Facebook, we are frequently told, is a disruptive technology. Twitter is a disruptive technology. Tunisia and Tahrir Square could never have happened without the disruptive influence of flashmobs and mobile technology. Blogs utterly disrupted the daily business of journalism and newspapers, and traditional media are finally mainstreaming the meme: February’s Forbes “30 Under 30” cover is subbed “Meet the Disruptors”—as if it’s a game show! And February’s Technology Review, that stalwart bastion of scientific bastardization from MIT, touts “Disruptive Technology” on its cover, anchoring an entire section of the magazine with an excerpt from a new anthology of the very book that inaugurated the term “disruptive innovation”: HBS professor Clayton Christensen’s 1995 The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Disruption is in the air, but it’s not always clear what it means. Even Christensen had his doubts. When I interviewed him nearly a decade ago, he was ambivalent about the word, if not the idea. Intel’s Andy Grove once gave a speech lauding him, but Christensen told me that even Grove was critical of the word, noting that there were too many “prior connotations to disruption,” and declining to use it internally. “People do misunderstand it,” Christensen told me, “but it said what we wanted it to say.”

The seed of that ambivalence is still growing 20 years later. To some ears, the disruption vogue smacks of the same revolutionary zeal embodied in another coinage prevalent at the birth of the web some 19 years ago: disintermediation. Consumers could break out the bubbly because the web was about to remove the middle man! Of course, it soon became clear that disintermediation was just another form of mediation, albeit one with cheaper advertising and new channels and digital gatekeepers, portals and the digital agencies that popped up to support them. We may have been removing the middle man, but we were far from sticking it to the man. Instead, like most revolutions, we’d just done a 360, replacing one regime for another.

Fortunately, the current vogue for disruption holds a different promise, one that creates tremendous opportunity, for brands or governments. Despite its fierce-sounding nomenclature, disruption is not ultimately a harbinger of revolution but rather the basis of a competitive reset founded on the fundamentals of good customer—or citizen—engagement.

To understand why, it’s necessary to go back to the Innovator’s Dilemma. As Christensen saw it, the innovator’s dilemma is that incumbent companies are caught in a web of their own success. Incumbents are terrific at staying one step ahead of threats to their business through what Christensen called “sustaining innovations”—the rational investments companies make each day to create more useful products: airplanes that fly farther, computers that work faster, mobile phones with longer-lasting batteries… whatever they think the market and its customers are telling them to do.

Disruptive innovators see the incrementalism in these innovations as a bloody red target. Disruptors see the telltale signs of historical change behind the incumbents’ incrementalism. To a disruptor, a hybrid car is a costly and inaccurate response to the need for low-cost, energy efficient automotion. To a disruptor, a newspaper blog is at best a  misguided response to the realities of instantaneous 24/7 networked reporting. Disruptors take aim at these targets with innovation based on the job that the incumbents are incapable or unwilling to fulfill through their value networks, and they do it for much lower cost: think Zipcar or Flipboard. Disruptors solve a job that would put the incumbents out of business if they were to try the same strategy. (Zip and Flip aren’t “advanced technologies” but  clever, cheap, off-the-shelf combinations of technology that work well in a fledgling market, and if Hertz or the New York Times bet their businesses on them, they’d fail miserably.) The incumbents see the virtues of disruption quite well, thanks much, they just can’t execute on them or they’d go bust. Hence, the innovator’s dilemma.

Historically, it seems we’ve arrived at a moment where disruption has succeeded revolution as a meme of historical change, providing us with better results and a fresher understanding of who our customers are and what they need.

Are there people who historically haven’t been able to do this thing for themselves and so have gone without it or let others do it for them? What products do your customers really want—and what are the best products for those customers? How do we structure our organization and whose money will we take to fund our business? Which parts of the value chain shall we outsource, and which need to be integrated?

Not coincidentally, this is one reason why advanced metrics for analyzing customer engagement—based on direct observation of literally hundreds of social signals swimming in the sea of unstructured consumer data that arises through social networks—are now emerging. (In future posts, I’ll be talking about some of those.) Dachis Group’s Social Business Index and Social Performance Monitor are designed precisely to help companies get out of the expensive incremental experimentation business and jump directly into the hearts and minds of their customers to figure out what jobs they really need to be done. With real, direct, actionable customer intelligence in hand—the Social Performance Monitor actually dives into the actual components that make up relative brand performance, specifically, Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Brand Mindshare, and Brand Advocacy—companies can practice innovation in ways that allow them to build good theories, find patterns and anomalies that will guide them to predictable success, avoid the bogeyman of commoditization, and teach them to migrate from vertical organizations and proprietary technologies to interdependencies and modular architectures.

