My favorite writing trick.

I’m a pretty optimistic guy, but for some reason I frequently start my writing with a negative tone. By negative, I mean I articulate what I’m against, not what I’m for.

Sample Negative Argument:

“Doesn’t it drive you nuts when consultants spend an entire presentation telling you how dumb the firms in your industry are? If they hate it so much, why do they even want to work with you? I’m going to walk out the next time someone starts off on another one of those doom and gloom rants.”

Do I believe what I wrote above? Yes. Does it make me feel better to unload every once and while? Maybe.

However, I have learned a trick which helps me to channel my initial negativity into an uplifting message. Here’s my secret.

Once I catch myself in the negative zone, I pull out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.

On the left side, I write down all the things I’m against, or that I find wrong, silly, antiquated, or annoying. I let that initial surge of frustration out until I feel better. Then I move over to the right side.

On the right side, I write down the positive version of the negative arguments, looking for counter-examples, people who are exceptional, or outlying firms.

When I’m finished, I toss the left side and keep the right. That’s where I start my post, on positive footing. 

I do the same for presentations. For example, I just presented our preliminary findings on the state of R&D in architecture and engineering firms to the A|E Advisors Annual CEO Forum last week.

Is it true that most AE firms aren’t investing in R&D programs? Yes. Is it fun to sit around a complain about it, wishing we were more like other industries? No.  What’s fun is to find a bunch of firms who are kicking ass, point a spotlight on them, and encourage other folks to follow their lead.

You can read about those kick ass firms here. Many of them will be speaking at KA Connect 2012, if you are looking for a shot of inspiration this spring.

Degenkolb’s Knowledge Sharing Platform

I have had the pleasure of getting to know the team at Degenkolb through Knowledge Architecture’s work on Degnet Connections, their new intranet. Degenkolb is one of the nation’s leading structural and earthquake engineering firms, with six offices on the west coast. The more I learn about Degenkolb, the deeper my appreciation for the design of their knowledge sharing platform.

By knowledge sharing platform, I’m talking about more than technologies like an intranet or video conferencing system. For example, Degenkolb holds an annual technical conference, a two-day face to face annual training program for project managers and project engineers, and boasts a team of eight engineers dedicated to new innovations, which they call the New Technologies Group.

I use the word design because it is clear that they have carefully structured their organizational learning programs and technologies in an integrated fashion. As the business has grown over the last seventy-one years, expanding in headcount, geography, and capabilities, Degenkolb’s means and methods for sharing knowledge have changed as well. Many of the changes to how Degenkolb shares knowledge were driven by systematic reflection, not by simply relying on organic evolution.

In a recent interview, Degenkolb President and Chief Executive Officer Stacy Bartoletti told me that the values of teamwork, openness, and flexibility underlie the design of their knowledge sharing platform.

“Five or six years ago we had some pretty significant holes in the way knowledge was being shared within the company,” said Bartoletti. “Each of our offices was somewhat an island on their own. There wasn’t enough communication, there wasn’t enough teamwork, and there wasn’t enough knowledge sharing going on between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between San Francisco and our Pacific Northwest, even between Oakland and San Francisco. Everybody was kind of operating on their own.”

In fact, Degenkolb’s knowledge sharing challenges had grown out of the success of the firm.

“We had a single office in San Francisco until 1995,” Bartoletti explained. “At that time we opened up our office in Los Angeles. In 1996, we opened up in Portland. In 2001, we opened up in San Diego and Seattle. During this time we also became decentralized. We started to allow our offices to become more independent, heading towards individual profit centers and towards pursuing the kind of projects and markets that they wanted to pursue, even though they may not necessarily be the core of what Degenkolb does. However, we recognized that it wasn’t allowing an opportunity for our engineers to get to know each other.”

