Though their participation and assistance was appreciated, there was a clear need for an official presence in the community. However, we knew that this would not be a simple undertaking. We acknowledged the threat of backlash and carefully crafted our entry strategy to minimize turmoil. As we put our plan into action, five highly effective practices shone through:

1. Start the day on a positive—and influential—note

Without an official morning greeting each day, the tone and attitude of the community can be completely unpredictable. In the case of our project, it was almost assured that the tone would be negative without subtle intervention. Opening each day with a lighthearted greeting and a fun call to action enabled us to announce our presence, engage advocates, align conversation, and put community members in a positive mindset—all in one fell swoop.

2. Set rules and manage expectations

Clear and consistent communication of community guidelines is an absolute must. If a post is removed because it is in violation of guidelines, follow up and explain why the action was taken. Also, if the community does not have 24-hour management, it is important to communicate the parameters for working hours and response times. This prevents community members from feeling ignored if they post after hours. Eventually the community members will learn how to operate within a structured environment.

3. Establish credibility

A sudden brand presence within a community that has long been dominated by members can be jarring. Don’t be alarmed if a user’s first instinct is to disregard your opinion and look to others for affirmation. Building trust and credibility takes time, but with consistent participation and genuine interactions, it will surely happen.

4. Distinguish community opinion from official/brand response

Highly engaged community members often beat even the best community managers to respond. While this level of engagement is great, it often breeds incorrect information. Consistent brand messaging and presence teaches community members the community manager is the official word, even if it is contrary to responses from other members.

5. Nurture advocates

Lastly, pay tribute to the highly engaged community members who established themselves as experts prior to your arrival. Though there’s a new boss in town, their legacy is not forgotten! By acknowledging their efforts, the advocates know that their assistance is appreciated. If they agree to play nicely and provide respectful assistance to community members, there is no reason for them to stop doing what they’ve always done.

When the time comes to establish an official presence in your community, don’t take it lightly. This undertaking necessitates professional guidance and a wrong move can quickly turn the community against you. These five tips will help pave the way, but take time to make them your own based upon your community observations. Make special note of who your customers are, how they use social technologies, and what they expect from the brand and your overall community participation. Your level of consideration directly affects your success. Now get out there and claim your conch!

The Likes To Loves Tour continues through October 19 – you can see the real-time discussion on Twitter by searching for #L2LTour.

Technology of any kind isn’t very useful to us unless it’s put to work. This is where one of the most interesting new parts of the social media landscape has been forming, namely in the new field of social business intelligence. This is the discipline of monitoring the whole of the social media world while continuously deriving insight from the aspects of it that matter to you, strategically or tactically, depending on your needs. I say aspects instead of conversations, because while analytics will give us useful metrics, it’s only until we apply the lens of business intelligence to the data itself can we clearly see the deeper and larger scale implications for our businesses.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of blur between social analytics and social business intelligence. They’re both relatively nascent fields that have plenty of overlap. So where social analytics is about the measurement and data mining of the social universe for any reason, social business intelligence is concerned with a more holistic process aimed at specific business outcomes, depicted conceptually in the visual below.

To be sure, there are many different flavors of social business intelligence just as there are many reasons why organizations will want to create business processes around the feedback loop that forms. Currently, many of the processes involved are manual and ad hoc as the industry has felt its way forward and learned how to engage more meaningfully with social media. A few companies on the leading edge have increasingly formal social business intelligence processes based on sets of capabilities they’ve acquired or built. Other firms have hardly any technology at all, other than perhaps some reports and spreadsheets.

They are all seeking the same thing however: To pinpoint the opportunities and identify the events that matter most to them so they can engage. The actual response to social business intelligence insights will vary entirely based on what is learned. It can be strategic and affect how the companies evolves its products and services or the way it engages in entirely new and innovative ways with customers. Or just as likely, it’s on-the-ground insight that drives individual interaction or collaboration with prospects, customers, business partners, and others whose current and past activities social media have been identified as important.

Developing your social business intelligence capability will be a journey that will have stages, like any other process of development. For most organizations, it’s just a set of experiments at the moment. But over time, with hard-won lessons learned, it will become more formal and institutionalized. Usually too soon, the question of centralization will come up, since it’s often one of the experiments in a particular corner of the organization or another that will have significant success. It almost certainly will be asked if it makes sense to share this best practice and locate it in the social business unit or other centralized social media management capability. For now, encouraging decentralized experimentation is more important than achieved the economies of scale, since local successes are rarely likely to meet the whole organization’s needs. What’s most important is making as many discoveries as possible about what works and what doesn’t.

