But in the end, numbers just haven’t been enough.  Especially when it comes to unstructured data like social media, where the most important information isn’t going to be neatly bucketable into categories like clicks or bounce rates. The vagaries of human conversation are messy, hard-to-process, and seemingly worst of all, unpredictable.  Just as challenging, the flood of data from these sources is vast.  However, though sensors (such as those in our smart devices such as phones or tablets, or in our Internet-connected home/office) create a formidable and a rapidly growing surface area for big data, this data generally falls into the large, yet well-understood category.  In contrast, the most difficult to operationalize listening and analytics processes are ones that 1) which the information is uniquely formatted on a normal basis and 2) requires excessive human intervention to process or respond to effectively.  To succeed, both of these must be ameliorated, and if possible, dramatically improved by understanding the implications of the unanticipated and then correctly formulating a useful business response. Anything short of this makes the scale problem untenable for businesses: Mountains of data requiring mountains of people in order to service defeats the very purpose of using technology in the first place.

I used the word “operationalize” in the previous paragraph, because that’s what many companies set out to do in 2011: Begin building business processes that were supported by new types of listening and analytics tools in an effort to make sense of their enterprise data, social data, and other data sources. In the process they gave rise to the term ‘big data’, a whole host of existing and new technologies and processes integrated into a “stack” that can start cracking both the data volume problem as well as the messy data problem (and opportunity) inherent in data pools such as social media.  One of the root causes: Traditional analytics and business intelligence largely fell behind the needs of businesses to start seeing all of the data relevant to them, whatever the form, and being able to understand what it really meant quickly and easily enough to actually do something about it.

The now-famous McKinsey report on big data last year had much to say on the topic and it’s required reading these days, including some extremely compelling case studies and examples.  But while the domains of healthcare, government, retail, manufacturing, and telecommunications have much of the industry-specific focus on big data, the one general domain where most businesses of any kind will be impacted is in social media.  This is where tools, platforms, vendors, techniques, skills, training, and much more will have to be developed and brought to bear. To be sure, a good amount of what has already been developed for the fields of analytics, data warehousing, business intelligence, databases, visualization, natural language processing, and more will be usable. But much of it won’t or has become obsolete because of the vast pools of deep data accumulating around our organizations and its unique structure.

Therefore, a new discipline is being synthesized out of the existing pieces that are providing important foundational elements for big data. In many cases entirely new elements will have to be introduced as well.  These include: 1) Radical solutions to address scale and performance issues, 2) edge-of-the-envelope machine learning capabilities ala IBM’s Watson that can remove human decision making when it’s unnecessary, 3) unsupervised identification of strategic business concerns and opportunities, and 4) an operational construct that directly affects the course of the business (as opposed to generating automated reports that sit unread inside an e-mail attachment.) Big data has the promise to deliver on all of these and in ways that will drive better innovation, competition, and bottom-line results. It will take time, but hopefully not hard work, except for those that produce the tools, although that may yet be too much to ask.

For now, 2012 will be an experimental year, a year spent preparing the fundamentals and figuring out the ways in which the pieces of the many disciplines that big data draws from will fit together. Many organizations will be trying out new ways to integrate big data ideas into their business while others will be putting the tools through their paces. But the smart organizations will be doing both, since big data is as much about process as it is about technology.  All will be learning what works and what doesn’t (for them), and seeing where the holes in their organization are for enabling the outcomes.  There’s little question that big data will be one of the biggest IT and business stories of the year, but exactly how and why is unwritten so far.

10 Big Data Predictions for 2012

Here is what I think are likely the most significant big data happenings this year:

1. Data scientists will be in short supply, while data warehouse and BI folks will try to migrate over. Yet lack of experienced big data architects will represent the real hold-up for now.  As Tom Groenfeldt of Forbes says, it’s really a matter of degrees when it comes to labeling someone a big data scientist. It’s also clear that practitioners of precursor fields of big data will be lining up to get involved, yet often lack the new thinking required to master the field. But the biggest shortage in my opinion will be in the enterprise-scale strategists capable of crafting and realizing a big data vision, one step-at-a-time.
2. Analytics vendors (social and otherwise) will start down the big data path. Many won’t get far, but a few will make the transition. When venerable old-guard analytics companies like SAS start releasing big data reports, you know it’s the buzz word du jour. Yet this is inevitable with any important new technology trend. What’s more significant is that very few vendors will have a comprehensive blueprint or framework for big data, most will be providing point solutions, and that’s fine. In this early wave, big data suites as such really don’t exist and it’s up to companies to curate a set of capabilities.
3. Everyone will label everything big data in 2012, making it hard to see what makes the approach or technology stand apart and provide a unique solution. The issue of signal-to-noise with big data marketing and hype will threaten to obscure its real meaning for some, yet others will take what big data represents — a set of innovative new approaches to solving new and long-standing business problems in a much more agile, integral, and high impact manner — as a call to significant action.  The Register recently published an effective cross-check of what big data really means to those on the ground. Regardless of the term itself, from their surveys it’s clear there’s a broad perception that big data will let organizations tackle problems that were previously ‘too hard or too expensive’.
4. Companies looking for instant nirvana with one-click setup and zero-configuration of big data solutions will increasingly have their needs met, but slowly at first. The problem with effective big data is that it’s not just about predetermined buckets or templates for business intelligence; it’s about meaningful analysis and processing of information in a way that’s highly relevant to the business.  .
5. Codifying the domain of a business in order to ‘teach’ an organization’s big data platforms will turn out to be one of the outstanding challenges, but some initial solutions will emerge. Most of the better big data stories, such as the health care company that’s collecting ubiquitous fertility data, instead of just from those having fertility problems (and skewing it for everyone), are specific to a domain or industry. In other words, they’re custom-built and designed.  Big data is often more about the democratization of data as Bradford Cross once put it, to be liberated for use inside and across the business, instead of limited to data scientists in white lab coats, tackling a small number of well-defined problems. To do this, we need better ways to adapt big data appliances to the details of our business. Important initial headway is being made here (example: Appistry‘s industry-specific big data solutions) and I think we’ll see much more of it this year, especially in social business fields such social marketing, Social CRM, social product development, and crisis management as well as specific domains such as life sciences, defense, and especially financial services.
6. Consumerization of big data will be one of the primary vectors into the organization for tactical needs, making ‘shadow’ big data a nascent but important new trend. I’ve made the argument that Google search is a great example of a simple big data appliance anyone can use. It analyzes the contents of most of the world’s Web sites in near real-time, allows all of it to be quickly searched using a simple interface, provides recommendations when it thinks you’re asking the wrong question, and so on. It’s in use at virtually every company in the world.  It will be followed up by numerous SaaS big data services over the next few years that will bring consumer-like simplicity and power to the field. They will be so easy to start using that many workers will prefer them to any home grown solution. While this won’t always be the case (partially because the internal data is typically quite difficult to load into external services by the average worker), companies will see plenty of unsanctioned big data solutions. Not that I think this is a real problem.
7. The more bureaucratic the company, the more it will struggle to embody its strategy and policy in an operational big data life cycle, despite this being the best way to obtain value. It’s hard for rigid processes and hierarchies to change, and companies either poor at using technology to solve problems or those that aren’t very agile will have more of an uphill challenge to activating on big data.  I don’t expect big data to appear in these organizations in 2012, but early adopters will appear in technology, finance, healthcare, insurance, government, media, and retail businesses if they have either stiff competition or are already rapidly growing (and hence already changing) more than other businesses. Correspondingly, big data vendors that supply these industries will experience the most lift.
8. Rich data, such as audio, images, and video, will remain opaque to most organizations this year, despite advances in machine analysis of both and their growing prevalence. I’m basing this on looking at most big data offerings today, which don’t emphasize these types of data very much if at al, despite the explosion of images, audio, and high-definition video in recent years. For now, the lion’s share of big data will focus on textual processing.
9. On the other hand, social media and big data — because it will usually not be opaque — will have significant lift this year, though semantic processing will remain in its early stages. I recently identified nine top uses cases for social business intelligence, for which big data will be a leading solution.  Social media, because it requires linguistic and natural language processing, is an ideal candidate for big data analytics yet it will be in areas requiring sophisticated link analysis like automated reputation/ influencer tracking and segmentation that will be of primary interest this year. Perhaps more importantly, big data will “complete” social business as a capability that allows the company to listen and intelligently analyze their constituents contextually and in scale (see figure above.)
10. Despite all of this, companies will do surprisingly well integrating early big data capabilities in their social business efforts in particular. That the big software vendors are moving into the big data fray (such as with Oracle’s new big data appliance) speaks volumes. And offerings are focusing on the ease-of-use factor, both in installation and maintenance as well as operation, clearly understanding the immense competition and pressure they’ll be experiencing from online providers.  I’ll be publishing a breakdown of the consumer big data app soon, but I’m virtually certain it will show a list of well-known and up-and-coming household names that you’ll be seeing in the enterprise this year as companies throw big data solutions at their issues to see what sticks.

