Thinking about changing behaviors

I had a conversation with a doctor recently that got me thinking. This doctor works in a large, inner-city teaching hospital. He was talking about how to get groups of people to do something... in this case getting people tested for HIV.

It's a significant behavior change. It means addressing at lot of things that people don't like to think about, much less talk about.

He was gently trying to tell me that computer mediated-communication wasn't the best way to change behavior. He said that, in his experience, the most successful outreach was through traditional broadcast media. It was important to reach people with their own communities. There was also a need to have a physical presence in those communities somehow.

But even that doesn't always work. His point was that to make people change dangerous behaviors (like smoking, not getting tested for HIV, or even not getting enough exercise), you are dealing with a lot of complicated norms and attitudes -- some very social and some very personal.

Creating healthy behavior (like creating world peace or fixing the environment) is a "wicked problem". It impacts a very large number of diverse people -- all of whom have different ideas of what "success" looks like and all of whom have problems and issues in their lives that impact making these healthy changes in some significant way. "Wicked" problems are basically problems that are impossible to solve.

Yet things do change.

The doctor I was talking to said that people needed a catalyst to make these behavior changes a priority. They needed a close call -- a close friend or family member unexpectedly dying perhaps -- to pluck this one issue out of mad soup of day-to-day problems and make it a priority. If the issue stayed a priority in the person's life for more than about three months, it tended to become a permanent behavior change.

As a strategist who spends a lot of her time working wicked problems, this is an interesting insight -- a subtle consistency to hang a theory on. It tells me that:

• There is probably not much my web site will do to change a behavior, except keep reminding people that there is a behavior that should be changed.
• I need to be ready when this person experiences his or her "close call" and strongly support the changes that he or she is willing to make for about three months.
• This is all happening on a very personal, very individual level and that I need to speak to that person with a very personal voice.

Get A Grip: The Summary

Yeah. I'm finally going to climb off my soapbox on this. I just thought I'd summarize things a bit.

At some point (I don't really remember when anymore), I asked five questions. Here's your executive summary of the answers:

Now what do I do?

• Make sure that this social media tools actually support your goals.
• Make sure your intended audience members are actually using the tools you choose (as opposed to just jumping into whatever online tools make the morning news shows).

How fast does it work?

• Not fast. Get over it and set your expectations appropriately. Be suspicious of people or organizations offering "quick results" for a price.

How much will it cost to run?

• Unless you are very lucky, a lot. Adjust your strategy and budget to allow for a long haul.

What can I do to get results?

• Look for ways to engage many voices toward your communication goals. That helps the credibility of your efforts, as well as spreads the tasks across many people (giving your team energy for the long haul mentioned above).

Now what do I do?

• Clear your mind of the "overnight success" stories about using a social media tool or network. I think that you'd find that very few happened "overnight" and that even fewer were "successes" when measured against the original goals or (*gulp*) corporate ROI.

Social media is here to stay. To not engage with it is to miss a wonderful opportunity for really talking with your customers or members in a very individualized way -- but be realistic about it. People have lives and loves and joys and problems and aren't just visiting these networks hoping that you'll pop up and tell them what to do. You can't ignore the customs and norms of human communication just because you are talking via a computer.

I like to keep going back to a wonderful list of "reality checks" created in 1999: the Cluetrain Manifesto. Nine years later, many of the cautions listed here are still valid for most organizations:

• "These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked."
  
  
• "Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do."
  
  
• "But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf."
  
  
• "While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it."

You can use these tools strategically and effectively. Just do your homework, speak with a genuine voice (or many voices), and get a grip on your expectations.

Get A Grip: How much will it cost to run?

Twitter is free. That's the part that usually hooks people. "Whoa! Free access to millions of people who are just sitting around waiting to do our bidding! Let's do it!"

Then this excited person skips lightly to wherever the web team (or web person) sits and shares this fantastic new insight.... only to be crushed by the lack of enthusiasm in the web person. You might see frozen smile or the rolling eyes and probably assume that person thinks you are an idiot.

Let me fill you in on what's really going on inside that web person's head....

*frozen smile* "Great, they've discovered Twitter. Now I have to maintain that on top of the 50 other random requests I get from you people every day plus the stuff I'm actually committed to doing in order to keep my job... and, of course, there's the stupid custom code that blew up about 10 minutes ago that I'm trying to band-aid back together with digital duct tape and spit so that the site doesn't go down...." *eyes rolling* ..."And you think I should drop everything to start tweeting I-don't-know-what because no one gives me any content."

