Like you I believe that we are at the beginning of some tectonic shifts in how business gets done.
The challenge you have is in trying to convey the depth of your thinking and the value of your offering to those outside your company. Ironically you have a marketing problem.
You have chosen to clarify a new term (social business) with other new terms (hivemind, metafilter etc.) which makes it doubly hard to get inside of the core concept of social business design.
One thing that might help is to begin speaking in stories and examples that illustrate these four “archetypes” in the unequivocal language of a case study so that we can understand more clearly (1) who has effectively deployed a “metafilter” for example, (2) how do you calibrate it and (3) what does the result feel like.

I look forward to keeping up with the good work you are doing.
Best,
Josh

I find your ideas and your company’s ideas fascinating and valuable.

You analyzed vendors at Forrester, so you know vendors’ claims need to be evaluated from the standpoint of where they are in the market and what they are trying to accomplish.

Your “thought leaders” statement would be far more convincing if it linked to other thought leaders. Your argument would be stronger. I have seen them out there — why not cite them?

As a vendor, not just a thought leader yourself, you have a responsibility to present more evidence, including evidence from outside your own company.

“It’s time for us to straighten out the terminology we use when this describing this space” . . . and use yours. Did I get that right?

Point understood. Naming confers meaning and value – when used deliberately, it can be powerful. We call our approach Social Business Design because it signifies something distinct, not an idea that is the same as everything else at its core.

If it is the same, I haven’t yet heard from anyone who has taken the time to understand the depth of our thinking and respond with meaningful counterpoints. Blog posts like this one only scrape the surface. Real work and deeper thinking take place elsewhere, in formats that allow for much larger value creation and capture.

http://www.dachisgroup.com/PDFs/Social_Business_Design.pdf

I’ve always been a fan of your blog, subscribing to it via Google Reader and am an admirer of the work that you have done in the social media space. However, having been in marketing for well over a decade, online and off, I am wondering if some of these recent posts are falling into the classic marketeer trap of writing long-winded marketing-speak, full of 3-syllable buzzwords.

I have found over the years that clients – especially those that are not in marketing departments – will either ignore me, switch off or at worst shut me up when I begin talking/presenting in what they term as stereotypical marketing-speak. We are often criticised for not being tuned into the bottom-line aspects of business, of being theoretical instead of practical and of over-complicating business processes. A few years back I even had an MD (American CEO) tell me that if I said one more marketing buzzword she would have security throw me out.

In rewriting his work, the author DH Lawrence would ruthlessly slash and burn his day’s work, cutting 3-syllable words down to 2 and 2-syllable words down to 1, simplifying his text as much as possible in seeking to communicate his ideas. Could we not learn a bit from how he turned simplicity into art?

Most of today’s companies aren’t designed for social business. By doing so, they’ll unlock value.

While the tools and platforms for social connection are evolving, and new vocabulary around these new tools is proliferating, it seems that the social nature of business is the one constant that hasn’t changed: good business has always been about good relationships, just as successful teaching is always about strong relationships.

To put it differently, what *isn’t* social business design? If we cannot define what lies outside of that domain I am not sure it clarifies much as to what is new or different in this view of the business ecosystem.

A richer question to debate might be to ask how definitions of business “value” may evolve as we begin to broaden our perspective of business ecosystems and increase use of the new social tools and platforms.

[Jeff]
@jboogie

At the risk of oversimplifying – isn’t this all just Product Design? If the product/business has/requires a social component, then isn’t this just part of the broader product?

It seems like there’s a constant drive to create new terminology and define new “spaces” while the existing spaces and terminology seem to contain what almost all people are doing quite well.

I saw a presentation recently by some folks from IDEO who spoke about Business Design (sans the social) and, once again, it seemed basically like product development/design and user experience planning and design.

If you’re trying to drive enterprise awareness of the benefits of social components in their strategies and products, perhaps this will help, otherwise, I think a lot of folks are starting to get confused.

[Jeff]
@jboogie

Neither Wikipedia nor Wiktionary have entries for Social Business Design.

I’m along for the ride on this one!

It’s really not that big of a deal.

(end of mini-rant)

To your point, Web 2.0 stands on its own and is worth understanding as originally defined by O’Reilly: http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2009/01/why-web-20-still-matters.html

Will you expand on your meaning of “socially calibrated”? What does it mean, who does it, and how does it happen?

thanks,
@mwalsh

Insightful, your thoughts are helping us to get there, but we do need to get some of the terminology straight, if nothing else so we can move on. I would like to add something that may help (or just create another term – you decide). Social System Design is the instantiation of Enterprise 2.0 as the technology foundation of Social Business Design. Yes, People and Process first, I know, but technology does need to fit there somewhere.

Mitch