Bartoletti and the leadership team were concerned because challenges to sharing knowledge between offices meant their clients were not able to benefit from the full range of Degenkolb’s experience and capabilities. Over the last decade, Degenkolb has rolled out one knowledge sharing program after another, each designed to build relationships and improve communications within the firm. The first such program was the Degenkolb Conference.

“You can’t talk with somebody, you can’t share with somebody, if you don’t know who they are, so we needed to bring people together and we decided we needed to do it once a year,” said Bartoletti. “And our format of doing that was the Degenkolb Conference, where we want people to talk about what’s innovative in the projects that they’re working on.”

Degenkolb’s Conference takes place over two days each June in San Francisco. All of Degenkolb’s technical staff participate, including interns and new hires who have not officially started working yet. Conference presentations are recorded in both video and audio format and are posted on Degenkolb’s intranet. Sharing technical knowledge is clearly an important goal of the conference, but perhaps more critical for the firm is making social connections between engineers who work in different offices.

“Typically we mix in one sort of team-building activity during the day, and then we have breaks for people to get a chance to network and talk with each other,” explained Bartoletti. “We have a big dinner and social function on Friday night, and activities on Saturday for people to get a chance to know each other better.”

[Show as slideshow]

Images from the 2011 Degenkolb Conference |  © Degenkolb Engineers

In addition to the annual Degenkolb Conference, the firm runs a formal training program for technical staff once a year in San Francisco. Again, the emphasis is not only on content, but also on building relationships.

“We do what we call a Project Manager/Project Engineer training program once a year,” said Bartoletti. “So just like our Degenkolb Conference, we bring all of our project engineers and all of our project managers together once a year, typically for two days of sessions, and we focus on all kinds of different topics. It’s generally not technical.”

Bartoletti continues, “It’s face to face, and includes all of our Project Engineers through our Senior Principals. The mix of experience levels and backgrounds creates an environment for very experiential learning. If they’re talking about a topic like client relationships, the younger folks need to hear from the people that have been doing it for a long time. So we make sure our senior people are there participating with them.”

The most recent and most substantial investment Degenkolb has made in their knowledge sharing platform, is their New Technologies Group.

“The idea with the New Technologies Group is that they are a resource to the entire firm,” said Bartoletti. “Their role is to be looking externally at what innovations are being developed at the university, what innovations are being developed in the profession, and what we can bring back into our practice. They’re also developing innovations in and of themselves. It could be software development. It could be new processes. It could be new capabilities that we don’t have in-house.”

The New Technologies Group is made up of five permanent employees who have significantly lower expectations for billable hours than other technical staff. In addition, three engineers rotate through the group, supporting Degenkolb’s strategy of sharing knowledge through building relationships.

“Engineers that are on rotation spend 18 months with the New Technologies Group,” explained Bartoletti. “During their time with the New Technologies Group, they may be supporting projects across the company that need help with advanced analysis or applying new tools. A piece of their time is dedicated to the development of new technologies for the company, and that is overhead. So they work within the New Technologies Group for 18 months and then they go back to their engineering group. The idea is that we’re developing technical experts that are focused on innovation across the company through their time within the New Technologies group. They then bring that back with them to their engineering groups after they’re done.”

What I find important about this story is the way it illustrates that there is not a quick fix to the question “How do we encourage people to share?” Degenkolb has taken a multi-pronged strategy to designing their knowledge sharing platform, including both technology (digital) and organizational programs (analog), fueled by the insight that people want to share when they know each other and share a common purpose. Equally important is the insight that as the firm evolves, so must the knowledge sharing platform. Degenkolb is a great case study on how to proactively renew the design of a knowledge sharing platform.

If you would like to learn more about Degenkolb’s knowledge sharing platform, you are in luck. Mark Sinclair, a principal in Degenkolb’s New Technologies Group, will be giving a talk called “Engineering Innovation: Challenges and Opportunities” at KA Connect 2012.

Hey, that’s our CTO!

