Steverubel | chrisbrogan.com

The Big Risk for Corporate Trust Agents

October 3, 2008

What if you made an amazing product that people loved, and could recognize by the name alone? They knew your packaging. They knew the promise of what you offered, and they were lining up to buy it. And then, what if you moved on from that product and that brand, and had to start again?

That’s the basic story of Wally Amos and Famous Amos cookies, but it might also be the story of corporate trust agents. We build relationships with these people who are representative of a company’s brand in our eyes. We’re in line for their cookies, but suddenly, they’ve got to start again with a new cookie company. Let’s talk about how that cookie might possible crumble.

Recent Moves

Charlene Li rose to prominence while working at Forrester. Her blog was there. Her presence on the web was there. When she left to go solo, this required a bit of brand extraction, or divorce, where she had to rebuild her own presence on the web to redirect interested parties to her new little plot of web real estate.

The same happened with Gia Lyons, former cool hunter from IBM, who ran off to join the Jive circus. Her presence was entangled with her corporate brand, and this meant that she had to do a little shuffling to put it all together again outside of the entity. I believe this will be more of a point to consider in coming years.

Closer to Home

My own blog has been mine since day one. When I worked with Jeff Pulver, it was still my blog. With CrossTech Media, this is my blog. They might ask me to be mindful of our company and occasionally post information germane to my business, but that’s expected. I’m their guy. Why wouldn’t they want that of me? And I love writing about the work we’re doing, like the New Marketing Summit (plug plug).

But the blog is mine. It’s my shingle. It’s where I conduct my business. Most of this business is on behalf of my organization. I’m grateful to have a company to work with, and both CrossTech Media now and Pulvermedia before supported this stance.

Best in Show

Some trust agents are already doing this well. Robert Scoble has moved his blog along from Microsoft to PodTech to FastCompany with limited scarring. Of these, FastCompany did a lot of makeover work for Robert, but hey, it’s still his site and I’m sure it’s all still his decision at the end of the day.

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester maintains his own blog presence, though he writes pretty frequently along Forrester lines. Louis Gray is his own man on the web. Superstar Steve Rubel keeps his brand though we all know he’s Edelman’s engine. It’s a balance where, in all cases, they are mindful of their position in the communities they serve, but also respectful of their employers.

That last point bears repeating. They are respectful of their employers. This includes making sure we do our work, that we deliver value while sharing a brand, and that we keep our motives in perspective. The business we do on behalf of our company must be the driver so long as it’s our primary salary source. Anything else is not fair, not responsible, and not sustainable in the longer term.

The Risk

But now, let’s shift back to the risk. If you are the company’s cool hunter, if you are the social media rockstar, if you are the person touching the community the most, remember that jobs are not and never will be jobs for life any more. As much as people tell me this (and you and I talked about it at Blog World Expo, mister), it’s just not the kind of business environment where anyone’s getting a company tattoo these days.

To that end, consider how your world will change when you shift roles. What happens if you go solo? How do you go from being Frank Eliason from Comcast to being Frank from Best Buy? (Because if I were a major company in the US or elsewhere, I’d be doing my damnedest to hire Frank away.) How might you stake out your own little place on the web where you can be you with or without your company badge?

And business leaders, how can you protect from the other direction in this world of the half-owned brand? Are you in the business of developing a deep bench of talent? Have you thought about succession plans for your “faces and voices” people? What happens when your community manager, someone like current superstar Connie Bensen gets a better offer, and you’ve lost one of your competitive advantages?

In my company, the answer was to start a process to reach out to some of the other social media up and comers in the space. I’ve been working on that for a little while now, and I love the idea. It means that, as a strategist, I’ve started to protect my company from a risk. But have you thought that through for YOUR company?

How is this working for your situation?

Threading Some Trends Together

July 4, 2008

This post by Shel Israel and this post by Steve Rubel bear reading and examining. There’s something afoot, and it deals with several pieces of economic pie shifting at the same time. In fact, it’s a little strange that Richard Florida’s latest book, Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, is so timely. For a little more trend connection, throw in a little bit of Seth Godin from May (this has stuck with me since then).

If you are an employer, think on this:

Connectivity is Everywhere

It costs you more money to house a work staff than it does to manage them remotely. Cost per cubicle, per in-house service, per enterprise service license. Your network bandwidth costs, your power and cooling costs, the things you have to do to keep people comfortable in an office space, are all worth reconsidering.

Afraid of how they’ll work?

Shift measurements from “being there” to “what you’ve done.” Look for deliverables that are based on pieces of information, goals met, business moved forward.

I’m at a Barnes&Noble on wifi. For $39.99 a month, I could be on Verizon EVDO and writing this by the lake where I took my daughter swimming. I can work ANYWHERE there’s a signal. So can a lot of us. In fact, I do my job much better at a remove (plus, it saves 4 hours of driving, two each way, at $66 a tank of gas twice or more a week).

