What’s New @ PollStream

It has been a while since I have sent out an update  to members of the PollStream community.  There has been so much going on these past few months that I just have to stop for a moment to share some news with you all.

In June we moved to our new offices located at 18 Hook Ave in Toronto’s up and coming Junction neighborhood.  The new office is large, light and bright and ready for guests, so feel free to drop by any time!

On the project side of things we have been very busy with client implementation since the move to the new office.  The Cleveland Clinic’s employee communications program is well underway, the Ontario Place public consultation enjoyed fantastic participation and RBC has launched their Pollution Probe annual quiz.  I was shocked to discover that I only scored 3 out on 10 on the Pollution Probe quiz – I couldn’t believe how poor my ‘energy literacy’ was!

Currently we are busy with a new Hive implementation with our partners over at Rideau Recognition Solutions.  I recently spent a lot of time with the gang from Rideau; Peter Hart, Peter’s son Jordan and Max Brown, while at the VPHR conference in Paris.  It was my first time presenting outside of North America and it was wonderful.  Paris is certainly a lovely place – even in the midst of month long national strikes.

The PollStream developers have been incredibly productive this fall and have delivered a ton of new functionality that many of you are familiar with first hand by now.  For those who may not have discovered these new enhancements….read on!

• Poll Mobile: PollStream is now optimized for all current smart phones.  The experience is perfect and I encourage you to give it a try: http://vote.pollstream.com/7934.

• Poll in Facebook: Looking to make your Facebook brand site more interactive without driving people away from your Facebook pages?  Poll in Facebook allows you to publish rich media filled, multi-question polls right to your Facebook site.  And the reporting is awesome too.

• PollStream API: Love PollStream and looking for more flexibility in where and how you integrate our solutions?  Well, the new API will let you do your stuff your way.  Here are some examples of what clients have asked us to enable:

• Build Polls right into iPhone apps. Once integrated with your app, you can still create, publish and report on polls from the PollStream admin
• Integrate PollStream with your IVR system.  The same poll that is published to your web site can be presented to customers calling your contact centre
• Incorporate PollStream within your Flash applications.  Again, you can publish and report on polls right from the admin
• Extend PollStream features across your site.  Sparkplug ideas, Comment Engine comments, Hive Beelines and Poll results can all live outside the application pages.  Pull the content into your social services, add them to profile pages or display them in your site search.  All is possible.

The New Year is just around the corner and from our view is gearing up to be a breakthrough year.  I thank you all for helping us get to where we are today and for staying with us as we grow together in 2011!

Best,
Steven Green

All of Us Are Smarter Than One of Us

It seems like a no-brainer. You hire the best and the brightest people you can find. Why not get the most out of your employees by turning their collective mind-power toward your organization’s thorniest problems?

When you think about it, your workers’ minds are going a mile a minute all day long. That’s a lot of “CPU cycles” that are, for the most part, going untapped. You can bet that one of your QA technicians has a strong opinion about a better way to do product testing. She might even have some ideas about improvements to the manufacturing process.

Why is it so difficult to get the brilliant ideas that are generated on your campus every day into a stage anywhere close to implementation? Business has been living with the Suggestion Box for over a hundred years now and yet it still doesn’t work as well as you think it should.

Walking the Plank

In the 18th century a midshipman in the Royal Navy wouldn’t dare to offer a helpful suggestion to his commanding officer. Clever ideas from the rank-and-file were too often viewed as insubordination—and could mean dancing a jig at the end of the yardarm.

Oddly, today’s Suggestion Box is hold-over from those bad old days when organizations were ruled with an iron fist. Anonymous entries are supposed to be less threatening to upper management who might feel that they alone are the brains of the organization. But an anonymous suggestion system also means that employees don’t get the recognition they deserve for their good ideas.

Welcome to the Half-Bakery

The other problem with today’s suggestion systems is an abundance of half-baked or poorly thought-out ideas. Too many suggestions to put Root Beer in the corporate water cooler and not enough about solving persistent delivery issues. Furthermore, the person who is hired to process employee input might not have experience with the part of the organization where the suggestion could be implemented.

Introducing Distributed Thinking
So we’re left with organizations that have wasted brainpower and ineffective suggestion systems. Why not use one problem to solve the other? Let your employees mill through the great ideas of their peers, giving recognition where it is due. If an idea is half-baked, turn it over to the workforce and let them bake it, top it and serve it on a platter.

Today’s social software gives us exciting new opportunities to capture the best thinking within the organization and make it even better. We don’t have to settle for an electronic Drop Box for random thoughts. We have the tools right now to capture, process and promote the best thinking of your corporate brain trust, making a leap from the Suggestion Box to an engine of Distributed Thought.

What happens in Princeton . . . gets shared in this blog post

I recently returned from the three day Social Media for Pharma conference in Princeton, NJ.  The conference, put on by the Advanced Learning Institute, was a great meeting of large Pharma like Merck, Pfizer, J&J and Abbott alongside smaller outfits with fantastically futuristic names like Regeneron and Widex.  The three days offered a great window into a highly regulated industry. Here are some of the take-away’s from people I had a chance to connect with.

The FDA and the Rules of Engagement for Social Media

I don’t care what industry you work in, if it’s not Pharma then you do not understand the meaning of regulation.  The FDA is the watchdog of this industry and they are a very watchful dog indeed.  Every presentation delivered over the three days included eye rolling references to the FDA’s vigilant oversight of Pharma’s foray into Social Media.  In 2009 alone 14 warning letters were sent out admonishing companies about social media ‘offences’.  Vigilant yes, clear and predictable, no.

