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Thursday, January 9, 2014

Big Idea 2014: Marketing Becomes the Giving Tree for the C-Suite

Big Idea 2014: Marketing Becomes the Giving Tree for the C-Suite

 
"Marketing is everything." I hear that phrase - or a variation of it - a lot these days. I agree with the sentiment given how brands can turn almost any moment with a customer into an interactive experience. However, while it’s easy to say “marketing is everything,” the truth is that marketing can’t do everything. That’s why I think 2014 will be the year that marketing leaders must become givers: providers of insight, creators of connections, deliverers of performance improvement. Succeeding in this kind of giving will be critical if marketing is to drive above-market growth.

Let me explain. As companies become ever more responsive to and informed by their customers, their range of interactions will continue to expand. Those customer interactions hit many different parts of the organization (call center, sales staff, web sites, mobile apps, etc.). Since those interaction points are often owned by many different parts of the organization, the customer experience is often disjointed, inconsistent, and unfulfilling. Those experiences need to be integrated into consistent customer journeys. That’s where marketing comes in.
Here are three areas where marketing can really make a difference:

Provide relevant insights: Big Data and analytics have opened the door to mind-blowing insights about customers – how they behave, what they like/don’t like, what they’re interested in, etc. While carefully staying within the bounds of privacy parameters, marketers can know so much more about their customers than was possible even two years ago. Marketers need to identify, bundle, and serve relevant insights to the various parts of the organization. Insights are the foundation of any commercial strategy. Those insights, in fact, provide a vocabulary that the organization can share across silos. Data – and the insights derived from them – become the lingua franca of the organization.

Create valuable connections: CMO's know their effectiveness will increasingly lie in a brand's ability to make the execution happen at the front-lines of interaction with a customer. But marketing cannot control them all. What that means is that marketing will need to tighten their partnerships with sales, service, and product development around all sorts of things, such as how the brand should handle personalization and privacy. Service organizations, usually under the COO, now need to also coordinate with marketing as the volume of requests coming in through social media blurs the lines between what is remediation help and selling support. CMOs will need to increasingly guide IT on what their priorities should be for investing in new technologies that drive personalization and new experiences. Marketers are helping CFO's understand that "working media spend" ratios no longer define the efficiency of marketing operations when more investment has to go into content for owned and earned media.

Deliver performance excellence: Beyond creating tighter relationships, CMOs and marketing in general will need to help various other parts of the organization connect with each other. Product design should be working closely with sales. Marketing can be the glue to help bind these groups together around a vision based on deep customer insights and a clear go-to-market strategy. That growth comes from having balanced and connected marketing and sales capabilities. We have found that companies with that profile perform 2x to 3x better than the market in terms of revenue growth. And while only 14 percent of companies in a separate survey believe they have the right investment levels across their capabilities, almost 2/3 of that group has much greater confidence in their ability to beat the market compared to those that aren’t investing effectively. When the organization can effectively work together better, marketing becomes a “performance multiplier” for the entire business.
These are all fundamental acts of giving. But unlike ending of “The Giving Tree” (a great book, by the way, as any parent knows) where the tree wilts away after giving away so much, the marketing version will enhance marketing’s influence. If marketing can really deliver on insights, design great experiences by pulling together the right parts of the organization, and then deliver those services and products at the right place and time to the right person, then marketing will see its influence increase significantly. I’ve seen it happen at a number of clients already. In 2014, I expect to see that giving role for marketing expand.
Learn more on our McKinsey on Marketing & Sales site, and please follow us on Twitter@McK_MktgSales. And please follow me @davidedelman.
Graphic: Cienpies Design / shutterstock

