Social Networking: Online Community Marketing

Recently one of my consulting clients asked for an online strategy.  We discussed a number of different strategies.  Most people think about some type of online community marketing when they think of social networking.  When hear discussions about twitter or Facebook marketing, these are really small technologies that are tapping into the online communities that are there right now.   In this article I would like to discuss looking at an online community, rather than a technology.

So first let’s think about community.  People live in a community because of a common interest.  That interest could be centered on the landscape and beauty of the community.  The interest could be financial, in that many people in the community may work for the same or even similar employers.  The community might have a unique cultural diversity or even a cultural singularity that might be of interest to people in the community.  The more of common interests there are in a community, the bigger the community becomes.  The marketer’s job is to tap into those interests and you will find more and more small sub communities within the larger community.  As a marketer if we integrate ourselves with an interest group, we can market to that group.  Instead of selling them everything though, we are most successful when we market products and services that are of interest to that sub-community.  As an example don’t sell vacuum cleaners to a group of car enthusiasts, unless that vacuum cleaner is designed specifically for the problems with cleaning a car.

On the internet, there are communities as well.  These communities are focused on information and data.  Find these communities and you have also found a group of buying customers.  Which is the pitfall many marketers run into, in any buying community there is interest in buying a very limited product or service.  That is the problem with most corporate online social marketing strategies.  Instead of marketing to the group interest, they market as if the group were the general community.

As an example: Look at Facebook.  Marketers will point out the number of users on the system.  As if to say that all these users are potential buyers.  The reality is that very few of these users are there to actually buy products.  Instead they are interested in participating in an online community and sub-communities.  Finding and supporting these sub-communities in Facebook or across the internet is the first step for online marketing.

Experts like Tracey Warren teach businesses understand and leverage these online communities by providing services like a “Social Media Tuneup.”  So if you were a producer of car parts, the first goal is to identify the car enthusiasts groups.   If on the other hand you market eggs and other groceries, marketing to a car enthusiasts group might not be as effective.   The car enthusiasts are not in the buying mode for eggs.  When they are, they will be looking at a different group.

The rule I share with people is that social networking is like a cocktail party.  People are not there to do business.  That is not to say that a lot of business isn’t done at cocktail parties.  It’s done in a very subtle way.  Nobody opens an egg selling stand at a pool side party.  It could be argued that everyone at the party will probably be buying eggs in the next week, “Why not at this party?”   The reality is that when people buy eggs they go to a grocery store… not a cocktail party.  Instead go into the party and ask, “So when and where do you buy eggs?”  Chances are it will be a place where you can sell your eggs online.

Oh and if they help you give them some virtual chocolate as a thank you.

So why bring up online marketing strategies and community marketing?  The topic of this blog is modern network architecture, not old school network architecture.  As the day to day infrastructure support moves into the cloud, there is less need for server support.  The modern network architect will need to understand and answer these types of questions for their employers and clients.  This is the question I was asked by a consulting client at the beginning of the article.  The more we don’t understand about online marketing, integration with business systems and the like, the more we become legacy and irrelevant in determining the future architecture of the network.

Social networking: Social networking expert

Most of the deeply technical IT Experts I work with don’t spend a lot of thinking around social networking strategies.  I’m not sure why, but I think this might be because most deep IT experts much more comfortable relating to things (computers) or ideas (computer systems) rather than relating to people.  Being a Seattle business consultant, specializing in Continued »

Social Networking: The Chocolate strategy

When twitter was first being introduced, I talked to the students in one of my classes about twitter.  The whole class laughed at me.  Thinking that social networking really wasn’t something serious a system administrator would bother with.  As a Consultant and teacher I try to look into the future and predict new potential opportunities for both my Continued »

Is the IT department keeping up?

Is the IT department keeping up?

Recently a client of mine suggested that UC communication was silly.  I’ve worked on teams where tools like Lync make life much easier.  It’s not just about text messages.  It’s about presence, Continued »

Windows 8, “That loving feeling”

I’ve been using Windows 8 for about 5 months now.  Sometimes I love it, other times I’m a little lost trying to navigate the system.  I notice that many of my clients are not migrating onto the system yet.  I wonder how others are finding the system?

Continued »

What is your management preference?

