Beware of the Hidden Goal: A Lesson on Clear Communication from World War II

The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, was many things but effective was not one of them. Under the ruse of securing peace through disarmament and promoting national self-determination with Wilson's 14 points, the Allies set forth to brutally punish Germany by weakening it through forced disarmament and ridiculous reparation penalties.

Adolf Hitler was also many things but naive wasn't one of them. Before executing the Anschluss that forcibly reunited Austria back into Germany, he went to the Allies with an offer to unilaterally disarm if they would divest themselves of all weapons as well. The French and British scoffed and Hitler had them. In their lie lay the foundations of the Second World War, born from the hypocricy at the heart of the Versailles Treaty.

The lie was that disarmament for peace was the purpose of the treaty. It wasn't. The purpose was to crush and keep weak, to rule, to overlord. Many companies still take this approach towards their employees and social media. The lie is that they do so in the name of protection and security. The truth is they are afraid of open and honest dialogue in the marketplace. And the truth is that this honest communication is taking place with or without their consent.

How many companies use words like collaboration and synergy in an agenda of employee support yet they turn around and block major social media collaboration tools that would accomplish these goals much easier?

The bottom line is that the Germans knew the French were lying about securing peace when Hitler pressed unilateral disarmament and employees likewise should know that companies who block Facebook and Twitter yet still talk about collaboration and synergy are full of the brown stuff that makes crops grow.

And guess what--soon their customers and prospects will find out also.

Photo by Nationaal Archief

Access Versus Ownership: The Critical Battle For Business Information

By frankpierson

I pay $9.99 a month for Spotify and I don't own 95% of the music I listen to on there. But I carry that music with me on my iPhone, iPad and whatever computer I'm currently logged into. Does it matter that I don't have a hard disk or the digital rights management to sync the file to my iPod when I still have access to the music 95% of the places I go?

This question isn't just one for personal entertainment; it's a vital showdown taking place in Information Technology departments around the world. Companies like salesforce.com are convincing their customers to move their data, application development, user access and indeed whole business processes into The Cloud, where hardware and software are no longer line items to budgeted for and maintained. This is taking place right now from multi-thousand user Financial Services companies to two person private companies. Server hardware and maintenance is going the way of The Confederacy as is proprietary client-server software packages that are expensive to deploy and ridiculous drains of resources to enhance.

I recently worked on a team of ten or so people that managed a Salesforce organization of 8,000 users. Go find me an IT department that can do that with on premise client-server technology. 

The battles being fought right now in Information services are centered around access to data and digital products versus their physical ownership. If a company sides with the latter, it is going to cost them triple and take three times as long to keep up with than their competitor who chooses the former.

The needs of today should've been met yesterday and the needs for tomorrow should be working right now. Where is your company?

Joshua Minton is a salesforce.com Certified Sales & Service Cloud Consultant, Advanced Administrator and Developer. He works for The Revolution Group in Columbus Ohio.

The New Censorship: Social Media & the Corporate Employee

It’s happening right now in the hallways, breakrooms and bathrooms of corporate America. Employees are shelled away, swiping at their smart phones and tablets in silent social soliloquies, each of them a tinder box, their mobile devices flint sparks in the tyrannical dry air of bureaucratic executive censorship which hangs above their heads like a sword of Damocles, just waiting to catch them saying the wrong thing online.

At Dreamforce 2011 this year, Marc Benioff announced a new regime in the movement of data and communication for the purpose of business. He calls it The Social Enterprise and I could almost hear the teeth knocking of CEOs throughout the audience when Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry stated in her Dreamforce commercial, “If you don’t [build a social enterprise] now, I don’t know what your business model is going to be in five years.” 

But the problem is that CEOs and corporate PR and Legal at many of these companies are still under the delusion that they can control the message and focus of the conversations happening online about their companies, their employees and their products. They are trying to catch and contain a tsunami in a Starbucks venti cup. 