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

From Keywords to Concepts: The Smart SEO's System for Themed Keyword Research

From Keywords to Concepts: The Smart SEO's System for Themed Keyword Research

 - Posted by  to Keyword Research
If Google's Penguin update and Knowledge Graph have taught us anything, it's that concepts have become more important than individual keywords for search marketing.
Many people in the SEO space mistakenly assume that because Google withholds keyword referral data in the form of (not provided), keywords no longer matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every search begins with keywords. Over 5 billion Google searches a day. Consider the following:
  • Google's entire business is based on selling keywords – over 40 billion dollars a year, most of it from keyword sales through advertising.
  • (not provided) affects only post-click analytics. It doesn't influence the pre-click keywords users type into search boxes.
  • Keywords and their meaning remain the primary input search engines use to deliver answers to users (while other inputs such as location data and app integration are on the rise).
Marketers who invest in smart keyword research will continue to have a huge advantage over the competition.
The trick today is turning those keywords into concepts.

From single keywords to themed concepts

When most of us first learned SEO, we learned to research one keyword at a time. We optimized our page for that keyword by placing it in the title tag, in the headline, a few times in the body, and maybe the alt text of a photo.
If we were really fancy we'd optimize a page for two keywords. Oh dear.
In truth, optimizing pages with a single keyword mentality hasn't worked well for a long time.
Content today has to be about something.
The difference today from years past is the shift from individual keywords to concepts. Concepts relate to search marketing in three primary ways:

1. What the user intends

Search engines try to better understand what the user asks by relating that question to concepts. If I search for "movie about tiger on boat" Google will likely understand that I am asking about the movie Life of Pi, not about pages optimized for those specific keywords.

2. What your content is about

Search engines read the keywords on your pages to try and figure out what those pages are conceptually about.

3. Relating concepts to one another

The Knowledge Graph shows us how Google relates concepts to each other. In the case of Life of Pi, this may be showing how the film relates to ratings, reviews, actors, writers, and the cast.

Keyword targeting: the dumb, hard way

In the post How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint, I first addressed the concept of themed keyword research. The guide lists the biggest mistakes people make when choosing keywords. Here's what we want to avoid:
  1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
  2. Keywords with too much competition
  3. Keywords without enough traffic

  4. Keywords that don't convert
  5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time
Instead, let's take the opposite approach.
The basic idea is that we're going to focus our content around ideas instead of keywords, and thus give us the potential to rank for 100s or 1000s of keywords at a time.

The smart system of themed keyword research

Let's explore a new way of thinking about keywords. It requires discarding some of our old ideas and taking advantage of how Google may likely decide what our content is about.
To accomplish this, we'll leverage some obvious truths about search traffic.

Truth #1: Over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from keywords you didn't try to optimize for.

If you've ever seen a keyword report in your analytics platform or Google Webmaster Tools, you know this is true.
What are these keywords? They may be synonyms, thematically related, or closely related ideas that search engines thought best matched your content. Sometimes they are way off base, but we won't concern ourselves with those.
With this in mind, optimizing for a only a single keyword means ignoring the majority of your potential traffic.

Truth #2: Ranking number one is not a requirement for earning thousands of visits.

Given what we know about point #1, it's often better to rank in position 2 or lower for hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords than it is to rank number one for a single keyword.

Truth #3: The best keyword tools in the world will only show you a fraction of the keywords you can potentially rank for.

Have you ever compared your long tail keyword data with data from Google's own Keyword Planner?
Most of those keywords will show little potential search traffic or won't even register, but you know this isn't true because these are the same keywords that brought you traffic.
Relying on keyword research tools alone wont bring you to your full ranking potential. You need content that fully explores your themed concepts.

Truth #4: Search engines sell keywords grouped into concepts and themes.

We can learn from this strategy.
When you purchase keywords through AdWords, Google suggests keywords to you in tightly grouped themes and ideas. In fact, they do everything they can to discourage you from bidding on individual keywords.
Of course, this is one way for Google to make more money, but it's also because Google knows that concepts are often a better indicator of searcher intent than individual keywords.
Part of this is due to the fact that 15% of all Google searches, or over half a billion per day, have never been seen by before.
Now let's put these ideas into action.

