The holiday craziness is well behind us, but before we get too far into 2012 I want to highlight some of last year’s best work from Dachis Group’s Information Design Team. The projects include apps, maps, videos, and more.

The truth is that we do a lot of amazing, internally-focused work that can’t be shown publicly — this is just a taste of the stuff that’s not super top secret. And you’ll notice that the work here might not always look like what you’d expect to see. That’s because we believe that it’s not just clarity and good design that helps people understand data and other complex information — you also need good old-fashioned storytelling. It pulls people in and helps them connect and care.

With that said I present to you a few highlights from 2011…

The Economist: World in Figures 2011 mobile app

The World in Figures iPhone app puts essential data and unexpected knowledge in your pocket, with statistics on more than 190 countries around the world. Based on The Economist‘s annual book, Pocket World in Figures,” the app lets you view and compare world statistics on topics from transport to tourism and commodities to cinema. You can access important socioeconomic data from anywhere or just let your mind wander with trivia about innovation, debt, and divorce rates.

Iowa, Did You Know?

This was our third collaboration (the others are here and here) with Dr. Scott McLeod, who wanted us to create a video that would get the 2,000 attendees talking at the 2011 School Administrators of Iowa conference. The purpose was to highlight the struggles that Iowa schools face keeping up in today’s global environment. The video emphasizes the magnitude of the challenge, the need for Iowans to support the changes that schools must make if their learners are to be career-, college-, and citizenship-ready, and the imperative to do this quickly.

Kronos: Women in the Workforce

Another in a series of powerful video collaborations with Kronos, the workforce management company. The video was created in honor of International Women’s Day (the 8th of March) and the purpose was to provide a look at some of the incredible contributions that women have made over the years, and to celebrate their impact on today’s workforce. This was the first time one of our videos was connected to specific day, which drove more immediate views.

IHG: Business Reputation and Responsibility

BRR is the legal and risk management part of InterContinental Hotels Group. They asked us to create an entertaining intro video to help employees better understand who they are and how they champion IHG’s reputation, brands, guests, and employees. Despite the serious subject (and the department’s name), the playful spy theme and soundtrack helps present the team as fun and approachable way. This release followed a previous video that highlighted IHG’s efforts to be environmentally responsible.

Data Quality Campaign: Data is Power

This video was created for The Data Quality Campaign (DQC), a national, collaborative effort to encourage and support state policymakers to improve the availability and use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement.

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.

Updating Digital Strategy For Social Business and Mobile

The long-term ramifications of the Web continue to be felt by most organizations, particularly since the evolution of the Internet has not only picked up pace, it’s now profoundly situated in the way society and culture works today. Businesses do increasingly feel the need to catch up and reconcile themselves with these broad changes. Conscious attempts at this include formulating a comprehensive view of what digital strategy means today and this is what we’ll explore in some detail here.

Though recent global trends such as social media and next-generation mobile have both appeared over the last five years, an eternity in the online world, most businesses are still only engaging peripherally in these areas. They are the proverbial digital immigrants often significantly behind the curve compared to their Web native counterparts. While most companies have started using social media or providing mobile experiences, the efforts are often experimental and too-often poorly integrated with their older channels such as Web presence, traditional marketing, e-mail, etc. to be truly effective or transformative to their organization.

The good news is that it’s abundantly clear that companies clearly perceive the need to change, even if they are experiencing continuing trouble in deciding on how best to proceed. For example, a new and more detailed breakdown of Jive’s recent social business survey shows that while three quarters of senior executives believe social media is of major importance to their business right now, only 27% think it’s a top strategic priority. However, as I recently explored in detail, there has already been a tectonic shift in the way the world communicates and engages. Traditional channels are declining rapidly in effectiveness, while new channels with entirely new sensibilities and modes of behavior are replacing them.

We also should not forget that the shift to social business is far more than just a channel switch for the world population. Along with it comes a global behavior change in how the people engage with each other. This discussion holds true to a lesser extent of next-gen mobility as well. More importantly, while social business and mobility are sometimes perceived separately, a recent report on mobility by Forrester’s TJ Keitt, explains why they are so deeply connected and belong together, technology strategists “must now must have a mobile-first mindset when designing workplace policies.”

