A healthy business culture is something we all aspire to. We hold up shining examples like Zappos or Southwest Airlines when we talk about the kind of personality and mindset we want to portray to our employees and customers.

There’s an important element in defining that culture that we sometimes discuss, but rarely pointedly, because it’s not comfortable.

Your values as a company are demonstrated – and judged – through the people you entrust to embody them.

It’s why having people you can trust on your team is so very pivotal. And by trust, I mean the ability to rely on individuals to demonstrate discretion, professionalism, decorum, and sound judgment in potentially crunchy situations.

Humans become a magnifying glass, especially online. And as much as we’d like to believe that we can separate our personal selves from our professional selves merely by drawing imaginary lines between our profiles, it simply doesn’t work that way.

Emotionally and rationally, those that do business with us connect the dots among the people that comprise our organization, both online and off. We hold individuals in high esteem or not, and in turn extrapolate a picture or a perception of the organizations they represent. We look at them as an indicative, smaller part of a larger whole, for better or for worse. The individuals we choose to represent our collective organizations leave impressions with people by their actions and interactions with others, and those behaviors inevitably drive people to draw conclusions about our business and its attitude.

If we empower and unleash brilliant, innovative minds that contribute to larger ideas and offer constructive, well-thought dialogue or debate, people notice.

If we empower and unleash self-important, arrogant individuals that create or fuel petty conflict, sling insults or make pejorative comments as a way of communicating their position, people notice that, too.

And both of them – however incrementally – create associations between that person, our organizations, and our potential customers. Those associations affect our company reputation, credibility, and brand.

If we encourage our teams to be present and engaged online as I believe we should, we must also recognize that in doing so, we are empowering them not just with the ability to be advocates for our organization, but to negatively influence the perception that others may have of us.

I won’t advocate as a solution to instill command-and-control tactics to try to mitigate the risk, because those are rarely effective and perpetuate a sense amongst individuals of being “babysat” or worse, watched. Trust is mutual in its impact. Nor am I suggesting that interactions and discussions online be devoid of individual thought or opinion. The answer isn’t in locks and keys or overt censorship of ideas.

But it does bring to mind an important thing we must not ignore: using a discerning eye to both bring aboard people that exhibit the same kinds of behavior and values upon which we’d like our organizational culture to be judged, and to have potentially difficult and uncomfortable conversations with the people who exhibit everything from a slip of judgment to an outright abuse of their representative role. Above all, we must be holding ourselves to the same standard to which we’d hold others.

Our companies are judged in large part on our efficacy as leaders and managers, and how we embody our work in the interpersonal dealings we have. It’s always been so, whether over coffee or cocktails or on the golf course.

And in our quest to become more social businesses, we must accept the difficult balance that comes with the rewards of engaging our customers and communities online, embrace the intertwined reality of our personal and professional selves, and insist on standards of behavior and professionalism among our organizational representatives – and ourselves – that do our hard work and hard-earned reputation justice.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Obvious But Uncomfortable Way Your Company Culture Is Judged

He’s got a video up on his site from a couple of years ago, talking about the need to highlight the good work and the good people out there. He kicked it over to me for consideration, rekindling the notion that we need to do more of this. It’s a simple message, but it matters. Here’s why.

The velocity of the web makes it so easy, fast, and inexpensive to spread information.

But the truth is that the bad stuff has always moved faster and farther (even before the web took the world by storm). It’s the whole “have to turn and look at the car wreck” thing. We thrive on controversy. Feed on others’ shortcomings. Feel empowered somehow when we sanctimoniously point out where people or businesses have gone wrong in our eyes.

I’ve felt and seen it a lot lately, and perhaps Gary was reading my mind or heard me say so. The rash of impatient, reactionary #FAIL declarations day in and day out. The social media lynch mobs. Entitlement and opportunism. Criticisms and “advice” that are not so constructive. Judgmental behavior and comments based on precious little context or information. And all of them wielded through easily accessible online channels, sometimes carelessly and without regard for the people on the other end.

I’m sure there’s some sociological or psychological pile of stuff about what makes us do that. But Gary’s trying to make sure we take time to do the opposite, and I’m glad. Because I need to put my money where my mouth is and rather than lamenting the existence of the bad stuff, I too can shift my perspective and shine a spotlight on the great examples.

There are promising organizations being built and fostered to do good with the technologies we’ve created.

There are displays of humanity, generosity, wit, humor, and smarts all over the place. I’m on the lucky end of lots of those folks, too. There are brilliant writers, helpful content creators, positive-minded businesses that are trying to improve the communities around them, whether virtual or concrete or both.

It would be really hard for me to draw up a list without excluding someone, so I’ll probably take a different approach that I’ll have to think about. But I hope you’ll mark your calendar for Good People Day on April 3rd, 2010 and do something to focus on the good people and ideas that surround you.

