Archive for the ‘sentiment’ Category

The power of sentiment…

Posted: 26/09/2012 in Communication, Engagement, Human Resources, sentiment, Social Media, Technology, Twitter
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And as if by magic..! Literally two days after my previous post for the HRTechEurope blog entitled It’s Time to measure engagement in #realtime, this article appears talking about the new partnership between Yammer and Kanjoya Crane, which will provide yammer clients with real time sentiment analysis of their employee conversations.

This is more significant than it at first seems and marks the beginning of a period when we will see employee engagement monitoring and measurement move from clunky, question driven surveys done once a year, to #realtime monitoring and action. In his latest post for this blog, How will employee engagement develop, Founder of OrganisationReview Andrew Merritt interviews Peter Wilde, former head of employee engagement at UBS and Unilever and now founder of www.employee-research.com and Peter makes the following comment about the future of traditional employee surveys:

“They’re still the most cost effective and useful way of getting insight from your people. They may well adapt (see Tesco’s new ‘Listen and Fix’ scheme) but, like cockroaches, they’ll still be around after a nuclear war”.

I’m not sure this is true, but even if it is, it won’t be for long. Innovation in employee engagement tends to follow that in customer engagement and this is increasingly true in this emerging social era. We have been using sentiment in customer engagement for some time so this move was inevitable, if not a little overdue. This means that real time tools for the employee group will develop along the lines of how we are innovating with customer data, as this latest article in latest issue of The Harvard Business Review about real time customer experience tracking demonstrates.

The interesting thing about the Yammer/Kanjoya tie up and what I shall be looking to understand is just how Yammer will make the most of the partnership. Yammer is a good product; it does what it says on the tin. But even amongst its big corporate client users there are critics, especially about its pricing model. A number of large organisations that I know are still on the free platform because the benefits of going to paid don’t seem to outweigh the significant cost.

It is not clear yet to me on what basis this app is deployed. If this app is only deployable on the paid for service, then Yammer might just have found the magic key to persuade large scale users to upgrade. If not, then there is even more reason for and organisation to stick with the free option. If anyone knows the answer, please get in touch or leave a comment.

I shall also be looking to see how the traditional engagement/survey tech companies will respond to the growth of real time and sentiment monitoring. As it stands at the moment, unless they do evolve and embrace the real time trend, I cant see them surviving long term. Surveys just don’t give you a multi-dimensional view, which is where the real value is here.

The potential of #Bigdata is often referred to when talking about structured data, but significant actionable insights can be gained from unstructured, conversational data too. In fact, because the availability of this type of data is relatively new, we don’t yet fully appreciate it’s long term value compared to more structured data forms. In my view, it could, longer term, offer greater and more relevant insight. There’s money in sentiment!

I firmly believe that the future trend will see innovation in employee engagement become parallel or even overtake that around customers as we increasingly recognise that the root to successful – and profitable – customer relationships start with an outstanding employee experience.

You heard it here first folks ;)

Realtime engagement in action…

Posted: 24/09/2012 in Engagement, HR, Human Resources, sentiment, Social Media, Technology
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If we strip away some of the hype and mystery surrounding social media and the emerging social technology landscape, you will see two core elements that in my view are the two fundamental building blocks:

Real time communication and Collaboration

Look around and you see these elements as key drivers in most of the emerging technology that pervades our lives, both personally as consumers and also as professionals, particularly if you work in the field of customer engagement or marketing. However, HR Tech seems to be dragging its heals somewhat. Is this a feature of the professions general angst and aversion to “social” generally?

Lets take employee engagement as an example. It’s a top subject right now and it seems that a day doesn’t go by without yet more research coming out that articulates the link between a highly engaged workforce and superior business performance.So in theory, employee engagement would seem a natural place to embed the core principles of real time communication and collaboration would it not? Sure, we have enterprise level collaboration/community solutions already in platforms like Jive,Lithium, Telligent, Yammer etc. and you could argue that embedding these into the organisation has a knock on effect on engagement.

However, at a more granular level, when you look at the tools out there that are specifically targeted at helping you measure and manage engagement these principles are lacking.

