We take a photo. We share it. We collect it. We upload it. We email it. We put on Facebook. Yeap, we do a lot of things with our photos. But, one thing we don’t do a lot of, is printing those photos. My hats off to the team at Walgreens for bringing Printworthy to market.

There are two projects, when I look back on my career, that I was present to see kick-off…there to see it take shape, but wasn’t around to see it launch. BMW Films was one. The other is Printworthy. I was in the meetings with the Facebook and Photo Teams when this went from a whiteboard to a deck to a sales pitch and to a statement of work. Since leaving Walgreens, I’ve been dying to see Printworthy launch. Well, it launched and it’s freaking killer.

For the first time ever, you can print a photo from Facebook that includes the comments left by your Facebook friends. That’s amazing. Think about it, when you post a photo to Facebook, there’s nothing better than seeing the globe in the header light-up with notifications telling you that people “liked,” commented or shared the photo. There’s a sense of pride that swells. With Printworthy, you get to turn those social and virtual kudos into an element that makes the photo a keepsake.

Well done Zach West, who drove this project from day 1. He pushed, he pulled, he fought for the right idea and he lead a comprehensive team of wicked smart people to create Printworthy. There’s no better feeling in the business world than seeing those who worked with you, reach and exceed their potential.

I think Printworthy is killer and can’t wait to see how my friends, family and colleagues use the platform. It sets a high bar for those in the photo printing space and also reminds us that photo printing isn’t dead…we just needed a reason to print.

Check In, Scan and Save…Amazing!

In keeping with our concept of Return On Amazing, I’m excited and proud that today for the first time EVER when you check in at a Walgreens on foursquare, you’ll receive a scannable coupon for Arizona Iced Tea, directly in the check in. That’s right. 1 step. 1 click. No text to get a coupon. No print out an offer. No show the check in deal to the cashier. Nope, just check in, scan and pay. In the past a “coupon” or monetary value associated with a check-in involved a few extra steps. Not anymore.

So, what does the first time ever mean? Well, for starters, never before have you been able to do this in foursquare. As of today, we are the first and only retailer that foursquare is working with to bring instant coupons to check ins. It also goes without saying that this is the first time Walgreens has ever delivered an instant coupon via check ins.

This is just another way Walgreens is making it rewarding to check in. From flu shot donations to free movies from redbox to Arizona Iced Tea Coupons, we’re looking to make check ins more meaningful.

This is also yet another example of how we’re innovating and investing in mobile. If you’re keeping track, these are all the things we’ve done in the past 6 months

1. Offers included directly in our award winning Walgreens app
2. Offers available through SMS
3. Traditional foursquare check in offers/deals
4. Tap and pay with Google wallet

Being first is hard. It’s also incredibly fun and insanely rewarding. At Walgreens a big part of our social media strategy is the concept of Return on Amazing. Don’t laugh. Yes, we made it up. But, we needed a way to articulate the concept that big, audacious, bold and amazing ideas are how you win.

Return on Amazing is a way to set the bar for our thinking. It means you need to think beyond the “like.” You need to think beyond the click stream of a “wall post.” Why? Because thinking in such a micro way, is a recipe for short term success…at best. But, ideas that qualify as amazing are often legitimate game changers. And game changers are long term business drivers.

I can’t take all the credit for this major initiative. We pitched this concept to foursquare several months ago. They loved the idea, but at the time it wasn’t on their immediate road map. But, our Return on Amazing philosophy and commitment to speed and innovation were key factors in having them re-prioritize this idea. Over the past 11 months we’ve proven to them that we are committed to innovation and are a partner they could rely on. The same could be said about how we feel about foursquare. Together we’ve brought some truly amazing programs to market.

Once this idea became a real concept, our social and Emerging Media team made sure the experience was simple, safe and secure. All we needed at that point was the right partner and that’s where Arizona came in. They moved as quick as we were and as quick as foursquare was. And in retail, that’s VERY fast. Kudos to the Arizona team for being able to move that quickly and investing in an idea that had never been done before.

As an old mentor of mine coached me, speed wins. In this case, that maxim was a major reason why we were able to be the first and only company to offer real time seamless check in deals. Give it a try. I’d love your thoughts on this initiative and how it compliments everything else we’re doing at the intersection of local, mobile and social.

Needless to say, this is going to be the first of potentially many future initiatives where we’re looking to find that perfect intersection of Social, Mobile and Local marketing to provide value and a fantastic user experience.