The Loosely Joined Employee

The age of half-owned brands is upon us. Years ago, it was only Robert Scoble. We watched in awe as he put a whole new face on Microsoft. He then shifted over to PodTech, and it didn’t feel so strange. Is it strange at FastCompany? Kind of. Look at their latest print issue and see how many times they mention one employee, and not the boss.

Charlene Li leaving Forrester is actual news to a lot of us in this space. Why? Because probably five years ago, everyone would clamor to get IN to Forrester. (And by the way, I think it’s a great company, with good people, and all that. That’s not my point.)

But is Jeremiah Owyang about Forrester, or is he a half-owned brand that Forrester can claim for the time being?

As employers, it’s a strange situation. I cause a bit of this grief for my friends and employers at CrossTech Media for sure. Because I’m “me” quite up front, but still functioning as their partner, employee, and representative, and because I’m non-traditional and difficult and a Mac user, an stuff like that. And yet, will I become more of the norm? Will there be more businesses trying to loosely couple with personal brands while building corporate brand equity? I think so. And this doesn’t reflect on employer-employee relations. It just seems to be a shift for some classes of knowledge worker.

How Where Matters

Seth Godin’s post about conferences and workplaces strikes home doubly for me. I’m partly in the conference business. It’s my duty to convince thousands of people that I’ve got great speakers, engaging exhibitors, and passionate attendees for them to meet.

Shel Israel’s post says that more businesses will use social media tools for economical reasons, for one:

Businesses will increasingly use social media to get closer with customers. This, of course, is already happening and happening at a pretty fast rate. But I think the trend is about to accelerate. Because it is getting too expensive and inconvenient to meet face-to-face in the real world, there will be more efforts to bring the conversation to the next best place, in the form of virtual communities.

Steve Rubel says:

Digital Nomads are growing in numbers and they will create ripples. This trend will accelerate use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. Over time, this may slow the efficacy of email marketing and accelerate the reliance on social media engagement.

However, it goes deeper than that. If you don’t allow your employees to become nomadic, they may do so and even compete against you in the process.

Where Will This Go?

In the very near term, I think a few things happen. I think that employers are definitely in a spot where they might have to consider how their employees work. On one side, the management challenges are huge. It’s not easy to shift around leadership and management styles. On the other hand, there are cost savings to be had, a shift in flexibility that might provide some hidden rewards. (Flex hours did this for a lot of companies. Suddenly, they had what amounted to shift workers without having to pay a premium).

I also think that the idea of employees-as-brands-as-employees will stir more bees in the shorter term, but might start to make more sense as we get more comfortable with that lifestyle. Businesses are primarily organized in 1950s-era style right now. If we can adapt measurements and management style, I believe the downstream benefits are going to outweigh the interim headaches. Will all employees at all businesses feel these changes? No. And several employees will still have to be hands on and nearby. (By the way, lots of people can’t manage themselves very well, and can’t work remotely because they’re easily distracted.)

Fuel costs are rising. Bandwidth is everywhere. Jobs are shifting into knowledge delivery and networked communities more than face-to-face affairs.

It sure makes for a complex picture, but I don’t know that we’re going to stop it.

What do you say? Could you work remotely? Do you? What has the price of fuel done for you? What motivates you to attend a face to face event these days? Will you be changing your conference going trends for the rest of the year and 2009?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

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Strip Malls for Personal Brands

July 2, 2008

Steve Rubel has a thoughtful post about the recent state of Internet social sites. In it, he suggests that users are acting as tenants in a rental property situation, and that it seems we’re all a bit flustered when our properties, like Twitter, have damage. I like the perspective, and I think the conversation should definitely be had. But immediately, I had another analogy come to mind for a slightly different reason. Steve mentioned the difference between “renting” on other people’s services versus “owning” our blogs. For whatever reason, I thought about the way we “shiny object” types are showing up on all these various social platforms, and I thought about strip malls.

We’re Everywhere

A quick digression: I believe that if we ever invent time machines, they will be situated in WalMarts and other big box stores. Why? Because they’re everywhere and look roughly the same. We won’t be as baffled when we shift between locations on the globe.

Strip malls feel like that. Sure, there are different stores, but they’re just places full of stuff. You can get a haircut, buy a cheap Chinese buffet, mail a letter, and take a karate lesson in any given cluster of strip malls. The same names start to pop up.

So, in Steve Rubel’s tenants and owners analogy, I liken a lot of us who are taking up space on these various social networks as some kind of strip mall tenants. Think about it.

I’m on Jaiku.
I’m on Pownce.
I’m on Twitter.
I’m on Plurk.
I’m on Facebook.
I’m on MySpace.
I’m on LinkedIn.
I’m on Utterz.
I’m on Seesmic.
I’m on Flickr.
I’m on … I can keep going.

And so are you. So’s Scoble. So’s Paisano. Lots of people are everywhere all of a sudden.

In a way, haven’t we made little branding strip malls? Little outlet stores for the product known as “me?”

What’s your take?

Photo credit, le

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