The foundational feature of News Feed was introduced in 2007 to amplify the relationship between social objects and people. News Feed next evolved through the innovation of Open Graph in 2010. Open Graph added expression to interest distribution with the addition of “Like” and social plugins for websites and through the Graph API. Today the Open Graph actions become unrestricted expressions in more contextually relevant means, as a verb, to best describe engagement with anything like running, dancing, watching or eating. Each of these interactions offer our friends, acquaintances and subscribers context and contribution to the self expression about the “story of our lives”. Chris Cox, Facebook VP Product, describes the relevance of apps to capture the summary of our use of time and the expression of data as a narrative. These are profoundly personal representation of structured information that now define individuals, points of interest and discovery. Timeline now is the active canvas for the rich curation of the “modern scrapbook” – signals structured for information discovery.

Facebook as a platform offers one of the richest data sets available to business. The signals exchanged between customers, partners, brands and employees will be enriched through the new Facebook Open Graph and Timeline. Business will move from the foundational metrics of impressions, Like/Fan count, and comments to more meaningful insights delivered through the pulse of a broader set of metrics offered through organic content, application and paid initiatives. Each of these tactics provide the business with the signals to measure strategic alignment to business objectives. Facebook is one of many signals we look at to view the fingerprint of the social business.

Our Social Business Index was publicly launched earlier this month as a view into companies’ social business performance and trends. Complex social signals mapped back to the complex business structures of brands, geographies and social identities. The rich visualization of these signals are expressed through the Social Business Graph enabling contextual filtering and comparative views. Signals surround business and of the most complex are those found in social. Like it or not, you are a social business. You are driven by the signals of your employees, partners, customers and influencers all associated to the social object of your brand. The question I ask; is your social business graph aligned with your business purpose? Have a look today, next week, month and quarter to check your signal.

In practice, email communication happens for work. Most office workers would gladly accept less email to deal with every day, unless they’re addicted to the dopamine rush of receiving new messages.  A shift to dynamic signal moves employee mentalities and behaviors to communicate as work instead.

Luis Suarez offers an alternative to email: activity streams. He offers five reasons why activity streams work better than email:

1. They permeate throughout transparency and openness
2. They help you, greatly, be done with the obsession to read AND respond to everything
3. They facilitate serendipity and Informal Learning
4. They help flatten organisations and traditionally hierarchical structures
5. They inspire an open knowledge sharing culture

In a recent IBM poll, 49% of respondents stated that they post status updates on social tools for work purposes either a few times a month or never. The data show that corporate inbox codependency is alive and well. But activity streams have started to flow inside organizations and social businesses are starting to architect the aqueducts that will allow them to flow out to the organizational edge.

Reach essentially describes the major new feature of Socialcast, which is the ability to embed microblog conversations in external systems that still appear in the main home stream. For example you can embed a discussion into an internal HR page on sick time. That discussion will exist in context forever on that page, but the comments will also appear in the organization-wide stream along with a reference to where it came from (perhaps an icon of your intranet). The company has plugins today for Google Apps Gmail, Microsoft Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010), Lotus Notes, and Salesforce.com. But the potential is limitless.

Socialcast Reach includes what is essentially a wizard for making Socialcast discussion widgets. You choose parameters, such as the need for authentication, and some behaviors and settings, and then embed a short snippet of code into your desired page. In addition the plugins that are available today, this capability will let you embed the discussion, stream, and/or “Like” button pretty much anywhere. In addition, the company says that you can utilize REST to programmatically create or respond to messages. I can envision typing “When is Bill Smith available to meet today?” and a system looking at his calendar to respond automatically with Bill’s next available meeting time.

Why Is This Important?

For all the talk about enabling social businesses, microblogging is really just another data silo. Socialcast Reach is taking the conversation out into specific operational systems in the enterprise. People in the organization can comment on those operational conversations in the main company stream as well. In general getting adoption of social systems in the enterprise is an uphill battle. Using reach in more transaction-oriented systems may be a lead in to bringing larger amounts of people into the conversation, paying more attention to the entire company ecosystem.

