However, I use the term “thinking organizations” to refer to organizations with a conscious and systematic awareness of the thinking process as distinct from the more widespread appreciation of the end products. Id est, most companies readily acknowledge the importance of good decisions, but fewer examine the process of coming up with good decisions beyond “hiring smart people.”

Two important characteristics of the thinking organization are a focus on results and a preference for hypotheses over conclusions.

A focus on results removes the “good” and “bad” from thinking and replaces them with an emphasis on effectiveness. Id est, most of us would probably agree that thinking about eliminating childhood malnutrition is morally superior to thinking about how to get someone to buy cologne. However, the purpose of the cologne maker is not to create world peace, but to sell cologne. So the lens through which it looks at its thinking should be the effectiveness with which it results in cologne sales. There are of course ethical, legal and other subjective factors in the thinking landscape which need to be considered, but in the context of achieving results.

A culture that speaks in the language of hypotheses broadens its thinking because foregone conclusions and assumptions become interesting ideas. The sentiment that “it’s obvious this is the best way to deal with this kind of customer” is recast into “I think this way of approaching this kind of customer will yield better results than this other way” and subject to critical thinking and a process to gather evidence to support or reject the hypothesis.

According to The New Voice of the CIO, a recent study from IBM, this involves:

• Making innovation real:  You need both insightful vision and able pragmatism to explore what technology can do and then generate the can-do sense of urgency essential for navigating great ideas into working systems,
• Raising the ROI of Information Technology: A two pronged approach involves better solutions that deliver more business value and an understanding of expense structures that lets you trim costs whenever possible, and
• Expanding Business Impact: Leaders in your various business areas need to be wondering how information, communication and collaboration can present new opportunities and your information systems staff and consultants need to understand your core business.  These high level, cross functional partnerships should be augmented by a commitment to deepening information expertise at all organizational levels.

Even though you may not be able afford a full time CIO, you can’t afford to not exploit the opportunities and address the challenges that information presents your organization.

It’s no longer enough to build a website where prospects can learn about your products. The thinking strategist now provides resources that help prospects think about their needs in a context that nourishes their appreciation of the company’s unique value proposition.

It’s no longer enoughto find a website that teaches you about the latest advances in your field.  The thinking imperative is to find people who are talking about what those advances mean and enter the conversation.

Two ways businesses can use a thinking perspective are for web marketing and strategic conversation management.

• Web marketing is concerned with bringing visitors from outside the company to your website and
• Strategic conversation management is concerned with sending people from your company to external websites.

Thinking is the New Sales Process

The key driver of modern marketing strategy is customer centricity.  But this no longer means seeing the world through your customers’ eyes.  It means thinking about the world through your customers needs.

Therefore, successful web marketing depends on understanding the thinking process that your prospects go through as they learn about your capabilities, evaluate them against their goals and decide whether to continue in the sales funnel. Your job is to fill the sales funnel (your website) with opportunities for them to think in ways that help them appreciate the match between your unique value proposition and their needs.

A vibrant web marketing strategy consists of

• An ongoing and deepening alignment between your unique value proposition and your customers’ needs, and
• An evolving web site that’s dedicated to allowing your prospects to think about their needs in a way that will help them learn about that alignment, appreciate its value and decide to expand their relationship with you.

Your unique value proposition should be built from your competitive strengths. Do you offer the lowest price? The best service? A distinct product?  It should complete the sentence “I am the best choice for someone looking for ….” and not contain any wishful thinking.

Describe both your face to face and online customer segments in great detail (The number of segments you use will depend on your time and other resources.)

If you have face to face customers, how and why do they differ from your online customers?

For each customer segment, ask yourself:

• What is the relative importance of each of my competitive strengths?
• What do they want to know before they purchase or contact me? How do they learn it?
• Where do they come from?  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, search engines, advertisements, word of mouth?
• What will they do on my web site and in what order?
• What kind of post purchase support will they appreciate?

Is your web site designed with your customers’ thinking processes in mind?