In addition to leading software development at Knowledge Architecture, Chief Technology Officer Brian Campbell also owns and operates The Candy Store in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood with his wife Diane. (That’s Brian at the 50-second mark.)

The Candy Store has been selected by Target to participate in their inaugural “The Shops at Target” program, which will feature five small businesses by putting a small “store-within-a-store” in each of Target’s 1,700 locations this May.

Brian and Diane started The Candy Store three years before I started Knowledge Architecture. Their passion and dedication to the store was an inspiration to me as I was getting started. Congratulations guys, I know how hard you have worked for this.

Founder and CEO

When I started Knowledge Architecture I decided to take the title of Founder. CEO seemed overkill for a company with no clients or employees.

I liked (and still like) the word founder. For me it it evokes imagery of a foundry, the heat and noise of melting down scrap metal and casting it into gussets and beams.

While the 10th floor of a San Francisco office building is not exactly as chaotic as a shop floor in a foundry, the early days of a company are when fundamental elements like the name, purpose, and culture are forged. For the first few years, you are not only fighting for survival, but also to discover the soul of the company.

You spend hours debating questions like "What kind of people do we want to work with?" "Why does our company exist?" "What work do we most enjoy?"

In the beginning, we had dozens of ideas for products or services, but we had no idea which ones would be commercially viable, technically feasible, or even fun. So we ran experiments. We took on small projects doing a range of things, from technology assessments to custom financial reporting, before finding our niche in developing social intranets and integration software for architects and engineers.

Critical to finding our niche was asking the following questions after every project, "Can we make money doing this?" "Is this product or service repeatable and scalable?" "Will it be fun?"

Often times "Will it be fun?" was the deal killer. We took on several projects that were fun to do once, but none of could imagine doing regularly. So we moved on and tried something else.  With time it became easier to spot the signs of winning and losing ideas, and interestingly, it didn’t take much debate. The way an idea (usually one of mine) was vetoed was what I can best describe as a collective groan from the team.

That collective groan is actually kind of amazing if you think about it, because what it represents is intuition and culture wrapped up in one. It effectively says, "Chris, yes, perhaps we can make money at this, but even if we could, none of us want to do it, and even if we did, we’re not sure that our clients would even want this."

Something like that.

Last year, we moved out of startup mode and into company building mode. I’m using Steve Blank’s definition of a startup as a "search for a repeatable, scalable business model."  We know what we’re building and who we’re building for. The main challenge now is execution. Because of that, I have felt that my primary job shifting from Founder to CEO.

On the whole I’m spending more time probing the "who, where, when, and how" questions and less time on "why and what" questions. I can do this because most of the answers to "why and what" questions were embedded in our culture back in the founding phase. The answers are intuitive. Occasionally, I’ll even issue a preemptive groan of my own before taking a new idea to the team.

Yet sometimes the wrong idea slips through. We came up with an idea for a new product a few months ago. We’ve proven we can build it, we have validated the market for it, but in our excitement to bring the product to life, we forgot to ask a fundamental question, "Will we enjoy the success of this product?" After concentrated debate, we have decided no, at least not it in its current form, so we are seeking alternative methods to bring the product to market.

This has happened a few times in our past, and every time, the Founder part of me reached back to very basic questions about why we are in business and what kind of company we want to be. Luckily, the CEO side of my brain listens to the Founder side, who remembers the early days. The secret I believe, is the relationship between Founder and CEO. The CEO might be about building our future, but the Founder preserves our past.

New Year. New Intranet.

How about starting the year off right by upgrading your knowledge sharing capabilities?

Knowledge Architecture’s flagship product is Synthesis, a social intranet based on Microsoft SharePoint, which integrates with common industry applications such as Deltek Vision, Newforma Project Center, and Axomic OpenAsset. Synthesis makes it easy to share, discuss, and follow the conversations you and your firm care about.   

Architects and engineers across the country have deployed Synthesis because they wrestle with the same problems you do – sharing knowledge, leveraging expertise, and searching for information.

