The first theme strikes the core of a learning organization.  A learning organization is in constant flux, continually challenging its assumptions and evaluating wins and losses to glean insights for competitive advantage.  Organizations designed for loss of control will not be in balance; their equilibrium will be deliberately and continually challenged.  These challenges and pressures are the forces that create learning organizations.  Attempts to learn and achieve equilibrium will create a more flexible and agile enterprise better equipped to respond to frequent and unexpected changes in the competitive landscape.

Keeping the above in mind, addressing the process issue starts to become more clear.  When (re)designing process, assume and design for loss of control.  Build in an evolutionary mechanism for the process itself.  This meta-process could be as simple as a feedback loop consisting of collection, prioritization and process alteration.  In the continuum between control and chaos, target somewhere in the middle for your process (for most organizations this target represents an uncomfortable shift away from control and towards chaos).  An open and flexible process has the benefit of returning expected results (what’s the point of process after all?) plus the ability to adapt, optimize and mutate if need be, enabling emergent outcomes.

Most cutting edge ‘social’ enterprises are still only in an adoption phase.  Pilots are scattered across business units and functional organizations and, in many cases, the separate project teams aren’t aware of each other’s efforts.  As these efforts mature away from adoption towards integration and aggregation, process will be challenged.  Start thinking about that now.  Take advantage of this adoption phase and practice designing for loss of control.  You want to be good at it when it’s really going to matter.

As I recently pointed out, it’s not hard to see why this is happening now: the writing is on the wall and the consumer world has driven much of this change to the extent the social is now essentially the dominant model for communication globally, at least on the Web. Social as the driver for business activity is still usually not the case in the enterprise, but it’s now clear that too will soon change.

Here were some of the largest take-aways for me and what I saw at the event:

Designing Enterprises for Loss of Control

British Telecom’s CIO JP Rangaswami gave a thought-provoking keynote that was notable for the lack of slides (instead, a real-time social media stream was produced live, alongside) as well as for putting forth the concept that enterprises boundaries are increasingly blurring with the greater network and that businesses must start getting good at “designing for loss of control.” This topic has long been discussed in Enterprise 2.0 circles and many of us already realize that the shift of control from institutions to communities of individuals has been long underway, yet it was only at the conference this month that there seemed to be ready understanding and acceptance of this concept in a mainstream way. While we’re still learning exactly what it means to design for loss of control, particularly in the enterprise, it’s readily in the spirit of social software with its general lack of barriers to participation or preconceptions about how people should come together and build value on the network.

Enterprises Are Going Social

If the presentations at the opening day’s The 2.0 Adoption Council customer workshop weren’t convincing enough, many of the presentations later on in the week were impressive. While most organizations worldwide now have social software in some form, at least departmentally, the deeper and wider use of Enterprise 2.0 strategically, across all stakeholders (customers, partners, and workers) is still emerging in most organizations. While this is leading to more sophisticated and mature discussions, such as the one around Social Business, extrapolating from the 200 organizations already participating in the council is sobering and I predict the data for 2010 will show that around half of all organizations globally had an internal enterprise-side social media strategy created to guide efforts across their business units.

So how does a business determine what it should and should not outsource when it comes to social media? I believe Joe Raasch of Target says it well.

Joe’s comment was one of 41 responses to the question “should you outsource social media” posted on LinkedIn by brand strategist Valeria Maltoni this past March.  Valeria published a great post featuring these responses on her blog Conversation Agent.  Many respondents agreed social media application development, content development, monitoring, and measurement activities could be outsourced.  These are activities that are more transactional to Joe’s point.  My colleague Peter Fasano puts it another way by saying social media functions that can be clearly defined are possible to outsource.  For example, a business can leverage third party services to scan the Web and help filter and flag comments about its brand by defining the inquiries.  A business should not rely on a third party to respond to comments before it can carefully define appropriate responses.  The exercise of scripting appropriate responses to hypothetical comments is often fruitless just as you cannot script one side of a real-time conversation before it takes place.  Some companies develop intricate scripts and then realize the responses do not work in the real world.  That means a business must establish clear guidelines on when and how to respond.  Guidelines do not prevent the sponsoring organization from being present to manage escalation from third parties.  The question remains as to whether or not organizations that choose to outsource due to lack of resources will be able to support and enforce these guidelines externally.

Why outsource?

Businesses consider outsourcing social media functions because they lack the expertise in-house.  Outsourcing social media functions could help a business buy the time it needs to develop these core competencies in-house.  In this case, outsourcing can be a viable option, especially if the business partners with the agency for education and training.  However, if a company can find a way to keep social media functions in-house, I recommend doing so given the potential risks involved.

Potential Risks to Outsourcing Social Media

• social conversations feel less authentic and trustworthy
• business has less direct oversight to be flexible in strategic approach
• agency not equipped to answer customer questions given its limited access to important business intelligence to make decisions
• business process continuity is challenged leading to delayed response times
• agency loses sight of core business values and objectives driving social participation (we see examples of this even within a business)
• customers grow frustrated because they want to talk directly to the business

A business can minimize potential risks by carefully choosing which functions are outsourced.  The general rule to is to avoid outsourcing participation and engagement.

What Can Be Outsourced

• recruitment
• social web monitoring
• moderation (filtering for inappropriate comments or curating the best)
• social web analytics
• content development
• application development

What Should Not Be Outsourced

• listening (you need to be listening to know the context for how to respond)
• responding
• driving conversations
• mediating member discussions
• content management

Possible Exceptions

Companies like Communispace and Passenger have created successful models around outsourcing customer insights communities.  Customer insight communities are easier to manage because they are private, members are pre-screened and many community activities are defined in advance.

Remaining Problem

My biggest concern with outsourcing social media functions is that it suggests these activities are not core to the business.  If a business has not made the case for investing in social initiatives, outsourcing will add new challenges to making this argument.  Outsourcing social media functions puts social media at risk for becoming a separate, siloed business activity which prevents the integration of customer participation into all aspects of the business – a critical move to realizing the full value of social business.  Our clients that have experienced success in social media treat their communities as business assets.

Social media initiatives require the investment of resources no matter what, so why not make the right investments in-house to maximize the return?