We are still working to structured, linear questionnaires aimed at eliciting responses to specific questions crafted by the organisation. Structured linear questions get structured linear answers, which are great for the data, but not so good at creating engagement, or, in fact, getting to the nub of what is preventing the organisation achieving the levels of engagement that it is striving for. The best we generally get is a space for open questions/statements but often these are not analysed properly and also, in isolation, these comments can often be dismissed because only one or two people raised a particular issue.

Couple this linear, non collaborative approach with the fact that these surveys are mostly done annually, with a then three month wait for the results to be published before any actions are taken and it starts to feel incredibly clunky. What we need is something more realtime and collaborative. Something that allows more open conversation, opinion and observation but which also allows us to draw some familiar analytics. Cue tumbleweed from the HR Tech industry…..

I have come across only one solution in the past year that gets anywhere close which is being used by a guy called Michael Silverman at Silverman Research.

Disclaimer Alert! Well there isn’t one actually. He’s not a client and I’m not a blogger for hire – I’m not that cheap ;)

I just really like his stuff and have seen nothing like it anywhere else. Michael has pioneered some new technology and approaches both with clients like Unilever but also in open projects like The Garden.

The technology allows you to ask the questions you would normally ask in employee surveys, but crates a collaborative environment within which employees can review each others responses, submit their own view, rate the responses and see how their own view compare to those of the wider group. It’s interesting stuff and the closest thing I have seen yet to brining together traditional analytics with real time collaboration.

If you want to know more you can hear some of the Stuff Michael has been doing at Social Media Week as he is running an event featuring the Unilever projects. I will be there too, as a panel member so feel free to say hi.

Employer Brand out: Employee Brand in…

Posted: 16/04/2012 in Communication, Community, Employer Brand, Engagement, Leadership, sentiment, Social Media, Twitter
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I’ve never really been big on the whole employer brand business. Obviously there is a purpose served in some way by trying to encapsulate what it’s like to work at an organisation and I think there has been some good work done in this area here and there.

Otherwise, for me, most of the stuff around employer brand has, over the last 15 years or so, been largely a way of keeping agencies in business and giving the HR and Marketing functions something to do. It’s roots are in web 1.0 – when all we really managed to do was put most of what we did in print form, online – job ads, CV’s and “company brochures”. OK, the technology added some nice bits and bobs, but largely it has been, and still is, brochureware centred almost exclusively around the company website.

The subject came to mind again the other day when watching Matt Alder’s rather nifty dispatches video series from his recent trip to the US. In the second installment he talks briefly about employer brand and how in conversation with John Sumser, they speculate that a single employer brand is no longer relevant. Instead, they suggest breaking it down into a number of niche employer brands.

I like the thinking, but does it go far enough? I’m not sure it does and I’m not sure the “employer brand” as we know it is actually relevant anymore. Indulge me for a minute if you will, with a quote from one of my favourite leaders, Greg Dyke.

“Leadership is about the stories that are told about you – both positive and negative. You’ll be judged by those stories more than anything you say or write”

Replace the word leadership with Employer Brand in the quote from Greg and the sentence still works. In this context the “truth” about an organisation’s leadership – the leadership brand if you like – is already determined by these stories, these conversations, no matter what guff the leadership might put out in an effort to create a vision of how it wants to be perceived. In the rapidly expanding social context, the employer brand is no different. In fact, the “truth” about an employer is already being laid bare the stories being told through online (and offline) conversations, increasingly on social media. In other words, employees are telling “stories”, increasingly so, in all sorts of places, naturally and unmanaged by the organisation. Therefore, in my mind this is no longer an employer brand message, it’s an employee brand message.

And I think this is a good thing. The employer brand was in no small way a manifestation of organisations trying to make themselves more appealing in the light of the biggest corporate red herring of all time – the war for talent. A lot of the output was purely a marketing excersise – what the organisation wants you to believe it looks and feelst like to be with Company X, their view of how great the business is and what it stands for. And whilst in some cases this did do a reasonable job of reflecting reality, in many it was far from it – the promise was often not delivered..

