My first taker was Russ Somers, the Director of Marketing for local video commerce startup Invodo. First, to familiarize you with the value proposition that Invodo offers, here is an excerpt from their What We Do page:

Invodo helps businesses sell more online through the power of video. We improve the way online retailers sell, brands communicate product value, and consumers shop.

This excerpt is very much in line with how Russ described the company to me (guess who managed website messaging?). During our discussion, however, Russ elaborated, “Our goal is to bring the visuals and the experience of a live retail environment to you via eCommerce. Since visuals are an an important component of that experience, video is the natural answer.”

Based on those two statements alone, you can start to imagine the possibilities of how the company’s services and technologies can really impact online sales. If you can’t see the product firsthand, how about a 3-D treatment that allows you to view from any angle? Or maybe a quick overview of the benefits and key features of the product? What if the speaker on the video just so happens to be part of the target demographic? I guess you can tell I think they are onto something here.

With a clear understanding of the offering, I was interested in hearing why Russ enjoys working at Invodo so much.

Cultural Intangibles

Russ outlined the company’s cultural mantras, and I must say, they were great! The leadership team is focused on creating careers for the employees, evangelizing the idea that this not merely a “stop” on your path to greatness. Specifically, he shared several key operating principles that the company stands for (paraphrased in my own words):

• Customers First
• Our Team Rocks
• Humans Not Resources
• Build an Amazing Company

My initial thought was, “What a company!” Of course, every great company finds a way to keep the customers happy. If that’s not part of the mission, the risk of failure is much higher, right? The rest of the concepts, though, are excellent. “Our Team Rocks” is about establishing pride and camaraderie among the employees. Some companies use the family analogy, but Invodo cuts straight to the point. Russ shared some nice stories about the whole team pitching in on all sorts of things in the early days (e.g. moving several large appliances over a weekend, where nearly everyone showed up to help).

I must say, though, “Humans, not resources” really piqued my interest. You see, I’ve always taken issue with the phrase “Human Resources”. The term is rather dehumanizing, grouping you and me together with things like computers, machinery, and materials used for manufacturing products. Invodo got it right…we’re all people who deserve equal respect regardless of position, experience, etc.

Cover via Amazon

Building a Great Company is something that all leadership teams want, but not all are able to sell properly to the entire company. The above mantras surely help set them

up for success with this objective, as does the fact that they encourage their employees to read the classic business book Good to Great. If you haven’t read it yourself, I strongly encourage you to do so.

Finally, Russ made it clear that the whole company embraces Austin as a city. “Quirky” was a word he used for something they consider a part of the company as well as the city. I must say, I’m in complete agreement!

After a nice walk through of Invodo, we delved into some other topics of interest.

Online vs. Offline vs. Mobile

I have very strong opinions about where I think the various mediums should interplay. When I asked Russ about his take, we generally agreed. Online will continue to be online, albeit with improvements such as the Invodo offering to help improve the experience. On the other hand, offline and mobile are due to merge in the future, at least partially if not completely. Geo-based social media services have opened a lot of doors that we are only beginning to peek through, and with the growing popularity of QR codes, you can now integrate all three touchpoints in new and different ways.

Social Media: Where Is It Heading?

In digging into one of my favorite topics, social media, I learned that Russ is truly “old school”. He was getting social on usenet groups before many of today’s adults were even exposed to the Internet! Heck, I’ve been online for years and he even beat me to it. Impressive, to say the least.

We both agreed that we are already in a period focused on content. The phrase “content economy” came up at least a couple of times. What does that mean? Ask Demand Media if you’re unsure of what to think. They’ve just lined up 151M reasons to believe in the content economy.

We discussed newcomer Quora briefly, and both agreed that it really needs some structure introduced into the experience. While it is great to get answers to questions from heavy hitters like Evan Williams of Twitter, finding it can be a challenge. I asked Russ if he thought a service like Quora might threaten blogging, and he didn’t buy it. His great analogy was that a blog is like your “home base”, while all the other social sites are great ways to extend the conversation. I must say, we were in complete agreement.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the visit with Russ Somers. He had great insights and is a generally interesting guy. I wish both Russ and Invodo the best of luck in their ongoing endeavors.

