This is the third and final installment of our series with crisis communications expert Neil Chapman who led crisis communications for BP during the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and is now a senior associate at Wixted Pope Nora Thompson. Chapman gives us his view on how digital media (and particularly social) have transformed crisis communications strategy.

Chapman runs instructional workshops and training in the field of crisis communications. These are some of the most frequent questions he fields, which he will answer here for SMI readers. For part 1 of this discussion, please visit and for part 2, click here.

I’m a communicator. I deal in words. How do I keep up with all the changing technologies?

It’s tough, so you likely need outside help. When I started working in this field I needed to know typographical measurements such as points and picas. No longer. Now SEO (search engine optimisation), videography, geolocation, and mobile technologies are more relevant.  Learning and training isn’t an option, but a must do – participating in industry conferences, attending training programmes, reading crisis blogs, sharing best practices, and seeking learnings from other industries.

Which aspects of crisis communications are enduring, unchanging?

The power and importance of effective, two-way communications with key stakeholders remains as relevant and essential today as it did at the start of the new information age. Organizations must embrace the need to equip its supporters (employees, contractors, annuitants/retired employees, shareholders, suppliers and other potential advocates) with the tools and skills to help protect and advance an organisation’s reputation.

Corporate crisis plans, processes and procedures need to incorporate the opportunities social and digital media channels offer. The communications landscape will continue to evolve, but the fundamentals of good communications remain the same. It’s about trust. It’s about relationships.

Is your staff prepared to handle a fast-moving social media crisis? Join us on Feb. 29th for SMI’s instructional Social Media Crisis Communications and Reputation Management workshop in London. We’ll again be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. His stories and lessons from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy will fascinate you!

We continue our series with crisis communications expert Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP during the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 and now a senior associate at Wixted Pope Nora Thompson. Chapman gives us his view on how digital media (and particularly social) have transformed crisis communications strategy.

The following points are questions Chapman typically fields during his instructional workshops and training. For part 1 of this discussion, please visit

What’s happening to the media these days?

They are being squeezed and reinvented. Traditional media – including the broadcast networks, wire services, and major dailies – still exert powerful influence with a vigilant public and with opinion leaders. Big name media outlets will cover a crisis and you need to be ready to manage the demands this will place on your communications team and executives. However, new and old media feed off each other. And corporate communicators should provide information to both, and to not think of ‘the traditional media’ as the only information channel to use. Communicators should be in the publishing business themselves, using different distribution channels to get their message out – Twitter, blogs, websites, emails, phone, Facebook. The key is integrating and managing the distribution process, which often takes coordination across corporate communications, marketing and IT departments.

Is your staff prepared to handle a fast-moving social media crisis? Join us on Feb. 29th for SMI’s instructional Social Media Crisis Communications and Reputation Management workshop in London. We’ll again be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. His stories and lessons from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy will fascinate you!

How can we ensure our message is heard above the noise?

Reliable, accurate information is what’s needed during a crisis. People will gravitate to it wherever it is. Take Twitter hashtags (the # symbol used to mark particular discussion topics in a Tweet). The new challenge for communicators is: ‘Should your crisis plans include launching or using a hashtag around your incident/emergency? It’s almost certain one will be created, so why leave it to someone else?’

Timeliness, transparency and accuracy are what the world expects of organizations. Anything less, and they lose trust. Despite the pressures, communicators must champion openness and immediacy when an organization’s crisis management team is debating what to share and when.

Do we have to tell the world everything about our business during a crisis?

Here’s a common concern: ‘Our organization is transparent, but we have certain constraints – legal, regulatory, corporate culture.’ Transparency carries risks, but it is a real issue during a crisis. BP found itself live-broadcasting gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico with the now famous “spill-cam.” Just a few weeks later the world watched miners being rescued live on TV. One was deep under the sea, the other deep under ground. My fears went skyward when I saw a live webcam show one of the Fukushima units explode.