• Is it easy for them to think in the order and detail they want about everything that’s important to them?
• Does it present information in a context which shapes their thinking in ways that help them appreciate the relevance of your competitive strengths and distinctive value proposition?

Does your web site reinforce the wisdom of their decision to be your customer so they’ll recommend you and purchase again?  Does it help them learn new ways to get more value from your product?

Once you think your web site is aligned with your customer’s thinking processes, you need to test your assumptions and make evidence based adjustments.

You can use analytics, cookies and calls to action to get a better understanding of who your visitors are (existing customers, first time prospects, returning prospects,) where they come from and what they do on your web site.

• What are the different paths they take through your site?  Which lead to purchases, contact information or departure with neither?
• What are the most popular pages and what do people do there?
• Which of your webinars have been the most popular?  What’s happening in your support forum, LinkedIn Group or Facebook Fan Page?

If you can’t answer some of those questions, change your web site to give you better information. For example, you can get a more granular view of why people are visiting pages by replacing them with multiple pages with tighter foci, providing downloadable web assets that appeal to specific interests and adding calls to action.

If certain pages seem to be dead ends, think about what people might have been looking for.

Once you’re satisfied with your understanding of what’s occurring on your web site, compare it to how you think your customers will behave and adjust your web site and deepen your understanding of your customer until they’re in a new alignment.

Customer-centric web marketing is a constant process of thinking about what you know, adjusting both your customer solutions and web site, and testing your assumptions.

Strategic Conversation Management

Every time we use a search engine like Google, we’re reminded that the web is our knowledge economy’s most powerful and rich resource.

However, it’s vastly underutilized by most businesses because their employees use it mainly as a reaction to random needs for individual bits or small chunks of ad hoc knowledge.

Strategic conversation management is a proactive, systematic and cohesive system of utilizing the web’s resources to make your company more competitive by deepening and developing your core competencies.

It’s an ongoing process that consists of:

• Choosing your strategic conversations,
• Creating and training your social media team,
• Committing resources,
• Establish milestones, and
• Reflecting and modifying.

There are three threads from which you’ll weave your strategic conversations:

• What the organization’s various job functions need to know to do their job better,
• Places where these conversations are occurring or could occur, and
• Who in your organization has the time, interest and abilities to participate in these conversations.

You’ll need a social media facilitator to act as project manager and

• Create and manage the infrastructure.  This includes developing guidelines, helping to articulate and imbue the company’s social media ethos and setting up and managing a wiki, LinkedIn group or similar place where the social media team and others in the organization can talk about the project, and
• Support the social media team by solving problems, scheduling and facilitating meetings, making sure training occurs and encouraging and supporting individual and collective reflection.

You’ll need to train your social media team in the

• Operation of the selected social media platforms,
• Company guidelines,
• Culture of Social Media and what it means to think socially,
• Art of conversation and developing thinking relationships, and
• Process of reflection.

Decide how much time each person will spend

• Participating in conversations,
• Reflecting asynchronously with the rest of the social media team,
• Updating their non social media peers on what they’re learning, and
• Meeting face to face with the rest of the social media team.

Establish milestones for

• Setting up profiles,
• Participating in ongoing discussions,
• Starting new discussions,
• Making connections and friends, and
• Connecting via phone calls.

Your social media team should interact regularly using both asynchronous tools and face to face meetings to think about:

What they’re learning about both social media and their field,

• What works and what doesn’t,
• How well they’re working as a team,
• Changes they’re thinking about, and
• New conversational directions.

The individual members should also be interacting with their functional groups to get ideas and keep them up to date.

You’ll regularly need to evaluate what succeeded and what didn’t so you can decide how to allocate resources for the future.  Some of the things you should consider are:

• The things people learned,
• Specific questions people were able to get answered,
• The robustness of the network they formed including its variety, depth and scope, and
• The new questions they’re asking of your organization.

Conclusion

As the knowledge economy continues its transformation into an imagination economy, it’s essential to move from a learning to a thinking organization.