Right now we are tracking a rapidly growing and expanding set of providers of social business intelligence. Products like Radian6, Kontagent, and SAS Social Media Analytics are just three examples out of many of social analytics tools that also provide some level of deeper social business intelligence features. Over the next few years, there will be numerous entrants into this space, as well as additions to existing social media services, as the industry as a whole learns the ways that companies can turn their social engagement with the world into real opportunity and value.

Often starting as a secondary requirement of early social media monitoring and listening efforts, for now, these are the leading drivers behind social business intelligence capabilities:

Drivers of Social Business Intelligence

• Marketing Optimization. Marketing has long been an early adopter of social media, and it’s no different with social business intelligence. Now instead of reports and dashboards that merely show the what, marketers can find out the why. With social business intelligence, companies can craft much more detailed yet fully integrated qualitative pictures of the inbound funnel, identify why engagement strategies are working or not, and organize systematic, yet mass-customized responses in scale.
• Capturing Ideas and Unmet Needs. Going beyond the trend analysis of analytics allows the processing and isolation of the deeper implications of social media activity. Social business intelligence can capture innovation, new ideas from the marketplace, identify customer wants and desires, and identify the gaps in your organization’s services.
• Situational Awareness. Identifying and tracking the top trends, understanding when critical situations arise to protect customer experience or brand, and much more. Going well beyond low-level analytics, social business intelligence can help make sense of more data than any manual or raw analytic process ever could.
• Customer Care Opportunities. Fully empowering Social CRM, social business intelligence can augment the interaction with customers in social media by improving the triage, prioritization, and resolution process of customer care.
• Sentiment Analysis. While social analytics can provide some basic insight into a customer’s state of mind, only more sophisticated methods can semantically process and assess the actual meaning of the social media conversations involving your company or its products in order to derive actionable insight.

As I pointed out recently, the focus of your social business intelligence efforts will be rooted deeply in business-specific motivations, thus these are just a small sample of the ways organizations will employ the capability. To give you a better sense of the possibilities I will explore specific examples of companies employing the strategies above successfully in upcoming posts.

What does all this mean for you now? In my opinion, it’s virtually certain at this point that social business intelligence will become a vital component of the way that companies derive bottom-line benefits from social media including revenue growth, innovation, cost reduction, and more successful line-of-business operations. So connect to the world, start your experiments, and start learning how to make it work for you.

One of the biggest challenges these efforts face, whether they are internal or external, is that engagement via social media is generally perceived as a voluntary activity. As in, workers can collaborate and customers can choose to interact with a business through older channels that are often more familiar and better supported by the organization itself. Or they can engage through social channels. For people to choose the social path of engagement as the most suitable one, there need to be motivations and incentives that are aligned with that path.

As companies seek to ensure the highest level of success with their social business efforts, I am seeing that they want a proven, reliable way to drive adoption of their social business strategy, whether it’s an Enterprise 2.0 initiative, a social media marketing program, or Social CRM effort. But social media is not as deterministic and controllable as the channels that have come before it. It’s one of the reasons I say that adoption of social media can only be co-created. It is as much up to the those engaging to create value, sustain engagement, and build community as it is to those that sponsor them. You can’t own a community like you can buy software or a marketing campaign, social business is a two-way street like nothing quite like it. This makes adoption of social business a very different creature from the way businesses used to engage before.

Fortunately, after over half-a-decade of experience in scale, we can see the broad outlines of adoption, which have stages that are very different based on the state of maturity and overall rate of social business adoption in the organization. In other words, as much as we might like it, there is no “one size fits all” approach to it. Fortunately, we can organize around these different stages, which fall roughly into four parts given below. Specifically, these are:

Phases of Social Business Adoption

• Early adoption This is the most nascent and delicate state, where there is perhaps only a seed of community and there is no network effect yet or core membership that can help with the essential work of social business building. The goal is to validate the direction, tools, and social business design. This is often called the pilot phase.
• Critical mass adoption This is transforming a successful early adoption phase into broader uptake that is self-sustaining. I’ve previously observed that this critical mass is around 20% of workers, but has been verified as even less.
• Mainstream adoption There is usually a long pause between the first two waves of adoption and late adoption. Early adopters are often very early and the remainder are often represented by those who have challenges in engaging in a different way, for a variety of reasons. Specific steps must be taken to address these adoption issues.
• Sustainable adoption A successful social businesses contains communities of people, their business activities, and supporting tools. They will largely self-organize and grow on their own once you’re well into the critical mass phase and beyond. However, these communities can also decline over time without appropriate care and nurturing. Employees move on, customers decide to leave, your company changes direction. All of these affect the long term health of your communities, and so specific adoption strategies are required for as long as you have a thriving social business environment.

