One of the most powerful communication strategies you can use to gain support, alignment, and resources allocated to customer-impacting initiatives is to tell a compelling story about how you’re eliminating customer pain points and saving customers’ time. I learned this lesson from Phil Gibson, the head of Web strategy at National Semiconductor. Phil perfected a way of communicating the benefits of the investments he was making by always starting first with the benefits he was delivering to National’s most important customers—the design engineers who select National’s devices for the products they’re designing for mass production. Phil talked about the hours that he was able to save customers each month by providing them tools to do their jobs. (“We are saving each of our customers on average 60 hours/month.”) He talked about the increased number of design iterations that customers could do in the same amount of time (3x to 4x), which resulted in better designs and more design wins for themselves and for National. In every presentation Phil makes describing the latest enhancements he has made to National’s Web site (or the ones that are on the drawing board), he leads with the customer benefits, followed by the benefits to National. He also tells the story by describing the context and the goals of the typical design engineer, or purchasing agent, or partner, or account exec. Then he maps those stakeholder benefits to business bottom-line benefits. But he always starts by putting himself and his audience in his customers’ shoes.
In "The First Big Mistake in Search and Knowledge Projects: Establishing the Right Vision and Compelling Communications," Sue Aldrich offers a great visioning “how to.” She provides an antidote to the “first big mistake” she encounters in most search and knowledge management projects: No clear compelling vision. She dissects two great examples of successfully delivered visions: putting a man on the moon and restoring New York’s Central Park. Sue walks you through the process of crafting a compelling vision and telling it as a story. You’ll want to craft a story about how we can save customers’ time and make their jobs and lives easier. You’ll want to tell a compelling story about how we can empower employees and partners by making it easier and faster for them to do their jobs. You’ll want to use real numbers. Sue explains how to identify and to sell your vision to all the internal stakeholders who need to understand what’s in it for them and why they should care.
Web 2.0: Collaboration or Empowerment?
Cisco’s charismatic CEO, John Chambers, is back with full messianic fervor. Internet junkies recall the way in which John’s missionary zeal and folksy down home speaking style fanned the flames of the Internet boom. John’s “Net Ready” message got top executives around the world investing in Internet infrastructure.
This week, John Chambers has been talking up the virtues of Web 2.0, which he defines as collaboration and convergence among data, voice, and video. (Not too surprising given Cisco’s current portfolio of products ranging from WebEx web conferencing to Scientific Atlanta cable boxes to Linksys wifi routers.) Kevin Allison of the Financial Times interviewed John Chambers, chairman and chief executive of Cisco Systems, in San Jose, California on July 9, 2007[1]. Here are a few excerpts from the transcript of the interview:
“I’m probably more excited about the business than I’ve been in a decade. You can feel it. CEOs can sense it. All of a sudden we’re back in vogue, if you will, in terms of it isn’t about the Internet, it’s really about collaboration, it’s about Web 2.0....”
“Phase two of the Internet is going to be about this collaboration, in techie, Web 2.0. All Web 2.0 to me is a set of technology that enables collaboration. As we said in 2000, the first wave was driven by business and then it went to the consumer, the next wave would be driven by the consumer into business....”
“What occurred in the early 90s was Cisco in many ways took this technology called IP and we said, here’s how you use it in business. So, we began to use it for entering orders, customer self-service, employee self-service and for new business models like outsourcing. We called it out-tasking.... Phase two of the internet is going to be about this collaboration, in techie, Web 2.0. All Web 2.0 to me is a set of technology that enables collaboration.....”
“If you look at successful collaboration with teleconferencing, Web 2.0 activities, it’s really due to four or five characteristics. The first is convergence—data, voice, video together. The second is the ability to make it simple. So, when I wanted to do a teleconference to Bangalore, I had it there in my Telepresence room. All I’d do is two clicks like this, hit the button, and he’s either in this office or he’s not and it comes right up. The third element is that it is an open standard, it isn’t closed. Before it was all done closed, including a lot of the videoconferencing was closed in terms of direction forward. The fourth element is virtualised. You are going to be able to get access to almost any data at any time that you have authorised over a combination of networks... So, all of a sudden, in scheduling a meeting, you hit a couple of clicks and you’ve got the meeting scheduled on everybody’s calendar, you hit a couple of clicks more and you are able to see the same presentation off the same content.”