We’re on the road to mobile with our latest release, Synthesis 3.1.

• Opt in to receive Email Notifications for anything you follow on Synthesis. Want to comment? Simply reply to the e-mail and your comment will get added to the stream on Synthesis.
• Want to contribute to Synthesis while you are on the road or at a client site? Our Synthesis External Access Kit makes it possible.

Join us on January 24th at 11 AM PST for our Introduction to Synthesis Webinar.

Knowledge Athelete

For the last few years my wife Denise and I have each selected a word that would symbolize our hopes for the year ahead. I start the process a few days in advance, writing lists in my journal, talking through the options on a walk or over a beer, and then letting them sit, waiting for the winner to magically elevate to the top of the stack.

This year I struggled a bit, so I came up with a new tool to help me find the right word.

I made a list of helpful questions. Here are a few of them:

1) What animal will you be most like in 2012?
2) What number will best represent you in 2012?
3) What city will you be most like in 2012?

Denise added the one that might have been the most fun to the list:

4) What garden vegetable will you be like in 2012?

We answered each question about ourselves and then also gave an answer for each other. I highly recommend trying this.

One of the side-benefits to the game was that it helped me to answer my original question, what word will symbolize your hopes for the year ahead?

I settled on Athlete.

I like the way that athletes devote as much energy to recovery and practice and they do to performance. Athletes actively manage their energy levels. They recognize that eating, relaxing, and sleeping are critical to their job and treat them as such.

Athletes, at least most of them, have off-seasons, which is where they invest in prolonged recovery. Performing is tough on their bodies and some injuries may even require rehab or surgery. The off-season is planned maintenance.

Athletes also use the off-season to develop new skills and push their fitness levels even higher.

I’ve been thinking about seasons for several years, largely due to the year we spent living in Point Reyes, where the seasons radically change, not simply shift, as they do in San Francisco. As the seasons change in Point Reyes, so do the inhabitants and their routines. For example, the farmers market in Point Reyes is now dormant, not to return until June. In San Francisco, the farmers market is year round.

Our lives, and our work, used to reflect the seasons. Could they again? Can we carve out off-seasons, not only individually, but also organizationally?

I’d like to try. I’m working on a book, which requires sustained focus. Denise is working on a book as well, and one thing I’ve learned from observing her is that travel really disrupts long-format writing. Once you have the themes, structure, rhythm, and story loaded in your head you want to keep going, to explode through the work.

I’m going to treat this summer like my off-season. No travel. No performing. Just recovery and practice. I need time to develop new ideas and recover for what I like to call “conference season,” which runs from September through April. By scheduling an off-season I’ll hit conference season fit and sharp, ready to perform again.

Like an athlete does. A knowledge athlete, if you will.

Why do you want to write?

I moved to San Francisco in the summer of 2000, during the last gasp of the dot-com boom, with the ambition of becoming a high-tech beatnik. I had a copy of Dan Pink’s “Free Agent Nation” in one hand, and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” in the other. (I’m moderately embarrassed to admit that this is not hyperbole, this really happened.)

My dream was to code by day and write by night, with long trips to South America, Yosemite, and Europe breaking up the work.

The problem was that I didn’t know how to write. Writing was critical to the identity I was crafting for myself, so I signed up for a non-fiction writing class with Ethan Watters at The Grotto.

I spent most of the ten weeks working on an essay about a poorly-planned solo backpacking trip, which was representative of exactly the type of story I was most interested in telling – travel adventures about me. As long as I kept having adventures, I would have things to write about, so I was incentivized to keep having adventures. Perfect.

Once the class ended, I realized that my design had a fatal flaw. When I asked myself, “Why do you want to write?” my answer was “So that I can tell people I’m a writer.”