This post is part of a four part series on social business adoption that will explore each of these phases, with early adoption being examined here. For this effort, I’ve contacted over a dozen experienced social business practitioners, tapped into my research, and aggregated the results of numerous case studies. The outcome is what you see here and while it’s probably as definitive as you’ll find, it’s a necessarily limited view of a rapidly moving new field. Also, in the end, what drives adoption best is whatever actually works for your social business project, and what works best for your project often isn’t what’s in the check lists, no matter how good. Social isn’t as predictable or as deterministic as we might like, and that’s the challenge. Of course, it’s also a large part of the opportunity to drive innovative new outcomes you could never otherwise achieve or imagine. So while your mileage may vary somewhat, the adoption strategies presented here can be a very useful jump start of your social business journey.

Recognizing that that although social business is part of a single continuum across workers, business partners, customers, and the marketplace, that internal use of social business and external uses involve participants that have a very different relationships with the organization. Adoption strategies therefore vary the most between these two groups and so they are presented here separately, though there is often significant cross over, particularly in areas like community management and connecting social business activities to relevant business outcomes and bottom-line benefits.

Note that these adoption phases also take place during the journey of becoming a social business in the large and will be directly informed by that journey. Individual social business efforts, and their adoption strategies, should be loosely connected to what the entire organization is doing and “calibrate” to align themselves in the same direction.

Early Adoption Strategies – Internal Social Business (aka Enterprise 2.0)

While the blur between internal and external communities continues to increase, for now most efforts are still separate. Listed beow are the top adoption strategies for external social business efforts. Begin with these but experiment along the way and find the adoption patterns that are unique to your environment, culture, and constraints.

• Establish a clear purpose. Ill-defined and vague social business efforts end up with a similar outcome. As Susan Scrupski, who formed the active and highly engaged Social Business Council (disclaimer: this is a Dachis Group online community), conveyed when I asked her what the single most helpful action she took to foster adoption was this: “We established a clear purpose for the community, combined with fostering a sense of trust and a culture of sharing.” Clearly stated intents and objectives let participants self-select, join in, and find what they are looking for while contributing more of the same.
• Identify and engage adoption champions. Locate and identify unofficial leaders in your target community and get them involved and participating early. They will ultimately do the bulk of the work during the early adoption phase in drawing in participation using the social networks and good reputation.
• Help leadership set the tone. One of the biggest triggers for adoption is when leadership clearly communicates how they’d like workers to participate in social business. While setting a personal example through participation is best, all it takes is direct, regular, and public involvement by several well-respected executives.
• Communicate clear policies for usage (cans and cannots.) Social media policies have come a long way from the 7 page fine print of years gone by to simple and clear directives. Specifically, the lessons learned over the years have distilled to focus on explaining exactly what employees can and can’t do in the most understandable terms. Bonus points for providing effective suggestions on when they should use social business solutions.
• Test social UX usability with workers. Inexplicably, usability of a social business design is too often under-tested or performed as an afterthought despite it being one of the biggest drivers of early adoption. If you don’t have budget set aside for A/B testing (which is proving to be the very effective, though more expensive) and time in the schedule to fix the biggest usability barriers you discover, you will take an adoption hit.
• Use a consumer-style marketing campaign. How you communicate to workers and the tone you use will set stage for the way its perceived, and in the early days perception of everything. It must be credible but it must also be memorable and convey what’s new and provide motivation to join and try it. John Woodworth of 3M Lab Collaboration used this approach successfully: “Employees already have a preferred product. By using market segmentation and a value proposition for each ‘segment,’ we identified what they would need and how they wanted it delivered. A good customer doesn’t just try your product; they buy it often and endorse it. Focus the sales on finding the ‘good customers’ and the best markets.“.
• Strategic community management. Especially early on, the facility of community management is one of the only real assets you have to drive social business transformation and adoption. Rachel Happe, co-founder of the The Community Roundtable and a world authority on community management, notes that “community building is a critical element of social business success and typically organizations cannot get there by deploying social technologies alone. There are a variety of contextual factors that can increase or decrease the ease of building a community but there are also some common best practices“. I’ll note these best practices in this list.
• Connect to business purposes. This seems obvious stated this way, but many look at social business approaches as a horizontal or general purpose communications method more akin to e-mail to IM than a way to improve a specific business activity. Sometimes this is true of course, but the best results often seem to come from those that aimed their social business design at a specific business opportunity. As Lauri Buczek, social media strategist at Intel, recently noted in Mark Fidelman’s Sure Fire Ways To Become A Social Business, “First, identify the business objectives.” Ken Domen, an enterprise collaboration lead at a large enterprise, conveyed to me that finding a “killer app” that solves a particular business problem better than before is a strong adoption technique. For example, Ken finds that IM and calendaring apps, embedded contextually in his social environment, to be particularly effective.
• Proactively share the adoption process. Communities are built by their members, not companies alone. Time after time, as I see particularly effective examples of social business, I see that this is a core value. The more the process is open and members are encouraged and empowered to provide structure, rules of the road, and spread the word, the more ownership, involvement, and productive work results. Experimentation should be encouraged. A leading example is SAP’s million-plus member Community Network (case study) with their SAP Mentor program.

