Blog Archives
Networking delivers competitive advantage through the sharing of good ideas
In his paper The Social Origins of Good Ideas, Ronald Burt from the University of Chicago looks at the behaviour of employees and how their networks affect the generation of new ideas and how often they are applied.
Two key trends appeared from his study: that ideas generated from within a particular department were rejected more often, being seen as too insular; and that people who’s network spanned individuals across departments and organisations were more likely to come up with good ideas.
Neither of these results should be particularly surprising, but it’s good to see them qualified in an academic study. Water cooler conversations that take place between colleagues from across an organisation enable indivudals to put a different perspective on a situation, giving examples of how something has been done elsewhere or simply to say ‘have you thought of doing it this way’.
Burton summarises the study in his paper:
People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.
Some of this explains the explosive growth of social networking. With 25% of all internet pages visited being to one of the top 10 networking sites and 9% of all internet visits going in the same direction, our insatiable need to connect with others is going somewhere to being satisfied.
The next step is to move this networking into a truly collaborative environment, where conversations can take place between many in a virtual space that crosses geographic and language boundaries.
Ten years ago this was just a figment of our imagination, today, thanks to some very clever guys in San Jose, it’s a reality.
Email marketing loses its edge
Once upon a time direct mail ruled.
You bought a carefully selected list; segmented it by geography or job title; crafted appropriate letters; packed them in an envelope together with a generic piece of collateral and posted them out to your target audience, safe in the knowledge that you would, by the law of averages, get a 0.5% response rate. It was expensive, but if you did it right you knew you would get the results which were measurable and traceable.
Then email came along and life changed beyond all recognition. Suddenly you could send out as many messages as you liked ‘for free’, hitting your database with more and more frequency. Open rates were 33%+ and the sales team was happy because they could tell potential clients about the ‘millions of hits’ in your advertising campaign.
But things aren’t looking quite so rosy these days. While event organisers and marketers maintain their love affair with electronic mail, the recipients are less enamoured. Faced with a barrage of messages on an hourly basis, potential visitors and delegates are learning to use the tools on their mail programmes to create rules that send messages from certain senders direct to their junk folder, or to flag them as spam so that they never even make it as far as the inbox at all.
Opening rates continue to fall, with an average marketing campaign now looking at figure of approximately 25%. From these the average click through rate is somewhere in the region of 4%, which means that for a mailing of 1000 people you can expect 10 to go through to your site, a response rate of 1%.
On the face of it, this still looks better than the 0.5% we expect from traditional DM, but this is not so. In the conference or event market the DM figure refers to actual bookings or registrations whereas the email click-through rate refers to clicks on any link in an email to any document or web-page. If we then assume that only 1 in 10, which is still very optimistic either books or registers then the actual response rate for an email campaign is only 0.1%.
Coupled with the fact that every time a database is mailed, it encourages individuals to junk or block the sender, a campaign that is poorly targetted and irritatingly frequent can actually create a double negative of failing to deliver response while actively turning potential customers away from the event.
Does this mean that there should be a return to DM? Not really. But it is time to reflect on a more holistic approach to marketing. Using social networking techniques and creating communities that are engaged rather than annoyed.
Getting connected
con·nec·tive (k
-n
k
t
v)
adj. Serving or tending to connect.
n. One that connects.
Clever organisations are already engaging in connective marketing: joining all of their activities together into a seamless strategy that encompasses all of their internal, online, mainstream media and live communications.
It’s such a simple idea that it’s hard to understand why it is such a new concept. Why is bringing all this activity together so difficult?
Perhaps it is because events are often seen as an adjunct to, or separate from, the main marketing activity, or that online is so sophisticated that it can only be handled by a specialist agency.
But technological advances mean that this is no longer the case. Platforms that enable live events to be knitted into the very fabric of online activity are now available; social media can be tied into conferences and disparate workforces bought together to exchange ideas and proffer solutions.
Creating connections has never been easier.
Virtual has been reality for some time
Changing attitudes is hard. Particularly when people believe that what you are talking about could really shake up the status quo.
When we talk about our passion for changing business practices through groundbreaking technology we get a variety of responses:
- Event management companies look at the virtual technologies, compare them with their live offering and are generally dismissive, despite results from our recent survey saying that 80% of event directors/managers/organisers think that virtual events represent a real opportunity for the events industry.
- Corporates who are already using or building different forms of virtual communication technologies can’t quite believe that the technology is as advanced as it is, and are blown away by the simplicity and the capabilities of the system we use – 6Connex®.
- Business leaders listen politely, technology isn’t their thing, then they have what we call a ‘confetti bomb’ moment, when they suddenly realise just what we can deliver.
Virtual events and connective marketing are not just concepts. They are business changing reality and they are available right now.
People have been doing things virtually for a very long time already: from pilots trained in flight simulators to buying your train tickets online; building virtual farms on Facebook to checking out health symptoms on NHS Direct; we don’t even question the process. Twenty years ago the insurance agent came to your house to arrange your car insurance, now you gocompare. Was that so hard?
It’s time to embrace virtual technologies to create collaborative communities that make a real difference to the way the world does business.
Mark Zuckerberg is wrong…
“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” he says. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Well this might be OK for Mark, for whom it would appear that work is life because he seems to eat, breathe, sleep Facebook and has done ever since his college days. So you could possibly predict that his friends are his colleagues are his family…
But I would suggest that he is the exception rather than the rule. I don’t know many people (with any common sense) who would want their clients, patients, pupils etc. to see what they get up to on a drunken stag weekend, but who do want to have an active professional profile on a networking site such as LinkedIn.
Like many people I know, I’m careful who my friends are on Facebook and I use the privacy settings to ensure that only the people I really, truly want to share the minutiae of my daily life with can see it. My kids are cute (honest) but that doesn’t mean someone I met at a conference last week wants to hear about their achievements and frankly the antics of one of my hounds would put anyone off dog ownership for life.
Mark’s mistake is that he has fallen into the ‘one-size-fits-all’ trap. Retailers realised some time ago that if you have a 28cm waist then you don’t automatically have a 28cm inside leg measurement and began providing options accordingly. Social networks are just the same.
While we all want to ‘belong’, hence our desire to join networks as an extension of what we do ‘live’, we aren’t looking for a single ‘tribe’ that fulfils most of our needs. Modern technology has given us the opportunity to select our own very special group of ‘tribes’ where we can indulge our interests and feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Membership of each of these groups is not mutually exclusive, nor do we need to share (or confess) our interests to others who might be judgemental or critical.
By insisting that individuals need to be ‘open’, Mark is also being incredibly naive. For people who work in the criminal justice system, health service, armed forces, teaching, social services or even the volutary sector an entirely open network would mean that they could not participate for fear of compromising their professionalism, opening themselves and their families to abuse and intimidation and in some very extreme cases, physical danger. But why shouldn’t these individuals be able to link with their families and friends online?
Creating a balance between work and life is one of the most important cultural shifts in the developed world. The ability to separate a work persona from a personal one is a fundamental part of this and is something that the founder of Facebook needs to understand.
hellen @missioncontrol