Audaces fortuna iuvat – that’s latin for “Fortune Favors The Brave” or sometimes depending on the use and interpretation “Fortune Favors The Bold.” Over the years it’s been the rallying cry of several organizations and it’s something I adopted as a mindset years ago. Too often, we shirk from being bold, brave and taking risks. And why not? When a risk goes wrong, everyone looks for someone to point the finger at. I’ve always been ok with that approach. I like being accountable for my decisions. And often, they are bold, they are brave and they are risky. But, they are never ill-informed or not grounded in insights. See, that’s the key to being bold. Don’t be bold to be bold – be bold because your gut and your insights are supporting your decisions.

As I was writing this post, I came across this great post from Kathi Kruse, titled, “The Awesome Power of Bravery in Social Media.” It’s a great read, and not just because she leads with a timely quote from Richard Branson:

The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all!

Yesterday, we launched a very innovative, first of its kind social media program. It was a risky program that some have referred to as a war. It’s often easy to play armchair strategist without knowing the goal, the objectives, the strategy or the final campaign metrics.  I knew when I recommended this program and when we launched it, that the social pseudo-experts would jump all over it.  I knew we’d hear that you shouldn’t “sling mud.” I knew social meda “purists” would argue you shouldn’t pay for “social media.”  There were definitely potential downsides and less than 10% of all the conversation came from those dissenters.  That 10% number isn’t made up. You can do a quick pull of the hashtag #ILoveWalgreens certainly demonstrates a more than 10 to 1 ratio of positive to negative opinions. That ratio was also validated by 2 of our social media monitoring tools. Some of my favorite tweets can be found here.

Certainly, the program wasn’t perfect. No campaign is. We learned a lot.  We learned how to improve. We learned what worked. I also learned, what we’ve always known in this business…everyone thinks they know more than you do!  That’s ok. It comes with the territory. As Richard Branson said, “The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all!” So long as empowered to do so, I’ll keep blazing new paths, new trails, rocking boats and leveraging real insights to drive smart risky decisions.

Yesterday we launched an exciting social program to support of our Walgreens Flu Season campaign.  Every time you check in to a Walgreens location on foursquare or Facebook Places, Walgreens will donate 1 flu voucher, up to 200,000, to someone in need.  That’s right, it’s that simple. You check in.  We donate a flu voucher.

But, what does someone in need mean?  Well, we’ve partnered with 5 great charities:

1. AmeriCares
2. American Diabetes Association
3. National Urban League
4. Feeding America
5. League of United Latin American Citizens

It’s very difficult to succeed in social without partners.  Not unlike the old adage of it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a village of partners to make social succeed at the enterprise level.  One of the first areas of focus for me when I joined Walgreens to head up social was to define our partner strategy and then select partners to help us succeed.

There’s no shortage of companies out there claiming to have the “best,” “innovative” or “game changing” tool/platform/software/offering.  When you’re building a social media strategy for the enterprise, partner selection is critical.  Make the wrong choice and you could be set back several months or more importantly hinder momentum and damage internal credibility.  But, pick the right set of partners and success becomes easier, you’re able to move quicker, insights are uncovered, credibility created and momentum accelerated.

If partner selection were easy, anyone could do it and we’d all be working with the same set of partners.  Unfortunately, the answer isn’t turning to experts in the space.  Forrester, Altimeter, Info-Tech, eMarketer and many, many, many, many consultants/agencies all differ on which partners to work with.  Also, you can’t simply turn to other organizations, because the partners that work for their organization may not in fact work great for your organization.  Culture, aptitude, organizational structure, team size, objectives, industry vertical and other factors all impact which partners make sense.  Your organization needs to be able to maximize the relationship with the partner.  It’s a strange version of dating

Sounds like quite a downer so far, right?  I’m not trying to be negative, but I am trying to be honest.  We started with a smart partner strategy.  The framework for the strategy was built on understanding what the role of social should be at Walgreens:

With Social There’s A Way For Our 5.9 Million Customers To Stay Connected To Our 250K Employees Every Day

From there, we outlined the types of partners we wanted/needed to deliver on the role of social.  Well to transform our organization we need 4 categories of partners:

1. Monitor: It all starts here, but it doesn’t end here.  Job 1 was finding a partner to help us monitor the social space.  The key here and it’s often overlooked is you don’t need a partner with features that duplicate existing initiatives.  Unfortunately, there’s a lot of redundancy in this area.  Social is a team sport that goes across an organization.  Having a monitoring partner that simply duplicates on some level what’s already being done by other tools that are already in place doesn’t make sense.  Guarding against this means having a partner that understands what they really bring to the table and doesn’t try to be all things to all people.
2. Measure: How I wish there was a platform/partner that nailed social monitoring with measurement, analysis and insights.  The reality, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t exist.  There’s too much to measure, too much data and often not enough actionable insights. Separating measurement from monitoring was a big decision, but I think it’ll be the right one long term.
3. Engage: An over-used term, but an important partner category.  We needed partners who were going to help us integrate social behavior into our initiatives and partners who could help us enhance our existing social presence. Lastly, we needed partners who could help us connect with our customers.
4. Planning & Strategy: We’re smart enough to know that there are people and companies out there who understand social as good or better than we do.  They have battle scars, sharp minds and a willingness to adapt.