Now a question for you – Who in Austin do you think would make a good interviewee for Return On Now? I already have quite a few folks in mind, but I want to hear from my readers directly. Thanks for reading!

Related articles

• Invodo Video Player Adds HTML5 and Sharing (austinstartup.com)
• Invodo Driving Higher Conversion Rates at Golfsmith.com (austinstartup.com)
• Invodo and Digby Team Up (austinstartup.com)
• eCommerce Video Trends To Watch In 2011 (reelseo.com)
• Quora – Your next information destination? (trak.in)

Tired or not, it is still absolutely a fact. Thought leaders spend unbelievable time and effort trying to hammer home this message in an online context, wrapping words like social networking, social media, social graph, and other terms around it in hopes of getting the message across.

The problem? Well, there is a forest, and there are some trees, but are they one and the same? Not really…

Social Networking vs. Social Media

First let’s draw lines between a couple of terms that I see being used interchangeably far too often. My loose definitions read something like this:

Social Networking

The act of reaching out to and engaging others via whatever means possible, including social media, traditional media, real-time communications vehicles (phone, SMS), or even an in-person conversation (remember those?).

Social Media

The category term for data-driven services and tools, typically delivered over the Internet, that enable networking of various types by providing new and novel communications capabilities, leading to unique ways of sharing and spreading messages with your network.

Social Networking = Networking

Social Networking: Get Out There And Meet Someone

Bear with me for a moment as I explain the thinking on this one. I’m positing that Social Networking is nothing new. In fact it’s simply old fashioned networking, with new communications vehicles available for the exchange of information and referrals.

At the end of the day, we are still people with real-world needs. This isn’t just about the “must haves” from Maslow’s Triangle either. We get our food, shelter, etc. (the basics) handled offline with our day-to-day lives. But all of that stuff about self-actualization, spiritual growth, career progression, etc. take much more than us working hard during the day and cashing checks for our time and effort.

Now we just have limitless opportunity to expand the “who” in our analogy above. The days are over where your only networking option was to go one of to those awful events where a bunch of Type A exec-wannabes are running around in Dockers, with their hand extended to shake yours, and a business card waiting to be shoved into your pocket in the other hand. Or where you had to arrange your schedule around an event where a thought leader is speaking, just so you can wait in line to guffaw over them and hope you don’t look like a dopey (or creepy) stalker-in-waiting.

Now we can build rapport with anyone that makes him- or herself available. We can establish mutual interest, trust, even schedule availability to meet in real-time.

And once we meet, we already have a foundation upon which to spark interesting conversation. I must say, any introverts who aren’t rejoicing at this newfound way to “come out of their shell” are simply missing the big picture!

New Tools; Old Techniques

The key thing to keep in mind is that all of these cool new tools, websites, and services are just that…tools for us to use. We need to then apply tried-and-true networking and communications techniques to these new tools, and we’ll be able to more nimbly craft networking strategies that take advantage of both the new capabilities and approaches that work.

Once we get that part in order, we can start to experiment with any sort of newfound techniques. Perhaps certain types of discussions are better started on a microblogging service, while others are better on a career networking site. Maybe some belong on Facebook but wouldn’t work anywhere else. I’ve found that Twitter is great for exchanging ideas, sharing content, and promoting services tactfully (i.e. no hard sells). LinkedIn is great for reconnecting with old colleagues, interacting in groups with likeminded professionals, and trying to connect your way to the right people via a “6 degrees of separation” like effort.

You get the picture. These new tools are great, but they can only go so far as your imagination. Get the basics down first…how to use these tools for traditional / IRL networking…and then you can start to try new things. And yes, this does involve getting off the computer and meeting someone in person! If that’s not one of the reasons you’re doing this, then it should be.

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What have you observed in the past in this area? How much more effective has it been for you when you blend offline networking with online / social media-based networking? What do you deem the best mix? Or alternatively, have you seen the opposite?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please share in the comments below.

With our economy running on life support, the dollar in the tank, and fast-rising inflation, companies had to pinch pennies wherever possible to keep the ship afloat. The results have been widespread and severe…significant loss of jobs, budgets slashed to levels we haven’t seen in years, and even a slew of companies going belly up during the prolonged recession.

Now we find ourselves with an unemployment rate higher than we’ve seen in at least couple of decades, if not longer. All companies want to do “more with less”. But business must go on, so we have to work within the current constraints placed before us.