Crafting The Big Picture

As I alluded to above, a major question I’ve been getting from senior executives quite consistently recently is how these changes relate to the existing digital strategies they’ve been crafting and refining over the years. What they really want to know is if the strategic application of social media and next-gen mobility can be smoothly incorporated or otherwise slipstreamed into what they’re doing today. The short answer is that yes, there is clear overlap and connectedness in this space. But the less happy news is that that successful admission requires much deeper rethinking of the way the business operates, particularly the timeless issues of control, trust, and risk. This is part of the impedance I referred to earlier and is much harder for organizations to work through, which is why many have done so only partially. Consequently, much social business and next-gen mobility consists of “paving the cowpath” instead of getting down to the difficult yet rewarding work of transformation the organization to new modes of operation. Fortunately, part of the solution lies in clearly and explicitly connecting your digital strategy with social business and next-gen mobility instead of implementing it side-by-side or in a vacuum. Of course, it’s usually easier said than done.

We should not forget that most digital strategies are reflections of the parts of the business that were involved in created them. Typically such initiatives are medium to long-term planning tools for marketing or customer relationship management (CRM) departments. Sometimes they are more B2B, Web presence, or e-commerce focused. But whatever their primary goal, the digital strategy picture of today’s business landscape must be complex, nuanced, and filled with a great many (and still growing) critical activities that must be addressed to remain relevant in the marketplace.

Depicted above is an up-to-date representation of the major moving parts of a modern digital strategy, including how social business and next-gen mobility relate. It is not exhaustive but I believe it does successfully connect the main elements of Web strategy to the two major new components that most companies have now added to their operational priority lists in the last two years. Though every company’s digital strategy will vary, there are typically components of social business and mobile that aren’t part of a digital strategy proper yet are a pre-requisite for success. The level of appropriate cross-over is largely up to organizations to decide and prioritize for themselves. I should note that the view of digital strategy shown here holds fairly true for corporations, government, and non-government organizations and indeed, for most entities large and small. Note that this view does not include management, budgeting, policy, or governance functions, which are separate from this functional view of digital strategy.

The Elements of Digital Strategy

Exploring the visual conception of digital strategy above, here is a brief tour through the various elements and how they are connected to and reinforce each other. These explanations are neither complete or sophisticated enough to use as their own basis. For that, you’ll need to delve into the subjects themselves and map your own requirements onto them. When possible, I’m provided supporting links and explanations to assist in this.

The list below travels roughly clockwise around the digital strategy visual above starting with social media marketing:

• Social Media Marketing. One of the earliest areas of focus in social business, social media marketing remains a major strategic focus in most organizations and will be for some time. Covering an enormous amount of territory, social media marketing is typically the easiest and least risky to start with and is increasingly affecting all areas of digital strategy. Consequently, social media marketing is farthest along in capability in many organization skill levels, capability development in areas such as community management, tool selection, and so on. One of the biggest challenges in this area remains the impedance between push marketing and engagement marketing. In general, simply copying push marketing techniques into social media channels doesn’t work well. The best results come from strategically partnering with the marketplace to jointly co-create the the desired outcomes and network effects. Social media marketing is now near the end of its beginning, and a lot has been learned about how to unlock real ROI with it.
• Demand Generation. A relatively new aspect of digital marketing, demand generation consists of targeted digital awareness efforts to drive an understanding and interest in a product or service. Most frequently used in business to business, public sector, and longer term business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, demand generation involves multiple areas of marketing. It has been described as the fusion of marketing and sales into a holistic effort using sophisticated support tools that combine data management and intelligence to reach strategic goals. Effective social business integration has also been appearing recently in demand generation platforms like Eloqua.
• Search Engine Optimization. Long a part of Web strategy, SEO is as important as ever as the proliferation of content accelerates. With pace of content creation increasing, the vast majority of it being user generated, SEO is the intentional treatment of Web markup to ensure that content, traditional and social media both, are readily discoverable. SEO is important both externally as well as internally to an organization and remains a key aspect of digital strategy, though internal implementation is typically neglected to the extent that productivity and efficiency suffers in many organizations making it difficult to locate information on intranets. SEO itself continues to evolve and expand as video, speech recognition (for audio), semantic, and social search engine optimization have entered the picture.
• Search Engine Marketing. Tightly coupled with SEO capabilities, SEM is the marketing aspect of SEO to promote Web sites and content to increase their visibility for sales and branding purposes.
• Social Networking Services (SNS) Apps. Applications embedded into social networks have become particularly significant as engagement mechanisms via the co-location of a convenient and potent user experience within the social networking experience. By tapping into users’ activity streams and social graphs, social networking applications have both the immediacy and full social context of their users to create a high-impact and shared social experience. SNS apps run the gamut of purposes including informational, productivity, gaming, and marketing. Most popular in the consumer world, where market leader Facebook has hundreds of thousands of available apps, social apps are now beginning to move seriously into the enterprise as well.
• Online Advertising. While all businesses must have an online advertising strategy, I find that it is underaddressed in all but the most sophisticated Web industry firms where arbitrage and adaptive ad strategy is commonplace. For example, Amazon allows competitive ads on their own product pages, allowing them to generate revenue on the momentary visitor engagement, even if the customer decide to purchase a product elsewhere. Advertising now goes well beyond text ads into sophisticated user experiences that leverage rich media, social media, cross-platform experiences, contests, co-creation, and carefully designed demand generation funnels.
• Consumer Social Media. The early world of consumer social media consisting of blogs, wikis, and simple social networks has exploded into a sophisticated world of global social networks, mobile applications, and aggregation involving the majority of the developed world population. Social business strategy connects to this complex landscape by exploring the many motivations and options in engaging with consumer social media to create better business outcomes. I find that many strategists are still not aware that most of the world now uses social media for communication and collaboration, over virtually all other forms of human interaction. Thus, if your organization is looking at engaging the marketplace, consumer social media is at the top of the list even while legacy channels still need to exist for continuity and consistency, while they still bring value.
• Social CRM. Customer relationship management has been moving into the social sphere for several years now, though the practice is still early in the maturity stages. CRM itself covers the gamut from sales, marketing, customer services, and technical support, and each one of these aspects can benefit from social media. Pre-sales Facebook engagement, online support communities, and crowdsourced technical support are typical uses of Social CRM, with world class examples being GetSatisfaction and Fixya, respectively, have shown that CRM costs can be significant reduced while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Customer Communities. A while back I noted that the best customer communities were often created by customers themselves, instead of by the companies whose products or services they care about. Intentionally creating a successful community is still more of an art form than science, yet some companies have been very successful at it, most notably SAP. Customer communities, which started as little more than online discussion forums, have gone on to become a key differentiator in the way that businesses engage with the marketplace. In this new era, the traditional static corporate Web site is usually a marginalized brochure, with the more meaningful and productive aspects of customer engagement taking place in the structured and unstructured activities of online communities.
• Community Management. A vital yet growing aspect of digital strategy, community management provides the needed oversight, moderation, and support that social media needs to be successful and sustainable long-term. Often informal, and increasingly recognized as a key function, community management has been gaining respect as a indispensable capability of modern digital experiences that can assure higher levels of success.
• Affiliate Portals and Communities. These days I hear from a lot of companies that no longer have the staff to reach out to and directly support thousands of business partners and affiliates. These can be everything from supporting broker networks and franchisees to managing suppliers and licensees. Private label communities and social networks have become a prime tool in servicing these constituencies with a fraction of the staff, yet frequently lead to higher levels of awareness, engagement, service, and transaction levels than before.
• Social Supply Chains and Open APIs. While supply chain management has been one of the last bastions of traditional business to be affected by social media, that is beginning to change. The most recent significant case study is Teva Pharmaceuticals, which reported a manufacturing cycle time reduction of 40% as well as reducing supplier lead time by up to 60% by applying social software to communication challenges. The other related — and just as big — story is open supply chains, typically via open APIs and supported through developer communities, which has lead to a major shake-up in the way business partnerships are digitally delivered.
• Innovation Management and Crowdsourcing. Peer-production of ideas and work has become an increasingly popular topic as the tools and techniques have matured. Idea management tools using social collaboration, such as Spigit, and crowdsourcing platforms like Crowdspring or Mechanical Turk have led to a small and steadily growing revolution in the way business gets done. I’ve explored the growth of this topic in detail before, but it’s clear it’s just ramping up as co-creation increasingly becomes the norm in the way innovation and work output is achieved today.
• Workforce Collaboration. Also known as Enterprise 2.0, internal social media has become a very popular topic in the enterprise these days. The way social media is entering organizations varies widely and will often form an initial beachhead in social content management, enterprise social networks, even (and more recently), unified communications. While interest in social intranets in particular is currently on the upswing, the business results are in from many different surveys and case studies: Information can be found faster, knowledge is retained better, and employees are more efficient and productive when there is widespread social collaboration.
• Web Presence. One of the earlier elements of Web strategy, Web presence now must take into account rich media, CRM, mobility, e-commerce, and more. Often Web presence is put into a silo next to, rather than integrated with, newer digital capabilities since the platforms and tools upon which it is based is either aging or technologically incapable of moving into the present. Web presence remains an important part of digital strategy, but its relevance is steadily being eroded by newer forms of engagement, particularly social media. Proactive firms will find ways to reconcile newer digital strategy elements with what’s becoming a legacy channel for a growing number of organizations.
