Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

Rigor? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rigor! The Importance of Process

In which Jill urges BI teams to roll up their sleeves and put process into practice.

Most of Baseline’s clients already have a general sense of their desired outcomes before they retain us. They need to launch a new project or begin a design or development effort, and they want the benefit of experience to start the right way.

The savviest clients welcome the knowledge transfer that accompanies working hand-in-hand with a consulting firm. They often take a “learn it, watch it, practice it, entrench it” approach. This lets them embrace change in an incremental way, incorporating new processes into their BI, MDM, data integration, or data warehouse development initiatives gradually, after putting them into practice.

But believe it or not, I’ve seen diagrams like this one scare the pants off of people:

Figure 1. Sample Requirement Process

We built this framework—simplified here—to instill a process for what didn’t currently exist: business-driven BI projects. Recognizing that true business-IT alignment was lacking, we worked together with the client’s key BI business sponsors to bang out a more formal process in which both business and IT would be accountable for ensuring that requirements drove BI projects.

When IT grumbled we weren’t surprised. Change invites discomfort. But we were amazed by the rationalizations for clinging to old ways. IT staff had been accustomed to throwing work over to some contractors who’d become fixtures onsite, filling in generic project requisition forms and write the odd SQL query. Indeed most of IT’s BI work was reactive. Most tasks were delegated, and most took more time than they should have. The fact that each of the steps in the new process required inputs, outputs, ownership, and delivery made some people in IT downright angry.

Consider manufacturing as a metaphor for IT development. As twentieth-century manufacturers embraced Henry Ford’s assembly line concept, they were ensuring:

• Predictable outcomes. By instituting repeatable processes, everyone knew what the end-state looked like.
• Easier detection of anomalies and defects. As processes make outcomes more predictable, outliers come into sharper focus.
• Enhanced productivity, since roles, work tasks, and handoff points are established and well-understood.
• The ability to track and measure productivity, quality, and desired outcomes, thereby driving further process refinements and product improvements.
• More accurate time and resource estimation, since initial scoping efforts can be informed by established process times.

As ironic as it seems, in BI—as in manufacturing—rigor actually invites flexibility. When everyone follows a sustainable development process, ownership, decision rights, and completion milestones are baked-in. Early error detection mitigates the need for reinvention and rework, allowing IT and business constituents to be clear about their commitments, and deliver them more quickly. BI teams can spend more on creative improvements, like enlisting new users, developing on-line tool and data training, and using social media tools for closer team collaboration.

Most of my new clients tend to want to talk about new technologies to acquire and organizational changes to make. What they don’t understand is that by embracing best-practice approaches to development and getting the process piece out of the way, they’re making room to have more substantive conversations about people and tools.

BI in Health Care—and Everywhere Else

In which Jill observes that the maxim, “Physician, heal thyself” can have several meanings.

Several years ago, Baseline Consulting received a blind Request for Proposal from an HMO. The RFP was for help building a BI strategy. Right up our alley. Trouble was we didn’t have many references in the healthcare sector. At that time our largest competitor had a practice dedicated to healthcare. While Baseline routinely won competitive bids in retail, financial services, gaming, insurance, communications, and other verticals, our competitor had healthcare locked up.

Moreover, like many consultants and vendors, we tend to be suspicious of blind RFPs. Being asked to answer a lot of complicated questions, and even divulge some IP, by a prospect where there is no pre-existing relationship, no referral, and no attempt at personal outreach can be a dicey proposition. One BI vendor of note refuses to even entertain blind RFPs. “When you get something out of the blue like that, it usually means you’re column-fodder,” their sales executive said recently. Blind RFPs are like the guy on the Times Square side street who wants to show you some nice Rolexes. You want to check them out, but you’re dubious.

The combination of these two factors led us to send the HMO’s contact a polite “thanks anyway” note, congratulating them for realizing the promise of BI in an information-rich industry, and wishing them luck on their BI journey.

Surprisingly our V.P. of Client Services received a call from the HMO contact right after she received our no-bid notice. Danielle was the HMO’s BI Program Director, and she was insistent. “We really want a proposal from Baseline,” Danielle said.

