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Business Prevention Committee

Do you have a BPC (Business Prevention Committee) where you work?

The BPC may not have a formal meeting schedule, so it can be difficult to tell who is actually on the Committee.  But you can often tell who is on the BPC by looking for these signs:

1.  Person has a narrow view of the company or customer, a “my silo” thinker.  For example, a Marketing person who doesn’t care about the negative impact of a marketing program on customer service.

2.  Person is generally averse to testing new ideas, a “this is the way it has always been done” kind of personality.  BPC’ers never admit to being wrong about an idea, especially ones that have to do with “change” of some kind.

3.  Talk of performance-based measurement and compensation makes BPC’ers very nervous.  Not fans of their own skin in the game, getting a little risk on the table.  Like many bloggers, they just repeat what they read.  No data, no conviction, and no responsibility.

4.  A fundamental lack of knowledge about how the business really works.  Worse, won’t take the time to find out what they don’t know because “that’s not my job”.

The best way to go about dismantling the BPC in your company is?

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Social for Business

Sam Decker of BazaarVoice has posted a cogent, well-supported argument on the business benefits of social applications.  Many of the themes will be familiar to readers of this blog, including the substantial cross-functional reduction of Friction that can take place when you have this kind of data, and some of the cultural issues surrounding adoption of the data-driven culture.

Here’s what I don’t get though. Many of these goals could be accomplished though customer service analysis and other data the company already has. In fact, you could argue in many cases, the data you get from internal sources would be better since you could work some of the bias out of it and correlate with actual behavior.

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Social Media Questions

I have some questions on social “media” prompted by Mike’s post and in particular the comments the post received.

First, can we please agree that social applications and social media are different ideas that sometimes happen together?  I think creating this difference would dramatically help the social discussion along by focusing it and making sure people understand exactly what is being discussed in context.

Now, I suppose you could argue that the comments, pods, and so forth are “media”, to which I would ask, then what is your definition of Content?  You can’t have it both ways.  If Comments are Content, how about Social Content and Social Media as two different ideas?

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