Most often it's not arrogance... it's panic overlayed and mellowed by being really tired.

What does this all have to do with cost? The biggest cost you will have (assuming you aren't reinventing the wheel by creating your own version of Twitter because you can't stand the thought of people interacting on a site that isn't your own) is in human resources. If you dump this on the web person described above, you will get negligible (if any) response. He or she is probably juggling too much already to do it properly.

Hire a full-time "tweeter"? Probably not. What does that job description look like anyway? Alternatives? One organization I ran across took a bold move to make this happen -- though the solution had some problems.

This organization identified the web site as central to doing business and demanded that social media become part of everyone's job -- basically a small, controlled crowdsourcing of this task, extending well beyond Twitter into participation in other social networks and blogging. You train everyone about social media culture and etiquette and give them talking points. This gives your organization a diverse group of voices all pointing toward a single set of coordinated tasks and goals. Sound strategy.

Here's the problem: Not everyone in the organization thought that they had bandwidth for another responsibility and they definitely didn't think that "tweeting" was a good use of their valuable time. Others had personal presences on these social networks -- some rather extensive -- and they weren't anxious to mix business with personal. Others were straight-out technophobes (or just nervous perfectionists), afraid of "doing it wrong".

Here's what happened: The efforts were lackluster. People did only what they were specifically told to do and tended to do it only when told to do it... by their immediate supervisors. These supervisors weren't all completely bought into the strategy or sophisticated about social media and so the specific instructions were not always coordinated or strategic. The problems snowballed to the point where the strategy just couldn't work anymore. Responsibility for the social media efforts once again fell to small group of "web people" and consequently fell far short of both stated organizational goals and its real potential for effective outreach.

I still think this is a useful strategy, but I'd suggest some adjustments:

• The supervision and management of this task needs to be constant and strong. If there needs to be a full-time person anywhere, it should be the manager of the effort rather than the "tweeters".
  
  
• A 2-hour briefing about online etiquette won't do it -- education needs to be constant as well. Everything makes sense in the briefing... the questions come up when people sit down and start to apply what they learned.
  
  
• There needs to be a constant sharing of what different people are doing, what information and insights they are uncovering, and best practices. People can't just go back to their desks and do this in isolation.
  
  
• This might have worked better if people came into the organization more experienced with (and enthusiastic about) web. While this would have been an unreasonable expectation ten years ago, it's becoming more reasonable with every wave of people graduating from college.

It's going to be a significant outlay of time and will impact the rest of your business.

I know I started out writing about costs and seemed to devolve quickly into whining about human resources again. It's a constant theme in this series because it is the fundamental barrier you are facing. It takes a lot to maintain these presences the way they are need to be maintained in order to "move the needle" on your overall web strategy. Human resources cost a lot, at every step -- the person doing the work, the person managing him or her, and the organizational resources needed to support this person.

The tools are generally low cost or free. Your costs are in the craftsmen.

Get a Grip: How fast does it work?

Unless you are very, very, very lucky, it'll take some time. For every YouTube video that goes viral and hits the morning news shows, there are hundreds of thousands that never see the light of day. Don't wrap your strategy and measurements around... you know... luck. Strategy takes patience and work.

Look around at what else is happening in the world. Look at what's on the news and what people are talking about. If you are talking about a guarenteed way to land a job in a bad economy, you are more likely (at this particular moment) to get a following more quickly. If you need to talk about travel to exotic four-star resorts... well... maybe not.

You are going to be building an audience. It takes the same amount of time (and a lot of the same steps) it took to build the audience/market/customer base that you currently have. Look at these tools as a way to enhance your communications with people, not build a new audience. A great example of this is how Comcast decided to use Twitter. They scanned the tweets for complaints and then proactively dealt with the problems. It became viral when the people who had been helped reported back to the larger Twitter community. While this looks like a no-brainer use of the tool, there was certain amount of social context around this. Comcast needed to have a reputation for incredibly bad customer service for this sort of thing to become "news" and proliferate. An organization that has a much better reputation for customer service would likely not see nearly this kind of buzz.

Remember that this isn't like advertising on the Super Bowl. Social media isn't about people randomly stumbling across you. You are walking into a party where everyone is already talking in little clumps all over the place. The easiest thing to do is join a group where you are already known and ask to be referred to other groups hopefully becoming the center of a larger and larger group. You need to talk to people -- as much as humanly possible -- as individuals or very small, tight groups. Applying traditional mass marketing techniques* and assumptions won't work.

What do you do?

