1. An Ant's Eye Point Of View – Employee Engagement and Getting it Right!

    Tuesday, 31 Jan 2012 2 Comments Posted by:

    Our people are our most valuable resources in business. In most business operations they also sit in an under-utilized state. No – we’re not talking about productivity. We’re talking about engagement. Employee engagement is often something that is being managed by individual managers or in the vacuum of an HR program. Employee engagement is something that needs to be activated across the entire organization and embedded and embraced at every level.

    Fully engaged employees will be more productive. They will have greater retention. They will work not just with the organization – but FOR it. A highly engaged employee base can be your greatest pool of advocates when empowered and activated.

    Internal Employee Engagement

    Recruiting, on-boarding, training, performance management…we could go on. These are all highly costly activities that your business must participate in. Highly engaged employees are more likely to remain a part of your organization longer leading to a decrease in costs nearly across the board. Engaged employees are more likely to advocate for you as an employer. Engaged employees are more likely to maintain an active and participatory role in their own professional development. Engaged employees are more likely to invest back in your company. Here are some interesting articles we’ve seen on this topic:

    External Employee Engagement

    The US economy continues to improve and organizations are looking for new ways to innovate and recover – they will continue to look inwards for ways to gain inertia and make progress. Employee activation is a dramatically untapped resource in the majority of organizations. What other group of people are as knowledgeable about your organization as your employees? What other group is as tapped into your marketplace as employees? And what other group of people is as excited about your product and potential as your employees? (HOPEFULLY no one!) Some of the most recent finds on this topic from around the web:

    • One of the first places many CMO’s thoughts go to when talking about enabling employees to engage with customers online is one of CAUTION. Yes, yes there are some really dramatic stories floating around out there about employee blunders in social media. But let’s remember that these are the minority. While we’re not suggesting that it is a good idea to get all of your employees out there and engaging in social channels without appropriate governance – it’s not something you want to avoid completely either.
    • Your employees have “skin in the game” as John Bell puts it in his post titled 8 Questions to Answer Before Activating Employees as Advocates. He lays out 8 questions for you to ask yourself that will help you plan out how you can develop your “super advocate” from the inside.
    • Start by activating your employees that are already and work on improving literacy for the rest is the tack that Shel Holtz suggests in a post on SocialMediaToday awhile back. This post looks at a Forrester study that points out that among staff who already use social media that almost half of them would actually recommend the company’s products/services. Hello opportunity.
    Whether we are looking at ways to engage your employees internally or looking to activate them in the social media space one consistency we see is Empowerment. Give employees the knowledge and training they crave to participate. Give them the governance they (and you) need to feel safe and confident. Lead by example and celebrate together. Given the right set of ingredients you can active your most powerful and high-potential asset: Your Employees.

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney, Anthony Garcia and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  2. Got Governance?

    Friday, 27 Jan 2012 No Comments Posted by:

    With the new year, you might find yourself cleaning up from 2011. Have you ever cleaned up your processes? Do you find that you have a lot of processes that were necessary at one time and now are abandoned? What happened? Did the need for the process expire?

    Too often the process is still needed, but the energy behind the adoption and adherence of the process has relaxed. Usually the energy of the process shows up in the form of a individual who is very passionate about the process or more importantly the outcome. When this person relaxes, others tend to relax too.

    How many times have you known that you have an expense report to submit, but delay in getting it done. Why? Ignorance? Probably not. No one is harassing you to get the expense report submitted. Bingo (no one is watching)! Some tension is necessary until processes are second nature. Often the tension is governance. Governance is a critical element of managing processes to ensure compliance.

    At Ant’s Eye View, we work with top brands moving across the Social Engagement Journey. In the journey, there is process design and process implementation. After some period of continued activity in stages 2 and 3, process atrophy can settle in if you don’t have the right governance in place. Hoping for process outcomes is not enough. Audit and frequent review of operational metrics ensure that process (and more importantly the outcomes) don’t suffer from Social Process Atrophy (getting lax on social outreach service levels, infrequent content generation). Governance is a necessary audit function. Your governance model might be in need of a tune-up.