• Microsites. The darling of targeted engagement a few years back, microsites remain a popular way to narrowcast online to a target audience or community to increase relevance, deepen reach, and foster engagement. Social microsites have become the next generation of microsite and it can be argued that Facebook pages themselves have become the ultimate microsite platform.
• E-commerce. The long and steady growth of e-commerce has continued unabated and is on pace to grow into a quarter trillion dollar business in the U.S. alone by 2014. The latest developments include the “Grouponing” phenomenon of connecting discount e-commerce to local business, mobile e-commerce and payment systems, as well as social SEO (now the leader in driving inbound leads) and gaming. Doing businesses online is a booming business, but new entrants will need to use existing distribution networks to catch up while deeply incorporating mobile and social into their efforts.
• Influencer Engagement. The premise here is that it’s more scalable and easier to reach influencers directly and take advantage of the audiences they’ve created for themselves, rather than reproduce their respective engagement level. While still an important part of any digital marketing strategy, influencer engagement remains largely a bespoke activity while the tools for doing it more scalably are still in their infancy.
• Analytics and Business Intelligence. Along with Big Data, analytics and business intelligence across the digital spectrum is one of the hot spaces in the industry right now for its promise to derive deep insights and harvest value from the endless streams of social activity taking place today. It’s one of the major reasons we developed and recently launched our Social Business Index and why other companies, such as Salesforce with their Radian6 acquisition, have been focusing their attention on it as well. The premise here is that companies that can make sense of combined behavior of their workers, customers, and partners and make meaningful use of their collective intelligence will have a real competitive advantage.
• Digital Branding. Branding remains an essential component of digital strategy, even while brands themselves are becoming ever more directly influenced by their customers. The rise in customer-driven marketing and advertising is only matched these days by related branding efforts, which despite cautionary notes to retain essential control, have already been conducted by some of the world’s largest and most influential companies including Ford, Kraft, and LG.
• E-mail Campaigns. While e-mail is finally in decline in terms of usage, it remains an integral part of digital strategy for the foreseeable future. With the rise of spam and social networks, e-mail is no longer the particularly appealing channel it once was yet it’s still an important touchpoint for CRM and to a lesser extent marketing.
• Location Services. Location-awareness consist of GPS, compass, RFID and other sensors in mobile devices to drive marketing, sales, CRM, and operations. Still in its early stages for most businesses, location-awareness can drive personalization, useful geographic context, analytics, and usage efficiencies in general for many kinds of applications. Digital strategies should maintain a proactive roadmap for where ambient location information can be incorporated over time to improve the digital user experience along with their supporting capabilities.
• Mobility Platform Support. Businesses are getting serious this year in adding support for iOS and Android platforms for service delivery of internal and external mobile applications. This requires application development capability and operations support as well as matching analytics, branding, advertising, and other related aspects of digital strategy.
• Mobile Content Enablement. Mobility support usually includes updating existing content and layout so that it works well with today’s newer mobile devices. This can be extensively automated and is also generally less challenging than developing entirely new mobile applications, though it is also often less effective. Content enablement for mobile can involve a wide range of activities including converting Flash to HTML 5 friendly formats, reformatting and testing Web forms and applications, and wholesale stylesheet/document repository transformation so that existing information assets are readily usable in popular mobile form factors.
• Consumer and Customer Mobile Apps. The barriers to delivering high quality user experience continue to drop as the cost of high quality mobile app development falls. There is no avoiding the fact that mobile apps are becoming one of today’s prime customer touchpoints. One of the single most effective ways to engage with someone under 30 is to have your app on the first or second screen of their smart mobile device. Mobile applications are on track to become one of the leading ways to engage in the digital marketplace. In my opinion, virtually all companies should be developing competency in this space and ensuring integration with the rest of their Web strategy.
• Mobile Messaging. SMS and MMS still have some life left in them and indeed remain one of the most popular communication services on the planet. However, they are threatened by new proprietary services such as Apple’s recently announced iMessage service and a growing chorus of independent providers such as Pinger’s popular Textfree app. Despite the technologies long history, businesses are just now beginning to build up real competency in mobile messaging for CRM and marketing (and to a lesser extent co-creation). The coming market fragmentation with major new non-carrier messaging services will likely just be a curve in the road. In general I anticipate that mobile messaging will be even more integrated into new digital touchpoints.
• Mobile Line of Business Apps. The internal business use of mobile apps is growing in leaps and bounds. Most CIOs I speak with these days are now under significant pressure to deliver existing services via iPads, tablets, and smartphones. While internal app stores are a few years away for most organizations, content and application enablement are now well under way in many companies. Digital strategies typically don’t explore internal apps nearly as much as external, but that may change given the amount of audience blur developing across the channel.
• Mobile Operations. A fair amount of operational competency and infrastructure development must be brought to bear the deploy the full experience of smart mobile in the enterprise. Bandwidth management for video chat is just one example of the headaches that mobile operations makes acute. Investment in all manner of smart mobile skills is another key area required to fully capitalize on what is one of the fasted growing segments of computing today. Operational capability is needed to deliver successfully on digital strategy in a timely fashion. Planners should be aware of capability levels and should proactive pursue and support funding to develop this area of their organization.
• Mobile App Stores. App stores are positioned to be the solution delivery conduit for both external and internal mobile applications for the foreseeable future. Digital strategies should plan for this on their roadmaps. While app stores are already the primary acquisition channel today on smart mobile devices, the enterprise itself (as well as the supporting technology) has a long journey to resolve issues around data security, provisioning, and governance.
• Mobile Security. Not part of digital strategy normally, yet impactful on it, mobile security is going to be a hot topic this year and next, particularly on platforms that are less controlled such as Android. Ensuring customers and workers have a safe and effective mobile experience will be a high priority — though sometimes a significant challenge — for those delivering through digital channels in the next few years.
• Content and Document Management. Social media has had a sustained and continuing impact on content and document management, to the extent that many of the latest iterations of these tools are major social platforms in their own right (such as Drupal). While this is true to a lesser extent in the enterprise, reconciling the current proliferation of social media, content management, and document management platforms, many which also connect to the public and have digital strategy implications, is one of the bigger challenges for IT departments right now.
• Intranet Strategy. Intranet strategy, a key aspect of social business, is usually not part of digital strategy proper but ends up being intertwined in it as the boundary blur continues to grow across worker to marketplace touchpoints. I’ve depicted the progression of intranets as one where social media is inevitably a key aspect, de facto or otherwise. Unfortunately, I expect that there will continue to be only a mild integration between digital strategy and intranet strategy given the diversity of their stakeholders.
• Unified Communication. Social business delivery will increasingly happen in unified communications channels, even if they often aren’t the monolithic software and infrastructure suites that were gaining some traction a few years ago. Unified communications is often moving inside social networks these days rather than the other way around (witness Skype integration with Facebook as just one example), though the jury is still out on IBM and Cisco’s offerings which are growing increasingly strong.
• Online Video and Podcasting. Rich media remains an important and significant part of digital strategy and social media (when it’s user generated.) However, the growth areas are in multipoint video chat, video archival and search, mobile video (both recorded and live broadcast), and of course, sharing capabilities. Integration of video into Web experience and applications is also increasingly popular and the case is increasingly being made that it’s a productivity driver as well. Digital strategies that treat video as a driver of network effect and accumulated value growth will have the largest long-term ROI.

