During the same week of learning this strength about myself, I discovered this strength in a total stranger. She works as a shift supervisor at Starbucks in Austin, Texas (where Dachis Group headquarters is based). Chances were greater that we would meet in-person during one of my 4pm coffee runs, but we met via Facebook first.

The notification arrived before I even realized my wallet was missing. I had made a Starbucks run with a colleague earlier that afternoon and in the chaos of sugar, cream and conversation, I left my wallet at the store. My wallet did not include any identification with a telephone number.  The Starbucks shift supervisor noticing the credit cards and cash (I had just recently visited the ATM), decided to immediately look me up and contact with me via Facebook. When I met her at the counter to retrieve my wallet she explained how she too had recently experienced the nightmare of losing her wallet. We connected.

I doubt that Starbucks trains employees to service in-store customers this way on Facebook, but it is evident that making a commitment to increase points of connections with customers is a big part of the company’s culture.  Facebook enabled the shift supervisor to contact me when she had no other means than the mailing address on my license. The shift supervisor could have kept the wallet until I connected the dots about what happened (which I could have, as it is also a strength) and returned to the store. Of course, that would most likely be proceeded by the anxious discovery that the wallet was missing at the moment I needed it and a frantic retracing of steps in my head of where I could I have left it. The shift supervisor saved me this emotional energy by making the extra effort to search for me on Facebook and send me a message immediately.

So what does this really have to do with customer service?  It has everything to do with me – the customer. I feel more connected to that particular Starbucks location and I feel safe shopping there. Although Starbucks coffee is available at the hotel where I typically stay in Austin, I made a mental note of wanting to give this Starbucks my business, even if it means walking an extra street block. Someone there cared about me and I will reciprocate.

While this story has nothing to do with innovative social CRM strategy, it has everything to do with how a social savvy shift supervisor connected the dots and leveraged Facebook to send a high impact signal to a customer. To the shift supervisor, it was a no-brainer.  While social technology can automate and innovate many processes, I still believe it is the human behind the technology that makes best-in-class customer service. To that end, connectedness is a quality I would recommend Starbucks preserving and nurturing at the front lines.

What are your thoughts? Do you believe connectedness is an important quality for customer service?

A few key elements of Social Business Design include a staffing model and a policy that integrates with your business. At a smaller company one person may be able to coordinate a successful social strategy; at larger and more complex organizations, there is a need to implement a model that not only gets the job done, but also allows for scale.

Creating a cross-functional team is a way to scale your strategy and create a strong foundation for a social media program. Each member of the team should bring relevant expertise to the table. Most people turn to the “usual suspects” when putting together a social team: Marketing, PR, and Customer Service. However, there are other job functions to be considered, such as:

• The Sales team as you incorporate Social CRM
• HR as you begin to craft corporate policies
• The IT and Information Security groups as you consider social platforms
• Consumer Insights as you develop your listening program
• Product Innovation/Development as you glean insights from listening
• The Legal/Compliance teams who can help avoid potential legal roadblocks

It doesn’t necessarily matter which group leads the team of social experts and enthusiasts so long as they are smart and knowledgeable; the key factor is that the people on the team be embedded across the organization. A cross-functional team would be responsible not only for creating resources to help the organization participate socially, but spreading them as well.  As a result, people from disparate areas of the business are meeting regularly, sharing ideas, and spreading those ideas across the organization. This could increase knowledge sharing and openness in a coordinated and intentional way. In addition to developing your outward-facing social media program, you would also set the stage for collaboration and emergent outcomes.

When it comes to your company’s social team, who will you include? What barriers do you want to break down?

While much of the discussion around sCRM correctly begins with a focus on customers, there’s an opportunity to use social tools to focus on consumers.  The distinction being that customers already pay your brand for a product, whereas consumers have yet to make a purchase.  Put simply, consumers make up your pool of prospects.

But not all consumers are your prospects.  So why do so many social media programs treat them as such?  Why is the focus for many still on building the highest aggregate number of fans or followers or viewers and then attempting to appeal to all of them with the same content?   You’ve probably been followed or friended at least once by a company you’ve never heard of, in a region you’ll never visit, in a category that you don’t shop in (this seafood restaurant in Georgia comes to mind for me).  How does that relationship benefit the brand beyond boosting an arbitrary number?

Social nurturing is that idea that at the very beginning of a social CRM program sits the strategy for attracting the right prospects to your brand – and then nurturing them into customers through targeted social communications.

Companies should start implementing a social nurturing program to segment their social networks, identify potential customers, and create a strategy for interacting with the most highly desirable members of their community.  In other words, they must actively seek out, engage with, and influence their actual prospects. Social nurturing can even help your efforts scale, since you’ll be focusing on a smaller – but more valuable – group of consumers.

Some simple ways that your brand can immediately start using social nurturing to increase the strength of your social networks:

• Actively spend more time interacting with consumers who have identified themselves as enthusiasts or influencers in your brands’ product category.  If you can only respond to a limited amount of comments, engage with the consumers who matter the most to you and who are most likely to actually convert to customers.
• Use your already segmented email lists to search for your consumers who are active on the same sites that you are – then seek them out and engage them.
• Balance the content on your social site based on who you want your followers to be, not necessarily on who they are right now.  If your product is geared towards 18-24 year old males, are you spending most of your time talking about topics that interest 18-24 year old males?
• Create an account that is geared towards specific consumers (i.e., regional, age group, etc) and invite them to join you there – similar to how Dell has approached Twitter.  Yes, your follower count will be lower, but ask yourself what’s more valuable:  1,000,000 people who “like” your brand, or 100,000 true fans in your target segment who are actually interested in your content?

If you still need convincing, just think about Old Spice’s much heralded recent social campaign. They chose who to interact with based on the potential value of their fans – influencers, celebrities, and those whose responses would gather the most attention.  Why should your day-to-day social campaigns be any different?

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Properly implementing social nurturing will take a coordinated effort between several departments and is dependent on committing resources to social media and social CRM for the long haul.  What is your company doing right now to make sure it is attracting, keeping, and nurturing the right – not more – consumers?

Two years ago, I joined Dachis Group as employee #1. This week, I start my third year with the company and it’s fun to glance back and see what we’ve accomplished. But it’s even more energizing to look ahead and see where we’re going.

Our strategy is hiding in plain sight. Companies have the world to gain by becoming social businesses and we help them get there. The hows and whys are summarized in the idea of social business design.

It’s clear to me that our continued success depends on several key factors, namely:

• Clients who desire to lead the way. We are working with leaders from world-class brands who are breaking new ground with their initiatives, from new organization structures and governance frameworks to global education programs and collaboration approaches.
• Consultants who are never satisfied. Our people are relentless when it comes to delivering results for our clients and for ourselves. And then we push each other to do more.
• Management with a big picture focus. It’s easy to get caught up in the short-term. Four acquisitions, over 100 professionals, multiple seven-figure contracts – you’d think we’d be pretty proud of ourselves. Actually, we are still only at the beginning of what we set out to accomplish and all of our senior managers are committed to a long-term vision.

It’s not easy to start a new company that espouses a new way of doing business. But as we’ve done so far, we will find a way or we will make one.