Early Adoption Strategies – External Social Business

As social business scales up and goes external, successful adoption has a new, though often complementary set of requirements. Some of the differences revolve around motivation in that external participants aren’t typically paid to work for the organization like internal participants and so usually have a very different set of reasons they are involved. Other issues that tend to be unique to external social business includes appealing to a much broader demographic and competing with similar communities elsewhere on the Internet.

• Identify and engage influencers. Enlisting those with strong reputations and contacts related to the purpose of your social business effort has long been understood as an effective adoption pattern. Engagement with influencers takes many forms and should be connected to adoption whenever possible early on.
• Use content as a participation seed. At first, there’s little in a new community to draw in initial participation. Rachel Happe says this is one of her top three adoption patterns: “Create a content calendar that provides members with something they value and creates opportunities for them to interact.” Obtaining seed content can be resource-intensive and can require more investment than expected if influencers are not well-engaged early. This should be sustained until at least the critical mass phase of adoption and usually beyond.
• Go to the audience, draw them in. Building a community on a far corner of the Internet makes it hard for new participants to find it. This is one of the reasons that Facebook pages have become so popular, by going directly to where a vast, already social and participative audience is. There are many approaches to this but it can greatly aid adoption when integrated properly.
• Personal engagement from key business stakeholders. Having the presence of company leaders and providing structured access to them by recognized members of the social business ecosystem provides the deep engagement that’s more likely to both increase participation and lead to useful outcomes. SAP’s Community Network does this proactively (see case study link above.)
• Reward the remarkable 1%. By now just about everyone is familiar with the 90-9-1 rule, where 90% are passive browsers, 9% contribute a little, and 1% account for a disproportionate amount of the value created. These are rough numbers for external social business participation. While the specific technographics continues to fluctuate a little as the market evolves, the key to driving adoption is ensuring that your most valuable contributors are incentivized appropriately to contribute, once you identify who they are. While timing and perceptions of conflict of interest can be issues, rewards typically run the gamut from simple recognition to more formal business relationships.
• Proactive community management. Community management continues to make my top list of what helps define a successful, vibrant social business. Rachel Happe includes this in her top three list as well, noting “allocating a full-time community manager that both encourages member activity and keeps the conversation on track.” The biggest misstep I see many social business efforts make is greatly under-resourcing this capability early on. SAP’s Gail Moody-Bird has observed that resources like this “are not a part time job for everyone.“
• Keep it simple. To be usable and effective for the broadest demographic, simplicity in joining, user experience, and conversation are essential to reduce abandonment and maximize the value being exchanged. This is Rachel Happe’s top adoption point as well, “keep the functional environment simple so new members quickly grasp how to participate.“
• Be authentic, don’t overproduce. Over the years, as I’ve collected best practices for online communities, I’ve noticed a common pattern. The fanciest and slickest social business experiences don’t necessarily achieve nearly the uptake as ones that are simple, basic, and straightforward. Though social media marketing aspects of social business can be an exception, excessive polish conveys a sense that too much lipstick is being put on. As John Hagel has talked about a trust paradox and social business, that being truly genuine and letting human realities be exposed is much more likely to sustain adoption and less likely to actively repel participants.
• Employ the “Us First, World Second” strategy. Time and again, when I’ve spoken to social business efforts, they explained how in the early days everyone was on deck in the organization and helped create the seed of participation. I’ve even heard it phrased that at first “it was 90% us and 10% them, and then later it was 90% them and 10% us.” Driving early adoption in this was is successful but unsustainable at a high level for long and must be timed right. “All hands on deck” may be problematic for your organization for various reasons but it’s a powerful tool for early adoption when it can be used.
• Build trust and a culture of sharing. This is one of Susan Scrupski’s adoption lessons and has been repeated by just about everyone I’ve spoke with over the years. It’s not just enough to build trust, the culture must be one where the free exchange of ideas is valued and encouraged, because that’s the observable value that drives innovation, better decisions, and more. Building that culture requires leading by example and rewarding contributors both.