Those organizations that take the time to coherently plan their digital strategies, as long as they are agile and flexible in keeping them updated, revised, and connected to ground truth, will do far better than those that only adopt approaches ad hoc and hope for the best.

For most however, digital strategy planning can be one of the most rewarding and beneficial tools in helping organizations rethink what they are doing in order to adapt to the seemingly onrushing future. Without appropriate care, however, they can also be an unrealistic albatross without deep connection to internal stakeholders and change champions that are effective in turning vision into reality. I urge you to look at the recent work on emergent strategy and business architecture as well as an updated view of IT consumerization to help you in your planning and create the best result.

You may also find our new Social Business CIO Shortlist as well as the Social Business Landscape as useful cross-checking aids.

1. Be real

The premise is simple: don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. A community manager should be selected because they’re a good fit for the community. Don’t select a community manager simply because they have community management or social media experience; make sure they also have a background that is relevant to the community or your brand. The community can tell if you’re insincere or clueless, and you run the threat of losing their trust.

Additionally, give your personality a chance to shine through. Community managers who are overly dry or technical might as well be robots. Community members appreciate the presence of a genuine personality with whom they feel a connection.

2. Listen

A good community manager makes time to check in on the community at least once a day. Depending upon the amount of activity on each community hub, you may want to check in three to five times a day. Reply to any questions people have asked, and let them know that you’re there for them.

Genuine interaction is a must. Take time to really read and understand what your community members need. Don’t try to make their questions fit into a formulaic category that can easily be answered with a stock response. This will frustrate them and make you lose credibility.

3. Share

When checking in, a community manager should post interesting material and encourage conversation in the community. Don’t feel like your posts have to strictly adhere to the theme of your community; feel free to post a funny video or cute picture when you see fit.