Step 1: Gather your keyword seeds

Folks talk about different processes of keyword research depending on whether you are going after
  • Traffic: good for pure pageviews and ad-based revenue sites, or
  • Conversions: for example, when you sell goods or services or need brand awareness
Most of the time, you already have a good idea of what your keyword topic broadly covers, especially if you're working with an established business or website.
For our purposes, let's explore ideas around the keyword "seo tools" – a term near and dear to our hearts here at Moz. In reality, this is an extremely competitive keyword, and for your own research you'd likely want to begin with a longer-tail, less competitive term.

Brainstorming

There are literally hundreds of keyword research tools out there to experiment with, but a few SEO favorites include:
In the end, you will likely rely heavily on Google AdWords Keyword Planner, but you never want to rely on it as your sole tool. It's best to explore and play around with many tools to discover new ideas.
Here are keyword suggestions from Grepwords.
There are no rules except to have fun and try to discover new keywords you haven't considered before.

Step 2: Get specific with modifiers

This is basic stuff, but it bears emphasizing: The more specific your keywords, the easier it typically is to rank for those keywords.
Sure, it would be great to rank for the keyword "SEO tools" itself, but most people aren't searching that way. Instead, they are likely looking for something more specific.
Common keyword modifiers include:
  1. Time and Date: "SEO Tools 2014"
  2. Quality and/or Price: "Free SEO Tools", "Fastest SEO Tools"
  3. Intent: "Buy SEO Tools", "Find SEO Tools"
  4. Location: "SEO Tools Online", "Canadian SEO Tools"
Your chosen keyword research tools will uncover these and many more qualifiers, but you'll want to include them in your searches as well.

Case Study: the $70,000 keyword modifier

Seasonal keywords are often super-effective. I discovered this myself a few years ago as an independent SEO with the keyword "IRA contribution limits." The keyword had good volume but was super-competitive, so I knew I was never going to rank for it.
Using Google Trends, I found that usage for this keyword spiked at certain times of the year, and that in fact people were looking for information for a specific year, i.e. "IRA contribution limits 2012."
Using Google Trends is a great way to validate any keyword idea, as it will often reveal hidden patterns and insight not present in other tools.
Armed with the new knowledge, I found many more date-specific keywords themed around this topic and built an entire domain around them. Although it took a lot of hard work, the site eventually drew tons of seasonal traffic and I was able to sell the site with a significant profit.
It's a good idea to validate all your important keyword ideas through Google Trends, as it will often reveal patterns and insights not present in other keyword research tools.

Step 3: Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner

For small and medium-sized research jobs, nothing beats going directly to Google's AdWords Keyword Tool for relevant suggestions and search volume. (For larger and enterprise-type projects, see the alternatives at the end of the post.)
This is basic stuff, but you'll want to search for New Keyword and Adgroup Ideas and head straight to the to theKeyword Ideas tab. For a more complete guide to using the planner, Kristi Hines wrote a great guide here.
Hint: While most seasoned SEOs skip over the Ad Groups tab, there's a wealth of ideas there tightly grouped into themed keywords – exactly what we are looking for!
Traditionally, marketers use Google's keyword tool because of search volume and competition scores, but most web marketers underplay one of the most powerful features of this tool: the ability to sort keyword suggestions by relevance.
This gives us a huge advantage in creating themed keyword lists, and helps us create more targeted content.
Because the top suggestions often contain your core keywords, it's helpful to use negative keywords to discover more variation.

Step 4: Defining the concepts further

Now that you have your basic keyword idea, the next step is creating your keyword theme by finding keywords that are conceptually related.
There are several ways to do this. For our example of "SEO tools" let's try the popular methods to build out our themed list.

Google's Related Searches

At the bottom of most Google results is a section called Related Searches. This is a gold mine of conceptually related concepts.
By clicking through the results and then examining those related searches (and repeating this process over and over) you can quickly find many long-tail opportunities much easier than using Google's AdWords Keyword Planner.

