I’m pleased to announce the Open Leadership Awards, which will recognize the organizations and individuals who are using social technologies to open and transform their organizations.  Being open is hard, so this is a chance to highlight organizations and leaders who are successfully giving up control while still getting things done.

If your organization has changed the way you make decisions, share information or engage with your community and employees, this is your chance to tell us (and the world) about it. We’re looking for real-world examples of success, but we also want to know about the journey you and your organization took to get there – especially the obstacles and failures you had to overcome along the way.

Our hope: that you will learn and be inspired by examples of how others are approaching leadership and strategy with a new mindset — and with the help of social technologies.

To enter, submit your case study, which will then be posted publicly for comment and also voting. Vendors and agencies are welcome to submit client case studies as long as they have permission from their clients.

All final winners will be decided by Altimeter Group and announced at our upcoming event, “Rise of Social Commerce” on October 6, 2010 in Palo Alto, California. Awards will be given in ten categories – nine industries and one for small/medium-sized businesses.

Deadline for submissions is Friday, September 10, 2010 at 6 pm Pacific. The detailed rules are available on the awards site.

What are we looking for in a submission?

- Leadership. This isn’t just leadership as embodied in a person, but also leadership in your industry. If you’re carving a new path for your industry, tackling a tough problem like an engrained culture, we’ll sit up and take notice. If you’re highlighting the launch of a Facebook page, you won’t stand out. In the book, it’s described how Best Buy boldly invited all employees to help answer questions on its Twelpforce Twitter account. Few companies would do this, but we’re all inspired by the possibility that we could.

- Impact. Show that your openness and social initiatives mattered and made a difference. We’re not talking necessarily “ROI” but numbers are always appreciated. For example, Starbucks is making better and faster decisions because of its use of mystarbucksidea.com. But more importantly, it changed the culture within Starbucks, where employees now bring their laptops into meetings so that they can easily and instantaneously access that site so that they can bring the voice of the customer right into that conference room.

- Failures. As I wrote above, being open and using social technologies are hard. So the best submissions will not only tell us about the great successes — they will also tell us openly and honestly how they got there. They will include what obstacles the company encountered — and how they overcame them.

If you have any questions, please send them to openleadership@altimetergroup.com. Good luck!

Today, Facebook confirmed that it is adding location awareness to the Facebook experience. Facebook Places enables members to share where they are and who they are with, find people near them and discover new places of interest.  So if you travel to Chicago and are craving deep-dish pizza, you can see where your friends have “checked in” and what they thought about the experience.

Facebook Places launches with an iPhone app, the addition of a location feature to posts, a mobile site, an API for third-party developers and, most intriguing, the addition of “Place Pages,” which will appear once the first Facebook member has checked in to that location. Initial integration partners include Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and MyTown by Booyah.

Until now, Facebook knew who you were, what you are doing and when you did it. Now they add an even richer dimension–where you are–that completes the picture.

In our opinion, the three game-changing elements of “Places” are:

1. A new dimension to the online experience. By introducing location awareness to Facebook, the company has added a critical layer to the online experience–who, what, when, and now where you and your friends are. In doing so, it has brought the online experience one step closer to the way people interact in the real world.
2. Scale. By adding location to its massive user base (500 million strong and counting), Facebook has thrust location awareness squarely into the mainstream.
3. A user-curated “Place Page.” Once a user has checked in to a particular venue, Facebook will populate a Place Page that includes the activity stream of everyone who’s visited. This is a window not only into user opinion, but actual behavior. It’s similar to walking by a busy restaurant; visitors immediately see which locations are popular, and which are not.

Given the massive number of Facebook members, privacy is clearly a tremendous issue, and Facebook needed to be extremely careful to approach this challenge with their members in mind.

In our opinion, they did their homework this time; Places is a completely opt-in service, with context-aware alerts embedded into the iPhone app to help users understand the privacy implications of checking into locations. There are added protections for minors (who, for example, can only make their location available to friends).

As with any feature of this magnitude, problems will inevitably surface–but we see this as a solid first step.