Interested in joining us? We’re looking for global clients who want to make a difference and professionals who want to help them.

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

- Abraham Maslow (the same Maslow who wrote about the hierarchy of needs)

Nobody minds receiving email when it is a customer placing an order for your services. Besides being good news it is actionable, auditable and appropriate communication addressed from one person to another.

When a client of ours recently did a tally of the emails in their inbox, they found that more than 90% of it was internal messages from their colleagues. While communication is appreciated and encouraged in this professional services firm, the deluge of email generated as a result is not seen as adding value. Information is shared in good faith and there is a probability that the knowledge is useful to the recipient, just not right at that moment and not mixed in with the feedback from customers.

Based on the volume of email traffic experienced (the CEO of the aforementioned firm counted 438 emails received over a three day weekend), I look at my inbox and wonder if I am unpopular with my colleagues. But the comparative trickle of email may be explained by our use of multiple modes of communication.

Depending on the velocity of communication we have a number of choices:

Fast-moving discussions are handled in an instant messaging application. This is a replacement for quick get-togethers when people are in different offices or the topic does not merit interrupting what a colleague is doing. Technically, the transcripts can be copied and stored somewhere else for posterity but most of the time it is the result of the interaction that is important and not the conversation itself.

Fleeting thoughts and questions find their way to our microblogging tool. Statements act as useful signals about what is going on and may attract comments from colleagues. Questions are asked and replied to, often with links to our knowledge platform or external sites.

Slow-moving, larger pieces of analysis are developed on our knowledge platform (which happens to be a wiki). Groups can work together to co-draft presentations or strategy papers, and pages can be tagged and linked together. Each project has its own area on the platform and we use it to store notes and prepare project deliverables. Working in this way has the useful side effect that work product is automatically shared (unless we need to react to information barriers) obviating the need for a specific “knowledge management” step in the work process.

We use email too, of course, but having a choice of channels means that email gets used a lot less. Often, an email will call attention to new developments on our knowledge platform and ask for input. What would otherwise be a flurry of email reply-to-all manifests itself as pages and updates on the wiki.

Some of our clients go even further in the effort to reduce overall email traffic and increase the relevance of what arrives in your inbox. We have helped redesign their awareness processes from internal email newsletters to subscription-style updates where the recipient has a choice of how to receive information, if at all.

Every email imposes a cost on the recipient in terms of filing. Reducing the list of recipients increases the risk that information is not communicated to people to whom it is relevant. When organisations rely on email alone it is difficult to strike a balance. Expanding the enterprise toolset to support signals and findability is a step towards improved cost and risk levels.

Applying Maslow’s insight to reflect the enterprise communication conundrum might result in something like:

“If all you have is email, everybody looks like a spammer.”

Is email volume a problem? Have you taken steps to reduce email or increase relevance of email? Are you measuring the drop in email volume as part of proving the benefits of the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 tools?

At first, none of these topics might seem mainstream to the lay businessperson. Nothing could be further from the truth and most of us are impacted by this every day. For years the rate of improvement in information technology in the business world has been falling farther and farther behind the rest of the world. Application backlogs and unmet needs are common, while the centralized nature of most IT departments makes it clear that only so much is possible, even as the rate of technological change grows. I want to be clear that the many hard-working people in the IT trenches are not at fault, it’s largely due to the archaic model for how we apply technology to business.

The real purpose of my talk was to examine how much we’ve learned about how we use modern network technologies today to achieve business objectives. As an industry, we recognized the importance of interconnected systems just over a decade ago and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was launched as a top-level business initiative in many organizations around the world. The goal was to systematically reap the benefits of easy interoperability between our business systems, turning our applications into reusable platforms, and drive innovation by fostering unintended consequences that create significant new business value. It largely didn’t happen for reasons that are much clearer now but weren’t then.

Pulling Together The Threads: Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, and SOA

While we were seeking the best way to realize SOA, and often having a very hard time of it, spending billions globally in the process, the Web sped ahead and began to discover many of the solutions to the challenges of opening and connecting our systems. This was true both technically and from a business perspective. Among many innovations, the Web went on to discover the power of Open APIs, which provided a successful model for large-scale SOA. The Web also became social and primarily user-generated, identifying powerful new models for driving both distribution and consumption that culminated in a global remaking of how we communicate. Along the way, it also became clear that social computing wasn’t just another communication paradigm, it was an entirely new way to think about how we relate to our business, data, and ourselves.

My premise is that the Web (and the full realization of it as a source of data, services, applications, and people being referred to as “the cloud”) has become our Global SOA. It’s the world’s most effective example of SOA with countless API providers, hundreds of millions of data creators (us), and an ecosystem of data that can be accessed and made sense of with tools such as search and analytics. This is in stark contrast to the enterprise today where, as I point out in my presentation, “Most of the vast repositories of data in enterprises is not accessible in any practical manner by most people“.

There is where Enterprise 2.0 comes in, with an emergent vision of a federated knowledge ecosystem that is fundamentally open and social (since that is the communication method we’ve essentially adopted globally today). Participation, openness, and self-service are some of the intrinsic elements of Enterprise 2.0 and why it’s a key part of the Social Business vision. It is now likely that social tools will ultimately be the dominant model for how we work together in the business world,  and they are deeply affected by both cloud computing and SOA. You can view my slides above in Slideshare for a more detailed walk-through of my thinking and opinions on this topic.

The key to changing a social media diet is creating structure. Structure comes in the form of a clearly defined charter for every social channel. The elements of a charter will vary, but items like channel purpose, tone, content schedule and measurement should be addressed at a minimum.

Photo by Emily Carlin

These charters in turn govern every communication occurring on the channel. If a message or activity doesn’t conform to the charter – then don’t do it. To some observers this is a kill-joy perspective, but let’s face facts here: even a brand’s lighthearted messaging should have a clearly stated internal purpose. Brands are not involved with social media by mistake or just for fun. Companies are in the medium to accomplish something and if they can’t define what that is, then things have gone awry somewhere.

The benefits of social charters emerge quickly. When someone from product marketing wants to promote the latest widget in a social channel it is easy to evaluate whether it is white or whole wheat: does it fit the charter of an existing channel? If not, does it merit creating a new one? Does the messaging simply need to be reworked? Does it belong in traditional media instead? Initiatives are quickly whittled down from nice-to-haves to must-haves.

In the end, a true social business eats right. So ask yourself: was your last post white bread or whole wheat?

The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order.  We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.

Social Business Design aside:  This conference room is what we commonly refer to as a silo.  A silo is anything (an organization, software…a conference room) that keeps information within its walls, making it hard for an outsider to discover what is going on behind them.  Tom and I were working alone, the rest of the company had no visibility into what we were doing.

Five minutes in to our brainstorm we were interrupted by a much more responsible group of colleagues who actually reserved the conference room for a meeting.  We packed up our stuff, white board included, and as there were no other conference rooms available, made camp in the hallway.  It’s important to note that this is really the only hallway that exists in our open floor plan office, so by default it is the highest trafficked hallway we have.