Everyone’s story about the organisation is an individual one. Sure, there are some common strands of DNA within an organisation, but largely every individual interprets these their own way, and talks about them in their own way too. In my view, organisations should maybe focus on getting the core DNA strands right – by listening to wide feedback from inside and outside the organisation – and letting the employees take care of the rest by opening up conversation opportunities wherever possible, across the entire organisation. This means complete unmanaged, uncontrolled and unmonitored access to social media across the business.

As Felix wetzel points out in his recent blog post for HR Examiner, zappos don’t focus on creating an employer brand. They just focus on making it an outstanding place to work. Their social ecosystem takes care of the rest.  And this is where most organisations are going wrong - just like Engagement, Employer Brand has become and end in itself, when in reality, it’s purely an outcome.

Time to embrace openness and authenticity – its coming whether we like it or not. Those that get that bit right will, without trying, create an employee brand to die for. And all without spending a penny on a new campaign.

SiftGroups membership community event…

Posted: 30/01/2012 in Communication, Community, CRM, Engagement, sentiment, Social Media, Technology, Twitter
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One of my highlights just before the Christmas break was to attend the SiftGroups Membership Community Huddle, along with representatives from my client the CIPD.  It was a short half day get together for participants in their recent survey amongst membership communities which resulted in an excellent report benchmarking online communities for professional membership bodies.  Despite it’s focus on membership bodes, the report has some excellent content and insights that are relevant to those in other commercial sectors and I would definitely recommend downloading and reading a copy if you are in anyway interested or involved in online communities.  The session was also very good with short bursts of insight from the report followed by frequent break-out groups to discuss the implications and share experiences.  Hats off to Sift and a big thank you from me for the invite and for letting me reproduce some of the highlights from the report and seminar here.

My thoughts and observations are below and some of the key findings from the report are also outlined further down the page.

Justification – Probably the first thing that struck me from the feedback from the community managers themselves is the work they were having to do internally, especially with senior management, to prove the value of having and investing in a ‘community’.  As someone who is working with a membership organisations on putting community at the hear of member engagement, I fully appreciate why but feel that this just shouldn’t be the case.  In a previous post I commented that if membership bodies were being created today, they would be communities with a purpose.  In other words, ‘community’ and the principles thereof would be central to what they do, no question.

Plateauing activity – Many are seeing a plateauing of membership or activity.  There was a feeling that this might be due to the age of the community and that over a longer period – say 2 to 3 years – it becomes more difficult to sustain. However I’m not so sure about this.  Unless you are in a shrinking overall market – your ‘community’ isn’t plateauing or shrinking.  When you consider that many of these communities were started before the thrust of social media it’s perhaps more likely that the activity or ‘conversation is taking place elsewhere.

Social Integration – One of the most telling charts from the report is this one in my opinion.  The problems many membership bodies face in terms of proving ROI and the benefits of community are not surprising when you look at this chart. The overall lack of integration with the social channels mentioned below is a big missed opportunity and indeed, I would argue that communities absolutely have to have tight social integration in order to see the community activity bear wider fruit.  Many of these organisations provide events and other membership benefits which would not only benefit from the marketing ‘amplification’ that tighter  integration with social channels provide, but could also be shaped and scoped better with input from community members.

Conversation vs broadcast – It appears that the emphasis of community and social interaction was still mainly around broadcasting/messaging rather than relationship building.  The chart below shows the level of activity in the community by each function – note the positioning of customer and member services.

KPI’s - My observation was also that the KPI’s in use for the communities are very transactional in nature and have a heritage in web 1.0 – visits, page impressions, time on site etc. I was surprised also to see that of the KPI’s the respondents would like to use, none mentioned sentiment or influence based measurements.  It would seem that as yet, many vendors are not offering these kind of measures or insights within their analytics which needs to change.

Functionality – This was perhaps one of the most striking charts in the report although one could argue that if your community is not at the heart of your strategy and you are failing to support/justify or engage with it, you will fail to see the benefit of any of the core functionality.  One point to note: whilst blogs are in there, most of the organisations I spoke to at the event have what I call a ‘managed’ blog, in that blogging is done by a ‘select few’ of chosen contributors.  I don’t recall any that provided an open platform for members to create their own blog for open readership.  This is another missed opportunity for engagement.  Not only can the most interesting and inspirational blog posts come from the most unlikely of sources (Indeed, some ‘experts’ produce awful posts!) but the comment stream that results creates valuable and sharable content itself – sometimes way better than the original post.