Our V.P. thanked her and explained that we were pretty sure who the competition was, and that we didn’t have their healthcare industry chops and thus had decided to forego the proposal process. But Danielle was unrelenting. She made her case, firmly explaining that the HMO’s evaluation process was multi-dimensional and involved more than just healthcare expertise. We would be given a fair shot at the business.

So we bid it, proposing our BI Portfolio service and roadmap, and waited for the inevitable “thanks anyway” e-mail. Instead, we received an e-mail from the HMO’s procurement manager informing us that we’d won.

In a meeting with the HMO’s CIO a few weeks later, still dazed by our unexpected success, we asked about their consulting evaluation process. We’d been honest about our lack of healthcare experience, and wondered why they’d picked us in spite of it.

The CIO replied, “You guys don’t get it, do you? You won because you DON’T know healthcare.”

My team and I could only look at one another.

 “What impressed us was your experience with customer intelligence,” the CIO continued. “You guys showed examples of the value of the 360-degree view of customer, customer profiling, and tracking a customer across his or her relationship with a retailer. That’s exactly what we need to do with our patients. We want your knowledge of retail. Honestly, that’s where healthcare’s headed.”

The CIO didn’t know how prescient he was. In the subsequent engagement and several more after that, we learned that applying customer intelligence principles from the retailers, banks, gaming companies, and other industries we’d worked with was nothing less than innovative in healthcare. After all, the idea of a  customer relationship lifecycle, with its myriad channels and touchpoints, mirrors the continuum-of-care goal of most of today’s healthcare providers . And all the user adoption challenges we’d seen in other industries paled in comparison to those in healthcare where physicians—notoriously set in their ways—now use BI to make smart decisions about patient care—not in an office or a cubicle, but at the bedside.

In an increasingly competitive industry where disruptive new entrants are taking healthcare administrators by surprise and the question of wholesale reform is not an “if” but a “when,” the patient-centric view is nothing less than strategic.  “We don’t need experience in healthcare,” the CIO concluded. “As it is, we already have more than enough ourselves.”

Photo by carlsonimkeller (via Flickr)

A Letter to Our Users, From Your BI Team

In which Jill writes a rebuttal letter to a rebuttal letter, this time from IT.

 

Two posts ago, I penned a fictitious (albeit observation-based) letter from a group of BI business users to their IT comrades. The post got lots of hits and tweets, many of them gently requesting equal time. (Okay, demanding it.) So I’m putting my IT cap back on and diving headfirst into the fray once again, this time with a rebuttal from the BI team.

Dear BI Users:

Thanks for your letter and for taking the time to write it. Sometimes we’re not sure you even know we’re here. In fact we’re working hard, and we’re grateful for any type of feedback.

Speaking of which, we invited you all to a Lunch & Learn session last Thursday where we presented a prototype of the Customer Event Management solution you’ve all been asking for. We’re one step closer to predicting the churn of high-value customers, but we need your input. Most of you accepted the meeting invitation, but only four of you showed up. What happened?

Okay, we don’t want to seem defensive but if you don’t feel listened to, well, neither do we. We understand that you’re not wild about those architecture and infrastructure conversations, and we try to shield you from that stuff whenever we can. But sometimes we need your approval for investments in foundational technologies. If IT indeed supports the business, both sides need to know what’s being supported.

But since you asked, we’ll tell you where we’ve been. We’ve been trying to explain to you that we can’t develop the custom software you’ve requested for a packaged price. It seems you all want Microsoft Office-quality tools, but we have a nine-person BI team here! And, not to burst your bubble or anything, but here it is:  there’s really no such thing as BI-in-a-box. All BI work is custom development. So, to answer your question for the 99th time: No, we can’t just “plug and play.”

We’ve also been delivering the 24x7 support you’ve wanted—or haven’t you looked at the SLAs we created? This stings a little, since we’re on call day and night. You don’t know this because you’re fast asleep while we’re loading your data and upgrading systems to support your requirements. After all, there are nine of us on the team, yet you want operational-class support. How many people staff members are involved in building our operational systems? (Answer: More than nine.) But we can’t get you guys to come look at the stuff we’re building for you. At lunchtime. With sandwiches.

Our conundrum is this: the business funds IT, so we’re beholden to you for money. Yet when we want to make sure your money is used well, we can’t get you to share where you’re going, let alone evaluate the solutions you’ve asked us to build!