Of course, many other interesting things will happen in big data as well but this is a good start. I’m hoping we’ll see how the real strengths and weaknesses of big data fall out over the coming 12 months. Please leave your comments and own predictions below in comments.

Certainly, some organizations will struggle with adoption of the latest trends, typically those already having challenges metabolizing the more significant ramifications of social media up until now.  However, the firms that can successfully assess how best to incorporate the latest strategic technology advancements will largely fare much better than others. As I examined last year, digital technology has consistently shown itself to be a powerful lever is separating the leaders from the also-rans.  Over the recent holidays, I spent time looking at the the latest crop of technology entrants that I believe will need to be on the somewhere on roadmap of a large percentage of organizations implementing social business strategies within the next year.

I should note that the number of disruptive shifts in the technology landscape is at a generational high at the moment.  In my recent exploration of the broader trends, I made the case the that social, next-gen mobile, cloud, consumerization, and big data are the essential macro trends that are broadly transforming the way that organizations apply technology to the way they deliver results to their business in the immediate future.  Many of these trends have implications beyond technology and are consequently driving deeper changes in business models, strategy, operations, processes, and interaction between workers, customers, and the broader marketplace.

However, technology itself is in fact a key part of the co-evolution of  the broader societal, cultural, and economic changes that are happening at present.  More specifically, businesses are increasingly impacted, even defined, by what the current and near-future technology landscape makes possible.  Don’t understand how social media creates the operating channels of the future between all parts of a business? Then those opportunities are not available to you. Uncertain how new mobile platforms provides a potent new means to improve the delivery of information and services to your business constituents? Then you won’t be able to meet their needs. And so on.

Getting ahead of the juggernaut of technology change today and guiding an organization through it is deeply challenging at the moment. While the CIOs, CMOs, and increasingly COOs and CEOs, are on the front lines of many of these changes, the rest of the organization is no longer waiting.  In many cases, the lines of business are moving ahead on their own. This is having the effect of making deliberate strategic moves at the top level more difficult due to a rapidly shifting business foundation.  In fact, in my discussions with senior executives of large companies over the last year, one truth stands out: Their organizations are increasingly seizing local initiative to apply the latest technological advances to improve their part of the business. Central planning and strategy around technological changes is now often in a reactive stance. A very typical example: A new Compuware survey on consumerization found that 64% of CIOs reported that mobility pilots were proceeding with little or no involvement from IT.  This is a sea change in how technology is adopted in organizations and it has serious implications given how tightly interrelated many of the latest advances are.

From my research, however, I don’t believe the trend towards decentralized technology adoption is of major concern for the most part, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.  Organizations can no longer wait for a few central actors to determine their business future. There’s simply too much at stake and too much unmet technology demand in organizations today.  To get there, I’ve held up the concept of CoIT as a natural new functional model that will enable organizations to drive technology adoption in far more effective ways. But on a more immediate and actionable tactical level — and in order to be a leader and not a laggard in your industry — the big question is what then should organizations begin jointly enabling in terms of the biggest technology movers this year?

From this perspective, I’ve assembled below a list of the emerging technologies with the most potential, or sometimes technologies that have been around and are just now getting lift. While your mileage will vary in terms of whether these technologies will all apply to your organization, chances are good that a significant percentage of these will significantly impact your social business efforts from a technology planning, strategy, and implementation perspective. When possible, I’ve tried to explain the exact tie in with social business, but for most of these, they should be fairly obvious.

Top Emerging Technologies with Social Business Impact in 2012

• Smart mobility. While the rise of iOS and Android as a primary end-user platform won’t be a surprise to nearly anyone, it’s amazing how the adoption of tablet computing has shaken out, given that Apple has not been a strong player in the enterprise traditionally. Jason Hiner at TechRepublic recently wrote a great breakdown of what’s happened in this space, including that up to 96% of enterprise tablet activations were iPads last year.  But the tablet form factor is just the first wave of mobile, namely that of the fundamental platform shift. Social business efforts must make platform an equal citizen, and in many, if not most, cases go mobile first.  Oncoming rapidly however are technologies such as near-field communications or NFC, which will make location-context, payments, gamification, etc. much  easier, more physical, immediate, and tactile. In terms of social media, NFC is going to make check-ins on location-based social networks like FourSquare even simpler, enable single-gesture product comparisons in stores, and even make friending each other less of a hassle by simply tapping smart devices together.  2012 will likely be a breakout year, with an estimated 100 million devices getting NFC capabilities, including perhaps the iPhone 5. On the leading edge, immersive user experiences such as Google Goggles and WordLens are proving that sensor-based context and augmented reality can be functionally useful.  I’ll write more about this in more detail soon, but the spatial reality that can be represented within new mobile devices allows informational displays and visualizing of information, including our social media user experiences (best example: Localscope), that can dramatically improve how we consume and participate.  Apple’s Siri, and host of similar services on Android, are also making verbal user experience viable in a mainstream way for the first time. While I expect this to be mostly experimental in 2012, it has real potential and should be a research area in smart mobility for industries that can get significant lift from it, such as those with field personnel and frequent travelers. I also predict that voice will be an increasingly important way to capture participation in social business apps and environments in the near future.
• Big data. Big data made a correspondingly big splash in 2011.  Last year I provided a detailed breakdown of how this ‘new’ field will provide organizations with major advantages, particularly in terms of coping with the vast streams of information that social media are unleashing within, across, and outside our organizations. 2012 will be a year of learning and capability development for most organizations but the short list of technologies is clear: NoSQL, Hadoop (which just reached version 1.0 as a finished product and is one of the most influential big data tools), supervised and unsupervised machine learning such as Mahout , and insight engines, which are tools which will enable us to autonomously tease vital epiphanies from our mountains of digital knowledge. For social business, big data is leading directly to social business intelligence services which will enable organizations to spot trends, identify opportunities, and operationalize social media in general.
• Cloud. The cloud has always been standard fare for social media, given that the vast majority of the entire ecosystem runs on cloud services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and so on. Even many enterprise social networking offerings are cloud hosted or have cloud hosting options. Even so, organizations are just now starting to consider cloud strategically. Software-as-a-service is already here for many companies, but the next major step is public cloud, which means moving existing infrastructure out into the cloud environment instead of just using what’s already there. This is a big move for many companies, but cost and operational agility is going to start becoming something organizations can’t ignore any longer, even as governance, regulatory issues, and transparency of cloud providers remains a hot issue.  Want to guess what one of the top initial candidates for moving to public cloud are? That’s right: Enterprise 2.0 (aka internal social business) services, which are generally not perceived as core mission critical IT, and hence safer to move out to the cloud.
• Shifts in digital distribution. User experiences, mobile, social, and otherwise, are increasingly coming from a new place: App stores. In their most disruptive form, these are consumer app stores that workers use to acquire software that they then put enterprise data into, including social applications. The usage numbers are staggering and demonstrate how fast the shift to these new digital distribution channels has been: Apple and Google have likely crossed a cumulative 20 billion app downloads this month. I examined throughout 2011 how app stores are changing how users acquire IT and self-service, and it’s increasingly leading to enterprise app stores, which are defanged and less rich but safer versions of consumer app stores.  2012 will be a year enterprises put them on their roadmap and kick the tires, and Jive’s new social app store will be closely watched as a barometer of how social business and app stores intersect. The trend to watch: Policy-based app selection instead of non-scalable hand-picking of app catalogs.
• The rise of the next Web. The trusty classical Web that has given rise to the social Web is undergoing some major changes of its own. HTML 5 is here and it almost makes the Web competitive with the current crop of proprietary mobile platforms (read: iOS, Android, Blackberry OS) by adding much of what is missing from the browser (and not native mobile apps) such as location, local storage, video and audio streaming, high-capability touch user experience, and more.  Those building or acquiring social applications will generally have to deliver them in HTML5 going forward to reach the widest number of users with the richest form of functionality. The Internet of Things will also become more real in 2012 as businesses increasingly Internet-enable their products and users actually desire this.  The new and immediately sold-out Nest thermostat from iPod fathers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers shows how this trend is becoming consumer-ready, and it will also enable all our Internet things to be social.  Businesses will increasingly look at making their products Internet-addressable and socially connected, such as with Toyota’s Friend social network for their vehicles.  More tactically, social gestures such as Liking, +1′ing, social sharing, and all the other flavors of being social will start appearing in just about every known traditional application, service, and product. This should include your own organization’s Web presence, intranet, and business applications. Less tactically, social standards were initially examined by the W3C in 2011, which Dachis Group helped support, and we should see some very interesting things emerge from this. However, the biggest social business impact is that there is a major shoe to drop when standards start crystallizing in terms of making our social platforms and service portfolio compatible (if indeed, they should be made so, depending on how things turn out.)