Note that this list cannot be exhaustive and there are literally dozens of techniques large and small that one can attempt to drive adoption of social business. You should also never forget the fundamental cycle of listen, analyze, measure, and respond. However, these cover the more widely used and repeatable techniques that I’ve seen of the many social business efforts that I’ve examined over the years. I’ll be covered the remaining adoption phases in upcoming posts but welcome your feedback to improve and extend this list.

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.

As an organization’s front line leaders in driving, curating and managing conversations about the brand, community managers hold a unique and critical position in social business. Day-in and day-out they are exposed to unedited conversations about every aspect of the company, from its offerings, brand, and customer experience to competitors and the overall public perceptions of trends in the marketplace where the company plays. Unlike other public-facing staff in a business that may only have isolated or limited exposure to customers around a specific need such as sales or support, the community manager is immersed in the endless flow of customer and influencer dialog that has become prevalent on the social web. This puts the community manager in a position to be one of the first to identify leveraged or unexpected outcomes from social business activities as well as identify potential fires while they are still just sparks.

The relatively new role of community manager has become business critical in today’s dynamic business environment.  Those who have begun to establish best practices for interacting daily across an expanse of forums and issues deserve a resounding “thank you” today as we celebrate the second annual Community Manager Appreciation Day.  

Community Management and Social Business

For businesses to extract real, measurable value from a community, the community has to be integrated into the business and the business has to be both willing and able to collaborate with the community. This level of collaboration and integration does not happen on its own. While organic process of community is essential, it’s important for the business to acknowledge that a live person connecting the dots between external and internal audiences improves the experience for both. Most community efforts that fail do so because the community is treated as an island or an initiative off on its own. This approach only frustrates community members who perceive the community and company as one but cannot get an answer about a product or service via the community. It frustrates executives who paid for a community, but have yet to understand the broader impact it has on the business. Bridging corporate and community agendas in a way that satisfies all constituents is key to what a community manager does. It’s new territory to be in the middle and, as Blaise Grimes-Viort puts it, no easy task.

“…you often find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, you are bringing in community opinion to people who often would rather not hear or act on it. On the other, you are trying to maintain an equilibrium within your community, all the while standing by the company line which may not be a publicly agreeable one.  The community might be happy, but the company isn’t, and vice versa. All the while, you are serving two masters with little recognition of your daily actions and successes, and continuous pressure.”

Source: http://blaisegv.com/community-management/5-ways-your-community-manager-is-the-glue-of-your-organisation/, March 2010.

Successful Community Managers Bring Diverse Skills to the Table

As you begin to solidify the role of community manager in your organization and define an approach to staffing it, be sure to take into account the critical position a community manager plays. Community managers are the connectors between information, ideas and people for your business. They learn first-hand about community member attitudes and preferences related to your business, therefore generating key insights that should be integrated into the overall business strategy. These tasks require a skilled and experienced staff member with a strong instinct for crafting communications within a rapidly-changing context. They must be agile, resourceful, and empowered.  Dion Hinchcliffe has created one of the best graphics to illustrate how community managers are the “jack of all trades.”

Data Supports the Efficacy of a Good Community Manager

Tom Humbarger is one of the few to gather actual data to support the critical need for a community manager. Tom compared health metrics for a community before and after the budget was cut for a community manager position. Without a community manager, Tom observed that membership growth slowed significantly, a fall-off of more than 63% on a week-to-week basis. Additionally, the number of community visits dropped 60%, number of pages viewed per visit drops 22%, and time on site decreased by 33%.

Three Reasons to Hug Your Community Manager Today

Community managers tell us that their work is largely very rewarding, but being the face of the community daily is an extreme position and a bit of reinforcement goes a long way. As you consider why you should give your community managers special thanks today, consider the following:

1. Community Managers Are Your Sherpa Guides. The difference between what even the best weekly report can tell you versus what a community manager knows about your brand is the difference between looking at a map versus hiring a local guide. Community managers absorb an incredible amount of information about your customers and fans by interacting with them on a daily basis in a genuine, organic way.
2. The Best Firefighters Are Local. When a crisis breaks out, you’ll probably hear about it from your community manager first. And when it comes time to formulate a response, your community manager is your best asset, because they’ve been a part of the community all along. They’re not an outsider coming in to deliver a message because they have to; they’re a trusted source of information with an existing relationship with the core members of your community.
3. Community Managers Put a Face with the Brand. Community managers receive a plethora of messages from users who are delighted that they’re able to directly contact a real person who responds in a timely manner (which is often uncharacteristic for large brands). The fact that customers are able to consistently contact a dedicated representative establishes trust and loyalty with the brand, and makes the customer feel like their needs and suggestions are actually being noticed by the brand.

