, 3M Corp. has allotted 15% of its employees' time to innovation, which led to the creation of the now-ubiquitous yellow sticky note, among other products. When innovation gets postponed for too long, companies languish -- witness the reversal of RIM's fortune and Microsoft's vilification in the mainstream media for its failure to innovate. "Innovation programs remove the constraints that accompany traditional work, and offer a safe space for failure. That lets people try riskier things.", says Dan Pink, author of the best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.Seeing innovation as idea management is much more effective than seeing it as just commercialization. In the commercialization view, the only way to win is to have a great idea, protect the IP from it, and bring it to market. In the idea management view, you win by identifying and executing great ideas. They don’t have to be new products; the ideas can be for new ways of doing things, or for new business models. Those are all ideas. The innovation process needs to manage ideas – not just create new products.

Reward employees with time to think, while providing them with the structure they need.

3- Recognize employees’s contribution to the innovation process.  Some companies offer monetized incentives. In mine opinion, it is hard to assign a $ value to innovation; this is good for sales teams. Some companies give annual innovation awards; it is a good initiative for a short term, but it creates more competition than it encourages collaboration and creates emulation. My former employer set up a more robust recognition program (it was around good performance, not innovation, but it can be applied to innovation stimulation). It is a peer-based recognition program where employees could purchase a “fuzzy” for 50 cents (profits went to a pool for charity donations), and would give the fuzzy to a co-worker to recognize their achievements. “Fuzzies” circulated around the office and stimulated others to do the same.

4- Return to the past. Debra Kaye, author of Red Thread Thinking, advises companies to return to the past. No new idea is completely original. Some concepts may not have materialized for various reasons, but it is always good to look at the past and understand why it did not work out. You avoid future mistakes, you can find ways to better the products (new technology, new process, new skill…). Start-up companies which by definition don’t have a past can look at what’s be done in the industry, what did not find success, and bounce off this to create something new.

5- Debra Kaye also stresses that companies should pay attention to culture, not trends. Culture is mass ideology - a system of values and beliefs that runs so deep we don't question it. There's an American belief in personal invention and reinvention. You see that in social products like Snapchat and Instagram, which allow us to invent ourselves in the moment. They may seem like a trend. But they reflect a deep underlying value.
Trends are much more superficial. They are hard to get in and out of quickly enough to make money. Kraft came out with CarbWells in 2004, at the end of the low-carb craze. It was a disaster.

6- Continuous education (L&L, conferences, seminars…). Self-development is the key to employee’s success. In the same system where company should create a structure for unstructured time, those same companies should create time for continuous education. Allow employees to seek new interests, learn and develop new skills.

7- Allow failure. The essence of innovation is that it takes multiple experiments to successfully create new products, solutions, services.  Failure is part of the innovation process. When employees are not afraid of failure, they will feel empowered to take risks and be “crazy”.

What reasons do you see for innovation to succeed?  Share your stories.

Starbucks: the brand experience more than the coffee

Last summer my wife and I took the kids to Chicago as my daughter wanted to go to the American Girl store to buy a doll. Beautiful summer days prompted us to walk across the city, enjoying the sights and various activities. With young children, every once in a while we have to make a stop to go to the bathroom. Not easy to find clean public bathrooms. In big cities like Chicago, you find Starbucks pretty much at each street corner. 

I have to acknowledge that I love Starbucks! Not for their average coffee, but for the customer experience the company has created. With its presence at almost every street corner, you can’t find better “public” (and always clean) bathrooms than at Starbucks.

Being European, I may be a bit picky (you can say “snobby”) about coffee. Although the average American Joe or Jane may go to Starbucks for their coffee morning Joe, I find myself that Starbucks’ coffee is very average. Thus, I don’t go to Starbucks for their coffee, I go to Starbucks for what the chain has to offer beyond coffee: its brand experience.
From its prime locations (i.e. easy bathroom stops), from its Wi-Fi, to its activism, its well-design by-products (mugs, espresso machines…), its Teavana "tea bar" concept, Starbucks has managed to create a global brand experience wherever it opens stores.

In Europe, people go to cafés or bars during lunch time, in the evening or the weekend to meet with friends, to relax, to read… Starbucks has imported this European “social” model to the US and made it a global phenomenon.