Organizations have to deal with the fact that millions carry around high definition cameras with them in their pockets. So, the world has very different expectations about being a witness to incidents, and internal organizational constraints to sharing or showing information sound like hollow excuses. What does this mean? The boundaries of what the world expects to see or hear about a business’ response to a crisis have been extended.

In 2012, corporate communicators will continue to grapple with the impact of social media – especially in the realm of crisis communications. How can they tailor and adapt plans to take into account a rapidly changing world that expects them to provide information almost instantly? Neil Chapman tells us how.

The profound role of social media in our lives was brought home to me dramatically a year ago. As the parent of a student caught up in the Japanese earthquakes and tsunami last March, I was reminded  just how vital good information is for those impacted by such terrible events, not only those caught up directly, but also for those with a direct (or perceived) interest – the ‘stakeholders’ in PR-speak.

Having myself responded to attention-grabbing events over a 25-year communications career, after Friday March 11, 2011 I found myself on the outside desperately seeking information. My reactions reinforced some thoughts I was still reflecting on. I was thrust back in time to the day I responded on-site in New Orleans to deal with the highly complex BP oil spill.

Fast-forward now to last year… During 2011 I shared crisis communications lessons learned about the spill with many corporate communicators trying to understand how to address the changing demands from both new and old media as well as other stakeholders, who appear to have insatiable information appetites in light of new technologies. However, corporate communicators are all too aware of the limited resources they have to hand in a crisis.

Here are some of the questions they asked me. I thought I’d share them with you here:

Should corporate communicators rethink their role in a crisis?

Yes. Time was, protecting reputation meant dampening or trying to soften headlines as much as possible. That might keep the CEO happy in the past. But with the capability to communicate directly to people in a way they want to receive information, communicators have to coach their organisations to adopt a more appropriate reputation philosophy – more on the lines of ensuring accurate information reaches people who need it most as quickly as possible. Media may be an important audience, but probably not THE most important in this scenario. Keeping faith with key audiences during a dramatic event can enhance an organisation’s reputation in the long-term, even when something bad happens. Cost-effective technologies exist to do just that – Ushahidi, PIER Systems, YouTube, Twitter, email etc. – yet too many are choosing not to use them. Crisis communicators today should be familiar with and know the value of different information channels and plan for the two-way flow of information rather than just one-way broadcasting.

How ‘demanding’ are different audiences in a crisis?

Very – and they won’t wait for you to get your act together. Dealing with hundreds if not thousands of emails, tweets, on-line comments/day with phones ringing off the hook is not the time to plan what to do. Meanwhile web traffic will test an organisation’s IT infrastructure, sometimes to collapse. Just one (of a number) of the websites launched to provide information on the BP oil spill received 150 million hits alone. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) now offers good web information about its Fukushima nuclear power station. For weeks after the tsunami it didn’t. I turned to Ushahidi  – an open source software that collects and displays information on inter-active maps – and other sources for the information I sought to help my son decide whether it was safe to continue his studies in light of the Fukushima nuclear fall out. Any organisation needs to plan and prepare for the digital information demand onslaught; otherwise audiences will drift away, along with their trust.

Is your staff prepared to handle a fast-moving social media crisis? Join us on Feb. 29th for SMI’s instructional Social Media Crisis Communications and Reputation Management workshop in London. We’ll again be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. His stories and lessons from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy will fascinate you!

How do we monitor what people are saying about us and what should we do?

Not easy. It takes a lot of monitoring because no single system – whether Google alerts or Hootsuite – can do it all. Besides, monitoring should be part of an overall reputational tracking strategy. It’s better to ask: ‘How should we respond when we find our name being used or abused?’ The Social Media Monitoring tool by SMI is a simple tool to help communicators think through actions when an organisation finds itself in the digital firing line (see graphic below).

Editor’s Note: SMI again this year will be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief of BP and a veteran of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, on a series of instructional Social Media Crisis Communications workshops. The first is scheduled for Feb. 29th in London.