How the Facebook Experience Will Change

For Consumers

• Value: connecting friends to places. Location awareness adds a new dimension of value to the Facebook experience.  For the first time, users will be able to see who among their friends has checked into or commented on a business or a place. Someone looking for a new dishwasher, a great bar or the best shoe repair shop in Chelsea may be skeptical of the opinions of 40 strangers, but they will care deeply what their friends have to say.   This makes Facebook far more useful to its members.
• Discovery and decision-making. Given the trust that people invest in their friends’ opinions, it’s incredibly valuable to know what they think about a new restaurant, store or salon. In the real world, it’s not always practical or possible to reach them, but Places provides a new activity stream that includes friends’ history and helps members make decisions. Which restaurants do my friends go to? What’s popular? This element of personal history has been missing from other location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp.

For Businesses

• Context and targeting. The golden ticket is the ability for businesses to see the local context of consumer behavior, which enables them to build far more relevant offers and services. Facebook has built on the early success of services like Foursquare with its Place Pages. While they are not focused on monetizing this immediately with ads, we anticipate that this will happen soon.
• Patterns and trends. When businesses are able to aggregate location data, patterns and trends will appear—what do people tend to do in one location versus another?  This is a treasure-trove of potential insights for business.
• CRM potential. The implication for CRM–not to mention social CRM–is enormous; location awareness enables business to understand exactly how their community interacts with them, not simply whether they “like” them.  The emphasis is on action rather than attitude. Overnight, this enables businesses to build relationships with people they could not reach before.
• Place Pages. Place Pages will includes an activity stream made up of everyone who’s visited. Businesses will need to learn how to use Place Pages and how to integrate them into their social strategies.

For Foursquare, Gowalla and other location-based services

By adding location to its massive user base (500 million strong and counting), Facebook has raised the bar for location-based companies like Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and others, and effectively disintermediated companies like Loopt who were not included in the initial launch list.  Location is now a feature—not a service, and these companies will need to differentiate quickly based on value to remain relevant.

Given this shift, consolidation is inevitable. A year from now, expect that many of these services will be acquired by the likes of MySpace and others. For more thoughts on the implications to location-based services, see my colleague Michael Gartenberg’s take here.

Recommendations

For Consumers

Expect it to take some time for Facebook members to understand the implications of location, and to decide how they will use it. Given the privacy concerns that location awareness naturally raises, Facebook has engineered their privacy settings to favor more, rather than less control.

Parents of teenagers should take the time to educate themselves about the privacy controls for minors, and talk to their children about the implications of sharing their location online.

At the same time, adults should think about their own disclosure strategy and preferences. When you’re traveling for business, do you really want to broadcast that you’re in town but don’t have time to see all your friends?

Ultimately, members will need to experience the process of checking in for themselves to fully understand how they want to use this service, and what benefits and drawbacks it raises for them.

For Businesses

First, businesses should claim their Place Pages immediately. Facebook has said they will have a way to claim their Place Page and integrate it with an existing Facebook business page.  Second, businesses should encourage their patrons, employees and others to check in and let their friends know they’re there. Whether you’re an electronics retailer, a supermarket or a hair salon, start to nurture your Place Page activity streams now.

Final Note

For Facebook, this is a bold move, but an inevitable one.  Its sheer size and scale guarantees widespread repercussions for some time to come. Businesses will work to incorporate location into their social web strategies, while consumers will take some time to acclimate to this new experience–as they have with other social media.

Our heuristic evaluation revealed that brands fell short – nearly half of the brands we reviewed (14 out of 30) did not fully leveraged social features to activate word of mouth, the hallmark behavior of social networks. Within this immature landscape, a few brands were on the right track to successfully harnessing Facebook page marketing. Brands like Pampers, Macy’s, Kohl’s, and AXE increased engagement and activated word of mouth through advocacy and peer-to-peer interactions, or solicited business call to actions that result in transactions.

How should brands approach their Facebook page marketing? We asked the experts.
Research means digging in deeper to find the truth,  and we know our place in the ecosystem is to work with others.  As a result, we had a call for submissions, and we received input from 34 vendors, agencies, brands, and individual experts. We read blog posts, looked at examples, and reviewed case studies.