How many of us go to a Starbucks store to work for a couple of hours, get away from the kids to read quietly? I even see (more precisely hear) on a regular basis job interviews taking place at Starbucks. I like Starbucks as it is an observational deck from my business. Tattooed, pierced baristas interacting with CEOs, families having a treat, business meetings conducted in a store…

Starbucks mixes the corporate brand with and edgier side. Global meets local. On the corporate side, Starbucks is a large global corporation with a local touch. Products are similar from one country to another (products developed by HQ), with a twist to local preferences. You will find a few different products in European stores from US stores, but most of the product offering is similar.
In Europe, people go to cafés or bars during lunch time, in the evening or the weekend to meet with friends, to relax, to read… Starbucks has imported this European “social” model to the US and made it a global phenomenon.

How many of us go to a Starbucks store to work for a couple of hours, get away from the kids to read quietly? I even see (more precisely hear) on a regular basis job interviews taking place at Starbucks. I like Starbucks as it is an observational deck from my business. Tattooed, pierced baristas interacting with CEOs, families having a treat, business meetings conducted in a store…

Starbucks mixes the corporate brand with and edgier side. Global meets local. On the corporate side, Starbucks is a large global corporation with a local touch. Products are similar from one country to another (products developed by HQ), with a twist to local preferences. You will find a few different products in European stores from US stores, but most of the product offering is similar.On the edgy side, you find the tattooed and pierced baristas, the company’s activism (the latest’s being its campaign against the government’s shutdown), its well-designed by-products, the company’s morphing into a music distributor (music albums being launched exclusively though Starbucks stores), its fair-trade coffee beans… Now, Tweet-a-coffee is the latest company’s program to “to bridge the online and offline worlds”.


It all comes down to the experience, which every corner of the world you are in.Starbucks has successfully brought to the US a social experience from Europe (get together around a cup of coffee), but more surprisingly has brought a similar although different experience to the rest of the world. The last time I was in Buenos Aires, Barcelona or even Singapore, I was shocked to see Starbucks stores crowded with locals having fun. You can find some of the world’s best coffee in Argentina and Spain, and like in many Latin American and European countries, socializing around a cup of coffee (or a beer) is a common habit. You would think that locals would find places offering better coffee. What Starbucks has mastered outside the United States is not to bring a European experience or a good coffee, but to bring a US experience to the world. Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans go to Starbucks for the American experience, not because the coffee is good. It is like going to McDonald’s if you are a kid in France to eat an American burger.

Starbucks has gone so far to create a unique experience that a new coffee chain takes the experience even further. Ziferblat is the first pay-per-minute cafe, based on a Russian chain concept where "everything is free (food, coffee, Wi-Fi), expect the time you spend there.

Share some of your Starbucks experiences with us.

How to optimize social media to recruit talents

Your company’s reputation and brand are not enough to attract or retain a talented and skilled workforce. An innovative, future-oriented organization must build a smarter workforce.

Flying back home from a conference recently, I was engaged in an interesting although argumentative conversation with the person sitting next to me. An HR executive in his late 40s for a law firm, he told me he was caught in a generational fight with younger associates on how to recruit and maintain talents in his firm. He argued that the reputation of a company, combined with the high number of job seekers vs. a global slim job offering should be enough to find the right talents. I replied sarcastically that as much as most job postings are no longer publicly advertised in various platforms (newspapers, online job platforms such as Monster and CareerBuilder), and that more than 80% of positions are filled by referral and networking, the same logic also applies to job seekers. The new generations entering the job market no longer respond to tens or even hundreds of job postings. On the contrary, through online and live networking, job seekers are able to narrow down their search and apply to the very jobs and companies that appeal to them, not relying merely on a company’s reputation.

As job or talent search is a matter of supply and demand, it is easy to assume that more job seekers than jobs means that companies should not have trouble finding the right talents, should they? Interestingly, 65 percent of global companies are having problems finding employees with the skills they need. A recent report lists talent shortage as the #2 risk for businesses globally. The evidence is clear. The need for superior talent is increasing and organizations across the globe recognize that the best candidates are worth fighting for. The question is: how does your organization attract, retain and empower the right talent for the right position at the right time?

