Thanks to the Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified, we now have a framework for deciding how to measure progress with social media marketing — a draft model that’s worth talking about. Both firms have introduced this framework with an explanatory white paper on the co-authors’ respective blogs. Courageously, they’ve done so under the “Open Research” model to galvanize industry-wide commentary and collaboration so the framework can be refined and extended.

Put It in Context

Their paper advocates positioning this framework within a larger planning context, so the social marketing objectives align with the organization’s broader goals and KPIs. To me this is a key point, and one that’s often overlooked in the euphoric hype that tends to surround “social.”

If you narrowly measure social media tactics without aligning them to a larger strategic context, you’re just measuring activity. (That’s like measuring reach and frequency in the old realm of advertising.) The question is, how will those activities help drive business results? How do they link to your most valuable customers or prospects? Which influencers have the most impact on the people you care the most about?

Which are leading indicators, and which are trailing? Which measures will drive actionable insights, given your strategies and key business drivers?

The authors of this framework are well aware of these issues; however, the framework won’t achieve its intended purpose if it’s not set in the right context. That’s the job of the social marketing team, with potential help from their advisors; and it must be negotiated with the business- and line managers inside the enterprise.

Where This Framework Will Be Most Effective, And Where It Won’t Be

Like the social media monitoring technologies themselves, this model is best suited for larger, established organizations, ideally those serving gazillions of consumers; companies blessed with household brand names — or existing marketplaces where conversations among consumers or a company’s partner base are frequent, voluminous and well underway.

At their core these technologies require significant activity volumes before underlying trends start to become apparent or predictive. Sadly, if you work for most start-ups or new ventures, there’s less out there to be measured and analyzed.

Similarly, if you’re in a highly specialized B2B niche, you may find yourself struggling to find those needles in the proverbial haystack. Or worse yet, you may not know where the conversations (sparse as they may be) are taking place. Where the heck is that haystack, any way?

You’ll be challenged when the most important conversations take place behind “pay walls” that are inaccessible to most of the monitoring platforms, unless (a) you own the pay wall and have the wherewithal to help the platforms’ developers troll your content, and (b) their business model and technology strategy enable them to do so. That said, this sort of customization tends to be costly.

Case In Point: SMB

Here’s what confronts a certain 3-year-old B2B technology start-up with revenues measured in the tens of millions. Before beginning a coherent social plan, this firm’s brand name (their company name) averages only 3 mentions a day — and that’s before filtering out the mentions that have originated from the company itself or its employees. No one is talking about them, online at least. And yet, they’re generating revenues. (There are other indicators of marketing fragility, which the company has discovered by analyzing internal data sources, such as customer spending patterns and churn rates.)

To be fair, this should be viewed as a benchmark: the situation pro ante, before they begin any social marketing programs. This company has functioned without a marketing department (or marketing budget) for most of its history, as you might surmise from this chart. (And yes, they’ve just hired a marketer, so hopefully this picture will look a lot more attractive a year from now.)

It’s obvious that one of their first challenges will be figuring out what their customers want to talk about, the issues on their mind, and where those conversations are already taking place — the conversations out of “ear shot,” as it were. Fortunately, they have begun a real-world dialog (by phone) to hear what’s on their customers’ mind.

But they’re not alone.

New Business Objective: Discovery

This is an area where I see recurring limitations in today’s platforms for social media monitoring: the early discovery process for B2B markets.

This a painful and highly fraught phase: when you don’t know what you don’t know. And as most strategists recognize, it’s the things you didn’t know that you should have known that are most likely to kill the company.

So my personal addition to this framework would be a new row linked to a business objective called “Discovery.”

The purpose of the “Discovery” phase, which should precede the “Foster Dialog” phase, is to uncover what people want to talk about, what’s on their minds, etc. This could help reveal unmet needs or latent opportunities that could be ripe for the right companies, value propositions, ventures, nonprofits, what have you.

A related goal is to discover who is talking or blogging, where and when, and what the general “social technographics” profiles are for people in this arena, as described on in Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, and on Forrester’s groundswell blog. (Charlene is now a partner at Altimeter Group, one of the two firms that sponsored the research that resulted in this proposed social marketing analytics framework).