Google Trends

At the bottom of each trends report is a "Related Searches" section that can be used to discover conceptually related queries.

Wikistalker

This cool tool introduced to me by Peter Bray "illustrates the relations between different things by visualizing thesemantic relevance between the inter-connected structure of their Wikipedia entry articles."
So if we search Wikistalker for "Search Engine Optimization" it shows us the following Wikipedia articles with the highest semantic relevance.
  • Internet Marketing: 85% relevant
  • Google Webmaster Tools: 70% relevant
  • Marketing: 59% relevant

Other tools

In fact, many other keyword research tools like Deeperweb SearchSEMRushYouTube Analytics or WordStreamcan help you discover related keyword phrases.

Step 5: Empathy, your secret keyword weapon

Ask yourself what a visitor wants to find on this page.
As Rand explains in this excellent Whiteboard Friday, putting yourself in the visitor's shoes and anticipating their needs provides a wealth of conceptually related keyword ideas.
Searchers of "SEO tools" are usually asking a number of similar questions:
  • How much does it cost? Free, plans and pricing, free trial
  • What kinds of tools are there? Link building, crawling, and indexing
  • Who are the tools for? Agency software, small business
  • How good are the tools? Best, endorsed by, customer review
By answering as many searcher questions as we can, we continue to build our themed keyword concept.

Step 6: Can you rank? Getting strategic with competition

In this case, it's much better to go straight to the search engine results page (SERP). This was covered in How to Rank, so let me plagiarize myself by repeating the important points here.
You have two basic methods of ranking the competition:
  1. Automated tools like Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool
  2. Eyeballing the SERPs
If you have a paid subscription to Moz, or even a free trial, the Keyword Difficulty Tool calculates — on a 100-point scale — a difficulty score for each individual keyword phrase you enter.
If you run a full report you can break down the SERP for each keyword and judge the individual strengths of each URL that ranks. You can even add your own URL to see how you stack up.
Keyword phrases in the 60-100 range are typically very competitive, while keywords in the 30-40 range might be considered low to moderately difficult.
Manual method: the eyeball check
Even without automated tools, the best way to size up the competition is to simply look at the top results currently ranking.
Run a non-personalized search query for your keywords. Examine the top few results and ask yourself the following questions (SEO toolbars like the MozBar or SEOquake can help speed up the process):
  • Are the first few results optimized for the keyword?
  • Is the keyword in the title tag? In the URL? On the page?
  • What's the Page and/or Domain Authority of the URL?
  • What's the inbound anchor text?
  • Can you build links and/or mentions around this keyword?
  • Can you deliver a higher quality resource for this keyword than the top ranking sites?
The last question is the most important: can you deliver higher quality content for this keyword than the competition?
The answer must be yes if you expect to deserve to rank.

Step 7: Pulling it all together

By this point, you've probably analyzed hundreds or thousands of keywords and organized them into themed, related groups.
You've found keywords that relate to your business or website, around which you can create shareable content, with a high enough search volume, and that you believe you can rank for.
Often, the keywords that you choose depend as much on your business or website as they do on the competition. We chose the keywords above not only because they relate to our primary keyword, but also because they relate to our business. Google may rank keywords based on relevance, but only you can decide if those keywords relate to your audience, product, and brand.
In the case of our "SEO Tools" example, our themed keyword list might look like this.
  • Free SEO Tools
  • Best SEO Software
  • Keyword Research
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Link Building Toolset
  • Best SEO Tools in 2013
  • Online Marketing
  • SEO for Google
  • Best SEO Tools for Agencies
Remember, we started with a very broad keyword. In practice, your final keyword will be much more tightly focused.
We'll now use this list for creating content around our keyword theme. In a future post, we'll discuss integrating these concepts for optimal on-page SEO.