I worked at NetJets when the great Richard Santulli still lead the company and I remember he always made a point of telling the employees at every all hands meeting that they were the brand. He meant that every single interaction an employee has with a customer or speaking about the company or wearing the corporate logo in public, all of that accreted to become the sum of the brand. Ironically, Richard was completely against any employee speaking to the media about the company but if he were still leading NetJets today I would say the same thing to him. Give it up. Let your employees take the brand out into the world online. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Foursquare. Chatter. Whatever comes next dot com.

There is no one more qualified to engage your prospects and customers in the world of social media than your employees. They are the ones with the knowledge. They are the ones with the heart. They are the ones who care. There are conversations happening right now in social media outlets across the internet about your company and your products and if you are not part of those conversations, listening to them, engaging in them, then you are blind, deaf and dumb to the opportunities of today and the possibilities of tomorrow.

And for the vocal negative ones who don’t care, the disgruntled—well, you’ll have to deal with them as well. This is the power of the 1^st Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights—it established the marketplace of ideas for those courageous enough to express and defend them publicly. And who is any company to tell a free human being what they can or can’t say, or deny them access to the ability to say it and allow them to accept the consequences or benefits of their actions?

Break down your firewalls corporate America. Open up acces to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. Let the information come pouring in and let your brands go flowing out.

The Social Enterprise is upon you so suck it up, put your back into it and we’ll all make it through this revolution to prepare for the next one. It is much smarter to ride the wave than be drowned by it. 

Photo by alainalele

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Joshua Minton is a Certified Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud Consultant, Advanced Administrator and Developer for The Revolution Group in Columbus, Ohio.

"Un-Murder Worthy": Josh Writes a Scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm

I actually dreamed this Curb Your Enthusiasm completely and had to write it down. It's disturbing that I'm actually dreaming about Larry David but that's what watching 8 straight seasons of Curb in a row will do to you.

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LARRY sits behind an annoying woman in a theatre who keeps moving her head the wrong way, making him miss the performance.

LARRY (Agitated)

Will you move your god damned head?

WOMAN (appalled)

Are you taking to me?

LARRY (More Agitated)

Yes I'm talking to you. Duck your fucking head!

WOMAN (turns to look at LARRY and wildly gestures for the USHER to come over)

WOMAN to USHER

This man is threatening to murder me!

LARRY is grossly offended that the potency of his anger has been so outrageously misread on his anger scale

LARRY to WOMAN

You think you're murder worthy? (wags his finger in her face). You're not murder worthy!

WOMAN to LARRY 

I'm murder worthy! I'm special.

LARRY to WOMAN

Yeah, you're special. You're fucking brain dead, you know that? And let me tell you something. If you were in the middle of the road and I was going 90 miles an hour, I would swerve into a car of puppies and nuns before I'd run you over. That's how un-murder worthy you are!

LARRY, cont. (now resolute with a finger in the air) to WOMAN

In fact, I would murder myself before I would murder you. That is how insignificant you are to me...and to the world I might add.

WOMAN (now insane, snatching at LARRY's bald head)

YOU WILL MURDER ME!

The show stops, the ushers move in and escort both LARRY and the WOMAN from the theatre.

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Why Executives Who Don't Understand Social Media Need to Go

While politicians bickered in front of television cameras and C-Level Execs crossed lines through the names of employees they are going to have to let go of when the Dow dips below 8,000, Marc Benioff, President and CEO of Salesforce.com, started a revolution last week at Dreamforce, the largest Tech conference in the world. And there was nothing quiet about it.

The theme of the conference was Welcome to the Social Enterprise and to any of the 45,000+ who attended or the equal number who watched Dreamforce through streaming online video, it is very clear that communication, marketing, sales and service in the future will not be originating in call centers or hand shakes across the counter of brick and mortar buildings anymore.

They will start in the cloud.

They will start on Twitter.

They will start on Facebook.

They will start on Foursquare.

They will start on LinkedIn.

They will start in places that don't exist yet and through mediums we've never even thought about.

The call centers and handshakes still matter but they have now become second base, a higher tier to get to that companies and businesses must pay their dues with prospects in order to turn them into customers. And the field those dues will be paid on is through social media.