Of course, this is just a start on what organizations should be closely tracking for , but it’s a solid one I believe. I would love to hear you take on the emerging technologies that will have substantial social business impact, either from a planning or implementation point of view below.

Thus, with all this activity, it’s not surprising that it was at the beginning of this year that some estimates of the total investment in the social business industry exceeded $100 billion, an impressive figure for an industry that’s just about five years old. The big question for those now investing in and promoting social business approaches in their organization is, namely, what’s coming next? Are there any new major new insights that will reshape the field? The examples of hard won lessons of years past, such as the need for community management in most social business implementations or that social business should be connected to the flow of work, have been critical ones. What else have we learned?

It’s from this perspective of significant impact that we take a look below at what’s likely to happen in social business next year. If it’s not a major issue or a likely improvement on what’s taken place this year, I’ve generally not included it. In addition, I’ve only tried to include high probability trends and predictions so that those planning their social business strategies for next year can take them into account. If something is particularly speculative, it’s been highlighted in text.

Twelve Social Business Predictions for 2012

1. Social shifts to mobile. This prediction is obvious given the massive ramp-up of smart devices this year (in late 2010 they eclipsed PCs for the first time ever) yet it needs to be stated and is actually one of the biggest user experience (UX) shifts in social so far. Social business solutions lacking a capable mobile UX are going to underperform, especially in the second half of the year, in terms of adoption for end-users and sales for vendors. While vendors have been getting much better at providing quality native mobile clients, there is still lots of room for improvement, though this will largely happen in 2012. Less successful will be Enterprise 2.0 efforts that have performed extensive customization for their desktop intranet, who will have to do the equivalent updates for mobile devices such as the iPad and Android tablets.
2. Analytics and business intelligence (BI) becomes standard fare. Making sense of the endless flow of conversations, inside and outside of the organization requires smart, effective filters. It also needs a way to analyze the giant haystack to derive business significant insight. This has led to a flood of social analytics tools and vendors that has turned into a glut, just as sustained interest emerges. As I explored in my keynote presentation at Defrag last year, social analytics has emerged to cope with the quantity of information that is created in social media, and to extract value from it. This is one of the primary reasons we created the Social Business Index and why Salesforce acquired Radian6 this year in one of the largest social media acquisitions of 2011; getting to ROI means getting to the information that matters inside time windows that matter to make business decisions and guide strategic activity. Expect capable analytics and downstream business intelligence features to be added as central elements to virtually all social media tools. The most useful additions of social analytics and BI will also make the distinction between leaders and also-rans not only in terms of products but also as key activities in social business projects on the client-side.
3. Gamification doesn’t happen, yet. Adding game mechanics to social business through leaderboards, competition-driven activities, and via other game-based engagement mechanisms has a very bright future in my opinion. I was finally convinced of this when gamification was famously used to solve the highly stubborn protein folding problem for the AIDS virus earlier this year. In my estimate, 2012 will be an experimental year where early lessons learned are made and the right directions are teased out by the industry. Capable offerings either won’t be ready or mature enough for it to be significant in 2012; perhaps in 2013 but it will happen. In the meantime, social business efforts can certainly experiment where it makes sense but can otherwise focus on other items in this list in my opinion.
4. Social intranets struggle forward, social business processes don’t. Those overhauling their intranets to make them more social have had a long, hard time of it. To be clear, this is not because social intranets aren’t useful, but coordinating (and sometimes fighting) the IT department, corporate communications, HR, and often competing vendor camps inside the company means that many firms aren’t as far along as they should be. SharePoint has often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in particular. Industry regulation, privacy laws, and other issues for many firms have made internal social media difficult to adopt widely. Combined together, the drag has been surprisingly high for Enterprise 2.0. That said, Toby Ward has reported the highest penetration of social features on corporate intranets yet, with 61% of all companies reporting at least one social media tool in place this year. This has led to an increasing attention on a subject that adds a new dimension to the discussion: Integrating social media more directly into business processes. This discussion was sparked by Laurie Buczek this year and was discussed widely by the Enterprise 2.0 community, with a growing consensus that while general purpose, open-ended social media was the right direction (and is vital for emergent outcomes), a more direct route to value capture is also needed. It’s now increasingly believed that high impact results will come most directly from integrating social business into daily work processes on the ground. Expect much more practitioner focus on this in 2012. For more details, read my latest round-ups of where we are with Enterprise 2.0 here and here.
5. Smaller social business vendors continue to get rolled up. It was a year of acquisitions in 2011, including Radian6, Rypple, Leverage, and many others. After years of building up customers in a growing space, the success stories have started to emerge. Expect that, to the extent that technology alignment and functional overlap can be addressed, 2012 will be an even bigger year for acquisitions as Salesforce, IBM, and SAP, and perhaps Microsoft, go on a spending spree to snap up the first few generations of winners in various social business verticals. This will make a fair number of their customers unhappy, as the desire to escape the stranglehold of the big enterprise vendors was no small part of the attraction of going with the startups in the first place. This will make some room for a next generation of more sophisticated social business startups. It may also slow innovation from the acquired companies as they get absorbed into the software giants that will likely push a round of customer defections as the top end of social business market both heats up and speeds up. This will keep the market interesting while retaining choice, though longer term, consolidation is inevitable.
6. The social business unit/center of excellence phenomenon continues. Last year I wrote about the emergence of an organizational structure we called the Social Business Unit. In most large organizations, a social media committee is created out of a group of interested stakeholders (typically IT, corporate communication, HR, legal, and some business users), they sooner or later realize they don’t have expertise in social media and end up creating a dedicated team, a center of excellence, or other central group to manage the move to social media. I now see this happening to the extent this year that it’s fairly standard but, next year, expect it to become a top objective and a virtual requirement as companies realize their are moving too slowly to adopt social media across their lines of business. The move to a real social media function will drive up social media budgets but will get organizations the maturity they need and sort out the experimental social media ‘pandemonium’ that is often common in large companies (and usually a good thing if managed well by the SBU.)
7. Internal and external social business efforts blur, but remain distinct. Ever since the term social business was coined, it was quickly realized that there is a really single continuum across internal and external usage. While companies often maintained separate efforts for internal and external engagement, it became obvious that they were surprisingly identical in terms of features and function except for the audiences they were engaging. With the advent of more and more social business platforms and tools that can keep information safe in blended social business environments, the blur has now started to happen. In 2011 it was still not that common however, and most efforts remain separate. That will change in 2012, but real blur appears on track for a 2013 mainstream appearance in my estimate.
8. Customer-facing social “hockey sticks”. While marketplace-facing social has had a terrific run-up for businesses over the last few years, customer-specific social solutions — such as with CRM — only started experiencing major growth this year, and is expected to be a $1 billion industry by next year. 2012 will be the year of the social customer in strategic terms.
9. Community management goes pro. It didn’t take long for the social world to conclude that communities work best with designated leaders guiding them, supporting them, and dealing with the thousands of tiny tasks that are essential for any large group of people to function well together. But business users have been slower to get on board with community management, even as we see that Enterprise 2.0 efforts with community management capabilities regularly report that it was a critical success factor. In 2012, community management will get the respect it deserves on the enterprise-side and become a first class citizen as a strategic social business capability. I also expect that training and certification for this vital function will also mature significantly.
10. Social business budgets go up another level. This year’s average social business budget, while somewhat larger than last years, will climb up another significant notch as social business become more prevalent across the the organization. As more dedicated staff are required and the social business unit becomes more common, expect a respectable increase, on the order of 50% or more in the average social business budget, especially if the economy starts to mend. Many organizations have held off spending on even important new projects because of the economic climate. Thus a growing turnaround will likely accelerate social business investment.
11. The year will close with a consensus (or lack thereof) on enterprise social apps. I’ve been tracking the promise of embedding of social applications into enterprise social networks, so that our business systems are embedded in collaborative context. I’m not alone in thinking this is a vitally important way to connect our systems of record with the informal, unstructured work activity that dominates the work today. Jive is a leader here with its social app store, but all the big vendors support social apps except for Microsoft. With the development over the summer of the next version of OpenSocial, it has reached the point that it will be capable enough to meet enterprise demands for features and flexibility. Given that the latest version of Jive put social apps front and center in many large companies, we’ll likely find out by the end of 2012 if this is a primary way that workers will integrate their core business activities with social networking.
12. Social business becomes less art, and more science. This prediction was also on Angela Houseman’s 2012 prediction list, but it’s one that I’m very much seeing as well. The early days of social media attracted highly creative types that sometimes thrived on lack of structure and analysis. Today, even social business, particularly in the marketing arena, requires serious number crunching, quantitative analysis, and the ability to derive insights from the resulting business intelligence. While creativity is perhaps more valued now than ever, the analytic and scientific approach is moving into the fore as well from tools and frameworks to services and methodologies.