Tips for scaling and large sites

The above method works if you're building out keyword lists for small to medium sites, but scaling this process for large and enterprise sites requires a different, more mathematical approach.
If you want to research tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of keywords at a time, I highly recommend the looking into the following resources:

Conclusion

The above method is only one method of keyword research. There are hundreds more and you'll likely invent your own method.
Regardless of the method you use, thinking about keywords in terms of concepts and themes represents a hugely important step in content development.
What are your favorite keyword tips to organize content around concepts?
About Cyrus-Shepard — Cyrus Shepard is Senior Content Astonaut for Moz. Follow him on Twitter andGoogle+

Monday, December 30, 2013

Six social-media skills every leader needs

Six social-media skills every leader needs

Organizational social-media literacy is fast becoming a source of competitive advantage. Learn, through the lens of executives at General Electric, how you and your leaders can keep up.

February 2013 | byRoland Deiser and Sylvain Newton
Few domains in business and society have been untouched by the emerging social-media revolution—one that is not even a decade old. Many organizations have been responding to that new reality, realizing the power and the potential of this technology for corporate life: wikis enable more efficient virtual collaboration in cross-functional projects; internal blogs, discussion boards, and YouTube channels encourage global conversations and knowledge sharing; sophisticated viral media campaigns engage customers and create brand loyalty; next-generation products are codeveloped in open-innovation processes; and corporate leaders work on shaping their enterprise 2.0 strategy.
This radical change has created a dilemma for senior executives: while the potential of social media seems immense, the inherent risks create uncertainty and unease. By nature unbridled, these new communications media can let internal and privileged information suddenly go public virally. What’s more, there’s a mismatch between the logic of participatory media and the still-reigning 20th-century model of management and organizations, with its emphasis on linear processes and control. Social media encourages horizontal collaboration and unscripted conversations that travel in random paths across management hierarchies. It thereby short-circuits established power dynamics and traditional lines of communication.
We believe that capitalizing on the transformational power of social media while mitigating its risks calls for a new type of leader. The dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with a corporation’s social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization.
Social media also adds new dimensions to these traits. For example, it requires the ability to create compelling, engaging multimedia content. Leaders need to excel at cocreation and collaboration—the currencies of the social-media world. Executives must understand the nature of different social-media tools and the unruly forces they can unleash.
Equally important, there’s an organizational dimension: leaders must cultivate a new, technologically linked social infrastructure that by design promotes constant interaction across physical and geographical boundaries, as well as self-organized discourse and exchange.
We call this interplay of leadership skills and related organizational-design principles organizational media literacy, which we define along six dimensions that are interdependent and feed on one another (exhibit).

Exhibit

The six dimensions of social-media-literate leadership.
Our clearest window on the development of these new forms of literacy is General Electric, where one of us is responsible for leadership development. Witnessing GE through this lens is particularly interesting; unlike Google or Amazon, GE isn’t a digital native, and its 130-year tradition of reinventing businesses and itself makes it worth watching. So does GE’s status as a “leadership factory.”
GE’s commitment to social media is perhaps most visible through its digital platform GE Colab, designed by GE employees for GE employees to facilitate global teamwork and collaboration. GE Colab combines the capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications, allowing easy networking, information sharing, instant communication, advanced search, blogging, videoblogs, and more. Launched in 2012, the platform has already attracted more than 115,000 users.1
To get a sense of how executives deal with these new realities, we interviewed GE officers of various businesses and regions. These leaders and their organizations are at different mileposts along the journey to social-media literacy, just as different companies are. In aggregate, though, they described a rich range of efforts to build personal skills, experiment with technologies, invest in new tools, expand employee participation, and shape organizational structures and governance to capture emerging social opportunities. We drew on those experiences to illustrate the six-dimensional set of skills and organizational capabilities leaders must build to create an enterprise level of media literacy—capabilities that will soon be a critical source of competitive advantage.

