There are many fledgling businesses that have laudable intent and shaky commercial foundations.  

This is a problem because, in an ideal world, the businesses that stand for values we share should also be able to sustain themselves as businesses. That’s the key premise underneath social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism.

Purpose-driven organizations need compelling values, but they also need coherent business models. 

People want to buy products that support values they believe in. To meet this consumer need, some businesses now make their values visible in their products and services, and sell them to customers who share those very values. 

But what happens when the values are more popular than the products, as with Holstee and their Holstee Manifesto? What kind of business can you create then?

This problem of organizations with compelling values that can’t seem to make a business out of them came to mind when a friend shared a Washington Post article about a company called Holstee.  Holstee is experiencing a somewhat dramatic version of this problem.

Holstee has a company values statement that people are crazy about and a business model that is underwhelming.

Who is Holstee?

Holstee is a Brooklyn-based, mostly e-commerce business that sells clothing and accessories described as “products with a conscience.” These products include upcycled wallets, t-shirts, messenger bags, and similar lifestyle items.

By designing and curating with a conscience, Holstee offers a place for mindful shoppers to find meaningful products.

However, Holstee doesn’t seem to support itself by selling these lifestyle products. Instead, Holstee supports itself by selling its actual values — The Holstee Manifesto — in the form of a poster.

The Holstee Manifesto

The Holstee Manifesto is the Holstee founders’ life vision put into words.  It’s been typeset and printed on high-quality paper stock, and is sold on the Holstee website.

The Holstee Manifesto is Holstee’s most popular product.

So far, the Manifesto has been viewed over 500 million times and translated into 12 languages. There are Flickr groups, Facebook conversations, and blog post after blog post focused on how inspiring the Holstee manifesto is. Holstee sold over 11,00 posters in 2011, at $25 a pop, and posters accounted for half of Holstee’s revenue in Nov. of 2011.

Holstee “isn’t a Manifesto Company”

In an interview in Inc. magazine, the founders explain that

“We’re not a manifesto company, whatever that would be. The success of the posters helped us bootstrap, but at the end of the day, we’re about products with a unique story that are designed with a conscience.”

I’d take those words at face value, if it wasn’t for Holstee’s second most popular product.²

Holstee’s “Lifecycle” video sets the Manifesto to evocative images and music. Released only three months ago (Nov 2011), the Lifecycle video has been viewed almost 900,000 times to date, and has inspired its own Tumblr.

Clearly, Holstee is putting time, money, creative energy, and not a little bit of love into sharing their Manifesto. Why, then, aren’t they a manifesto company?

Is Holstee a Manifesto Company?

If half of your revenue, the majority of your units sold, and 99% of your public’s awareness can be attributed to the manifesto you sell, aren’t you a manifesto company?

And, given the hundreds of companies that sell ethically-sourced, free trade, biodegradable t-shirts, isn’t there something neat about being the only one also selling a Manifesto?

In the words of Holstee’s founders,

We wrote a manifesto but we never wrote a business plan.

If that’s true, what does that tell the founders about what really matters to them, as a business?

Is there a business behind the values statement?

The 50 million and 900,000 views that the Manifesto is generating are telling Holstee that there is demand for the values in their Manifesto to be articulated, shared, and made visible.

But while the millions of views are good public relations, they aren’t helping Holstee they way(s) they could be, since   these page views aren’t making Holstee any money.

I don’t know how much non-manifesto merchandise Holstee is selling, but using sales from the Manifesto to bootstrap their non-manifesto product business suggests that the products are not selling enough to sustain the business on their own.¹

• Why does Holstee see their Manifesto as a short-term way to provide start-up capital (i. e., as bootstrapping) but not as a source of ongoing, growing revenue?
• Why hasn’t Holstee “productized” and monetized the Manifesto further?
• Why can’t people buy the Manifesto on mugs and mousepads?

Holstee is leaving a lot of money on the table.

When the posters of your values statement outsell your intended product line, you’ve got a business problem and a business opportunity. 

The market is telling Holstee something.

The market is telling Holstee that their values are more desired than their current products. And, the market is telling Holstee that it’s missing an opportunity to meet consumers’ needs and to build themselves a sustainable business by promoting the values in their manifesto.

Right now, Holstee doesn’t seem to have a business model that fully supports their values. They need to rethink their busiess plan, and they need to ask themselves what kind of business they are, and what kind of business they want to be.

A Lifestyle Products Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based purveyor of clothing and accessories “with a conscience”, they might focus on developing a product mix that conveys their values more prominently.

A Life Inspiration Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based organization devoted to inspiring individuals’ hopes and dreams for a meaningful life, they might look for different ways to convey the actual words of their Manifesto.