This is a lot of issues for social business practitioners to keep track of and activate on, but that’s always the case with fast moving new industries. Social business has made major strides this year and I anticipate that 2012 will be a truly breakout year, across the board, for organizations that are prepared to plan and invest. However, no list of predictions could possibly be complete and I’d be very interested in hearing your predictions in comments below.

Most of us have either witnessed this or have read it the press. We see this change all around us in the highly innovative new mobile devices and their ecosystems upending the world of personal computing. For its part, the cloud is rapidly becoming the way we deliver and receive virtually every meaningful service today, from music, TV, applications, news, phone calls, social media, etc. Even our data centers are beginning to move out of our organizations. This year I hear story after story from large company CIOs partially — or even in some cases almost completely, moving their IT outside the firewall, something almost unthinkable even a year or two ago. If these changes were all that was happening it would be a major challenge for any organization.

Compounding the mobile and cloud story is the consumerization of information technology — another one of the major drivers of change today — and something I’m calling CoIT for short. The world of CoIT is moving and innovating far faster than the business technology world. Along the way, it’s been making highly sophisticated and powerful technologies extremely easy to obtain and use, while also dramatically changing the buy side economics of technology with advances such as app stores and software as a service. Right behind this is the big data movement, which is making sense of and creating real value out of the deepening streams of information pouring forth from our applications, devices, and connected social ecosystems. While big data is the least developed of these changes, all of these represent major global trends.

Taking all these together, we have a closely grouped set of serial disruptions of the technology world and associated business landscape that are happening almost at the same time. As a number of my readers have pointed out, these trends are also intertwined and co-related. However, it is the social media revolution that may go down as the biggest revolution of all of these, and as applied to our organizations, is often called social business. Transformative social technologies in the form of public social networks like Facebook and Twitter, or the rapidly emerging platforms of Social CRM (soon to be a $1 billion new industry), and the steady proliferation of social collaboration in the enterprise, are all just data points of a larger social megatrend.

Social media is leading to, just like the Cluetrain Manifesto predicted, fundamentally better, highly open, community-based, and effective new ways to structure what we formerly called our products and services. As we’ll see in the examples below, the best and most innovative new businesses are more and more often comprised primarily out the participation of their customers and partners.

The lesson of our era is this: Collectively, the marketplace and our customers far exceed our own capacity and creativity as businesses. The future lies in tapping directly into this fact.

In this way, our new product development, marketing, sales, support, and operating processes are becoming carefully calibrated and tuned architectures of participation. The magic is in design of these and how we connect them to our business ecosystems. Thus, it’s social architectures and the way we construct them into useful and highly valuable (and profitable) new partnerships with the marketplace that will ultimately define the success of organizations going forward.

High-Impact Social Business Stories

I should emphasize that this is no longer theory. We can now perceive how this is happening and there are increasingly powerful and compelling examples of social business transformation. Just a few of the new stories I am tracking currently are:

• Bloomberg. Using social business intelligence techniques, Bloomberg has begun offering traders real-time sentiment indicator for stocks heavily influenced by consumer opinion. The details of the story is fascinating in that it mixes a highly regulated industry with social media, a real challenge for many organizations that are public or otherwise constrained by legal and policy frameworks. Interestingly, they’ve been finding that social media sentiment is a surprisingly accurate predictor of the markets. As with our Social Business Index, real-time engagement and measuring of the marketplace with a feedback loop to valuable business outcomes is a particularly effective technique.
• Intuit. One of the more impressive Social CRM stories, Intuit has been crowdsourcing customer support with Live Community. They’ve been driving down costs while scaling up support around fixed yearly tax deadlines to meet millions of requests for support in a satisfactory time window. They’ve achieved this by primarily partnering with their customers to spread out the support load. See Morgan Floyd’s great case study of Live Community on Slideshare. By co-creating support responses with their customers and building a highly effective social architecture around customer care, Intuit is showing the art of the possible in a high impact way in this aspect of social business.
• Siemens. Launching the “Changing Your City for the Better” competition, open to anyone who wants to submit captivating short films that demonstrate how technological innovations can transform urban life and improve the world. With a $40,000 prize, the competition just closed with 121 major contributions, none produced at any cost to the company, yet containing a rich tapestry of useful innovation and creativity far beyond what any relationship with any single research firm could provide. Siemens can use this partnership with the community to directly drive forward the company’s vision as well as have a more positive impact on their customer communities around the world.
• uTest The community you cultivate around your organization will help you think of ideas, design them, build them, and even test them. uTest is a carefully built community of testers that’s 45,000 strong. They claim they are the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services. They can mobilize a small army to connect to your business using customer social channels to rapidly improve testing throughput and delivery times. The service is finally getting the recognition is deserves and just won the Stevie Awards’ top honor as “Most Innovative Small Company of the Year” at the 9th Annual American Business Awards.
• MIT Climate Co-Lab. The Climate Co-Lab is an open community project to construct an effective consensus on how best to address climate change in the international community. It is almost certainly the most far-reaching and ambitious effort yet to crowd-source global challenges. But crowdsourcing is not that interesting if it’s just an idea gathering exercise; connecting it to outcomes is where it matters. MIT actually models the top contributed ideas using advanced software. Says MIT, “Open modeling, or simulation modeling, projects the likely impact of actions proposed to address climate change in the CoLab. The system makes use of the many existing models of the physical and human systems that effect climate. The CoLab will also pioneer a new approach for extending and developing these models, radically open modeling.“

As I said, these are but a handful example out of dozens of similar new stories and case studies I’m tracking and it’s hard to keep up (for instance, I just added the excellent new example from Lowe’s that Susan Scrupski just posted.) Social business, because it’s inversion of the engagement process, is going to be one of the most transformative to our organizations. But it’s intertwined with mobile, cloud, and the others in meaningful ways. I explored all of these disruptive shifts in detail on ZDNet this week, making the case for how they are either well on the way, or will be soon. Finding our path through these shifts is going to be the signature challenge of the 21st century. But it’s also where the opportunity lies.

However, in reality these relatively minor tweaks are just the proverbial paving of the cowpath through the addition of limited social features such as collaborative sharing, persistent chat, and perhaps some deeper integration with activity streams. Unfortunately, these actions easily fail the imagination test, which is essentially this:

If you could completely rethink your work in a social business world, what would it look like? How would it be better?

To me, this is the fundamental question that organizations must be asking themselves today. Yet, I also think they should do this while going about the aforementioned incremental improvements such as adding basic social layers to their IT landscape. One reason is that this will happen inevitably as more and more enterprise applications and platforms add social computing features and companies proceed along that vendor’s upgrade path. So, while social impinging around the edges of enterprise applications is worth dealing with from a strategic perspective, it’s going to happen largely whether organizations plan for it or not. As such, it’s not likely to make a huge competitive or qualitative difference in the way most businesses perform. That is, unless they start the process of deliberate and strategic social business transformation, such as what IBM and a few other large organizations have begun.

This process of social business transformation will require both advances in social technology — such as the innovations below — as well as changes to the way we do business. Fortunately, one of the great attributes of the larger social business community is that it generally focuses as much on the business and cultural changes as it does the enabling technology. Some of the best discussions I’ve seen on the people aspect of the transition to the social enterprise are from folks like Luis Suarez, Sameer Patel, Stowe Boyd, and JP Rangaswami, who are just part of a much larger conversation about how we remake our organizations for the 21st century.

So, while there are certainly some companies not tracking the sea changes in the world right now in terms of the way we are globally transforming the way we live and work, we’re also continuing to see fascinating next-generation innovations in social business. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Rethinking Workflow, Manufacturing, and Money in Social Business Terms

In just the last week I’ve encountered several fascinating offshoots of the mainstream social business thread. Social business frequently focuses either on social engagement externally or internally on collaboration and social interaction between workers. This is a limiting view, but it’s also where most of the activity and uptake is today. However, as more and more business leaders and entrepreneurs become digital natives, I’ve theorized that the power laws and principles of social business will encourage them to rethink their traditional modes of business. At the same time, Web startups and large software vendors often put themselves out 2-3 years ahead of the market by predicting where their customers will arrive once current trends reach a mainstream tipping point. Then they adjust their product roadmaps to align with this schedule. The combination of these two trends is starting to give us some interesting new possibilities.

I say possibilities, because unlike social collaboration or Social CRM, the outlook and growth potential for these innovation is still unknown. However, it does give us a sense of what’s coming next in social business.