360i, AKQA, Awareness, The Community Roundtable, Context Optional, Digital Evolution Group, Edelman Digital, Facebook, Gigya, Horn Group, Inside Facebook, Janrain, KickApps, Lithium, LiveWorld, Ogilvy’s 360° Digital Influence, Razorfish, RockYou, SHIFT Communications, Spredfast, StepChange Group, a Powered Company, Vitrue and Wildfire Interactive. We also received input from individual contributors such as: David Armano, David Berkowitz, Bert DuMars, Charlene Li, Dave McClure, Annie Noll, Shiv Singh, Adam Smith, Justin Smith, Jason Sullivan, and Anita Wong.

8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing
After pouring over the data from the ecosystem we’re part of, we found a clear pattern. There was a consistent set of criteria we heard from the industries experts, we found the following 8 criteria:

Then, we put 30 brands to the test to find out who’s doing it right –and wrong.
We then took that criteria, created a scorecard with quantitative criteria, and measured the world’s top brands on their Facebook efforts to find out who’s doing it right, and who’s not.  In the embedded report, you can download many of the high level findings, as well as see screenshots, comparison by industry and read our recommendations.

About the Altimeter research team.
For this report, I’m very thankful to work closely with Altimeter Partner, Alan Webber (bio, Twitter), who served as Editor. Alan is a multi-talented guy who stems from Forrester with a strong background in web user experience, and was able to tighten down the scorecard methodology which we’ll use to help clients. Christine Tran, Researcher (blog, Twitter), lead a detailed and thorough research process, always kept the ball rolling and is a consistent and reliable source of quality work, long hours, and positive energy. I’m very thankful for both of their consistent help!

Our belief in Open Research: It works when you share it
We want to be facilitators of the ecosystem and want to work closely with the marketplace.  We’re publishing our report under Open Research, at no-cost under creative commons licensing, this report was 100% funded by Altimeter Group, we also do our best to disclose our financial relationships.  To make Open Research work, we hope you read it, spread it, and use it to improve.  If you found this research report helpful, please embed it on your blog, email it to your teams, and spread it to others.

by Charlene Li
Please join me for an evening discussion at the Clearvale SecondFloor speaker series on Wednesday, August 18th at 5pm in Redwood City, CA. I’ll be doing a general Q&A and also discussing the “Open Leadership” book. (The date for the event was originally set for July 14th but I had to move it because of a conflict on my part.)

Join Altimeter Group’s first conference: “The Rise of Social Commerce” on Oct 6-7, at the Palo Alto Four Seasons.

Commerce has changed –companies must catch up

Shoppers want to belong. They want to be heard. They crave a better buying experience. Power is shifting from the retailer to the shopper. Social commerce is filling the void between clicks and bricks to deliver a personalized experience. Join us on October 6th and 7th in Palo Alto, CA to understand how to leverage these shifts to improve your brand.

Social Commerce redefines the buying experience. When it is done right, customers have a voice. They are connected in new and exciting ways. Brands become more personal.  Technologies are emerging to answer the challenge. Point of Presence (POP) is combining with Point of Sale (POS) to influence, persuade, and guide shopping. Artificial reality and virtualization is enhancing interaction. Social media is evolving to social commerce to improve the in-store experience. Attend this event to understand how companies are capitalizing on these trends to influence shopping on mobile devices, automate check-out and link the voice of the customer to the value chain.

Business leaders are impacted by social commerce

At our event, line of business leaders in retail and manufacturing in the consumer value chain:

• Chief Customer Officer
• Chief Marketing Officers and Merchandisers
• VP of Sales Operations
• Technology and Social Media Strategists
• Chief Information Officer (CIO)

Why should you attend?