Writing fit the identity I was crafting. I liked the idea of being a high-tech beatnik, so I worked backwards from the identity and started writing. However, I quickly found out that the key to writing sustainably is passion. I liked the process of writing, it seemed that I was reasonably talented, but there wasn’t a burning drive inside me to tell the stories I wanted to tell. I ended up putting my writing down for about eight years, returning to it first in 2008 when I started gardening and then more regularly in 2009 when I started Knowledge Architecture.

There are a million things I’ve learned about writing over the last three years, many of them can be found in books like “Bird by Bird,” “If You Want to Write,” “On Writing,” and even “Made to Stick.” Those books will give you great advice about the mechanics of writing. More important though, is understanding the psychology of writing. For example, how do you keep writing when you are not getting comments on your blog?

That’s why I believe the question “Why do you want to write?” is the most important question you can ask yourself. (A close second is “Who is your audience?”)

If you are deeply driven to solve a problem, learn about people, or serve an audience you’ll tap into a renewable source of energy that will not only feed you through the ups and downs of writing, but also lead you to content.

I have a backlog of posts I want to write in a folder in my e-mail box, largely inspired by interactions I have on a daily basis with interesting people. I want to write because I want to tell those stories and uncover the invisible threads linking them together. How about you?

What gets you into the consideration set?

I am a big fan of Tom Stewart. Tom is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer (CMKO) of Booz and Company and the author of “The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Organization” and “Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations”.

Forbes.com posted a short interview (below) with Tom in October about the impact of digital tools on marketing professional services. There are a couple great exchanges that I pulled out. The first is about why Booz and Company takes a thought leadership approach to marketing.

Tom suggests that they start with the question “What gets you into the consideration set?” He goes on to explain that “The primary role we try to play with thought leadership is to provoke the phone call, which, ultimately, provokes the deal.”

Booz and Company has made substantial investments in building a “mini-media empire,” including strategy+business magazine and several books. Clearly, thought leadership-based marketing is a proven way to get into more “consideration sets” than you would by relying on relationship-based marketing alone.

The second thing I wanted to flag in Tom’s video is his view on the evolving nature of content. Stewart contends that most of our focus on the impact of new social and digital tools is on the fact that they open up new channels for reaching broader audiences. Stewart thinks we should be asking what new forms of thought leadership content digital tools will enable .

“It is clear that you see both with the web and with social media new ways of attracting people to click on something that downloads a file that was, nevertheless, still created in Word. So it may be delivered digitally, but it was still created in Word. What we’re only at the beginning of seeing is what you might call multimedia native or digitally native content.”

I hope you enjoy the video. I’d also recommend reading this interview with The Bloom Group.

P.S. Hat tip to Susan Strom of Knowledge Architecture for finding this video.

P.P.S. I found out about this video because Susan posted it on our intranet, a good example of Level 5 of our Intranet Maturity Model, which suggests that social intranets can become farm leagues for external communications.

Who is your core audience?

“Who is this for?”

The most important question I ask myself when I’m working on something new is “Who is this for?”.

This is true for a new blog post, a new feature in our software, a new product, a new presentation, or the program for a KA Connect conference.

Earth-shattering, right?

Well, even though “know your audience” is rule #1 of creativity, sometimes I forget. So I built a tool, which I’ve shared with you above. 

Me

I put myself at the center of my core audience diagram because I started blogging to help me figure out what I think. Writing is great for that. If you know me, you know I like to talk. Writing forces me to concentrate, to distill the essence of an idea to the point that it can stand on its own, without me being able to twist, turn, or rephrase it for a particular audience like I can in person.

The beauty of course, is that I can return to talking armed with a set of ideas that was sharpened through the writing process.

I’m also at the center of my diagram because I believe that this is the only way that anything I’m working on (blogging, software, research, conferences) will be sustainable over the long run.  

I experience a “blogger’s high” after successfully communicating something that has been trapped deep inside the fog of my brain. A “blogger’s high” can last for days or even a week.

I use (almost) all of our software products on daily basis, so if something is goofy, complex, or time-consuming for me, I want it fixed just to help me do my job better.