Thinking is a creative process so managing the thinking organization is essentially managing innovation.  However, even though you’ll be navigating open-ended ambiguity instead of accumulating explicit knowledge, your goal is the same and the vast majority of what you know about business will continue to be relevant.

Whether you’re engaging customers or optimizing your business operations, you need to think through what’s important, decide where and how the important things get done, set up a process for doing them and then evaluate and modify.

Many of the high school, college and other students who’ll be using a tablet computer to engage their course content are innovative and adept programmers who’ll create “apps” based ontheir ideas of what will help them and their friends learn.

These millions of rapidly prototyped attempts to improve specific learning environments will decentralize education research and change its focus from the large and timeless issues identified in the academy to the immediate and granular concerns of learners.

Most of today’s educational content comes in textbooks, which Bryan Polivka likens to CDs in “Why the iPad really could change everything.”  He asks us to wonder about the textbook “single” and imagines a future in which we can create a learning “playlist” for a course that mixes tracks from Macmillan, Pearson and others.

My own sense is that it won’t stop there and digital “papers” and assignments will be elaborations (riffs?) on those textbook singles and the best ones will be added to the library from which future students construct their playlists.  And, as I mentioned in a previous post, they’ll also be added to the school’s website as inbound marketing assets that are both learning resources for the world and recruiting pieces that show how well students learn at that school.

The ebook of the future will transform delivery by replacing Moodle and other systems that manage learning (LMS) with learning landscapes that encourage exploration and experimentation by shifting from a pedagogy that puts content into an LMS to one that puts widgets and apps into the content.

Sharing bookmarks and links, embedding conversations into chapters and paragraphs, and collaborating with each other on problems will be the first steps in the transformation of the student to a self directed learner who experiences content as a learning environment instead of a learning goal.

Reimagining the tablet computer into the kind of networked application platform that will enable this transformation requires:

An open system that makes it easy to create applications and share content,

A scalable, cloud friendly architecture that seamlessly integrates these applications across the desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile device, and

A peer-to-peer distribution system that makes sharing easy and cheap.  A centralized “store” is too slow and rigorous for the prototyping at the heart of this revolution, although it will probably be a good place for the “finished” products.

Fortunately, not only do all these exist, but they’re also the prevailing directions in which computer systems are moving.

Do you agree that when students have the power to program their e-books we’ll see an explosion of creativity that will radically change the nature of education?

Please let me know.

It also offers significant competitive advantage to educational organizations because of its proven appeal to your customers, the lack of products being offered them and a substantial body of knowledge from other industries that can inform your approach.

Andrew McAfee, a respected business thinker, believes that Enterprise Social Software Platforms (what we think of as social media,) will “have about as big an impact on the informal processes…as large-scale systems…have had on the formal processes.”

Social media will have as big a place in education’s future as learning management systems.

Social media is a cognitive tool that facilitates peer-to-peer learning and collaboration in the classroom:

• Twitter hashtags for courses let students ask their classmates for help,
• Discussion groups are good for exploring topics,
• Tools like Google’s Wave allow the class to construct a collaborative set of notes both in real time and after the fact.  Not only are these notes more complete, but the process of engaging each other leads to deeper learning,
• Students can collaborate on projects such as creating videos, wikis, webinars and podcasts, and
• It can mitigate two of the biggest challenges with distance learning: the sense of isolation and lack of participation in the social channels of learning.

Social media is a substantial enough topic of study to justify certificates and majors in both the how-to and the management of social media:

• There’s an increasing demand for people who understand the mechanics of blogging, microblogging, bookmarking, webinars, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Flickr and many other platforms as well as ancillary products like Google Analytics, and
• Managers are increasingly being called to understand social media.  How can they calculate its ROI?  What’s its role in an integrated marketing communications plan?  How can it be used to facilitate innovation?  What does it mean for the organizational structure?  What strategic opportunities does it present?

The degree is just the beginning. Social media communities are great ways to keep in touch with your graduates and involve them in developing continuing education products that meet the needs of people like them.