Encourage your community to share, too. When you post, always include a call to action to encourage responses. If you post a video of a puppy stuck on its back, ask your community members to share their favorite puppy videos in the comments. This creates a dynamic of mutual respect and open sharing, and keeps your community members interested.

4. Watch out for your friends

Every good community manager wears the hat of a moderator at some point in time. When a community member comes to you with an issue, do your best to respond and resolve it within one day. If a flame war erupts within your community, step in and take the necessary steps to restore peace. Moderation is an important part of community management, and your community will thank you for the support.

5. Pitch in during times of crisis

When there is unplanned downtime or unexpected technical difficulties, a community manager should do all they can to guide the community through the rough patch. It’s always a good idea to have a crisis response plan in place before it is needed so you can promptly escalate the issue up the proper chain of command and provide a swift resolution.

Radio silence from a community manager during times of uncertainty can lead to panic and frustration from community members. If possible, contact your community members via alternate methods such as email or other unaffected social outlets. If there is planned downtime on the horizon, make sure your community is aware of it at least two weeks in advance.

6. Give your friends space

There’s such a thing as oversharing in a community. Good community managers make sure to avoid posting too often or dominating conversations. Doing so will lead your community members to ignore you or even leave the community.

A good rule of thumb is to not post more than three times a day. Additionally, allow your community members to interact with one another and create organic conversations around a central topic. Quite often, community members’ questions are answered by other members before you get a chance to respond. This builds a strong community based on mutual respect, and makes the community manager’s job a lot more pleasant.

My friend and industry colleague Rachel Happe wrote recently about something she calls A Vision for the Social Organization. In this, she explores the current situation in companies today and what a social organization of the very near future might look like. Reading over this, I was struck both by the clarity of the vision and by how far off many organizations are from closing the gap between what’s now possible in terms of performance improvement and what they can deliver on any time soon. It underscores an essential point that Andrew McAfee has been making for a while now, namely that information technology is a strategic force multiplier that is inexorably “driving the leaders and the laggards farther apart” in today’s business landscape. Like previous generations of IT, this is true of social business as it was once with both the early Internet and personal computing.

At the executive level, the clarion call is here. Deloitte’s new study on using social software for improved business performance has made bold pronouncements for business leaders of today’s organizations, namely that social business offers “unique capabilities to address current operating challenges and improve operating metrics”, but that skeptics will be among the very last to reap them, if they ever do. This observation and many others in top management and business circles is creating the drive to better prepare for social business.

Currently, I see a confluence of core issues holding back executive teams as they attempt to determine what kind of focus on social business they need to have. Though we’re now years into the tactical adoption of enterprise social media, we’re only now seeing widespread strategic adoption that will have real effect on competitive position and long-term financial health and growth of a business. The good news for those long in these trenches is that the social business imperative is indeed being felt by most senior business leaders these days, and there is readiness to invest and make it a priority. But the way forward is too unclear for many still.

From what I’ve seen, the issues, and what you can do about them, are as follows.

