173 posts in category Blog Post

On a recent trip to Bermuda, I was inspired by the different types of collaborative behavior exhibited by the marine life that I observed.

A knowledge worker spends a good portion of the day communicating – meetings, status reports, emails, phone calls, water cooler talks. Much of this activity is considered unproductive overhead; when you look at a calendar full of meetings you wonder when you’re going to get any REAL work done. And while many popular forms of communication may be inefficient and ineffective, communication is work; perhaps the most important work knowledge workers do.

Next time you’re out running some errands, give this simple experiment a try. Visit a national company that you know has a strong social media presence, and then ask an employee or two about some social tools. Is the clerk at the register familiar with any incentives for Foursquare check-ins? Can the teller help you with your iPhone app? Does the waiter know what Yelpers think? Does the sales woman know about the discount you just saw tweeted?

At our recent Social Business Summit 2010 in Austin, Dion Hinchcliffe gave a presentation about the state of Social Business Strategies in 2010, and more importantly what is working and why. His 56 slides are included below, in the event that you weren’t able to attend the summit. They cover topics such as social business benefits, the social supply chain, and communities.

Earlier this week, my colleague, Kate Rush Sheehy, posted about the importance of implementing corporate social media policies, and I couldn’t agree with her more. Policies should be firmly in place before a company attempts any internal or external social initiative.

Social tools are used for a number of business reasons; to promote a brand, improve reputation, increase engagement, encourage advocacy, and recruit, retain, and nurture relationships. Not only that, they are accessible 24/7. Just because we can use social tools any time, should we use them all the time?

Two separate themes stood out to me during my time at the E2.0 Conference in Boston last week. The first, design for loss of control, came directly out of JP Rangaswami’s top-notch keynote address. The second, how can E2.0 improve process at my company?, was something I picked up more organically from time spent in conversation with E2.0 pundits and practitioners. Separately, these concepts seem opposed but when blended together they create a healthy tension that exists in agile organizations.

I’ve had time to sit back and digest the great many discussions, meetings, and ideas circulating at this year’s excellent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, just over a week ago. For just about everyone I spoke with, there was a consensus that this was a special event this year and the industry has hit a new level of maturity. This was evident by the proliferation of vendors, major client-side success stories such as CSC’s presentation on how they achieved over 50,000 registered internal users of their social community, and the 2.0 Adoption Council’s outstanding all-day workshop of customer stories with concrete lessons learned about planning, advocacy, adoption, community management, ROI, and much more.

A question about measuring social initiative success is always 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 initiatives in a meaningful way.

A major component of Social Business Design is developing a staffing model to support our clients’ desires to harness opportunities presented by customer participation. A question we have had to address at Dachis Group is whether or not any of the new social roles we recommend can be outsourced. I asked this question to the panelists of a session I moderated at Enterprise 2.0 2010 this month in Boston. In this blog post, I give my own point of view.