And believe us, we’d like to fix the data as much as you would. But we don’t own the data, the operational systems developers do. And they say no one ever complains about it. Seriously, we are only as effective as the data we get from those systems and our understanding of the rules needed to fix it. We could put you guys in touch with our Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivable system developers and you can get them to write your reports. No? We didn’t think so.

Look, we’re happy to rethink the way we work together, to define new rules of engagement. We’re even happy to fund a resource to shadow you while you do your jobs so we don’t have to keep on asking you what’s next. But we need you to meet us halfway. Shoot, we need you to meet us, period. How about lunch?

You know where to find us,


Your BI Team

Photo by footage (via Flickr)

Manners in Twitterland

In which Jill looks in vain for the “undo” key.

photo by Robert Scoble

When it comes to Twitter, I embrace my friend Donald Farmer’s (@donalddotfarmer) metaphor that Twitter is a lot like a fish tank. You stop by and watch some interesting fish float past. It’s a temporal experience that yields interesting observations, exotic surprises, as well as some completely unremarkable specimens.

I’ve been a Twitter user for over six months and have established habits. I check out new followers and follow most everyone back. The exception is those with more than ten tweets in succession about getting more Twitter followers. I’ve also been known to count the number of “Good morning!”or “’Night, all!” tweets and make my follow decisions accordingly. I make it a point to re-tweet interesting, informative, and hilarious tweets, yet generally avoid re-tweeting Twitter heavy-hitters like Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) or Laura Fitton (@pistachio). Both are great to follow but people re-tweet them enough and this strikes me subtly cloying. Not so subtle are the “Read my blog!” DMs arriving daily from the legions of social media experts. 

 I follow smart professional friends like Ray Wang (@rwang0) of Forrester, Josh Weinberger (@kitson) from CRM Magazine, Scott Humphrey (@scotthumphrey) from Humphrey Strategic Communications, and strategy and leadership guru Art Petty (@artpetty), and I monitor tweets from my own firm, Baseline Consulting (@BaselineConsult). I don’t deploy bots that automatically thank people for following me, and I only recently began using the groups feature in Tweetdeck to organize my tweeple. (The Twitter lexicon just creeps up on you.)  I make it a point to log on to Twitter daily to stay in touch, but sometimes don’t tweet as often due to my hectic travel schedule. As my buddy Michael Cristia (@mcristia) once tweeted, “Jill, no tweets for three days! Traveling internationally?”

But despite my Twitter routine, I’m still very much of a dilettante. One follower I’ll call Pam had over 37000 of her own followers, making her a charter member of what I call the “tweet elite.” Pam’s profile described her as a social media-savvy professional woman, and her tweets were generally informative and smart. I followed her back. But I noticed a certain political theme recurring in her tweets that was squarely partisan (no problem), slightly mean-spirited (hmmm), and often hostile to those that disagreed (deal breaker). I’m all for healthy repartee, but in Pam’s case I could have logged off Twitter and turned on The O’Reilly Factor. I’d heard the term “unfollow” and decided to do it to Pam. 

So I typed “Unfollow @Pam.”  Less than 30 seconds later, I received a DM from Pam:

“If you are on a campaign to have people unfollow me on Twitter, then allow me to do the same for you.”

Uh oh.

Here was a hard-won lesson in Twitter diplomacy.” Crestfallen, I’d once used the “block” command on Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) because I was convinced his tweets weren’t his, but I’d never explicitly unfollowed anyone and figured it was just an in-line command. It wasn’t. And now Pam and her hearty army of loyalists were going to unfollow—or more likely block—me en masse and I was not only going to lose Twitter followers but some personal friends who weren’t even on-line, six degrees of separation being what it is.

“Yeah, I saw your tweet,” said my friend and our VP of Marketing, Tamara Dull (@tamaradull) when I shared Pam’s icy reply. “She’s a Twitter bigwig. I’m surprised it took her a full thirty seconds to see it.” Tamara coached me on how to go to a Twitter user’s profile and then click the “Remove” button there. “Then you might want to go back and delete the tweet,” she suggested, “and maybe remove it from your Facebook page, too.”  Tamara’s too nice to finger-wag in these situations but she could have, and I would have taken it, head bowed.

The obvious moral of the story is to learn to at least dog paddle before swimming with the big fish. But at the end of the day, the real lesson is that social media is new water altogether, and sometimes you have to just hold your breath and jump in.