1. Don't treat your Twitter account as the "silver bullet" that will save you from your online goals. It will let you down.
2. Start by using your account to better support your existing customer base. You can reach out from there.
3. Set reasonable expectations for this tool and then adjust your effort and financial support accordingly. If you are just going to use it for talking to a group of 50 people who need tech support on your widget that probably should have been better designed to start with, don't put a full-time staff person on it.
   

* I am watching an organization that is trying to apply mass marketing techniques to building social media engagement. So far, the return on the investment has been... well... disappointing. They are doing some interesting things around marketing and incentives, though, and I plan to keep watching. This world changes very quickly and any solid statement like "traditional mass marketing techniques and assumptions won't work" is likely to be proven wrong at some point. Stay tuned.

Want to take over the world with Twitter?

So you've decided that Twitter is the way to jump into this Web 2.0/social media thing that everyone is buzzing out. If that's where everyone is, then maybe this is the "magic bullet" that will finally get you to those crazy traffic goals you were given last year.

I have one bit of advice (given with all due respect and great humility for my own mistaken attitudes in the past).

Get a grip.

You aren't going to suddenly "move the needle" on you web goals by starting up a Twitter account. Having a Twitter account does not automatically mean that your organization is "Web 2.0" (this is quickly becoming a meaningless term so you should probably stop using it) or social-media savvy.

It means you have an account on Twitter.

That's true of Facebook, Ning, Yahoo Groups, niche online communities and all of those other social networking hotspots. These are all different tools -- like hammers, screwdrivers and saws. Got an account on all of 'em? Great. You've got a full toolbox. Now you need a plan, materials (content), and a crew to do the building. Take any one piece of this away and it won't work. If you expect a single person to do all of the building, it's going to take an awfully long time. If you "crowdsource" the work and don't have a plan (or oversight), the effort will be hap-hazard and unfocused in terms of your goals. Think about your content -- what you are talking about on all of these platforms. The expectation of your audience is that you'll be contributing valuable content to the community... not tweeting "where should I go to lunch to today" or "@whoever You Rock".

So... what do you do?

First of all, look at these communication tools and see how they align with your organizational mission and goals. I'm not talking about the goals that say "10 million web visitors by July", I'm talking about the big, organizational goals like "we want to make boatloads of money as quickly as possible" (I paraphrase here) or "we want to make the world a better place for the backyard chipmunk". Whatever your board of directors bought into, dust that bad boy off and take a look. Will having a Twitter account move you in the right direction?

Yes? Awesome. Excellent. We're on a roll here. Will it move you toward your goal faster than other communications options (marketing, public relations, large donations to key political campaigns) or even physical options? If you are trying to get more schools built in Sao Paulo, would you get to that goal faster by actually giving grants to schoolteachers who live in that community or by paying Paris Hilton to pout into a television camera?

Think hard about it. Just because Twitter exists doesn't mean you have to use it. If you decide to use it, it doesn't need to be central to your communications strategy. If you are trying to reach a small, targeted group of people (such as chipmunk lovers), they've probably found each other without your help and are connecting somewhere. It might be Facebook, it might be Yahoo Groups, it might be a listserve run out of a server in someone's basement. Whatever the case, go to them.

You spent a lot of time and effort coming up with those goals. Stay focused on them. Don't retrofit your strategy to fit the tools.

OK. So after all of this the broad social media tools still make sense in light of your organizational goals. Now what? How fast does it work? How much will it cost to run? What do I do to make sure I get results?

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of "Get A Grip", coming up really soon. I promise.

How I learned to stop underestimating social media* efforts

* For the purposes of this blog, I view social media as a set of tools used to create online community -- connections between people. I don't see social media as an end in itself.

Most of what I know about building online community is self taught. I talk to people... I see what else is working or not working... I make a few informed guesses and then I dive in. I've worked strategically and hard to push a campaign making use of both an online community I oversaw and other online communities.

It wasn't all successful, but I learned a lot.

Most importantly, I learned that it's a lot harder than it looks.

I knew what the steps were... find and empower mavens within your own community. Try to stand back enough to allow the community to find and speak in its own voice. Use incentives to encourage members to bring in other members, and to behave appropriately. Make sure there is a constant stream of new people coming into the community to keep it alive. Keep on top of your server stats as a real-time indication of what the members of your community want. Establish valuable presences on the other communities you want to participate in as an inexpensive and credible outreach mechanism. Make sure that your participation in those communities is visible so that your rating within the community rises and your content (with your name attached) floats to the top. Set yourself up to be an expert on whatever message you want to push, and then push (ever so gently so that you don't lose your credibility).