Social Business Design aside: A hallway is very much like a dynamic signal, a ‘dynamic information flow produced by constituents.’ As Tom and I were working in the hallway we were being passed by other employees with different experiences, expertise, points-of-view and tacit knowledge. Our activities were now visible to the rest of the company.

In the hallway we were being passed by colleagues.  They could see what we were working on and chose to either keep walking or stop and engage us.  We experienced both.  Within ten minutes, Tom and I found oursleves in a conversation with two colleagues each knowledgeable and experienced on the work we were doing.  Over the next 30 minutes we discussed our current situation, the vision and goals for the project, recent trends and developments and lessons learned from having ‘been there and done that.’  Afterwards, Tom and I literally went back to the drawing board to incorporate what we had just learned.

Social Business Design aside:  I mentioned that colleagues in the hallway would either keep on walking or stop to talk to us.  This is an example of a metafilter, ‘what’s important to one person may be meaningless to another.’   Those who wanted to participate could, those who had other interests could keep on going.  By being in the hallway (the dynamic signal) we were making ourselves visible to the rest of the company so they could decide to participate or not.

It’s impossible to compare the Dave & Tom-only project to the Dave & Tom + Colleague Feedback project (because the former will never happen) but everyone involved felt much better about latter: more input, more experience, more tacit knowledge.  We had engaged in communication and collaboration that resulted in a much more holistic approach to our work.  Our path forward became more clear, informed and actionable.

You might not have the collaboration luxury of working in the same office as the rest of your company, so this might not be your everyday experience.  The good thing is you don’t have to be in the same office to collaborate with colleagues.  There are fantastic tools available that will give your company all the virtual hallways, metafilters and whiteboards it needs.  But, tools are the easy part these days.  Your company is filled with smart people, gathering knowledge and insights every day…are you prepared to use them?

Over the long-term, I believe IT departments will split into separate functions with different approaches to service delivery, value and risk, rather than continue to be lumped together with the same risk-averse attitude that rightly surrounds critical systems being applied equally to personal devices and non-critical applications as well. I expect (and hope) that a proportion of the current IT department will move into the business and be given a brief to work as business enablers and innovators, rather than continue with a default setting of ‘no’ regardless of the cost to the business. Projects where internal IT and IT procurement add 500% overhead to technology delivery, and yet still manage to make the delivery worse in many respects, simply should not be happening in 2010.

In the short-term, we have to work with what we have got, and that means constructive engagement with IT departments, understanding their issues and helping to implement social technology in a responsible and business-like manner.

At the recent E2.0 conference in Boston, I presented some of our thinking about how to make this happen, which centres around the idea of technology layering and the use of APIs and data sharing to create consistency without uniformity:

Why is this important? Well, first of all, we must strive for a quality of user experience in the enterprise that is comparable to what we are used to with consumer applications. This is key to pushing forward self-service and it is necessary if we are to achieve the network effects that have proven so powerful outside the firm; but it is also about reducing training and support costs, and striving for simpler, cheaper, more flexible software rather than large all-in-one systems that are too expensive to throw away if they don’t meet changing needs. We are also spending too much time and money re-inventing the basics, because of an outdated obsession with standardisation and single platform plays, or just a mis-placed desire among low-level IT staff to build everything themselves. Instead of struggling to re-create basic social features, we should be deploying platforms and then treating them as a starting point for the development of smart, situated software that hone in on specific business needs.

As social business consultants, we want to be able to paint applications on a platform canvas, where all the basics are a given, rather than have to struggle to work inside an inflexible platform that supports little more than basic customisation. We can already see the need for much more advanced network navigation and awareness, discovery and personal productivity applications, but in most companies there is just not enough joined up social technology to make them viable. If we are to support employees in making sense of the emerging firehose of social data and signals, and turn them into action, then we will need these new applications soon, but IT blockers and the slow pace of implementation are holding this process back.

In the bad old days, our mobile phone applications came with the phone, differed wildly across platforms, and we couldn’t change them. These days, with Android and the iPhone, we expect to use a platform or OS, upon which we can load any number of applications that do very specific jobs, and perhaps look and feel the same across different platforms. We can treat the apps as throwaway, whilst the platform evolves more slowly through updates and point releases, but without needing to change the phone itself more than once every few years if we choose to.

The social layering idea is no different. At the base of the enterprise IT stack, we have expensive, slow-moving technology such as document management systems, ERP systems, databases and so on, which we might change every 3-5 years, if at all. They are good at the heavy lifting and underlying processes that many businesses need, but often very poor at user experience. Assuming these systems expose APIs and data sharing, which most these days do, we ca layer on a slightly lighter, slightly faster moving layer of social sharing capabilities such as social networking, collaboration, micro-blogging, wiki engines, etc., perhaps by using a dedicated enterprise social platform such as Jive, Socialtext or even Sharepoint if that is all that is available. But to really make the most of their features, it is often necessary to go beyond generic social tools and create much more business-relevant and locally-contextualised applications. For example, it is possible to use a wiki for co-ordinating new bids for a sales team, and if you give them one and a little guidance, they might make it work. But it is a lot more likely to succeed if you give them the Acme Bid Management System, which leverages the functionality of the wiki within an Acme-specific interface and workflow. If the wiki platform has an API, then you can do this and continue to iterate your application without having to mess with the wiki engine itself.

Leading social platform vendors Jive and Socialtext are both moving quickly in this direction with their respective announcements of a Jive app store and the Socialtext layering initiative to add to its existing strengths in API-driven applications. This is good, and it creates whole new opportunity for consultants and integrators to add value for their clients above and beyond the products themselves. Out of necessity, we began creating a meta-API above several of the most common social platforms to allow us to do precisely this, and I am very excited at the progress we are seeing when implementing this technique. In the future, I expect we will see a lot more focus on analytics, MIS/measurement, and individual productivity tools built on top of this kind of stack.

By coincidence, around the same time I was talking about this in Boston, my more IT-knowledgeable colleague Lee Provoost was sketching similar ideas at an SAP event in London, looking at the issue from the point of view of pace layering – in other words, coping with tools and platforms that have very different velocities of change:

But, to return to the original reason for this article, the main prize is not just better apps for enterprise users, but rather a constructive, value-enhancing relationship between business and the IT department. If IT departments can continue to own and manage underlying enterprise IT platforms, but expose APIs and data, then business users can define, provision and run their own social applications at the top of the stack without having to defer to IT for every decision they make, or work at a slower pace and in a more constrained way than they need. Based on our experience of the difficulties of implementing social business tools within existing IT department frameworks and culture, this would be a huge win for all concerned, and where we are using this approach, we find it solves a lot of issues and concerns on both sides.

In the Social Media Marketing channel we were wooed by the new viral celebrity Isaiah Mustafa (@isaiahmustafa) in the role of Old Spice Man (@oldspice) delivered in the Old Spice brand campaign. This campaign bridged the connection to us in the social webs by connecting social media celebrities and influencers to the Old Spice brand. Brands are popular in social media but celebrities are HOT. Celebrities in social media share personality, are personal and thus popular – Musicians and Actors top the Facebook Pages rankings over brands. The Old Spice Man brought that personality to the campaign through near real-time YouTube video and Twitter replies to the questions that he invited us to ask. Engaging the community is the aspiration of all brands. Engaging with the community with personality is a rarer capability. The Old Spice campaign delivered on the brand promise through the well integrated creative, social and marketing teams to create, listen and respond to both social celebrities, influencers and the masses.