And because this phase generally occurs during the unfunded, or under-funded stage of a company or product lifecycle, the tools and technologies available here will have to be affordable — or they will remain out of reach and under-utilized by the start-up community, category pioneers, and other entrepreneurial innovators.

I came across an interesting blog post today about the differences between active versus passive discovery on the part of buyers and prospects, and what that implies for messaging architectures — and by implication, for outbound marketing plans.

Most of the tactics based on SEM and SEO aim at capturing the attention of shoppers engaged in active discovery. Which is cool, if people already know your brand, are aware of your current offers, and generally understand your brand promise or core value proposition. (In this context we’re talking about the buyer’s activities during the earlier phases of the marketing funnel.)

But what do marketers do if people are unaware of or unfamiliar with your brand? Or if you’re confronting damaging misperceptions about your product’s positioning, core benefits, price-to-value equation, etc.? Search alone is not enough.

Quick Explanation of Terms: Online Context

Active discovery

A buyer engages in active discovery when using Google or Bing to search for something in particular, such as which stores are offering a specific brand of fashion jeans at the best price. From the marketer’s standpoint this is the realm of search marketing. ‘Nuff said: there are a bazillion web resources on this subject.

Passive Discovery

Passive discovery occurs when the buyer didn’t know she was looking but found out about your brand (or offer) while visiting a web site and noticing your ad, seeing your message presented in the context of other search results, stumbling upon it while researching the category as a whole, etc.

The challenge for marketers is how best to leverage passive discovery in order to influence the buyer’s perceptions or emotional state as he moves through the purchasing process.

For B2B marketers Steve Woods (the author of the post I’m referencing) writes,

Passive messages are messages that would not be actively sought by potential buyers, such as messages that alter preconceived notions of reliability, applicability of a solution to a certain industry, and perceptions of product usability, service quality, or price point.

Woods says that marketers planning their messaging architecture need to think about how/when buyers are likely to encounter your messages, so you can anticipate and then create opportunities to benefit from passive as well as active discovery. He highly recommends the storytelling format as the mode most likely to be noticed and recalled.

So What’s the Answer?

Advertising?

Traditionally consumer marketers have resorted to various forms of advertising as “the way” to get in front of people when they’re not looking, but to do so in a way that would be memorable (and hopefully motivational). Once upon a time that kind of mass marketing worked … at least, better than its alternatives. These days, old-fashioned, out-of-context, interruption-based advertising is not an effective solution for capturing people’s attention when they’re not actively looking.

That is, it’s not the solution if you’re being held accountable to measured returns on marketing investment. Instead you’ve got to figure out how to make those messages available to the right people, at the right time, and in the right context. And despite all the advances in online display advertising over the past decade, we’re still in the early days of what’s possible when it comes to marketing effectiveness and ROI. [Disclosure: one of my clients is working on ways to meet the needs of under-served marketers who want to include more intelligent forms of online advertising in their marketing mix, especially when challenged by budgets that are too small to appeal to digital agencies.]

Word of Mouth?

Word-of-mouth is probably most effective in the context of active discovery, when you (as shopper) ask your friend what she thinks about her new Prius, or the nail salon that’s just opened up down the road.

All the wizards practicing social media marketing have lots to say on the subject of how to influence the people most likely to be influential when it comes to online word-of-mouth, so I won’t add to their wisdom here.

I do think the jury is still out when it comes to making social influencer marketing scalable and sustainable in the face of hard-to-prove concrete ROI. If the downturn continues,  hard-nosed bean counters are going to make it difficult for companies to staff up so they can operationalize social market-engagement models.  I think social has lots of promise, but it’s in its infancy when it comes to practicing this as a discipline that can be managed appropriately so it has a lasting effect on customer engagement and retention.

Other Sources

At the conceptual level there are some intriguing possibilities in Martin Lindstrom’s book Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. He spent several years and millions of dollars researching how the brain responds to advertising, product placements, and various communication techniques (such as symbols, stories, etc.). His findings are summarized in Buyology.

