My dilemma would be made simpler if “social business” were just another name for something you already know, like “social media marketing” or “enterprise 2.0″ or (god forbid) “knowledge management.” But it’s not. It’s a term for something new and different, and our journey is so early that I don’t think any company would declare victory on being a social business in 2011. Many of our clients are definitely taking the right steps, however.

The social organizations that I have an opportunity to interact with typically have some specific elements. They include:

• Organization. A social business will look less like a top-down, command-and-control structured organization, and more like a flexible mesh network. The mesh is empowered to act and conduct business, not needing to wait for orders from the commander-in-chief when a target is in the crosshairs. The social organization might appear podular.
• Leadership. Most companies are over-managed, but social businesses are led by talented and visionary people. Charlene Li does an excellent job of presenting the case for open leadership and letting go of control.
• Social. At the end of the day, businesses are made up of people. Do you interview them to determine traits like sharing and collaboration, or are you still hiring for skills? The millennial Gen Y that is entering the workforce is 80 million people, and their brains are wired differently than other generations. They literally have larger amygdalas, which makes them more social.
• Holistic. People are at the heart of every element of the enterprise ecosystem. Social organizations pay attention to all of their constituents, understand the relationships between them, and how strong or weak the connections between them are.
• Engagement. The old school ideas of marketing stress frequency, reach, and a multi-channel approach. Hit them with our messages as many times as possible, in as many places as possible. Rise above the noise, right? The social business isn’t trying to shout the loudest, but finding ways to engage with customers and other constituents.
• Connected. Are the people in the company connected together, in real time? Does the CEO blog (even if it’s just internally)? Are there easy and open ways for people to discuss, share, and participate in the planning, managing, and controlling of the business?

What other elements of a social business have you seen?

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?

Today’s guest post is from Debi Kleiman, the Vice President of Product Marketing at Communispace, who will be speaking at Social Business Edge. A leader in generating insights via private online customer communities, Communispace has created more than 350 customer communities for industry leaders such as Kraft, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Hallmark, Best Buy, Microsoft, MTV, GlaxoSmithKline, and Hilton Hotels Corporation.

There’s too much data.  Way too much, and it’s not helpful. There, I said it.

Social media monitoring, web analytics, quantitative market research, trackers, clickthroughs and opens… your ecosystem produces a firehose of data, but not a whole lot of meaning.

How about some insight instead?  Insight – what we’re really after – can create new businesses, grow existing ones, solve problems, tell stories and deliver real value to your organization.  Businesses today are drowning in data and missing real insight. But they don’t have to. The same forces that are converging to bombard us with more data are the same ones that will help us. Customers today want to participate with businesses and brands more than ever before, which creates a real opportunity to use that connection for insight.

It’s great that your customers can give you feedback on products using the ratings and reviews, and being alerted to their dissatisfaction on Twitter is important. But what if I told you that you’re missing the heart of what really matters to your customers? CRM expert Denis Pombriant calls this “CSI approach” to customer intelligence badly reactionary, and he’s right. How powerful would it be to truly understand your customers in a way that allows you to be relevant to them, right out of the gate?

This is what the insight discovery process is all about – actively engaging with customers in an ongoing, intimate dialogue over months and years through private insight communities, so they let you into their lives and mindset – the insights, big and small, will blow you away.

Brands that have harnessed the power of customer-driven insight know that the rich, meaty center of their customers’ needs lies in their hearts and minds. And it’s hard work to get to that place where they’re willing to share it with you, but the payoff is certainly worth it.

Here are a couple of examples from our experiences at Communispace:

• A leading financial services company tapped into the mindset of Gen X using a private online community over six months and learned that 90% of what the company is saying in the market is irrelevant to them. (That 90% is not data, just my rough dramatic insight.) The intimate and comfortable environment of their private online community enabled members to tell their personal stories, hopes and fears in new way and provided insight into how to reach this skeptical generational cohort. Through a variety of activities in the community, the company was able to learn from Gen Xers not only about their perceptions of investing and financial services firms but also their life priorities, their savings goals and important messaging cues.  The members evaluated new product concepts for relevance and appeal, as well as started their own conversations so that the company could hear what’s important to them. By deeply understanding Gen Xers, the company found that their challenges are more about successfully maintaining a checking account rather than setting up their 401K, for example. Insights like these helped to create products and messaging that were more relevant to Gen X – things like a high yield checking account, special features for savings accounts and new pages on their corporate website that spoke directly to their needs. Overall, their deep exploration into GenXers lives translated into significant ROI in the form of an entirely new base of Gen X customers who appreciated finally being understood by their bank.
• A top technology solutions company used their private online communities to explore what “value” meant to their customers in a recessionary environment and how that affected what they were buying and why. Busy professionals who already bought millions of dollars worth of technology from this company were more than willing to help them develop new offerings that better address their changed priorities in a rapidly-shifting economic context.  By creating different value-add marketing and promotional programs tailored to speak to what affected community members the most, the company built stronger, more durable customer relationships and generated $70 million in new revenue in one year.