Brand Lessons Learned:

• Collaboration is essential to campaign and community management. Does your Social Media Servicing team have a view into your Social Media Marketing or Communications calendars? Are you anticipating responses to your messaging? Do you have a knowledge map of your organization to workflow your community communication?
• Community is forever, campaigns are transient. An integrated social media team is essential to deliver on both. Do your teams have access to the tools and information necessary to make decisions? Do they have the ability to listen, respond and measure?

In the Social Media Servicing channel we learned about the career transition of Frank Eliason (@FrankEliason) from Comcast. Frank and the cast on the Customer Service Team that emerged under the Twitter handle @ComcastCares. Over the past three years Frank and team have earned top mention on every Social Media Servicing case study. He and this passionate crew innovated the Social Media Servicing model by adding Twitter to their customer listening toolbox. Under this decentralized social media servicing model emerged @ComcastBill, @ComcastSteve, @ComcastDete, @ComcastMelissa, @ComcastBonnie, @ComcastSherri. These personalities were able to attract in some cases, larger Twitter followings than the brand they work for @Comcast. The service relationship they earned with the communities they interacted with are largely to attribute to this elective community behavior. In contrast, my experience as a Social Media Marketing Manager and Community Manager (@CocaCola), our community engagement was centralized. We engaged the community as the Coke bottle and with a tease of attribution to our personality through our CoTags or ^PF. This tweet signature helped to humanize the interaction with our community while maintaining brand identity and growing a centralized community. Brands that engaged and mature in social media face the challenge of social media identity management. As social media teams and channels grow so do the decisions brands must make to balance their identity and personalities that support them.

Identity Lessons Learned:

• Centralized communities build larger communities. Have you enabled an enterprise social media publishing and community management capability to support this approach? How are you able to publish, listen and respond with a large social media service team?
• Decentralized communities enable your brand knowledge to independently scale. Do you have a social media policy, certification and identity guidelines to support your social workforce? Can you aggregate your distributed conversations to facilitate a common social brand channel?

Managing your social media brand, supporting personalities and policy for social media identity are lessons being learned first by the largest brands and communities. As your Social Media Marketing and Servicing channels mature with resources and community expectations, so must your approach to the medium to find the balance right for your brand.

Coral reefs are formed by secretions of hundreds of thousands of tiny polyps living together in stable community.  While they form formidable structures, the individual stony coral separate the polyps from the other members of the colony.   They are extremely sensitive to small changes in the environment, and one major storm can cause irreparable damage to the entire reef.  Just like at many major companies today, a lack of communication and an inability to quickly adapt to a new environment can quickly wipe out years of hard work.

You’ve probably heard of the poisonous jellyfish called the Portuguese Man-O’-War.  But you probably didn’t know it isn’t actually a jellyfish, but rather a closely coordinated colony of four highly specialized organisms (“zooids”) that are incapable of surviving without each other. Like an organization with specialized PR, marketing, sales, and IT departments, each of the zooids performs a specific task. The Man-O’-War is feared for the occasional impact it can have on humans, but for the most part it’s simply ignored.  And with no means of active propulsion, the Man-O’-War can’t control what direction it’s headed in – leaving it vulnerable to factors beyond its control.

Schools of fish are social groups that function almost as one entity.   Through highly coordinated activities, the fish can swim more efficiently, find food more easily, and defend against predators more successfully.  And just like fish, when employees begin to collaborate effectively, they’ll be able to work more efficiently, bring in new business more easily, and guard against competition more successfully.  The problem is, the goal of schools is to maintain the status quo.  Fish lack any sort of long-term plan beyond fulfilling their basic needs and only join schools to benefit their own self-interests.

Finally, there are dolphins, the most advanced of the social marine animals.   They work together in close-knit groups, but often collaborate with other pods.  Their communities maintain distinct cultures that foster extreme loyalty.  They help each other by communicating regularly.  They share learned behaviors and even experiment with and adopt simple tools.  In an ideal world, this is how employees at large corporations would work together.  Close collaboration amongst smaller divisions would create loyalty, but employees would freely work with other departments to benefit the company.  By communicating regularly and effectively, employees would share knowledge that would improve how others do their jobs.  And, of course, they would experiment with and adopt the newest social tools, further improving process efficiency across the corporation.

Which creature are you? Any dolphins out there?  Are there any more ‘animals’ to add to the list?

Knowledge work is aimed at turning information into something decisionable and actionable; too often reports, presentations, survey results are mistaken for such.  While they are a key part of the decision equation, they are not enough.  They don’t provide insight.  The only thing they’re good for on their own is filling repositories.

Knowledge, unlike the data and information contained in reports, is a living & breathing thing.  It can’t be put in your enterprise content management system.  It exists in the heads of employees (often referred to as ‘tacit’ knowledge), constantly being shaped by different stimuli: articles, blog posts, pictures, models, books, conversations with colleagues, etc…  Communication is the process by which this constantly evolving knowledge is applied on data and information to a decisionable end.  This process will generate insights on how to take advantage of the information you have gathered.  Unless the reports, presentations and survey results are subjected to scrutiny and analysis through communication, no insights are created and decisions are delayed or malinformed.

Communication is more than just a block of time on your calendar.  It’s an opportunity to  share knowledge, gain insight, make better decisions and create for your company a competitive advantage.

What does communication look like where you work?  Is it enabling the application of knowledge to data and information?  Where do your company’s insights come from?

If your experience is similar to mine, then all too often you’ll be met with a reply of “What’s that?” or “I’m not really sure.”  I once told a hotel receptionist that I was the mayor, only to be asked “Oh really?  Is this your first time staying with us?”

So why the disconnect? Because almost all of the advice that corporations receive is how their brand can leverage the unprecedented opportunity to interact directly with consumers.

But most consumers still talk to real people more than branded accounts and pages – they interact with brands indirectly.  And as adoption of social tools continues to evolve – like mobile applications that merge online and in-person behaviors – consumers will begin to have more face-to-face “social media” interactions with brand representatives.  These employees, or “social media middlemen,” will need to not only be familiar with social tools, but also be apprised of any relevant social campaigns that your brand is participating in.

So what can a company do?  First, identify your middlemen. If you’re an insurance company, they may be independent agents or in-house customer service representatives. If you’re a restaurant, they might be the wait staff and counter help.  Banks have tellers and car companies have sales people. For some companies, like electronics manufacturers, it can be more complicated – your middlemen might be employees of the store that carries your brand.

Second, you must determine the role that these middlemen will play. Will they be active participants who promote your brand’s social engagements? Or should they just be educated representatives who are simply aware of your online efforts?

After you’ve identified your middlemen and determined what role they play, you’ll need to figure out how you will educate them. How will they know the difference between a mayorship and a badge if they don’t even know what Foursquare is? Will they need to be formally trained to help a consumer download your app on Android instead of an iPhone? If your company has thousands of locations, how will you make sure that everyone is up-to-speed?