Social media can help with marketing and admissions:

• You can join the social media conversations where your prospective students are wondering what to do and where to learn how to do it,
• Your current students are already talking about you through their social networks and you can turn them into brand evangelists,
• Admissions, career services, financial aid, management and faculty blogs can create additional entry points for prospects to get the specific information they want about your school, and
• Social media projects created by current students and posted on your website will give prospects the kind of authentic and trusted peer perspective which is such an increasingly important factor in their purchase decision.  These projects can easily go viral because the students will want to show their work to their friends and peers (who are your ideal target demographic.)

Social media can help with retention and career placement:

• Better informed decisions about what to study and where to attend will lead to better matches and reduce the number of students who leave because they made the wrong choice,
• Many students feel more comfortable with a social media environment than a traditional education model so a school that uses social networks will be more intuitive and make sense to them more quickly and less painfully,
• A collaborative curriculum will make it easier to see who isn’t participating and counselors can intervene before they’ve drifted too far away,
• Social networks outside the classroom that give voices to students will be places where you’ll hear about strengths, problems and dissatisfaction,
• A strong alumni network that keeps experiencing your value proposition will be a good source of jobs,
• Participating in conversations on the internet with the people who will hire your students will create valuable contacts and help you shape your program, and
• Training students for successful social media careers with robust growth will keep their interest.

Social Media in Education is currently a blue ocean with very little activity compared to all the realms to which it’s connected:

• There are millions of people in your target market who have integrated social media into many aspects of their lives.  However, if they wanted to prepare for a career in a business that operates the same way as their cohort, they would be hard pressed to find that training,
• These same people use social media to learn about the things that impact their personal lives, yet if they looked for an education that used social media as a learning tool, they’d have difficulty finding one, and
• If they tried to use their social networks to research educational opportunities, they’d also find relatively little material compared to other searches.

What is your organization doing to catch up to your customers’ interests and the job market’s demands?  Please let me know.

“We think when we are in doubt about how to act, what to believe, or what to desire.”

In-the-workflow thinking, the first type, makes the decisions people are facing in their every day work life and above-the-workflow thinking, the second and third types, invites people to step out of their everyday experience to look at the big picture of the world and the opportunities it presents.

Before the explosion of technology and media, business people’s choices of actions were limited by their local resources and they had limited contact with the world and its opportunities.

As a result, they had very little need for help with in-the-workflow thinking and substantial need for stimulating above-the-workflow thinking.

The thought leader model emerged to meet those needs and event keynotes and panels emerged as channels of distribution.

However, technology, globalization, the internet and other forces have changed the thinking landscape.  Today, most business people are inundated with a steady stream of both information about all the latest developments that could possibly relate to them and stories of all the things people are trying.

And their choices about what actions to take have simultaneously exploded.

As a result, attendees arrive at our events with a pretty clear big picture.  It may only be 2 mega pixels instead of 20, but the main features of their world and its possibilities are clear.  And if they want to zoom in on any feature, they can do it for a very low cost on the internet.

What most of them don’t know is how to translate this big picture into concrete actions that are relevant to what they’re doing back at the job.

This crumbling foundation of the typical event’s thought leader value proposition is evident in some recent blogs (See Is Social The New Conference Black & Are Attendee Lists the New Allure? or Why I Travel to Conferences Last Minute) in which the authors state that their decision about whether to attend an event is becoming more dependent on which members of their social networks are attending and less dependent on the speakers and program.

They’re more interested in going deeper into their workflow, which is what our online networks are becoming, than listening to speakers talking about the big picture.

Most attendees don’t yet have the robust social networks that can offer the same opportunities for engagement so attending the speeches and panels continues to be their best/only value proposition at the event.

However, a strategy based on scarcity (lack of robust social networks) is an emperor with no clothes.

The fact that the authors of these blogs are willing to take the time and spend the money for transportation, lodging and event registration shows the value they believe face to face contact can add to their social networks and points to the new strategic direction in which events need to embark.

Helping people develop rich social networks that help them with their in-the-workflow thinking is a new opportunity for event producers and one in which the face-to-face realm has a clear competitive edge.