If you have been to a KA Connect conference, you probably observed that I am having a blast on stage, bringing together friends and clients for two days to talk about the future of our industry. If KA Connect was just about making money or marketing, everyone would feel it. It wouldn’t be the special event that it is.

Team

I understand that the correct thing to say is that we put clients first. I don’t agree.

In fact, my diagram reveals that I put clients third, behind myself and our team. I believe that putting our team ahead of our clients will produce better outcomes for our clients. Our clients know that we are passionate about our products. I never want to put us in the position of cranking out solutions that we don’t truly believe in.

There is another reason I put the team second in my diagram, and that’s because the team is part of my core audience for my writing, speaking, research, and our conference. I’m trying to distill as much of what I think for their benefit and for the benefit of future team members.

One thing that I found fascinating in the Steve Jobs biography was that the  primary target of the “Think Different” ad campaign was Apple employees, not potential customers.  Jobs felt that Apple had lost its way. He felt that the “Think Different” campaign could remind Apple employees what they stood for, who they were building for, and how they should make decisions about products, services, and design. 

Now, I’m not trying to compare myself to Steve Jobs, but I do strongly agree with his approach. For example, when I ask myself the question “Who is this for?” as I’m writing a new blog post,  it is as much for Knowledge Architecture as it is for our clients and prospective clients.

Clients

My diagram becomes very useful when making product decisions. For example, we have been asked by several prospective clients to consider making some rather large changes to our products to make our offerings more attractive to them. Clearly, I’m always interested in ways to grow our business and have been very open to their ideas.

Here’s the problem. We have limited development resources at Knowledge Architecture, both in terms of time and money. Any resources which we invest in developing new products or services to capture prospective clients with different needs, are resources we are not investing in meeting the needs of our existing clients.

That’s where my core audience diagram comes in handy. We have chosen to prioritize our existing clients over prospective clients, especially when it comes to making product decisions. Having this diagram in front of me every day helps me to remember that choice.

The concept of focusing on our clients as a core audience is so obvious that it risks becoming invisible. That’s not good. For example, as I was thinking about how to share our social media research I asked the following question:

“What’s the best format for sharing this research?”

Here’s a slightly different version of the same question:

“What’s the best format for sharing this research with our clients?

Those three words have totally changed the way I have approached the research itself, as well as how I plan on making it available next spring.

Prospects

Focusing our writing, software, research, and conferences on our prospective clients requires being very clear about who those prospective clients are. Fortunately, we’ve got that part down pretty well.

The hard part is sticking to that decision. There are temptations to stretch and fudge the definition of “prospective client” on a constant basis for us, and I’m sure we’re not alone in this.

Whether it is being asked to speak at a conference where the attendees are not existing or prospective clients, develop one-off products or features, or take on a consulting project in a non-target market by a very persuasive prospect, we have to be good at saying no.

The flip side of saying no to our non-core audience, is that it opens up more opportunities to say yes to our core audience. For example, our client base is currently comprised of more architects than engineers or environmental consultants. Our first round of research for our social media study focused largely on architecture firms. Our second round of research will focus on the Engineering News Record Top 500 Firms. I’m sure we’ll find several firms to profile on the KA Connect blog and/or invite to speak at an upcoming KA Connect conference.  

Everyone Else

To summarize, when I’m working on something new my core audience is me, our team, our clients, and our prospects, in that order. That’s my answer to “Who is this for?”.

The answer to who is this not for is “everyone else.” Understanding this concept is incredibly liberating. The problem with focusing on “everyone else” is that:

• Focusing on “everyone else” means hoping that one of my posts goes viral, getting retweeted thousands of times and getting hundreds of comments.
• Focusing on “everyone else” means angling for a three-page feature spread in Fast Company’s Top 40 under 40.   
• Focusing on “everyone else” means dreaming of being asked to speak at TED.