Dear IT: A Letter from Your Business Users

In which Jill writes a rebuttal letter on behalf of her business clients.

photo by aflcio2008

In my last blog post I told a story of a client who, in an effort to explain the value of business intelligence, wrote a letter to his CEO explaining the business value delivered by BI and the ROI projections for newly-integrated data. The letter worked. The BI team got the funding it needed to propel itself from project to program.

But at many companies it would take more than a letter and a value proposition to convince business users of the value of BI. Knowing some of the harsh realities at other companies, I’ve penned a sort of rebuttal letter from the BI user community back to IT.

Dear BI Team:

Long time no see. And by that, we mean where the hell have you been? We know you’re around. Seems you’ve been complaining to our execs about the lack of user adoption. And that we never engage you. And now you’re mad that we’ve hired consultants to come in to help us build a roadmap.

Well guess what? We had no choice. While you’re letting that big database vendor buy you lunch and having dashboard bake-offs and devising new IT standards—again—we have work to do. This may have slipped your mind, but the company has just downsized. Despite this rough patch, our responsibilities haven’t changed. Remember the CEO’s company-wide webcast in January? The one where he promised that in the coming year the company would cut costs while increasing customer acquisition and driving innovation? Well, that’s our job. And we’re trying to get it done.

Frankly we’re not sure whether to feel resentment or resignation. After all, we know what you guys have been spending and, frankly, all that funding should align with our needs. You’ve been loading data warehouse tables for as long as we can remember. But no one’s asked us if we wanted any of that data. And if we hear the question, “What keeps you up at night?” from one of your business analysts one more time we’re going to throw the poor bugger down the elevator shaft. Odds are he’ll bounce off one of those big servers in your data center.

We read someplace that IT is supposed to act as a supplier to the business. We deal with suppliers all the time. But none of them expects us to understand their internal processes—they just help us solve our problems. You guys insist on us working within your framework. Whatever it is.

Here’s what we’d like. We’d like to track the results of our marketing campaigns by the hour and make continuous adjustments. We’d like to monitor and respond to the buzz about the company through social media. We’d like the account reps to know about support and payment issues when they’re writing customer bids. We’d like management to understand the true profitability of our products, not just their revenues. We’d like our numbers to reconcile between finance and sales.

So while you’re mounting your campaign against our consultants and lamenting our shoddy technical skills, why don’t you calendar a face-to-face meeting with us and ask us about this list? No, this isn’t another requirements gathering session. Instead, it’s us offering you an opportunity to participate. We’re hopeful that maybe you can help us solve some of these problems? Or maybe it’ll just be business as usual.

In characteristic anticipation of something new,

Your Users

Dear CEO: A Letter from Your BI Team

In which one of Jill’s clients puts his team’s success in writing.

 

photo by spitecho

Baseline Consulting was recently engaged by a large pharmaceutical company’s business intelligence team to give BI a shot in the arm. Paul, the Director of BI, had been frustrated with the general lack of support he was getting from business stakeholders. Our goal was to help Paul and his team to formalize their BI program, lay out an 18-month roadmap, and build a pitch to solicit additional funding from lines of business.

“They’re taking us for granted,” Paul explained when we asked about his users. “They don’t understand the complexity of their requests. They think everything should be cheap and easy and take four weeks.” Indeed, the business users saw the BI team as just another IT development organization. Rather than engaging them in sustained requirements conversations and discussing business outcomes, they had marginalized the group as nothing more than reporting order-takers. There were no rules of engagement. There was no collaboration.

Ironically, the BI team had a pretty good delivery record. Their analytical applications were comprehensive. Despite widespread disaffection, user adoption had increased, and data quality had improved over time. In fact after reviewing the team’s progress we recommended that Paul stop focusing on battling the various line of business managers and go straight to the top: he should go talk to the CEO.

Paul demurred. A meeting with the CEO was outside his comfort zone. He wasn’t even sure he could convince his boss, the CIO, to support the idea. He didn’t know what points to bring up, and he feared he might even flub his lines. “This could turn out to be career-limiting,” he said nervously.

