Manage-Wise

Building great teams

One of the best ways to build a great business is to create a great team. Great teams will think up great ideas, build visibility, and spot defects in products, which they will then correct. A great team can fix just about any problem, given the right resources, and is happy to take on just about any challenge.

Unfortunately, great teams can be difficult to create and keep motivated. Anyone who’s built successful teams knows that more often than not some particularly “X Factor” will make or break the team: often the ability to find common ground and common interests can be a make-or-break issue. A team comprising colleagues with common interests, backgrounds, or passions will be able to rely on those commonalities, even in the most adverse circumstances. The challenge is to find employees who fit together; few employee profiles include information that will help you find the common ground.

To solve this dilemma, many large corporations are turning to self-forming and self-sustaining teams. These people have found that they have things in common and they work well together. Companies post internal team opportunities that “ultra teams” can choose to tackle or ignore. Sometimes projects will be assigned based on need, but, generally, having a team own a topic is a more effective tactic.

The challenge for companies looking to enable these dynamic teams is in figuring out how to enable employees to connect based on passion, a team will not only find itself quickly in rut, but it will likely find its members unable to gel, have fun, or help the company in a meaningful way.

How blogs impact your business

Of course, creating a successful business involves more than having great teams, great ideas, great products, and increased visibility —but if your business could do only these four things right, you had be off to a good start. The real question is how blogging can augment or help in each of these areas.

• Ideas: Good ideas are always hard to come by. Several adventurous companies have begun blogging for new product ideas, assuming that their users know what they want better than the companies do. GM’s FastLane blog (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com) is a great example of this: GM runs new concepts by readers at the site, inviting them to comment. By providing a space for customers to interact, you can be assured that they will interact. As a company, you need to be ready for the feedback that will come as a result.
• Products: Traditional product development leverages a roomful of customers to make decisions for a world full of people. The end result is a series of focus group insights that have no real-world applications. Blogging affords the opportunity to ask the world of customers about what they actually want.
• Visibility: Most traditional visibility campaigns are single events that rarely go beyond the customer’s first experience. Even the best viral campaigns that encourage customers to spread the word are really just single-interaction events. Blogs let your readers decide how and when to interact with you. Not only do they give customers control over the relationship, but they encourage customers to continue to engage with you over time, thus providing a multitude of experience they can subsequently share with friends and associates. Blogs encourage customers to become participants and participants to become evangelists. And they encourage everyone to come together as a community.
• Teamwork: By creating opportunities for your staff members to communicate effectively, you create a space for more meaningful interactions. Blogs come in where other types of communication fail. It’s been said that e-mail is where information goes to die. When was the last time you actually looked at a message you had archived awhile back, “Just in case”? Blogs are where living information resides. People in your company can find others with similar interests by searching topics that other internal bloggers have considered. Creating ad-hoc connections based on content that is created and owned by internal bloggers is a great way to keep your teams well oiled, motivated, and in touch with people with similar passions across your organisation. Think about the efficiences that could be gained for the whole company if these experts had an easy way to exchange and archive ideas.

Improving ideas, greater visibility

Beyond the core concepts of improving your ideas, products, visibility, and team cohesiveness, blogs can improve your business dozens of other ways. Here are a few examples to wet your whistle as we get deeper into exploring blogs.

• Improves customer loyalty: Elisa Camahort is a passionate blogger. She helps theatres in her area, such as 42nd St Moon (http://42ndstmoon.blogspot.com) by blogging behind-the-scenes details, which dedicated theatre-goers love. She also features discounts for theatres to track how effective blogging is at driving new ticket sales. Overall, the ability to connect with their niche audience has been a huge boon for the small theatres that Camahort passionatey serves.
• Build an early buzz: Nooked (http:// blog. nooked.com/) was first envisioned on the blog, was built on the blog, and has grown through the blog. Nooked is an RSS tracking company—RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and refers to a format used for easily distributing news on the Internet via feeds or channels. At each step of the way, the Nooked blog has been full of inside information that is devoured with abandon by those following the project’s progress. It is the perfect example of how to use blogs to build a buzz early on in product’s development cycle.
• React to negative events: Earlier this year, General Motors engaged in some major restructuring. GM Chairman Rick Wagoner took a larger degree of control in the company by restructuring selected units so that they reported directly to him—these selected units were previously under the care of such key executives as Bob Lutz. Interestingly, Lutz is the primary author of GM’s exceedingly popular FastLane blogs. Instead of being silent about the event, Lutz was able to turn what many had considered a demotion into a positive thing: he was able to focus entirely on what he loved—product development. Several hundred bloggers and commentators supported his attitude by commenting and followed his example of how to deal with negatively in a public forum.
• Extend your influence to your influencers: For many companies, the key to success is knowing who influences the industry. For Microsoft, developers are first priority. To influence developers, Microsoft launched Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com), which gave a true inside look at the company through daily video profiles of important figures in each product group.

The response to this blog and its video angle took everyone at Microsoft by surprise; the blog community grew to more than 50,000 members, making it one of the largest developer communities ever.

Bringing in customers

The challenge that today’s companies face is one of mindshare. Mindshare is all about how many people are aware of your product. Think of it like market share, except instead of having a percentage of the market in terms of dollars value, you value mindshare on the percentage of people who know what the heck you do.

The problem is that everyone is vying for mindshare, and customers only have a certain amount of mindspace.

Excerpt from ‘Blog Marketing’ by Jeremy Wright. Reproduced with permission © 2006, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com