• We’ll have a workshop, as well as a power session lead by the top brands, companies, vendors and analysts in the social commerce space. See the full Rise of Social Commerce agenda.
• Power is shifting to the shopper. Learn firsthand how this is changing the channel, brand positioning, and the buying experience.
• Leverage insights to build communities, enhance brand loyalty and gain insights on how to improve the customer relationship. Is this customer experience?
• Network with leaders that are making it happen. Learn from people who are doing it - in different industries and segments of the value chain.
• Learn the latest on enabling technology – Augmented Reality, Gaming, Sentiment Analysis, POP, POS, social media, etc. in hands-on sessions.
• Be part of a community of practitioners in the Social Commerce space. See the hash tag #RSC10

Sponsorships available

• We’re thankful to Vision Chain, an early sponsor of the event.
• Learn more about sponsorship opportunities.

“Focused on disruptive technologies, the advisory firm’s office–called the Hangar–lets clients learn about and experiment with new technologies. Experts in leadership and management, customer strategy, enterprise strategy, and innovation and design, Altimeter helps companies navigate changes brought on by the disruptive nature of social media, all the while taking advantage of the new technology.” -Fast Company names The 10 Most Creative Small Businesses.

We’re also pleased that our Founding Partner, Charlene Li, was named as one of the top 100 creative people in 2010. They reference her prior research work and two best selling books Groundswell and Open Leadership. Thanks Fast Company, we appreciate the accolades.

As organizations explore a wide range of disruptive technologies, their success hinges on building the right culture of learning, collaboration, and adoption. Marcia’s research will focus on answering the key questions of how social tools can connect people within the enterprise, where outmoded education practices can made way for modern real-time learning from experts and peers, and which technologies will foster a vibrant multi-generational collaborative culture.

One of many examples of her thought leadership is her latest book, The New Social Learning: Transforming Organizations Through Social Media. Available August 2010, this book lays out a new approach to harnessing the brainpower and experiences of colleagues working across the globe as easily as if they were side by side.  Marcia conducted industry analysis over the emerging enterprise microsharing industry, and published a vendor selection report, influencing the buying process.

We’re looking forward to collaborating with Marcia on multiple fronts. Jeremiah and I see tremendous synergies in how Social CRM meets Enterprise 2.0. Her experience with government agencies creates great opportunities with Alan Webber. Her ongoing focus on mobile learning and a vision for learning labs provide an intersection with Michael Gartenberg and Deb Schultz. Collaboration plays a key role in enabling frictionless supply chains and the research Lora engages in. Marcia’s work with driving change maps well with Charlene’s work in Open Leadership.

As we bring more partners and associates on board, expect to see this continued level of collaboration and opportunity to put research into action.

Marcia’s insights and research can be found on her blog at http://learnativity.com and on Twitter at @marciamarcia. I’ve included her bio below as well.

R “Ray” Wang
Partner - Enterprise Strategy

Marcia’s Bio:

Marcia Conner is a Partner with Altimeter Group, bridging the gap between traditional enterprise practices and the opportunity to use emerging enterprise 2.0 technologies to create collaborative cultures that produce more energy than they consume. Research topics often include internal social networks, media sharing, learning management, leadership development, and multi-generation business culture.

For enterprise leaders, she leverages her experience operating high-speed organizations to spur personal and professional growth. Clients have included Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield, IBM Lotus, S&P, WD-40, and the United National Development Programme.

For software vendors, Marcia provides strategic guidance in go-to-market strategies; reviews and designs products for usability, learnability, and adoption; delivers competitive assessments; and evaluates software partner ecosystems.

As a keynote speaker and meeting facilitator, Marcia talks with groups throughout the United States and abroad on turning social media and learning into competitive advantage, microsharing for macroresults, overcoming organizational learning disabilities, catalyzing the new digital learning style, and aligning education with dynamic business goals.

Her latest book, The New Social Learning: Transforming Organizations Through Social Media will be out August 2010. It addresses the challenges organizations face today, such as a widely dispersed employees and striking differences in work styles, particularly across generations. With case studies from Deloitte, IBM, Mayo Clinic, TELUS, Chevron, and even the CIA, it shows how social media can transform the workplace by harnessing the brainpower and experiences of colleagues working across the globe as easily as if they were side by side.