Reach is being launched today, so it remains to be seen how people will utilize it and if they will fully take advantage of things like the Open Graph Protocol. But this is an important and exciting step forward.

Source: Nokia.com

With that background, it was interesting reading this recent article in the New York times regarding the countless opportunities that Nokia has squandered to lead the smartphone market. A few examples culled from the article include:

• Years before the iPhone, Nokia tested touch screen phone technology, but failed to embrace the concept until long after the iPhone launched
• Nokia employees invented a Nokia App store in 2004 but never deployed it
• 500 operating system upgrades were suggested by Nokia research teams from 2001 to 2009 but none were adopted

The main lesson to be gleaned from these examples? The future has already been invented at Nokia. They just don’t know what the future is or how to commercialize it.

On a personal level this is frustrating because I really love Nokia phones. My first phone was a Nokia and it was an awesomely reliably and beloved device. My favorite phone of all time was a Nokia N95 that survived incredible abuse (most notably a drop into the Mekong River during a vacation to Laos) to serve me well for years.

On a professional level this is frustrating because what the New York Times makes abundantly clear is that things didn’t have to be this way. If we just recast Nokia’s issues in Social Business Design terms, and examine certain archetypes, it’s easy to see why.

What Nokia has is not an innovation problem, but a Dynamic Signal problem. This is common at large corporations. Teams generate ideas and features of varying quality. Some are terrible. Some are revolutionary. The issue is that there are so many signals that no one can possibly evaluate the ideas fairly. The result is conservative decision making based on accounting instead of the true merits of an idea. Companies can overcome these problems by creating structure around the signals and then using filtering systems to parse the raw ideas floating around.

My suggestion is to turn Nokia’s size into an asset by developing a stronger ecosystem. In Nokia’s case, the answer may lie in the collective wisdom of their 129,000 employees, their substantial supply chain, and the huge worldwide customer base. A good place to start might be enabling the ecosystem to populate a crowdsourcing platform with idea submissions from across the company, letting the whole organization act as a metafilter – filtering the concepts by priority, and aligning those ideas with a strategy.

Of course, no amount of crowdsourcing can supplant the power of strong leadership and a vision of the future. But what this kind of filtering can do is reduce thousands of options to a few dozen. From there it becomes possible to actually assess and discard ideas instead of letting them die before they even see the light of day.

What do you think? What other social solutions could we bring to bear on Nokia’s Dynamic Signal and Metafilter problems?

Not dynamic signal.

Adapted from the Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology

Jeffrey Dachis.  Open for Business. I believe that open companies will achieve exponentially greater success than closed ones. Open = Success, Closed = Failure. To be clear and right off the bat, I am not in favor of 100% transparency as what defines an open company… or 100% of people seeing 100% of a companies information 100% of the time. That is a bad idea. Anyone advocating for that type of transparency is simply not working in reality. However, providing the right people with the right information at the right time in the most transparent way is the only way successful businesses will win in the information economy marketplace.   Unfortunately most large global businesses are not good at getting information and communication to the right people at the right time.  Although paradoxical, businesses aren’t as efficient being free markets for the information currency and value they transact. This makes for missed opportunities, slowed growth prospects, higher cost structures and inefficiencies.  Its for this reason that engaging and exposing more people, more often, to more filtered information about what is actually going on in a business opens up exponentially greater opportunities to everyone participating.  We are open for business.

David Armano. The Latest New Technology? Humans. We wonder what’s so special about this bright and shiny object we call a number of things. “Social Media, Web 2.0, etc. etc.”. It’s people. The latest iteration of the Web is connecting people directly to each other, giving us the tools to collaborate remotely and even access people in companies and brands that we never had access to before. It’s less about transparency, or technology for that matter and more about humanity. Customers, consumers, employees are craving more direct human contact, because they’ve gotten a taste for it whether it be direct engagement with a real live human being on Twitter or comments from your teammates with their avatar sitting right next to it. At the individual level, anyone can experience their 15 megabytes of fame. At a business level, this can present new challenges. What happens when someone wants to share a picture from the office with their external ecosystem? We’re moving toward a real-time Web where signals transmit dynamically—but it’s important to remember that it’s a Web woven of human beings. Connecting at a human level can make a business more personal, and enticing to customers. It also needs to be managed as humans from time to time have been known to make mistakes.