A truly social business will take advantage of this motherload of insight by connecting important elements of the ecosystem, and using that to create value. It’s not easily acquired, but private insight communities have proven to be a way to bring emotions to life, and to discern meaning beyond the numbers.

I love Apple products.

Apple makes beautiful, elegant, simple to use, powerful hardware and software/services.  This is obvious to almost anyone and yes, in case you were wondering or had a doubt, I am a biased unabashed Apple fan.  You can run whatever rig you want in our shop, but everyone is on a mac.  I have been using the products for years and will continue to do so as long as they make them.  My life is better, my work is easier and more productive because of Apple.

We will see yet another example of this in action with the release of some new Apple products.

As always, the Apple haters will pick apart the device and examine each component as if they were commodities and complain about the under-powered processor, or lack of battery life, or missing firewire port or choice of network partners or undersized storage…  They will complain bitterly that they don’t understand what the big deal is.  They will say the products are overpriced and that you can get them cheaper.  You can get the commodities cheaper, but herein lies the rub; its not about the commodities, its about how they are packaged and integrated into a much larger ecosystem of hardware, software, services, applications, developers, distribution, marketplaces and content.  In each of these areas, Apple doesn’t have to own every facet of the system, they just have to provide or facilitate value exchange.

We are about to see Apple place itself in the middle of several business ecosystems with its elegant hardware and software/services, and provide an easy to use experience for participators.  The funny thing is that many of those critics still don’t get it.  It’s not only about the elegant hardware or simple to use and understand software (based on Apple’s rock solid unix based OSX), it’s about Apple’s ability to insert itself into the middle of an industry or business ecosystem, innovate, and provide/extract enormous value —  which they do flawlessly.

Apple’s relatively frictionless marketplaces for value exchange provide an expanded business operating environment, different from any previously imagined. Especially in the business of digital.

Let’s take a look at what we get as users of Apple products and why the Apple ecosystems are hands down market leaders and will end up transforming the industries they touch.

Lets talk about content

Magazines and Newspapers

The Apple tablet will likely provide digital distribution and a seamless marketplace for the dying magazine and newspaper publishing businesses with a built in monetization model for subscriptions, pay per play, or advertiser supported consumption.  If the print organizations can get their cost basis down fast enough they may find a highly profitable global marketplace for short form literary content with a rich user experience delivered through the iPad.

Gaming

Again, the Apple tablet will likely provide digital distribution and a seamless marketplace for touch or controller based games with a built in monetization model for subscriptions, pay per play, or advertiser supported consumption.  Moreover this industry is already well established and generates more revenue than all other entertainment media forms combined.  The iPad will provide an opportunity to bridge an app store model for more game developers to monetize their efforts with a seamless distribution and gameplay environment.

Movies

Apple will yet again provide digital distribution and a seamless marketplace for HD movie content and a built in monetization model for subscriptions, pay per play, or advertiser supported consumption wrapped in a beautiful and elegant movie delivery vehicle perfectly suited for portable viewing experiences.  As we’ve seen with the iPod and iPhone (where people said no one would be willing to watch movies on a tiny screen), the fact is that they will and they do by the millions with the new Apple tablet.

Books

The Apple tablet is a perfect eReader.  It will provide a rich color reading experience combined with yet another seamless marketplace for digital books to be purchased and downloaded. I’m certain you will be able to sample some of the book content before purchasing and moreover I think, like the app store for developers, the Apple bookstore will provide a richer monetization model for authors while at the same time providing for a global distribution platform for existing publishers.

Music

Apple is already the largest retailer of music on the planet.  They are also by far and away the largest seller of music players in the market.  While the music industry is still trying to protect the relics of its past, Apple has stepped in and figured out a way to sell more music to more people and expand the opportunities and options for music creators, sellers, and buyers…  I’d expect this to continue to be the case.

Photos, Video, and other personal content

The democratization of the tools of self expression will continue to expand the universe of content manifesting people’s creativity and ideas.  Apple provides the most easy to use suite of personal creation tools ever created.  More people document their lives, share memories with family, and utilize Apple’s tools to create, produce, edit, and share their personal experiences than ever before.

