I tweeted recently that all of the details of planning an online community reminded me of planning a wedding. I submitted the tweet at the very moment I felt overwhelmed by the details of coordinating so many moving pieces weeks before launching the community. In this blog post, I share the lessons I have learned so far in community planning to avoid losing your cool over the details before launch.
One of our colleagues at Dachis Group, X-Plane Founder Dave Gray, recently co-authored and published an incredibly valuable collection of techniques for the use of games to help individuals collaborate and make decisions in a business setting. The book is called Gamestorming and a group of us here at Dachis Group North America though we would inaugurate our first Summer Reading session by reading it. We all got a lot out of it and thought we’d write up a few of our thoughts for any curious passers by.
The idea of becoming a truly social business isn’t as “blue sky” as it was a year ago – the market is starting to shift. More people are talking about the benefits of engaging with consumers and collaborating internally. We’ve even heard of corporate mandates from the C-suite: “Social is happening; get the company up to speed.”
While the goal of social business is to distribute social responsibility for scale, the edge of the organization is put at-risk if it doesn’t operate from a strong center. This post explains the importance of creating a cross-functional team that can act as a command center for governing and coordinating social business initiatives.
Yes, collaboration has risks. There. I said it.
As my colleague Kate Rush Sheehy pointed out recently, forming a company’s social business strategy and resources requires speed and scale — and for some organizations these two qualities don’t come naturally. Many employees fear the departmental silos they don’t understand. The complex processes that don’t always work. And the colleagues they don’t know — constantly concerned these people will object to their ideas, plans, or points of view. This sometimes irrational worry can frustrate employees, but inactivity typically persists within their organizations anyway. Some companies refuse to let these concerns constrain them, and are trying to do things a little differently.
What do we know from being in the business of buzz since the early days? Dachis Group Kate Niederhoffer, one of the earliest players in the online listening space, shares her thoughts in this SXSWi 2011 panel.
Sound familiar? The state of now for you is a game of whack-a-mole. You are looking for a future state of scalability for you, your team and your business. For a solution, read on…
Do you want to work with a group of creative, progressive, and talented social business professionals in a fast-paced but relaxed office in downtown Austin?
Do you have “Social DNA”?
Dachis Group is growing and we are hiring for numerous positions and want to meet the brightest Austin has to offer! Come have a drink [...]
To many in the social media world, today is the day of reckoning. Facebook has finally launched it’s own location based service, called Places to its 500 million users (the number is actually much less than that, since it’s initially only available to US based iPhone users). If you have an iPhone and you’re using the Facebook app, you can immediately start sharing your exact location with your friends by clicking the “Check In” button under the Places tab and finding (or adding) the nearest location (sidenote: Facebook says that Touch is also enabled, but I wasn’t able to use it on the latest versions of the default Android 2.2 browser, Opera, or Dolphin. I’m also hearing of iPhone users having initial problems). Your location will then be shared in your friends’ News Feeds, as well as with the “Place Page” of the location that you checked into.
The main office finally wants to activate social business programs – great. Now, are the front lines ready to follow through? This panel proposal for SXSWi 2011 will focus on getting the organization activated from top to bottom.