Authentic Organizations » Brandividuals

How Social Media Affects the Organization Itself: Post Roundup

cv harquail — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 22:20:35 +0000

What are we learning as we watch (and help) social media, consumer-outreach -style tools, make their way into the organization? We’re learning that this phenomenon can be understood from a wide range of disparate perspectives, which don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye. At least not yet. Still,

I’m anticipating a convergence among perspectives that will create a coherent explanation of what social media and systems of engagement can do inside organizations.

And, I’m expecting that we’ll soon be able to craft a compelling argument for being deliberate as we implement these systems, to see beyond what they do on the surface and focus instead on how they can create net positive value for members, organizations, stakeholders and communities.

Ahead, I’m expecting that the perspectives from inward-facing information management systems like:

IT & digital systems design
Content management,
Work process flow
Enterprise resource planning

Will overlap with perspectives from outward-facing interaction systems like:

Customer relationship management
Corporate communications
Brand (product) management
Customer service
Recruiting, and

Will be enhanced by understanding what it takes to get people to involved and move them to action, drawing on insights from:

Social entrepreneurship
Cause marketing
Social change

Add to these the conventional, managerialist approach of Social Business, the network & power approach of Wirearchy, and insights from the organizational change area (e.g., organizational democracy, employee engagement, and stakeholder value conversations) and you’ll see how the groundwork is being laid to use digital social tools and analog social systems to reorganize *inside* the organization.

I’m discovering colleagues, distributed across these areas, who are excited about the opportunities that social media and systems of engagement present for social change. And, I’m starting to get a handle on who’s contributing what to this convergence.

As part of my effort to sketch the big picture:

Here are posts on Authentic Organizations that are working to build connections across these areas, one link at a time.

All of these systems — social media and systems of engagement — share some important value assumptions.

Social media & systems of engagement can be used to transform organizations- intentionally as well as unintentionally.

Social media/engagement systems create meaning and value at the individual, organizational and stakeholder system level. This meanin, and the activity that creates it work to build engagement.

Systems allow us to create & shape who we are and how we are seen, As individuals

and as organizations.

Systems allow us and others to evaluate our behavior. Who makes these evaluations, who uses them, and what priorities they reflect all matter.

If your organization does or does not reflect its espoused values and character in its social media systems and outputs, stakeholders will figure it out and ask you to do better.

The assumptions and decisions that designers – and managers- make about these systems matter more than most people think.

Designers have more power than users, so you should be deliberate about the designs you create, choose and implement.

We can be proactive in how we use these tools, so that we create the kinds of jobs and organizations that inspire us. For example,

It’s usually easy to use a social media/engagement system, but it’s hard to do it well.

Where to next?

As I look at the summary statements I’ve offered for each cluster of posts, the connections and conclusions seem more straightforward than they are “in real life”. As always, the beauty is in the details, and the power is in the implementation.

Image: “The Road Ahead” by colorbee, available as a print on Etsy!

How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

cv harquail — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:11:40 +0000

Social media tools can transform an organization.

One of the things I enjoy so much about social media is the chance to be (more often) the person I am, with my specific sets of talents, interests, and goals. Every time I extend myself out on social media, I get to choose what I’ll say, how I’ll represent an idea, and how I’ll demonstrate what that idea means to me.

The same is true for organizations. Each time an organization reaches out to share a message, it is aiming to create an impression on its audience(s) that conveys a sense of who that organization is and what it cares about. Each message creates meaning.

Historically, this reaching out, this extension of the organizational ‘self by creating meaning,’ happened in one of three ways:

formal corporate communication,
advertising (either for products or for corporate), and
CEO presentations (e.g., interviews, speeches).

All of these efforts involve managing the corporate, collective self into a single, intentional voice– keeping the meaning as tight and limited as possible. The message was (and is still) almost always massaged, shaped, intentional, deliberate, goal-oriented.

What makes social media so interesting as a tool for creating meaning about an organization and within an organization is that:

1.) Social Media messages often bypasses the ‘professional massage’ step, and
2.) Social Media messages come from many places, many individual and many interactions instead of one central source.

