Using Social Communities in Product Development

April 8, 2013 www.tcgen.com - @jeannebradford 1

Resetting Strategy, Organization and Execution Through Community

Jeanne Bradford@jeannebradford

TCGen, IncCupertino, CA

May 2012

Social Communications as a Competitive Advantage

2012 Annual Conference

Social Communications – Yikes!


A common interpretation of social media – especially for the enterprise

Social Communications – Yikes!


A common interpretation of social media – especially for the enterprise• We’re not talking about FaceBook & Twitter

Path to accelerate positive results across your business

Social Technologies, Competitive Advantage?


High quality dataCollaboration

Social technologies is not a fad -Companies that figure this out will win, those that don’t will spend valuable time

and resources trying to catch up.

Making better decision faster

*Barry Libert

Navigating the Social Maze



TCGen: Innovating Products Faster

• Silicon Valley-based management consultancy

• Practice Areas: Strategy, product creation best practices, product definition, predictive metrics, change management

• Combine experience with contemporary best practices to create lasting change

Social Innovation Best PracticesBenchmark Study

40 graphical tools:• Strategy• Management• Execution• Organization• Process

10 best practices for Strategy, Management & Execution

The Enterprise Social Landscape

• Organizations are applying social technologies broadly across the company.

• Recent data indicates that investment is increasing.

• Companies know they need to invest – the challenge is how to get started and be effective with their investment.


Execution

Organization

Strategy

Babson/Mzinga Social Media Usage Report

Social Media Concepts: The Basics

• Social Communication: Engagement and interaction with clients/customers, partners, employees, and competitors through a platform.

• Social Technology: Tools and applications that facilitate the creation and exchange of content.

• Communities: • Purpose driven to provide focus, engagement• Value for all participants (WIIFM)• Allows multi-directional communication flow – “cross talk”• Structure: Open, Closed, Expert

• Innovation (our context): A new concept with significant business relevance

• Social Innovation: Innovation leveraging Social Media Technology

www.tcgen.com - @jeannebradford 8April 8, 2013

How to start, where to focus

Collaboration: Effective Communities

• 5 characteristics of effective communities

1. Well defined, shared objectives (mutually beneficial)

2. Proactively managed (community manager)

3. Vibrancy (relevant content)

4. Acknowledge/reward participation

5. Data generated is actionable

• Communities are organized in different ways to accomplish different objectives

– Participation

• Crowd vs Expert

– Focus

• Problem vs. Solution


Community Organizing Principles


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Focus SolutionProblem

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Not one way to organize, but successful communities are well defined

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Social Community Matrix

• What is the tool? Social Community Matrixo Constructs the most effective community for the problem you’re trying to solve.

o Organizes by focus and participation.

o Focus refers to the overall objective of the community.

o Participation: identifying the most qualified voices

o Allows you to come up with specific solutions for a well-stated problem.

o It’s a myth that social communities should be open to anyone with an opinion on the problem.

• Benefitso Allows you to quickly define the right type of community to create based on the problem

o Accelerates results by increasing focus on the most important issues

o Provides an effective tool to gather the collective intelligence

o Minimizes “noise” that comes from data overload



Social Community Matrix

Social Innovation Readiness Score Card

• What is the tool? Social Innovation Readiness Score Card

– Decision-making tool that provides an objective view of their organization’s capability for successfully implementing social technologies.

– Helps you determine whether or not your organization is prepared to launch a community.

– Allows you to identify the critical areas that many organizations overlook and the weak areas that you need to address prior to launching a social development initiative.

– The scorecard is a spreadsheet that you develop with a group process.

• Benefits

– Provides a new methodology for accelerating innovation

– Identifies strengths and weaknesses that will impact your probability of success

– Helps you avoid mistakes in the implementation process

– Creates a framework for managing the implementation of social solutions


Poise Your Team for Success


Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard


Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard


Poise Your Team for Success


Applying Collaboration:Community Driven Strategy & Tactics


Practice

• Community driven corporate product strategy – with 80% of the priorities aligned with external input

Goal

• Allow users to influence product development at many levels – strategic and tactical

Results• Up to 80% of user driven priorities are implemented

Allowing customers & partners to set development direction, priorities, and feature definitions via communities demonstrates how voice of the customer can be obtained at many levels efficiently

Collaboration Solutions & Dedicated Team


Practice

• Formed a small group to serve as an innovation management team.

• Use out-of-box platforms to quickly harness innovation on new problems within large, distributed organizations.

Goal

• Collaborate and innovate more quickly across very large, globally dispersed teams.

Results

• The team, formed to drive innovation, was widely tapped to help many of the operating businesses achieve their innovation goals.

• Standardized platforms allowed flexibility to customize, while allowing data sharing across the global organization.

Typically innovation programs require a long time to get up and running even if leveraged by technology – but there are rapid deployment solutions available.


“Expert” Sourcing: Optimizing the Crowd

Practice

• The best ideas come from the best people. Quality trumps quantity. The best systems start with qualified participants and then track the participation and quality of ideas.

Goal

• Maximize the quality of data generated by a community to drive decision making & execution

Results

• Qualified participants yield a much higher quality of data. Additionally, with the use of subject matter experts, learning curves for subsequent campaigns are shortened.

There is only wisdom of the crowd if participants are qualified to contribute


Summary

• Social technologies in the enterprise are not a fad!• Can be applied to Strategy, Management & Execution• Lack of community purpose and vibrancy is a common reason for failure• Not all voices are created equal: Crowd sourcing vs. expert sourcing

– You can generate high quality data

• Changes in the balance of power and decision making in companies

How Can I Help?

Jeanne Bradford@jeannebradford

[email protected]

TCGen, IncCupertino, CA

www.tcgen.com


mailto:[email protected]

http://www.tcgen.com