His application of neuroscience to communication effectiveness suggests some very interesting ideas, but taken too far, could also be scary…

Based on Lindstrom’s research Steve Woods’ recommendation that passive messages should be designed for transmission within stories is a good one.

Lessons from Apple & Evangelism

Lindstrom notes that communications techniques practiced by most established religions and cults are also highly effective when it comes to stimulating the brain to pay attention to or remember messages about brands and products. (And yes, those of us who have formerly worked for Apple’s marketing department are well aware of this…)

Here are the cross-denominational pillars of “marketing” as practiced by the world’s leading religions, according to Lindstrom in Buyology:

• A sense of belonging
• A clear vision
• Power over enemies
• Sensory appeal
• Storytelling
• Grandeur
• Evangelism
• Symbols
• Mystery
• Rituals

Just think about the launch of the iPad, as a case in point… It’s clear to me that these techniques are being deployed by Apple’s hype machine…

I’ve always loved David Armano’s thoughtful irreverence, his clear infographics, and the ways he helps us think about or reframe core issues in the worlds of marketing, media, community and communications. After stumbling across his wry “wheel of marketing misfortune,” for a recent presentation to a Chicago AMA event, I just had to share it here.  It made my day.

Looks like we’ve moved from “shiny object syndrome” to “social media goldrush,” if this gizmo is to be believed.

Armano presents some interesting frameworks and concepts, including a more holistic approach to guiding social media initiatives across the core disciplines of a business, rather than isolate them within yet another marketing silo. Thanks to Slideshare, here is David Armano’s latest thinking on social media from a “common sense” perspective:

Every time I hear references to social graphs, I’m reminded about research into relationships and community structures, published by Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter in a thought-provoking book, World Class: Thriving Locally in a Global Economy (1995). Kanter’s research suggested that people, organizations and civic communities gravitate toward one of two classes: local or cosmopolitan.

Mindsets, competencies and connections are what distinguish these two social classes.

The implications can be profound for local economies, based on the prevalence and mindsets of locals versus cosmopolitans within their population. At its worst the political divides can be polarizing, especially in regions full of locals whose once thriving industry has withered away or moved offshore. Unable or resistant to change, locals can languish in a community of “have nots” who lack the imagination and wherewithal to reinvent their local economy.

These distinctions apply to the world as a whole, not just the Americans Kanter studied for World Class. As she declared so presciently 15 years ago,

Today, the world economy is a period of rapid and dramatic change, and the question of just how we will connect to this new world is the single most important issue of our lifetime.

Here is how she characterizes these two social classes.

Cosmopolitans

Cosmopolitans enjoy travel, “are comfortable in many places,” and tend to move away from the homes of their youth for access to a wider set of opportunities. They are broad-minded, have learned to be adaptable, to listen, and how to bridge cultures. By definition they are well-connected to other people and information resources. Kanter writes:

Cosmopolitans are rich in three intangible assets, three C’s that translate into preeminence and power in a global economy: concepts — the best and latest knowledge and ideas; competence — the ability to operate at the highest standards of any place anywhere; and connections — the best relationships, which provide access to the resources of other people and organizations around the world.

Cosmopolitans tend to affiliate with other like-minded cosmopolitans. Depending on how often they travel and how many places they’ve lived in, their ties to their local community may be loose, and their definition of “home” quite fluid or multi-faceted.

Locals

Kanter goes on to say,

Locals, by contrast, are defined primarily by particular places. Some are rooted in their communities but remain open to global thinking and opportunities. Others are simply stuck.

As long as their local economy remains vibrant, locals like these enjoy satisfying lives surrounded by friends and family, nourished by long-term ties, deeply rooted in their community. When all goes well, they provide the social capital and investments of time and resources that enable their local clubs, churches, synagogues and schools to thrive.

