Leaders In the Know

Big Brother, Virtual Ombudsman or Change Agent?

If you're a Comcast customer, chances are you can relate to the postings on the  comcastmustdie website.

If so, you've got to read the article posted earlier this evening on the New York Times website entitled, Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company's Ear. You betcha, it's about Comcast.

Comcast has adopted a new strategy for reaching out and touching someone. Frank Eliason, a digital care manager at the company, monitors public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks about the Comcast.  Complaints result in the writer receiving a message back, pronto, from Frank.

Wait, there's more. According to the article, within a half hour of posting a negative comment on his blog, not only did an aggravated customer receive a  "Can I help?" message -- within a half hour there was a technician at his door. 

Social media experts believe that one of its great strengths is to bring companies and customers together in deep and meaningful ways. This is a great example of what we mean.  Can you imagine how transformational this could be to a company?

No doubt this was a risky experiment for Comcast to undertake.

Most of us do not expect to interact with a company to resolve a complaint unless we initiate the discussion with them directly. For some, this form of  reaching out may seem intrusive, even creepy.

What's really brilliant is that this employee can connect with people and actually solve their problem, not just placate them. Frank has the ability and authority to act. This eludes customer service reps and their supervisors, who are often reduced to order takers and sounding boards. When was the last time you called customer service and a tech came out within the hour?

The big question is whether this experiment will fundamentally change the way Comcast and its customers interact. Will it lead to more empowered customer service reps, be they digital, virtual, telephonic or inperson?

I ask you:

• Has Comcast gone too far? Is Big Brother watching?
• Is a digital care manager nothing more than a virtual ombudsman?
• Or, will this use of social media make a systemic change in Comcast's relationship not only with its customers but also with its employees, entrusted and empowered to make decisions and act?

Links to Leaders

Check out Not Necessarily Genius: Reflections from the Wharton Leadership Conference  by Saurabh Madaan in the current Wharton Leadership Digest as well as interview you shouldn't miss, all courtesy of The Wharton School's http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu.

                                  

Mike Useem's engaging interview with Southwest Airlines' Colleen Barrett. The video is priceless.

                                    

You can also watch the video, listen to or read the interview with J&J's CEO William Weldon.

                                                

And David Gergen's thought-provoking  observations on the leadership qualities of U.S. Presidents.

Can Leaders Be Internet Illiterate?

"I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator."  (John McCain, New York Times Transcript 7/13/2008)

I'm sure there are executives out there  - others who, like John McCain, haven't felt much need to surf the web - who don't get what all the fuss is about.  They just don't see the benefit in reading the news online or checking out the blogosphere. It's easier to just pick up a phone  than be inundated by email.

Does the phrase, "You don't know what you don't know" come to mind?

On a purely intellectual basis these folks understand that others find it useful.  Just not them.  Wasn't the same said about the microwave oven when it first came out?

So the question being asked is, can someone who is Internet illiterate be president of the United States?  I would add, more generally, is web literacy now a core competence expected of any leader?

While it's true that leaders can surround themselves with others with greater hands-on experience and knowledge than themselves, I'm coming down on the side that says web literacy cannot be delegated.   It is rapidly becoming as essential as reading, writing and arithmetic in terms of basic skills necessary to function effectively in daily life.

The web is not a spectator sport. McCain's comments that his wife and staffers read his email or go on the web for him are analgous to being an armchair traveller. You can read about going to a foreign country but it's not the same as experiencing it for yourself.

It's impossible for a leader who is not personally engaged in it to deeply understand why the web is so transformational to all aspects of our society and our relationships with others around the world. 

We haven't heard nearly the same level of buzz about the part of McCain's statement in which he says that he doesn't expect to be a great communicator. Does that  mean that the American people no longer have an expectation that leaders be good communicators?

What do you think?

Trust in a Web 2.0 World

If leaders don't have the trust of those who follow them, are they really leaders?

After following the election in Zimbabwe, well, I guess it's possible. But in a business setting, it's hard to imagine they'd last very long. Think Carly at H-P or Bob Nardelli in his Home Depot days.

Being trusted is not the same as being nice, or well-liked.  While maybe not fun to work for, you can still trust their judgement and their ability to lead the company to success.

In its most simplistic form, it seems to me that two important components of trust are around competence, judgement and integrity. In other words, people trust leaders if they believe they have the mental acumen, knowledge and experience; have demonstrated that their decisions are sound; and have a track record of saying what they mean, doing what they say, and doing the right thing.

An interesting article about a research study on trust is in the Summer 2008 MIT Sloan Review, Unconventional Insights for Managing Stakeholder Trust by Michael Pirson and Deepak Malhotra. (You need a subscription to read the whole article, but this link takes you to a nice summary.)

A brief excerpt of the summary gives you the bottom line:

The research analyzed the relevance (if any) of various factors: benevolence, integrity, managerial competence, technical competence, transparency and value congruence.In essence, the study asked what matters — and to whom.

Some of the results were unexpected, and a few were even counterintuitive, leading to the following key insights: Transparency is overrated; integrity is not enough; the right kind of competence matters; building trust with one group can destroy it with another; and value congruence matters across the board.

Trust is one of four essential elements we have identified as critical to building relationships on the web. Charlie's written a terrific article on our E3T(tm) Model which will be in Website magazine next month. More on that in another post. Suffice it to say that the T stands for trust.

I'm very  interested in learning how people and organizations earn, create and maintain trust in the Web 2.0 environment. How do they demonstrate competence and gain a reputation of high integrity through their web presence? This involves not only the content they put up themselves, but what others say about them in the far-flung reaches of the web.

Influence, which grows out of trust, is an important component of web success.

Given the nature of Web 2.0 to be transparent and where one's integrity can be closely scrutinized, I found the results of the research intriguing.  If, as the research suggests, building trust with one constituency can destroy it in another, this has a huge impact on how we build trust over the web.

It''s reassuring that competence and congruency still hold sway. Here again, though, we run into a snag. Many people have trouble determining if a site contains accurate, competent information or just sounds like it does. Is Technorati really the best judge of that?

Much to think about and discuss. Any thoughts?