We’ve published in the past some interesting pieces of social media research from Mike Schwede who has always taken an interesting look at how the public responds to and impacts the major stories of the day from the Greenpeace siege on Nestle to the shortlived love affair with Pippa Middleton. He joins us here for a look at some big observations for the year to come.My visit to LeWeb 2011 with Tobias and Barbara in December was very inspiring, especially the personal conversations with Internet entrepreneurs, app developers and social media pros. What seemed important to me for 2012, and will certainly be a big part of the discussion I’ve outlined here:

1. LoMoSo will be central – local, social, mobile. Mobile Internet use will increase sharply, especially with customers who already have a high online affinity. Its importance will actually exceed that of desktop use. This fact has an impact on the requirements of your website, or on search advertising strategies.
2. Social is a feature, not a platform – Users have gotten to know and grown to love news streams, commenting, sharing, likes and check-in functionalities. Additionally, they want to join the conversation, wherever it may be taking place – be it employees, customers, suppliers, or the public. I therefore recommend: approach social in a holistic manner and think about where social elements can generate added value between you and your target audience.
3. Social enterprise instead of just social media: In the future it won’t be enough to enrich communications efforts with a few social media elements. Enterprises must transform themselves into social enterprises – that way,  much like there is no switchboard or phone operator, every employee uses social media principles and platforms in the context of their role. The way is still a long one, which is why you should get started with it today, and not put it off until tomorrow. Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts formulates it more dramatically: “If you don’t do that – I don’t know what your business model will look like in five years!“
4. The role of the website is dramatically changing: Just one year ago I was convinced that the website was the central element of digital communication and that everything else is grouped around it. Today it looks a little different: why should you try to build functionality into a website that would be much more useful and easier to implement elsewhere? Why should content not be distributed across the web according to the target audience and media specifically? The most important thing is, however, that content can be easily found and lead the user to predefined goals (leads, buys, awareness, position, etc.). Where is this to occur, if not on the website? Of course, a Facebook app, a mobile App or a YouTube presence can help you achieve these goals more effectively. However, it is important that you retain perspective. Don’t become too dependent on other platforms (i.e. Facebook) for the sake of your website.

What goes through the human mind when a crisis strikes? Panic? Meltdown? You’d be surprised. During moments of extreme adversity, well-prepared teams can do extraordinary things – identify the heart of the problem, devise a plan of attack and return the operation to “business as usual.” Veteran crisis communications trainer Neil Chapman offers us some key insights, starting with some lessons from a must-read book.

By Neil Chapman

Anyone interested in crisis management should read Amanda Ripley’s book ‘The Unthinkable - Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why.” In fact, any corporate communicator should read this book, both for professional and personal development. In this excerpted version, the Time reporter covers much of the key points from her book, which was published in 2008, but remains particularly relevant today.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday, famed digital analyst Mark Meeker gave her annual “Internet Trends” address that touched on everything from Greek debt to a long-overdue re-casting of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs putting our digital/mobile needs over self-actualization. Here’s the presentation in full:

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

First to the positive points: by just about any measure, online advertising, e-commerce and mobile revenues are going to be major engines of growth for years to come. Interestingly, social networks (slides 39-40) are out-performing portals in virtually every measure, now even carrying a higher CPM.

Meeker though is pretty much stumped by the future of content. She notes revenues for U.S. newspapers is down five consecutive years and that the group as a whole is about to be surpassed by Google, revenues-wise. She reckons that “With undifferentiated products, price is competed down to marginal cost. And the marginal cost for digital content is $0.”

Ouch.

We’re a bit more optimistic about the role of digital content. Content will be crucial for digital commerce, for starters, though that probably doesn’t necessarily serve the pure-play publishers of the world. At least not straight away. But organizations would be wise to figure out their digital content strategy. Yes, even for organizations and brands that aren’t in the media business. Why is that? Because we believe all organizations will have to become publishing operations in order to survive.

Too bad Meeker didn’t address this. We certainly see it as a worthwhile discussion going forward.

Our SEO expert Andrew Shotland spends a lot of time pondering the algorithmic guts of Google Maps. Could it be all that user-generated data it’s incorporating into Maps is making locations actually harder to see? Let’s find out.