Instead of offering conference content and random networking opportunities that are becoming a decreasingly less attractive alternative to the unconferences which attendees’ social networks are letting them build, event producers need to embrace this shift and

• Make it easier for prospective attendees to see how the conference will enrich their social networks.  This will involve not only letting them see who in their existing network will be there but also what meaningful and relevant contacts they might be able to add to their network,
• Change the event pedagogy from instruction to construction.  Instead of presenters who attendees learn from, use facilitators who get attendees learning with each other because exchanging tacit knowledge is the best way to build the trust and understanding that’s a social network’s soul, and
• Keep enhancing your attendees’ social networks between events.  The world doesn’t need another online community so don’t try to build one and recruit your audience into it.  Instead, visit your attendees’ and prospects’ communities and constructively participate with useful knowledge and ideas as well as suggestions about other networks they might find interesting.  Naturally you’ll wind up with your own social identity and web presence, but keep in mind that your value proposition relates to their social networks, not yours.

The thought leader/expert model is fundamentally inconsistent with the emergent wisdom of the crowds that social software platforms are energizing.

This represents a new and rapidly growing opportunity for event promoters and speakers who are willing to start shifting their focus from above-the-workflow thinking to in-the-workflow thinking that offers people opportunities to deepen, enhance and expand their social networks.

What do you think?

• As a learning record, it will allow the Event Industry to fully embrace the outcomes focus of modern business and create value propositions that resonate more effectively with the modern budgetary approval process, and
• As a learning environment, it can move us from a business model based on the delivery of explicit knowledge, which increasingly “wants to be free,” to one based on the construction and sharing of tacit knowledge, which The Shift Index, a 2009 report from the consulting firm Deloitte about the impact of the digital infrastructure on business, calls “the most valuable type of knowledge”(p 46,) going on to observe that “Interactions in face-to-face settings are where tacit knowledge creation and exchange is most rich” (p 47.)

These two characteristic are woven together in Outcome-Based Education (OBE,) which Wikipedia describes as:

“a recurring education reform model. It is a student-centered learning philosophy that focuses on empirically measuring student performance, which are called outcomes. OBE contrasts with traditional education, which primarily focuses on the resources that are available to the student, which are called inputs. … OBE generally promotes curricula and assessment based on constructivist methods and discourages traditional education approaches based on direct instruction of facts and standard methods.

Modern management is increasingly focused on results and expenditures which can show they deliver desired outcomes have a much greater chance of approval.

Until now, event education hasn’t been able to follow public education’s move to outcomes because event managers can’t force attendees to subject themselves to the kinds of tests which students are forced to take.

As a result, events have continued to “focus on the resources that are available” to the attendee: the speakers and panelists who are the “inputs” providing “direct instruction of facts” through their presentations.

In my previous blog post I wrote about using Wave to enable event attendees to create a collaborative set of conference notes, pointing out they’d serve as a rich resource for participants, people who can’t attend and the next marketing campaign.

They’ll be an effective marketing tool because they’re a way for prospects to see what people got from the event, i.e. they’re a record of collective outcomes.

As such, they can be the centerpiece of a marketing strategy that not only tells prospects what they’ll learn, but shows them actual outcomes.  And just as importantly, they can fit the event more smoothly into a purchase authorization process that’s geared to matching product outcomes to organizational goals.

Constructing a set of collaborative notes of the “direct instruction” from a panel or speech is inherently disruptive because construction and instruction are on opposite sides of education reform.

The momentum of social media, educational research and learning preferences are all on the side of construction and Wave represents the kind of catalyst that will enable entrepreneurial thinkers to change the learning style of the entire event (not just the note taking) from knowledge consumption to knowledge construction.

Knowledge construction is such a valuable learning methodology because it surfaces tacit knowledge, “which often embodies subtle but critical insights about processes or nuances of relationships (and) is best communicated through (the) stories and personal connections”(Shift Index p 46) which characterize collaboration.

Wave’s unique ability to provide both the medium for and the empirical evidence of the attendees’ ability to construct, create and exchange tacit knowledge creates the kind of real time feedback loop about which both educators and marketers dream.