In the world of IT management styles seem to be more and more confusing.  As a Consultant, I’ve worked with teams from all over the world.  The hours were long, sometimes sleepless, but very very satisfying.  Then things began to change.  As networks became more complex, more and more experts were added to the teams, some who came from Continued »

What does it take to be an expert?

This is a question I began to ask myself. As a consultant I am often asked to collaborate on projects with other consultants. It’s a great experience when to experts in two separate companies can fill in the gaps by combining combine experience. Then complete a project that the two consultants couldn’t have Continued »

Strategic Technology Planning

When I started in IT, Novell was the big player owning 70% of the networking industry.  WordPerfect owned word processing and had the best print drivers on the market.  Lotus 123 owned spreadsheets and I could go on.  So now 20+ years later I am a Seattle IT Consultant with certifications in Novell, Windows and experienced as a project manager and in ITIL.  The world of technology has changed dramatically, and then changed dramatically again and again.  With the cloud, UC technologies and big data we can expect to see the whole industry turned upside down two or three more times in the near future.  So the question is… with so much change occurring regularly how do we plan what our network will look like in 10, 5 or even 2 years from now?

My personal feeling is that the weakness in IT is that the IT department is actually a tactical not a strategic arm of the business organization.  Sure we hear the term web strategy or server strategy, but in actuality these are just marketing terms.  Tactics focus on the day to day execution.  Strategy is not focused on the day to day.  Strategy is focused on the long term picture and alignment with a long term vision.  The IT department doesn’t focus on the long term.  Instead technology groups are focused on getting things fixed, managed or implemented as quickly as possible.

It could be argued that there are many strategic tools that the IT department uses for technology planning.  Some of these tools include;

Data repositories that include system life cycles, information knowledgebase, and historical records for tracking projected vs. actual metrics and more

Capacity Mapping tools that visually graph business capacity vs. actual technical capacity

Gap Analysis tools that identify the so call “stretching seams” in the present capacity as business grows

Unfortunately these and other tools are very static when looking at the long term future of data systems.  We know that in the future technology will change and tools will change.  So these tools can really tell us about what’s going on now. 

True strategic planning thinks into the future rather than assuming that today’s problems will also be tomorrow’s problems.  Who should be making strategic plans for the technology department?  If the IT is truly a tactical component of the business, should IT be doing the strategic planning for the business?  As strange as this sounds the answer is no.  Now many IT professionals would argue, my CEO doesn’t even read his own email.  How can this person possibly make a strategic technical plan.  I think this is a good question.  Yet lets look at the other departments.  Though the CEO is not an expert in Accounting, the board makes strategic decisions for the Accounting department.  The same is true for every department, people who know nothing about HR, Law, marketing, sales make strategic decisions for each of those departments.  Why should it be different for the IT department? 

Throughout my own history in IT, when the IT department has made strategic decisions about technology the department gets in troubles.  Because the department is in trouble, the business quickly follows.  When IT is truly successful it’s because the top level strategic thinkers in the management team have designed the strategic planning for the IT department.  Working as a technology consultant, I thought my role was to represent the IT department in the board room.  What I find is that I am actually representing the strategic vision and leadership of the management teams to the IT department.  When the IT department follows the strategic planning of the management team everyone, including IT, is successful.

Governance and Due Diligence

Lately I’ve found myself in a new role.  Most companies IT departments are functioning, but nobody really understands how well those departments are functioning.  When I’m called in as an IT expert its usually to verify the state of the IT department.  Most owners are clueless about whether the department is functioning well or not.  To be honest most IT departments are pretty clueless as well.  Not about what they think their job is.  But about how their job should have changed as the business grew.

The IT role changes in many ways.  First and most obvious as the technology changes, the role of technology expert is to keep re-learning the technology each time it changes.  Many technology experts are experts in multiple technologies.  So the learning curve is constant as we learn new technologies and develop new skills in those technologies.  Then it starts all over again as a new change or a new technology is rolled out into the work place.  This learning by itself is enough to keep any technician on their toes.

The role of the technology expert changes in other ways besides technology.  Another important way is with the growth of the business.  For example: Change control is actually pretty easy when there is just one expert managing a system.  Even with 2 experts, it’s not difficult if both experts are constantly communicating.  Now imagine 10 experts or 20 experts.  The casual methods of change control start breaking down.  Non documented changes are “fixed” by other experts causing the system to break down over and over again.  Change control becomes a governance role in the IT department to avoid problems where one technician is stepping in and breaking the fix of another technician.

