Dick Raman and the business of paying attention

Dick Raman had a useful idea for the executive suite: give somebody the job of listening. He called that person a Chief Listening Officer. The title has the pleasing effect of making a quiet activity sound expensive enough to get a budget. It also captures a recurring concern in his work. Businesses acquire new ways to communicate, then have to work out who will pay attention to what comes back.

Raman arrived at social media by a route through electronic trading software, IBM, a Dutch stock-market listing and international standards work. Later came Twitter guides, Facebook page applications and consulting from Miami. His career connects two sorts of business message: the structured information that lets companies trade, and the less obedient conversation that happens when customers can answer in public.

That second category supplied him with work, arguments and occasional criticism. It also supplied a Dutch wordplay project. Somewhere between XML and a well-turned double meaning, Raman found several uses for a network.

The business before the buzz

He studied business economics at the Free University of Amsterdam, taught briefly, then joined IBM in the Netherlands. There he trained as a consultant in its Information Network department. In 1987 he left to start a company providing software for electronic trading. The business became TIE Holding and was listed in Amsterdam in 2000.

The sequence matters because it puts the software before the social media advice. Raman had spent years on the machinery of commercial exchange. His 1999 book, XML/EDI: Cyber Assisted Business in Practice, belongs to that period. By the 2004 international XBRL conference in Brussels, his roles included president and CEO of TIE and chair of the UN/CEFACT Forum.

There is a small, enjoyable scene from TIE’s expansion. Welcoming visitors to its new Schiphol-Rijk office in 2000, Raman remarked that the company finally had doors. The detail is more memorable than the usual corporate account of larger premises. Growth had acquired hinges.

The listing had brought capital and a volatile share price. Raman defended the decision to go public and argued for the continuing usefulness of businesses doing substantive internet work. Years later, the relationship with TIE’s board deteriorated. He stepped down as chief executive in November 2007 at the supervisory board’s request, amid disagreements. A founder’s long association with a business could include both building it and losing authority within it.

A different kind of message

Raman moved from Amsterdam to the United States in 2005. His subsequent books followed another change of scene: companies were learning to conduct part of their public lives on social networks. Tweeteronix: Using Twitter for Business and Pleasure appeared in 2009. The Dutch guide Twitteren met resultaat followed in 2010, addressing business users and ambitious individuals.

The latter covered the practical furniture of Twitter: profiles, searches, etiquette, useful applications and connections to other networks. It also introduced Tweeteronix, the application Raman had developed. The combination was commercially neat. A book explained the medium, and software offered to take some of the repetitive work out of using it.

That pairing exposed a difficulty. A contemporary review praised useful advice in the book while objecting to its enthusiasm for automation, including managing followers and publishing material through software. The reviewer valued the personal contact that automation might displace. It was a criticism of how the tool was being used to define success, rather than a complaint that the buttons failed.

The commercial pitch also reached beyond a company account. BrandReact offered to help executives and professionals develop personal brands through social media and blogs. That put the individual voice inside the service offering: the person signing the message could matter as much as the business named above it. An executive’s account brought its own expectations about who was speaking and whether a reply would receive personal attention.

Raman’s own emphasis on creative listening makes the tension interesting. A business could want a more efficient publishing routine and a more attentive relationship with customers at the same time. Software could assist with the routine. Judgement about when to speak, what to say and which reply deserved attention remained harder to package.

A small shop inside a large platform

His author biography dates the founding of BrandReact to January 1, 2011. The company offered social media monitoring and response, outsourced social media work, personal branding support and consulting. Facebook Apps World sat within that wider business as a catalog of tools for customizing Facebook fan pages.

The catalog’s historical pricing made the purchase easy to describe: $9.99 for one standard app on one fan page, paid once. A free editor called Full Page gave people another starting point. Other names included MeToo, ShopWindow and FeedMaster. Beside the ready-made tools were custom development and consulting services, for customers whose requirements extended beyond the shelf.

For Raman, the shop connected software with advice. A company could buy a small function and still need help deciding how it fitted into a marketing effort. The app was a piece of the work. Someone also had to choose the offer, maintain the page and respond to people who arrived.

The joke travelled too

His publishing took a detour that a list of executive roles would miss. Raman’s Dutch Twitter account @Dubbelzinnig circulated linguistic double meanings. A 2011 collection carried the title Mannen die naar vrouwen fluiten, kunnen naar vrouwen fluiten. The joke turns on two senses of a Dutch phrase, a reminder that language can create trouble even when it is behaving exactly as intended.

The project made social sharing tangible. Readers could enjoy a line, send it on, or contribute wordplay themselves. The subject was lighter than electronic commerce, but the activity involved real people deciding that something was worth passing along. A joke had to earn its journey.

Another 2011 publication looked backwards. 20 Years TIE in Pictures assembled almost 2,000 photographs for the company’s twentieth anniversary. Its description ranged through selling, support, consulting, travel, celebrations, skiing and difficult times. Here was a founder preserving the working life around the corporate milestones.

The album gives the career a different scale. A listing date fits on a timeline; twenty years of people travelling, exhibiting and celebrating requires rather more space. Raman’s decision to gather those images placed everyday company life beside the achievements usually allowed into a business biography.

Breakfast, with a practical agenda

In May 2012, a Miami breakfast seminar put his newer concerns into a compact title: Social+Mobile+Local Marketing. The venue was the Banker’s Club, and the program promised practical discussion of Google Places pages, text-message marketing and local search. The audience included professionals and business owners. There was coffee-and-calendar specificity to the proposition: arrive in the morning, learn something usable, return to work.

The event shows the scale at which much of his advice operated. A local business needed customers to find the right listing and know where to go. An ambitious platform vocabulary eventually had to become a practical action for somebody running a company. Raman’s program connected search, phones and social networks around that ordinary commercial need.

He also offered caution. During the London Olympics that summer, when athletes’ social media posts were producing very public consequences, he advised people to think before tweeting. It was an uncomplicated instruction. A publishing tool makes speed available; it supplies no corresponding guarantee of good sense.

Put a person in charge

The Chief Listening Officer proposal gave this concern an organizational address. Raman argued that someone should own the work of attending to customers and strengthening the company’s public profile. The phrase appeared in an Oracle social media guide, placing responsibility alongside the technical ability to monitor a conversation.

“Every company should have a Chief Listening Officer”Dick Raman

His broader response also involved teaching. In November 2013, BrandReact announced Social Media Manager College, a proposed thirteen-week online program. It was intended to cover customer interactions across marketing, support and other functions. Raman described companies struggling to find people with the necessary digital skills.

The announced format included weekly classes, assignments, tests, recordings and individual support. Students were meant to leave with a website or blog and properly configured social profiles, giving prospective employers something they could inspect. The plan treated competence as work a person could demonstrate, down to the pages they had actually set up.

The proposed college also allowed people already in work to use their employer’s website and social media setup for the assignments. That gave the training a second audience alongside job seekers. An employed student could bring an existing business problem into the classroom and produce something for the company while studying. It was a practical extension of the consulting offer, with instruction attached to work that needed doing.

There is a connection to his earlier teaching and consulting here, without requiring the career to obey a tidy master plan. Electronic trading, social media tools and training each addressed a different practical obstacle. Sometimes businesses needed software. Sometimes they needed an explanation. Sometimes they needed an employee who knew what to do next.

Raman’s story is most engaging at those intersections: a software founder making room for wordplay, an automation developer arguing for listening, a public-company executive assembling an album of colleagues at work and play. The Chief Listening Officer title brings those competing demands into the same room. Before the next message goes out, somebody has to hear the one that has already arrived.