When you put it like that, of course, disruption sounds a lot less radical and a lot more like hard-assed social business intelligence. As Occupy Wall Street discovered, it’s easy to make a big noise, but something altogether different when you need to make real change actionable. To disrupt, and not just to shake things up. Without deep insight into the job your customers (or citizens) need you to do, disruption either can be a cover for impotent viral expression or an expression of  needs the status quo can’t even imagine. The question is, what kind of disruption will you choose in 2012? Tell me here in comments or @craigbromberg on Twitter.

The business environment is being disrupted by fast-moving innovators.

In the last few years we have seen some dramatic changes in the business world. Very young companies, such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook are achieving startling growth and are disrupting entire industries.

To competitors, it may seem that these companies are growing at impossible rates. These recent startups seem to defy the laws of nature. How can they grow so fast?

Who would you be with? How long would it last for?

Would you be creating anything, interacting with anyone, discussing, reflecting, listening, watching, experiencing?

Would it involved a mix of some reading in your comfortable chair at home follow by some discussion and questions with other people a few weeks later?

Now imagine that seemingly perfect experience of learning at work, and picture giving it to the person next to you for them to learn something with, and them giving you their ideal learning experience in return. Are you comfortable still?

Why is it we don’t trust so many young professionals to have an idea of how they could learn best?

Think about it. Gen Y have just finished some 13+ years of full time education. They’ve adjusted to the ‘real world’ and taken on jobs, adapted from the classroom to more independent learning at post-school institutions often juggling part-time employment, work placement and a healthy social life at the same time. They convinced HR, recruiters, line managers and whoever else that they knew how to learn quickly, that their limited experience could be applied across contexts, that their formal learning was a great starting point for a successful work-life with their new employer. Do we assume that they did this with no awareness of how they learn new things best? Or do we think that through experiencing all these changes and new things that the average Gen Y’s ability to learn could definitely use some prescription?

Gen Y are a group of people who are used to exercising control.

Controlling how they consume information is something they’re expert at. The stereotypical Gen Y knows what they want and is already working at how they can get there, quickly. Control is just something they come to expect as a result of being exposed to so much choice. If we hire Gen Y as a result of their convincing ability to apply past experience and learning to a new context quickly, why do we then remove any control they have over their ability to learn in ways that are most appropriate or effective for them? Gen Y’s ability to use control in a productive way for learning demonstrates a level of critical reflection and self-awareness. It also removes some of the decision making process from the learning designer or facilitator.

Now think about the average induction program within an organisation. Many are now e-learning modules, delivered asynchronously and are effectively flashy versions of PowerPoint slideshows. We’ve all seen them. Click ‘next’ to proceed, tick a box to indicate you read the information and understood it, complete these multiple choice questions copied verbatim from the previous slide to indicate a genuine learning experience. Sure, these e-learning inductions are cost-effective and create consistency of delivery across a large population. They also ensure new employees are immediately given a message that learning in this organisation is void of individual control, is delivered without any opportunity for interaction or flexibility and definitely doesn’t acknowledge any unique abilities for information filtering, reflection, questioning or application of information to real workplace situations.

Is this the ideal way to introduce the most individualised, independent, fast-paced generation to learning at work?

If not, what is Gen Y’s expectation of learning at work?

If they’ve not been to work before, or had limited experiences of a professional environment where learning supplements other activity, what were they thinking they’d encounter?

Is it even worth acknowledging this group’s expectations?

I would argue yes.

Recognising this young group of professionals’ expectations is worthwhile because ignoring them means ignoring an impacting factor on the possible success of any learning efforts with this group. Definitely, there is the possibility that the expectations brought to a professional learning experience could be unrealistic, but given that they’re going to exist whether they’re acknowledged or not, it would be more productive for both the learner and the organisation to get the ideas out on the table and address them relative to the immediate learning needs of all involved.