By Andrew Shotland

I just wanted to use “radii” in a headline…

Mike Blumenthal tweeted yesterday that he thought the radii of the Google map for various local queries had gotten smaller.

To me it seemed like the radii hadn’t changed much but the map pins had gotten bigger so I decided to compare the map that displayed for me a few months ago for “san francisco restaurants” v. what I see for that query today:

Of course this is just one query and GOOG changes things all the time. This query also could be affected by ranking changes – GOOG may adjust the map radii based on the locations of the top ranked businesses.

If in fact the radii are getting smaller and the visuals are getting bigger, I am guessing that this has something to do with baking more user feedback into the ranking algo for certain queries (e.g. show results where people click/go the most) which also means that there may be more mobile search feedback being incorporated into the Web results. The bigger visuals might make the maps a bit more usable and perhaps point to the influence of alternative browsers such as the iPad where this might really make a difference.

Or they just could be screwing around with your radii.

Andrew Shotland blogs about local SEO services and tweets at @localseoguide.

I have been thinking more and more about the various strands to Social Business Intelligence, which is a major area of focus for us here at Dachis Group in 2011. At our London summit earlier this year, I spoke about the way open data inside and outside organisations can uncover new sources of value and help drive performance improvement. Yesterday, at the lovely Social Media Influence Conference, I spoke about how the field of Social Media Monitoring will become more real-time, operational and valuable as it moves towards Social Business Intelligence.

In summary, I think social media monitoring will evolve towards real-time data-driven business improvement based on socialising customer insight within the firm as a whole, not just within marketing and outbound communications.

Here are the slides, and a longer summary follows below for those of you who were not there:

From Social Media Monitoring to Social Business Intelligence

Listening grows up; becomes more business-focused

We have all been to events where people (sometimes me!) reference the Cluetrain manifesto and say that markets are conversations, and therefore we need to get better at listening before we engage. But in reality, the fact that ‘listening’ is still seen as a new and novel activity just goes to show how alien this has been to the culture of large companies and brands for so long.

But, looking at Altimeter’s survey of social strategists, it seems that listening, customer dialogue and word of mouth are now high on most organisation’s spending priorities for 2011. This is a good sign. Listening tools and techniques have evolved rapidly in the past year or so, and the purchase of the market-leading Radian 6 by Salesforce suggests that listening platforms are now regarded as a key piece of the wider social business infrastructure.

However, current practice is still largely dominated by the ideas of brand monitoring and buzz – in other words, it is still more about the company or brand than the individual and their needs or interests. Brand monitoring is a slightly narcissistic way of engaging – ‘they love me … they love me not’ – and often tend to look at aggregate measures of sentiment (which is, by the way, extremely unreliable) and reach, rather than specific issues. But there are plenty of other ways to use listening platforms to get a better idea of customer needs, opportunities, etc. We are working on some quite specific listening campaigns to help refine clients’ service offerings, and this requires far more linguistic gymnastics than asking “does my brand look big in this?”

Brand perception is obviously important, but I think utility matters more to customers most of the time. This is why I love the way companies like Southwest Airlines and others use Twitter in a very down-to-earth way, responding honestly and openly to complaints, questions and issues.

A fun little story that I think exemplifies the way utility trumps “official” brand communications, and also illustrates the need to listen and engage rather than jump feet first into social media, is the tale of woe surrounding Tom Armitage’s Tower Bridge twitterbot.

I am sure our favourite bridge needs no introduction. We love it and watch it every day (as some of you will know, often from the window of our favourite local eaterie). It’s only downside is that when the bridge raises, we sometimes get stuck in traffic for 10 minutes or so on the way to meetings in the city. Luckily, whilst he worked here, the lovely Tom Armitage created a twitterbot for the bridge that would diligently tweet bridge openings and closings, and even tell you the name of the boat sailing through, all based on public data. Beyond its practical utility, the twitterbot gave the bridge a personality in the social web, and inspired other inanimate objects to do the same (incidentally, the SF writer Bruce Sterling coined the term spimes in 2004 for this very purpose).