1. The leader as producer: Creating compelling content

With video cameras achieving near ubiquity and film clips uploading in the blink of an eye to YouTube or other platforms, the tools for producing and sharing rich media are in everyone’s hands. GE’s Video Central now houses thousands of videos, many created by top leaders. More than a few executives have started to incorporate video streams into their blogs. As video communication rises in importance, effective leadership will increasingly require the kind of creative skills we know from the world of “auteur” filmmaking—an authentic voice, imagination, and the ability to craft compelling stories and to turn them into media products that make people take note and “lean forward.” To engage in real time on a personal level, executives will also need the technical skills to master the basics of digital-multimedia production, including how to shoot and, if necessary, edit videos.
Social media
Tools for producing and sharing videos are now in the hands of many executives, who can upload recordings of meetings (such as this one) to an internal server that employees can access.
© Image courtesy of GE
Mark Begor, who runs GE Capital’s real-estate business, was nervous when he shot his first “unplugged” video message. “I was used to a studio environment where I could do several takes and have editors polish what I wanted to say.” That unease soon vanished with practice. He now routinely produces a weekly five- to ten-minute video for his division. “I talk about what I learned during the week, about a great deal we’ve closed, and the status of the business. I also add comments about employees that I want to recognize.” Begor says that this routine forces him to crystallize his thinking and that creating short stories people can relate to makes him more aware of his strategy and communication.
As Begor and others have discovered in this process, the logic of participatory media is strikingly different from that of traditional corporate broadcast media, where each and every piece of communication gets perfectly crafted. Too much perfection is actually a barrier to collaboration and cocreation, as it disinvites participation. To thrive in the world of social media, leaders need to acquire a mind-set of openness and imperfection, and they must have the courage to appear “raw” and unpolished—traits that may be as challenging for them as developing the creative and technical-production skills.

2. The leader as distributor: Leveraging dissemination dynamics

Business leaders have traditionally disseminated information along a controlled, linear chain that begins after the development of a formal meaning-creation process—think of how your company creates and distributes memos explaining new initiatives. While traditional distribution pathways won’t disappear, social media revolutionizes the standard information process by reversing it. Social communication makes distribution the starting point and then invites company audiences to cocreate and contextualize content to create new meaning. Messages are rebroadcast and repurposed at will by recipients who repost videos, retweet and comment on blogs, and use fragments of other people’s content to create their own mash-ups.
As the (vertical) broadcast media and the (horizontal) participatory media converge, leaders need to master the interplay of two fundamentally different paradigms: those of the traditional channels, which follow the logic of control, and of the new channels, where it is essential to let the system’s dynamics work without too much direct intervention. Since executives won’t be able to govern or control a message once it enters the system, they must understand what might cause it to go viral and how it may be changed and annotated while spreading through the network. Distribution competence—the ability to influence the way messages move through complex organizations—becomes as important as the ability to create compelling content.
Equally important is the skill of creating and sustaining a body of social followers who help to spread and reinforce the message. It becomes critical to know who an organization’s key—and often informal—influencers are and to leverage their authority to push content through the right channels. Finally, leaders must recognize their role as redistributors of the content they receive, so they can leverage the communication continuously happening around them.
Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president and general manager of GE Aviation Systems, acquired these skills through experimentation. She began blogging a few years ago but initially didn’t get much response. “It took time to get my audience actively involved,” she recalls. “I had to find my voice and become more conversational, more easygoing.” To increase the allure and sustainability of the dialogue, she eventually created a “360 blog,” where all her direct reports blog with her on the same platform. This networked blog, with 12 regular contributors, provides additional points of view on issues, promotes more frequent communication, and attracts broader participation. Bolsinger says that the quality of her group’s dialogue about strategy and operations has improved thanks to these efforts.