Conclusions
  • Community activity is actually increasing, just not on your site!
  • The growth of the social channels (which are really just hitting mainstream) has huge implications for the technology vendors.  The community is no longer “in the community” (Probably never was) and as such, future development needs to look at how to be more like the ‘glue’ that binds together all the ‘other’ places we are having our conversations and being active, including offline.
  • We need to ditch the notion of ‘our site’ and driving people back to our website.  I listen to marketers talk about social media and’ engaging their audience’ which is good. But then they often fall into the trap of making the goal to use social to ‘drive people back to our site’. Wrong – in the future, you are going to have to be where they are, on there terms.
  • Those organisations – not just membership bodies – that have a compelling community and social engagement opportunity but are failing to exploit it are looking a marketing gift horse in the mouth.  As mentioned in a previous post, the power of “conversational SEO” could not only save them significant amounts of marketing budget, it can also drive up revenues in a much more simple and practical way than ‘content manipulation’ could ever do.
Other Key highlights

There are many more excellent observations and insights from the report, but the key ones that stood out for me are:

  • 55% of our respondents have no budget set aside to support community management internally and enhance the technical platform
  • 85% do not see the community contributing any financial benefit and 89% have no way of measuring contribution to ROI even if they were asked. Although 53% recognised significant benefits, they could not, and are not required to, link to the organisation’s ROI
  • 44% of respondents did not recruit advocates and seed content, 22% did no pre launch activity at all, 73% did no pre launch marketing promotion and 93% did not have a launch event
  • Surprisingly, of the tools provided to the community, only the discussion forum was seen by 25% of the respondents as very useful; groups being the next highest at 18%. Of those tools that respondents would like to have, 46% want mobile apps and 36% a Q&A forum
  • Although most are using twitter, LinkedIn (Groups) and Facebook, few integrate these activities with the online community
  • Nearly 37% of respondents have not integrated their community with the main site, which limits the opportunities to generate influence and support Return
  • Only 15% make their community space open to the public
  • Of 41% of organisations with an onsite community only 8% are equally proactive in social media spaces
  • 48% consider their community activities have plateaued, are decreasing or in one case have ceased to exist
  • 35% think the community influences strategy, 33% influences content strategy and 20% influences lobbying
  • 43% do not report community activity to anyone internally at all, and in 19% of cases, reporting is only to senior management

The next big thing…

Posted: 23/01/2012 in Business, CRM, Employer Brand, Engagement, Job Boards, sentiment, Technology
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Working with startups has made me reflect a lot on the similarities between now and the former dot com boom period of the late 90′s.  In doing so I’m driven to speculate what the next big thing is and when the next significant shift will happen.  Lets look at the timeline.  Check out my crappographic™  below:

1995 – 2000 – So the internet made it out of the university/geekdom and into the wider world of work around the mid 90′s.  (I make no apologies for date generalisations so smarty pants date pedants look away now!).  Even though companies like ebay were already up and running they, and the other companies that became household names, didn’t really get on the radar until the late 90′s/early 00′s when the dot com bubble really grew, some 5 years later.

2000 – 2005 – In this period, (the mini economic dip aside) we moved into a period of consolidation where all the ‘me too’ products and those with unsustainable business models melted away.  In fact, the hyperventilating around the technology subsided and we all got on with business as usual, but supercharged by the internet.  As we reached the end of this period, another wave of new plays were emerging – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to name a few.

2005 – 2010 ish – Here again, the aforementioned ‘social’ plays took 5+ years to reach market maturity to the point of being embedded in our general awareness/usage. Despite the economic downturn, many of these offerings are growing rapidly and drawing huge valuations.  We have seen a general ‘social’ boom, with the start up scene as hot as ever and many many me too products or micro variants on a theme.

2010 ish – 2015 – Despite this social boom, consolidation and hype tail off is inevitable.  We shall see key players grow to take market share, many me too’s fizzle out and a general reduction in the dialogue around the tech.  We will, again, get back to business as usual, only this time  supercharged by the social layer.