And finally, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy to ensure that your middlemen continue to be properly identified, trained, and leveraged. Remember, social tools are about connecting people with people – and the more that the online and offline worlds of consumers begin to merge, the more they’ll be socially connecting with your employees in real life.

What disconnects have you seen?

Our entire slide library can be found on Slideshare.

Over the past two years I’ve analyzed every policy I could get my hands on to identify important buckets of necessary information. Those with corporate policies know that there are non-negotiable points every policy must communicate. For example, you must remind employees to respect each other, keep proprietary facts confidential, and handle mistakes transparently.

An often-overlooked point is the importance of accurately capturing and reflecting your company’s unique culture in the policy’s language. There are a few good examples of social media policies that many have borrowed from (IBM, Intel, and Oracle, to name a few). There is nothing inherently wrong with using one, or a combination of those policies, as a solid starting point. However, what I seefrequently is a lot of “copy-paste” action. Herein lies the issue: If you take a close look at these companies’ policies, you get a good glimpse of their corporate culture in the wording. Not yours.

In the same way that not every company is the same, not every company is in the same place when it comes to embracing social tools. Your company may be more or less open, more or less transparent, or more or less ready than the companies whose policies you are using to craft your own. There are also important implications to consider based on your industry and your client base.

If you currently have social media policies and guidelines in place, I would recommend pulling them out and carefully evaluating where the policy stands in comparison to where your company stands.  Does the policy accurately reflect where you are, as a company, today? Are you a “can” or a “can’t” organization?

Don’t get me wrong. You should definitely plan for where you want to be, but you should also be realistic about where you are. Baby steps. Don’t try to go from zero engagement to social business in one move. As your corporate culture becomes more socially minded, your policy can adapt to allow for increased engagement.

The beautiful thing about social is that it is ever changing, as your policy should be. Your policy today should not be the same as your policy in a year, or two years from now. As your organization gets up to speed, revisit your policy often to make sure it continues to promote the right amount and kind of participation.

A couple of weeks ago, there was an article about @GovernorRod’s intention to live-tweet his corruption trial. Were Blagojevich’s tweets appropriate given the fact that he was in a federal courtroom facing 24 counts of corruption? Most people would agree that there are inappropriate times and topics to tweet. A high-profile, federal trial is definitely one of them.

Analogously, how appropriate is it to tweet or update your Facebook status while you’re in a meeting or an interview ? Or checking into a client’s office on Foursquare before the public knows that they’re your client?

A number of companies, Coca-Cola and IBM to name a few, have already put corporate social policies in place to avoid potentially embarrassing situations. As companies and their employees become increasingly social, brands must balance the essence of social (openness, sharing, and transparency) with the realities of business (information security, risk management, and legal).  Corporations with policies in place will be better prepared than those that have yet to address the issue.

Does your company provide meaningful guidance in relation to the use of social tools?

The first theme strikes the core of a learning organization.  A learning organization is in constant flux, continually challenging its assumptions and evaluating wins and losses to glean insights for competitive advantage.  Organizations designed for loss of control will not be in balance; their equilibrium will be deliberately and continually challenged.  These challenges and pressures are the forces that create learning organizations.  Attempts to learn and achieve equilibrium will create a more flexible and agile enterprise better equipped to respond to frequent and unexpected changes in the competitive landscape.

Keeping the above in mind, addressing the process issue starts to become more clear.  When (re)designing process, assume and design for loss of control.  Build in an evolutionary mechanism for the process itself.  This meta-process could be as simple as a feedback loop consisting of collection, prioritization and process alteration.  In the continuum between control and chaos, target somewhere in the middle for your process (for most organizations this target represents an uncomfortable shift away from control and towards chaos).  An open and flexible process has the benefit of returning expected results (what’s the point of process after all?) plus the ability to adapt, optimize and mutate if need be, enabling emergent outcomes.

Most cutting edge ‘social’ enterprises are still only in an adoption phase.  Pilots are scattered across business units and functional organizations and, in many cases, the separate project teams aren’t aware of each other’s efforts.  As these efforts mature away from adoption towards integration and aggregation, process will be challenged.  Start thinking about that now.  Take advantage of this adoption phase and practice designing for loss of control.  You want to be good at it when it’s really going to matter.

As I recently pointed out, it’s not hard to see why this is happening now: the writing is on the wall and the consumer world has driven much of this change to the extent the social is now essentially the dominant model for communication globally, at least on the Web. Social as the driver for business activity is still usually not the case in the enterprise, but it’s now clear that too will soon change.

Here were some of the largest take-aways for me and what I saw at the event:

Designing Enterprises for Loss of Control

British Telecom’s CIO JP Rangaswami gave a thought-provoking keynote that was notable for the lack of slides (instead, a real-time social media stream was produced live, alongside) as well as for putting forth the concept that enterprises boundaries are increasingly blurring with the greater network and that businesses must start getting good at “designing for loss of control.” This topic has long been discussed in Enterprise 2.0 circles and many of us already realize that the shift of control from institutions to communities of individuals has been long underway, yet it was only at the conference this month that there seemed to be ready understanding and acceptance of this concept in a mainstream way. While we’re still learning exactly what it means to design for loss of control, particularly in the enterprise, it’s readily in the spirit of social software with its general lack of barriers to participation or preconceptions about how people should come together and build value on the network.

Enterprises Are Going Social

If the presentations at the opening day’s The 2.0 Adoption Council customer workshop weren’t convincing enough, many of the presentations later on in the week were impressive. While most organizations worldwide now have social software in some form, at least departmentally, the deeper and wider use of Enterprise 2.0 strategically, across all stakeholders (customers, partners, and workers) is still emerging in most organizations. While this is leading to more sophisticated and mature discussions, such as the one around Social Business, extrapolating from the 200 organizations already participating in the council is sobering and I predict the data for 2010 will show that around half of all organizations globally had an internal enterprise-side social media strategy created to guide efforts across their business units.

Now I wonder how often we use this device when it comes to social measurement.

Whether I talk to an IT consultant or marketing strategist, one answer is always the same. A question about measuring success is met with a long response. For some, data collection is in-progress. But many borrow familiar metrics like clicks and counts to gauge success. Why are people stuck in this cycle?

It’s time to interpret the data from your social initiatives in a meaningful way:

• Return to your objectives. Today the problem isn’t leading with business goals but sticking with them. Without examining data in context, you risk losing the chance to prove what you’ve actually accomplished. For example, tracking how many blogs were created on your internal collaboration platform tells you nothing about how you retain talent. But trending employee satisfaction does. Analyzing data as it relates to your objectives helps uncover relevant behaviors — not just those measured most easily.

• Tap into multiple stakeholder perspectives to define value. Different business units depend on different things. Consider developing a dashboard that accounts for the diverse proof points individual departments need. For instance, a marketer managing a customer idea community could track customer satisfaction and the number of testable ideas generated to satisfy customer care and market research.

• Treat metrics as insight tools, not just ones that output results. Most people interpret metrics in absolute terms. Their results illustrate the success or failure of whatever initiative they analyze. Examine them in more detail and the same information can help define strategy, pinpoint necessary changes, and identify future opportunity.