3. The leader as recipient: Managing communication overflow

Social media has created an ocean of information. We are drowning in a never-ending flood of e-mails, tweets, Facebook updates, RSS feeds, and more that’s often hard to navigate. “There is too much noise out there,” says Stuart Dean, CEO of GE ASEAN,2 who is an active blogger and tweets regularly about issues in his market space. “I’d use Twitter much more as a source of information if I could get exactly what I need.”
Dean’s sentiment is echoed by most executives we know—many of them barely find time to catch up with their daily e-mail load. What to do? As a first step, leaders must become proficient at using the software tools and settings that help users filter the important stuff from the unimportant. But playing in today’s turbulent environment requires more than just filtering skills.
In traditional corporate communications, consumption is a mostly passive act: you are pretty much left alone to make sense of messages and to assess their authenticity and credibility. In the social-media realm, information gets shared and commented on within seconds, and executives must decide when (and when not) to reply, what messages should be linked to their blogs, when to copy material and mash it up with their own, and what to share with their various communities. The creation of meaning becomes a collaborative process in which leaders have to play a thoughtful part, as this is the very place where acceptance of or resistance to messages will be built.
“You have to see the entire communication universe, the interplay of traditional and social media,” says Bill Ruh, head of GE’s Software and Analytics Center. Just as leaders suffer from overflow, so do their people. “As a leader,” says Ruh, “you have to develop empathy for the various channels and the way people consume information.”

4. The leader as adviser and orchestrator: Driving strategic social-media utilization

In most companies, social-media literacy is in its infancy. Excitement often runs high for the technology’s potential to span functional and divisional silos. But without guidance and coordination, and without the capabilities we discuss here, social-media enthusiasm can backfire and cause severe damage.
To harvest the potential of social media, leaders must play a proactive role in raising the media literacy of their immediate reports and stakeholders. Within this 360-degree span, executives should become trusted advisers, enabling and supporting their environment in the use of social tools, while ensuring that a culture of learning and reflection takes hold. As a new and media-savvy generation enters the workplace, smart leaders can accelerate organizational change by harnessing these digital natives’ expertise through “reverse mentoring” systems (see later in this article).
Steve Sargent, president and CEO of GE Australia and New Zealand, believes that social media is reshaping the leadership culture by pushing executives to span geographic boundaries, engage more closely with stakeholders, and amplify the impact of employees at the periphery. Over the past five years, as proof of concept, Sargent has established a mining-industry network that cuts across GE’s businesses and regions, linking informal teams that use social platforms to collaborate on solving customer needs. GE employees in Brazil, for instance, now work with colleagues in Australia to develop products and services for customers doing business in both countries. The network’s success led the company to elevate it to the status of a full-fledged GE mining business. “Markets today are complex and multidimensional, and leadership isn’t about control but about enabling and empowering networks,” Sargent says. “The type of leadership we need finds its full expression in the DNA of collaborative technology, and I am determined to leverage this DNA as much as I can.”
To achieve this goal, leaders must become tutors and strategic orchestrators of all social-media activities within their control, including the establishment of new roles that support the logic of networked communication—for instance, community mentors, content curators, network analysts, and social entrepreneurs. Organizational units that leverage the new technologies in a coordinated and strategically aligned way will become more visible and gain influence in a corporation’s overall power dynamics.

5. The leader as architect: Creating an enabling organizational infrastructure

Leaders who have steeped themselves in new media will testify that it requires them to navigate between potentially conflicting goals: they must strive to establish an organizational and technical infrastructure that encourages free exchange but also enforce controls that mitigate the risks of irresponsible use. This is a tough organizational-design challenge.
Most companies have a defined formal organization, with explicit vertical systems of accountability. But below the surface of org charts and process manuals we find an implicit, less manageable “informal organization,” which has always been important and now gets amplified through social media. The leader’s task is to marry vertical accountability with networked horizontal collaboration in a way that is not mutually destructive.
This challenge is reflected in GE’s policies, which embrace the value of sharing expertise and perspectives with family, friends, colleagues, customers, and other stakeholders around the world. With this openness comes a shared responsibility: employees must observe GE standards of transparency and integrity, refrain from speaking on behalf of the company without authorization, and be clear in their social messaging that their views are personal.
In this spirit, creating a social architecture that provides a meaningful space for internal and external interactions has been an ongoing mission for Andrew Way, vice president of GE’s Oil & Gas Drilling & Surface Division. “I love the social-media stuff,” he says, “so I surround myself with an organization that supports it.”
In Way’s last role in the division, he and his team launched a video project about the history and current timeline of the business. Since the videos are shared with customers, team members must make choices about which content can cross external boundaries. “It’s an evolving thing. Every quarter, the team adds a new segment that features important things that happened in the last three months. It has resulted in a continuing story, and people look forward to every new version.”
Way says that the videos have united division members around common goals, helping to bring new employees on board and making everyone more proficient in using new media. “Three years ago, an effort like this would have used PowerPoint with a standardized font. It clearly has created a new culture.” Boosting engagement with stakeholders such as customers is an added benefit, since videos often include them in segments to help tell stories.