As marketers, there comes a time when you have to consider outsourcing some or all of key programs. Let’s look at the most common situations where you should consider an outside consulting resource.

Work Overload

Doing more with less essentially means your company has decided to squeeze lemon juice out of a turnip, and you’re the turnip. Work/Life balance? Fat chance. This is typically a situation where the company has lopped off as many limbs as possible in hopes of surviving, and all of their work either goes away, or more likely, falls squarely on your “to-do” list. If you have been working so many hours that it takes more than a split second to remember your kid’s middle name or birthday, draw a line in the sand and sign up some help.

Missing Skillsets or Experience

I’ve spent a great deal of my career in startup environments, and there always comes a time when you need to do something that no one on the team has done before. There are two answers to this situation – invest your own valuable time and effort into figuring out how to band-aid a solution together, or pony up the dough to hire someone who already knows what they are doing. Having taken both approaches, I can speak from experience on this one. Bring in a consultant for the execution, and spend your valuable time working with them on fitting it into your overall strategy and vision.

Short-Term Needs or Projects

This is the situation where you most need to look outside. It’s one thing to have a new ongoing need, which is the only time you’d really want to invest the time and energy in ramping on a complex new skill. If you have a time-limited project where you need specialized technical or execution resources, save yourself the hassle, and budget for hiring some help. You can do a quick ROI analysis by taking your hourly rate, estimating how long you have to work to learn the skill, calculating how much slower you’d actually do it than an expert would, and comparing that to their quote. If you are still ROI positive, what other non-financial tradeoffs are you making, such as opportunity costs (i.e. other important projects that go into a queue instead of getting done), your stress level (and how that affects your ability to properly address other priorities), and whether you are getting enough time to recharge personally.

Building a “Virtual Support Team”

Maybe you’ve determined you do need to do a large volume of work, you are missing skillsets for managing the work, and you have frequent needs for short-term project assistance. Great! You may not be able to get a permanent job req for hiring new direct reports, but you can likely plan around setting budgets for your extended team. I’ve run entire virtual marketing groups myself by hiring outside professionals for web design, PPC strategy/execution, trade show support, writing, graphic design, etc. This is a valid and proven model, particularly in the startup world where you have to do the work of an army by yourself.

Conclusion

Your company may expect you to do the work of a small army, but is that truly reasonable? You can do financial calculations to justify outsourcing rather simply. Use those numbers as ammo to negotiate funding for outside help or to persuade the company to de-prioritize activities that aren’t worth the investment. After all, if it isn’t worth a few grand to get it right, is it even worth doing in the first place?

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This work originally appeared as a guest post for the As-Such Communications blog.

What is Product Management?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the discipline, Product Management serves a hybrid role that sits between Engineering (or the equivalent product development group, depending on what your product is) and Product Marketing. This function is important for strategically translating market requirements, collected via research, campaign results, sales and customer feedback, etc., into product roadmaps and plans for upcoming development. They then feed information to the Product Marketing group for use in messaging activities leading up to a product launch or release.

Clearly, Product Management serves an important role in nurturing products as feature set is expanded, as well as defining new products to be developed and launched into the market. Everyone seems to understand that part implicitly. This role also includes a crucial responsibility that is often undermanaged or even completely ignored: Product End-of-life.

Why to Care About Product End-of-Life

If Only Product End-Of-Life Were This Simple...

Like customers, products have a full product life cycle. There are a slew of publications and courses about how to identify a market opportunity, concept a product, develop alpha and beta releases, finalize feature set, outline a roadmap for development, and launch into the market. This model is proven and important, but what happens when a product is no longer needed or superior products have made it obsolete?

To coin a very cheesy cliche: All good things must come to an end.

This is the area where I see the ball dropped by companies the most frequently. As businesses grow, this part of the process becomes a requirement, rather than something to “get to when the products get old.”

For early-stage companies who really don’t have official documented customer support plans, end-of-life is much simpler. Stop selling it, market a new product to the existing customers, consider offering discounts for upgrades or updates for those who still wish to work with you. Case closed.