When communication bypasses the sausage machine, it can create meaning that evades centralized, controlled boundaries. It can be ‘off message’ and offer a very different meaning, it can be ‘on message’ and be more complex than the typical extruded meaning, and it can be somewhere in between, fleshing out and filling in our understanding of what that organization is all about.

Because social media communications come not only from ‘corporate’ or ‘marcomms’ efforts but also from online representatives, brandividuals, and a motley assortment of folks connected to the organization, all these additional, little bits of communication offer an alternative form of data for understanding the organization.

Instead of a massaged, managed, deliberate stream, social media give us many local, specific, situational, personalized messages about the organization.

While it’s true that sometimes the meaning conveyed in these messages just reinforces the centrally-managed meaning, a lot of these messages create new meaning.

New meaning gets created when individuals speak about something specific, on behalf of the organization.

When individuals are speaking on behalf of their organization to some interested person, that individual faces a unique challenge. S/he has to take the general, global, abstract, big picture message of the organization and translate it into the specific context. S/he has to understand the organization and s/he has to put that understanding into her or his own words. Her own words convey new meaning.

The organization member her or himself has to craft specific meaning out of a general understanding. In that moment of crafting, at that point of articulating, the individual has to put new words together in new ways to represent the organization’s point of view.

At that moment, in this unique communication, the individual creates new meaning about and for the organization.

One source of new meaning is how the individual translates an abstract organizational position into a specific statement. Another critical source of new meaning is that the individual contributes her or his own knowledge — local knowledge, from her or his direct engagement in the organization — into that message. That local, personal knowledge is almost always new information, and in this way the real experience of that individual member creates new meaning for the organization.

In the process of creating new meaning, the new meaning also accrues some additional heft. Not only does the new meaning get created, but also it gets ‘owned’. The person who said it owns it, and now has to stand behind it. S/he may called upon to repeat this message, to elaborate on its meaning or even to demonstrate it in her next interaction with that audience. Thus, the new meaning has legitimacy, some authority, and more than a little bit of authenticity.

Here on this blog, writing about the dynamics of social media, new meaning creation, and how it engages organizational identity and reputation challenges me the same way that writing ‘about’ Zappos culture on Twitter challenges the average Zappos employee.

We both have to take a big picture message, and convey a big picture intent, in specific communication acts. We have to understand, translate, embellish, exemplify, recreate, rewrite, from general to specific. We have to create new meaning each time, in each blog post and each tweet.

And so it is with each of us who, through social media, puts into words and into interactions the values, the attributes, the goals, the meaning of what we are part of, who we are speaking for, and what we are speaking about.

We’re not just making it up as we go along; we’re making new meaning as we talk together.

See also:

Be Your Own Hashtag
Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be
The Best PR that $1.6 Million Can’t Buy: Authenticity in Action at Zappos
Why We Want Brandividuals on Social Media

Image: Solidarity….. misconceptions by Super is Sunny

Personal Branding: It’s Different for Girls

cv harquail — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:51:51 +0000

Personal branding is inescapable.¹

A person simply cannot participate in online forums, much less in their full career, without deliberately or unintentionally crafting and framing the way that they are seen by others.

However, while personal branding is inescapable, it isn’t easy to make it work in our favor.

Personal branding is fraught with choices and tensions, and these challenges are different for girls.

For women of every race, ethnicity, and orientation, each personal branding decision requires us to navigate the crosscurrents of societal pressures and personal authenticity. Each woman needs to negotiate which social expectations she’ll meet, and which ones she will resist, as she strives to create and defend a personal brand that expresses her unique identity.

Every social media platform constrains the ways that you can represent ‘who you are’.

Personal Branding starts with presenting yourself online, in public spaces, on public platforms, for other people to see you. Most professional social media platforms–those internal to the organization, those connected to particular communities, and even those where you might participate as your own “self” – select and constrain the information you are able to display.

Software platforms are built to reflect value-laden decisions about what sorts of information matters, how much information is important, how that information with be displayed, and to what degree the presentation of this information can be personalized. These choices reflect what’s best for the software platform, not what’s best for your personal brand.

On these social platforms, we craft our personal brands though a series of decisions about – naming, - claiming, – displaying, and - disclosing ‘who we are’.

For women, each of these decisions requires us to navigate that gray space between buying into or resisting social expectations for what she is allowed to be and how she is allowed to claim her unique identity.