Don’t Wait Until Next Year to Appreciate Your Community Manager Again

As with any other business-critical professional position, you want to let your best players know that their work is not only appreciated but important. Take time regularly to thank your community managers and promote them in your organization. The results will benefit every constituent in the business and help drive those emergent and leveraged outcomes we’re all searching for.

Special thanks to Jeremiah Owyang who established every fourth Monday of January to be Community Manager Appreciation Day.  This year events are taking place all over the world to honor community managers.  Dachis Group will be participating in the Boston and Austin events this evening.  Follow the related #CMAD conversations on Twitter.

Community dashboards are not unlike treadmill dashboards.  Both provide metrics as indicators of health.  The treadmill provides this with heart rate and calories burned.  The community platform provides this with number of active members, content contributors, etc. Dashboard metrics don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story. The treadmill does not factor calories consumed that day, hours slept, etc., just as community dashboards do not track off-site attitudes and behaviors of community members. Community managers can be blinded by the ease with which these numbers are provided by the dashboard and forget to track other important metrics. That’s why it is important that a measurement plan is developed in tandem with community strategy, not in reaction to the metrics generated by the community platform.

For companies launching marketing communities, I recommend the following measurement approach:

1. Start with the goals of the community

• Establish a measurement plan based on focused goals for the community.  Is the goal conversion, customer retention, sentiment, etc.?
• Avoid the trap of borrowing metrics from other marketing initiatives because they are familiar.

2. Identify the desired community behaviors to prove these goals and the associated platforms tracking these behaviors

• Think broadly about desired community member behaviors (online and offline) that have implications for desired community outcomes.
• Tracking these behaviors typically means pulling data from multiple sources including the community dashboard, web analytics platform, social media monitoring service, URL shortening service, CRM system as well as community member surveys.
• Collaborating with colleagues from your analytics, customer insights, customer service, and IT departments will help you make sense of all of these data stacks.

3. Consider all initiatives that support community success

• Keep in mind all of the paid and earned media initiatives (e.g., promotions and referrals) that will contribute to community success and consider integrating the associated metrics into a community scorecard.

4. Select the best metrics to tell the story of community progress

• Now that you have considered all of the possible metrics for proving desired community outcomes, refocus the measurement plan with the right balance of metrics that tell the story.  That might translate to three key metrics to support each community goal, for example.

5. Establish a baseline

• Determine if the metrics that are part of your community measurement plan were collected historically, or if you need to establish a baseline.  Do not establish specific numbered goals (e.g., 15% increase in positive sentiment) without knowing the baseline from which you are working.  Otherwise, you risk setting unrealistic goals.

6. Set specific targets to stay focused while allowing for some flexibility

• Once you establish a baseline, set specific (realistic) monthly and quarterly targets to serve as motivators to keep you focused on your goals.
• Maintain a flexible approach to your measurement plan as you discover what works and what doesn’t work for reporting purposes.

Capturing a holistic picture of community health and progress requires a tremendous amount of planning and integration.  Community dashboards provide only a piece of the puzzle.  This is why the marketer’s role involves both art and science.

From Boomers to Millennials

The Millennial Generation Y is 60 million people strong, and is three time larger than Generation X. I think most of them were at the festival, actually. That generation is very individualistic (they demand customized products and services), diverse (one in three is not Caucasian), and technology savvy. The experience that today’s enterprise will deliver to this new breed of worker will have to change dramatically. They have grown accustomed to today’s Web 2.0 software technologies that are personalized, and require no training to use. Putting them in front of traditional ERP software systems is going to be a poor fit.

Management to Engagement

Most organizations are over-managed and under-led. Solid leadership engages people in their work, and the organization’s greater goal. Today an organization realizes more value from their employees by engaging them, rather than managing their tasks. At SXSW 2010 in a panel presented by Dachis Group, Kate Niederhoffer asked the audience to rate their level of engagement with their work. The scale ranged on one extreme from being a passive participant in their work lives to on the other end almost complete intermingling of their personal and work lives. To my surprise almost nobody rated themselves on the disengaged level of the scale, and fully half the audience identified themselves as almost indivisible from their work. Add to this the move away from top-down command and control structures to more flexible networks of workgroups, and the writing is on the wall that the org chart will soon be a thing of the past.