Bryan Menell. The voice inside your head. At first glance, when you see our homepage and how it’s a window on our working lives you revel in the coolness of the transparency. But then you think about the domain names of all the emails that you’ve sent, and the tweets transmitted. Moving forward, there’s a voice inside your head every time you tweet that says, “Remember, this is going on the home page!” But my tweets are already public, so what’s the real difference? There isn’t, yet my perception is that there is. When my iPhone is acting up, and I vent my frustration in Twitter accentuated by a #FAIL tag, the voice asks “Are they a client?” Even if they are, does it matter? While we don’t have all the answers to these questions, it’s great to see the “lab” part of Collaboratory come alive.

Ellen Reynolds.  What am I really doing? At first, it was tempting to send a lot of email or update our internal knowledge-sharing sites so that I could watch my name appear in our live feed. To be honest, it also made me feel kind of productive. But now, when I don’t see my name show up, I realize that I also consciously want my coworkers to know that I’m actually working. I find myself wondering…do I look like a slacker when my name doesn’t appear in our live feed more than once a day? Am I a slacker? Am I not documenting what I’m doing enough? For someone to know THAT you’re working, do they need to know WHAT you’re working on? The fact is, I’m usually doing a lot of offline work and/or work that doesn’t require frequent communication with everyone here. Maybe I should be making a bigger effort to communicate, or maybe I need special feeds that show when I’m working in QuickBooks, researching on the internet or updating a Word doc. Will feeds like ours push employees to over-communicate or just to be more conscious of how they spend their time?

Jevon Macdonald. How far can we go? At first glance, displaying indicators of our email, yammer and other conversations was daunting, but the moment we went public with it I felt an instant comfort. I would never have guessed that I would learn to “ignore” it so quickly. It makes me wonder just how far revealing information and metrics about internal communications could go, and what that could mean in the marketplace. Could a publicly displayed Dynamic Signal become an established element of an organization’s website? Could it become an expected form of communications between a company and their customers? Will organizations compete to demonstrate the strength of their Dynamic Signal and the Hivemindedness of the organization.

Kate Niederhoffer. The black hole of transparency. Once you get into the swing of having all your communication acts published, a confusion sets in wherein you forget how much is public- exactly what is the boundary between public and private? I find myself questioning the difference between data and metadata. If I’m showing others which behaviors I’ve enacted, shouldn’t I show them more– the content, my style, purpose… I imagine it’s like being a performance artist where you challenge others to test boundaries by audaciously testing them yourself, in the moment, as if you’ve done it before, but really are scared shitless. The key is to lose your self consciousness and get in the flow of organically communicating in order to get work done. People seem to have grown increasingly comfortable with this in a personal setting (e.g. Facebook, online banking), but in business, we still have somewhat Victorian standards that could be locking up valuable information.

Peter Kim. How open are you? The Collaboratory made me rethink my perspective on authenticity in social media. For the most part, people live by the old T.S. Eliot quote, “prepare a face to meet the faces you meet.” That is, despite claims of openness, most social media presences are carefully crafted, user-controlled portraits of what they want the world to see. As a company that advises clients on social spaces, it’s paramount that we push on boundaries ourselves. I’ll admit, I was uncomfortable when we turned the feed public – but the more I thought about what was being shared, the more I realized how often legacy thinking can roadblock new ideas…and how much work we have ahead of us before people truly understand the fundamentals behind social business design.

These are some of our reflections on the Dachis Group Collaboratory’s window of work so far…how about you?  What thoughts, issues, ideas, or concerns does this raise in the context of your business?  How do you think about these ideas as they relate to transparency in your life or work environment?  Please don’t hesitate read our thinking on Social Business Design, stay connected and subscribe to our RSS feed, contact us about working together, and engage with us in the comments below share your experience.