Social BPM

Last week while I was speaking at Sibos, I had the pleasure of speaking on the phone with Sandra Moran from OpenText Metastorm, a leading workflow/BPM product that recently announced the addition of social computing features to its capabilities. Metastorm now enables workers to engage in real collaborative process design, takes advantage of social profiles to locate needed expertise to plug workers into processes in essentially real-time, and has matching dashboards to provide BPM and social analytics. OpenText had this to say about the new social capabilities, which Sandra told me is now available to over a thousand major customers as a standard part of the Metastorm suite:

These new product enhancements help organizations successfully implement business process improvement initiatives by empowering users to become more engaged and productive. Metastorm’s social collaboration tools provide businesses with a highly personalized workspace and unparalleled access to top contributors, enabling them to drive innovation and increase collaboration and improve efficiency among employees. These tools help employees find other people within their organization with specific skill sets required to help them complete their work. Companies can also route work to the most appropriate employee based on individual skills and workload – ensuring the most cost-effective strategy for work allocation.

I think this is significant for a few reasons. For one, I find that there’s often not enough focus in social tools in collapsing the walls between business processes and social conversations. They often run in parallel, side-by-side, even when they are being used simultaneously for the same piece of work. Putting social in the flow of work in highly process-intensive environments should lead to some interesting outcomes. I pressed Sandra on if there was leverage in Metastorm of existing social graphs and networks, and she indicated there was. What remains to be seen is how easy it will be to integrate the resulting BPM environment with an enterprise’s other social business efforts.

I’ll be exploring the social features of Metastorm in more detail soon on ZDNet, but I think the combination of social computing and BPM has genuine potential. This isn’t the first time social and workflow have been connected but I think it’ll be impactful given their large customer base and how central and useful the features are to the product. I’m hoping to revisit how their customers are faring in a year or so to see what the result has been. I currently believe social BPM technology, combined with the right business and cultural changes, will help companies attain a higher than average level of social business transformation.

Social On The Shop Floor

Earlier this month Derek Singleton over at the Software Advice blog wrote about social manufacturing, what you could call a new subfield of social business that’s focused on improving how companies turn raw materials into finished goods. Discussing Kenandy’s new announcement for improving the efficiency and productivity of supply chain manufacturing, Derek wrote:

Creating accessible and actionable inter-shop floor communication can only work if an entire supply chain and other manufacturers are members of, and logged into, Chatter. In short, it requires organizational change for effective use. While manufacturers using Kenandy wait for that changeover, Chatter can be a useful tool for project management.

For instance, the engineer of an aerospace job shop could notify shop labor that they’ve just finished designing the wing component of an aircraft. The job shop could then begin building the wing while the engineer finishes designing the other components they’ve been contracted to build. This has great implications for just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing – as it frees up labor to work on more value-added activities rather than waiting for the completion of another phase of the production.

In my workshops at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in years past, I’ve had manufacturers and assembly line managers come up to me to say that social tools have been moving into their area of the business, but it’s mostly been horizontal tools or very focused niche solutions. We’re now seeing broader and more strategic use of social tools with the arrival of solutions such as the Kenandy social manufacturing platform, which has garnered attention in the New York Times. I’ll be exploring this further in coming months to see whether social manufacturing leads to tactical or substantive social business transformation.

The Rise of Social Currency

Finally, at Sibos itself last week, I participated in Innotribe, a social media event inside the main financial services conference that explored various aspects of social media in financial services. For a more in-depth look, I wrote up a detailed exploration of the event on ZDNet on Friday. One of the more interesting and visionary topics at the conference was the subject of social currency, the transformation of the very concept of money in social world where reputation, trust, and openness are prized much more than information control, the latter which is how the financial industry is mostly structured to leverage for gain today.

As an experiment, a social currency called Reputone was actually in use at Innotribe, see picture right. In fact, peer-to-peer monetary systems such as Bitcoin were a hot topic at Innotribe and for good reason, it represents a major shift of control in how banking, money transfer, and investment will work in the future. If Paypal was the first generation of digital money, then Bitcoin is the Web 2.0 version. From their Web site:

Bitcoin is a new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network.

Mark Shead recently provided a good overview to Bitcoin concepts and is worth taking a look at. In the final analysis, Bitcoin falls a bit short of being a true social currency, in that it doesn’t have an explicit capital mechanism based on social graphs or other means that leverages the intrinsic worth of social status and reputation. That doesn’t mean it should be watched closely as money and social reputation appear ready to get deeply intertwined and Bitcoin is at the leading edge of digital currency at the moment. This is a subject that warrants a lot more exploration as companies such as Facebook look at making their global platforms far more relevant from an economic perspective. For additional insight, David Armano posted some useful insights on social currency recently on his Harvard Business blog.

I’ll be exploring all of these concepts in more detail in coming months as social business continues to evolve. I would love your questions and feedback on this emerging social business topics below.

Note: This blog entry was cross-posted from On Web Strategy.

A few weeks ago I took a look at useful and proven techniques for the the early adoption phase of social business, which is often the trickiest and most fraught with challenges. But there’s another important aspect of social media that’s often neglected, overly legalized, and treated as a static formality through which to guide social media use in safe and constructive directions (again primarily to deal with risk and associated worries.) I’m talking about the often-discussed but all-to-frequently under appreciated social media policy.

Social media policy is usually not perceived as an exciting topic, yet at this stage of the industry nothing could be further from the truth. It should now be considered a primary enabler as enterprises develop — or update — their social business strategies. Because of this perception, one of the more powerful and transformative tools in the social business arsenal will be left to languish unmodernized by many, making the organization do too much work, assume too much downside, and ignore important upsides.

The good news is that from my experience, most social media policies have evolved into largely common sense listings of how to protect yourself, your co-workers, the company, and your customers from potential missteps in a very public forum. In that most workers can now read and generally understand their company’s social media policy (at least once, hopefully) it serves its purpose. But an infrequently revised and non-operational social media policy means that 1) most of the potential value that it could provide fails to be seized and 2) it misses a major opportunity to become a place to communicate, realize strategic vision, and enable on-the-ground change across the company in a surprisingly concrete way.

The essential point here is that the manner in which companies go about connecting their employees to the channels of social media does very much matter in the end. Creating an environment that makes it easy for workers to succeed is one of the most important first steps. In this, a more up-to-date and modern conception of social media policy and associated governance is needed. It must be adaptive, dynamic, and living. It must also have a closed feedback loop with the rapidly changing and evolving environment it purports to govern.

The industry has recently begun seeing the necessary trappings from enterprise social software vendors to enable a new vision for social media enablement, one driven by policy, yet leaves participants free to act as they need, knowing they’ll be quite safe in the boundaries that have been prescribed. When it comes to the strategies that drive social business performance, we find that social media works best when its users are set free to create the collaborative patterns, structures, and processes they need to work together, inside, outside, or between companies. When they have a safety net that ensures they can act with confidence, the results will correspondingly improve. And when corporate governance teams and senior leaders realize that a safety net is operational around the clock and around the globe and that it accurately represents their concerns, they have their own level of confidence to begin driving forward social business objectives, knowing that in these fairly uncertain times, their imagined downsides are at bay.

What does a modern social business policy look like, one that enables this scenario? It should contain the following three ongoing processes:

Define

The modern social media policy should be contained in a blog post, wiki page, or some other social artifact so it can be revised quickly and easily, as well as commented on and discussed. It should be updated no less than once a month and preferably after every significant lesson learned.

It should contain the code of conduct, key laws and regulations that must be followed for that industry and company, as well as relevant IT policy and associated issues. It should also contain good examples of best practices that helps spark workflow improvements and local innovations to business processes. This latter piece is a major opportunity missed in my opinion and requires little additional effort. The policy should also represent the latest best practices being captured within the organization, giving examples of key elements of the policy. In fact, tying useful techniques to policy ensure that the additional context makes it more relevant as well as making it much more useful and interesting to most line workers, increasingly absorption.

Communicate

The social media policy should be communicated via training, clearly articulated goals and incentives (real-life examples of which I’ll explore as soon as possible), and executive outreach including leading through example. Communication of the policy should be conducted during new employee on boarding, for contractors, and for existing employees, ideally using lightweight education technologies that makes it simple to review. In fact, since the policy will change often, the lightest weight forms of content should be used since it will be updated frequently.

Verify

When it comes to social media, the best way to reduce concerns about risk and liability while simultaneously ensuring safety and widespread participation is to trust, but verify. The latest social media compliance tools can be used to literally embody the social media policy as a real, participatory actor in the system, creating secure narrative logs for regulators and internal audit, while monitoring conversations, detecting policy violations quickly, and interceding automatically if necessary. This is where exciting new fields of social analytics and business intelligence come into play as a key element of monitoring, detection, and reporting. I’ll be exploring the latest of these capabilities soon to see what their strengths and weaknesses are, but it’s currently ushering in a major new way to connect policy, corporate governance, while lifting the shackles from social media so it can get real work done while practically dealing with the realities of a highly dynamic and freeform new medium.

