Ideas = Influence * Engagement

How to find all the best ideas in the world online?

One would think it’s simple. Step 1: be influential, with authority comes power and people will flock to you. Step 2: be engaging, ask people for their ideas and share your thoughts in a way that benefits both parties.

(comment from a reader of this draft earlier added Step 0: dangle money… which I think is ok, but out of scope of this article)

Easier said than done. Companies have spent millions online and get no incremental influence than what they already have offline.

Influence
Apart from some one hit wonders with a very unique-to-the-Internet idea, most influential companies online are also influential offline. But not all influential companies offline choose to maintain an online “persona”. Often, companies utilises certain hip spokesperson (bosses who “get it” often think they are too old for that sort of thing and delegate it to some fresh graduate hooked onto facebook 24/7) to be the “online face” of the company, bestow them a budget and tools, and keep their fingers crossed. After all, surely a blend of Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and what not would bring some sort of effect right?

I think there are nuances that differentiate online charisma and offline charisma. Steve Job’s reality distortion field is an extreme example of a person who can mesmerize with a blend of “charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, and marketing” (quoted from wikipedia) that includes both the online and offline world. Although President Obama famously make use of every online tool at his disposal to garner support for his cause, the follow up for every contact is almost always a real person. Compare this with an people who make a lot of noise online like Robert Scoble or Seth Godin (see more online media leaders here), if it was just a few decades ago he would be just another stereotypical silicon valley engineer with no platform of expression. The freshness of their content and size of their following makes online influencers enormously valuable to their companies (example I quote outshines their own employer in fact).

Also important is the company’s environment that such online media leaders have when leading an influence about the business. If you haven’t read the 95 ClueTrain Manifesto it’s time to at least click through and read it online (for free) or buy the book. Concepts like markets are conversations (1), or hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (7) are already so old school, but some companies still insist on having an intranet “homepage” that does not have a “search” function, forcing people to follow the browse hierarchy to get their job done (42-48). If the company is not ready to internalizse such online culture, or worse, have conflicting culture of bombastic boast (24), keeping secrets (12, 28), then it’s safe to say that trying to force an online persona is only going to bring about low ranking blogs, no twitter followers, and fan pages where fans are only other employees (53-60).

Engagement
This is a nice segway into engagement, because for most companies, especially influential ones (since they got the first part right somehow), the challenge is how to engage these thousands or millions of people who want to share their ideas with you. Or to use the words in the second half of ClueTrain Manifesto: the market wants to have a conversation with you.

Engagement, similar to influence, has a mix of online and offline components. While it is possible to always buy food and drinks at places like BarCamp, the impact would be greater if the conversation could happen instantly online. This was the original “big idea” for Web 2.0, not just the blogs and the wikis, but the comments on the blogs and the crowdsourced edit of wikis. Social networks has since facilitated most of the conversation besides popular blogs, and now every online media property owner is trying to get a piece of the extremely short attention span of people.

The venture capital industry, which is famously known to be always seeking out ideas and companies, also mixes a blend of online interactions and lots of yumcha session as well. After all, a lot of the ideas they dabble in are first-of-a-kind, and getting it to market quickly without being distracted or copied by a competitior is crucial for the success of these company. But is it? More and more perpetual beta products are being thrown into the market, because the earlier they can engage the customers (leveraging on the influence of the financers) the quicker the can steer the ship towards the right direction.

Case Study
I think this would also apply to a small company. Take an F&B outlet. You need to know what your customers like to eat. Traditionally, you need a customer database, pay for food testing sessions, and finally, make decisions on what’s the next big marketing launch event (and appropriate discounts and freebies) to bring the new entree to your customer, and even then you won’t get the best idea from them. But doing it this way firstly doesn’t leverage on the influence that you also already have (your fan clubs, online or offline), and if you can identify and keep these fans, you ability to constantly engage them to give you feedback, sometimes incrementally, is limited.

A new breed of companies has recently started to do what’s called “social media monitoring”. This is like part of the solution to the above case study. These software crawl the web for related information about the F&B outlet, and go into as many social networks as the terms and conditions of those platforms allow, to collect information, hopefully profile the customer and show the company what their fans talk about, what they look forward to, and what they don’t like about their current offering.

Granted that this works (even though it’s not yet 100%, we shall assume that their technology will get better over time), we still need a clear way to increase the influence, and use that influence to engage these people constantly. F&B, like many businesses, is hard to engage online because you have to “taste” the food, but this shouldn’t stop you from enlarging your influence to continue to charm customers into becoming your fans. Now, if the first thing that come to your mind is TV ads, then I think you need to look around more. Even in the offline world, we saw many CSR related activties that could be used as a tool to extend the company’s influence. Being no expert in F&B industry myself, suffice to say that at least I’ve seen a combination of flash games, email chains and food blogs playing their influential role.

Once you have their attention, it’s time to strike up a conversation. No, again it’s not the pencil and feedback form at the odd corner of the restaurant (although no harm is putting that and having offline conversations as well). Conversations happening online is much more powerful in generating the ideas you need. Use a #hashtag and get people to tweet about their experience in your store. Have free food day and get as many people to blog about it as possible. Solve some world hunger problem by getting people to choose which item on your menu you would like to feed the hungry children. (Again if you haven’t noticed, I’m really not in the F&B industry hahaha) Anything to get a conversation going. This non-traditional conversation is Not Linear. One will still need to piece the information back together as a “report” to your “bosses” (to use simple corporate speak). But these are precisely the kind of engagement that needs to happen about your product.

Summary
You know those “your business is valuable to us, please respond to a survey about our service by pressing 1” kind of survey after you’ve used the call center’s services? That’s probably the opposite of what I’ve just said because 1. The call center has absolutely no influence over you – you probably had a problem with some product which is supported by this call center, not the call center itself, and 2. the call center is engaging you in a way that’s just invitng trouble – you already waited on the phone to speak to someone and after all the trouble they want you to hold on to the phone and give them some response on how they are doing. Who would hold and answer the survey? In fact, dangling carrots (answer the survey and stand a chance to win another of the product you have!) makes it worse in this particular situation as you automatically invite people to scold you with no construtive suggestions.

Idea = Influence multiply by Engagement. You will get the best response if you have both, and neither one can be 0 (else you get 0 new ideas).