With a focus for social in place and a partner strategy defined we started creating a short list of partners we wanted to talk with.  The short list was based on:

1. Previous direct experience
2. Existing partners at Walgreens
3. Industry Analyst Data (aka Forrester, Gartner, etc.)
4. Feedback from colleagues
5. Points of view from analysts – Altimeter Group was a great help here

After the short list was created we started meeting with companies.  For all of you out there in a similar role to mine, let me offer 5 pieces of advice on how to do this:

1. Remember process is a framework.  You might think you’re only going to meet with 4 companies.  It’s ok if you meet with only 2 or 6 or 12.
2. Identify early and get agreement on how partners will be evaluated.
3. Don’t focus on the cost, focus on the pricing model.  This is a big one and trust me, in the monitoring space the model is more important than the quoted cost.
4. This could be 3A, but after understanding the pricing model, don’t jump to the lowest cost provider.  This is about long term relationships, it’s not about treating someone or some company like a commodity.  If you simply go with the cheapest provider, you’ll get what you pay for.
5. Remember that it’s people who make an organization.  If you don’t like the people you’re meeting with or will be working with, it will impact your ability to partner well.

800 words or so in. Thanks for hanging with me.  Now we’ll get to what I’m sure you’re most interested in: who are we going to be working with.  With many of the contracts still being finalized, I can’t share the full list at this moment.  However, as soon as the contracts are done, I will update this post to outline our full list of partners.  What I can say is that we ended up with 11 core partners across the 4 categories.

Keep in mind we accomplished all of this inside of 3 months.  For a large organization, we move pretty fast at Walgreens.  A big part of why we were able to move so quickly was how much support we had across the organization.  Teams were focused on removing barriers instead of creating roadblocks.  Additionally, there was a clear understanding that we were going to listen to our internal customers, but ultimately the decisions about who to partner with would be made by the social team.  Focus and accountability.

One thing to remember is that there is no one size fits all partner, and as nice as it would be to have the uber partner/tool/platform, the reality is you’re going to need more than one partner.  Sometimes you’ll even need more than one partner per category.  So long as you have clear direction, solid social media guidelines/policies in place and alignment on how to measure your investment (time, dollars, etc.) you can manage multiple partners.

Defining our partners was a major first step.  Now we need to leverage these partners and maximize their capabilities to reach our potential.

UPDATED
As promised, now that many of the contracts are done, I can outline the partners we’re working with this year to help us succeed:

Visible Technologies: They’ll serve as the nerve center for our social monitoring. They’ve been flexible and easy to work with throughout the review process. I’ve been impressed with their commitment to innovation; I’m excited to see many of their new features roll out this year. It’s also worth noting, they fundamentally understood how to work with an enterprise as large as Walgreens.

Crimson Hexagon: I was turned on to Crimson Hexagon by the folks at Altimeter. I love their approach to making sense of unstructured data. They’re offering is similar to what Visible Technologies is bringing to the table, but they provide analytics, insights and measurement capabilities that I’ve yet to see anyone (eg Radian6) match. I’m giddy with anticipation of being able to finally provide something more than just sentiment analysis and volume of posts to the organization.

Wildfire: Much like Visible Technologies they made the pricing model simple and something that could scale as we grow. We also looked at Involver and Buddy Media. Both were interesting, but ultimately Wildfire won out.

HootSuite: A serious grudge match was had as we looked for a partner to help us publish content and handle some of the day-to-day interaction. In a perfect world Visible or Crimson Hexagon would have offered a feature that provided the same functionality as HootSuite in the same cross-platform way. Cross-platform was the key here. With HootSuite we can leverage the platform from the web, as a downloaded desktop app, or on a mobile device. The mobile support was second to none. They support iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android. This was huge. We also looked at Sprout, which we liked, but lacked any mobile features.

Page Lever: The Facebook Insights tool is, at best, ok. Page Lever helps us make better sense of our Facebook performance by leveraging the Facebook API to provide reporting. It feels like Google Analytics from the interface to the animations to the ease of use. It’s missing a few features that I’d love to have, but I have a feeling they’ll keep adding to the platform over the next 12 months.

Edge Rank Checker: This is one of the tools I’m most excited about. In essence, Edge Rank Checker helps us understand when we should be posting on Facebook and what we should be posting (based on content that’s generating a response).

Bazaar Voice: We’ve been working with Bazaar Voice for some time and they’ll continue to power our product reviews on our website.  I think there’s a lot that their platform offers that we aren’t even fully leveraging.