Thus, taking all three of these processes into account, the best way to connect employees to social media is to create an environment where their actions are not only going to be checked with business guidelines at a distance, but literally made safe yet productive at all times. While this is a newer conception of policy, as a living, breathing agent in the ecosystem, it’s one that is now within reach for most firms to ensure the openness and transparency of social media give us the results we’re looking for, day in and day out.

Social business is rapidly evolving and the possibilities of enabling social media in a policy driven way that lowers concerns while tapping into what makes it special is key. I’d love to hear your stories about how your organization is dealing with policy.

Reactions to the SBI

First, let’s go through the most significant and insightful pieces in the media to tease out what the SBI is and what it can do.

One of the best summaries was by Robin Wauters of Techcrunch, who wrote:

In essence, the information service aims to provide some insights into how ‘social’ companies are, and how they stack up against similar corporations in their respective industries and their competitors, and provide some ‘social business’ benchmarks by company, subsidiary, geography, department and brand.

If Klout and PeerIndex are about trying to measure the ‘socialness’ and influence of people and rank them, Dachis Group basically wants to do the same for corporations, in real time.

It’s a good distillation of the key points, that the SBI normalizes social activities so that it can actually be measured between companies, and that it provides different key dimensions to slice and dice comparisons. It’s also updated in near real-time, which distinguishes it from virtually all of the other social business rankings.

Over at The Next Web, Courtney Boyd Myers noted the breadth and depth of the SBI’s tracking over 100 million social media accounts:

The Dachis Group says its SBI is derived from company, employee, partner/vendor, customer, engaged market and influencer data, and it is sourced from scraping sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikis, YouTube, forums, and blogs as well as data buys, data partnerships, company contributions, and its own internal data team. It had over 100 of the world’s largest companies participating in its early access program to help cement the data and gain insights as to how the data is used.

In this way, as companies change the way they behave and in engage in these channels, and the world responds to it, the changes will be reflected in the score and other metrics that the SBI lists publicly. The SBI provides a long-awaited continuous feedback loop with social media that can be used to dramatically and quickly transform the way companies engage with the marketplace by giving them a normalized benchmark — along key performance indictators (KPIs) — to respond to.

It was Arik Hesseldahl at All Things Digital, which got right to the heart of the matter, rhetorically asking “Which Company Is the Most Social? Check the Social Business Index“:

As so many companies have learned the hard way, it doesn’t take much for an unhappy customer to organize an army of similar-minded people on Twitter. The case that always comes to mind is when in 2008 mothers got mad at Motrin, giving Johnson and Johnson a headache.

Episodes like this put the onus on companies to be social, and some do it better than others. Today the Dachis Group, an outfit that helps companies get a handle on all things social media, launched its Social Business Index which ranks, in real time, the most socially-active companies.

But some of the best descriptions of the Social Business Index came from folks at the Dachis Group. All of them are worth reading and offer a unique perspective. While probably do not have time to go through all of them, as you use the SBI and want to understand it better, they can help. These posts include:

• Introducing the Public Launch of the Social Business Index by Dachis Group CTO Eric Huddleston
• Reading the conversation cloud by XPLANE | Dachis Group’s Dave Gray
• I, For One, Welcome our New Social Data Overlords by Social Business Council founder Susan Scrupski
• Social Business Index: Bringing the Left Brain into Social Business by Dachis Group Chief Strategy Officer Peter Kim
• Social Media Measurement: This time for realz by Dachis Group’s Kate Niederhoffer
• The Social Business Index is open by Headshift | Dachis Group’s Lee Bryant
• Performance Brand Marketing and Facebook by Stuzo | Dachis Group’s Gunter Pfau

You can also read my own take on the SBI on ZDNet, exploring how it delivers on the promise of big data to bring highly innovative and emerging new capabilities to the social business community.

Finally, I was also able to sit down and catch up with the two folks that have been instrumental in creating the Social Business Index itself. The SBI is the brainchild of Dachis Group CEO Jeff Dachis himself and I was able to sit down with him and talk about his vision behind the index. I also was able to talk with our CTO, Eric Huddleston, whose technical leadership with the SBI product team made the launch of the index possible.

Interview on the SBI with Jeff Dachis

Interview on the SBI with Erik Huddleston

We’ve also been asked quite a bit over the last few days about how the index works and what it’s made of. To address this, we’ve been contributing to an informative Google+ thread that’s been building all week. It’s good place for those that want more details on the inner workings of the SBI as well as some thoughts on future plans. Please give us feedback on our various social channels including comments below and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

We’re pleased at the very positive reception of the SBI so far and look forward to expanding it and improving it in the very near future!

That’s not to say that some organizations, either by inclination or through gifted leadership (or both), won’t naturally adopt social business methods. To them, the patterns, tools, and modes of participation are even easier ways of working than what they do today and there are relatively few obstacles. Those aren’t the companies that will ultimately have a dark night of the soul as they look at what their competitors are starting to accomplish and wonder how they can get there too. As the evidence mounts that socially engaged workforces, along with their trading partners and customers, result in more productive, efficient, and profitable enterprises, it will be — by definition — the organizations less likely to be able to make the transition that will have the most challenges and the longest path.

This was a key point made at Dreamforce, namely that there is a growing “social divide” between 1) our customers and workers, and 2) our organizations, the latter of which have been much slower to adopt social methods of engagement, both internally and to the world at large. Like Benioff, I’ve long predicted that the gap between how we’ve changed as a culture and society will become untenable with the relatively slow rate at which many of our businesses are adapting to these changes. Benioff has gone so far as to seriously suggest that there will be a “Corporate Spring”, analogous to what’s happened in the Middle East this year, that will change the status quo positively from companies to governments as aging and obsolete methods are cast aside by workers for better social ones.

Frankly, this loss of control is evident in many organizations when they do any kind of application audit these days: Workers are using the means that pose the least barrier for them in getting their work done. Social media is increasingly winning the growth game with shadow (unsanctioned) social tools for collaboration, for example. These are technology and behavioral shifts that just about every CIO is closely tracking at the moment.

But the transition to the social enterprise, as inevitable as some (including myself), think it will be, will not be as simple as buying the latest social software solution — no matter how good — and declaring victory. For starters, the process involves genuine cultural change even more than than it requires technology enablement. Then there is the sheer size and variability of the enterprise itself to contend with. The truth is that as compelling as comprehensive platform visions such as what Salesforce articulated last week are, the journey towards social enterprise involves conscious decisions to change organizational behavior, business strategy, and technology.

How Social Business Convergence Is Happening

Here is my premise: Just as the early rise of departmental use of social media in marketing, communication, and collaboration has escalated to more organized and sophisticated methods, I’ve noticed that there has started to be what I’ll call a convergence to social business. This is opposed to a “revolution” or a “transformation” though those will certainly happen in the large over time. Instead, based on what I’m seeing in the case studies, stories, research, news, and with clients are the following changes that — is a series of loosely connected yet closely related changes — gives us a portrait of how our organizations are most likely to evolve in these directions over time. The exact details may vary for you, but this is how organizations generally will make the transition to social business:

• Moving from some participant channels, then to all separately, and finally together. Right now most organizations are just developing their social engagement capabilities for B2C, B2B, E2E, and E2B. They will develop them separately for the most part, then learn the importance (and need) to cross-connect them strategically and then begin unifying the platforms, organization roles, resources, and processes so that there is consistency, reduced duplication, better governance, and higher business impact. The organizations that can do this in the fewest steps will be the winners and they will be aided by increasingly mature platforms from the largest vendors, though some companies will roll their own.
• Going social generally first, then connecting social activity to work processes. Those that have been following the extensive discussions recently in the social business community are becoming more aware of how important that social activities be integrated with high value work streams. If business applications for customer care, product development, operations, and so on are isolated from social tools, then by definition there will be limited impact. Most organizations will adopt general purpose social communities (internal and external both) and then begin the hard work of integrating them to line of business applications as well as producing new kinds of socially-enabled applications that didn’t exist before, such as social intranets, location-based apps, and much more. Lesson: Those that can put social to work with business apps via a more direct and meaningful route will generate substantially more business value than those that don’t.
• Starting at the departmental level and then creating enterprise-level social business capability. This is the story around the social business unit and CIO-level programs to provide the strong technical support. Unfortunately, cultural support for change will lag in many organizations that don’t have strong social business leaders at an executive level, as serious a hindrance as not having social business capabilities themselves.
• Top-down leadership and grassroots initiatives meet in the middle, then sort it out. Most organizations have blogs, wikis, social CMS and other social media lurking in the margins, some even that are quite successful. At the same time, many organization are indeed pushing out official efforts but ones that don’t necessarily have support and buy-in from workers. Very often, the issue is with different parts of the organization at approximately the same level will engage in internecine conflict until their approach, platform, or preeminence wins out. While this is what happens at first, slow in same cases, though more quickly for high functioning organizations, the issues get resolved and the various parts of the organization generally becomes “calibrated” in the same direction, resulting in a unified approach to social business in general.