Your company’s reputation and brand are not enough to attract or retain a talented and skilled workforce. An innovative, future-oriented organization must build a smarter workforce.

With Generation Y entering the job market massively, and next-in-line Generation Z being raised on social media, companies must go beyond “just” having an online presence. A robust social media strategy will not only help your company develop brand awareness, but will also help recruit talents, gather customer insights, maximize customer service and retention.

Recent social media stats show that more than 60% of adults are connected to one or more social networks, while 23% of online time is spent entirely on social networking activities.

Online recruiting must be integrated in a company’s marketing strategy. A solid plan, a target audience, metrics and data are all required for effective social recruiting. With the introduction of Brand Pages on Facebook, your organization isn’t any different from those selling a product — instead, you're advertising a place of work.

Through brand management, content creation and engagement, candidates and employers alike see the value of social interaction for talent acquisition. It’s instantly measurable and targeted to something that older processes simply can’t match.

How can your company actually use social media for recruitment purposes? To answer that question you have to break down social media by channels.

LinkedIn for sourcing

The world’s largest professional network is what first comes to mind when speaking social media and careers. 43% of all LinkedIn users are based in the US, with 61 million users. Your business can use LinkedIn in several ways. There is the Company Page where you can share updates and LinkedIn users can follow your company to stay informed. This is completely free but at the moment few businesses have actually claimed their pages.

IBM tops the rank in the US with more than 580,000 followers, who are likely to be good future recruits or know people to recommend for jobs at the company.

Another useful tool on LinkedIn is running a group around a topic. Groups on LinkedIn serve as discussion forums and a place to exchange useful information. HP has successfully built a community of followers that drove significant increases in brand awareness and advocacy.

Then there are of course personal profiles on LinkedIn. The key to success here is to engage your employees. Your own workforce is the best place to start adding followers – after all, they’re your biggest advocates. Encourage them to create and complete LinkedIn profiles – once they include your company name, they automatically become followers of your Company Page. Ask them to include a link to the Company Page in their email signatures.

LinkedIn is extremely useful for sourcing and approaching new talent. Good recruiters navigate through the LinkedIn database using their upgraded accounts, 3rd party tools and networking skills. You won’t find user profiles with more professional information than on LinkedIn, making this a primary tool for any recruiter.

Facebook for brand awareness

With 158 855 340 monthly active users in the United States, FB has become to most used social medium. Companies are using Facebook to discover talent but are not hiring directly from the site. However, they are creating FB pages and promoting them, as well as jobs, through the Facebook Ads platform. Recruiters are using Facebook groups, advertising and their corporate Facebook careers page in order to source candidates. For instance, Marriott’s Jobs and Careers page has an application that lets a job seeker run his own Marriott Hotel kitchen, which increases their page engagement and attracts more people to “like” the company.

The goal here is not to hire talents through Facebook, but rather use FB as an additional channel to LinkedIn or Twitter to increase your brand exposure, share information about the company’s value, career opportunities, benefits… in short – share why your company is a great place to work!

Twitter to keep the conversation going

With 140 million users in the US, Twitter has positioned itself as the second-biggest social networking site after Facebook. The optimal usage of Twitter while recruiting talent is to use it as a conversation tool. This is a great way to keep your followers engaged, spread your story, share updates. You can answer candidates’ questions, wish them good luck for interviews… 

You can also use Twitter to post job entries through your own accounts, use third party companies, such as Tweet My Jobs and Twit Job Search, to promote your listings…

Encourage your employees to tweet about their (positive) experience working in your company.

By having individual Twitter accounts for recruiters you will humanize the whole process and give applicants a single point of contact.

YouTube for more branding

The world’s largest video sharing community and second largest search engine is all about branding. Everyone consumes content from YouTube but we still see very few companies producing videos for recruiting purposes.  Some applicants want to read articles, others want to speak to current employees, some love watching videos about ‘A day in the life of [insert job title here]‘. Companies like UPS have successfully used YouTube for large recruitment campaigns where they show what it’s like to work for that company. UPS also proved that every employee within a company has a story to be told, by leveraging these stories on video you make prospective applicants feel like they know your employees already.

