In 2003 I started blogging in my company’s internal blogosphere. The topic was the intersection of social media and customer support, as well as the Long Tail of customer support issues.

After a half dozen blog posts on the topic, I started to get some attention from other bloggers, who chimed in with their own thoughts and reactions. Their feedback pushed me to develop my ideas further. As I’ve written about before, eventually those blog posts turned into a whitepaper and still later a presentation.

At the time my immediate management chain was not particularly supportive of my ideas. I’ve seen other folks advocate that when your management isn’t supportive of your innovation, then you should simply go above their heads and show your idea to the people above your manager. In my opinion, this is a fine way to make an enemy of your manager. Fortunately, I didn’t do that.

Instead, I started responding to requests for presentations from people in different parts of the business. I spoke to several groups in the enterprise side of our business, the website management portion of the business, the PC business, the research arm. In fact, I talked to nearly everyone except the folks in my own business.

With each presentation, I iteratively improved my own thinking on the matter, my presentation, and my presentation skills by listening to feedback and understanding the application in different business contexts.

One of the reasons this works so well is that strangers don’t have any preconceived notions about who you are. So they are more likely to take what you say at face value. Your ideas get judged, instead of you getting judged.

Whereas, for many people, your immediate managers and immediate peers and partners will view you with a certain amount of baggage: They have their own idea of who you are, what you do, and what you’re good at. This is certainly true of me: my managers have viewed me alternatively as an expert on data analysis, a program manager, a web developer. But when I’ve stepped outside those roles, it’s hard for them to accept that.

By the time I was ready to present to managers in my own group and our immediate partners, I had a well vetted set of ideas, and honed my presentation skills. My managers had received kudos about the work I was doing, so they had some sense that something was coming, and weren’t completely blindsided.

With positive feedback from others ahead of the event, and seeing a well-craft presentation, my own management gave my presentation their full attention, and I was able to break through the barriers of any preconceived notions.

I come into work one morning. I go get a cup of coffee, say “hi” to folks, and sit down at my computer. I fire up Outlook, read my new email, and answer a few questions. And without thought, I head over to Facebook before I start my work. I read through a handful of my friends’ status updates before it hits me.

What the heck am I doing?

It’s my choice how I spent my time at work, and how much time I spend at work. Is reading Facebook what I really want to be doing – even just as a five minute mental break?

I close the Facebook window and sat back. No, Facebook is not really how I want to spend my time. What I really want to do was to leave work early to go work on my book. (At the time, I was writing a science fiction novel.) What I also want to do was prove there was a connection between printer installation failures and people returning their products – a theory I’d had for a while, and which was widely believed, but never actually quantified.

That’s the exceptional stuff. And of course there is my business-as-usual job basics. But reading Facebook and answering email isn’t going to get me out of work early so I could go write, and it isn’t going to get my pet research project done.

I sit down and made a list of the most important things I need to get done that day.

#1 on that list is to move the research project forward, which meant I needed a source of email addresses of customers who had an installation failure. 

#2 is to analyze survey feedback on one of our support tools, and send out the results. 

#3 is to get everything else done so I could leave work a little early to go write.

Determined to stay focused, I ignore email, Facebook, gadget blogs, work social media, and all other distractions. With laser sharp focus, by 11am I have done my two most important and urgent things: moving the research project forward, and analyzing the survey feedback. I finish so quickly I realize that the only barrier stopping me from getting them done earlier was simple procrastination and distraction.

By 1pm I take care of my other business as usual work, and by 3pm I am sitting in a coffee shop working on my book.

This becomes a habit for me. Each day I start work, I made my list of 1 to 3 really important things I needed to do.

The idea for this actually came from Tim Ferriss’s book: The Four Hour Workweek. The idea that Tim put out there was that most of our work day is procrastination: whether it is procrastination by reading email or blogs or Facebook or make-work. And if we just did our really important work, we’d be done in half the time and with twice the effectiveness

I don’t know if any of you ever read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, but he advocates all these lists: lists of things to do at home, by a phone, at work, in front of a computer. Lists and lists and lists. The system is effective for reducing stress and improving productivity, but it doesn’t really help you focus on what’s most important. So you are doing more, but are you doing the right things?

I practice this habit of making a list of 1 to 3 key things each day for months. I made refinements too: making a list of 1 to 3 key things for each week, so I have a general theme for the week.

Most importantly, I make sure that most days, unless the list was truly filled with crucial and urgent business as usual stuff, I put at least one item that moved my own innovation projects forward. I make it a point to get that work done before lunch.

Sure, I still have plenty of business-as-usual things to do, but I’m consistently making progress on my innovation projects.

I am working on one of these innovation projects, when I have a new insight. The idea I am working on is the application of recommendation engines to our newest generation of web connected printers.