Email to Collaboration

Recently I heard Dion Hinchcliffe cite a study that showed email traffic at IBM was down 29%. It’s not because business is down, but that communication is moving from email to more social systems. It’s also being reported that social network traffic is surpassing email, and Facebook is receiving more visits than Google. Expect this trend to continue.

From CRM to Community

In the mid-90′s I worked with clients who had some of the largest customer contact centers in the world, some of them totaling 3,500 customer service and support representatives. I don’t know how big the largest ones are today, but I’d bet that the number of people answering telephones is shrinking, and the number of people managing and engaging customer communities is growing. If the rate of job openings for the title “Community Manager” is any indication, then my hunch is most likely correct.

UI to UX

The expectation these days is that apps should require no training. Why should they? In my personal life, I can find friends, create events, invite those friends, twitter the invitation, coordinate the work of my friends to upload  pictures and then crowdsource the tagging of the photos. I didn’t take a class in that, and your average teenager can do the same thing. At this year’s Social Business Summit, Karen McGrane makes the case that UX will make or break social business. Take a cue from Apple, Starbucks, and Disney; the experience matters.

Can you feel this migration in your organization, or is it just business as usual?

Even as organizations have strategically started to embrace social business, the global changes driven by widespread social computing are still ongoing. A confluence of large scale behavior change and co-evolutionary Internet-based technological progress are driving important new trends in 2010. While some of these are somewhat early stage, a few are more advanced and nearly upon us. By and large, most of these are still under the radar of enterprises today. Yet each of these trends highlight key developments that will be absolutely essential for businesses to succeed in the very near future. Make no mistake, the future of business is now tied directly to whatever strategies and techniques work most effectively in a profoundly connected society. It’s a world where knowledge is not only already produced primarily using social media but is instantly findable, accessible, virtually free, and superabundant. Thus, as businesses seek to address the disruptive challenges of social media using Social Business, anticipating what comes next will be an essential exercise.

Here are the major trends that all organizations seeking to become 21st century digital natives should watch closely this year:

Six Social Business Trends To Watch

1. Value creation shifting from workers to outside the enterprise. Anyone who has been involved in social media understands that they personally are just part of a much larger ecosystems of conversation, innovation, and participation. So goes it with the enterprise. In this new world success is defined by how well you can connect with and tap into the global network, both for obtaining value and delivering it. And to be perfectly clear, I am not saying that all value is going come from outside of enterprises in the future, far from it. But in general, organizations are now greatly outnumbered by the resources on the network and real business value is increasingly coming from the social world as we learn how to participate in it. I’ve tracked major trends in this area such as crowdsourcing, open and social supply chains, and other closely-related practices such as social media marketing and Social CRM as ways to apply Social Business to greatly amplify and transform what your organization does. The lesson here is that the network will always greatly outnumber you, so you must enlist it to participate in objectives everyone jointly values. The good news: Organizations are starting to listen this year.
2. Business processes as opt-in community-powered activities. Social engagement promotes openness and builds community. Today’s workstreams are becoming ever more social and can tap into a wider and wider pool of inputs and contributors. Trends like Enterprise 2.0 are starting to put the tools that make this possible into millions of workers hands. Now it’s up to organizations to ensure that organizational support and social media literacy is in place to deliver on the potential. The fact is, however, today’s business processes are mostly still closed, private activities between obscurely identified groups of people that happen largely inside little known silos of organizations. Not only are the processes themselves typically isolated and often disconnected from ground truth and many of their key stakeholders, but as the open source world discovered a decade ago, there are just too few eyes to ensure they are doing what needs to be done and in the best way possible. While the success stories of open innovation and other open business models have started to pave the way, only now are we seeing organizations realize the value of community-based processes conducted in the open and with network effects by default (everyone’s contribution creates observable value, large or small). While Social CRM is probably the lead exemplar this year of how to turn general purpose social activity into community-powered transactions that are focused on specific business outcomes, there are now many other emerging areas where social media is directly informing business processes for the better.
3. Mobile experiences as the primary social channel. The latest June, 2010 research from Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker and team tells the story here. The mobile Web is currently experiencing unprecedented growth in use. The iPhone and Android platform in particular are fundamentally changing the game when it comes to our new usage of mobile Web applications. Notably, this includes providing powerful monetization and usage safety nets that are very attractive to both consumers and the businesses that want to engage with them. As importantly, smartphone shipments are now expected to be greater than notebook and PC sales combined by 2012. When coupled with the sea changes taking place in social (the Morgan Stanley deck also provides the Comscore data I’ve cited in the past that shows how Web communication is now led by social networks), and you have a social computing revolution that is going mobile. This new mobile reality is based on smartphones, with all their unique capabilities such as location awareness, video/audio capabilities, and arrays of other sensors. In other words, most businesses need a plan for a near-term future where most interaction with workers, partners, and customers is through task-specific and social applications on mobile devices with all their attendant strengths and weaknesses.
4. Business engagement driven by social analytics. Any business processes that runs without a closed feedback loop is almost always going to underperform. It’s only through sustained contact and understanding of the marketplace that engagement can succeed. Much of the world has now migrated from the familiar, well-known places to interact and gone elsewhere, to new social environments. There are hundreds of social networks with a combined audience of over 1 billion users today. Beyond the Internet, there are many private social environments that exist within most organizations today (even if it’s just local e-mail.) Given that social networks are increasingly open and, well, social, and you have the unique, generational opportunity to actually understand what’s happening, what’s known, and who knows it, all in near real-time. How can this accumulated knowledge be used to drive business goals? Without tapping into what we would call the dynamic signal, there’s no way to know. Mining the collective intelligence of the social Web or an enterprise network is a tall order but there have long been concerted efforts to do so, with a growing number providing meaningful, actionable approaches. Whether it’s finding new ideas, identifying important trends, measuring sentiment, supporting customers, or whatever it is that needs to be done, keeping track of the galactic conversation still isn’t easy. However, the good news this year is that the tools and techniques of social analytics that deliver results are emerging, such as WebTrends’ Social Measurement capabilities, Infegy’s Social Radar, or the growing interest in enterprise social analytics for performance management, as just three examples of many. Starting now, businesses must deeply access, understand, and react intelligently to all the important currents of activity that affect them across the social universe.
5. Engagement strategies that scale across all important social channels. Listening to the social universe, both outside as well as within the enterprise, and then developing a desired response can be readily achieved by most organizations today. But effective delivery of that response across the myriad social channels that exist is another challenge entirely. Fortunately, we are beginning to see approaches that can aggregate and scale out to the large number of channels and people in today’s massive social environments. For example, companies like Radian6 and GetSatisfaction are already providing some of the capabilities to scale social media engagement and community management as widely and deeply as it must be done today. Scale has become the signature business challenge of social media and will be for the foreseeable future, whether that is the explosion of knowledge when workers engage in Enterprise 2.0-style activities or being a part of the hundreds of millions of daily social media conversations taking place on the Internet. Creating strategies, infrastructure, and processes to deal with this is what I am seeing organizations working on around the world this year.
6. Anticipating and designing for loss of control. At this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, my friend and colleague JP Rangaswami delivered a terrific opening keynote where he dropped the phrase that became a hot topic of conversation for the rest of the week. In his keynote, he talked of the necessity of enterprises today needing to “design for the loss of control.” A combination of Web access, SaaS, cloud computing, social software, and smartphones that are more powerful than many laptops are leading to a world where anyone can access the IT solutions they need to get their work done and don’t need any permission to do it. Enterprises currently expend considerable resources trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears like it not only can’t be controlled, but almost certainly doesn’t need to be. The level of control being imposed over IT today is excessive, counterproductive, and undesirable from a business results standpoint, the argument goes. Routing workers away from the applications, social networks, and devices that they clearly prefer to use is a strategy that, like most modern urban conflicts, is almost certainly a losing proposition in the long run. Instead, focusing on enabling the safe and effective use of cloud-based solutions that fit local problems, leveraging workers’ growing social capital and their own mobile computing devices can be looked at as just another form of outsourcing. In other words, letting go of non-essential control will be a key success factor for Social Business leaders going forward. Certainly there are still real challenges to doing this but the point is that the opportunities are certainly significantly greater than the cost. Together, we must learn how to fix IT in the Social Business era.

I’ll be tracking these trends and other important ones we’re beginning to detect in the coming months. What is becoming abundantly clear is that we’re seeing a major inflection point this year with social computing that made the original uptake a couple of years ago look like a niche trend. This also means that the next generation of products and services must be deeply informed by these pervasive trends, and therefore seeing deeply into, understanding, and responding to their implications will be the key hurdles for most organizations.

What other trends are you seeing in Social Business today? Please add your ideas and insight in the comments below.