(9 posts)

I tweeted recently that all of the details of planning an online community reminded me of planning a wedding. I submitted the tweet at the very moment I felt overwhelmed by the details of coordinating so many moving pieces weeks before launching the community. In this blog post, I share the lessons I have learned so far in community planning to avoid losing your cool over the details before launch.

While the goal of social business is to distribute social responsibility for scale, the edge of the organization is put at-risk if it doesn’t operate from a strong center. This post explains the importance of creating a cross-functional team that can act as a command center for governing and coordinating social business initiatives.

While social technology can automate and innovate many processes, I believe it is the human behind the technology that makes best-in-class customer service. To that end, connectedness is a quality I would recommend preserving and nurturing at the front lines. I explain this recommendation with a personal customer service story from Austin, Texas.

A major component of Social Business Design is developing a staffing model to support our clients’ desires to harness opportunities presented by customer participation. A question we have had to address at Dachis Group is whether or not any of the new social roles we recommend can be outsourced. I asked this question to the panelists of a session I moderated at Enterprise 2.0 2010 this month in Boston. In this blog post, I give my own point of view.

Freeing the flow of information so more people can act on it is a major benefit of social business design. Social technologies combined with corporate culture that supports information sharing behaviors enables a networked infrastructure. The networked infrastructure helps break down information silos to create a marketplace for information exchange.

One key theme from last week’s Web 2.0 Expo event in San Francisco is that the winning business models must create more value than they capture. Creating vast amounts of external value requires a business to have a keen understanding of what people want. Social technologies enable businesses to capture this information directly from constituents at scale.

This week Twitter unveiled a new advertising platform called Promoted Tweets during its Chirp conference. Twitter developed Promoted Tweets with the vision of a new hybrid model of paid and earned media where advertisers will pay for prime real estate on Twitter based on how well a tweet resonates with viewers. This blog post states the facts we have gathered about how it will work.

Social business requires a shift in culture and structure to allow for transparency and democratization of processes. This shift does not happen overnight. It’s easy for people to get discouraged and resist change when the transformation process takes time and doesn’t come easy. Hence, social business evangelists have emerged to help sustain the momentum and promote cultural changes required for social business. This post outlines five key characteristics of a successful social business evangelist.

During her presentation, Charlene Li said leaders of modern organizations must adjust to working in a world where they are not in control. The reality is that modern organizations are no longer in total control with customers posting public complaints on Twitter and employees leaking information on Facebook. The sooner leaders accept this reality, the better. However, Charlene recognized that there are limits to how much control a business will give up.