Just as a musician has his own style, brands must develop metrics that consider their business needs first. This requires renewed attention to our choices — recognizing where we must blaze trails of our own. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but at what cost?

What are some of the ways you’ve avoided this metrics trap?

So how does a business determine what it should and should not outsource when it comes to social media? I believe Joe Raasch of Target says it well.

Joe’s comment was one of 41 responses to the question “should you outsource social media” posted on LinkedIn by brand strategist Valeria Maltoni this past March.  Valeria published a great post featuring these responses on her blog Conversation Agent.  Many respondents agreed social media application development, content development, monitoring, and measurement activities could be outsourced.  These are activities that are more transactional to Joe’s point.  My colleague Peter Fasano puts it another way by saying social media functions that can be clearly defined are possible to outsource.  For example, a business can leverage third party services to scan the Web and help filter and flag comments about its brand by defining the inquiries.  A business should not rely on a third party to respond to comments before it can carefully define appropriate responses.  The exercise of scripting appropriate responses to hypothetical comments is often fruitless just as you cannot script one side of a real-time conversation before it takes place.  Some companies develop intricate scripts and then realize the responses do not work in the real world.  That means a business must establish clear guidelines on when and how to respond.  Guidelines do not prevent the sponsoring organization from being present to manage escalation from third parties.  The question remains as to whether or not organizations that choose to outsource due to lack of resources will be able to support and enforce these guidelines externally.

Why outsource?

Businesses consider outsourcing social media functions because they lack the expertise in-house.  Outsourcing social media functions could help a business buy the time it needs to develop these core competencies in-house.  In this case, outsourcing can be a viable option, especially if the business partners with the agency for education and training.  However, if a company can find a way to keep social media functions in-house, I recommend doing so given the potential risks involved.

Potential Risks to Outsourcing Social Media

• social conversations feel less authentic and trustworthy
• business has less direct oversight to be flexible in strategic approach
• agency not equipped to answer customer questions given its limited access to important business intelligence to make decisions
• business process continuity is challenged leading to delayed response times
• agency loses sight of core business values and objectives driving social participation (we see examples of this even within a business)
• customers grow frustrated because they want to talk directly to the business

A business can minimize potential risks by carefully choosing which functions are outsourced.  The general rule to is to avoid outsourcing participation and engagement.

What Can Be Outsourced

• recruitment
• social web monitoring
• moderation (filtering for inappropriate comments or curating the best)
• social web analytics
• content development
• application development

What Should Not Be Outsourced

• listening (you need to be listening to know the context for how to respond)
• responding
• driving conversations
• mediating member discussions
• content management

Possible Exceptions

Companies like Communispace and Passenger have created successful models around outsourcing customer insights communities.  Customer insight communities are easier to manage because they are private, members are pre-screened and many community activities are defined in advance.

Remaining Problem

My biggest concern with outsourcing social media functions is that it suggests these activities are not core to the business.  If a business has not made the case for investing in social initiatives, outsourcing will add new challenges to making this argument.  Outsourcing social media functions puts social media at risk for becoming a separate, siloed business activity which prevents the integration of customer participation into all aspects of the business – a critical move to realizing the full value of social business.  Our clients that have experienced success in social media treat their communities as business assets.

Social media initiatives require the investment of resources no matter what, so why not make the right investments in-house to maximize the return?

Then it becomes the new platform for business processes. Sticking with the version number metaphor, your 2.0 platform starts subsuming your 1.0 environment in three important ways:

1. Users’ ingenuity results in improved ways of doing things. For example, documents are checked into the document management system as procedure may require but a link so the document is shared in a blog post calling attention to the document and inviting comment. Or, similarly, a link to an entry in the issue management system is the seed for a broader discussion of the issue. Or you find that while communities supporting business development for strategic clients are peppered with references to events in the CRM system, the high value input now happens in the E2.0 platform.
2. As the 2.0 platform becomes one of the primary interfaces people interact with, building connections to legacy enterprise applications provides a new lease of life for the investment in legacy architecture. Old style apps can be surfaced in the 2.0 platform as frames in a dashboard, remodelled forms with links to the underlying systems that are made available for data input and workflow inception, or events which are syndicated from transaction applications or knowledge stores to show up in activity streams.
3. E2.0 platforms are evolving and starting to become application frameworks instead of just content platforms. The frameworks make it possible to develop applications on top of the E2.0 platforms, leveraging superior user interfaces, social connections and an already rich feature set.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, several platform vendors announced enterprise app store additions to their platforms or are allowing for ways to integrate with enterprise applications along the lines of points 2 and 3 above. For examples of what is offered now and in the near future see Socialtext Connect, IBM’s Vulcan vision and the Jive Apps Market.

What we are seeing is a move towards Social Business Design in the enterprise. It is not just a company’s unstructured knowledge that benefits from social platforms; business processes and transactions have always existed in a social context but that aspect has not always led to value creation outside of defined boundaries.

Clay Shirky crystallized what was going on with social media in his 2008 book “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky has a new book out called “Cognitive Surplus.” For a summary of the book, you can read this speech transcript from a couple years ago. You can also watch this video, similar content.

Shirky’s concept certainly has, as Seth Godin puts it, “world-changing” potential. In fact, Tim O’Reilly has already pointed out how to make this a reality, imploring us to work on stuff that matters.

Beyond a straight summary, here are some of the concepts I found thought-provoking:

• Media is the connective tissue of society. This is a wonderful definition of not only what we share, but also hints at why we connect and how.
• Digital sharecropping. An idea that social sites create an unfair situation whereby individuals create content but platform owners get the monetary rewards. Theoretically feasible, but rare in practice.
• Consumers will take control – if you let them. ”If you give people a way to act on their desire for autonomy and competence or generosity and sharing, they might take you up on it.” This could be for better or worse with regards to your brand.
• The problem is us, not it. “Many of the unexpected uses of communications tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy.” Fewer people today say they don’t get Twitter, namely because we have shifted mental models regarding how people communicate online.
• Why sharing ideas works. Thomas Jefferson: “He who receives ideas from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine.” I can share ideas through this blog that do not detract from my own ideas – and in fact this community returns the value through comments, retweets, and other responses.
• Culture is key. It’s how alchemy evolved into chemistry and the world ended up gaining from a greater degree of openness.
• There are drawbacks to more connectivity. “Increased communication and contact with others isn’t risk free, and any new opportunity requires ways to manage risk.” Moreover, “social media introduces social dilemmas into a number of environments where they didn’t previously exist.”
• Building a business case may be difficult. “We can’t ask people running traditional systems to evaluate a new technology for its radical benefits; people committed to keeping the current system will tend, as a group, to have trouble seeing value in anything disruptive.” Don’t limit the definition of “systems” here to IT only – think of processes and culture within ecosystems as well. 

The entire last chapter focuses on starting, growing, and adapting efforts – solid advice for anyone responsible for community development. Shirky has created a wonderful outline of the what, why, and how of our society’s Cognitive Surplus – the only question left is “what now,” which can only be answered by each of us.