Naming

Let’s start with a really easy personal branding decision: What name are you going to use?

Will you use a formal name, a nickname or a handle? Will you choose a name that reflects your life-partnership status, or one that is independent of your relationship status?

If you are married, are you going to use your birth name or your married name? Are you going to hold on to your pre-marital online history by retaining your name? Will you try to keep your professional and personal lives separate online by using different surnames?

If you are in a relationship that is not recognized by the laws in your state, will you try to signal with your name that you have a life partner? Or, will you use a name that helps you keep this part of your life? Are you going to try to hyphenate your last name, and then hope that the software platforms you need to use will actually accommodate a name with more than 16 characters, that includes a hyphen?

Along with the decision itself, are you ready to negotiate the expectations about your career commitment and your priorities that people infer from the decision you make around your name choice?

Claiming

Online, we need to claim what we know, how we know it, and what we can do so that people know how to categorize us. We need to describe ourselves with terms that represent our defining characteristics, our experience, our accomplishments, and our abilities. For women, claiming presents three challenges– claiming our expertise, finding labels that fit that expertise, and finding labels that don’t invite the ‘wrong’ interpretation.

When you label your attributes, your skills, and your accomplishments, your goal is to establish credibility. Taking credit may or may not be harder for women, but certainly appearing credible by striking an acceptable tone as you describe your achievements and accomplishments is harder for women.

What terms feel accurate and comfortable for you to use to describe yourself and your expertise? How do you choose terms that strike the right note without seeming presumptuous? What words and phrases are appropriate for women?

Are you ready to deal with the ways that some people will respond if you emphasize a particular credential, or when you take credit for an accomplishment in a way that they think is inappropriate for women?

Formal titles and credentials can often be received differently when they are offered by a woman and not a man.

Here’s an example from my own experience. I’ve noticed that a few times when I’ve commented on other blogs and mentioned my PhD, or referred to my scholarship (as in, research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals), men who disagree with me have challenged my academic bona fides by making snarky references to my PhD or putting the work “scholarship” in ironic quotation marks. I haven’t seen men dismiss other men in the same way.

The credential ‘bounces’ differently when offered by a woman than when offered by a man. Just ask Senator Boxer, or Dr. Jill Biden.

Displaying

Peole consume online information visually, so “optics” matter a lot. What kind of visual design and images will you offer to establish people’s first impressions?

Head shots, profile pictures, and twitter avatars capture one particular visual image of who you are. The picture you choose not only (usually) reveals your gender, but also reveals your age, ‘attractiveness‘, and gender performance. So, choosing your headshot is a big deal.

Will you wear makeup or not? Will you have your hair natural or will you get your hair processed? Will you retouch your photo or leave the wrinkles blemishes visible? Will you try to look older or younger? What will you wear?

Will you have a professional take your head shots or will you just crop an informal snapshot? What gaze will you choose? Will you smile or look serious?

(Note: Regardless of your sex, unless your screen name or handle includes the word ‘diva’, I don’t think your avatar should project a ‘come hither’ vibe. Just sayin’.)

Are you trying to look competent or warm? Personable or professional? Claim or avoid the ‘feminine’? These choices matter.

You also create your brand through the visual appearance of your online space, with fonts, themes and colors.

Will you chose fonts, colors and themes that communicate that you are female? Will you present a conventional expression of femininity with a pink or purple website with curvy fonts? Or, will your site be red & black, blue & grey, sans serif and androgynous?

All Cover, Not Much Book

The first three steps of personal branding — naming, claiming, and displaying– focus on creating a first impression. These steps of personal branding emphasize the simple surface more that the complex depth of a person.

Coincidentally, these steps heighten two ongoing tensions that many women struggle with:
1) being subject to the scrutiny of the male gaze, and
2) being valued for how she looks rather than who she really is.
Consider that simply being told that men are observing her can prompt a woman to “narrow her social presence” and to say less about herself.

Just as women experience pressure to meet external, often unrealistic (and usually performance-irrelevant) appearance standards in physical work spaces, they also experience that pressure online. This pressure is not imaginary or all in their heads; women actually get unsolicited feedback on their pictures and self-descriptions based on whether and how their appearance conforms to some people’s standards. All you have to do is read the comments on blog post by an outspoken woman, and without even scrolling a third of the way down, you’ll see some reference to her appearance. It won’t be complimentary.