Managing End-of-Life Properly

As your business grows, the situation becomes much more complicated. Customers will be more critical of businesses that cannot smoothly manage the transition from older products to new versions. Some important topics you might have to address would include:

1. When to stop providing guaranteed maintenance or warranty terms
2. Outline of the upgrade or update path
3. Whether to “Grandfather” in old terms and conditions, rules, benefits, etc.
4. Directions for customers to use old and new products together, if applicable
5. Documentation of historical release path (for software / hardware technical products)
6. Obsolescence of product accessories

This is most certainly not an exhaustive list, but enough information for you to get an idea of the challenge. Basically, you’ve established that there is a need, you’ve addressed the need, and now you simply cannot drop customers cold without some negative reaction. Particularly if you have a growing product portfolio, it is essential to help usher customers along from product version to product version, release to release, etc.

For those customers who will not upgrade, it is also important to clearly communicate when and what is being eliminated over time. Before making these types of changes, you need to advise all users of the product in question that a change is on the horizon. Provide ample time for them to upgrade or find another solution, and be sure to reach out to them multiple times. In this media and content-heavy world we now inhabit, frequency becomes even more important for ensuring your message is received and understood.

Conclusion

This seems like a lot of work, and in all honesty, it is! There are some darn good reasons for this function existing in the first place, and end-of-life is one of the most important, yet least understood.

How do you phase out products over time? Do you have established practices for this part of the product management puzzle? Do you ignore it? Let me know and indicate the size of your business; I am curious to learn whether our social-everything world is changing some or all of this practice as we better learn how to live in real-time.

Good marketing or old and dated?

It amazes me to see so much dry, ineffective marketing out there, much of it brought to market with large budgets and huge teams of professionals executing on it. And really, it’s quite easy to fall into groupthink when so many cooks are at play in the proverbial kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you can’t execute effective marketing messaging, campaigns, etc. with a team-based approach. Quite the contrary, I’m actually saying a couple of things.

First, marketers simply fall into bad habits, at least those of us who are well-trained in the first place. Probably the worst bad habit is sitting on your laurels while new techniques and media emerge, assuming that you know “enough” based on experience and gut. With the pace of change and availability of unprecedented communications vehicles, that is, at best, naive.

Second, to quote Rodney Dangerfield, “marketers don’t get no respect” in a lot of cases. With tight budgets, a prevalence of micromanaging executives, and the folks I mentioned in the previous paragraph all playing roles in our success or failure, it’s easy to just agree to a bad idea in the sake of meeting a dreadline or getting another arduous piece of busy work off your plate.

You could just say, “Well, said marketers just need to get ‘back to the basics’.” But what the heck are the basics? The Four P’s, which were already outdated when I last took a Marketing course in the late 90s? Mass media driven advertising? What is this, 1975?

And don’t tell me the answer is to put in more hours, because quantity has always been and is still inferior to quality.

We need a better way to manage all this. As much as humans like to elevate themselves to some superior level to other living organisms on this planet, the hard truth is that we’re just another species of animal. Sure, we can talk, walk upright, surf the internet, and do a slew of other things that are only possible with our advanced brain structure. But we all still have basic needs like safety, food, shelter…y’know, all that stuff at the bottom of Maslow’s Triangle.

I just spent the better part of three days in Las Vegas, NV for Interop 2010, managing the set up for Anue Systems and then manning the booth for most of the first day. In my career, I’ve managed many dozens of trade shows. Most of those were for small companies, and across the various  companies we consistently struggled to drive sufficient booth traffic with various giveaways, in-booth talent, live demos,  contests…you name it; we probably tried it.

This time, we decided to try one of the few things that I’ve seen work in the past: Free Coffee. I must say, the results were overwhelming through the first day. Why did it work? We marketed to the “Inner Animal”, as I like to call it.

I’ve been reading a wonderful book lately, Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in your Customer’s Brain (kudos to @AustinGunter, Community Manager for Tech Ranch Austin, for turning me onto it). In it, the authors expound at length about how to identify the differences between the new brain, which is logical, the middle brain, which is emotional, and the old brain, which is what breaks the ties between the other two subconsciously, so to say. I liken the old brain to what you might call “going with your gut”, where you don’t make a decision for either emotional or logical reasons, but something else.