Each day I am putting something related to the project on my most-important-task list. For several weeks running I worked on getting access to the data we had, then on how to understand the data. After that, I focused on coding the algorithm. Then I blog about it in the internal company blogosphere, then I optimize my code some more. Then I get some additional data. Then optimize based on the new data.

It finally hits me: I am procrastinating yet again. I am only doing the parts that are comfortable to me. I love coding, and I love data analysis. I love writing and I love blogging.

Those were the things I’d do anyway, even if they weren’t on my most-important-task list.

What I need on my task list is the stuff I am less comfortable with: promoting the idea. I need to make slides to boil down the concept and show the project results. I need to find out who the key players were that would care about app recommendations, and talk to them. I need to sell my idea. I was coding away, thinking I was moving my idea forward, when really I was just procrastinating to avoid talking to people.

This isn’t just a problem that software developers have. I have a friend who is a great salesperson and business person. He loves to talk to people, to build up excitement about a project or an idea. He’s had many great ideas for interesting products, but they tend to remain at a very abstract level: talking points, rather than mockups of screens or detailed documentation. He procrastinates when it comes to the detail level stuff.

Now when I made my 1 to 3 item list, I make sure that my own project ideas are on the list, and I make sure that I’m picking the things I need most to move my project forward. Not just the most fun or most comfortable ones, but the ones that make the biggest impact.

When I finally get around to promoting the recommendations project, I create a set of slides. I deliberately choose to show a high fidelity mockup of what the recommendations might look like, guessing that this would be the best way to describe the concept. I include example data I had run through my algorithm, and a high level description of the algorithm. I feel out who the key people were, then sent then my slides.

That same day the slides started getting forwarded around inside the company, and made their way to several managers and engineers Another engineer in a different part of HP turned out to be working on something similar, and he contacts me so we could share techniques.

Other managers were impressed with the work, and get in touch with my  manager to talk about it. To date the idea hasn’t been implemented for customers, which would have been the ideal outcome to me. But I’m sure it will eventually, and when it does, it’ll be influenced by the work I did.

In 1996 I discovered that my large corporate employer had a fairly new, but emerging internal company blogosphere. I set up my own internal blog that was a mix of posts on interesting things I came across, as well as posts about my work.

At the time I was working on social media and customer support. I wrote about using wikis for online documentation, forums for customer support, about making support document feedback visible so customer’s could see each other’s comments, and how customer support problems fit the classical long tail definition made popular by Chris Anderson.

I received great feedback on my blog posts: passionate discussion in the comments, many hits and re-posts. People were genuinely enthusiastic about what I was writing, and I quickly became the go-to expert for social media and customer support.

But can you spot the problem? I was talking to the choir. The people reading my blog posts inside HP weren’t executives or decision makers. They were social media enthusiasts. Of course they got why it made sense to use social media for customer support.

I had a vague notion that I needed more reach further out. So I took my blog posts, and made those into a whitepaper describing the opportunity for social media and customer support. Suddenly the people who were reading my blog posts had something that felt more credible that they could forward on to other people. Now I had more reach.

But I was still reaching primarily technical people – people who would like to read a whitepaper. While that was good, but I still wasn’t reaching the decision makers – the managers who were deciding on the plan of record.

I took the next step and boiled everything down into a set of Powerpoint slides. This is one of those tasks that I always have mixed reactions about. On the one hand, the slides look pretty. On the other hand, it feels like I have dumbed down my content.

But suddenly my presentation found its way into the hands of management across the company. I had mid-level managers asking me to present to their staffs on social media. I had senior VPs asking me to coach them on a presentation to our CEO.

A little while later, after presenting to much of customer support organization, and after coaching the VPs who were presenting to the CEO, our Fortune 500 company had:

• a dedicated social media team in our support organization
• we launched our support forums – forums which now handle millions of customers and tens of thousands of posts
• we started looking harder at embedding social features in our web site, and in a few cases we’ve done it.

Now, to be clear: other people did the vast majority of the work, and other people campaigned very hard to create the environment for all of that to happen. I don’t want to downplay all the very hard work that they did.

But I made a substantial contribution to getting social media into the mindset of managers across the company, and painting a picture of the benefits they could realize by using social media throughout our support strategy.

But none of that could have happened if I had stuck only with blog posts and a white paper. Even though the ideas and knowledge were there, had been reviewed by others and improved, it still lacked the final piece necessary to go viral inside a large company: PowerPoint. Unfortunate perhaps, but still true. I had to endorse PowerPoint, make slides and shop them around, and lastly, get out there and talk to people. If you’re a geek who’d rather be writing Ruby code, it isn’t the most natural thing to do. But in the end, the benefits for our customers, our company, and my career made it worth doing the uncomfortable.