So what is to come in the next 5 to 10 years as the tech settles down and social becomes woven into the fabric of everyday lives?   Despite it feeling like a very social web right now, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet in my view.  The outcomes of the social web in terms of product innovation, enterprise adoption, creative development, hardware innovation, bandwidth increasing etc are all still to come.  Just like the period following the ‘bedding down’ of the internet.  See ‘Internet Maturity’ and ‘Social Maturity’ on the crappographic™.

When I look back at my crappographic™, it occurs to me that in terms of identifying the next best thing, it would seem logical to keep a keen eye out around 2014 ish, for a crop of new businesses, a new form of start up which again, won’t reach maturity until 5 or so years after that c 2018 – 2020.

And what will they be? Maybe i’ll know it when I see it. Maybe it will pass me by. Who knows. Answers on a postcard please. For what its worth though, here’s a couple of thought:

Big Data – Currently a hot topic, big data is big! Its also expensive to access and largely in the domain of the corporate classes. But I think that will change.  There’s an old saying about luxury goods that “everything filters down to the working classes”, and the same principle can be applied to a number of things including advancements in technology. Look at CRM. Once a purely enterprise domain, with a fitting number of zero’s attached if you wanted to be granted access.  Now, CRM is available to Bob and his corner shop, for $9.99 a month or even free in some cases. And better still, it comes with ‘integration’ with Bob’s other tools right out of the box! All nice and seamless without a consultant in sight! Big data, and the sentiment that it carries, has huge potential to change the way we currently do things.

If some hedge funds are already abandoning their traditional forms of ‘research’ on which they base their investment decisions, in favour of twitter sentiment, its not hard to imagine that this trend could spread. As I mentioned in a previous post, twitter sentiment is like having the worlds biggest focus group at your finger tips, only better. Think what implications hat has for the market research industry. I suspect that sentiment driven ‘big’ data will filter down to the consumer sometime soon.  Its not hard to imagine a consumer moving away from ‘comparison’ type websites in favour of using ‘sentiment based apps’ instead, to inform themselves on what to buy, where to go, what to do etc. Big data access for the consumer gives us the opporunitity to not just find the cheapest car insurance for example, but the BEST car insurance deal, taking into account every aspect including cost, terms, payout history, customer service and the rich ‘conversation’ that goes on our there on platforms like chatter and user/customer communities. Pretty powerful stuff when you think about it.

Closer to home in HR and resourcing, I think the power of big data and sentiment analysis has huge implications for organisations. The ‘conversation’ about an organisation is already being tapped into from a customer perspective, but internally it is being ignored. Capturing and pulling together this sentiment can create a powerful  picture about a business – inside and out – that can have a significant impact on both the brand and the employer value proposition.  Given that employees are having these conversations on platforms and technology that the organisation doesn’t own or control, its only a matter of time before this is harnessed.

Mobile – Being an early adopter of most things, I thought I was abreast of all things mobile.  That was until I was lucky enough to be invited to the Freshthinking event run by Jobsite UK  in october last year.  The two speakers were Tomi Ahonen and Tony Fish. I was particularly blown away by Tomi’s grasp of the global mobile scene and some of the data he was sharing was staggering – see Tomi’s presentation here and Tony’s here.  It made me realise that a lot of smart things are happening in other continents in terms of mobile which have yet to hit these shores in any meaningful way.  Tomi is careful to classify mobile separately from smartphones but to me, it’s all converging. We are moving more and more into a ‘mobile economy’ – away from the fixed place of work or place to purchase.  Devices are now beginning to deliver, on a mass consumer scale, what has only been dreamed of before. Big thanks to @felixwetzel and @mervyndinnen at @jobsite for the invite.  If you are lucky enough to get a similar invite for a future freshthinkers event, then consider yourself extremely lucky!