Can’t Holstee capitalize on people’s desire for inspiration? Look at all the “Keep Calm and ….” merchandise — all purchased by people who want a reminder of what’s important to them.

Maybe what consumers want is the most streamlined exchange possible, where they literally buy the meaning itself, so that the item on which the words are placed is largely irrelevant.

There’s nothing wrong with mousepads and mugs with inspiring words on them. Words printed on various everyday items aren’t any less noble or less impressive than t-shirts. They can all be made “with a conscience”.

What should Holstee do to match its business model and its values?

Should Holstee develop the organization’s capacity to translate their values into products so that the products are more meaningful?

Or, is it time for Holstee to pivot, and change their business model so that they are selling the values directly through words and images?

Either way, don’t you think that Holstee should do more with their Manifesto?

¹ I’m interpreting and opining based on publicly available information. There may be important details I don’t know about that would reshape the conversation. If so, I’d love to learn about them. Email me at cvharquail at authentic organizations dot com.
² Measured by page views.
Also, I hear from mutual friends that the Holstee founders are lovely people, which you’d expect given the ideas in the manifesto. 

See also:
Why Your Company Should Have A Social Mission, by Olivia Khalili at CauseCapitalism.com
Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose

Images: © Holstee and AllPosters

Hat tip: I was introduced to Holstee by @BrainPicker. I’ve been to their site to see what I could buy to support them, and I bought a poster that’s now on our refrigerator.

In my first contribution to Social Business News, I’m reminding organizations that want to align their social media messages to focus their efforts on leadership.

I find it pretty frustrating that so many social media advocates recommend “governance” or “policy” or “control” when an organization finds there are too many voices, not enough voices, or the “wrong” voices aiming to represent the organization online.

My post on Social Business News, “Too Many Wrong Messages On Social Media? Try Leadership, Not Control” outlines my argument and recommendations in full. Here’s the takeaway:

If employees are making “mistakes” on social media, that’s not the fault of the organization’s governance, but the fault of the organization’s leadership.

If your employees use social media to talk too much or not enough or not about the right things, that’s a leadership opportunity for you. Don’t concentrate on policing the perimeter with control tools and governance initiatives. Instead, lead from the core of your organization and help members learn to express the organization’s brand and demonstrate the organization’s values as they represent the organization.

 

________

Social Business News is a website dedicated to covering enterprise social media, collaboration, governance, technology, and change management. It’s updated every day with original content from a broad range of social media, social business and social organization experts.

Be sure to bookmark or get the RSS feed for Social Business News.

Follow us on Twitter @SocBizNews_.

Every organization has a story. Any group that wants to be an important part of that organization needs to craft a place for itself in that story.

The story an organization tells itself and shares with others helps everyone make sense of who the organization is. For members, the organization’s story helps them articulate their connection to the organization, because it explains how their work contributes to who the organization is and to why it exists.

Crafting a place in the organization’s story can be harder than it seems.  Especially in consumer-facing companies, groups that are not visible to consumers often fall outside of the story. Departments like Accounting, IT, HR, Facilities Management, et. al., are rarely part of the organization’s brand, and they are often distant from the core promise of who the organization is, what it does, and why.

 [When I worked in the manufacturing and sales divisions of a consumer products company, folks in both divisions felt like under-appreciated step-children. If you didn't work in marketing you weren't a full-fledged member of the organization, because only marketing was featured in the organization's story. ]

So how does a part of the organization that might not be seen as central to the organization’s purpose make itself part of the organization’s story?

The Software Engineering group at Etsy has what looks to be an effective way of connecting themselves to their company story. Their example shows how some clever and authentic self-description can knit a traditionally ‘backstage’ group into the main fabric of the organization’s identity.

Etsy’s Company Story

Etsy’s company story revolves around artisans, makers, crafters, and the community these artisans create with each other and with their customers. At Etsy¹:

Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers.

A company story about a marketplace for handmade and unique objects doesn’t seem like a story where software engineers could be lead characters.  Conventionally (meaning, outside Silicon Valley and Alley), software engineers work in the background, off to the side, in cost centers that support but don’t create the organization’s identity.

But at Etsy, engineers have cast themselves as craftspeople – as people who make a living making things — just like everyone else in the Etsy community. With their Code as Craft initiative, Etsy’s engineers have designed their group as a central, direct, and explicit contributor to Etsy’s mission and Etsy’s overall success.

