David Armano - Edelman Digital from Seismonaut on Vimeo.
Last week I had the honor of performing the opening Keynote at Community Conference 2011 hosted in Copenhagen Denmark. A delightful, high quality event with attendees coming from all parts of Scandinavia and Europe, it also featured talks from Dell's Bill Johnston and Good Magazine's Max Schorr. The full video from my talk (above) captured the theme I went with for the event. I made the case that changes in business, technology, society and media can only be met by a business which is able to embrace and scale it's "human side". And humans are social creatures, so by that logic a human business is naturally a social business. Here are a few visual highlights:
And this strikes at the heart of the matter. With all of this change, many businesses are slow to adapt or face significant challenges in the pursuit of tapping opportunities presented by the upheaval. But there is also disruption—as Wikileaks demonstrates it's becoming increasingly difficult to control the flow of information. For many organizations, there is nowhere to hide. Shortly after outlining the challenges, I offered up a brief definition of social business planning—what we consider to be the critical step in beginning to address these challenges. In short, it is this:
Make sense? Social business means doing business in a more connected, participatory and socially responsible fashion. If done correctly, it benefits multiple stakeholders: your customers, employees, advocates, partners, etc. But the bigger the business, the less human and less social in nature it is—so in short we all have a long way to go, but all signs point to connecting vs. disconnecting as the way business will be done in the not so distant future.
