The Social Way - Servant of Chaos

Walkers, Talkers, Stalkers and Baulkers

Activism, Audience 2.0, Flaneurs, Innovation, The Social Way

In almost any field of endeavour, you are going to come across four different types of people. Your project may be some form of project implementation for your company. It could be that you have a creative idea for an advertising client. Or you may just want to go back to university to complete a degree. But no matter your focus, you will have to deal with walkers, talkers, stalkers and baulkers. In some cases these people will be your boss, or a member of your staff. They may be parents or friends.

But whether you like it or not, you need to figure out a way of dealing with each type. Let’s take a look at their characteristics.

Type	Description	How to help them
Walkers	You want the Walkers on your project. They deliver. They understand the terminology and the goals and they know how to achieve outcomes.	Because the Walkers are so busy resolving issues, achieving outcomes and so on, they may not communicate “up” as much as is necessary. Add regular communications into their mix of KPIs.
Talkers	The talkers are evangelistic. They are great at the start of a project, picking up the terminology and the ideas and transmitting them to others.	The Talkers are often purists which means that they are sometimes unwilling to compromise. Help them see the win-win outcome – but also push them to move from “talk” to “walk”.
Stalkers	The vast majority of the population are Stalkers. They will watch from a distance but don’t personally commit. They won’t get in the way but they won’t participate either. The Stalkers will often do a great job – but will only do as they are instructed.	Inertia is the domain of the Stalker. You can use the Talkers to engage and activate these folks. You can point towards the Walkers as aspirational role models, but the challenge is in building momentum.
Baulkers	The Baulkers are the intransigent group. They may be active detractors or simply explain all the reasons why your project will not succeed. They can sometimes feign support but will often move back to an inert or negative position very quickly.	The Baulkers have the power of negativity on their side. As we generally don’t like change, the Baulker appeals to our risk averse natures. They discredit the ideas underpinning your project and those who support them. Leave them in a room with a Talker.

Any long term project success requires the activation of all four of these types. The important thing to remember is that you don’t need to change these people. They won’t change for you.

But they may change their opinion of your project.

Take the time to understand the motivations of each of these types and play to their strengths and weaknesses. It is about playing the person, not the project.

Working with the people will deliver your project – but focusing only on the project will more deeply entrench the positions of the Walkers, Talkers, Stalkers and Baulkers. Your challenge is to create movement between the categories – and the best way to do that is activate their talents.

Give it a try, you might just find you succeed wildly.

Why Social Media Hurts

Social Media, The Social Way

It is with a touch of irony that we often say “the one constant in life is change”. Yet, despite the continuous fluctuations in our lives we really do struggle to accommodate it.

But coming to an understanding of what “change” actually means for us can indicate clear success or clear failure. It is part of our evolutionary makeup. Equally, for those of us charged with guiding businesses through the minefield of social media, there are additional responsibilities – it is not just about our own personal changes, it’s the changes faced by our colleagues, our management, executives and customers. And it is also about the organisational memory that needs to be recast or reimagined so that we can all make the transition.

Right now, there’s a lot of hurt being experienced and it’s because everything is changing. Not only are our roles changing, but so are our organisations. What we once loved may have to be sacrificed – be it a business process, a responsibility or even a customer. As with all things, there will be compensations – new customers, new approaches, promotions or new opportunities – after all, not all change is bad: but it is still change. And with every change comes a loss.

So how can we cope with this?

To become part of The Social Way – to need to move quickly through our sense of loss. We need to become Yes Men or Women. And one way to do this is to understand how we deal with loss, with grief and how to embrace acceptance.

This beautiful presentation from Leslie Bradshaw talks about the five stages of social media grief (something that Amber Naslund also wrote about recently). This can also be useful (see slide 6 specifically) to help map out the impediments that you are facing (is someone in denial, angry, bargaining or depressed) – before you reach that lovely state of “acceptance”.

By understanding the stage that you, your stakeholders and your organisation is placed, you can begin to address the challenges and overcome the hurdles that prolong the change process and cause the pain (for us all). And then, in parallel, you can begin to work together to create a newly imagined, social world.

Utopian? Maybe. But generosity and optimism are part of The Social Way. Our challenge is to accept the consequences of what that means.

Why Social Media

View more presentations from Leslie Bradshaw

Innovation, Leadership and Transformation

Case Studies, Conferences, Innovation, The Social Way

Imagine …

You have one great customer … a shoe manufacturer. They create shoes that are worn by the world’s great athletes. I’m talking Michael Jordan. I’m talking Tiger Woods. I’m talking Serena Williams. Cathy Freeman. But there’s more. Many more. It’s like a star-studded cast of top tier athletes that are not just "at the top of their game", they are making history.

And this customer, working with these sporting icons, these star athletes, have transformed the way that we look at sport. They have transformed our own participation.

These days we treat our own fitness as if we were professionals. We spend hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars on equipment. If we have the money we can dress the part. Even if we can’t BE the part.

These brands, their ambassadors and their customers have changed the game. They have blurred the line.

Last week – as part of the Hargraves Institute’s Innovation, Leadership and Transformation conference – I delivered a keynote address on Open Innovation: Using Social Media to Build and Maintain Momentum. I shared the approach that we are taking with the SAP Premier Customer Network – to not just think or talk about open innovation, but the concrete steps that we are putting in place to enable and facilitate it.

“Blurring the line” is a fundamental tenet of this approach and what I am increasingly calling The Social Way. Where once organisational performance was achieved through a co-opetition framework, we’re now seeing (and supporting) new models of innovation that closely resemble the social networks that we use at home, at work and in the places in-between.