In the past, I’ve talked about how to reach the “Inner Animal”, and this publication comes the closest I’ve seen to providing an actionable approach to it. This isn’t another how-to about social media or similar topics. It’s a great strategic approach to how you speak to your target audience, regardless of where you speak to them. Some of it’s content is old news if you’ve been in the marketing game for 10+ years, but even with my 20 years of experience, I’ve been pulling some valuable nuggets out.

So go pick up the book, give it a read, and start talking to the “Inner Animal”. For many of you, your long term success very well may depend on it. Let me know if you also find it useful, or have seen other similar materials that are worth all of our time.

Have you tried anything like this? Did it work? What do you call it? Are there any books you’ve read in the past two years that have impacted how you operate in a major way? Please share!

I recently had the opportunity to spend upward of two hours on the phone with co-founder Kenneth Cho (virtual high-five to another UT-Austin MBA Alum!), first to learn the philosophy and history behind the product, and then to take a guided tour through it firsthand. What I learned is that these guys “get it”, and the best is yet to come.

You see, this product is an evolution of Ken and his partner, Scott McCaskill’s, previous venture, Social Agency. The previous organization was focused on actually managing the social media campaigns themselves on behalf of their large business clients. Given the slow adoption of social media to date in the enterprise space, Social Agency was able to do very well in that capacity. Almost too well; they found themselves overwhelmed with managing a variety of disparate tools and services on behalf of their clientele.

So the SpredFast concept was borne. SpredFast is intended to be a tool for social media campaign execution and engagement. What does that mean? They built it to help with getting messages out, scheduling them, tying in the multiple channels, and publishing to those channels (channels in this product are the multiple SocMed “tools” out there such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.). But they didn’t stop there, because there are free tools for many of these activities  (e.g. HootSuite, my personal favorite), and their intent was to monetize the product to create a real business (novel, huh?).

I must say, for a first release of the product, what I saw holds a great deal of promise.

The first impressive thing you notice is the intuitive GUI and seamless integration across the various tools that are included on the first release (more to be added in the future) – most notably Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.  You can manage all tweets, status updates, video postings, and photographs from right within the SpredFast product, including RTs and the like.

Even more importantly, they listened to what we’ve all been screaming about and built a measurement system right into the product. The model, while not yet a full ROI calculation, should prove helpful for measuring the impact of your efforts on the conversation and the marketplace. And all statistics should be fully accurate, since the product uses APIs to collect the data directly from each channel.

The model as it stands today includes three key areas as follows:

1. Engagement - A measurement of what actions result from your ongoing social media activities. This metric includes number of replies, comments, Re-Tweets, bit.ly clicks, Facebook “likes”, and many other affinity-related behaviors.
2. Reach – A straightforward count of how many people your social media campaign is, well, reaching. Metrics include number of followers, Youtube subscribers, Facebook fans, and other standard counting numbers associated with “direct reach” (i.e. being connected to you or your brand directly). In the next revision of the product, they are even considering adding extended reach indicators such as friends-of-friends or followers-of-followers.
3. Activity – Quite literally, this is a measure of how many things you are doing on the various channels, including things like number of messages, tweets, and links that are published through a particular campaign.

For now, these indicators are most useful in telling you how influential your activities are (Reach), and then helping you benchmark whether your level of Activity is generating the appropriate level of Engagement. If your Activity/Engagement ratio is too high or too low, you either need to change the level of activity or change the actual approach, because something is not working as intended. Return-on-investment? That would be a stretch in this iteration, but what it can do it show a return-on-activity in the form of engagement.

In our extensive conversation, we dug pretty deeply into philosophies about social media, where it fits, how important it was, and some key areas where this product can be built out to truly reach the vision that Ken and Scott have in mind. Of course, I won’t steal their thunder by going into too much of that detail here, but I do recommend that you give this product a look. Particularly for those of you in larger or mid-sized companies where social media is still a work-in-progress, it can offer a starting point for measuring and justifying your efforts.

What other tools have you seen out there that may rival this approach? Some of the established players do have similar models (as indicated in Aaron Strout’s guest post from last week), but who do you think is best poised to get this right? And most importantly, what do you want to see measured to better gauge whether your SocMed efforts are working or not? Let’s discuss, because the power of social comes from free sharing and discussion among us.