- John Chambers Interview, July 7, 2007
Good News and Bad News from Cisco’s Message
The good news is that Web 2.0—Next Generation Internet—couldn’t have a more convincing spokesperson than John Chambers. John is still well-respected and convincing to world leaders and business leaders alike. This despite the fact that Cisco’s stock price has never climbed back to the stratospheric level of the company’s boom days, and that Cisco’s execs badly miscalculated, leading in part to the tech crash in 2001. Now that John Chambers is wrapping himself in the banner of Web 2.0, budgets for next-gen Web sites, Internet investments are likely to rebound all over the globe. That’s good news for those of you who are going hat in hand for funding for your next-gen Web sites and infrastructure.
The bad news is that by defining Web 2.0 as “collaboration,” John Chambers is obfuscating an already very confusing buzzterm that nobody really understands. Everyone, including John Chambers, throws their favorite technologies into the pot and calls the mix Web 2.0.
Web conferencing and telepresence are great, useful technologies to have available. They do enable collaboration, but they don’t, in my opinion, get to the heart of what Web 2.0 is all about. If your execs drink Chambers’ proverbial Kool-Aid, they are likely to want to invest more heavily in online meeting technology and video casting for employee communication and meetings. That may not be the very best investment you could be making.
What’s Web 2.0 Really?
Here’s the way I view Web 2.0: It’s the next generation of the Internet in empowering customers and employees to get things done. It’s when you give your customers (and employees) the tools to roll up their sleeves and design things themselves and to share their work in progress with others. The social networking aspects of Web 2.0 are profound. Customers strut their stuff around your products and services, drawing more prospects to your solutions. I characterize the business benefits of Web 2.0 this way:
“The benefits of Web 2.0 accrue when you empower your consumer and/or business customers to participate in shaping their online experiences with your company and with one another. Empowered customers are more engaged and more loyal. They cost less to serve, and they contribute value by adding their own “spin” to your Web sites, your products, and to your brand experience. Your firm profits from the network effects that result as customers interact electronically around your products and your business.
Web 2.0-enabled customers become designers, contributors, consultants, guides, and promoters to other prospects and customers”[2].
- Patricia Seybold, April 2007
Web 2.0 is about Empowering Customers. Instead of (or in addition to) making virtual sales calls using interactive Webinars and virtual meetings, what about giving your customers tools that enable them to share their own ideas (discussion forums, blogs, Wikis), their mental models (tags and search terms), their ratings and reviews, and their creations, inventions, and extensions to your products? The companies that have empowered customers to contribute to shaping their firm’s brand and offerings are the companies that are succeeding in building an “outside in” culture and in harvesting the rewards of customer-led innovation.
Enterprise 2.0 is about Empowering Employees. Instead of (or in addition to) making it easier to hold virtual meetings, why not empower your employees to collaborate by sharing their best ideas on internal Wikis and blogs? We’ve noticed that the organizations that have empowered employees to strut their stuff online, share their work in progress, and build on each others’ work, are the ones making the biggest strides in shifting their corporate cultures from top down to bottoms up cultures.
Cisco does have a good story to tell about customer and employee empowerment. Cisco was one of the first tech companies to enable customers to provide technical support to one another through early online forums. The company uses the Net aggressively to nurture and reward employees’ best ideas. However, Cisco has actually fallen a bit behind in using its own Web presence to reach out and empower its customers and partners. Hopefully John Chambers’ zeal will embrace customer empowerment as a key cornerstone in Cisco’s own Web strategy and in Cisco’s Web 2.0 educational mission.
How Do You Craft a Compelling Web 2.0 Vision?
You use the same approach to craft and communicate a Web 2.0 vision that you’d use to craft a search vision or a knowledge management vision. It’s not about which enabling technologies to use. It’s a story about how you can save customers time by providing them with interactive tools to do their own design work. It’s a story about how you can help customers design custom solutions by giving them access to the tools to mix, match, tailor, and extend your (and your business partners’) solutions. It’s a story about how you can empower customers to collaborate with one another to solve problems and to design new solutions to previously intractable problems. It’s a story about how you can shift valuable employees’ time away from walking customers’ quotes, orders, and change orders through your complex inter-organizational business processes to liberating them to co-design new products and solutions with their customers. Remember to anchor your stories in real and plausible numbers. You’ll find these real numbers by looking at the gaps between the vision—how your own customers would ideally like to be able to get things done—and the current reality—how they have to do things today.
*Footnotes*
1) Cisco Interview: Full Text, by Kevin Allison, The Financial Times, published July 15, 2007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/fb83a018-32fd-11dc-a9e8-0000779fd2ac.html (requires a subscription)
2) Outside In: What’s Beyond Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0? Biz 3.0!
By Patricia B. Seybold, April 19, 2007. http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=819
*Footnotes*
RSS 2.0 Feeds
Comments