South by Southwest Interactive. Day 1. Panel 1. Here we go!

First up was Unleashing Employees: Empower Innovation from the Ground Up featuring Forrester’s Josh Bernoff (who co-authored Groundswell) and Ted Schadler, co-authors of the book “Empowered.”

The panel was largely an advertisement for the book — not a bad thing, mind you — which addresses how companies can implement social strategies in spite of legacy thinking and process structure.

In summary: the challenge for business today isn’t just knowing what to do, but how to actually succeed in a corporate environment.

The technologies of empowerment have changed the landscape. If you’re familiar with Forrester’s Technographics Ladder, you’ll know in 2007 almost half of the population was untouched by social media, but in 2010 only 19 percent (1 in 5) are untouched by social technologies.

The presenters listed some disruptive consumer technologies that are empowering both customers and employees:

  • Mobile: Only 14 percent of people use smart phones for work
  • Social media: Only 17 percent of people say they use social media for work
  • Cloud computing: 27 percent use software as a service for work

Empowered is the next chapter in the story. You can give employees the tools, but if you don’t empower them to use them, what’s the point? Consumers have the social media tools to make big impact (e.g., an angry customer can tweet about a bad customer service experience and cause action). Yet on the flip side, organizations aren’t staffed or do not have the culture to support and empower these customers. In the social media world, it is impossible to run your company in a traditional top-down manner. Only empowered workers can serve empowered customers.

Empowered Customers: The traditional marketing funnel starts with awareness and ends with a customer. There is actually a funnel at the other side where that customer projects out to your company, their friends and influencers themselves.

The presenters have a four step process for Empowerment, boiled down to an acronym – IDEA:

  • Identify your mass influencers: Basically, 20 percent of online adults create 80 percent of the influence impressions.
  • Deliver groundswell customer service: For example, Best Buy’s Twelpforce, where any employee can assist consumers looking for help on Twitter.
  • Empower with mobile information: consumers are increasingly mobile, and companies must evolve to support them whenever and wherever they are — not just relying on them to deal in their terms (e.g., call a toll-free number on weekdays 9-5 p.m.
  • Amplify fan activity: Consumers are already talking about brands. How can you turn them into advocates?

Only empowered workers can serve empowered customers. Within a defined sample size, Forrester found the proportion of people who:

  • Use smart phone for work: 8 percent
  • Download and use applications on a work computer: 12 percent
  • Use unsanctioned login-required sites for work: 27 percent

The takeaway here is that people will get their jobs done no matter what. The only reason they won’t is because they’re afraid (I don’t want to get fired). People are very good at solving problems with solutions from home applied at work. For example, Google Docs is a fantastic way to collaborate on work, but it is rarely sanctioned by a company’s IT department.

The presenters shared some recent real world examples of empowerment in action:

  • Rob Sharpe built an internal YouTube for Black and Decker that actually cut employee training in half.
  • Gina Poole runs an internal social community within IBM.

The next takeaway was that customers drive the empowered agenda while technology empowers people: mobile, social, video, cloud.

Companies and manager need to support innovation at an employee level. Success is also tied to investment in technology, including scaleable solutions, tools to help manage risk and an overarching mindset that breaks silos (e.g., don’t develop a mobile app that ignores what’s happening on your website).

Josh Bernoff has a column coming out in the next month that suggests, “Take 10 percent of your advertising budget and put it in customer service.”

Getting over the fear and implementing change management is not an easy procedure, but companies who adapt and innovate will continue to succeed, attract the best employees and make their mark.