Practice Areas

Social Business Design is a framework for rethinking how business gets done. This framework can be applied to help businesses solve the problems they face today. We focus on companies at the level of their component parts when applying Social Business Design, as each major operating function has its own inherent challenges and opportunities.

To that end, we focus Social Business Design on three key practice areas: Customer Participation, Workforce Collaboration and Business Partner Optimization.

Customer Participation

Social business affords companies an opportunity to engage with customers in ways that traditional one-way communication cannot support. With the ever-increasing adoption of consumerized technology, people now carry powerful, networked devices everywhere. This constant connectivity drives the expectation of an always-on, always-available interaction with companies. With countless brands now participating on networks like Twitter and Facebook, consumers have come to expect, if not demand, that companies make themselves available for multi-directional communications.

These changes present enormous opportunity for brands to harness customer participation to drive value in numerous ways. Before this can happen, companies must overcome substantial new challenges. When internal company interactions aren’t interconnected, this increased customer communication results in disparate threads of dialog, instead of a holistic, meaningful conversation with measurable and actionable results. Further, the sheer amount of information this customer engagement can create makes it difficult for existing organizations to discern signal from noise. And finally, measuring the impact of social endeavors can be difficult with traditional methods, but businesses demand objective ways to prove results.

Social Business Design For Customer Participation

Social Business Design provides a framework to help companies create value from customer participation. Applying the archetypes to core issues exposes clear opportunities for value capture:

• Ecosystem: Instead of being targeted by advertising messages, customers are recast as part of a network of participants in addition to corporate marketing, public relations, and customer service staff.  Their connections facilitate open, multi-directional communications. The strength of ties between network nodes can be measured to determine ecosystem health.
• Hivemind: The propensity of customers to engage with the company and each other can be assessed and cultivated. This leads to success in outreach and advocacy efforts.
• Dynamic Signal: Customers are recognized for the content they create and a new mode of authorship and ownership come into play.  Brands encourage signaling and respond with their own, in addition to initiating contact and anticipating response.
• Metafilter: Content generated via participation is harvested and analyzed for relevance, providing feedback to the organization which can be used to improve the nature and quality of participation going forward.

Workforce Collaboration

Social business renews focus on improving an organization from the inside out. At its core, a workforce needs to collaborate and coordinate efforts to effectively meet business goals.   Employees benefit from evolved technology in the form of robust personal applications, networks, and devices, allowing for constant connection and more synchronous communication.  Increased connectivity allows better management and coordination of distributed teams, whether around the country or around the globe.  At the enterprise level, cloud computing allows companies to create collaboration platforms that support business activities with more flexibility than standalone legacy applications.

Even the most participation-minded workforce must overcome legacy structures to take advantage of enabling innovations.  Organizationally, managers reinforce functional and operational silos to retain control of fiefdoms that align with rapidly dying business models.  Technology supports disparate objectives within these silos, resulting in a landscape of point solutions – instead of a unified platform – when viewed at a company-wide level.  However, these issues are only exacerbated by incentive structures that motivate individuals to maximize near-sighted goals, only loosely connected to greater business objectives.

Social Business Design For Workforce Collaboration

Social Business Design provides a framework to help companies create value from workforce collaboration. Applying the archetypes to core issues exposes clear opportunities for value capture:

• Ecosystem: The definition of a company’s workforce requires an expanded perspective of its constituent base beyond employees in a business unit or division. Besides breaking down internal silos, corporate networks must incorporate previously external nodes as contributing participants as well.  The technology required to support this network must operate as a platform delivering what is necessary and relevant for nodes to perform and progress towards business goals.
• Hivemind: The social calibration of the company’s workforce needs to be measured and cultivated. Moreover, the business operates with distributed governance which allows the best ideas to evolve from all corners of the network.
• Dynamic Signal: Communication takes on a new role and happens in social business as work, not just for work. Information like status messages and location updates allow workers to relate to each other and make better decisions more rapidly, with fresh data.
• Metafilter: Content generated via collaboration is harvested and analyzed for relevance, providing feedback to the organization which can be used to improve the nature and quality of collaboration going forward.

Business Partner Optimization

Social business requires rethinking value chain relationships, including connections like suppliers, distribution networks, and vendors/delivery partners.  Terabytes of data are available for companies to exchange, analyze, and act upon, driving new possibilities in business intelligence.  New data sources allow greater depth of understanding, whether via mining internal and external communities with specific business intent or combining sociological and psychological principles with technology.  Operations have always been managed for efficiency and social business requires no less, albeit accountability at a system level.

For most companies, the business partner landscape unfolds as a tension-filled competitive environment.  Different departments often interact with the same customer, prospect, or partner, pursuing disconnected corporate goals.  Most strategies boil partnerships down into simple us-versus-them relationships which prevent genuine collaboration and dampen long-term system-improving results.  Moreover, in the case of data more doesn’t always mean better and the existing people and processes in many businesses struggle to filter and stay on top of information overload.

Social Business Design For Business Partner Optimization

Social Business Design provides a framework to help companies create value from business partner optimization. Applying the archetypes to core issues exposes clear opportunities for value capture:

• Ecosystem: Evolving the competitive nature of value chain relationships into a jointly-held system perspective will help optimize outcomes for all involved.  Alliances move from defined supplier relationships to a dynamic network of business partners. Value creators are encouraged to innovate within the network to create value.
• Hivemind: A social calibration of company and partners leads to higher overall returns.  Business partners operate in a state of ready collaboration to respond more quickly to new opportunities and challenges, and with greater resources.
• Dynamic Signal: Data can be exchanged with intent that signals direction (albeit legally), allowing partner ecosystems to react rapidly to capitalize on opportunity.  Signals prepare systems and resources to align and respond quickly to changing market conditions.
• Metafilter: Content generated via partnership is harvested and analyzed for relevance, providing feedback to the organization which can be used to optimize the nature and quality of relationships going forward.