Unfortunately, locals tend to be vulnerable, says Kanter, to external changes imposed by factors beyond their control, such as factory closures, the exhaustion of local natural resources, as in Oregon’s timber industry, or the mid-century migration of the textile industry away from New England to the Southeast and now to Asia. Locals can suffer when exogenous change occurs:

…At the extreme end of the local class are those whose skills are not particularly unique or desirable, whose connections are limited to a small circle in the neighborhood, and whose opportunities are confined to their own communities. In contrast with the limitless horizons for cosmopolitans, [such locals] face increasing limits to opportunity. They lack control over resources and knowledge, which can move rapidly in and out of their communities.

Given the cultural divide between “Red States” and “Blue States,” I wonder how much of it might be ascribed to the predominance of cosmopolitans versus locals within their boundaries…

Visualizing These Differences

It would be interesting to apply these constructs to the leading social networks and other online communities, to see what the patterns might reveal. It’s probably a safe bet that LinkedIn enjoys lots of cosmopolitans within its professional membership. As MySpace moves down market, is its appeal shifting towards locals? And is FaceBook a mix of the two? An interesting visualization of US regions based on FaceBook data by Pete Warden is an intriguing beginning (as shown here).

It’s beyond my abilities to apply data mining or visualization to their members’ connections and degrees of relationship in order to compare social networks. But it will be fascinating to discover the patterns that characterize communities based on their members’ mindsets, geographic locale, and interconnections. I look forward to what will emerge from the social scientists who will study this subject.

Having said that, the unintended consequences of doing so might be frightening, especially if unscrupulous politicians and demagogues exploit the results to further polarize the citizenry of our already divided country.

News update: Pete Warden, the creator of the social graph above, has had to destroy the data set he culled (apparently without permission) from FaceBook in the face of threatened legal action, saying he could not afford the litigation costs.

Clearly, this is a controversial subject on many levels…

It’s been a curious 24 hours. First, snow falling on daffodils and cherry blossoms (our first of the season, here in Seattle). Then, 2 people emailed me, having found my blogs, to inquire about contributing posts for this blog and my personal blog.

The requests, while flattering, caught me off guard. They made me realize I hadn’t thought about a policy or guidelines that would make it easy to know when to say yes or no to such requests. And because I blog for love, not money, the answers aren’t necessarily as straightforward as they are for people who monetize their blogs.

Given that blogging (to me) is all about the authentic voice, or sharing thoughts, personal reactions and feelings, how best to respond when someone else — particularly someone you don’t know personally — asks to step in and guide a conversation? For the moment I’m thinking about this like a dinner party. Why not allow other people, if the conversational topic seems appropriate, to share their voices from time to time?

I’m leaning toward an experiment or two. We’ll see what happens as this unfolds.

Meanwhile I’ve replied to the requesters that I’m not interested in showcasing overt commercial pitches of someone’s product or services. It’s possible that this response may have discouraged one or both of the people who contacted me yesterday. We’ll see…

If I decide to experiment, I’m relieved to note that my WordPress installation enables me to accommodate people with roles as author or contributor… What’s unknown is how much effort will be required on my behalf to ensure the contributed post is appropriate for this blog.

I was amused to read in today’s tweet stream that email still matters, as Jeremiah notes here (screenshot above).

As a practical indicator of social media adoption, I’ve been looking for signs of how Twitter is used by people within my business networks, and in particular, by my clients. My non-scientific research suggests that email, phone calls, or in-person meetings still dramatically outweigh the use of Twitter in the business communications and interactions I see on a day-to-day basis. What’s interesting about this is that my clients are all in the high-tech arena. Within this community Twitter has not yet reached the tipping point of network effects to mandate its use as a required communications vehicle…

Note that I’m not talking about brands’ use of Twitter for customer communications or customer care (whether inbound or outbound). I’m focusing on people-to-people communications here, for business conversations. The essence of social interactions.

When meeting new colleagues for the first time business people still predominantly give out their office and/or mobile phone numbers, their email address, perhaps their office location — but not their Twitter account — when exchanging business cards or contact info. When I ask administrative staff for a new client or colleague’s contact info, PAs and exec admins provide phone numbers and email addresses but no Twitter handles. I’m still waiting to see Twitter contact info show up in people’s email signatures.