I checked these steps with other very smart people who were doing the same thing I was doing. They said the steps were basically right. I skipped gleefully back to implement them. I had six months and a map of steps to take. I was sure I could do it.

I really should have asked those very smart people some more questions, such as

1. "did it work?"
2. "how long did it really take?"
3. "what, exactly, was your definition of success?"
4. "were you able to make success happen more than once?"

I think I would have gotten some interesting answers.

Let's break these steps down a bit.

Community growth
In our business, we often joke about the "if you build it, they will come" cliché. Funny how often we still do it. It takes time for a community to build and even longer for it to find its voice. I felt that starting with a relatively small, friendly group who had real-life experience with the topic would be the way to go. I didn't press for a big marketing budget. I figured it would be easier for the mavens to get comfortable and safer for the members to invite friends and coworkers in if it wasn't the digital equivalent of a rave party. It would make community management a lot easier since a small community is a lot less attractive to trolls... and, besides, I didn't have a lot moderator of help.

The community that got built using these assumptions was solid and active... Just small and not growing much. That was considered a failure. There were statistics somewhere that my boss got hold of: it said gave a rule of thumb that if participation a community wasn't doubling in size every month, it was dying. That didn't make sense to me. Communities see so many ups and downs that why should a period of marginal growth be a reason for panic? If the quiet lurkers of the pages continued to increase, is that a success or failure? I wasn't running a community centered around software or games, it was around on-the-ground, off-the-computer community involvement. How much do these "rule of thumb" numbers really apply from one kind of community to another?

I resisted a lot of pressure to just keep heaping more people into the community via marketing or incentives and I wonder how that would have changed things. My gut says that we would have had a huge mess on our hands in terms of moderation and PR (as the one-the-ground action we were trying to generate was child-serving)... but we might have made our numbers.

Community mavens
They come and go so you need to keep a string of "mavens in waiting" going. Setting aside the issues around identifying and engaging these folks, just keeping them "in waiting" a management trick in and of itself. Really good "mavens" tend to be ambitious, outgoing, fairly aggressive, somewhat obsessive "type A" personalities. They are characters. That is what makes them so much fun. It's tough to keep someone like this waiting in the wings -- keeping him or her engaged and excited about your community -- while someone else gets the glory.

I'm not sure that pitting people against each other but allowing them to set up their own competitive cliques is the way to go, either. If your goal is page views, this probably works. If your goal is to get people to work together toward a common goal... probably not.

There are so many options for people that we have very little opportunity to attract and maintain high value participants. If a potential maven comes to my online community and doesn't like the voice or tone or clashes with the current set of mavens, he or she will likely just move on to the next community.

Bringing in new members
I know we got some referrals because people would say so as part of an introduction... but most of our new traffic came from search engines. A person participated in the community (for a long time, consisting only of threaded forums) only if he or she couldn't find the answer to a question in the existing, freely available content. These people did tend to come back and answer other questions, but this was a very small number and they protected their own personal networks like the networks were their children.

According to the "rule of thumb" mentioned above, the community was not growing... and actually qualified as "dead".

We tried the following to kick up registration and participation:

• Google Adwords
• Banner advertising
• Significant mentions on national media
• Celebrity endorsements
• Emails to existing members to increase participation
• Phone calls to existing members to increase participation
• Contests with large and small prizes

The banner ads, national media, and celebrity endorsements were nonstarters. For all the effort involved, particularly with the national media and endorsements, the return was crushingly disappointing. Obviously, there was no money for research so I'm not really sure what the problem was. My guess: People don't always do what celebrities tell them to do, particularly if what they tell them to do is one or two steps removed from what the celebrity is famous for in the first place (like a TV show).

...Or it might be that we just had too big an "ask" in terms of action. (We were asking people to do real-world, community organizing.)

We also experimented liberally on the organization's staff, who were true believers in the mission, but not all of whom were completely bought into or aware of how we were using the Web to further the organizational goals (another unpleasant surprise). We got some interesting insights from that... If you want people to do something, be very, very clear about what that is -- and pay them (through incentives).

Strategically, that wasn't the result we were looking for.

Incentives for behavior
We found that across the board with all of the contests. If you pay them, people will do what you ask. All of the smart people I was talking to generally considered prizes (paying people for a particular online behavior), a bad idea. It was a Pandora's box, they said. Once you start, you can never stop.