At some point, the marketing people at the corporation of London, who run the Tower Bridge Exhibition, decided they had the right to the “official” twitter handle @towerbridge and applied to Twitter to have it handed over to them. After trying and failing to contact Tom, Twitter sadly complied with this request and what began as a public utility (that also did a great job of promoting the bridge) turned into a dull, series of weak marketing messages for the exhibition. Perhaps the Corporation of London thought it had ‘followed a process’ and so everything was ok.

To cut a long story short, a minor twitter storm ensued with over 1,250 tweets mentioning @towerbridge in just a few days (approx. 50% of the 3 year total), almost all of which were very critical of the Corporation of London’s disregard for both Tom, the Twittersphere and the users of the bridge. I would hate to be the one trawling through the sentiment analysis for their newly minted Twitter account. Finally, realising their mistake, and to their credit, the people involved contacted Tom and the bridge now tweets at the rather unmemorable @twrbrdg_itself, presumably to “protect” the brand equity of the exhibition.

Listening and analytics cannot, of course, undo stupidity like this, but there are many other situations in which earlier action in response to product or service problems or user issues could be possible thanks to real-time data.

Some pointers for data-driven business

There are several areas in which I think listening and analytics will grow up to become more business relevant, and if they do, then I think they can play a major role in helping businesses evolve in a more customer-centric way:

• Instead of studying a microcosm of online social activity, we should try to immerse ourselves in the ecosystem and be closer to the context of what is being said and shared.

• In addition to listening to opinion, it also makes sense to gather and connect behavioural data so that future social marketing efforts can build up a rounded picture of customers and their needs.

• Don’t just listen to external conversations – also point analytics at internal conversations and see if there are common themes or correlations between them (e.g. someone in product teams suggesting feature X might be buggy should ideally be picked up before customers begin complaining).

• Share streams of listening data internally as widely as possible to bring everybody closer to customers, and involve the whole company (not just marcomms) in making sense of the data and what actions it suggests.

• Think carefully about who should ideally action customer insight, and bring them into the listening loop. For example, efforts by Gatorade, Dell and others around social media command centres have shown great promise in immersing C-suite execs in the flow of customer insight, and that helps them understand what social media teams are trying to do and why.

• Move beyond reports and dashboards and find new ways to share real-time data ‘in the flow’ of peoples’ work. Reports have never been a particularly effective way of changing behaviour, but in this case their limited distribution and the time lag effect both limit their usefulness.

The “who owns social” question

In order to action some of the points above, the perennial question of how to organise for social cannot be ignored. Who “owns” social (if anybody)? How do different business functions come together to make it work? These are not easy questions to answer after decades of increasing specialisation and silo-building, but without at least an interim answer to this question (even if it is as simple as a co-ordination committee), there may be problems ahead.

Ideally, we would recommend the kind of podular structure that my colleague Dave Gray has written about recently. It is interesting to note how Amazon – a very data-driven business – uses small teams or pods to drive tiny features on each Amazon web page, and how they use he vast amount of behavioural data generated by the site to tweak, improve or remove these features in an approach dubbed ‘Data Darwinism.’

Actions speak louder than algorithms

Why do we listen? We listen to learn and inform action. But how do we act? This is the key question that can help us close the loop between insight and results. All the data in the world will not help if we do nothing with it. Right now, one of the problems we see with listening campaigns is that the insights go no further than the marketing department, but they are not able to pull the right levers within the company to act on them. This was one of the take-aways from Jaimie Punishill’s entertaining talk at the 2010 Social Business Summit in Austin, and from what I understand, it came up in his 2011 SXSW panel on the challenges of doing customer engagement using social media as well.

So how can we both improve the way we make sense of customer insight whilst also encouraging people to take ownership of the issues identified?

We are working on the application of social analytics to this problem for clients that want to take the next step beyond passive listening. The basic idea is this: start by surfacing a stream of potentially actionable events or insights within a social environment inside a client’s organisation, and give people the opportunity to easily flag items as actionable / non-actionable or to claim them as actions. Claiming actions in the open, we believe, encourages a culture of ownership but also helps others learn what sort of actions and resolutions work best. The logical next step is to reward those who are best at filtering, sharing, escalating or claiming actions, perhaps through simple game mechanics or visible rewards.