The usual exception to this is contact info supplied by analysts, consultants or speakers whose primary revenues come from activities that promote social media adoption or services for organizational change management to make enterprises “socially ready.” These are people who have a directly vested interest in accelerating social media adoption, let’s be honest.

This makes me conclude that for those of us not living on the bleeding edge of social media, earning our living as “social experts,” email or phones are still more reliable for contacting and interacting with other business people, assuming you have some prior relationship.

And in my mind for something to merit the name “social,” there needs to be some sort of current or potential relationship, even if it’s just embryonic or provisional. Said otherwise, if you’re just tweeting in hopes that someone interesting will take note of your messages, the experience feels like flycasting.

Lately, my experience of Twitter, from a signal-to-noise POV, has caused me to reduce my usage, but not as a conscious decision. Not only has my own tweeting dropped down, I don’t launch Tweetdeck or Tweetie as often as before. This has resulted from a whole series of pragmatic mini-decisions, moment-to-moment time optimizations. To date Twitter has been a fun experiment, but not yet essential for my professional conversations or client interactions.

Once people in my business network start to rely more heavily on it, I’ll be happy to use Twitter more regularly. In the meantime it tends to be a distraction that gets in the way of “real work.” Having said that, I still check Twitter every day or so,  in hopes of finding the  rare gems, those tweets that point to relevant articles, blog posts, presentations or other resources I would otherwise have missed. Those serendipitous lucky finds…

I’ve discovered I can go a day or more without checking Twitter, without any negative consequences. One of these days, that will probably change. But for now, adoption still lags behind the promise and certainly the deafening hype that surrounds it.

Why is Twitter adoption lagging in my professional circles? Perhaps because our conversations and interactions focus on content that’s not appropriate for public disclosure, or they’re conducted among a manageable (and known) set of participants. Although others might want to eavesdrop on these conversations, there’s no good reason to make the contents more public. In fact there may be NDA agreements that block us from sharing more broadly, and thus, Twitter usage could expose us to legal risks. Ironically, the most compelling usage of Twitter that I can think of, for our purposes, would be some form of “narrow-casting” outreach to people we don’t yet know, but who may have interests or needs in common with ours.

So I’m still waiting for that tipping point in my professional network, the moment when tweeting becomes an essential form of communication, indispensable to our interactions. Until then I confess I’m suffering “Twitter fatigue.”

Lately I’ve been struck by how we marketers may be losing our way, overlooking our core mission. Preoccupied with wrenching changes in how we launch products, retool the marketing mix, and engage influencers and stakeholders, it’s easy to overlook our core mission: understanding customers. How we apply what we understand about customers is what drives the marketing (and sales) engine.

Although we may be landing new projects based on the latest new thing, like social media or yesterday’s Web 2.0, that’s not the point. Here’s the deal:

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer

If you believe Peter Drucker’s maxim, surely you accept its corollary: the role of marketing is understanding what it takes to create and keep customers.

Our quest for understanding should encompass the entire lifecycle of customer engagement. We need to listen to and learn about customers, putting ourselves in their shoes at every step along the way. Listen, and then respond appropriately. The question is, how do we do that without falling back into company- or product-centric habits and biases.

Where Do We Start?

These days, it’s hard to know which methods or technologies offer the most effective, actionable, timely, accurate and affordable ways to capture, share and refine customer insights so they lead to understanding. All the hype around social media may cloud the issue, and get us focused prematurely on platforms or technologies before we understand the reasons why. (What people call the lure of the “shiny new object.”)

What’s a marketer to do?

Should we mine twitter streams or troll the blogosphere? Subscribe to a “listening platform” so we can listen in on customer conversations wherever they occur online? Develop and manage a private online community? Outsource community management to a specialist firm? Hire ethnographers to observe customers where they work, play or go about the business of their daily lives? Run some focus groups? Send out an online survey? Do some phone interviews? Get some insights from an online consumer or executive panel? Buy some reports from Forrester or Gartner? Run some web analytics reports?

There’s no easy answer to these questions, given the siloed nature of marketing services, the fragmentation across market research and analytics providers. It’s hard to find objective advisors with a broad perspective across the full spectrum of customer insight sources, from the tried-and-true to the new online options. It’s all too likely that whoever you consult will tell you that their way, their proprietary methods, or their technology/service is the best.