  3. An Ant's Eye Point-of-View: Zappos Crisis Response (the first 24 hours)

    Tuesday, 24 Jan 2012 1 Comment Posted by:

    On January 15, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos issued a letter to employees and customers informing them of a massive security breach that exposed customer information including name, passwords and other personal account information.  Widely regarded as one of the most socially connected companies, we were eager to see how Zappos handled this crisis both as professionals and as customers of the brand.  What transpired reveals the importance of not only having a crisis communication plan in place, but also preparing a social engagement strategy as part of that plan.

    From our observation, the Zappos crisis response plan seemed to be solid at first.  Passwords were reset. Content was quickly produced and posted. The message that credit card information was not impacted was clearly articulated.  Customers were being notified of the breach with clear directions of what to do to protect accounts. But, as the news rolled out across the country on Monday, January 16 customer reaction on Facebook and Twitter started to turn negative.

    What’s interesting, in our opinion, was that negative comments were not about the data breach itself, but rather the company’s reaction.  The New York Times tech blog captured the zeitgeist in this quote from a Zappos customer “That’s it? That’s how you respond to a security exposure that may require me to change my password on a large number of other sites to protect myself? That’s how little you think of your customers, just drop this glib little note and wash your hands of the whole affair? You have a legal and moral obligation to protect my information.”

    The first 24 hours of the response captured a few missteps out of character for a social business like Zappos and can provide some helpful lessons for e-commerce brands:

    1.    Changing the standard form of communications with customers.

    One of the biggest successes of Zappos’s business model is ability/desire to interact with customers seamlessly across multiple channels. During the first 24 hours of this crisis, Zappos went the opposite direction, shutting off phones due to high volume and relying on their blog post and email as their support channel. With email slowdowns and blocking international access to Zappos.com properties, a large number of customers were kept out of the loop.

    2.    Key information was not discoverable.

    The main logic behind using a blog post to respond to a crisis is to lend an authentic voice and sense of credibility to a company’s message. Deliberate or not, the Zappos blog post about the security breach is not discoverable via their normal blog channel.  Instead, you needed a link sent via email or posted on other properties to view the key content about the response.

    Moreover, the only public version of their message to customers comes as a “Here is the email that our customers will be receiving” section of that note to employees. The result is a sense that Zappos is ashamed of their response or not truly committed to helping their customers understand the situation.

    3.    A (large) blind spot in their response strategy.

    While Twitter was a responsive channel across the entire first 24 hour period of this crisis, Facebook seemed to be handled by an entirely different team. They missed obvious opportunities such as posting Hsieh’s letter as a note for people who could not access Zappos.com. More impactful perhaps was an seven-hour quiet period wherein Zappos did not respond to customer posts on Facebook. While it is a well-established practice to have a looser response time policy for Facebook than Twitter, seven hours is a long time to go silent during a crisis.

    The lesson to learn from the first 24 hours of the Zappos crisis response is that a crisis communication plan is not complete without integrating social engagement. Zappos seemed to be caught flat-footed and unprepared to engage with their customers across multiple channels. This exacerbated the frustration of customers who had not received an email from the company or were stymied by the bottleneck created by the volume of users resetting their passwords. The end result was a smudge on Zappos’s impeccable heritage of online customer service.

    Conducting crisis communications across multiple channels is no small feat but the foundation of a successful response can (and should) be set in advance:

    1. Build a crisis response team (with representatives from Corporate Communications, Legal, Public Relations, Customer Support and Marketing to engage online and coordinate between channels)
    2. Create a proactive and reactive crisis communications plan that includes an escalation policy for negative comments on social media sites
    3. Conduct crisis response simulations to test teams and processes
    What are your thoughts on the crisis? What could Zappos have done better?

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney, Anthony Garcia and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.