However, the challenges are worthy of the rewards.

• Event professionals are used to thinking in terms of the resources we’re going to make available, such as “a nationally known thought leader to give the keynote” or “networking breakfasts every day.”  Reimagining our product into result-measurement pairs introduces a completely different methodology and
• Constructing and unpacking tacit knowledge is not about the wisdom of crowds that characterizes much of social media but about turning the entire event into an inquiring organization that uses dialogue and discussion to navigate ambiguity and mine indirection.

Wave’s triad of collaboration, assessment and public record provides a unique platform for resurrecting the competitive advantage of face to face interactions by reshaping events to provide the tacit knowledge their attendees will require to succeed in the 21^st century.

And it’s also the death knell for the status quo.

How do you see it?

I think Wave and Twitter will combine to transform event marketing by taking social media to the next level because Wave finally gives people an essentially social media subject about which to tweet.

In many ways, tweets are currently a social media extension of the old style of marketing.  Although there’s some editorial content in what gets tweeted about and whether the tweeter thinks it’s cool or not, the essential subject is the event and its content, not what peers are thinking about the event(and peer to peer interaction is the crux of social media.)

Wave will release Twitter from that constraint and integrate it into a complete social media marketing solution because waves can reveal what attendees and potential attendees are actually thinking both when they’re making their purchasing decision and when they’re at the event.

It lets the event producers shape a conversation and then open it up to prospects and attendees to fill with their thoughts, which statistics have shown their peers find so much more valuable for purchase decisions than agendas, speakers’ bios and other company generated material.

Combining Wave and Twitter to effectively help prospects learn what their peers are thinking requires understanding how they differ as learning tools. There are essentially two ways to learn: Learning from (instruction) is what Twitter’s great for and learning with (construction) is Wave’s strong suit.

We all know what a potent tool Twitter is for letting people know what’s going on.  Its brief alerts are hooks that grab our attention.  The follower model is a great recipient driven distribution list and retweeting can create powerful viral effects.

However, it’s not a good environment in which to share thoughts because:

It’s linear, which makes it hard to connect and integrate thoughts in various tweets,

Its organizing capabilities are very limited, so there’s no shared body of knowledge or perspectives on which to base any sort of conversation,

There’s a lot of redundancy because multiple people are tweeting about the same topic to different audiences,

You can’t get very reflective or thoughtful in 140 characters,

It’s all text, and

Tweets have a limited lifespan.  If you’re putting together an event over a period of more than a few weeks, you won’t even be able to find everything.

Google Wave, on the other hand, is great for revealing what a group of people are thinking on a substantial level:

Like a document, you can put thoughts wherever they belong.  You can even modify a post,

Subtopics let you group thoughts,

Since it’s a collective document, there’s no need for people to repeat each other,

You can post whatever length comment you want,

You can include images, videos, maps, polls and all sorts of media in your wave.  There’ s also a wide and growing variety of extensions and gadgets (e.g. a translator for international events), and

It has an unlimited lifespan.

Wave is not that good for announcements:

The updates to a wave can be to any part of it (a strength) but that makes it more difficult to identify what’s new,

There is no follower relationship.  For someone to see the wave, they currently need to be able to modify it, and

The only way a wave could be “retweeted” would be by adding all your followers to it.  Then to retweet another wave, you’d have to add your followers to that as well.

If you harnessed their collective strengths for an event, here’s what you might see.

Imagine planning your next event in public!  You could start a wave with topics about the physical location, the education tracks et al and invite attendees from previous events, potential speakers and others to join your planning wave.

As you figure out what you’re going to do, your customers will be able to chime in and if you forgot to include a topic they think is important, they’ll add it. You’ll have a chance to see what everyone thinks and either accept their ideas or explain why you won’t.

Other than being frightening (giving up the control social media demands usually is,) this is a way to plan the event that people want and have them take ownership of it.