We suggested that before he scheduled the dreaded meeting, he write the CEO a letter. The letter would outline the BI team’s contributions to date, discuss the potential of BI to solve additional business problems and drive competitive differentiation, and explain the opportunity cost of cutting BI investments. We agreed that if, after writing the letter, Paul was still nervous about meeting with the CEO, we would find another way to tell the story of BI to the business and get buy-in.

Writing the letter brought up some difficult issues. Paul had to be honest about his team’s ability to speak the business’ language. He also admitted that the BI development process was squishy and roles within the team weren’t circumscribed. This left the business users guessing about the team’s delivery process, resulting in incessant questioning about timelines, functionality, and value.

We worked together with Paul to write a letter to the CEO that was well-crafted, clear, and made a compelling case for renewed BI investment. It explained why the firm’s physician management program would flounder without the team’s data expertise; outlined how much money the company could save by pushing out accurate physician spend figures; made the case for integrating R&D data; and outlined the strategic initiatives that would be BI-enabled. It was also specific about new resource needs, technology upgrade costs, and why they were part of a larger vision for an information-driven enterprise.

Our bet was that the letter would energize Paul, giving him the confidence—and the ammunition—he needed to schedule that in-person meeting with the CEO. Instead, with the CIO’s enthusiastic approval and a little relief, Paul decided to e-mail the letter to the CEO.

We weren’t surprised when, upon receiving the letter, the CEO called Paul to request an in-person meeting. But Paul was.

Nevertheless, he bit the bullet and led a meeting with the CEO, the CIO, the V.P. of Sales and Marketing for the U.S., and several other business leaders, leaning heavily on our letter, but explaining historical challenges and additional opportunities for BI and integrated data. At lunch afterwards, we celebrated the fact that the CEO had a new appreciation for the overall value of BI, and a new level of commitment. And that Paul, flush with his own success and looking forward to a new way of working, had increased his team’s budget by 30 percent.

A Social Media Mini-Manifesto for Marketers

In which Jill gives advice to well-meaning marketers to manage their messaging.

photo by Zingaro

In my last blog post, I admonished marketers not to abandon a solid, multi-channel marketing strategy in their frenzy to embrace social media. Savvy CMOs are just now coming to terms with the fact that social media isn’t an alternative but instead a supplement to a deliberate, customer-focused marketing plan.

Concentrating on social media often usurps other marketing tactics in terms of visibility. Follow Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com on Twitter? Sure! Remember the details Zappos’ last e-mail offer? (“Free shipping” reminders don’t count.) I didn’t think so. As awareness of social media grows it risks becoming the Web 2.0 version of “spray and pray.”

What’s a well-rounded marketer to do? Here’s a list of six rules that effective marketers are following now. Consider it a mini-manifesto of social marketing:

1. Stop saying “Hi!” While offering a quippy joke about your sandwich spread or the odor emanating from your dog as she reclines under your desk is hilarious the first time (and maybe even the second time if it’s Braunschweiger), best-practice marketers don’t just entertain, they inform. As much as people like a good chuckle, your customers and prospects are hanging around because of your product, not your witty repartee. Unless you’re Eddie Izzard, be sure that your on-line dialog offers value.


2. Get busy with BI. Every company wants to predict its customers’ wants and needs. To do that requires more than an on-line dialog with customers, it requires an understanding the customer’s profile and historic behaviors. If your company doesn’t have a robust and evolving business intelligence program, build one before investing heavily in a social media infrastructure. Social media analytics and measurement are arguably a subset of a complete BI strategy. If you’re launching a social media program ahead of BI, you’ll end up over-investing in both.


3. Differentiate your members. You have a loyalty program, right? What? You don’t?  Then logoff FriendFeed and launch one. Because understanding who your top-tier customers are is paramount to your company’s share of wallet. Social media and Web 2.0 technologies promise new ways to reach out to your “best” customers and differentiate them to keep them coming back. But first you need to know why they’re your best customers. (See Number 2.) Then, start treating them differently. Then that Facebook fan page might even be useful.


4. Know your influencers. There are customers and then there are “constituents,” those concentric circles around customers that might represent suppliers, employees, service partners, industry gadflies, and marketing analysts. If you’re web-visible, then you’re talking to them, too.


5. Maintain your brand. In the rush to start an on-line party with their customers, some companies forget what they’re selling. Worse, the personality of the blogger/tweeter/e-mailer trumps the voice of the brand. Want to let your followers in on the action while flossing? Get your own personal Twitter account. Want to let on-line customers in on the 20 percent off coupon code? Now you’re tweetin’.