Whatever that means for you is great. Blog it, tweet it, podcast it, make a video. Or just pick up the phone and call someone and tell them they matter to you. I think that counts, too. If you publish it, tag it #GPD10 so folks can see it.

It sure can’t hurt to make a conscious effort to showcase the good stuff. We’ll always have more than enough evidence of the ugly side to go around.

You in?

image credit place light – flying not physically

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Good People Day April 3rd: Refocusing on the Positive

Social media isn’t harder to measure than any other area of business. It’s harder to prove causality, but then again, direct and independent causality is awfully hard to prove for any singular event that impacts a sale. Sure, you can track your direct response codes all you want, but you can’t tell me definitively that the advertising you did, or the relationship that person had with Bob the Sales Guy, or the article than ran in the New York Times didn’t also have an effect on that eventual decision.

But I digress. Back to the point.

What Are You Measuring Now?

My sense is that if you’re a company that’s in a measurement frame of mind in the first place, you’ve managed to measure and quantify (or qualify) something that you’re doing. For instance:

• What’s the conversion rate of your e-newsletter subscribers to actual prospects or sales?
• What’s your resolution time on customer service calls?
• What’s the cost of having a human resources department?
• What percentage of your customers renew after the second purchase?
• How do you calculate your customer satisfaction, and what is it currently?
• What return do you get on your advertising dollars, direct or implied (and which is it)?
• How do you justify your investment in your IT department and infrastructure?
• What is your return on training materials or continuing education for your employees?

Guessing that the last two might have thrown you a bit, but these are legitimate measurements, too, aren’t they? We often term measurement as only having value when it relates to dollars in, but I’d venture to say that measuring (and justifying) dollars out is important. After all, if you know your stuff about the actual calculation of ROI, you’ll agree completely.

If, however, you don’t have an answer for anything above or anything that looks like those things, you probably need to improve the practice of your measurement to start with.

Measurement Needs Infrastructure

I’m going to put this simply. If you’re not already rigorously applying measurement (i.e. justification) standards to other areas of your business – on both the cost and revenue side – you can stop blustering about needing measurements for social media specifically. Why? Because you’re not equipped, and you don’t have a discipline of measurement upon which to build.

Measuring things properly takes, at least:

• Time: In terms of man hours to actually do the gathering of data and the further analysis of it, over a period of time that can actually provide context and account for trends and anomalies.
• Tools: The ability to capture, aggregate, and correlate the data you wish to measure, whether that’s a spreadsheet or a more complex software application.
• Humans: One metric alone means little. You need people to draw relationships and correlations between the data points that indicate progress toward the goals you’ve set. Few machines alone are capable of such insights and conclusions. Those people also need to report back their findings and offer recommendations for acting on them.

It’s staggering to see how many companies are demanding measurements and some mysterious definition of ROI for social media that can’t even tell you their conversion rate on various website properties, or the retention rate for their customers. Please stop demanding something you’re not prepared to do as a matter of business, and as a cop-out for not implementing a strategy that is unfamiliar to you.

Start With What You Know

You might think you need to develop and invent a whole new set of metrics to illustrate how social media impacts your business. Sometimes, that might be true or valuable, because there are things we can measure now that we couldn’t measure easily before. For example, I’m particularly bullish on the potential for metrics like Share of Conversation.

However, if measurement of the new stuff confounds you, start with what you know. Figure out how social media activities and participation impacts and influences the metrics you already use.

For instance, when you launch your blog, do your email newsletter subscriptions go up? If you know the average conversion rate of those subscribers (and perhaps their average value as a customer), you’ll be able to correlate the increase in your blog awareness to those subscriptions. Are they the only driver? No. Can you map the two together over time and see if they rise proportionally to demonstrate impact? Absolutely.

If your call center costs you $5 per incoming issue and you deploy a DIY YouTube help series or a Twitter team to triage in the social media realm, watch your daily call volume. Does it drop over a 30 day period in conjunction with those efforts? How much time and manpower does that Twitter team or video series cost you overall? Line up that investment against the drop in call volume by $5 per call, and see if you end up in the red or in the black.

It Doesn’t Have To Hurt

Measurement doesn’t have to be arduous and painful. It should be something you can stream into your daily or weekly processes. Remember that the goal isn’t the measurement itself, but the insights you get out of doing it. Keep it straightforward, simple, and utterly tied back to the goals you’ve set for yourself. (Start over here if you need help setting measurable objectives).

Make measurement a part of each department or function’s leadership. Put it in terms they’re familiar with. And at least to start with, measure social media against and along with the things you’re already tracking. See whether it has an impact either way.

And above all, be sure that you’re building a discipline of measurement and accountability in your business before you blame the medium itself for being immeasurable.

There’s loads of opportunity to evaluate your efforts, if it’s a mindset you’re willing to take.

Over to you. Agree? Disagree? I’m here to listen.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Wiring In Social Media Measurement