The Code as Craft Initiative at Etsy

Back in June of 2010, the Etsy tech group launched a blog “Code as Craft” to focus and share their conversation about how the engineering group sees itself and how it fits with the larger Etsy community.  In the inaugural blog post, Etsy CTO (now CEO) Chad Dickerson explained:

At Etsy, our mission is to enable people to make a living making things. The engineers who make Etsy make our living making something we love: software. We think of our code as craft — hence the name of the blog.

It sounds a bit over-reaching, until you realize that the Esty Engineers’ Code as Craft initiative based in something real.

Genuine, not fake.  The language of “Code as Craft” captures and highlights something that is already true, indigenous and authentic about software engineering. Just as light is both wave and particle, software design is both mechanical and organic.

The “Code as Craft” movement /meme has been around since the dawn of computing. While mathematical rigor, linearity, discipline, and a mechanistic orientation might characterize how outsiders see software engineering, engineers themselves see this and more. They see themselves as artisans exercising skill, judgment, taste and creativity.

The computer technology folks aren’t over-reaching posers for calling themselves craftspeople. Their sense of themselves as crafters and their work as craft is real, rooted in years of professional self-description. The Code as Craft language may be strategic, but it is also a very simple act of engineers’ highlighting the part of their work that they choose to identify with most. In the Etsy environment, engineers are artisans whose work is simultaneously functional and beautiful.

Chosen, Not Imposed.   Etsy’s software engineers chose the language of craft themselves. The language wasn’t imposed on them by someone else in the organization trying to fit them into a tidy little box.

You might think it’s just a nice coincidence that software engineering would have words like ‘art’, ‘craft’, and ‘beauty’ in its toolbox of self-description, and that software engineers would be critical for enabling Etsy’s code- and data-heavy business model. But while there many organizations like Etsy that couldn’t exist without a cadre of software engineers, for these same companies words like ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘beauty’ are irrelevant to the company story.

For Engineers at Etsy, describing themselves as crafters isn’t a coincidence, but a leadership choice.

Craft Connects Coders to Etsy’s Other Crafters

At Etsy, engineers striving for improved run times and multi-layer design compliance can use the same words — craft, crafting, craftsperson — to describe their work as do the artisans making sweet mouse pincushions.

The shared vocabulary literally helps them communicate across differences that in other organizations could be barriers.  Moreover, shared language helps vendors, marketers and engineers see each other and recognize what each group is contributing, because they can use criteria that everyone understands.

Whether rendered in colors, textures or command lines, skill and beauty can be recognized by any craftsperson.

By connecting their discipline and their department to Etsy’s core story about “making things”, the Code as Craft initiative presents engineers as central and  relevant contributors to Etsy’s purpose. As a result, engineers can be recognized, affirmed and appreciated by other members of the Etsy’ community, who share the values and skills as craftspeople, albeit in different media.

Craft Connects Coders to Etsy’s External Role and Image

Engineers’ link to the company story is also useful outside the organization. Because they are crafters, Etsy engineers can represent Etsy and its company story to outsiders, not just other crafters but also the start-up community and the software engineering community.

For years, Etsy’s Community & Education group has been hosting regular after-hours Craft Nights at the Etsy Labs. Artisans come to learn and and share techniques for making products. With the advent of the Code as Craft initiative, Etsy’s engineering community has begun hosting occasional “Code as Craft” nights at Etsy Labs, where members of the tech community can come to learn and share techniques for running websites.  (Even better, the engineering group holds these events in a room lined with bins of sewing machines and fabric scraps, and feels perfectly at home.)

Their position as crafters helps the Etsy Engineers become both like other crafters in the Etsy community, and distinct from other software engineers in the tech start-up community. Etsy’s crafty coders become “optimally distinctive” — the same and special, at once.

Enabling, Engaging and Contributing as Crafters

The Code as Craft initiative is a way of embedding the professional brand within the organization’s brand to the benefit of both — like employee branding from the inside out.

What I like the most about the Code as Craft initiative at Etsy is the way that it invites engineers to contribute — from their uniqueness  — at their highest level. Code as Craft recognizes a specific part of a software engineer’s (potential) professional identity — the skilled craftsperson.  It engages that identity by inviting engineers to speak in the craftsperson’s vernacular, allowing them to communicate more easily within the Etsy crafting community. It puts their work right at the heart of the organization’s purpose — making a living making things — and aligns them with Etsy’s goals.

When we can craft our place in the organization’s story, we can create an authentic connection to who the organization is, what it does, and why that matters. That connection makes our work relevant and imbues our contributions with meaning.

See also:
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Be Your Own Hashtag
The “New” Crisis of Meaning?
Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand

Images:
Mouse with felt ears, from July 2011 Craft Lab, by thelongthread.com
I Love Etsy from amazingminiatures.com  

¹ It turns out that identifying Etsy’s current mission statement is harder than you’d think. More on that in a future post.

