Charlene Li: Leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum

I had to get up at 7 on a Saturday morning for this, but it was absolutely worth it: seeing ex Forrester Research executive, book author and influential marketing blogger Charlene Li speak at Stichting Marketing Congres. And she really made my day!

Stitching Marketing Congress: Thriving in Turbulent Times

View more presentations from Charlene Li.

Charlene Li saw 4 goals that define your strategy:

1. Always start with Learn and use monitoring tools to do so
2. Dialog with your community. It used to be called the Ladder of Participation (inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, creators) in Forrester's Social Technographics report, but Li now calls it The Engagement Pyramid (watchers, sharers, commenters, producers, curators). Much to Boondoggle's joy, she showed baby-olifant.be as a prime example of how to create a relationship with your audience. For her slide on the Engagement scores of 100 brands (with Starbucks and Dell as examples of high engagement in many channels) she used engagementdb.com.
3. Help your members support each other. And Twitter is indeed a great way to provide first line customer support.
4. Innovate and encourage ideas from your user base by using crowdsourcing.

So how do you get started with your social media strategy?

1. Start small, start now Understand audience “Socialgraphics” Set a clear goal
2. Understand the benefits of openness. Fans (e.g. of your Facebook page) have value only if you do something with them.
3. Build trust and manage risk. Here Li talked about the Sandbox Covenant, the process by which the open leader defines how big the “sandbox”, and then in concert with employees, customers, and partners, defines the walls of that sandbox clearly. Leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s defined by how you will interact and engage with your employees, customers, and partners.
4. Plan to fail well: identify the top 5-10 worst case scenarios, encourage risk taking and forgive failures.