As part of my research, Gen Y professionals indicated that having the ability to exercise some control over their learning experiences at work helped them to feel more involved in the learning as opposed to being dictated information. Having some choice about the way learning took place also helped some young professionals feel that the learning they were being asked to complete was valued by the organisation and not just something that needed to be delivered, consumed and ticked-off for compliance at the most basic level. Feeling valued even in a learning experience is an expectation that Gen Y bring to work and one that should be acknowledged if learning designers and people who want to create new, innovative ways of doing things with this new group of professionals need to view as an opportunity and not a burden.

As an initial experience of learning early on in their careers, Gen Y are not particularly excited about the prospect of continuing their professional development in this way. Can we blame them? Removing aspects of learning that this group of learners value and replacing them with ones that seem to communicate a lack of value in the content, the process and the learner is apparently a clear message for some Gen Y professionals.

The research I’ve conducted in this area has exposed a mismatch between the expectations and experiences of Gen Y engaging in learning at work. This mismatch involves assumptions about the learner, the value and process of learning, as well as learning design relative to content. Removing control from the Gen Y learner and providing a single channel for learning or consuming content in place of learning de-values the ability of this group of professionals to demonstrate the skills that helped them get to a professional position in paid employment in the first place. Finding an economical, enriching and mutually valuable way to design and deliver learning to this growing population of professionals is one of the challenges that face learning experts today. Or rather, it is one of the catalysts that should be causing change and innovation within learning circles.

I’ll be presenting a version of these ideas along with more discussion of my research at the Teaching and Learning with Vision conference in November on the Gold Coast.

This item originally appeared on the Headshift | Dachis Group blog.

If you haven’t watched these videos already, they give you a glimpse at what is coming:

• Introducing Timeline — a New Kind of Profile.
• A New Class of Social Apps on Facebook.

Looking at these two new elements together, really what Facebook has done is brought the concept of lifecaching to the masses.Lifecaching as a concept isn’t new but through its massive user base, development platform and the accessibility of mobile computing, Facebook presents users with means, motive, and opportunity to make this happen on a scale that other start ups and researchers can only dream of.

Josh Catone on Mashable points out that Facebook’s all encompassing vision won’t be great for those who need to fill in that timeline retrospectively. And there is also no doubt that some users won’t be happy with these changes, but the number of users with Facebook accounts and the way it is increasingly embedded in the everyday Web means that really we’ve have reached a tipping point that would require a mass exodus to make a difference to the direction Facebook is taking us in.

One of the most interesting changes coming from the new and extended version of the Open Graph (used to enable the new features you see in the videos above) is that the vocabulary of the “Like” is being expanded. Based on a user -> action -> object model, Facebook provides the following examples:

A running app may define the ability to “run” (action) a “route” (object). A reading app may define the ability to “read” (action) a “book” (object). A recipe app may define the ability to “cook” (action) to a “recipe” (object).

Facebook has already linked up a number of social media apps to integrate using this new method. If you are a brand or organisation you should be thinking now about both what these overall changes mean for not just your overall Facebook strategy but also more tangibly, how will you take advantage of this new vocabulary in the apps you existing apps and future apps. For innovators, the new Open Graph is in fact a platform for socially integrated services and products.

And if you are working on social intranets and apps inside your organisation, Facebook has just provided us with a vision of where workforce collaboration is going next once we really interconnect business systems and users through workplace social networking backbone.

Hold on to your seats, everything could be about to change again.

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.

As I type, I am sitting in our London office as part our global work exchange program. Prior to leaving the country, I called AT&T to add an international data-roaming plan. The customer service agent asked me how many MB of data I would need for my ten-day trip. I had no idea, so I asked him to check how many I usually use in a week. His answer? 800 MB. My choices: 50, 100 or 200. My expenses had only been approved for the 50 MB option, so I went with that and opted to keep data roaming turned off, except in an emergency.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been tempted to check email, look at Twitter, check-in on Foursquare, upload a twitpic, pull up a map or search for a restaurant. I’m constantly tempted because it’s what I usually do. So, when I’m sitting on the tube (the equivalent to sitting in traffic during rush hour), I’m always only one finger swipe away from seeing what everyone is up to. Aren’t we all?