I have been considering different approaches for capturing, filtering and modeling social media engagement data for some time. Like most other practitioners I talk with – we are generating more data than we can analyze. I have a stack of Short URL data, another with SEO data, another with Media data, another from Web Analytics, more from Social Media Analytics – Facebook or YouTube Insights, newly added Listening data, updates from CRM, with the newest and largest stack from Moderation. Certainly you may have more …. What do you do with your data stacks?

The burden of ownership of these stacks is that they are a combination of structured and unstructured data. We can neatly capture the structured data like time, date, profile name, network, location, browser type, tags, etc … The unstructured information is where many times the real insights exist. This is where we will find comments, blog posts, video responses, photos shared, etc … It is the balance of content with context that provides us with the real world relationships that describe the editorial measurement, community health or overall social engagement. This is the challenge of social media measurement as it is combines your web analytics standards with those of your social media data. O’Reilly Media (@oreillymedia) author, Sean Power (@seanpower) lead an Enterprise 2.0 Boston (@e2conf) session this week that aligned with my approach and offered a deep course in this integrated analytics or communilytics approach [see slide 95 to visualize this synthesis]. This brings the insights team off the sidelines and into the planning and delivery of the program goals.

Insights are in the eye of the beholder when it comes to measurement. The lens that I view these data stacks is very different than my colleagues that are observing from the lens of eCommerce, Marketing, Brand Manager, Public Relations, Customer Service, Investor Relations or Information Technology.  Each functional organization has different data elements that can be organized to model a possible solution set relevant for their insights. This dynamic is what drives the collection of these data stacks but the hoarding of data does not benefit the enterprise if it is not accessible and flexible. Your collection of  spreadsheets containing silos of data – only useful to the limited asynchronous owners. This model is single dimensional and focused on the structured data.

This brings me back to the snake cube. The view of this information reminds me of a project I worked on a project a few years ago where we modeled structured and unstructured video data to help inform a fantastic video search engine – dabble. The model we used was the OLAP cube to bring dimension to the data stacks we had maintained to develop new products with the core meta and search data. Capturing these data stacks as a cube offers as one of many forms of business intelligence to model your analytics. Bringing this agility to your data stacks to unlock insights will open the possibilities for you and other supporting organizations to develop formulas and benchmarks that bring the insights and evidence to fund, scale and better engage your communities. Embracing this flexible and business intelligence can move the social media efforts into the center of your brand planning rather than an after action review. Gatorade (@gatorade) and PepsiCo (@pepsico) has harnessed this approach to power the Zeitgeist and Mission Controlcenter. Are you ready for your analytics and analysts to have a seat at your digital table?

We will be working directly with Jive to improve their products, and to jointly to develop solutions for specific vertical markets that include Dachis Group’s industry leading strategy and implementation capability — Social Business Design.

As Social Business Software and Strategy continues to evolve, effective execution will require highly industry specific strategy, process design and software delivery which is not currently available in the market. Through this partnership we will be able to leverage knowledge, resources and a mutual set of case studies in order to develop better end-to-end solutions for our customers.

Fulfilling our vision for Social Business Design has led us to develop a series of important alliances. As a social business evolves, new vendors and partners need to be integrated into the overall solution to address new or expanded needs. Understanding what these options are and how they should fit into the larger social ecosystem is a core component of Dachis Group’s alliance program. Our constant awareness of new innovations means that we can deliver the best solution every time.

In the case of this partnership with Jive Software, we are expanding that scope to include the development of research and strategy solutions in order to proactively develop services to address emerging customer needs. For Dachis Group customers this means that we will be able to leverage an enhanced set of case studies and data in order to develop recommendation, strategy and business process design. For Jive Software customers, this means that you will have access to Dachis Group’s leading research, strategy and implementation capabilities tailored with Jive-specific insight and streamlined integration.

If you are in an existing Jive customer and would like to find out more about what this means for you, please contact Peter Kim in North America, Lee Bryant/Livio Hughes in Europe or Anne Bartlett-Bragg in Asia/Pacific.

BP can leverage the power of social tools to help their current situation – but only if all current business processes are aligned and calibrated for social activation.  The aforementioned paid search ads lead to the site pictured, where visitors will see phone numbers that offer several ways for consumers to contact BP.

What’s missing? Basic social tools that could provide more efficient ways to bring people together to solve problems – not to mention potentially alleviate call center traffic.  A side effect?  A modicum of positive PR, something that BP currently completely lacks.

What if BP added a “social” tab to this page, featuring:

• A wiki to provide information on how volunteers should properly deal with affected wildlife.
• A community to help would-be volunteers organize and mobilize.
• A community for those who have filed claims to help others through the process (and for BP to learn ways to make the process easier).
• An online directory of people to register their boats and professional services
• A forum to crowdsource ideas to fix the problem.

Most will scoff at the last notion, but a 21 year-old engineering student was recently featured on CNN discussing the fix that she proposed to BP executives. The possibilities are certainly real, with an independent group of engineers last year winning $1M for solving a complicated business problem that Netflix scientists couldn’t solve.

What else could BP do?  How about:

• An app to let people report affected areas and wildlife, similar to the City of Boston’s Citizens Connect iPhone app that lets residents report pot holes and graffiti.
• A private market research community made up of carefully selected consumers to begin to test public messaging.
• A local social program to help gas station owners who are being affected by boycotts (independent franchisees who are disproportionately affected by something that is completely out of their control).

Of course, for these efforts to be successful, they would have to be planned, heavily moderated, highly coordinated, and integrated with current data and information systems – then communicated to consumers, franchise owners, the media, and government officials.  In other words, all social business systems would have needed to be in place before disaster struck.   As all business functions become social functions, a proper social response is no longer just a PR response – it’s a business response.

Is your business ready for disaster?

Disclosure Statement: BP is a client of Headshift, a Dachis Group company.

For the rest of us who aren’t there yet, major change is still evident: The Web itself has become pervasively social as we’ve changed both the behavior and expectations of our private lives around so many of the ways that we relate to one another. This includes how much (more) we share information now, actively try to build social capital and our personal brands, as well as how we value others. But make no mistake, we are each still learning much about our newfound ability to directly influence the entire world from our tiny corner of it. The incredible leverage that each of us now possesses in the form of social tools is one of the most potent forces in the modern world.

If the pen was mightier than the sword, social computing is perhaps on an entirely new plane of existence. It has been used in everything from the real-time coordination of escape from natural disaster to permanently archiving genocide so that the perpetrators are held accountable. For businesses, it has revolutionized everything from product design and customer service, to operations.

By a good many measures, the writing is now clearly on the wall about what is happening today: With the data showing, for example, that the reign of e-mail is already over in the consumer world, can (and should) businesses be far behind? In fact, this year we are seeing the broadest changes yet in the way that social tools are being applied to business problems. While social media marketing and customer communities continue to be very hot topics in enterprise social computing, the discussion (and real-world practice) has evolved well beyond these initial activities that were common early adoption focus areas. Organizations are beginning to more deeply understand the ramifications of a highly social enterprise environment and they are beginning to see evidence that their efforts are actually fragmented elements of a bigger picture.