It’s clear that social business can be an arduous and difficult road for some, but it’s also a profoundly rewarding one as organizations consciously update their digital strategies for the 21st century to reflect the realities of and changes in the modern world today. The good news is that we now know more than ever before what the broad outlines of the transition to being a social enterprise will look like. I think you’ll find that aids like the list above helps see the context and the eventual end point to aim for. There are also many other valuable lessons learned accumulating in places like the Social Business Council and the Community Roundtable. For now, smart and forward-thinking organizations will begin looking more holistically at how they are evolving and develop strategies to make the transition with the least disruption, fewest steps, aimed at the most constructive and valuable outcomes.

What else are you seeing in terms of convergence of social business activities in your organization?

Technology of any kind isn’t very useful to us unless it’s put to work. This is where one of the most interesting new parts of the social media landscape has been forming, namely in the new field of social business intelligence. This is the discipline of monitoring the whole of the social media world while continuously deriving insight from the aspects of it that matter to you, strategically or tactically, depending on your needs. I say aspects instead of conversations, because while analytics will give us useful metrics, it’s only until we apply the lens of business intelligence to the data itself can we clearly see the deeper and larger scale implications for our businesses.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of blur between social analytics and social business intelligence. They’re both relatively nascent fields that have plenty of overlap. So where social analytics is about the measurement and data mining of the social universe for any reason, social business intelligence is concerned with a more holistic process aimed at specific business outcomes, depicted conceptually in the visual below.

To be sure, there are many different flavors of social business intelligence just as there are many reasons why organizations will want to create business processes around the feedback loop that forms. Currently, many of the processes involved are manual and ad hoc as the industry has felt its way forward and learned how to engage more meaningfully with social media. A few companies on the leading edge have increasingly formal social business intelligence processes based on sets of capabilities they’ve acquired or built. Other firms have hardly any technology at all, other than perhaps some reports and spreadsheets.

They are all seeking the same thing however: To pinpoint the opportunities and identify the events that matter most to them so they can engage. The actual response to social business intelligence insights will vary entirely based on what is learned. It can be strategic and affect how the companies evolves its products and services or the way it engages in entirely new and innovative ways with customers. Or just as likely, it’s on-the-ground insight that drives individual interaction or collaboration with prospects, customers, business partners, and others whose current and past activities social media have been identified as important.

Developing your social business intelligence capability will be a journey that will have stages, like any other process of development. For most organizations, it’s just a set of experiments at the moment. But over time, with hard-won lessons learned, it will become more formal and institutionalized. Usually too soon, the question of centralization will come up, since it’s often one of the experiments in a particular corner of the organization or another that will have significant success. It almost certainly will be asked if it makes sense to share this best practice and locate it in the social business unit or other centralized social media management capability. For now, encouraging decentralized experimentation is more important than achieved the economies of scale, since local successes are rarely likely to meet the whole organization’s needs. What’s most important is making as many discoveries as possible about what works and what doesn’t.

Right now we are tracking a rapidly growing and expanding set of providers of social business intelligence. Products like Radian6, Kontagent, and SAS Social Media Analytics are just three examples out of many of social analytics tools that also provide some level of deeper social business intelligence features. Over the next few years, there will be numerous entrants into this space, as well as additions to existing social media services, as the industry as a whole learns the ways that companies can turn their social engagement with the world into real opportunity and value.

Often starting as a secondary requirement of early social media monitoring and listening efforts, for now, these are the leading drivers behind social business intelligence capabilities:

Drivers of Social Business Intelligence

• Marketing Optimization. Marketing has long been an early adopter of social media, and it’s no different with social business intelligence. Now instead of reports and dashboards that merely show the what, marketers can find out the why. With social business intelligence, companies can craft much more detailed yet fully integrated qualitative pictures of the inbound funnel, identify why engagement strategies are working or not, and organize systematic, yet mass-customized responses in scale.
• Capturing Ideas and Unmet Needs. Going beyond the trend analysis of analytics allows the processing and isolation of the deeper implications of social media activity. Social business intelligence can capture innovation, new ideas from the marketplace, identify customer wants and desires, and identify the gaps in your organization’s services.
• Situational Awareness. Identifying and tracking the top trends, understanding when critical situations arise to protect customer experience or brand, and much more. Going well beyond low-level analytics, social business intelligence can help make sense of more data than any manual or raw analytic process ever could.
• Customer Care Opportunities. Fully empowering Social CRM, social business intelligence can augment the interaction with customers in social media by improving the triage, prioritization, and resolution process of customer care.
• Sentiment Analysis. While social analytics can provide some basic insight into a customer’s state of mind, only more sophisticated methods can semantically process and assess the actual meaning of the social media conversations involving your company or its products in order to derive actionable insight.

As I pointed out recently, the focus of your social business intelligence efforts will be rooted deeply in business-specific motivations, thus these are just a small sample of the ways organizations will employ the capability. To give you a better sense of the possibilities I will explore specific examples of companies employing the strategies above successfully in upcoming posts.

What does all this mean for you now? In my opinion, it’s virtually certain at this point that social business intelligence will become a vital component of the way that companies derive bottom-line benefits from social media including revenue growth, innovation, cost reduction, and more successful line-of-business operations. So connect to the world, start your experiments, and start learning how to make it work for you.

One of the biggest challenges these efforts face, whether they are internal or external, is that engagement via social media is generally perceived as a voluntary activity. As in, workers can collaborate and customers can choose to interact with a business through older channels that are often more familiar and better supported by the organization itself. Or they can engage through social channels. For people to choose the social path of engagement as the most suitable one, there need to be motivations and incentives that are aligned with that path.

As companies seek to ensure the highest level of success with their social business efforts, I am seeing that they want a proven, reliable way to drive adoption of their social business strategy, whether it’s an Enterprise 2.0 initiative, a social media marketing program, or Social CRM effort. But social media is not as deterministic and controllable as the channels that have come before it. It’s one of the reasons I say that adoption of social media can only be co-created. It is as much up to the those engaging to create value, sustain engagement, and build community as it is to those that sponsor them. You can’t own a community like you can buy software or a marketing campaign, social business is a two-way street like nothing quite like it. This makes adoption of social business a very different creature from the way businesses used to engage before.

Fortunately, after over half-a-decade of experience in scale, we can see the broad outlines of adoption, which have stages that are very different based on the state of maturity and overall rate of social business adoption in the organization. In other words, as much as we might like it, there is no “one size fits all” approach to it. Fortunately, we can organize around these different stages, which fall roughly into four parts given below. Specifically, these are:

Phases of Social Business Adoption

• Early adoption This is the most nascent and delicate state, where there is perhaps only a seed of community and there is no network effect yet or core membership that can help with the essential work of social business building. The goal is to validate the direction, tools, and social business design. This is often called the pilot phase.
• Critical mass adoption This is transforming a successful early adoption phase into broader uptake that is self-sustaining. I’ve previously observed that this critical mass is around 20% of workers, but has been verified as even less.
• Mainstream adoption There is usually a long pause between the first two waves of adoption and late adoption. Early adopters are often very early and the remainder are often represented by those who have challenges in engaging in a different way, for a variety of reasons. Specific steps must be taken to address these adoption issues.
• Sustainable adoption A successful social businesses contains communities of people, their business activities, and supporting tools. They will largely self-organize and grow on their own once you’re well into the critical mass phase and beyond. However, these communities can also decline over time without appropriate care and nurturing. Employees move on, customers decide to leave, your company changes direction. All of these affect the long term health of your communities, and so specific adoption strategies are required for as long as you have a thriving social business environment.

This post is part of a four part series on social business adoption that will explore each of these phases, with early adoption being examined here. For this effort, I’ve contacted over a dozen experienced social business practitioners, tapped into my research, and aggregated the results of numerous case studies. The outcome is what you see here and while it’s probably as definitive as you’ll find, it’s a necessarily limited view of a rapidly moving new field. Also, in the end, what drives adoption best is whatever actually works for your social business project, and what works best for your project often isn’t what’s in the check lists, no matter how good. Social isn’t as predictable or as deterministic as we might like, and that’s the challenge. Of course, it’s also a large part of the opportunity to drive innovative new outcomes you could never otherwise achieve or imagine. So while your mileage may vary somewhat, the adoption strategies presented here can be a very useful jump start of your social business journey.

