Open Leadership: Post # 4 - Crafting Your Strategy

Crafting Your Open Strategy
How to create your open strategy: The author supplies a four-step process for developing an internal and external openness strategy. First, Learn. companies (and organizations) need to learn from their principal stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, etc. Otherwise a company tries to execute on its strategy in the dark. Monitoring what people are saying about your company becomes vital in order to respond to any brewing crisis, before it gets to be one. Second, Dialog. The author talks about the variety of steps it takes to get someone intimately involved in the blog. One called “sharing” comes after people just watch a blog. When they comment, those remarks only represent 5-10% of the traffic, but they drive 50% of the traffic to the site! Third, Support. By monitoring social media, you might spot a dissatisfied customer who could infect a lot of people. By reaching out, you protect the company’s reputation by helping the customer before he or she becomes a thorn in your side. Finally, Innovation. Dell uses Ideastorm.com, and there are a number of other organizations that let you help solve their problems. It’s called crowdsourcing. It’s effective and keeps you in tune with customers—and makes them partners, not merely consumers.