We talk about an “always-on” culture: one where we’re all constantly connected through the Internet and our increasingly intelligent smartphones, but I hadn’t really stopped to think about it until I was unplugged. My iPhone is literally my lifeline to the world. I realize that right now I am still in the minority; however, according to a report from Nielsen in March of this year, smartphones are expected to account for 33% market share by Q4 2010 and 50% by Q3 2011. Do you know what percentage of your customers fit into the current 33% or the predicted 50%?

If you don’t – here’s the good news. There are a couple examples of successful one-off tactics, but nobody is winning here yet. This is very much a trial-and-error period, but you MUST start trying. Brands that jump in now and hone their mobile strategy will be well positioned for success as smartphone penetration continues to increase over the next few years. It is still early enough that consumers are willing to accept less than flawless execution; however, more and more, consumers expect a seamless experience, and they will gravitate towards brands that can create one.

Mobile is the ultimate channel: consumers are constantly attached to an endless stream of the information they want and need. It’s the channel where direct messaging (via text), social media, search, sites, and digital media intersect. Mobile also provides the perfect vehicle for tying online activities, like search, and offline activities, like shopping, together. As you can imagine, there are huge business implications here.

More than any other channel, mobile allows for the delivery of targeted, relevant, personalized information, when and where it matters most. I’ll illustrate what I mean with another example. Before I left for London, I stopped by the spa where I usually purchase my facewash. They were out. I went back out to my car, and searched “Sonya Dakar Austin” on my phone. Another retailer, about 10 minutes from where I sat, popped up first. I “clicked-to-call,” confirmed that they had the product and drove there immediately. The whole transaction took 30 minutes from search to purchase. This is just one example of how much retailers stand to gain by optimizing their mobile search terms to deliver relevant, (usually localized) results. And that’s just one example; consider the possibilities for your brand! Mobile is increasingly relevant to your consumers, which means it should be relevant to your brand.

I’m going to call it the “time for mobile experimentation.” Start testing the waters if you’re not already. Test, learn, and test again.

What about you? Are you playing in mobile?

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?

When markets change and the economic rules evolve — as they always do — companies that have an excessively vested interest in the status quo don’t bend or adapt to new ways of doing things. Instead, they usually break. This has been called the Shirky Principle, namely that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” When you have a global business environment in this state and a sharp bend in the road appears, many of them will go off the road.

Thus we find ourselves in a postmodern world that has recently undergone significant and tumultuous changes in some fundamental assumptions. These have largely been brought about by the difficult and very real consequences of following outdated, inadequate, and/or poor ways of doing business. Given the vast changes in the business landscape today and impacted by financial meltdown, a worldwide downturn, rapid globalism, an upended business equilibrium, and new pervasive global forms of communication and cooperation, the Great Recession now appears as a major signpost on the way towards a fundamentally new operating environment for most organizations. It will take years for most institutions to adapt to this new reality, and many won’t make it.

New Business Forces

So what are the new economic models that are emerging today? While no one fully knows the answer yet, there are some clear candidates: Peer production instead of central production, community-based networks instead of management hierarchies, nearly free real-time global data flows instead of expensive and ponderous data silos. There’s now pull instead of push, and social business models to augment traditional business models, and perhaps most important of all, the lowest barrier to creating network effects (i.e. shared value) in history. For most of us now, there’s an entirely new set of opportunities lying on the other side of the transition to the 21st century, if we only have the lens in which to perceive them.

With an economic environment beginning to come back from the brink and businesses planning for significant growth in many industry sectors this year including information technology, we’re facing the potential for a broad return to the status quo for some organizations, at least for a little bit longer. But more change is just around the corner and it’s time to lay the strong foundation for what’s coming.

Most of you that follow my writing and research know that we’re seeing social business as a major player in the way that we organize and operate our institutions of the future. Many of the macro forces at large in the business today are driving organizations to achieve new efficiencies. Harvard Business Review’s terrific Umair Haque made a similar point recently about the better operating conditions and dramatically reduced business impedance in an era of growing information abundance and profound social transparency:

What’s different, immediately, about a hyperconnected world is that information flows much faster and more freely. So it’s less costly to ascertain who’s really evil — and who’s really good. So the first force [in modern economics] is information.

Cheap information lays the foundations for more collective action. It’s less costly to punish those who are evil. Equally important, it’s less costly to reward those who are good.