This week, Return On Now has the privilege of sharing with you a guest post by Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered Inc. right here in Austin, TX. In addition to running marketing, he also serves as a key “social voice” for the company.  In that capacity, Aaron continues with his speaking, blogging, podcasting, and social networking activities with an eye toward creating awareness and lead generation for the company. Aaron co-hosts the Quick-n-Dirty weekly podcast with Jennifer Leggio, he maintains a social media blog titled Citizen Marketer 2.1, and he is well-known as a thought leader in online and social media marketing.

For today’s post, Aaron has agreed to give his overview on B2B and how social media can actually be used to benefit the business. With all of the discussion surrounding concerns about measuring impact to the bottom line, I felt that this would be an important topic for all to hear.

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Why is it that, when it comes to conversation about social media, business-to-business (B2B) seems to get the short end of the stick every single time? As someone who does a lot of webcasts, blog posts, and speaking gigs, the question/comment that always comes up is, “what about B2B examples.” Fortunately for me, I’m able to mention companies like BreakingPoint Systems and Hubspot that do a great job tapping into the power of social media, but I often wish there were more examples (with public results) that I could discuss.

In thinking about this topic, one of the main reasons that B2B has taken a little longer to adopt social media into its marketing mix is that it’s harder to do effectively. It’s also feels risky because there is less control then  in other channels. With that said, I personally believe that B2B companies stand to benefit the most from social media because they live and die based on the strength of their customer relationships. On top of that, many B2B companies actually know exactly who their prospective customers are, so seeking those folks out in a meaningful way and creating relationships with them can have a huge impact on the bottom line.

Given that I’m a prescriptive kind of guy, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t offer up some tips about how companies can start thinking about putting social media into practice. There are obviously tons of ways, but here are a few (including a diagram that provides more color commentary on item number three):

1. Start listening. This is easier to do than you think. Set up a Google alert for your company’s name, your competitors’ names, and keywords for your industry. If you’re already doing this, consider hiring a “listening” service like Techrigy, Radian6, or Meltwater Buzz. This will help you find where all the relevant conversations in your space are happening.
2. Create a Twitter account for your business. However, resist the urge to put up links to press releases, product specs, and links to press that are singing your business’s praises (at least out of the gate). Instead, talk about things that people in your industry care about. For instance, if you create bill payment software, talk about the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses across the financial spectrum (payroll, credit, vendor management, etc.) Link to reports and industry analysis. Point out other peoples’ blog posts and magazine articles.
3. Set up a blog. Before you do this, though, make sure you have someone (ideally internal) who is willing to commit to posting at least 5-6 times/month. This can be someone on your marketing, product, or PR teams, or even better, one of your executives. Think about creating an editorial calendar to help guide your topics. Most importantly, spend time looking at other industry related blogs — in fact, you should spend at least a month doing this before you set up your own blog. Be sure to comment on those blogs (talk about the topic, not your company). This will help with getting to know the relevant “social” people in the space.
4. Create an online community. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with items 1-3, start thinking about an online community. Ideally, this is for both current and prospective customers. Some businesses feel more comfortable about creating private communities where customers can talk to one another. The key in either case is to hire a great community manager and let them help you create relevant content via webinars, blog posts, and conference calls (see diagram below). A community manager will also help you draw out your customers and ensure that conversations stay relevant and productive.
5. Measure, measure, measure. This is less difficult than you might imagine. This really should start with looking at your current goals — i.e. new customers, greater retention, larger share of wallet, referrals, etc. Then make sure you benchmark (i.e. look at your webstats and current KPI’s) before you launch your social efforts. Then, look at how you’re moving the bar over time. A key place to look is your web analytics, to see what kind of traffic and engagement your Twitter feed and/or blog efforts are driving. Also, it doesn’t hurt to survey customers and ask them if your efforts are impacting their loyalty to your company.

I won’t lie to you; everything I mentioned above takes effort. But it’s worth trying, especially when it’s done right, because it will yield results. One thing that I failed to mention is the importance of integrating the recommendations above with your existing marketing/channel activity. Social media doesn’t live in a vacuum, and if nobody can find the fruit of your efforts, you may as well not have exerted the time and resources.

Am I missing anything? You bet I am. But that’s where you come in. What types of social media have you tried? What’s worked? Please feel free to share in the comments section below.