Personal disclosure

To craft an appealing brand, we’re told to share more personal information about ourselves– to tell personal stories, to share emotions, to be honest about our opinions. Personal disclosure helps people “get to know who we really are”.

However, personal disclosure can also make us vulnerable.

Online, personal disclosures are interpreted differently and are often less safe for women than for men. For example, when a man mentions on Twitter or Facebook that he’s home for the day with a sick child, people send him pats on the back. In contrast, many women won’t even mention if this is happening for them, since the very bit of disclosure that gets a man applause for being a good dad garners for a woman the concern that she’s less professional or less committed to her work.

Some people take the opportunity to offer unsolicited feedback on whether, why and how a person’s disclosure is valuable, and to pass judgment on that person publicly, through blog comments, “likes”, and responses.

Personal disclosure opens us up to other people’s scrutiny, where they can evaluate us on dimensions that are unrelated to our professional ability.

For many of us women who’ve been working in the professional world for while, much of our effort to develop our reputations and to build our “personal brands” has meant breaking free of the templates created by stereotypes. Most of us have been creating our reputations over time, through multimodal interactions, histories of action & reaction, long-standing professional relationships, and more. These are overstuffed with information about us and offering people experiences of us from which they can infer and construe who we are, and get a fuller sense of our authentic selves.

But even so, seemingly superficial choices about how we present ourselves online still seem to matter. We women have to create a place for ourselves and each other in a professional world that is not excited about having us participate as professionals – especially not in our most authentic, anti-stereotypical, self- expressions.

All this is not to dismiss the ways that personal branding is a challenge for boys, but rather to help us appreciate that:

Given the demands of presenting oneself in a socially-approved way versus as our most authentic selves, it’s different for girls.

Mystery and the Modern Woman,
Confessions of a 36 year-old woman, by Tara Hunt on horsepigcow

Images:
Hello My Name Is silver pendant, by pollysimon on Etsy
Princess Silhouette Cameo Vinyl Decal tweetheartwallart on Etsy
Girl Name Definition Adjectives PlanetWallArt on Etsy
Handmade paper flower by danamazing on Etsy
Stamp of Approval, by Circa Ceramics on Etsy

BP’s Bravest Brandividual: What could be motivating Darryl Willis?

cv harquail — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:53:53 +0000

If you’ve been paying attention to BP’s “Making it right” newspaper advertising, or if you’ve seen BP’s recent television advertising, you’ve seen BP’s new Brandividual Darryl Willis.

Aside from Tony Hayward, BP’s walking PR disaster CEO, Darryl Willis is the only person with a name shown by BPs own advertisements as being in charge of anything related to the Gulf Oil Spill. And, Darryl Willis is now the point person for a lot of anger, frustration and resentment over BP’s behavior. Why would anyone put himself in the position of speaking personally for an organization with such an actively damaged reputation?

Darryl Willis, BP Claims Spokesperson

Darryl Willis is featured in this television spot, where he speaks in the first person. Mostly, he speaks of “we”, as he explains BP’s position regarding fulfilling Gulf Residents’ claims against BP. And he closes by taking a person stand, saying :

“I was born and raised in Louisiana. I volunteered for this assignment because this is my home. I’ll be here in the Gulf as long as it takes to make this right.”

In taking on this role as BP’s spokesperson and using his face, name and personal history to represent BP, Willis is BP’s “Brandividual”.

A Brandividual is an employee who draws on her or his personal identity as well as the organization or brand’s identity, to represent the organization or brand to the public.

When brandividuals speak on the organization’s behalf, they intentionally and deliberately express their own personalities, personal attributes and personal attitudes as they represent the organization. This allows the audience to take the brandividual’s characteristics, along the emotions these characteristics trigger, and associate them with the organization.

Brandividuals loan or rent their own personal brands to serve the corporate brand. Thus, when a well-known and well-liked MarComms person like Scott Monty represents Ford, the positive elements of Monty’s personal reputation are transferred to Ford. When we like Scott Monty, we are more included to like Ford.