Peter Pitts, the former Associate Commissioner of the FDA who is now a Partner with Porter Novelli delivered a thrilling (yes, thrilling) presentation on the state of the FDA and Social Media.  Peter strongly asserted that the FDA does not understand social media and that the lack of regulations provides the FDA with too much power.  Peter stated that if the FDA provided more regulation, then Pharma companies would at least know the rules of engagement.  As it stands, the rules are vague and in vagueness lies ambiguity which is a powerful tool in the hands of bureaucracy.

May the ‘Force’ be with you

The human condition is strong, and as we all know, it’s impossible to keep progress from happening regardless of the obstacles.  This was clearly shown in the presentations of Novo Nordisk, Lundbeck and Pfizer at the recent Social Media for Pharma Summit in Princeton, NJ.

Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest maker of insulin, shared their sponsored Twitter program called Racing with Insulin.  By working closely with the Regulatory group, Ambre Morley, the Ass. Director of Product Communications was able to launch a sponsored Twitter account with F1 driver Charlie Kimball.  Charlie was recently diagnosed with Diabetes and Novo Nordisk saw this partnership as a great way to show that world that when properly managed, Diabetes does not have to mean the end of competition in high performance sports.  Visit their Twitter account: @racewithinsulin

Lundbeck, a research focused pharmaceutical company based in Denmark showed off their partnership with NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorders.  Clarissa Trujillo presented with NORD to show how they launched a Twitter program to promote Rare Disease Day 2010. The cause marketing program allowed them to promote the focus of Lundbeck as a leader in rare disease research while helping create awareness for the Disease Day program. Check out what Clarissa has to say about Lundbeck’s foray into social media.

Pfizer’s Kate Bird, Director, Corporate Digital Communications Strategy, presented their foray into Facebook.  Kate shared the challenges of engaging their community via social media while being cautious about the risks they would face in respect to Adverse Event Reporting and the FDA’s expectation of follow-up in a relatively anonymous environment.  Kate has done exciting work and has paved the way for others in her industry to follow.  You can view their Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/MSVoices

Is Pharma Marketing for You?

After three days at the Social Media for Pharma conference I came away wondering what type of person would choose to go into marketing in such a challenging and highly regulated environment.  The answer was soon clear –persistent people who have stamina for bureaucracy and who can see and convince others of their vision.   Pharma marketing is not for the faint of heart but as witnessed at the event, the boulder can be pushed up the mountain and each small gain breaks new ground and sets the stage for the next stage of innovation.

Unleashing Participation

There is an art to getting people involved. Building participation into your online communications is less like Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams (“if you build it, they will come,”) and more like throwing a wonderful dinner party. Ultimately it’s a lot less work and a whole lot more fun than constructing a baseball diamond!

It doesn’t take a tremendous effort to encourage participation but it does a certain knack. Like the host of an engaging party you need know your audience, bring people into the conversation, stir things up. A successful host or hostess knows how to pair interesting people together and then get out of the way.

Here are some ways to get people talking:

• Start by listening. Follow interesting people on Twitter. Learn what people are saying about your organization, product or service. Once you know what people think, you can address the things that matter most.
• Participate yourself. At first it can be an uphill battle drawing people to your site. Why not join people where conversation is already taking place? A Facebook fan page, for instance, is a great way to leverage an existing conversation space and share the added value you have on your main site.
• Ask questions. “What improvements have you noticed in the new product model?” A question is more likely to get a response than a statement such as ‘New product model has 23 new improvements’. Whether you are posting to your blog or participating in a Twitter conversation, questions can be an easy way to get people talking.
• Have an attitude of gratitude. Thank people for participating. Attribute your sources. Post links to the good ideas of others. People like to be recognized and they will reward you by participating more in the future.
• Give people a stake in your success. Letting people link back to their own online presence is a great way to add high-value content to your site. Some of your most thoughtful collaborators are interested in building traffic to their own sites. These people know how to create value and they can be some of your strongest allies.

So, in summary, I ask you, “What do you do to encourage participation within your company?

Recognition improves as the people giving recognition improve

I attended the SCNetwork session titled GETTING RECOGNITION RIGHT this morning at the beautiful National Club in downtown Toronto. I was a guest of Rideau Recognition who sponsored the event and who also happen to be wonderful PollStream partners.

Roy Saunderson, President of the Recognition Management Institute was the key presenter – if you have never had a chance to see Roy present, you should. He is VERY passionate about recognition and is always willing to share everything he knows about how to get recognition right (hence the session name!)

I would like to share just one idea that Roy shared as part of his opening remarks, ‘Recognition improves as the people giving recognition improve.’ I like this kind of wisdom – it forces me to swirl the words around my mouth a few times before the full flavor and meaning becomes clear. Roy believes that giving good recognition takes practice – it is not simply a matter of saying good job or telling a person they have received a raise. Yes, these are great moments, but there are ways to finesse the moment to make it last longer and burn brighter.

One concrete example that Roy provided had to do with communicating a promotion. His idea is to present a letter to the employee detailing why the person has been promoted – outlining the characteristics, behaviours and achievements that resulted in the promotion. If I had received such a letter from my managers at the time of my past promotions, I can assure you that the letter would have been AS impactful as the promotion itself.

Getting the job is great for sure, but we all know that someone has to fill it. By sharing your thoughts about why you believe I am the person for the job is a deeper and far more special form of recognition.

‘Wow Moments’ Helps TD Canada Trust Nurture Employee Engagement, Growth

The cover story on Engagement Strategies Magazine is about a project at TD Bank which provides an great inside view into a very successful peer-to-peer employee recognition program. Yes, the platform is by PollStream and, yes, I am from PollStream, but this is a very well written case study by Engagement Strategies Magazine and it should provide this community with some great insights into developing a meaningful recognition program.