Media - For the first time in 10 years my digital music collection is sorted. According to tuneup, its 97% clean including all album art, dates, song title and artist names etc.  Even better, all my old crappy low bit rate files have been replaced by high quality, rights free files. All this was made possible by iTunes match which cost me the princely sum of £20.  It was easy, painless and a once and done deal.  Now I have seamless access to all my music, on any of my devices. With high quality video and images becoming more accessible, editable and manageable I think there is more to come in this area.  Exactly what I don’t know, but some form of seamless, cross media collaboration, creation, access and management seems likely to me.  Also, the self publishing dynamic that continues to grow is another area.  Despite recent moves from Apple with iBooks Author, self publishing is still a pretty clumsy and inaccessible activity but something that has huge potential. As a final note on this, I was out with friends yesterday and their 13 year old daughter informed me that facebook was ‘yesterday’! When I asked her how she connects and shares media with friends as a lot of people do on facebook, she said “we just share it through BBM” (Blackberry Messenger).

Food for thought.  Whatsay you readers?! What should we be looking out for in 2014?

It’s all about the conversation…

Posted: 12/01/2012 in Communication, Community, CRM, Employer Brand, Engagement, sentiment, Social Media, Startups, Technology, Twitter
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Yesterday I came across a post entitled “5 things about Social Media you need to stop saying in 2012.” via a tweet by @socialhonesty by a guy called Edward Bass  An interesting post and I don’t have a big issue with some of his points (Ed would love to see email usurped by social comms so he must be one of the good guys!) But I’m sorry Ed, gotta take issue with these first two - that we should stop saying “it’s all about the conversation” and “It’s not about the technology”.

It’s all about the conversation.

Of course it is!  It’s just that a lot of organisations, marketers and ‘digital/social experts’ haven’t realised that it’s about PEER TO PEER conversation.  This is not the era of the website! Social isn’t marketing.  Social isn’t something started by marketers.  Social has been a long time in the making, driven by our underlying need as humans to be so.  One look at the bulletin board and chat room scene of the 90′s will show you that.  IThe geek in all of us has taken a long time to come out and for it to become a mainstream activity; for it to be ‘socially’ acceptable (haha!)

The empty, conversation-less places referred to by the Ed in his post are classic examples of environments/initiatives created by brand marketers in an effort to ‘engage socially’ around a brand. #fail.

Many marketers are still looking at social as yet another way to drive traffic back to ‘their site’ or ‘their place’.  But it’s not.  The rules are changing – it’s no longer about me coming to your place.  its about you coming to my place.  And the implication there is that usually, I only have friends round to my place!  And no matter how you try and wrap it up, I can see a marketing/sales message at a 1000 yards and frankly there is no place for it in my social, and very personal, world thanks!  At least not on your terms.  If it’s going to be there, and work, its going to be on my terms.

The conversational economy is growing.  Our ever increasing connectedness is going to change the way we do things significantly and this will have huge implications for marketing and brands.  Nik Halstead, founder of media sift, creator of tweet.me.me and the man to talk to regarding big data, once said, when referring to the changing way we seek content (HT @James_mayes):

“We no longer search, we follow. I predict the death of SEO within 5 years.”

I believe he is onto something there.  We are moving to an era of “conversational SEO” – not quite as described here, but more around how natural, realtime conversations (not optimised by marketers) between people across community and social platforms can put the subject matter right at the top of a search, without any manipulation or optimisation at all.  I believe that the advertising/branding era we have lived with for decades is over.  At least in the way we understand it today.

So yes, it IS all about the conversation.  Just not your brand conversation.  Peer to peer – remember that.

It’s not about the technology.

Of course its not about the technology!  Never has been, never will be.  John Sumser summed up our current situation beautifully in a recent post when he said:

“We are in the Compuserve-Prodigy-AOL stage of social media evolution.  It’s after Netscape and before Google in equivalent internet time.”

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember that time and the same obsession with technology existed then.  But within a few years that had changed and we got to focussing more on what it enabled us to do than the tech itself.  Solutions are springing up everywhere, with lots and lots of ‘me too’ products along the way.  But in the coming 3-5 years these will consolidate, many will go bust or just fold into a competitor and what they deliver will become pedestrian.