Organizing for Social Business: The Top Executive Issues

1. What do new social business models actually look like and how to they apply to our business? Because most traditional organizations tend not to have deep digital roots or connections with emerging technology, there is often a fairly limited understanding of how enterprise social media has impact and could strategically affect the business. Frankly, one cause of this is because internal social business is very closely related but not quite the same as consumer social media. This means there are fewer visible exemplars to point to outside the organization and it requires the ability to adapt outside ideas to the inside of the organization. Consequently, while notions of an ‘enterprise Facebook’ can be elegant shorthand for the first step towards a more effective and better performing organization, it’s too hard for those unfamiliar with the tools and approaches of social business to extrapolate beyond this and clearly understand the bigger opportunities. Fortunately, at this point, there are strong examples in just about every part of the business spectrum to point to, whether that is your industry, or a specific function like workforce collaboration or innovation management. The hardest part about social business is changing your thinking and I encourage to refer to earlier explorations of the fundamentals such as Communicating the Value of Social Business and Social Business: A Case For Disruptive Transformation.
2. Is there a way to determine which social business approaches will have the largest benefits with lowest risk? This is the part where demands are made for case studies, industry comparisons, and executive surveys, and other data to support what is working for other organizations, as opposed to self-determination of what’s best. In reality, the companies that are already getting significant rewards today (and there are quite a few now) aren’t eager to report how they achieved them to their competition. In the meantime, executives will frequently wait until they have enough information to have high confidence in their social business direction. While strategic analysis and careful research can certainly help address this issue, there is little replacement for actually developing capability and discovering how to create value through real-world application in your own business. Yet this also isn’t a recipe for enterprise-wide change. I don’t advocate half-hearted, poorly resourced experiments (see our debate here about failing fast) nor will bet-the-farm, all-or-nothing approaches be acceptable to businesses either. It’s far more likely that supporting and resourcing continuous local change across the organization will result in the most sustained and long-term effect, along with near-term strategic transformation of targeted products and services. For more detailed information, I currently recommend spending some time with The 2.0 Adoption Council, the world’s largest group of firms sharing knowledge and lessons learned on the strategic embrace of social business. Along with this conversation, executives will also want to know the approximate investment required. An estimated cost model for the next budget year for the top social business options is very good to have handy.
3. What are the best tools and technologies for engaging in social business? For companies, and large ones in particular, there is almost inevitably a focus on selecting one social business tool to rule them all. These days, it should be clearer to a growing number of organizations that there just is no one social business tool, just like there is no one IT application. While there are certainly economies of scale and other advantages to a common platform, we are exiting the era of massive application suites and entering an interesting space where social business software will either be 1) true social delivery platforms complete with their own app stores of vertical social software, and/or 2) regular business applications that have forged deep connections to the most popular/relevant consumer and enterprise social networks. Either way, the technology discussion can become a significant management distraction because the technical issues either seem beneath executive purview, there are multiple vociferously competing vendor camps, or the platform issues appear to be beyond the ability for non-technical managers to understand and direct. So paralysis sets in. In fact, it is the organizational, cultural, and behavioral issues of social business transformation that require as just as much attention as the selection of technologies. This is the best place for leaders to focus. It’s also good to keep in mind that the pace of technological change has the potential to overcome any short-term decision on platform. Instead, executives should spend their time preparing for the business part of social business, with attention to technology primarily in terms of whether it will address the capabilities they need to support desired changes.
4. Who should be responsible for realizing social business transformation? This has become one of the most frequent questions I receive: “Where does all of this belong?” There seems to be no natural location in the org chart for social business. Should it be in corporate comms or HR? Or should IT be in charge of it? How about the line of business? Unfortunately, none of these have the combination of organization-wide support capability, expertise in specifically what the business does, and actual experience in social business strategies and tools. I’ve discussed this challenge before in Introducing The Social Business Unit, namely that 1) it’s likely that a new organizational function needs to be created and 2) that social business skills and know-how be driven directly into the broader organization, starting in places where the business is most impacted by external changes in the marketplace. Short answer: Start with an internal social business committee composed of all the stakeholders and spin it off as an internal, independent group when it makes the most sense.
5. How should we reconcile new social business initiatives with [insert existing project or function here] (i.e. intranet, portal, document management, search, HR services, CRM, ERP, supply chain, etc.) One of the biggest obstacles of them all turns out to be that social business will impact existing areas of responsibility and ongoing projects that have deadlines that internal and external customers may be counting on. Decisions and actions that require other strategic decisions to be rethought or undone can have the most chilling effect of all when it comes to driving social business transformation. Analysis paralysis is just one manifestation of this issue. Another is the inevitable power redistribution as fiefdoms and political boundaries are rethought and recast as social business transformation changes the way things work. This can range from how customer care operates and employee hiring takes place to how product innovation and development is realized in a social organization. For this issue, the answers can be tough but often boil down to letting existing projects finish and then reconcile with the social business strategy, while looking for easy opportunities to integrate them earlier. Often, however, the answer is to pause existing investments and move them under growing social business efforts before too much time and resources are spent on outmoded work.

Of course, there are other issues that organization have as well, but I believe this is a useful snapshot of the most common and significant ones that will have to be addressed as organizations plan for their future. I would be very interested in hearing in comments below from those that are encountering their own set of discussions and use this as a starting point to share and work through the fundamental issues the companies are encountering as they begin the strategic voyage to becoming social businesses.

As I struggled to put my iPhone down Sunday night and go to bed after President Obama’s speech, I reflected on how involved I felt on a global scale as each situation unfolded. The high level of participation is directly tied to our world filled with always-on connectivity and participatory mediums. With someone in London live streaming their view of Westminster Abbey and @reallyvirtual’s moment-by-moment account of helicopters landing in Abbottabad, I didn’t have to leave Austin, Texas to share in the experiences.

When news breaks, what would have been shared among just a few, years ago is now a real-time, multi-way — forget ‘two-way’ — conversation that spans the globe. Our processing of news and events such as these now involves participation in multiple layers of communication and sharing across social platforms.