The point is that today’s organizations are the subject of growing collective intelligence (both inside and outside) and rapidly flowing information of a volume and inescapability that is just now starting to be felt. And there’s a long way to go yet. Some will call this accountability and others will call it tyranny, but what it really is, is far more efficient market forces.

The modern enterprise will be a truly dynamic and social one that is far more deeply integrated, responsive, and porous than most of us can imagine now. To get a sense of what this might look like, I’ve explored the modern reinvention of business in terms of next-generation enterprises and other strategic models such as crowdsourcing, online community, social business, and many others. As far reaching as these concepts are, they are just the beginning. At the core is the concept of social business embedded in the foundation of today’s rapidly evolving networked economy. This was also the subject that Caroline Dangson covered very well here recently in Shepherding Social Business Design, and I encourage you to study it.

As for the disruptive transformation in the title of this post, I am referring to self-disruption, before the world does it to you. For most of us, avoiding the long-term consequences of the Shirky Principle will require discipline and vision, and sometimes more of it than we can muster. More to the point, self-disruption is what allows companies to successfully reinvent themselves and be resilient over the decades.

The Case For Disruptive Transformation

This era’s particular and most significant transformation for most companies will be towards a social enterprise. The case for it is as follows:

• Value comes from the network. The vast majority of value inputs to businesses in the near future will come from outside the organization and through new networked channels. We must deeply engage with these new value sources.
• Cultivation on the edge. The “edge” being the most decentralized part of the network. The best ideas and inputs will be far more transparent, both easier for you to spot and for your competitors to capture as well, both internally and externally to your organization.
• The rise of social capital. Building good products and providing quality services will be important, as will creating financial returns. But the most valuable resource that a person or company can have in the future is social capital, the sum of the deep relationships they’ve acquired over their lifetime in the networked economy.
• Alignment instead of hierarchy. This is sometimes referred to as social calibration, where it is less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, such as edicts or financial incentives. Workers become socially engaged and find that collaboration and their growing investment in building social capital provides the best results for themselves and the organization. Social enterprises will have a corporate culture that naturally moves towards common, yet highly dynamic goals with little collaborative friction.
• Responsible control over shared value will define success. As many organizations have learned the hard way on the Internet, network effects are the new market share. Whoever has the best data or best community on the network, will win since they are all equally accessible. While open source software was the opening salvo of this, with Web 2.0 sites built on user generated content the one after, the future is going to consist of more nuanced organizations that combine traditional business savvy with these new social models for the greatest overall benefit of their participants.

What all of this means for the average organization is that a lot of change is coming. Most companies have now experimented with the early and relatively primitive forms of this revolution including basic social media like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, online video and so on. But the versions of these for the social enterprise are much more profound, focused on results, and far more powerful, starting with the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 and beyond. In the same way that some early Web sites went on to become e-commerce juggernauts, the consumer world of social media is giving rise to something very important and even more significant: social enterprises.

Of course, we are all still learning what much of this will really mean but it’s clear that disruptive transformation is on the menu for most of our organizations, just hopefully of our own volition.

I’ll be more deeply exploring the emerging social enterprise, both here and elsewhere. In particular, I’ll explore specific examples and case studies in the near future. As always, please send me your stories if you’d like to share them.

http://softwarewiki.dachisgroup.com/

A big part of our work here at Dachis Group is to maintain an understanding of what sort of tools and platforms are available to our customers that can support their Social Business Design initiatives.

We provide a comprehensive set of technology research services including: software landscape mapping, feature analysis, security analysis, vendor analysis and tool selection.  We also develop alliances with vendors who we find we are recommending regularly, and finally, we are often engaged to manage the implementation of these tools directly.

Through all of this, we have assembled a list of tools that we believe are relevant to Social Business Design initiatives.

We thought it would be a good idea to share some high level results in the Dachis Group Social Software Resource Wiki to provide a resource for those exploring social technology tools and to ask for help in making it a better resource.

If you are considering deploying collaboration, community, listening, or other social tools inside your organization, we have several hundred companies and products listed.  We’d appreciate your help in curating this list by providing more details and submitting additional cases.

For more resources: Stay on top of the most current thinking on Social Business Design and subscribe to our Collaboratory feed.  To learn more about Social Business Design, download our Social Business Design white paper free of charge.

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