Lets talk about applications and marketplaces

The Apple tablet will, like its sister the iPhone, have a robust and expansive application development environment with a widely distributed and easy to use SDK (software development kit).  This has enabled literally thousands of developers to develop thousands of applications, thereby making the hardware exponentially more useful because of a committed and properly incented army of developers providing meaningful and useful applications and utility to go along with the rich array of content married to hardware and software.

The app store and iTunes enables a frictionless marketplace for developers and content providers to monetize their creations and the Apple tablet, iPhone, iPod, and iTouch platforms provide a rich deeply installed global distribution platform.

Lets talk about the supply chain

Apple has become a very efficient master of its supply chain and distribution.  Although core to the heart of the business, from online purchases and customer support forums to the Apple stores and genius bars, to chip and component manufacturers and assembly, to software development and release cycles across the software line, Apple’s ecosystem of supply chain and distribution is a core (but only one component) to its success. The supply chain is enabling the hardware and software component of the ecosystem to get product to market and enable the rest of the ecosystem to function.

Lets talk about the cloud

Don’t underestimate the importance of Mobileme, Apple’s cloud based storage, application, and synchronization environment.  This online service allows a person to access most basic apps from any PC or iPhone (soon to be Apple tablet) in the world including calendars, email, address book, photos, and what will certainly be other apps as they become available.  More than that, Mobileme allows for the seamless synchronization of all your Apple devices so that they all have the most updated versions of all of your information all of the time.  Mobileme is the glue that allows me to have my stuff anywhere I want it on any device I choose.

Its about the ecosystem

Any one of these components are somewhat interesting on their own, but only Apple brings them all together in a seamless, broad and far reaching environment that combines hardware, software, applications, services in the cloud, content and B2B and B2C marketplaces into one rich, elegant, useful, and valuable user experience ecosystem.

Without a doubt there are interesting product announcements on the way. Apple has always been loved for its products, but in today’s networked economy it’s Apple’s understanding and strategic use of an expanded ecosystem that will continue to drive its power in the marketplace and will allow it to dominate and transform the media and technology landscape as we know it.

Social technologies are enabling all companies to expand their ecosystems, listen and gain insight from a variety of new areas, and participate and engage with exponentially larger ecosystems of constituents with the potential to drive enormous value in countless new ways.  Let us know if your organization is ready to discuss how to approach harnessing the power of your ecosystem.

Find out how Dachis Group can help your business worldwide. Send email to moc.puorgsihcad@seiriuqni, or download our fact sheet and contact us.

It’s great to open things up and give people freedom, but specificity– that is, some focus or structure- is what really unleashes talent. Specificity comes in many forms of social systems. As Tom Malone et al. point out, the “genome” of collective intelligence can be broken down into Who (staffing), What (goal), Why (incentives), and How (process). Each of these “genes” demand specificity.

Take the Netflix Challenge, for one: its success as a crowdsourced effort was attributed to connecting the right people only after some jockeying happened. It was not a result of all participants being connected, helter-skelter. Often throwing too many people into the mix leads to hasty and irrational outcomes due to groupthink or lazy free-loading, as a result of social loafing — not to mention pluralistic ignorance where we incorrectly assume acceptance of a given norm.

A less oft-cited method of making a social system work has less to do with who is connected and more to do with what you ask of those connections. This is a critical focus as researchers migrate from surveys as our mainstay methodology. Good questions are the currency of social systems that flow between the focused connections discussed above.

The other day I noticed Rypple made an important change in this direction with its “Power of One” initiative. Rypple, as you might know, lets you give and receive feedback online (anonymously), to and from select others. All humans lack an inherent sense of psychometrics, so it’s hard to know precisely what to ask, especially when the stakes are high. That is, you’re asking *specific* trusted others for self-related feedback. The inclination is to ask open-ended questions. Logic being similar to the above: connect everyone // ask people to tell you anything and any number of things. Turns out, lack of specificity leads to confusion, and in most cases non-response. Rypple is alleviating this problem by encouraging users to ask “what’s *one thing* I can do to improve.”

It’s usually one question that makes or breaks a given finding. Gallup’s one question, “Do you have a best friend at work” is the biggest predictor of workplace engagement. Other research shows that one question self-assessments of health are better predictors of mortality than an extensive battery of objective health data. Reicheld told us six years ago that your Net Promoter score is “The One Number you Need to Grow.”

My point is not about measurement error and response bias, it’s about specificity. Being direct in order to make social systems effective. Finding the signal amidst the noise.

We can’t go on idly talking about “social” initiatives. We must be focused in order to make social systems effective. This pertains to who is in your ecosystem, how they are connected, why they are connected, and how you measure those connections.

Being social is not necessarily complex. If you apply a lens of specificity, you can systematically simplify the situation.