We believe that open data can encourage greater self-management from staff by giving them the real-time feedback on how their efforts are playing out in terms of results. This can play a vital role in creating the conditions for evolutionary improvement in companies interested in harnessing customer insight to drive performance.

Lee Bryant was a keynote speaker at Social Media Influence 2011. He Tweets at @leebryant.

By James Brain

People often ask, ‘what is employee engagement?’ Most of us know how engagement feels because most days something is likely to ‘engage’ us, either at home or work. When we are engaged, we become focused on whatever subject or task is involving us. We are excited, enthusiastic, energized and more creative. At best we have that fully alive feeling when we lose track of time – what Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”.
What can be said of an individual also applies to groups, with top performing teams often described in a similar way. Imagine a company frequently displaying those attributes. It is not hard to see why there is a growing consensus, supported by a strong body of evidence, that high employee engagement is linked to much higher levels of performance, productivity and profitability.

But what drives employee engagement? What can we do to release that natural creativity, passion and energy?

Research reveals newly emerging, previously under-recognized drivers: being directly involved with big issue decisions, feeling able to contribute to the organization’s strategy, and empowerment to make decisions about routine day-to-day work, come top of the list. Motivation to perform, pride for their organization, and fairness – the ‘traditional’ motivators – are present but surprisingly not as significant as these more democratic drivers.
This reinforces what we already know: changes in the nature of power relationships between the employee and employer are accelerating, and this is being catalyzed by the new social technologies whose participative nature support these new drivers. The underlying theme is also clear:  the ability of leaders to share power and include people in decision-making is a powerful indicator of an engaged workforce.
Jonathan Austin CEO of Best Companies says, “The way employers treat employees has a direct effect on how employees treat customers. Customers, or service users, vote with their feet depending on the quality of the interaction they experience with any given organization. Quality costumer and employee interaction are, over the long run, the lifeblood of any business. These quality interactions ensure brand loyalty, advocacy and can give an organization a competitive edge, which if rooted in their culture can be hard if not impossible to replicate.” Gallup says that 78% of engaged employees will advocate their company’s products or services against only 13% of the disengaged.

Consumers themselves are also requiring a closer relationship with us, for a more mutual ‘partnership’ model of commerce. With powerful, easy to use social tools and pocketable mobile communications, every employee has access to potential touch points with customers or partners, making the boundaries and the inside and outside of organizations increasingly blurred.

Therefore almost everyone in our organizations and their wider community should be involved in this transition to a more transparent, democratic, natural and authentic way of relating to each other – it can no longer be the sole preserve of the marketing or customer service teams.

Engaged employees provide the most, genuine, switched-on, independent thinking people that are by far the most effective and natural brand ambassadors. They are no longer the ‘nice to have’ mavericks but the core of our customer engagement efforts as marketing communications turn predominately social.

Have you considered the role employees could play in your external social media marketing and campaigns? If not, you could be missing a trick.

James Brain is a consultant at Headshift, part of the Dachis Group. Headshift is a sponsor of Social Media Influence 2011. Register now to hear Headshift director Lee Bryant speak at the conference on June 14.

By Matt McAlister

I’ve been exploring some of the implications of openness at large scale and identifying how value is created.  One way to think about that is by positioning openness and empowerment against control and ownership. #

When does control create value? What characteristics do the opposite extremes have in common?  What does success mean in a world that is constantly changing at seemingly increasing speed? #

By ‘control’ I mean owning and defining product design, materials, rules, behaviors, processes, marketplace, pricing, etc. as opposed to ‘empowerment’ which is all about fueling strength in others. #

When you then compare that spectrum against a related tension in the world, change vs the status quo, some interesting things start to appear. #

Here is a very generalized view of where certain industry sectors sit on this scale, in my mind.  None of this is based on real data or research.  It’s still just a working hypothesis. #