There’s a great photo in the New York Times (May 19, 2011) of a whitepaper chart created to manage the Delta-Northwest Merger’s Long and Complex Path.

The chart is full of of post-its, probably more than 200 of them. Each post-it reflects a point where the systems and processes of the organizations need to be integrated, and the assorted colors represent the type of operational system where the integration task is to be solved.

Notwithstanding the low tech-ness of their process, this post-it chart is an amazing view of what it takes to put together two very different, very distinctive companies.

One Post-It = Two Different Cultural Expressions

Each post-it note reflects not only an integration task, but a point where the cultures and identities of these two companies are made concrete. Each post-it shows a place where the culture of one organization is different from the culture of the other. To resolve each of these integration tasks, the merger team has to decide which behavior, which system and which characteristic with be chosen for the ‘new’ merged culture, and which behaviors, systems and characteristics will be rejected.

While one spokesperson notes that these amount of work to resolve these details is ‘boring’, I see it as rather fascinating. That’s because opportunities for the merger team to create a distinctive, merged organizational culture exist at each of these points. The merger team needs to chose one concrete expression over the other.

What matters is not only which behavior is chosen, but also why it is chosen, and what that behavior is supposed to express.

Take this very subtle distinction, from Jad Mouawad’s detailed article:

Delta always thought of itself as the gracious host. Hence its flight attendants poured the requested drinks.

Northwest was the practical carrier; its attendants just handed over the can.

Distinctiveness => “Signature Moves”

When I talk with organizations about how they demonstrate what makes them distinctive, I often mention the concept of a ‘signature move’.

A signature move is a behavior that demonstrates — through its particular style– a quality that is important to how the organization defines itself.

The beverage delivery gesture is a perfect example– the same task, “delivering a beverage” is performed differently. And at each organization, that slightly different performance communicates something deeper and more meaningful about who the organization really understands itself to be.

These differences in ‘who the organizations are’ reflect how the carriers hoped (at one time) to differentiate themselves from each other and create a competitive advantage in the eyes of potential customers.

In the ideal airline industry …

Ideally, some customers would prefer the gracious culture of Delta, while others would prefer the practical culture of Northwest, all because the concepts of “gracious” and “practical” were concretely expressed in authentic behaviors by the organization and its representatives.

These signature moves, demonstrated throughout the organization, construct the distinctive identity that should differentiate the firm from competitors.

In a world where airtravel customers felt that they had positive reasons to choose one airline over another, the cumulative distinctions created by these different behaviors could have created a competitive advantage for one airline over the other.

In the actual airline industry…

However, in customers’ practical experience of these airlines, the subtle differences in style and culture were overwhelmed by the profound and disappointing similarity of bad service at both airlines. Neither the graciousness of Delta nor the practicality of Northwest made enough of a difference to set either organization apart as distinctive.

Which, of course, points to the weakness of depending on distinctiveness alone to make your organization competitive or attractive.  Distinctiveness only matters if you can deliver a decent product or service. The details matter, certainly, but only once the core business is competent.

See also:
Beyond Positioning: Establishing Authentic Optimal Distinctiveness

Is Authenticity the key to being “Meaningfully Different”?

Snippet of image by Seth W. Feaster/The New York TImes, in its full glory at The New York Times.

It’s easy to see how Employer Branding is useful to HR departments and potential job applicants.

Employer Branding, the practice of marketing images of your organization as a desirable place to work towards potential job applicants, is a sensible strategy for attracting the right people onto your bus (-iness).

Employer Branding works to draw to an organization the kind of people the organization wants to hire, by making the organization look like it has specific, compelling, desirable characteristics.

Promoting an idealized or crystallized view of “what it’s like to work here”, organizations and their HR departments hope to increase applicants, reduce recruiting inefficiencies, improve yield, and keep employees longer, all because these new employees experience improved person-organization /employee-employer fit.

Sounds good for HR, sounds good for potential employees.

And, although it is designed to attract future employees, Employee Branding also has a few benefits for current employees.

3 Ways Employer Branding Can Benefit Current Employees

l. The Employer Brand may bring new insight to key managers.

An Employer Branding campaign requires someone in the organization to spend time thinking about “what it’s like to work here” from the employees’ point of view.

Taking the employees’ perspective (however briefly and instrumentally) may give managers and HR departments new insights about the everyday experiences of organization members. These new insights might inspire managers to systematize, reinforce or change the environment at work to make the environment more attractive.