A 20-year veteran of the enterprise market, Marcia is a Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and founded the popular Twitter #lrnchat. She was Information Futurist and VP of Education Services for PeopleSoft, Senior Manager of Worldwide Training at Microsoft, Vice President of Enterprise for Pistachio Consulting, Editor in Chief of Learning in the New Economy magazine, and a Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.

She is also author of Learn More Now (Wiley, 2004), coauthor of Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Technology and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and co-creator of the Pistachio Consulting Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison (2008 and a soon to be released 2010 updated).

Marcia has been writing the “Learning at all Levels” column for Fast Company magazine since 2004. She has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, CIO Magazine, PCWeek, Information Week, Business 2.0, and has appeared on ABC’s World News This Morning.

More on Marcia’s blog: Learnativity

Contact information:

Email: marcia (at) altimetergroup (dot) com

Phone: 540.849.9011

That said, we’ve outgrown this site and blog - and we’re excited to unveil a new site that better represents who we are, what we do, and where we’re going.

To do this properly, we need your feedback. We’re fielding a website redesign user survey that consists of just nine questions. We want to know who you are, why you’ve come to our site, and how you think we can improve it.

Here is the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/altimeterweb-usersurvey.

It’ll take you just 5-10 minutes to complete it - and we’d love to hear from you.

Thank you,
Christine Tran, Researcher

Please extend a warm welcome to Susan Etlinger, the first consultant to join the Altimeter team. With the addition of Susan, we now have eight client service professionals and five team members on staff.

Susan will be working with me in the Leadership and Management practice to launch actionable programs in support of my forthcoming book, Open Leadership, due out later this month from Jossey-Bass. She will also conduct independent research and analysis, and will be starting a case study series that will examine instances of disruptive technologies in action, such as crowdsourced innovation, customer experience, crisis management and product development.

Some of you may know Susan from her recent work at Horn Group, where she counseled startups to Fortune 500 companies on the strategic use of social technologies, pioneered the agency’s social strategy and conceived and developed a number of thought leadership events both for Horn and its clients. Earlier in her career, she worked within the technology and retail business units at Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., where her responsibilities spanned organizational development to policy analysis and communications.

Susan is fluent in a broad range of technology disciplines and vertical markets. Most importantly, however, she is able to scale from strategic planning to tactical implementation, which will be a tremendous asset as we continue to build out our offerings at Altimeter Group.

Susan lives in San Francisco with her husband and young son. She is a well-known activist and a respected blogger in the special needs parenting community. When she’s not connected to one or more electronic devices, she loves to collect work by local artists, cook for family and friends and go on long, aimless road trips.

Susan’s bio is below, and is also available online. Please join me in welcoming her!

Susan Etlinger is a Consultant with Altimeter Group where she works with Charlene Li in the Leadership and Management practice, focused on helping organizations adapt and thrive in a changing technology landscape. For the past twenty years, she has worked at the intersection of people, processes and technology, in organizations such as Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., and in the agency world, most recently at Horn Group.

Susan focuses on helping clients develop strategic, actionable plans that support their unique objectives and organizations through periods of rapid change. Her experience across the enterprise in information technology, marketing, customer service and retail enables her to assimilate the needs of multiple constituencies and apply them pragmatically to real-world business requirements.

Susan has a deep grounding in interactive marketing and social technologies. As a Senior Vice President at Horn Group, Susan pioneered the agency’s social strategy offering, advising start-ups to Fortune 500 companies on social media best practices and strategic plan development. She has launched dozens of companies and products, and counseled businesses through crises, liquidity events and large-scale organizational initiatives.

An accessible, engaging speaker, Susan has authored and regularly conducts hands-on education sessions for organizations seeking to understand and integrate social technologies into their business plans. Susan is regularly interviewed and asked to speak on social strategy and best practices for business, and has been quoted in outlets including Business Week, ZDNet, The Orange County Register and eContent Magazine.

Susan’s personal blog, The Family Room, has been profiled in several national publications. She is a published translator and has a B.A in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley.

More about Susan on her blog: http://www.susanetlinger.com.

Contact information:
Email: susan (at) altimetergroup (dot) com, or find her on Twitter at setlinger.