It’s still early days for the programs that we have in place. But one thing is clear. We need to cling to our stories. And we need to tell them passionately and persuasively. For if we just rely only on the facts and figures, we miss out on the hearts and the minds who drive any innovation within our businesses.

The hard part with any business program is getting to the start line. Many believe that’s where the project ends – but in the social world – and the world of open innovation – the launch is the start of everyone else’s journey. And that is perhaps as it should be.

There Are No More Boundaries

Community, Life, Performing Social Media, The Social Way

The 1950s were a wonderful time. It was a time of nuclear, loving families, safe neighbourhoods and white picket fences. In our local communities we knew the butcher, baker and grocer. The mayor would tip his hat as he passed you in the street and the boy next door delivered the newspaper each day on his rounds. It was a time when professional and domestic spaces were separate – as much by who participated in them as by the clock.

We latched onto these distinct notions with fervour. Deep in our psyches we ingrained the borders between work and home, public and private, and professional and personal as though they held “the truth”. In a post-war world, these distinctions helped us find our place – in the world at large and the smaller, mirror-worlds known as “work”, “community” and “home”. It was our need to BELONG and our desire to PARTICIPATE that drew us to these distinctions and turned a “role” into a way of being. The very act of performing these roles then served to strengthen and solidify them.

Soon we began to identify ourselves with these roles. We left our names behind and adopted these roles in their stead. Rather than “Gavin Heaton”, I would be a “marketing professional”, or even more specifically, a “director of social media”. This meant that the answer to the question of “what do you do?” became even more critical. The society’s shift of emphasis away from community value (I am a father, coach of a soccer team, husband and intellectual journeyman) to personal, professional value (I work at Acme Co) further served to reinforce the distinctions, ascribing a value to the professional/public life over the personal/community/private life.

Even the term “work/life balance” contains this dichotomy. It presumes that there is work – and then there is the whole of the rest of your life hived off in some other (smaller) compartment.

And yet while these barriers have remained in our thinking, they have been undermined by our behaviours. The widespread corporate retrenchments that shook the 1980s marked a fundamental shift in the way that we behaved – even it if had not yet affected the way that we thought. We went from a “job for life” behavioural commitment to a “career for me” action. The sense of security in the workplace was replaced by suspicion (on both sides of the management fence), and the individualism of era was given the face of Gordon Gecko.

Interestingly, these changes were forced upon us. We did not choose them, nor were we coerced or cajoled. As Mark Earls points out, achieving a change in behaviour is difficult.

In the decades that followed, our sense of belonging and participation fragmented, becoming narrower and narrower. We were able to effectively create and manage our fragmented personalities because they were disjointed, unconnected and unconnectable. This personal determinism set in place a regulated paradigm of thinking. Operating within small enclave our behaviours and actions reinforced this mindset.

But the connected (or social) web changed all that.

Our actions and behaviours in one sphere would be surfaced in our dealings with another (I like to think there is a level of subversion taking place here – along the lines of what Mike Arauz calls desire paths). The way we act and behave in business ripples across these connections and impacts the network of Facebook friends, website readers and Twitter followers. Our carefully crafted reputation no longer holds water – living instead in the active recommendations, connections, suggestions and star-ratings of our social networks. Just like the brands that we work for, we have become hub-and-spoke manifestations of our personalities.

But it’s not just digital.

Sure, social networks have surfaced the connections that we spent decades separating. But it is in the real work – the real connections – that value of the network is realised. It’s in the phone calls and coffees. It’s in the collaborative projects and workshops that result. It’s in the conversion of a recommendation to a sale. And underlying all this is reputation.

Whether you like it or not, your reputation is bursting out. It is racing ahead of you – out of reach and far beyond your control. This what I mean when I say “there are no more boundaries”. It goes beyond what we own – to the heart of who we are. It’s about purpose.

It’s The Social Way.

Ejaculating Ideas

Creativity, The Social Way

We’ve all been there. The dark room. Intense. Shallow breathing followed by a gulp of breath. For the first timer, the virgin, it’s daunting. There’s new terrain to explore and new opportunities laid bare. There’s also risk.

The tension builds. There’s nervousness, trepidation and excitement. Even the more experienced person can falter right about now. After all, you just don’t know how this will play out …

And then, you’re committed. You swallow. You bark out a few unintelligible words.

And it’s over. You’re spent.

Welcome to the messy world of the creative process.

There was a time when I thought coming up with an idea was the hard part. I thought they were the hard work of the creative process. And I saw the fabled “big idea” as the money shot. The one that counts. The moment that the game changes and the clients/bosses fall over themselves.

But I don’t see this anymore.

We now live in a time of abundance. Where once there was the luxury of time, we now only have urgency. And this urgency now acts as a meta-filter for all our experiences. We all ask the same questions. When can I have it? How quickly? How big?

Perhaps it was ever so. Maybe I am viewing creativity through the rose coloured tints of nostalgia.

But one thing is clear. Ideas come and go. They are spurted out left right and centre by anyone with a keyboard and a Twitter account. These orphans are left gasping for life at the edge of the information torrents that pause for no ego. After all, today’s Britney meltdown is tomorrow’s Charlie Sheen triumph.

The challenge for the marketer is not in identifying the next big idea. Our challenge is to commit to something we can BELIEVE in. That’s right, we need to find a concept, a grain of truth … something that we can trust-in and drive. We have to put ourselves on the line for these ideas – not the other way around.

The time for ejaculating ideas is over. It’s time for the Social Way.