2. The Employer Brand may trigger sense-making and action by current employees.

The messages of an Employee Branding campaign are seen not only by outside, potential employees but also by inside, current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can create an opportunity for people in the organization to talk with each other about what their organization is like as an employer. Conversations about the Employer Brand might address questions like ” Is this what its like to work here?” and “How can we work together to make this environment more like that idealized picture?”

An uptick in awareness, the invitation to consider the Employer Brand, and the opportunity to talk about it together might lead employees to reinforce and/or improve the organizational environment themselves.

3. The Employer Brand can improve the contributions of new employees to the experience of current employees.

The Employer Brand can help draw the ‘right kind’ of coworkers into the organization, reinforcing the desirable elements of the work environment and helping to fulfill the promise of ‘the brand’ for current and new employees alike.

Of course, the Employer Brand can only have these positive effects if it is somewhat true and reasonably credible. An Employer Brand made up of unreal claims, however desirable these claims may be, would only create disappointment and resentment among current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can help a current employee these three ways, as long as the current employee has a good personal fit with the desired, projected Employer Brand.

Bonus Benefit if you don’t fit

And for the employee who doesn’t fit the work context of this projected Employer Brand?

There’s still a positive influence. The Employer Branding campaign may help that current employee realize that this organization really *isn’t* a good fit, and inspire the employee to look for a different employer, an organization that has a better fit with his or her own values and needs.

See also:

Images:
GoodFitting When Fastened, and CloseUp Some rights reserved by Lee Turner on Flickr

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.

• Systems of Engagement: Technology for Social Organizations
• Networks and the Myth that Flatter Organizations are Better
• Networks and The Myth of Flattening Organizations

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

• Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
• When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?

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.

• How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
• Active Lurkers: How Idea Lovecats Demonstrate Engagement
• Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand
• What’s your *personal* ROI as a Brandividual?
• Insights about Authenticity from the Open Community Book Tour
• Jews and Social Media: Aligned values reinforce an Authentic strategy

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

• Your Authentic Social Network: The Identity Graph
• Be Your Own Hashtag
• Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be
• How Social Media Reveals Invisible Work

and as organizations.

• 7 Tips for Rendering Authenticity Through Social Media
• The Best PR that $1.6 Million Can’t Buy: Authenticity in Action at Zappos
• Logos, Browsers, Brand Identity, and What You Value
• Beyond an Online Dress Code: A ‘Look Code’ for Work Avatars & Employee Branding
• Representing your organization on Twitter: A Logo or a Face?

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

• Action Branding: Using activity streams to authenticate identity claims
• Authenticity: Is there an app for that?

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.

• 3 Reasons Why Employee Engagement is a Scam
• 7 Core Principles for Authentic Engagement
• When Brandividuals Violate Organizational Reputation
• Social Media Risks: Restoring trust when your brand mascot is a killer (whale)

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

• Authentic Organizations communicate in their own special way(s)
• Facebook for Women vs. Facebook Designed by Feminists: Different vs. Revolutionary
• If Women Had Designed Facebook

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

• Use Extreme Leverage 2.0 to Change The Social World
• Why Women DON’T Rule the Internet

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,

• Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations
• Social Media, False Urgency & Anywhen: Chris Brogan shows how to improve your Work-Life Fit
• Work-Life Fit is an Enterprise 2.0 Solution

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

• Misleading Image for Army: New York Times, PowerPoint and Complexity Fail
• Are Online Surveys Making Us Stupid?

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!

Action Branding is the concept that brands are the sum of their actions.

– Extending this concept to personal brands and organizational brands, action branding helps individuals and organizations demonstrate, and thus authenticate, the character, values and purpose they claim to have.

– Social media creates opportunities for individuals and organizations to track, organize and display their ‘activity streams’ so that others can construe the person or organization’s identity from their actual behaviors.

Too much of what constitutes a “brand” is fake.

Most of a product’s brand is a fiction. It’s a social construction. You learned that in Marketing 101.

Brands are claims built on top of a product’s material features and attributes. Brands are claims that marketers want us to believe; when we believe these claims we make the claims and the brands they compose more or less “real”.

Still, in a consumerist culture, we’re generally aware and okay with the idea that our product brands are created largely to sell products, and not so much to reflect the inherent qualities of the product itself.

Personal Brands and Organizational Brands

When we apply the concept of “brand” to individuals and to organizations, we can run into trouble. When we replace concepts like “reputation” and “image” with “brand”, we highlight the question of whether the claims that compose these brands are authentic or not.

We know that people and organizations are “real”, but we are left to wonder whether their brands — their claims about “who they are” — actually represent what defines them. This question of how ‘real’ these brands are gets raised over and over on social media.