6. Finish strong. Like many buzz-worthy business fads, social media efforts can launch big, then fizzle. Don’t let social media become another intellectual exercise. Have a plan for adopting and rolling out a variety of social media programs,using it as a vehicle for  a deliberately planned marketing strategy. Be sure to define what success looks like. Then measure early and often.

In the end, social media is another set of tools in the marketing toolbox. And, like any business enabler, it needs to pass the management “sniff test,” meaning that it needs to generate sustained revenues or offer savings or efficiencies that exceed its cost to deploy. Otherwise, success is just another word for fad.

Social Media Renders Your Marketing Strategy Obsolete. NOT!

In which Jill admonishes marketers to be deliberate about their strategies now, and tweet later.

photo by Matthew Oliphant

The evolution of social media has all my marketing and CRM buddies a-twitter. (Sorry). They understand that there is promise in using social media tools to strengthen their brand images, to share company news, and to connect with customers and prospects. It’s just that they can’t seem to tear executives away from their balance sheets long enough to enlighten them.

Indeed, faced with falling stock prices, budget cuts, and shareholder disaffection, your CFO is all for social media, as long as it’s free. Your CEO thinks Delicious is a porn site that should be blacklisted from corporate access. And forget about asking your CTO to start blogging. He’s hunkered down trying to figure out the next disruptive innovation, and pronto!

But your marketing department is intrigued, enough to form a social networking task force and send twenty seven staff members to BlogWorld Expo. And just when you think social media has saturated the marketing Zeitgeist, you overhear your CMO say the words, “Friend me” to a supplier. This exchange strikes you as obscene, not because of any sexual undertones but because what the hell is he doing on Facebook anyway, he has a marketing organization to run!

If you’re like me, you’ve noticed that the social media buzz is taking far more time and energy than the answer to the question, “How will sales and marketing support this year’s corporate objectives?” Many sales and marketing organizations have emphasized social media at the expense of their strategies. It’s as if strategy doesn’t matter anymore.

Newsflash: It does. Moreover, the past is prologue. Companies that emerged from the last recession did so by returning to fundamentals. They understood that technology—even the coolest let’s-get-naked-and-party, Sandhill Road-backed, WTF 2.0 software—was nevertheless still a means to an end. In 2001, writing in Harvard Business Review as the dot-com bubble spewed its detritus far and wide, Michael Porter said of the Internet:

“Two broad conclusions can be drawn. First, many businesses active on the Internet are artificial businesses competing by artificial means and propped up by capital that until recently had been readily available. Second, in periods of transition such as the one we have been going through, it often appears as if there are new rules of competition. But as market forces play out, as they are now, the old rules regain their currency. The creation of true economic value once again becomes the final arbiter of business success.”

If you substitute the Internet theme of Porter’s assertion with social media, the same truisms apply. Companies still have to articulate how they intend to compete in the market, serve their customers in differentiating ways, and innovate. Smart marketing, customer experience management, and CRM leaders will lift their heads from their Facebook 25 Things lists, craft a deliberate, multi-media plan that supports their firms’ unique value proposition, and then—only then—determine how social media will fit. Got that? Okay, now friend me.

Social Media and CRM

By Jill Dyché

In which Jill in gets a bad grade, but keeps a good client.

My client is a long-time, self-described “data geek” and we get together when I’m in the Bay Area for status updates and some gossip. So here we are sipping our lattes at the headquarters espresso lounge and we’re not talking about data models (yet), open source BI tools, or what new information Marketing needs for its campaigns. “Our CRM is Web two-oh,” he tells me as he bites a biscotti.

photo by filipe ferreira

This is a departure for him, and I’m not sure what to make of it. “Really?” I say, cursing my lack of creativity but at the same time not wanting to prematurely prescribe anything.

“Yeah,” he says as he chews. “We have a corporate LinkedIn profile, our sales reps are friending all our clients on Facebook, and we have a corporate commercial on YouTube. AND,” he adds, inserting a pregnant pause for effect, “I just convinced our CEO to do Twitter!”