Recognizing that that although social business is part of a single continuum across workers, business partners, customers, and the marketplace, that internal use of social business and external uses involve participants that have a very different relationships with the organization. Adoption strategies therefore vary the most between these two groups and so they are presented here separately, though there is often significant cross over, particularly in areas like community management and connecting social business activities to relevant business outcomes and bottom-line benefits.

Note that these adoption phases also take place during the journey of becoming a social business in the large and will be directly informed by that journey. Individual social business efforts, and their adoption strategies, should be loosely connected to what the entire organization is doing and “calibrate” to align themselves in the same direction.

Early Adoption Strategies – Internal Social Business (aka Enterprise 2.0)

While the blur between internal and external communities continues to increase, for now most efforts are still separate. Listed beow are the top adoption strategies for external social business efforts. Begin with these but experiment along the way and find the adoption patterns that are unique to your environment, culture, and constraints.

• Establish a clear purpose. Ill-defined and vague social business efforts end up with a similar outcome. As Susan Scrupski, who formed the active and highly engaged Social Business Council (disclaimer: this is a Dachis Group online community), conveyed when I asked her what the single most helpful action she took to foster adoption was this: “We established a clear purpose for the community, combined with fostering a sense of trust and a culture of sharing.” Clearly stated intents and objectives let participants self-select, join in, and find what they are looking for while contributing more of the same.
• Identify and engage adoption champions. Locate and identify unofficial leaders in your target community and get them involved and participating early. They will ultimately do the bulk of the work during the early adoption phase in drawing in participation using the social networks and good reputation.
• Help leadership set the tone. One of the biggest triggers for adoption is when leadership clearly communicates how they’d like workers to participate in social business. While setting a personal example through participation is best, all it takes is direct, regular, and public involvement by several well-respected executives.
• Communicate clear policies for usage (cans and cannots.) Social media policies have come a long way from the 7 page fine print of years gone by to simple and clear directives. Specifically, the lessons learned over the years have distilled to focus on explaining exactly what employees can and can’t do in the most understandable terms. Bonus points for providing effective suggestions on when they should use social business solutions.
• Test social UX usability with workers. Inexplicably, usability of a social business design is too often under-tested or performed as an afterthought despite it being one of the biggest drivers of early adoption. If you don’t have budget set aside for A/B testing (which is proving to be the very effective, though more expensive) and time in the schedule to fix the biggest usability barriers you discover, you will take an adoption hit.
• Use a consumer-style marketing campaign. How you communicate to workers and the tone you use will set stage for the way its perceived, and in the early days perception of everything. It must be credible but it must also be memorable and convey what’s new and provide motivation to join and try it. John Woodworth of 3M Lab Collaboration used this approach successfully: “Employees already have a preferred product. By using market segmentation and a value proposition for each ‘segment,’ we identified what they would need and how they wanted it delivered. A good customer doesn’t just try your product; they buy it often and endorse it. Focus the sales on finding the ‘good customers’ and the best markets.“.
• Strategic community management. Especially early on, the facility of community management is one of the only real assets you have to drive social business transformation and adoption. Rachel Happe, co-founder of the The Community Roundtable and a world authority on community management, notes that “community building is a critical element of social business success and typically organizations cannot get there by deploying social technologies alone. There are a variety of contextual factors that can increase or decrease the ease of building a community but there are also some common best practices“. I’ll note these best practices in this list.
• Connect to business purposes. This seems obvious stated this way, but many look at social business approaches as a horizontal or general purpose communications method more akin to e-mail to IM than a way to improve a specific business activity. Sometimes this is true of course, but the best results often seem to come from those that aimed their social business design at a specific business opportunity. As Lauri Buczek, social media strategist at Intel, recently noted in Mark Fidelman’s Sure Fire Ways To Become A Social Business, “First, identify the business objectives.” Ken Domen, an enterprise collaboration lead at a large enterprise, conveyed to me that finding a “killer app” that solves a particular business problem better than before is a strong adoption technique. For example, Ken finds that IM and calendaring apps, embedded contextually in his social environment, to be particularly effective.
• Proactively share the adoption process. Communities are built by their members, not companies alone. Time after time, as I see particularly effective examples of social business, I see that this is a core value. The more the process is open and members are encouraged and empowered to provide structure, rules of the road, and spread the word, the more ownership, involvement, and productive work results. Experimentation should be encouraged. A leading example is SAP’s million-plus member Community Network (case study) with their SAP Mentor program.

Early Adoption Strategies – External Social Business

As social business scales up and goes external, successful adoption has a new, though often complementary set of requirements. Some of the differences revolve around motivation in that external participants aren’t typically paid to work for the organization like internal participants and so usually have a very different set of reasons they are involved. Other issues that tend to be unique to external social business includes appealing to a much broader demographic and competing with similar communities elsewhere on the Internet.

• Identify and engage influencers. Enlisting those with strong reputations and contacts related to the purpose of your social business effort has long been understood as an effective adoption pattern. Engagement with influencers takes many forms and should be connected to adoption whenever possible early on.
• Use content as a participation seed. At first, there’s little in a new community to draw in initial participation. Rachel Happe says this is one of her top three adoption patterns: “Create a content calendar that provides members with something they value and creates opportunities for them to interact.” Obtaining seed content can be resource-intensive and can require more investment than expected if influencers are not well-engaged early. This should be sustained until at least the critical mass phase of adoption and usually beyond.
• Go to the audience, draw them in. Building a community on a far corner of the Internet makes it hard for new participants to find it. This is one of the reasons that Facebook pages have become so popular, by going directly to where a vast, already social and participative audience is. There are many approaches to this but it can greatly aid adoption when integrated properly.
• Personal engagement from key business stakeholders. Having the presence of company leaders and providing structured access to them by recognized members of the social business ecosystem provides the deep engagement that’s more likely to both increase participation and lead to useful outcomes. SAP’s Community Network does this proactively (see case study link above.)
• Reward the remarkable 1%. By now just about everyone is familiar with the 90-9-1 rule, where 90% are passive browsers, 9% contribute a little, and 1% account for a disproportionate amount of the value created. These are rough numbers for external social business participation. While the specific technographics continues to fluctuate a little as the market evolves, the key to driving adoption is ensuring that your most valuable contributors are incentivized appropriately to contribute, once you identify who they are. While timing and perceptions of conflict of interest can be issues, rewards typically run the gamut from simple recognition to more formal business relationships.
• Proactive community management. Community management continues to make my top list of what helps define a successful, vibrant social business. Rachel Happe includes this in her top three list as well, noting “allocating a full-time community manager that both encourages member activity and keeps the conversation on track.” The biggest misstep I see many social business efforts make is greatly under-resourcing this capability early on. SAP’s Gail Moody-Bird has observed that resources like this “are not a part time job for everyone.“
• Keep it simple. To be usable and effective for the broadest demographic, simplicity in joining, user experience, and conversation are essential to reduce abandonment and maximize the value being exchanged. This is Rachel Happe’s top adoption point as well, “keep the functional environment simple so new members quickly grasp how to participate.“
• Be authentic, don’t overproduce. Over the years, as I’ve collected best practices for online communities, I’ve noticed a common pattern. The fanciest and slickest social business experiences don’t necessarily achieve nearly the uptake as ones that are simple, basic, and straightforward. Though social media marketing aspects of social business can be an exception, excessive polish conveys a sense that too much lipstick is being put on. As John Hagel has talked about a trust paradox and social business, that being truly genuine and letting human realities be exposed is much more likely to sustain adoption and less likely to actively repel participants.
• Employ the “Us First, World Second” strategy. Time and again, when I’ve spoken to social business efforts, they explained how in the early days everyone was on deck in the organization and helped create the seed of participation. I’ve even heard it phrased that at first “it was 90% us and 10% them, and then later it was 90% them and 10% us.” Driving early adoption in this was is successful but unsustainable at a high level for long and must be timed right. “All hands on deck” may be problematic for your organization for various reasons but it’s a powerful tool for early adoption when it can be used.
• Build trust and a culture of sharing. This is one of Susan Scrupski’s adoption lessons and has been repeated by just about everyone I’ve spoke with over the years. It’s not just enough to build trust, the culture must be one where the free exchange of ideas is valued and encouraged, because that’s the observable value that drives innovation, better decisions, and more. Building that culture requires leading by example and rewarding contributors both.

Note that this list cannot be exhaustive and there are literally dozens of techniques large and small that one can attempt to drive adoption of social business. You should also never forget the fundamental cycle of listen, analyze, measure, and respond. However, these cover the more widely used and repeatable techniques that I’ve seen of the many social business efforts that I’ve examined over the years. I’ll be covered the remaining adoption phases in upcoming posts but welcome your feedback to improve and extend this list.