My role has changed as well, now I see myself as a governance role.  I don’t walk in and fix technical problems.  Instead I walk in and fix the business processes.  Before I can fix the process, I need to understand what’s going on.  The process before fixing something is called Due Diligence.  In this role you don’t fix technical problems any longer.  This is the common thing about a governance role, it’s not about fixing things, it’s about fixing process.

Due Diligence is about figuring out where everything is at right now.  The first question I always ask is, “Where’s your documentation?”

You can imagine what the response is to that.  There’s more documentation today than there was when I was first managing networks.  The problem is that even with the most advanced networks, nobody really knows how to build a knowledge base.  Second even fewer technical experts understand how to write technical documentation.  So the first question is often the first problem.  My job becomes documenting, at least at a high level, the technical environment.

I then begin reviewing the system logs.  I want to identify risk for the owner.  If there’s no documentation, there is also probably no analysis of the network itself.  The first step then is to document the risk status of the network and report those to the management teams.  A

The next step is to begin identifying the roles in the IT department.  I’m looking for governance roles.  The reasons network fail is because there are ineffective governance roles.  If for example the IT department head is also managing the servers, running incident tickets, designing the network and doing root cause analysis we have a problem.  All governance roles must be held by separate people from the roles they are governing.  The system architect should be verifying the function of the systems.  The root cause analysis must be done by someone other than the Incident technician.  These are all red flags when analyzing the network.

Due Diligence is the process of gathering the data that the governance role will use to analyze the network.  I’ve never been called into a network that had appropriate governance roles.  These networks manage themselves well.  I have been called into companies that have grown past the capacity of the present IT staff.  Through due diligence, my collaboration partners and I, have found it’s possible to identify risks and missed opportunities.  Then the governance role can analyze and create new business processes for the IT department to follow.  The result is a strong and more efficient team.

Governance roles when planning a project

In planning a project, one must look at scope, resources and time.  Seattle IT consulting experts in my area often focus on the technical execution of a plan.  The other aspects of the project are ignored.  I think this means that we are undercutting ourselves as technical consultants.  So I created my Technical Collaboration Outline as a help to try to sort out what I was missing in my ball of string

What I found for myself was that I wasn’t planning my projects well enough.  It turns out the technical execution is actually a very small part of the project.  As the project becomes larger and more complex, the non-technical aspects of the project become more and more important to consider.  Planning a project for me is like setting up dominoes.  When you push the first domino each of the following dominoes falls next.  So with the energy to push that first domino dozens, hundreds or even thousands of dominos will be affected. 

Taking the domino analogy one step further, in a project no all dominos are the same color.  Some are black, some are blue, some are white and they all need to be ordered in the right way.  It turns out that planning the project is much more important than the execution itself.

We’ve all been on projects where suddenly the dominos stopped, even though here are dominos still standing.  What happened?  On domino in thousands was ignored so it was just a little to far away when it fell.  This meant it missed hitting the next domino.  If you’ve been on a project like this, trying to start the next domino in line becomes a real problem.  Now the project team is putting out fires.  Fires that probably never should have started.

Sun Zhu taught his leaders to plan everything in their headquarters not on the battle field.  What I find with most projects is that there are some fires that couldn’t have been anticipated, but 90% of the time fires on the project are a result of poor planning.  To avoid fires I add what I call governance roles into my planning.  An example of a governance role can be seen all over business.  The controller is a governance role for the CPA.  The Human resources department is a governance role for the employees.  The board of directors is a governance role for the CEO.  When IT departments and technical projects fail, I’ve found it’s because we don’t plan any type of governance role into the project.  Among my partners, I always try to assign a business governance role and a technical governance role.  The business governance keeps the project on track and makes sure no roles are getting side tracked. 

The technical governance role allows me to verify that my technical experts are being honest with me.  We’ve all seen technical experts who use their technical expertise as a way to consolidate power.  Adding technical governance negates that power.  I use technical governance to hold my technical experts accountable on a project.  I put the governance piece in form the beginning so everyone is aware that that can’t shade the truth in any way