Social media provides individuals and organizations with a huge array of places and formats for telling us who they are. On Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and more, we use profile pictures, self-descriptions, “likes” and dislikes, and other forms of self-presentation to claim and declare who we are.

How do we know whether these declared personal brands and organizational brands are real?

To figure out whether claims and declarations are real, we try to authenticate and substantiate these claims.

Authenticating is the process of establishing the origin or ownership of a quality to confirm that this quality exists. We want to know where that quality comes from, as a way to make sure that it is inherent in the person or organization, rather than just pasted on it.

Substantiating is the process of finding the substance, the material support, behind a claim about identity. We want proof that this quality exists.

We prove who we are by what we do.

When we want to authenticate or substantiate an individual or organization’s identity claims, we look at their actions. And, when individuals and organizations want to make their claims real, they turn to behavior to show us.

Just think of the words that social psychologists use to describe how we create and substantiate our individual identities: We express. We demonstrate. We perform. We enact.

In short, we behave like the people we say we are.

Social Media => Activity Streams

Social media creates new opportunities for us to demonstrate, track, aggregate, and display these actions, through our online “activity streams”.

A person’s activity stream, technically, is the confluence of many different sequences of activity-related data that a person publishes on an assortment of different work, social and personal platforms. When/if aggregated, either formally by a service or informally by someone simply paying attention to that individual, that activity stream tells us what you’re doing, often with whom, and often why, giving us a sense who you are based on what you do.

Activity Streams => Action Branding

Using activity streams made visible on social media, individuals and organizations can engage in “action branding.” They can create a more substantiated, authentic ‘brand’ by building a sense of who they are that is crafted as much by actions as by declarations and claims.

The actions people see on our activity streams, as captured by different media platforms, provide information for substantiating and authenticating identity claims.

• On platforms like Twitter, individuals can share what they’re thinking, offer their reactions, recommend resources, and engage in conversations with others in ways that demonstrate what they are paying attention to and even what they’re doing.

• On platforms like Hashable, individuals can track and then display who they’re meeting with, what they’re doing, and why, using activity hashtags (e.g., #meeting) as well as project hashtags (e.g., #morevoices).

• On other platforms like IfWeRanTheWorld and MyImpact.org , individuals can direct, organize and display project-related micro-actions where they are actively contributing support for cause they care about. Both of these sites are intentionally designed to allow individuals and organizations to display their actions to others with a composite personal profile as an as an activity stream.

Action Branding Defined & Demonstrated

Action branding as a business tool is the brainchild of Cindy Gallop, CEO & Founder of IfWeRanTheWorld. Cindy drew on her insights about what’s missing from traditional approaches to branding to build a social media platform that aggregates individual and organizational actions that advance values-driven projects,   IfWeRanTheWorld creates a place where individuals and brands (and the organizations that own the brands) can demonstrate the attributes and values that they claim to have, by organizing, recording and displaying the actions that they take to make these claims real.

As Gallop describes action branding:

“It’s not about saying but doing. It’s not about telling but being. It’s communication by demonstration.”

This business insight is supported not only by basic social science about identity and image creation, but also by our common experience of presentation and authentication.

• An organization’s “brand” or identity or image is anchored in the human attributes of organization members, in the organization’s collective values & goals, and in that organization’s routines and practices.
• An individual’s “brand” or reputation or image is anchored in his or her human attributes, values & goals, ways of being, and actions.

For individuals and organizations, the authenticity challenge is to demonstrate that your claims about who you are are borne out by the actions that you take.

Action branding holds us to a higher level of accountability, and brings along with it a firmer sense of authenticity.

See also:
Activity Streams: Moving Beyond Event Aggregation by Mike Gotta
Datum iPhone App turns your daily routines into visual report cards FastCompany

Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld
Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand
When the Organization Wears its Brand

MyImpact.org IfWeRanTheWorld

Images: Tracks from Doug McG. Fingerprints (page 12-13) -…from atibens Prints from qmnonic

Every organization needs to establish optimal distinctiveness – a competitive position within your field, where you are similar enough to other organizations to be seen as legitimate, but different enough that you’re seen as having something unique to offer.  But, optimal distinctiveness is more than being in a competitive place in your field.

Optimal distinctiveness means having a competitive position of similarity and difference that is anchored in the organization’s identity.

While optimal distinctiveness depends on knowing of your competition, it also depends on knowing your organization and what’s built in to who you are. When an organization can link its competitive positioning in the marketplace to the very features that define the organization for its members, its claims to distinctiveness are authentic.