I’m saying here that sectors like Finance and Manufacturing represent the status quo, industries where its customers want incremental change, if any at all.  By this measure, maintaining known outcomes through tumultuous times requires control of resources, distribution, etc. #

Utility services similarly want to keep things in a sustainable state and reject transformative change.  The Utilities marketplace differs from Finance in that its success is dependent on how well it serves people’s needs as opposed to predetermining outcomes for people. #

On the other side is Science where its core purpose is defined by the constant pressure to discover new, transformative ways of understanding the world.  Achieving success requires a great deal of control over details that only individuals and small teams can manipulate, often with great secrecy. #

On the other hand, social software enables similarly transformative capabilities in the world, but its customers are empowered to make those changes happen, albeit very chaotic.  These organizations are defined by their own customers. #

The argument then goes that success in each of these categories has slightly different characteristics but signficantly different core purposes. #

What do people, business, industries want? #

Some aim to sit safely and last as long as possible, while others want to do things and to be busy.  Some want to achieve or accomplish something new and important, and others want to grow toward something meaningful and to progress. #

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In the industrialized world, the reward for succeeding has traditionally meant cash money.  Historically, bigger financial rewards find their way to those who are able to sustain behaviors as opposed to those that intend to transform our world. #

But not everyone does what they do primarily for cash reward.  Some do it for the recognition.  Others do it to be useful. #

While fame and utility are strong incentives for many, money has very powerful gravitational pull, particularly at larger scales. #

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The power of money pulls many oganizations out of the worlds from which they were born into a place that ultimately values the status quo over change. #

Now, this in and of itself is certainly not a bad thing.  Too often, though, the financial motive drowns good intentions and changes the essence of an organization. #

From the outside this is what seems to be happening to companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft and even Google.  It’s becoming the expected outcome for Facebook, but certainly not its destiny. #

Interestingly, Apple has come back from that dangerous death spiral to irrelevance of the ‘sans Jobs’ years, but they’ve done it by focusing on transformation as a core value, a cultural flag in a sense.  As change is the interminable force driving technological advancement, it makes sense to have an intentional approach to it if you are a technology company…and even if you’re not. #

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This argument doesn’t suggest that more closed organizations like Apple, Microsoft, News International, Disney, etc. are unsuccessful.  By most commercial measures they are all very successful, indeed. #

Rather, this argument suggests that the characteristics of a closed approach to operating mean that change and growth are dependent on the organization’s achievements, it’s discoveries, it’s own capabilities against everyone else’s. #

It means closed organizations operate on their own and compete for points of control.  Winning comes at the expense of others. #

The open approach means that change and growth happen by giving, by strengthening others, by creating spaces for opportunity. #

The rewards for being successful as an open agent of change are profound.  By valuing utility, service, relationships, tangible impact and effect over precision, being right, process and method you become part of a larger, deeper, more meaningful change in people’s lives. #

This is not to say that operating on the edge of change doesn’t also have commercial value.  Being first to market has huge financial advantages if they are played correctly. #

I might argue, actually, that being an open organization focused on change is no different than a closed organization in terms of how to approach building commercial value. #

If you are not on the edge of change then you are more susceptible to the intense pull of the change-resistant markets sucking you back the other direction.  In that case, you risk losing focus on your intentions and instead become focused exclusively on cash rewards to survive. #

Then without a Mr. Jobs to recenter your target on the future your options close down in front of you very quickly. #

Value in open organizations operating at large scale, therefore, is created through healthy relationships with others, by giving value to them, by creating value for new partnerships, opening opportunties on the edge of change. #

In return, if it is in fact uniquely useful, the open organization becomes a dependency for its customers and partners.  And that is a position of strength with many positive commercial outcomes. #

Matt McAlister is Director of Digital Strategy at Guardian Media Group. He tweets at @mattmcalister and blogs at MattMcAlister.com. McAlister will participate in the annual Social Media Influence conference on June 14 in London, speaking on the “Mobile and Social Commerce Era” panel.