OK, speaking at TED would be cool. But the general point is that focusing on making sure that “everyone else” knows how smart or clever I am probably means that I have started writing for a very general audience and have forgotten to write for our core audience.

Here’s the good news. I have found that focusing on our core audience, really focusing on their challenges, focusing on being interested, not just interesting, has led more people in our non-core audience following our company than if we have tried to create very broad, unfocused content. For example, The Bloom Group.

However, having “everyone else” become interested in what we do is just icing on the cake. I’m happy to eat my cake without icing, so I’m going to focus my efforts on our core audience. If we end up with some icing, well, that’s cool too.

How much does social media cost?

Q1: “How much does social media cost?”
Q2: “What’s the ROI of social media?”

A1 : “I don’t know.”
A2: “I don’t care.”

I’m being glib. Let me explain my answers in more detail.

I presented preliminary findings from our research into the web, social media, and R&D activities of over 500 of the largest architecture and engineering firms in North America to the AIA CEO Large Firm Roundtable last week. During the question and answer session, one of the CEOs (whose firm participates very lightly in social media) asked about the costs and benefits of social media programs.

Here’s an abbreviated version of my answer:

“I don’t believe that firms should have a standalone social media program. Social media activities should be integrated into larger strategies for the firm, including thought leadership, research and development, recruiting and retention, and knowledge sharing. In addition, social media (or digital) activities should complement your face to face (or analog) activities such as speaking at conferences or running client workshops.

For example, if I develop a presentation based on research that our company conducted using both analog and digital methods, travel around the country giving the presentation, return home, carve the presentation up into a series of blog posts, share them via LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and then give an interview to an industry journalist about our findings — is that social media spending? If so, which part? How would I begin to separate out the costs and attribute them directly to social media? Or perhaps more to the point, how would I attribute revenue to the social media component of those efforts?”

I suppose we could review our client list, identify which clients (to the best of our knowledge) learned about us through our social media efforts, sum up their fees to date, and apply a sort of “social media finder’s fee” to them to determine the value of our program. Yet that would be ignoring the fact that we still had to close them once we began talking about our software and services, that our ideas had to be interesting, our products had to be compelling, and because our business depends on repeat clients, we have to keep innovating  as well as providing outstanding service.

I know on a deeply intuitive level that social media provides a huge benefit for our firm, because I can see and feel it working firsthand.”

At that point Phil Harrison of Perkins+Will chimed in:

“Trying to answer the question ‘how much does social media cost?’ is like trying to answer the question ‘how much does sustainability cost?’

If you are doing either one of them right, your efforts are so integrated that it is impossible to measure them as an individual component, you just do them because it is the right way to operate.”

Several heads nodded in agreement, especially among the firms that have been early to adopt social media. 

I sat next to Phil on the bus ride to dinner. We began to explore his analogy further. I proposed the idea of “socialwash,” which puts a social veneer on a firm’s marketing efforts. 

Like socialwash spending, greenwash spending is easy to track, since the approach of greenwashing involves spending money to generate the appearance of sustainability, not deeply integrating it into a building or an organization.

If one wants to socialwash their firm, they can hire a design agency to create a beautiful blog or hire a PR firm to tweet on their behalf. The costs of doing so should be easy to track. We discussed a loose rule of thumb for tracking social media costs — “If you can clearly account for your social media spending, you are probably doing it wrong.”

Back to my original answer to the questions of social media costs and ROI, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

I don’t know how much social media costs because I think it is both impossible and cost prohibitive to measure what you actually spend on social media if you have integrated it into the way your firm operates.

I don’t care about the ROI of social media because I think that moving towards social media is inevitable, so it is better to get in the game and make a few mistakes than to sit on the sideline until you completely understand the rules.

Technology moves so fast these days that you want to start learning as soon as possible, even if you have to begin without a clear understanding of the financial implications. Perhaps instead of ROI, we should be discussing CONI, the Cost Of Not Investing?