In other words they will become part of what we do naturally in business and we won’t be obsessing about the technology.  Tesco Bank is a great example.  It’s a bank; the fact that it’s online is totally irrelevant.  Think back to the turn of the millennium – remember ‘e-crm’ or ‘e-recruitment’? (or worse, i-recruitment!)  Now its Social CRM, Social Recruitment, Social whatever.   But that will ebb back to being CRM and recruitment and so on just as it did once ‘e-crm’ started to sound silly.  Take it from me, “social” will eventually sound silly too.

So yes, when we say it’s not about the technology, it isn’t.  No, really.

I’ll leave you with this gem of a conversation I had over dinner a couple of months ago.  One of the guys there was the CEO of what appears to be a successful and quite sizeable ‘digital agency’.  Innevitably, the conversation turned to social media and, of course, twitter.  Here’s a snippet:

Him: “No, I’m not on twitter.  I don’t think it’s really that useful or proven.  Anyway, it will be better when you can do more with it.

Me: “How so?  What do you mean?”

Him: “well, you know, when you can brand them.  Put Flash on them and stuff.  Make them creative. Thats when it will really take off.”

Me: ….?  You mean, like, embed Flash and images in the tweet itself? Like Ads?

Him: Yes!

Me: *Snorts wine out through nose*

Change is a comin’. Sadly, a lot of the people in the driving seats don’t seem to appreciate that just yet…

Employee surveys out. Employee sentiment in…

Posted: 22/11/2011 in Communication, Community, Engagement, sentiment, Social Media
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At the beginning of June I attended the Inspire Conference, London, a great event organised by a the very smart and thoroughly charming Adil mohammed, whom I have the pleasure of working with of late.  It was a great day that lived up to its name. There were many great presentations but one that stood out was by Nick Halstead, CEO of MediaSift and creator of Tweetmeme. His presentation was called Big Data and centred around growth of data and how important and valuable ‘Big Data’ management is. You can see the video here – watch it if you have time, it’s very interesting.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things he mentioned was that it has now been proven that the average sentiment of everyone on twitter correlates ahead of the stock market to an accuracy of 87%. Consequently an increasing number of hedge funds are now using twitter sentiments as their guide to investment.   This was news to me so I feverishly tweeted it.   Now on the face of it, it seems ludicrous – fund managers speculating with my pension fund based on the global ramblings of a load of social butterflies talking about what they had for breakfast?

But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense.  The ‘sentiment’ of millions of people, with their varied networks, individual views and collective intelligence, all flowing naturally and broadly and incorporating influence from all sources. Most importantly, freedom of expression and thought.  It’s realtime market research on a massive scale, with the most comprehensive and diverse research pool to draw from.  Contrast this with the average bunch of analysts and financial ‘experts’, sitting in their financial institutions, surrounded by other financial experts, in the centre of the financial district.  For up to 18 hours a day.

When you consider that a good number of these chaps probably spend the little recreational time they have left snorting cocaine, quaffing champers and chatting up lap dancers its not that difficult to appreciate that they live in a bubble and are probably far too close to the numbers and too engrossed in their world to tap into the broader collective intelligence.  All of a sudden, betting on twitter starts to make sense.

I didn’t give it much more thought until recently when I came across a conversation going on amongst some of my US HR friends at the Ohio SHRM conference.  Charlie Judy sent out a tweet that caught my eye:

I think he has a point and I tweeted my agreement.  For me, surveys are a tool that were once the only real way to get an understanding of what is going on inside the organisation. But for many years I have questioned their value and results.  Ask a leading question and you will get a leading answer.  See this recent article in HR magazine by Michael Silverman who challenges the current status quo on employee surveys.  He talks about “distilling the essence of conversations” which is exactly my point about sentiment.  Things have moved on and whilst I can see annual surveys playing a useful role in benchmarking, the emergence of social and community tools allow us to “open up the watercooler conversation” and get a real sense of what is on the mind of our fellow employees, in real time. Better still, for the small number of companies that are adopting these technologies internally, there are additional benefits including significantly increased engagement and product/service innovation.

Measuring employee sentiment in real time rather than surveying them across a number of structured questions would appear to unlock far more than the traditional survey route and I’m hoping to see a much wider use of this approach as more and more organisations realise that the watercooler is where the insight is.