Establishing Optimal Distinctiveness: Positioning plus Anchoring

Establishing optimal distinctiveness requires your organization to work in two directions. You must:

1. Position your organization in the marketplace
by comparing your organization to other organizations to see where you stand out, and then matching this to customer needs

2. Anchor your organizations position in your organization’s identity,
by recognizing and understanding unique characteristics that are indigenous to the organization itself, and linking these to claims of distinctiveness

Positioning: Your Place vs. Your Competition

Most people assume that you can find optimal distinctiveness simply through the process of positioning. Positioning is a marketing activity where you orchestrate perceptions of what your organization has to offer so that you occupy a valued place in the customer’s mind relative to competitive offerings. A product, service or organization can be positioned on the basis of an attribute or benefit, a user niche, class, price, quality, purpose, etc.

Positioning traditionally focuses on finding an attractive place in a competitive field. We consider what other organizations offer and what customers & clients want, and use this external information to find a definition or image for our organization that is attractive, competitive, and unique. We aim to be the one and only organization able to offer what we offer.

Positioning is not enough for optimal distinctiveness, though, because an organization needs to be able to substantiate its claims to be unique. The organization has to be able to explain where its uniqueness comes from and demonstrate that this uniqueness has a sustainable source in the organization’s core character. It has to anchor its claims in real features of the organization.

Anchoring: Grounding Optimal Distinctiveness in Organizational Identity

“Who you are” as an organization is your organizational identity. Organizational identity is the set of core, enduring and distinct attributes that define an organization for its members. The ‘core’ and ‘enduring’ elements refer to the idea that these attributes are foundational to the organization and more important than other attributes. The ‘distinctive’ element refers to the idea that this set of attributes defines one and only one organization.

To anchor any claims to be distinctive, an organization has to look deeper into itself to answer the question:

“What is indigenous to this organization that explains what we do, what we value, and what our goals are?”

These indigenous features could appear in the organization’s past, in its history, the founders’ personalities, mythical stories, and narratives. These features can appear in the present as organizational practices, routines, and capabilities, and as the organization’s perception of its best collective self. And, these features can appear in the future, in the form of the organization’s vision or aspirational ideal self.

When an organization is able to anchor its claims to be one way or another in actual features of its organizational identity, it demonstrates to its stakeholders that these claims are authentic—they have an actual source in the organization. They aren’t made up, or invented just so that the organization looks good. They are real. Anchoring claims of distinctiveness to the organization’s identity also demonstrates that this distinctiveness is sustainable. The organization controls the source of this distinctiveness and can continue to produce the same distinctiveness over and over.

Navel-gazing vs. Anchoring

Many managers think that crafting their organization’s market position is all they need to do to set their organization apart from others, to be distinctive, and to be competitive. Managers feel reasonably comfortable spending time on positioning, since everyone knows that marketing is important.

However, many managers think that focusing internally, on the organization’s indigenous characteristics, is not worth their time. It’s too touchy-feely, too much ‘navel gazing’, too much reflection.

What these managers fail to understand is that positioning an organization without anchoring that position in the organization’s actual identity ends up creating a façade—and an untrustworthy one at that.

A distinctive, competitive position in the marketplace is only “optimal” if it is authentic. To establish optimal distinctiveness, the organization’s market position must must be anchored in the organization’s core, enduring and distinctive identity.

By anchoring your organization’s position in the the marketplace in your organization’s identity, you establish an optimal distinctiveness that allows your organization to adapt to its different competitive contexts while upholding, confirming and sustaining who it is and what really makes it powerful.

See also: Can an organization be too different?: The Strategic Value of Optimal Distinctiveness

Images from Flickr: Dandelion collage from robynejay Dandelion from Anja Jonsson

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:

1. formal corporate communication,
2. advertising (either for products or for corporate), and
3. 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

Do you ever have a good idea, but find yourself unable to execute it fully because the technology simply isn’t available? And, then, just a few short years later the technology appears and you squeal “Where Have You Been All My LIFE!”?

I’ve been having that relationship with the concept of hashtags.

A hashtag is a keyword, indicated by a hash symbol # that anchors the keyword to other information (in the manner of a bookmark) and allows that information to be searched and found by other people. Hashtags are metadata — data about data– that help us recall, locate, filter, and aggregate more granular data. The hashtag #favoritejaneaustenquotes helps you find any tweet in which someone mentions– you guessed it– her favorite Jane Austen quote.

With hashtags, you can find blog posts, tweets, and all manner of online data related to the idea captured by the hashtag. You can see who’s talking about something, what they are saying, and what it means to them.

Hashtags make conversations searchable — in real time, and historically. Hashtags also help us find other people who are interested in the same ideas.

