Collaboratory
The Collaboratory is our Social Business collaborative lab where we engage and explore an ongoing discussion, share thoughts, opinions, and ideas on Social Business.
Social Landscape Review: Q2 2011
Blog PostLet's take a look back at the social landscape from Q2 2011 so we can paint a picture of what Q3 has in store.
Enterprise 2.0: Whither thou Goest
Blog PostThe conversation on the social web about whether “Enterprise 2.0” still has relevance has been ongoing for a long while. Nearly everyone has weighed in on it who follows the space.
Why should I follow or like you?
Blog PostEven now, some organisations are still making their first tentative steps into online engagement with their customers using social media and through social networks. They are easy to spot – look for the pleading calls to action, asking you to follow them on Twitter, like them on Facebook or subscribe to their YouTube channel. But what exactly is in it for me? Why exactly should I follow or like you?
Adoption Strategies for Social Software
Blog PostThis post deals with adoption of social software in enterprises. It might echo with people that have faced problems in getting others to believe that their approach works. It promotes how to “get a feel” for success; rather than a measure of adoption. It’s in-house employees and veterans of the company that know how dispersed a deployment really is. Whilst many things have been written about aficionados and early adopters, it’s critical to involve non-power-users for their insight into the maturity of a deployment. It’s those people that offer the most valuable and realistic view of adoption. Like slow-burning logs in a fire, they take some time to get going but eventually beam us through to a mature roll-out.
Connecting Digital Strategy with Social Business and Next-Gen Mobility
Blog PostHow do the overarching digital strategies of today's 21st century enterprise relate to social business and smart mobility? It's a question I've been asked more and more frequently as these two major new trends become primary areas of focus in organizations around the world. The reality is today that large organizations continue to struggle with how they are organizing around digital strategy in general. In this context I'm referring primarily to Web strategy -- including the various aspects of a business it touches -- since that's almost entirely where digital is headed as a whole. One of the aspects that stands out the most when I've worked with companies recently is that most traditional businesses often have a dramatically lower level of maturity around digital delivery of their capabilities than native Web firms. This despite it being almost twenty years since the Web arrived. It's clear there is significant impedance between the way digital business works and the way many companies still operate.
Marketing as Magic: Delighting Customers Through Deals
Blog PostReal-time geo-located deal services transform the social web from a "What are you up to..." sort of place to a "I want to..." sort of place. A place where a virtual prompt can link to a real-world desire and enable seamless fulfillment of that desire. Real-time geo-located deals is to Amazon shopping, what Flash mobs are to G+ hangouts. Both are awesome, both have value - but only one is birthed online and comes to full fruition in the real world. This is magical stuff.
Using service design to envision socially integrated services and products
Blog PostWhat if the technologies of Web 2.0 and the social networks it has enabled were part of the customer’s full experience of a service or product, rather than simply a channel used for promotion or customer service? A lot of time is spent thinking about how brands interact or engage with customers through social media, but less time is spent thinking about making social media and networks a core and essential part of the services and products behind those brands. I’m not talking about clever online marketing or promotional social media gimmicks – I mean real services and products, that are intrinsically integrated with social software.
How social networks grow
Blog PostIf user adoption of G+ follows what I remember from MySpace and Twitter, it may play out something like this.
Google+ and the Enterprise
Blog PostWhen new social networks pop up, normally one doesn't invest too much time in taking a deep-dive into functionality until there is significant adoption, suggesting that it is more than just a flash in the pan, and that it may have an impact on the social and digital space. With the release of Google+, we have just that; it has already hit 10 million users, has pinpointed and addressed some of the glaring "weaknesses" of Facebook, and has taken an active stance in the incorporation of business tools from the outset.
The Social Business Stack: The Elements
Blog PostTrying to stay up-to-date with the many moving parts of social business can be a full time job today. The technologies, trends, and techniques of social media as applied to business is evolving constantly and moving so quickly that it can be difficult to understand how all the pieces currently fit together. In information technology, we have long used the stack model to break down the description of a complex system into sets of related functions. It's not perfect in that it's a static view, and social business is very dynamic, but it's a good start and lets us achieve some useful intellectual control over the elements of social business and how they relate to each other.