In 2005, I gave a presentation on blogging and RSS to a group of mid-level executives at the nation's largest health insurer. You would have thought I was trying to teach them alchemy, trying to turn their TPS reports into gold. They didn't get it. I'll bet they still don't get it. But they're about to.

I tweeted a question to the Dreamforce audience (because the ones who understand were on Twitter talking to each other asynchronously during the conference) and said "I wonder how many Executives sitting the Dreamforce audience feel stupid because their companies block their employees from using Facebook and Twitter." The Tweet got laughs but I imagine there was also an uncomfortable pause as the terror of implication set it. These social media outlets are merging together, not in name or incorporation, but in functionality and your mother and father, your babysitter, your high school girlfriend, your wife and kids are all using them now and will continue to use them to shape their realities, their relationships and, most importantly for businesses, their purchasing decisions.

Let me tell you quick story about Costco and how they are winning in the Corporate Spring Revolution. My family shops at Costco for 70% of our food. The nearest Costco is 30 minutes away from us. We drink lots of milk and Costco carries an organic milk that has a shelf life of a month and a half. So when we buy milk at Costco, we buy 15 half gallons at a time. Sometimes we drink so much, we have to make a second trip. Well, the last time we went, they didn't have the cardboard half gallons, they had plastic gallons with a 2 week expiration date. Like any good consumer would, we had a visceral reaction of horror.

So when I got home, I went to Costco's Facebook page and posted my outrage, demanding an answer. Within a few hours, someone from Costco had responded to my comment, letting me know the situation was only temporary, that there was an issue with one of their suppliers and some locations had to mitigate with the plastic gallons.

I didn't make a phone call. I didn't write a letter. I didn't make an appointment. I spent two minutes and thirty seconds to express my frustration in an open venue and a live person went and got me the answer and responded to me like the representative of a company seeking to retain my business should--with truth expressed in common words with authentic empathy. Then they thanked me for being a customer. Now what more can customers ask for when we talk about good service?

But what if Costco blocked their employees from using Facebook? Nobody would have been there to respond to me. I would have started buying my milk at another grocery store closer to my house and I would always be stocked up when I finally made the monthly trek to Costco, so sorry Charlie but they would have lost my drinkable dairy money each month. But they didn't. They were Johnny on the Spot and they treated me with respect, information, appreciation and they won the right to keep me as a customer and the privilege of having me write a glowing public review (you just read it) which is worth more in value than pay per click advertising will ever be.

Imagine taking a call center and taping the mouths and ears shut of all the phone reps. They can't listen to or talk back to the customers calling in with service issues and they can't try to sell interested prospects, raising their hands to buy. How effective would that company be? How long would they last? Well, that is exactly what is going on at companies who refuse to allow, indeed do not strongly encourage, their employees to engage their customers and prospects in social media outlets. They are deaf and dumb to the future.

So what should shareholders and Boards of Directors do with the CIO who isn't breaking down the firewall to open up social media in the workplace? What do they do with the CEO who isn't pushing for an open and transparent enterprise-wide social media strategy? They get rid of them just like the citizens of the Middle East are throwing out these dictator bums who no longer understand that the world has changed and they are no longer effective in their purpose.

If a company is serious about competing in the future marketplace of ideas, goods and services--they had better establish a genuine social media presence online, make it accessible and engage with their current and future clientele like one would speak with others at a cocktail party. There are no excuses for accepting anything less.

POST LINKS:

• CLICK HERE to Watch the Dreamforce 2011 Keynote Speech


• CLICK HERE to buy Gary Vaynerchuk's book "The Thank You Economy"


• CLICK HERE  to Watch Marc Benioff (CEO Salesforce) and Eric Scmidt (CEO Google) talk about the future at Dreamforce 2011


• CLICK HERE to watch Burberry getting it right in the social media space

PHOTO:  Monument to 1795 Slave Revolt, Landhuis Kenepa, Curaçao © by cphoffman42