Jeff Dachis and I recently returned from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York—a near week long flurry of activity that brings together technology, business and design amongst other things. We co-presented a somewhat uniquely titled session called “Social Business Design: It’s Clobberin’ Time”. So what does this mean? Simply put, it means that we are fast approaching a time where there will be a de-emphasis on the “media” portion of “social” and an emphasis on a business being socially calibrated. By this, we mean a business being more real time, adaptive, and in tune with all of its constituents (not just consumers/customers). If you want to make this really simple, you can use the word better. We believe that a socially calibrated business will be better.
Our presentation provided the rationale for why we feel this (we think many business functions have the potential be socialized, not just marketing). We explained our position on why we think the intentional act of design (or business re-design) is needed to achieve the end result of “moving the needle’ or realizing significant cost reduction or profit. We cited several early examples of success while noting the challenges they also pose. Providing customer service on Twitter is great, but how do you scale and integrate it? What’s the right metric to measure? Do your “social initiatives” live in a silo or are they integrated into multiple facets of the organization? These are not media questions—they are business questions. We injected a bit of personality by starting the presentation by saying “we didn’t come to save social media, we came to demolish it”. An exaggeration to be sure, but we think there is something deeper and we’re just seeing the tip of the Iceberg.
We broke down what we think will be the building blocks of a more social business. Adaptations in people, process and technology. We talked about the benefits and value of “open cultures” (think Zappos) and the potential of connecting the ecosystem of an organization so that a new way of collaborating could co-exist with traditional hierarchy. The audience seemed receptive. More importantly, they seemed hungry. Does social media really need “clobbering”? Not really—many businesses are reaping the benefits of communicating and engaging with their customers in new ways enabled via social technologies. We applaud this. And we think it’s only the beginning. Have a look at our presentation and let us know what you think. More importantly—ask yourself this: How ready for social business are you?
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Divide and Conquer to Solve the Business-IT Disconnect Problem |
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Great observations, David. The development of media technologies is so far ahead of organizational development that in most cases there’s a complete disconnect, it resembles the dogmatic divide in our political discourse.. As you point out, it’s time for the human and social development to catch up to the technology. Unless serious strides are made in this direction, Moore’s Law simply becomes More’s Lost.
I believe the biggest difference between Industrial Age organizations and those designed to operate in the Networked World, is the ability to improvise. Industrial Age organizations script their narratives, and then try to inflict their scripts on the marketplace. Organizations designed for the Networked World improvise their narratives which lets them operate in tune and tempo with their audiences.
The approach Microsoft and NewsCorp are discussing with the contemplated Bing search terms opt-out is a perfect example of two companies trying to script their narratives.
Google, meanwhile, with its culture of improvisation, does not worry so much about where the narrative is going as much as they do about how to keep it engaging for their audience.
And that’s the difference.
Bonifer,
I LOVE that you wrote
“culture of improvisation”
And yet, Google as big as it’s getting needs to be careful not to fall into the same traps. You make a lot of great points here. Another example I used was the media industry (which I worked on in the late 90s—The Chicago Tribune). How is it that they didn’t see Craigslist poised to eat their lunch by offering free, national classifieds?
What if, in a network economy the media companies themselves networked, joined forced and provided a better Craigslist with some type of monitization model in place.
Hindsight is indeed 20/20. But there must be opportunities in “social media” that begin to address business issues even if they are incremental.
We just discovered your site and ideas. Very intriguing. Couple of items:
- We have just started a LinkedIn Group for B2B Sales and Marketing and Twitter. You might enjoy. We find Twitter exceptional for B2B in this hyper-competitive environment. However, our entreprise clients are :A. rushing to catch up, B. Way understaffed/skilled to handle – so they outsource to us.
We tell them: “You can’t stop the waves but you CAN learn to surf them.”
- Trying to “swat” at somed will be like doing the same to a growing swarm of gnats! It is definitely here to stay, mainly because it fits the ways our brains work so well.
Cheers
Excellent presentation gentlemen. I admire your commitment to transparency – it speaks volumes about your authority in this field. I fully agree that social business is the future. We’ve barely scratched the surface. Companies that embrace this holistically can be the runaway winners of tomorrow. Thanks for the great work!
Dave,
Funny how the brain stores images in context, then rehashes them in that same context later.
Mine is from October: http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/best-practices-for-social-media-the-basics-of-program-planning/
By the way, we’re definitely on the same page about this.