Hashtags cohere conversations on social networks (like twitter) since people can locate, watch, and contribute to conversations by using the relevant hashtag(s). (A great example of the is #prstudchat – a weekly conversation for students of public relations.)

What are Hashtags really for?

Back in November of 2009, Baratunde Thurston shared a funny and provocative presentation at the Web 2.0 NY Expo: “There’s a #Hashtag for That.” Baratunde was riffing on the fun people have creating satirical hashtags and corresponding Twitter accounts (e.g., @swineflu, #swineflu) and using these as memes to provoke creativity,  commentary and conversation across Twitter.

When I watched Baratunde’s talk, I wondered:

– What if we each had our own hashtag? Not a satirical one, but an authentic hashtag?
– What if we created and routinely used a hashtags to capture and communicate who we were, and what we cared about?
– What if we intentionally used these hashtags to communicate not only to other people, but also back to ourselves?

In addition to being meta-data that tell us what’s going on where, hashtags can also work at the personal, cognitive level.   Online in the digital world, hashtags can work like mantras — like those words we choose each January to help us focus our goals for the year. As simple short reminders, hashtags can help us focus our efforts. Hashtags can help our selves pay attention. Hashtags can remind us what is important.

How can we use hashtags as tools for our “selves”?

We can also use hashtags as more than reminders of features, ideas, topics, attributes, sentiments and/or actions. We can actually use hashtags to create meaning, individually and collectively. Here’s how.

Hashtags Help Us Name “It”.
When you give a feature, idea, topic, attribute, sentiment and/or action an name, you make that thing visible to yourself and others. You show yourself and others that the concept exists. You create meaning by naming something previously unnamed.

For example, there’s an experience/sentiment that I have often, that doesn’t have a name. I’m currently on the hunt for a descriptive & evocative hashtag to capture it.
“It”, right now, is “ the experience of having linked/pinged/interacted digitally with ____, so that I now have an energy surge of purpose and support. “ Now that I’ve described this experience, you can recognize it. But if I could name it by hashtagging it, we could do even more with the concept.

Hashtags Help Us Claim It.
When we use a hashtag, we can make that thing our own. We can use the hashtag to note for ourselves (and others) every time that we’re feeling it, doing it, sending it, verbing it. And, when we attach a hashtag to our communications and our actions, we help people understand what we are experiencing, what we are trying to convey, and that this matters to us.

Hashtags Help Us Fame It.
When we use a hashtag, we not only name (capture) and claim (attach to us) a concept, we are also then able to promote that idea. We can share the idea, we can propagate the idea, and we can meme the idea.

You may not have thought of “the experience of having linked/pinged/interacted digitally with ____, so that I now have an energy surge of purpose and support” but as soon as I have a good hashtag and use it, you can spread that idea wherever you want. Because we’ll all be able to recognize it and share it.

Being a Hashtag

Naming, claiming and faming are all good — but they do not quite make the idea a part of you. To do that you actually have to “be” the hashtag. You have to take the whole idea one step further into your self.

To “Be” a Hashtag you have to activate it– you have to make that idea real in your words and your actions.

We may actively try to be or do something that’s important to us, without getting the kind of response we hope for. Even though we think actions speak louder than words, those actions aren’t always easy to interpret. When you use a hashtag next to an action, you give other people the meta-data to understand what you are doing.

• Why do you keep tweeting about getting women on tech panels?
  Because you are all about #morevoices.
• What are these ten quotes about honesty?
  You are reminding yourself (and us) that you’re working to be your #trueself.
• Why have you just sent a #ThursdayTxs to that follower?
  Because you care about being @thoughtful, and you are showing this in your action.

In your relationships with others, being a hashtag makes your actions easier to interpret. You are more effective (especially with people who don’t know you well), because people know how to see you. You are more trustworthy, because people can see what you do and what you mean, and they know they can count on you for this.

Even more important, being a hashtag helps you enact that quality, that idea, more often. And the more often you enact it, the more it becomes a part of you. The more you “be” it, the more you become it.

I had a very busy session online this afternoon between a school play and a conference call, where for forty minutes or so I was tweeting and emailing four different tweeple about three different projects. With each interaction, I was _having_ “it”:   “the experience of having linked/pinged/interacted digitally with ____, so that I now have an energy surge of purpose and support”.

But even better I was _being_ “it” — I was giving it back. I was intentionally responding to my colleagues in a way that sent “the energy of purpose and support” out to them and right back to me. And it was great.

And it was “me” — doing what’s important to me.

Now, if only I could find a hashtag for that.

Images:What the Heck is a #Hashtag & 3 Steps to Set Up Your Own Hashtag, Hashtag Heart by Drew Olanoff on Flickr