So, what do a wedding and a death mean for your business?
Let’s recap last week’s major happenings for a moment so that you can use the insights to consider how traditional communication flows in your business today.

The Royal Wedding
The public had unprecedented access leading up to, during and after the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton. And we took full advantage of it whether it was an early morning watch party (my co-workers attended this one in Austin), a street party, tea with Oprah that afternoon or host of other offline and online activities.

Source: The Telegraph

The connective tissue that made all of this possible was social media. While I did wake up early to watch Barbara Walter’s live coverage and stay up late that evening watching my recorded Oprah and Entertainment Tonight (ET) wedding specials, it was the participation with friends and strangers in-between that cemented my hand in the discussion of this historic event.

Source: Facebook (post by a friend)

Osama Bin Laden’s Death
The ability to discuss and share is especially impactful after an announcement like the death of the most-wanted terrorist of our time. The sequence of events at my house last night played out as follows:

• Several friends alerted me via text message after the leak at 9:45 p.m.
• I checked Twitter on my phone to confirm the news.
• Immediately turned on CNN.
• Talked to family members on the phone (wishing I wasn’t on Verizon with the iPhone 4 so that I could check Twitter and Facebook while chatting).
• Anxiously awaited the President’s speech.
• Tweeted during the end of the speech after 11 p.m.
• Checked back with friends and family via a couple phone calls before bed.
• Prolonged turning out the light to continue following the conversation on news sites (local and national), Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Source: Twitter

Consider how the information flow might change to more effectively serve today’s connected employees and consumers
The process around consumption of major news events sheds light on the process that many businesses are struggling to define both internally and externally. While there’s no doubting this massive shift in process consumption, most organizations aren’t sure how to optimize their own communications ecosystems. In that regard, the information flow and value exchange during large events such as these is worth a closer look. Perhaps it can help businesses define a process to get its own news to move.

Speaking with intention is like writing haiku

Speaking with intention is an acquired skill and unfortunately, at this point in their maturation most companies lack the process and technology to use their official channels effectively.  This capabilities gap ought to result in some awfully soft-spoken companies, however the opposite is often true. Many enterprises take the lack of a structure for their communications as a green light to act like the over-caffeinated guy at a networking event. They talk to everyone, aren’t particularly mindful of tailoring their messages to their audience, don’t listen very well and forget to follow up on all the business cards they collect. It gets messy rather quickly.

This inability to speak with intention exposes enterprises to very real business problems, including:

• Increased Risk: The nature of social communication means that every consumer touchpoint is an opportunity to elevate or tarnish the brand. Unplanned speech lacks the support system of moderation, crisis planning, compliance training and tonal guidance of planned communications.
• Channel Fragmentation: This is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, however organic (as opposed to strategic) channel fragmentation exacerbates the risks outlined above, creates confusion for consumers, and reduces the natural amplification capabilities present in a unified social channel.
• Customer Amnesia: When an enterprise speaks without intention it loses the ability to track what it’s saying. Consumers don’t care which little bit of a massive conglomerate they speak with – the company is one entity as far as they are concerned. If the company forgets what they’ve already said, then it breaks down the vision of the enterprise as a unified entity and harms the consumer experience.

Dachis Group’s clients have faced these problems in the past and while it is difficult to make progress in solving them, there are proven techniques for getting started. Here are a couple ideas to help you in your journey:

• Say less: Temporarily limit the number of official communications channels for your company and the degree to which you participate in those channels. Use your social media policy to imbue implicit structure and restraint in how your official (think Facebook page) and unofficial (general employee participation) social channels function. Think of it like writing a haiku. When every syllable counts, you think that much harder about what you are saying.
• Learn more: Channel the resources you used to spend coming up with stuff to say and instead focus it on understanding what you want to say. Take the time to understand your audience, what they respond to, what your competitors are up to and most importantly – why you are speaking. When you return to a broader engagement scheme, you’ll quickly find that your messaging is more informed and effective in light of your newfound knowledge.
• Invest in systems: Put systems (technical and process-based) in place so that you know whom you’ve spoken to, what you said, where you said it, when you said it and what your audience said back. These don’t have to be particularly fancy at first. It may amount to a list of social handles that your community managers have had servicing experiences with in social channels. Long-term however, enterprises must systematically integrate digital identity into their understanding of, and interactions with, their customers (much of this is often bundled into the broader category of Social CRM).

These steps are just a place to get started and there is a whole lot more to pay attention to – ranging from policy development, to decision rights and from stakeholder integration to technical integration. But if nothing else, start here and give us a call for help when you need it.

Image Credit: Kathy Kimpel (CC) on Flickr

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?

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?