Catharine Fennell, President, Market Yourself Smarter
chats with Barry Libert
Co-CEO Mzinga; Co-Author, We Are Smarter Than Me
about The Power of We
You co-wrote this terrific book, We Are Smarter Than Me, about community which was the #6 Editors Choice on Amazon's 2007 Best Business Book list. In this book you talk about unleashing the power of crowds in your business. What does this mean and how does community benefit businesses?
Harness the wisdom, intellect and passion of external and internal communities to help you improve your company, its products, services and its processes.
What advice do you give Employers looking to adopt community best practices?
Let go of control. The more you give up, the more you get in return.
The biggest thing that I have learned in life is the harder I hold on to things, the harder it becomes for me....the more I let go, the more I give them
Are companies still resisting online community building and open source technologies for communicating and sharing ideas? Why?
Many more than I can count!! The minority-- early adopters that we worked with accepted the premise that if they shared, they got back in spades, many times over, what they put out.
If you share - become naked, transparent and open-- you will be more profitable and you will build better, stronger and more long-standing relationships with your employees and your other stakeholders.
This is an important message to get out to Employers. We need to share the wisdom.
Once businesses accept the premise that they are living in a flat and connected world-- and their product is not actually unique (in most cases) -- the way to ensure you are successful is to share your needs with your community of investors, prospects, customers, employees and prospective customers, prospects, employees, investors etc.
So, what we learned...
In employing the community building process in the writing of this book, we learned many lessons. Most importantly we realized that every time we would forced our way in, they
The 5 rules of successful community building
1. Find a process (product or service) you want to reinvent
2. Identify a group of people who want to change the process with you
3. Give them the tools and support that they need
4. Accept their wisdom
5. Measure the crowd contribution and 'our' contribution-- have to be a giver and a taker (not just a taker)
Are Employers fearing that social networking on company time is going to reduce productivity? If so, how do you respond to this?
Oh yes! Companies are really fighting about it. To this I always say that the great rules that we teach our employees MUST STAY IN TACT.
1. Keep your head down
2. Take no risks
3. All good deeds go fully punished
Let's make sure our Employees keep their heads down and don't learn anything new. That ain't a sharing environment and I’ll bet they won't have very many customers once the day is done.
For the employee who is levering these social networking tools, what advice would you give them in how to best employ them to market themselves smarter?
Most people know how to network in traditional settings like a networking event, a luncheon, a business meeting, but the next step is to learn how to use today's technology (Linked In, Plaxo, Facebook etc.) to extend the richness of (not replace) today's conversations.
