The Social Media 40/30/20

Euan responded to Corporate Listening with a quip that it may be hard within the BBC. I’ve been puzzling over the type of quick test to bring “listening” and social media attention home to top management. For strategy and thinking about the future I often use the 40/30/20 rule. See below - bottom. I’ve also borrowed Dion Hinchcliffe’s diagram to support why we should be probing management to think differently.

The point of the Prahalad and Hamel rule was to focus companies on setting aside 20% of their time collectively to think about the future. Today we should focus marketers and the CEO on not just thinking about the future, rather taking a view on facilitating the conversation.

The Social Media 40/30/20

First do you want to strengthen the global conversation around your company / brand? Yes or No?

I presume YES.

Where is that conversation today? Where is it migrating to? What are it’s most visible manifestations? Think Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Google, Flickr… etc. So:

As a Marketer or CEO –

1. what percent of your time do you spend listening 40% (for insight, to influencers, for intelligence? How is it captured?)
   
2. of that time… spent listening.. what percent is spent engaged in external conversations 30%? (not all is online, with customers, etc.. Do you record and share impressions as a team / commentary?)
   
3. of that time that you spend listening engaged in external conversations what percent is spent aggregating and facilitating the conversation? 20%? (How do you hub and grow the conversation? How do you recognize and encourage new contributions?)
   

Conclusion:
Thus.. what you are telling me.. is you spend less than 3 % of your total time (40 X 30 X 20) strengthening the global conversation about your brand….It means you proabably still spend the majority of your time developing traditional media programs and you have no metrics on board for building grassroots conversation.

HOW WOULD THIS LOOK IF YOU SPENT 20% of top management and marketing time collectively as an organization engaged with customers in conversation about the future of your company. What would the benefits be?

• To customer satisfaction and evangelism
• To buzz about the company and brand?
• To learning and response times?
• To the bottom line (think beta and research)

I think small software startups have a good model for this. These startups also start in alpha and beta. The problem with them is they often grow up… become big and then they stop listening to their customers, encouraging, participating and facilitating the conversation. Skype is a perfect example They lost this.

Focus on the Conversation today! How will you participate? The scary thing is… many companies that don’t want a conversation may postpone this… The risk is your competitor works it out. Then you are dead!

Competing for the Future

The answers to these questions typically conform to what we call the “40/30/20 Rule.” In our experience, about 40% of a senior executive’s time is devoted to looking outward and, of this time, about 30% is spent peering three, four, five, or more years into the future. Of that time spent looking forward, no more than 20% is devoted to building a collective view of the future (the other 80% is spent considering the future of the manager’s particular business). Thus, on average, senior managers devote less than 3% (40% x 30% x 20%) of their time to building a corporate perspective on the future.