The following post originally appeared on her Highly Competitive blog under the title Social collaboration in the enterprise: The heart – and goal – of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools. Yes, this was focused on the enterprise, while this blog tends to hone in on SMB and Entrepreneurial topics. Regardless, the message is relevant to business professionals of all types, and it is most applicable for those of you who want to sell to and interact with larger companies.

Without further ado…

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Community and collaboration in business enterprises is about people working together more effectively, quickly, and proactively – to achieve the goals of the business as robustly as possible.  This may sound like a simplistic statement, but it seems to be eluding many companies that are adopting social media tools.

There is a constant stream of information on the internet on how to implementing social collaboration software in enterprises, both for internal and external purposes.  Quite a healthy industry of solutions, consultants and advisors has sprung into being.  Many blog posts and articles are devoted to recommending the best ways to take advantage of social media software.

But for many companies, implementation efforts for social collaboration software will be doomed to failure for one simple reason:  most enterprises have failed to engender a “collaboration culture” based on real human interaction. The executive management of many companies does not even understand what a “collaboration culture” is.

Frankly, executive management of many companies is hard put to authentically value employees – these companies want to de-humanize employees with such terms as “resources” and “human capital”, and think that it is enough if they sling around a few “mission statements” claiming that they “value” employees.

The proliferation and subsequent failure of traditional formal enterprise collaboration tools proves that collaboration is not successful just because there are software tools.  These formal collaboration solutions are usually unwieldy, result in silos of information,  are extremely opaque, and most importantly, fail to engage the humans for whom the collaboration venue is meant.

The newer social collaboration tools are better at ease-of-use, agility, relevance. But it is still essential that companies grow and nurture live collaboration cultures, where collaboration is a natural response for business activities, for any departments in the enterprise.  Planning a healthy collaboration culture also requires a dynamic plan for the role social media tools will play to bring the people in the company together in worthwhile interaction.

Returning to the human side of business won’t happen magically – it will take real work and real commitment, from the executive level through all levels of management and employee departments.

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And, of course, you’re not getting out of here without my two-cents worth. This comes down to the desire to control everything by large companies. Until they can figure out they no longer own the messaging and conversation, this problem will continue. As entrepreneurs and SMBs who can adapt and react quickly, you should view this fear of change as an opportunity for you to get a leg up on the big guys.

Now go forth and prosper!

[NOTE: I am in no way, financially or otherwise, affiliated with the service I am about to preview for you.]

For those of you who interact with me on Twitter, surely you’ve seen the materials I’ve been sharing regarding the difficulty of getting your hands on financing or investment capital for your small business ventures. Credit markets have been squeezed to a pulp, it has been challenging to figure out how decisions are being made at the SBA, and angel investors and venture firms are being more cautious than we’ve seen in years when doling out funds. What’s an entrepreneur to do?

The answer: Turn to your peers!

Preneuraholics was created to connect business owners who need some startup capital with other business owners who might be gracious enough to donate a few dollars to the cause. For a nominal $49 fee, you can list your business with a description of it and why you need the money. Then, others can donate whatever they feel comfortable sharing, even as little as $10.

This is a great idea! With all the talk about goodwill and giving back, there is finally an easy way to share not only advice and insight, but also cold hard cash. The power of this model will come from the number of participants. After all, most of us can afford to donate $10 or $20 to a struggling entrepreneur who just needs a break. In the grand scheme of things, that is not a lot of money to give up, but it can add up rather fast with solid participation. In fact, the site does a great job of highlighting how fast funds can add up…again, with the right level of participation by not only the businesses themselves, but other small business owner peers.

Need more incentive why you should participate here? In their own words…

It is time to take back the American Dream.
Americans are uniting together to develop a whole new system of small business funding.
By joining forces we can help each other.
It’s all in the power of unity!

And who can argue with those points? Not me, for one.

The site is still very new, so they are just now building up projects seeking funding and participants to help make it happen. I chose to write it up because I think it’s an idea that needs your support. Please check out the site, create a login, and see if there’s anyone you can help. Heck, reach out to them afterward and introduce yourself. I, for one, would be more than willing to engage with a new contact who believes in my idea enough to donate to it.

Please come back after you review the site and let me know what you think of it. And if you want to engage with the site proprietors directly, you can find them on Twitter @preneuraholic.