Twitter would be a great way to let people know what you’re doing and to give them periodic updates/reminders of what’s happening.  Everyone who participates will tweet about the things they find interesting and, if there’s a point of disagreement, rally people to their side in a form of crowdsourcing.

At the event, the Wave, which already contains a lot of information about the speeches and panels, becomes a collaborative set of notes (as well a way of seeing how well the presentations matched their intentions.)  A wave can even include a real time poll in the midst of a talk if someone’s really brave.

Some people will want to keep tweeting, others will prefer putting their comments into a collective wave and some will do both. Combining Wave and Twitter gives people more options about how to participate and that’s only good for the event.

When the event is over, you’ll have a fundamentally different kind of public record.  Instead of records of the event like videos or speech transcripts, you’ll have a record of the attendee experience that both highlights what they found useful and testifies to how engaged and stimulated they were.

The attendee vetted usefulness of the content will be a valuable inbound marketing resource that will bring you traffic if the wave is hosted on your website (not possible now, but Google promises this for the future.)

The intimate revelation of how you responded to their peers’ suggestions for the event as well as what their peers were actually getting from the event while they were there will be a powerful marketing tool for your next event because it tells prospects what their peers think.

Google and Twitter are two of the Marquee Brands in social media and some people will inevitably get into a debate about which is better.  The main thing that debate will reveal is that some people prefer one and some the other, so our jobs as event professionals is to provide opportunities for people to use both.

I think Wave is the best thing to happen to Twitter since the hashtag.  How about you?

Here’s what I think this means for organizations building online communities:

The first change occurs in the design stage.  It’s heartening to hear all the customer related words in the mission statements for online communities, but you also need an equal dose of enterprise strategy.  Exactly how will all this customer engagement and empowerment advance specific strategies?  In many cases this comes down to how it will create demand for a product or service in which you have a competitive advantage.

Next, think about what kinds of conversations are likely to stimulate that demand.  On a broad level, discussions about how your product category is being used may give people new ideas.  However, you’ll want most discussions to explore areas in which you are the most competitive.  The people at Innosight have a “jobs to be done” concept which is very helpful here. For what job do you want your customers to “hire” you? Conversations related to those jobs are the ones you want to nourish.

Then, consider the different ways you can create these flows of knowledge.  Blogs, private networks, public networks, bookmarking and other platforms are all tools you can use towards this end.  What’s the best mix?  Why?

Once you’ve selected your mix of platforms, figure out the details for each.  You’ll still have to answer the same operational questions, but with the new goal of shaping conversations.  For example, you’re tweets will be pointing people to places that will stimulate curiosity about areas in which you have an expertise.

Shaping conversations requires a very different kind of social media community manager.  Instead of a platform expert who generates buzz, you’ll want a strategic thinker with a deep understanding of your competitive position and an ability to look at the myriad of social activity and opportunities from your perspective and:

See connections to your strategy in conversations,

Read people’s profiles and prior comments to see where their interests converge with yours and suggest discussions for them to participate in and start,

Find other web assets that support your message, and

Identify new people with interests that intersect your strategy and bring them into your community.

What do you think of their idea?

It emphasizes the company’s perspective, not the customer’s,

Funnels are for homogenous liquids.  Customers are all different,

Stickiness is anathema to funnels, yet essential to Social Media,

The customer isn’t even visible,

No give to get,

It suggests the customer comes to the company, instead of the company going to where the customer is,

It’s opaque, yet social media is about transparency,

It’s a hierarchical and closed system.  Everyone enters at the top and moves to the bottom, completely isolated from the outside world,

It suggests a single process, but every customer’s journey is different, and

It ignores the role of the community.

Models are way more than cute pictures.  They structure our perceptions, provide the foundation for our actions and inform our theories.

If we’re really going to create a social business, we can’t have a model of the fundamental customer-company interaction that yokes us to an obsolete way of thinking.

Let’s create something that better describes reality.  I’ve started a crowd sourcing campaign to find a replacement at unfunnel.crowdcampaign.com

Please participate, encourage your friends and make a substantial contribution to the changing in thinking we all know is needed.