Here’s a good starting point, a wise reminder from a research maven’s blog:

The purpose of market research is to understand people so we can answer business questions.

— Paraphrased from Steve August’s blog post

Step 1: Define Your Questions

So, start with your questions. What is it your business needs to understand? What do you need to do as a result? What can you afford (or afford not) to do? Given that as your business context, then start asking the marketing questions that will lead to understanding.

How customers buy (or make buying decisions)? Why do they buy? When do they buy? Where do they buy? What motivates them to choose your brand over others (or vice versa)? Where do they look for information or help?

How do customers segment, based on their particular usage occasions for your product? What causes them to stop using your product, or to use it less frequently? What other ways could they get this job done?

What do they think about you? What are they telling their friends about you? Who is influencing their thinking, or setting constraints on how they go about satisfying their needs? Whose opinions do they trust?

How else could you satisfy their needs? Do they have latent needs that you are uniquely equipped to satisfy?

Etc., etc.

How much are you willing to invest to get answers to these questions?

Step 2: Define and Prioritize Your Objectives

Define the questions that will have the most impact on your business. Eliminate those that can’t be linked to actions or decisions you might take in the future. While the answers to some questions might be nice to know, if you can’t identify how they will guide future business decisions, you probably can’t afford to waste money getting answers you can’t use.

Setting your objectives is a key step in any marketing project; smart marketers set objectives that are measurable. As a best practice, you should apply the SMART framework to articulate your objectives — and get consensus from your key stakeholders (and budget approvers) that these are the most important objectives and metrics.

Step 3: Do Your Homework or Consult an Advisor

Before getting caught up in the courtship dance with a technology or specialty research provider, make sure you’ve framed your business goals and marketing objectives; defined how you plan to apply the customer understanding you’ll obtain as a result.

Then assess your options for discovering or capturing customer insights, and how effective each option is for its intended purpose.

Be mindful of the implications from cognitive science about how people think, the low correlations between consumers’ stated intentions and actual behaviors — the gap between the conscious mind and what drives behavior. Narrow your list to the research methods (including listening) that are most likely to deliver the kinds of actionable insights you seek.

If you’re feeling over-whelmed by all these considerations, you might want to engage an advisor to help you think through your best course of action.

Be aware that the market research industry itself is in flux, undergoing transformation, so it may be difficult to find well-informed and objective advisors who can advise you across the full spectrum of options. If you consult a technology or service provider for guidance, watch out for unintended biases. As Abraham Maslow said,

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Large enterprises have all sorts of choices when it comes to managing interactions with customers and prospects. The options available to solo practitioners and very small businesses, until recently, have been much more restricted, especially for people who want more than what Microsoft Outlook has to offer. Marketing firms like mine want a service that’s not only functional, but one that also suits our design and UI sensibilities.

Lately I’ve been falling in love with 37Signals’ Highrise, especially now that they have streamlined the usability model for the “streams of information” that accumulate about contacts and projects over the course of each day. The more I use Highrise, the more helpful it becomes at helping me organize and stay on top of business development activities for my firm. It’s great at managing contacts, tasks for those contacts, as well as active deals and cases (their term for projects). I like the way it automatically sends reminders via SMS to my phone or email to Outlook for tasks I need to complete today.

I’ll love it even more when there’s a solid iPhone interface that’s supported by 37Signals — one that benefits from their radically simple UI sensibility. The third-party app I’m using is OK, but not great. I’d feel more confident if I were using an app that 37Signals stands behind, especially given the increasing importance of this hosted CRM system to my business.

As a solo entrepreneur I haven’t yet had the experience of using Highrise across a team environment. I can only imagine the insights that might emerge when coworkers can see or comment on the history of contacts and interactions documented by their colleagues. This is so much better than Outlook for this purpose! And the pricing model is a good fit for small firms.

During today’s presentation to the Seattle Social Media Club, Sean O’Driscoll, community builder and influencer marketing expert, revealed how he answers the inevitable questions about the ROI on social media and influencer marketing programs.