Conclusion

Social media doesn’t need to be the absolute center of your recruitment strategy, but it would be ill-advised to ignore the trend completely. 

In HR and recruitment strategy, social media should be used to develop your brand across multiple channels, share your company’s story, empower your employees to spread their positive experience working for you, engage your followers and potential hires. 

These channels are changing and advancing the ways we approach finding the best talent and taking it to a more personal, open and collaborative experience. 

What do you think? Does using social media mean less work for recruiting, or just more effective implementation of traditional ideas?

Why innovation fails...

I have a firm belief that to stay relevant and be successful in this ever-changing, ultra-competitive, whacky world, we actually need to upgrade the way we think on a permanent basis. To think the same as we always have is to fall behind. The things that used to make us successful no longer work, your old thinking is now taken for granted, and our problem-solving abilities are now commoditized or digitized.
As Wal-Mart director Jack Shewmaker once said, “the world is changing and Wal-Mart has to change, but I’m not sure it is changing fast enough”. This was 8 years ago, and the company is still trying to find its future path.

It is not whether you have fast smarts in spades that ultimately matters, but the version of thinking that you employ that determines your compatibility with these changing times. 

The best way to outperform the competition is to out-think the competition. The search for constant innovation, self-actualization is the key to success.  However, many companies fail to innovate, despite their good will.
In a recent survey I read, participants in majority pointed their fingers to the lack of innovation engagement from their leadership. Although leadership can be the force behind innovation, all components of an organization must be change agents.

In a Linked-In post in May 2013, Gijs van Wulfen identifies 10 problems at the start of innovation. 

Here are my top 10 reasons why innovation fails:

1. Lack of clarity of what the organization’s mission is, and by extension what its brand is about. Leadership may encourage innovation, but without clear direction, the company’s to-be change agents lose sight on how they can make a difference.
2. Unrealistic expectations from top management regarding the resources and time required in carrying on innovation, lack of resources allocated to innovation, in terms of budget, infrastructure and people. So-called leaders don’t have a real clue of the complexity of innovation, starve it of its essential resources or just want to stay well within their comfort zone of existing product and technology understanding. This reluctance to push innovation, to extend capabilities and provide it with the right capabilities ends up in these continuing failures. 
3. Stick to conventions; follow the same thinking pattern over and over again. Not to explore all the types of innovation available does not make sound business sense. This shows a lack of real involvement, comprehension, understanding and engagement. Equally, working with the same “creative” team time again and again breaks any aspiration from the rest of the company’s staff to come up with a different approach. If this “creative” team was so innovative, the results would be obvious.
4. Work in silos: this comes from leadership as well, as they fail to understand the value of building up the capabilities for broader collaborations across teams and areas of expertise within the organization.
5. Wrong people in place: leadership place “their” people by favoritism to on work “innovative” projects. They constrain the very essence that gives their organization its growth by holding back or not pushing for the best people to be engaged within the projects.
6. Lack of innovation strategy, where the emphasis is placed in far too much on idea generation and not on execution. Ideas will stall, leadership will not allocate resources adequately to carry through innovation.
7. Appropriation of ideas by leadership who kill innovation: leadership will take ideas to make them their own, transforming concepts to fit their “narrow” views, thus disengaging the very ones who came up with innovative ideas.
8. The management pre-kill. Even though the goal is to innovate in a serious way, the most far-reaching ideas are the first ones removed from the equation; either because management is unable to relate or considers the idea be too far-fetched. The responsible innovators are then left wondering: “Wasn’t the intention supposed to be serious innovation?”
9. Reluctance to involve external partners: fear of opening doors to competitive intelligence, reluctance to share potential benefits, concern to dilute internal innovation by letting external partners came into the space…
10. Line management resistance and poor management of the innovation process: lack of clear overarching innovation framework in place that links innovation to strategic alignment, which communicates innovations value and its value position, failure to put in place all the critical factors of an innovation process to make sure that innovation has the chance to work.

You may recognize the above-mentioned situations. Do not despair; you are not alone. I will provide solutions in my upcoming posts.

What reasons do you see for innovation to fail?  Share your stories.