6. The leader as analyst: Staying ahead of the curve

As companies start to digest the consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution, the next paradigm shift is already knocking on the door. The next generation of connectivity—the Internet of Things—will link together appliances, cars, and all kinds of objects. As a result, there will be about 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.3 This transformation will open new opportunities, spawn new business models, and herald yet another major inflection point that leaders must manage.
It’s imperative to keep abreast of such emerging trends and innovations—not just their competitive and marketplace implications, but also what they mean for communications technologies, which are fundamental for creating an agile, responsive organization. Executives who monitor weak signals and experiment with new technologies and devices will be able to act more quickly and capture the advantages of early adoption.
GE’s leadership university, Crotonville, is leading a number of initiatives to help top executives stay ahead of those changes. One example is a program called Leadership Explorations, launched in 2011 to support continuous learning for top executives and organized in locales connected with a specific strategic-leadership theme. In Silicon Valley, leaders are immersed in a range of cutting-edge technologies. Part of the program there involves “reverse mentoring,” which connects media-savvy millennials with senior GE leaders to discuss the latest tech buzz and practice. Many participants continue to exchange insights long after the formal session is over. Exposing seasoned leaders to the millennial mind-set encourages them to experiment with new technologies—which, in turn, helps them better engage with up and comers.
Clearly, these are early days. Most companies recognize social media as a disruptive force that will gather strength rather than attenuate. But social-media literacy as we define it here is not yet an element of leadership-competency models or of performance reviews and reward systems. Equally, it has not yet found its way into the curricula of business schools and leadership-development programs.

This needs to change. We are convinced that organizations that develop a critical mass of leaders who master the six dimensions of organizational media literacy will have a brighter future. They will be more creative, innovative, and agile. They will attract and retain better talent, as well as tap deeper into the capabilities and ideas of their employees and stakeholders. They will be more effective in collaborating across internal and external boundaries and enjoy a higher degree of global integration. They will benefit from tighter and more loyal customer relationships and from the brand equity that comes with them. They will be more likely to play leading roles in their industries by better leveraging the capabilities of their partners and alliances in cocreation, codevelopment, and overall industry collaboration. And they will be more likely to create new business models that capitalize on the potential of evolving communications technologies.

It takes guts to innovate radically in leadership and organization, for legacy systems, cultures, and attitudes are powerful forces of inertia. Fortunately, the inherent quality of social media is a powerful transformational force. Social-media engagement will confront leaders with the shortcomings of traditional organizational designs. Leaders who address these shortcomings will learn how to develop the enabling infrastructure that fosters the truly strategic use of social technologies. When organizations and their leaders embrace the call to social-media literacy, they will initiate a positive loop allowing them to capitalize on the opportunities and disruptions that come with the new connectivity of a networked society. And they will be rewarded with a new type of competitive advantage.

About the authors

Roland Deiser is a senior fellow at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University and author of Designing the Smart Organization: How Breakthrough Corporate Learning Initiatives Drive Strategic Change and Innovation (John Wiley & Sons, October 2009). Sylvain Newton is the GE Crotonville Leadership Senior Leader for Business and Regions.