I think that there is a place for contests and prizing in generating activity in online communities, but there is an important trick to it. You have to know what behavior to reward. It's a classic Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe situation. The answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. If you want the question that led to the answer 42, that's a whole other problem that you should have thought of a long time ago. If you are using contests and prizes to encourage a behavior, make sure that behavior actually supports your goals for the community. If you are asking people to randomly post photos to a site in return for a tee shirt, for example, will that entice them to continue participating? Probably not. They'll post their photo, get their tee shirt and then move on. If your community goal is 1,000 new photos, you are probably OK.

I found myself spending a lot of time and effort on contests that met short-term goals put on me as benchmarks to assess my success and the community's success. It broke my heart every time. While I recognize the importance of measuring the effectiveness of different efforts, that's not the way to build an online community.

Establish personal and credible presences on other communities
The challenge here that I completely underestimated was the amount of time required to do this right. Everyone knows this takes a long time. Take that assumption and double it... then double it again. The bigger the community, the harder it is to get noticed. The harder it is to get noticed, the longer you have to work. This is fine if becoming a recognized member of a particular online community is your only goal for the day... but we were also maintaining our web site: creating/updating content, moderating our own community, doing other outreach, analyzing what was working and what wasn't, and building new tech as needed.

Even if I had the luxury of a full-time person focused only on this, however, I'm not sure that would have solved the problem. When I started this effort, I identified at least a dozen targeted communities that I wanted my message visible on. Looking back at my list after a year, only four of those communities really took off and are pulling the kind of audience that would have justified this amount of effort. In order to correctly identify those communities from the start, I would have needed either incredible luck or someone who was paying very close attention to what was happening in the industry. I would have needed someone who was on top of the fact that XYZ community had a bidding war between Disney and Rupert Murdock going on or that the ownership ABC community was really just two sleep-deprived teenagers on a hacked Linux server someplace and that the site would disappear when one of them broke up with his girlfriend.

Thinking the logistics of this through made my head hurt... and made straight-out advertising looks pretty darned attractive.

So I come back to the questions that I would have asked my smart people, had I known then what I know now:

1. "did it work?"
2. "how long did it take?"
3. "what, exactly, was your definition of success?"
4. "were you able to make success happen more than once?"

These are the answers I suspect I would have gotten then (and would probably get now).

1. "It depends on what you consider success."
2. "Dunno, it's not 'done' yet."
3. "Ummm, yeah... well... that keeps changing...."
4. *shuffling feet* *looking away* "I'm not really sure we got it even once..."

Open letter to hiring managers everywhere

Dear sir or madam,

I have an impressive resume. I know that. I have done strategy work, managed budgets, managed teams of people, and done lots and lots of hands-on work building web sites. If you think your job is too “low level” for me, then just don’t call me.

Please don’t call me and ask me incredulous questions about why I applied. It just makes me feel like a fool for answering your ad.

It’s just not necessary.

Could it be possible that you were so focused on adding happy corporate babble to your ads, that you really didn’t say anything about the job? Most of the ads say “no phone calls please”. It’s not like I can call and ask “so are you really just a hole-in-the-wall nonprofit with three people on the payroll working on desks that the executive director yanked out of an alley trash pile one Saturday?” I have to assume that what you put in your ad is what you really want: “We are a world class leader in strategic commitment to making a real impact on [insert issue here], seeking a web professional of the highest caliber to join our team.”

Not a lot there to work with. The economy is bad so I’m casting a wide net. Please give me the benefit of the doubt. If it’s an entry-level, minimum wage job, just don’t call me.

Could it be possible that I have reached a point in my career or life where I’m looking to slow down a little? I’ve run two businesses. I don’t want to be the boss — been there, done that, didn’t like it. My ambitions are much more complicated than they were when I was 25 years old, and emphasize work/life balance a lot more. I can do a good job maintaining your little web site. I can do it 5-6 hours a day instead of 12 and use that extra time to add polish and pizzazz. I know that I’ll be trading off salary and responsibility for a simpler job and I’m OK with that. My salary history is completely irrelevant. I’m offering you a good deal. Please don’t throw that in my face.

One organization actually called me in for an interview to inform me that I was overqualified for the position. They had no intention of hiring me. I sat in a room, with 4 people staring at me, the lead person leaning into the table and looking at me like I had just sprouted flowers on my head. “So why did you even apply for this job? You are ridiculously overqualified.” I stood my ground, but it was one of the most uncomfortable 40 minutes I had every experienced… and it just wasn’t necessary.

These are hard times. Please be sensitive, and please be open minded. You might be surprised how well a person you thought “wasn’t a good fit” fits in ways you didn’t envision.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Amy