A brandividual puts his personal reputation on the line… for the business’s benefit.

Most often we see individuals using their personal brands to grow an organization’s business. Someone comes on board with his or her reputation already made and uses that to grow the business of the organization they’ve joined. Less frequently, brandividuals join organizations to buttress the organization’s damage control efforts with the power of their own person reputations. These sorts of brandividual relationships are less common, simply because they are so costly to the individual’s reputation. After all, why would someone become a corporate brandividual when the corporation’s reputation has already tanked?

That’s why the newspaper ad featuring Darryl Willis got me thinking: What’s in it for him?

In the ad, Willis is presented as saying “I volunteered for this position.” But why would anyone put his own personal reputation on the firing line in such an profoundly negative situation?

Surely, being publicly associated with BP right now has to be a losing proposition for anyone’s personal brand.

Why a person would NOT want to be BP’s brandividual

Being personally associated with an organization involved in a scandal, crisis or crime has many negative repercussions for rank and file members.

Just ask the Employees of Satyam, or Goldman Sachs. Or, Exxon.

The negative implications of association are exacerbated for brandividuals, because their roles as spokesperson make them constant representatives of the organization. They have no other work that takes priority over representing the organization, and no other roles in which to invest their self-concepts.

Further, the brandividual role as a constant, public-facing representative puts them in regular contact with stakeholders who now dislike and distrust the organization. The brandividual now has to manage his or her personal response to being the target of angry stakeholders’ criticism.

Being the Brandividual for an organization with an actively damaged reputation can lead to:

Long term, even permanent stain on personal reputation

The longer and more prominently the individual plays the role of brandividual, the stronger the public’s association of the person with the organization. The negative association will be hard to escape, and hard to change.

Emotional burnout from wearing a falsely- positive mask

Whether or not the brandividual believes that the organization is responsible, trustworthy or blameless, s/he has to present the organization this way to others. The burden of acting positively while hiding or suppressing even small bits of ones own negative evaluation of the organization takes an emotional toll.

Psychological exposure and threats to self-esteem

When brandividuals meet stakeholders face to face, they may be treated with scorn and derision as stakeholders make the brandividual the target of their anger. It’s hard for the individual to avoid internalizing the negative reactions they experience from angry stakeholders and start to see themselves in a negative light.

Threats to personal self-efficacy

Being a brandividual puts you in a place where you can represent the organization, but it doesn’t necessarily put the individual in a place where s/he can resolve the problem. Imagine having to apologize over and over again, and make promises over and over again, when you can’t control whether these promises will be fulfilled?

A damaged personal reputation, emotional burnout, threatened self-esteem, and a diminished sense of personal power don’t seem like much of a reward for taking on the brandividual role for BP.

Why might someone (like Darryl Willis) take on BP’s Brandividual role in spite of these potential costs?

Strong identification with company?

The brandividual may have so much of himself invested in the organizaiton that he doesn’t distinguish personal harm/benefit from the organization’s harm/benefit. He may think that, by serving as the person who apologizes, he’s actually getting the organization to apologize.

Self-esteem of steel?

The brandividual may simply be superhuman, able to withstand the emotional and psychological toll of this negative role. Or, through a related psychological mechanism, the brandividual may not care that much about his personal reputation among this particular (in this case, national) audience. He may have compartmentalized his reputations, and may be able to protect the more important personal reputation.

Career Opportunity?

The brandividual may make a deal with the devil, and take on this role as a way to advance his career.

Nothing says “company man” like taking the flack for the organization’s criminality.

Chance to make a difference?

The brandividual may sincerely think that taking this role may give him the opportunity to make some kind of personal difference, some personal resolution to the crisis. The brandividuyal may think that s/he can invest the role with something special, something personal, that will shift the situation so that harm is reduced and some good is created.

What’s motivating BP’s Brandividual?

The optimist in me hopes that Willis has taken on this role because he sincerely believes he has a “chance to make a difference”.

Perhaps he thinks that, being on the side of paying out claims, he can be associated with the good feelings of helping Gulf residents in some small way. Maybe he can help with his human touch, with the connections between himself, his family, and the Gulf community.

Then again, maybe he’s just a kinder, gentler face attempting to shield us from the horror of BP’s Gulf Oil Spill.