“So how are you measuring success?” I ask him. It’s a genuine question, but his expression changes immediately, and I realize I just graded a C minus in my role as Trusted Advisor. My client explains that though they haven’t worked out measurement yet, the fact that they’ve embraced social media is in itself a major cultural leap, as well as a personal career coup for him.

But is it really? Anyone in a bowling league, a reading group, or yes, a corporation, can throw together a MySpace page or cultivate a tribe of tweeple on Twitter. The adoption of online tools doesn’t automatically propel a company forward into the new world of social media any more than partying at Social Hollywood makes you a hipster. The art isn’t in establishing a social media presence as much as it is closing the “talking-listening-acting” gap.

When social media pioneer Scott Monty joined Ford Motor Company last year he set about helping on-line content providers tell “richer stories” about the Ford brand, once engaging a web site owner that Ford’s legal department had considered suing in a positive partnership dialog. The point is that Monty and his team have their ear to the ground when it comes to the Ford brand. They regularly act on the information they access—from online tools and elsewhere—to refine that brand. And yes, a potential Ford Focus buyer can indeed use the website’s RSS feeder to get regular SNPRs (Social Media Press Releases) and other updates about the car pushed to her reader or e-mail account.

My client wants to talk to me about the virtues of Facebook over MySpace and how FriendFeed can help drive more engaged customer conversations. But I owe it to him to tell him that this isn’t the hard part. The hard part is establishing new business processes and job roles in order to use these and other emerging social media tools effectively. It’s establishing on-line personas that are legitimate and empowered to engage in sometimes-difficult conversations. It’s about more than listening to or even  celebrating customers. It’s about formalizing new ways to capture this data, use it to re-segment customers, measure your share-of-voice, and redefine customers’ experience with your products and your brand.

And if you make some friends in the bargain? Well, that’s kewl too. E-mail me your comments—or tweet me @jilldyche if you’re already there.

Football for BI Fans

By Jill Dyché

In which Jill considers why brawny Brits in shorts and knee socks can harmonize.

Living in London in the late 1990s I got to watch a few football games live and in-person. U.K. football—aka “Association Football,” aka “soccer”—is serious business played by very fit men for hard-core fans. Having spent time in Liverpool earlier in my career, I had a soft spot for the LFC. So while the rest of my mates proudly donned Chelsea blue—a shade very similar to Dodger blue, I once remarked to a round of ribbing that didn’t stop for two more years—I skulked around in my red Liverpool muffler furtively routing for my beloved scousers. (Note: When on British soil avoid using the term “routing for.”)

Newsflash: As of this writing, Liverpool is tied for second place behind Manchester United, and I think they can roundly kick their arses. Yeah, COME N’ GET ME, you Girly Man United Wankers, you’ll have to track me down here in … uh… Pittsburgh. That’s right, you tossers! Pittsburgh! ‘Til then shut yer bloody cakeholes!

British football doesn’t have the padding of American football, nor does it have the mean streak of Australian Rules football which is another game altogether. But the rabid fandom in the U.K. can’t be underestimated, and the players themselves throw themselves into their game. So it was a bit incongruous to me to discover that each U.K. football team had a team song. That’s right. A song. And it was usually sung by the players themselves. And on television no less.

Imagine seeing a team of erstwhile ruffians, pressed and showered, convened to sing their team song. Chelsea’s team song is the catchiest, but the club actually has a variety of songs, and most of its fans know them all by heart. Daring to chant “Chelsea, Chelsea!” on the King’s Road at certain times in the season is nothing less than an invitation to mayhem.

The point of the team song? It’s branding. Yes, the logos, the colors, the scarves, and the flags all matter, but adding the audible to the visual is simply a stroke of branding genius. The song was the feather clapper in the iron bell of the club’s brand, and it rang loudly.

Sometimes our clients ask us to brand their BI teams or their data integration centers of excellence. We help them come up with a catchy name, sometimes designing a logo—usually an adaptation of their company logo—or a project moniker that reflects the team’s goals and individualizes it. Thus the team establishes a separate but complementary identity. It has a recognizable symbol to communicate its mission to the company at large. Now that I think about it maybe we’ve been remiss in not composing a catchy tune, too.

Imagine the Oakland Raiders of the 1970s singing “Oh! Oakland in My Soul!” and you’ll understand the paradox of a team song. But then again, it would be memorable, wouldn’t it? And that’s exactly the point.