David Armano (9 posts)

A while back I wrote a post titled “How to Spot Social Media Snake Oil.” Not long after, BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker ended up writing a sort of mainstream media version of it citing lots of sources and examples. What does life look like after social media snake oil?

Jeff Dachis and I recently returned from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York where we made the case that it’s time to de-emphasize the “media” in social media, and instead focused on a business being socially calibrated.

From a holistic perspective, we talk about the need for organizations to become more socially calibrated—able to adapt and respond to changes both externally and internally. The three areas where emergent outcomes can manifest are, participation with your customers, collaboration between your employees and optimization in the interactions/transactions between your business and its partners. Digging into customer participation, it’s clear that in a networked economy customers demand engagement, information, support and ultimately, value and ecosystems such as Twitter are beginning to deliver here.

While social media often commands favorable media attention, the less often told story is that successful initiatives are rare to come by and that there are still a number of organizational roadblocks that managers need to overcome in order to make progress.

This post originally appeared on David Armano’s Logic + Emotion blog.

So what is customer advocacy anyway? Well for starters, they don’t have to be your customers—they can be any part of your entire constituency. Employees, business partners, friends—you name it. But here’s the point. You need them more than ever.

Sharing ideas and insights with Bruce Nussbaum, contributing editor at BusinessWeek, is always a pleasure, so it’s fitting that he’s one of my first round table interviews. Previously assistant managing editor in charge of BusinessWeek’s innovation and design coverage, he was named one of the 40 most powerful people in design by I.D. Magazine in 2005.

I just returned from Blogworld 2009, where I delivered a presentation on The Value of Visual Thinking in Social Business. I’ve made those slides available on Slideshare, and also included it in the post. Visual Thinking was a key tool in the development of the visuals behind our architypes; ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter. In my presentation, I spoke about some of the ideas, themes, and imagery and most importantly the design process used to produce the visuals that we use today.

Visual thinking can help to break down complex ideas and synthesize them into something meaningful. Not everyone is a visual thinker, but we are all visual learners. Effective visuals can engage people, and inform them as they absorb your message.

The dynamic signals we send with our body language have been studied by behavioral scientists for many years. When not in a face-to-face environment, our systems and processes also send signals that can be just as powerful.