Social Computing + Business = Value Creation

For its part, the business world has begun to wake up to the transformation that is now happening all around it. Decision makers are now carefully weighing the potential benefits of transformation to new modes of work, with the costs and perceived risks. Many of the early social computing efforts that took place in many organizations have gone on to either 1) encountering some of the travails and benefits of genuine change or 2) learning enormously important lessons as they evolve and mature, or both. More importantly, there is now a sober realization that these early experiments and initiatives must turn into serious endeavors that produce results that scale and produce abundant business value. This is not not due to a sense of justifying the work already done, but that the full ramifications of social computing has increasingly serious competitive ramifications.

But the job of aligning an organization with social computing is not an easy one, if it ever was.

Consider the following scenario: You are tasked with sorting out, reconciling, and making sense of your various social computing efforts. You will typically have several online communities, a massive Sharepoint implementation, both a Facebook and Twitter engagement effort, an internal social network, several crowdsourcing projects, a microblogging platform, and multiple social media marketing efforts. All of them engage the same three audiences: customers, partners, and/or workers. But all of them have different owners, strategies, tools, teams, policies, standards, goals, and priorities. Most of them overlap in some way. The solution probably isn’t to combine them. (Not only do legacy efforts add challenge, but the most transformative phase of social computing transformation often isn’t represented by them.)

A better solution is to understand and manage them strategically using a consistent and cohesive approach. And one that doesn’t treat each one in isolation, for they are mostly aspects of the same thing: The intentional creation of a dynamic business culture that directly empowers all of its constituents to better create and exchange value.

I would put forth that it is having both consistency and a cohesive approach towards this goal that organizations are beginning to realize they are lacking. Without it, there is considerable likelihood that you’ll leave much of the potential value untapped and lose the opportunity for market leadership in your industry. As we are starting to see, the big picture here is much more than (just) team collaboration or incremental improvements to the way we market our products or provide customer service. There are order-of-magnitude operational business improvements to be had that will change the very way we run our businesses in the process.

As I explored in detail recently, this bigger picture is increasingly being called Social Business, and consists of the various threads of effort that business have gone through over the last half-decade, such as online communities, Web 2.0, Social Media, crowdsourcing, Enterprise 2.0, and Social CRM.

The Five Value Propositions for Social Business

To address the eponymous title of this post however, let’s ask what, specifically is the value that Social Business provides as a meaningful and enterprise-class framework for social computing:

1. Identification of the fundamental archetypes. What are the essential aspects one must cultivate for a successful Social Business effort, whatever the audience, mode of interaction, tools, etc? In our view, there are four classic archetypes. These are:
   • Dynamic Signal, which represents real-time social interactions and analysis like posts, Tweets, activity streams, feeds, aggregators, etc,
   • Ecosystem, all the functioning elements of a functioning Social Business environment
   • Metafilter, the ability to connect the right information in the ecosystem with the right audience, when it’s needed, and;
   • Hivemind, the collective awareness and intelligence of a Social Business community both in its totality (all participants, everywhere) and all constituent subgroups.
2. Consistency and cohesion across Social Business strategy and implementation(s). While Social Business will always manifest itself as many individual efforts in an organization, now there is a way to attain intellectual and business mastery of the forces and their orchestration at a management level. Social CRM and online communities facing the public are indeed different from internal Enterprise 2.0 collaboration efforts, but not only do the archetypes begin to reveal their core commonality, they allow them to be treated the same way when it comes to building shared value, extracting knowledge, and operationalizing the results as part of the business. They can often be a primary revenue generator in their own right.
3. Cost savings and efficiencies. While many organizations are already understanding the business value of factoring out commonalities and centralizing them, it’s been hard to do up until now until the larger picture was well understood. This is now starting to be possible in a significant way with Social Business, from social media policy to community management.
4. Repeatability and lower barriers to adoption. Different parts of the organization don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel with their Social Business transformation, but can build upon much of the strategy and implementation work that has come before it.
5. High success rates and lower risk profile Because much of the work around issues involving legal, HR, branding, governance, and other horizontal business concerns are addressed broadly and up front, Social Business efforts will have better chance of a high value, high scale outcome with less risk.

I’ll be exploring Social Business in-depth this year here and elsewhere as the concept continues to mature. Please contribute your thoughts below along with any concerns about yet another term for what we previously termed Web 2.0, social media, etc. Now is the time to discuss how all of this is becoming a standard way of doing business in our organizations. You can also read our white paper on Social Business Design.

We assembled the ideas, with the percentage of votes for each idea, into one PDF file which you can find here.

The point is not who received the most votes, but to see if there are some trends and commonalities in the responses. As  you will read, the themes seem to be around connecting people and systems in an open fashion, to allow customer-focused communication and collaboration. That’s a little bit buzzword-laden, but if you want it in a single phrase − there it is.

We are almost halfway through 2010. Which of these things have been imperative in your organization this year? Are you on track to meet your goals of being more social in 2010? We work with leading companies on these types of issues, so feel free to contact us.

Below is Christine’s slide presentation, which contains the highlights of her presentation.

Our entire slide library can be found on Slideshare.

Below is Charlene’s slide presentation, giving you a brief glimpse into the content of her talk.

Our entire slide library can be found on Slideshare.

The Rearview Mirror

Many companies have built their livelihood on dealing with consumers and the past. Bazaarvoice has built a nice business based on rating and reviewing past purchases. Amazon and NetFlix use previous behavior to attempt to predict future interests and purchase probabilities. This is all great, but it’s barely actionable. Informative, yes, but highly actionable, no.

Today

Some of the hot consumer websites these days work with geolocation, including Foursquare, Twitter, and Gowalla. They are all about the present, and the immediate. The present is actually a really great business, and there is disruption going on. If I want to search for anything in the world, I use Google. If I want to know how long the line is at the SXSW Facebook party, I use Twitter search (which must really piss off Google).

All this is great, but it’s still not terribly actionable. If I just checked in at a restaurant on Foursquare, it’s pretty useless to try an instant coupon to lure you to another restaurant.

The Future

The intention of consumers (planned future consumption) is incredibly valuable. If I could somehow broadcast to the interwebs that I intend to go downtown with my wife, have a nice dinner somewhere, catch a movie, and I’d like to meet up with friends for drinks after that — that is like gold for a savvy marketer. This is when it all starts to have shades of Net Worth.

Suddenly, instant coupons are really interesting to me, as are packaged deals, or additional discounts if I can convince my friends to make it a table for 8 instead of a table for 2. Combine this information with a little past behavior, like a bunch of check-ins at another upscale restaurant, and you’ve got the makings of some persuasive social marketing. Intention Economics are powerful, and one of the few companies I see going after this market is Plancast.

The Enterprise

We’ve written a little bit about Foursquare in the enterprise, but we’re probably 18-24 months away from seeing larger adoption of game mechanics to drive the hivemind in larger organizations. Which means we are probably 48 months away from seeing the beginnings of intention in the leading companies. The idea, however, is powerful.

How could you be more impactful and proactive in your organization if you knew what people were doing this upcoming week (the future), rather than reading their status report (the past)? How could you help close more business if you knew who the sales organization was pitching this week, rather than reading the monthly sales report?

What ideas does the power of intention spark for your organization?