He held up a phone and rhetorically asked, “How do you measure the ROI on your telephones?” Translation: it’s the conversations that count — assuming you listen and have scalable strategies for responding. He then went on to share his planning and engagement frameworks for strategizing and then operationalizing social media initiatives.

Based on his many years running influencer and MVP programs at Microsoft, Sean suggests that questions about proving the ROI on social media marketing often signal resistance to change. Rather than get into a debate on social ROI, he advocates defining business objectives with metrics linked to desired sustainable results, rather than tactical KPIs like the volume of tweets or fan reach.

The whole point of engaging in influencer marketing and conversations with your market is to learn where, how and why to transform key business functions, processes, products, etc., in order to better meet your customers’ needs. And to understand how to articulate and deliver on brand promises that will attract and keep your customers, and motivate them to enlist other customers — a virtuous cycle of brand advocacy.

Note: Sean O’Driscoll is CEO and co-founder of Ant’s Eye View, a newly formed Seattle area strategy and social consultancy.

Last night I heard Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and the new book Drive, speak about the most powerful wellsprings of human motivation: the intrinsic motivators autonomy, mastery and purpose. If you haven’t read Drive, here is Daniel Pink’s TEDTalk on human motivation. An entertaining 18-minute summary of what behavioral scientists know about human motivation, but ignored by business and management theorists for 40 years.

Pink struck a responsive chord with his Seattle audience by contrasting today’s dysfunctional 20th century institutions, with their outmoded management and reward-punishment mechanisms, with the 21st century model: what happens when you unleash the power of engaged and motivated employees. He summarized a number of experiments that proved the failure of “contingent motivators — if-then rewards and punishments” to drive the best performance from people who do anything other than rote, mechanical tasks.

In an economy fueled by “the marketplace of ideas” and intangible services, intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery and purpose are far more effective than external carrot-and-stick motivators. Employee engagement flourishes, says Pink, when people have more influence over what they do, when they do it, how they do it, and the team they work with. The lack of this autonomy was a contributing factor for the past “decade of truly spectacular underachievement,” asserts Pink.

To make his case for the superior power of intrinsic motivations, Daniel Pink cites the impact of the open source movement, as well as “20% time” policies on spurring new product innovation and new business models. 3M’s biggest hits (like PostIt notes) and 50% of Google’s new products all have emerged from the unstructured 20% time when employees are allowed and encouraged to work on things they feel passionately about (versus things they are required to do as a defined part of their job).

Putting It into Practice

Today while reading Jive Software’s manifesto, “The Social Business Imperative,” I find myself asking, what if enterprises truly embraced Pink’s ideas, and were empowered to do so? What if they invested in the processes and technologies to enable these changes? What if they thought, and acted, differently about how best to inspire and motivate their people? What if they discarded their outmoded theories of what motivates people?

Could this accelerate the reinvention of the world of work within large enterprises and institutions? Could we thereby unleash the power of the human imagination, and channel people’s passions and creative energies into more worthwhile products and services? Instead of believing the mantra “more is better,” might we shift toward “better is more?”

Yes, people who live their lives online are all in a frenzy about this thing they call “social.” But human motivation is even more fundamental. What if we linked the power of intrinsic motivators to right-brained work in the context of marketplace or intra-company conversations and learning? And enabled it with one of these so-called “social platforms?”

Jive’s social business manifesto asserts:

When your best people work on your best ideas in an open, transparent, collaborative way, they create a completely new kind of asset called Social Capital…. Social capital is what your company gains when its best people with the best ideas can take the right actions, actions that speed all sorts of time-to-business outcomes — from reducing costs to driving new product innovation and increasing sales and marketing effectiveness.

If you believe Daniel Pink’s assertions about the power of autonomy, mastery and purpose to fuel employee engagement and passion, what if your best people were enabled to work (at least part of their time) on their best ideas? What if they were really engaged, spending time on things they believe could truly make a difference, and had the opportunity to bounce their ideas off the best and brightest, or most experienced people in your customer and partner community? Or with fellow employees in other regions?

What might happen then?