Logic+Emotion

Social Business Isn't Dead—It's Just Connected

Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. 
~Mark Twain.

This isn't a post about social business—it's about doing business in a connected age, and this is an important distinction. Let me take a step back for a moment. In April 2009, exactly five years ago I took a chance and joined a start up that didn't have a name at the time and only a handful of employees. That start-up ended up being called Dachis Group, which was recently acquired by SaaS platform Sprinklr. There was a single reason I joined the emerging organization in pre-infancy. Jeff Dachis, who co-founded Razorfish—one of the original digital agencies said the following sequence of words which I had never heard before, and deeply resonated with me. 

Social Business Design

While my time with the start-up was brief, I never wavered from the belief that was core to what social business stood for. Everything had changed, and while we were a handful of true believers at the time, we all instinctively knew that the way business functioned was going to be impacted for the years to come. Now fast-forward five years later...

I touch a lot of clients and initiatives and our engagements can range from producing a regular and relevant stream of content for our client's brands to working side by side with them to figure out the infrastructure needed to support different forms of engagement with a variety of stakeholders. I had been spending some time recently on our beta version of "Dairy Hub"—one of the latest manifestations of evolution we've undertaken with our willing parters of the US dairy industry and it dawned upon me this is just scratching the surface of what we used to call social business. And looking forward, it's simply how all business will operate in one way or another (many are well on their way). 

However, the "Dairy Hub" alone isn't social business—it's one of many initiatives which were driven by a strategy and vision to bring the industry together and create value for a variety of stakeholders. The real story behind the the evolution had more to do with how we collaborated with the CEO of DMI and his team and aligning their efforts as well as ours over the years. It's the heavy lifting stuff you don't always hear about but is always necessary for real change to occur. It takes years. 

More on Dairy another time—back to doing business in a connected age. Below are a few areas which are highly relevant to how business needs to continue to change moving forward. They are how...

The Cloud Connects Us
Cloud technologies are eliminating the need for consumers and enterprises to store massive amounts of data by themselves through offering up an infrastructure which allows businesses to set up shop virtually overnight and empowers data sharing like we've never seen before. It's also potentially a security nightmare. 

Content Connects Us
As advertising becomes gradually easier to ignore or skip—brands are under pressure to leverage all forms of content which either educate, inform or entertain us. Never have brands had to work so hard to get their target audience to pay attention to them. 

Mobility Connects Us
Pay close attention to Facebook's strategy of unbundling the Facebook experience into an ecosystem of mobile first experiences. Mobility is on it's way to becoming the dominant way people interact with technology. Facebook understands this, having learned the hard way originally putting the desktop experience before mobile.

Sharing Connects Us
It's been described as the sharing or collaborative economy, but it's yet another way that connecting is changing the face of how we want to exchange goods and services. E-commerce allowed us to buy new or used—now we can connect to those who can help us get our needs met perhaps without actually buying anything. 
 
The thing that's driving massive change in organizations today is the fact that we've become connected in a number of ways that haven't existed in the past. It's bigger than social. It's bigger than mobile. It's bigger than wearables. And it will take years to work through as connections empower individuals across the board. 

Related articles

And Now For Something Completely Different

I'm Joining Edelman

Jeff Dachis Sells His Social Analytics Firm to Sprinklr

What Comes After Social?

Why Social Media Will Evolve Into Social Business

Dachis Group Acquired by Sprinklr

Social Media is F**king Addicitve

 

If you haven't seen it already, the third installment of the infamous slideshow, "What The F**ck Is Social Media?" has been published over at Slideshare by Marta Kagan. Since I'm a sucker for good visual communication or any good communication for that matter. I highly recommend flipping through it as it's both informative and entertaining. And it contains a few updated stats:

1. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated in the world, ahead of the United States. 
2. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populated in the world, ahead of the United States. Only China & India are more populated. 
3. 500 BILLION. The number of minutes spent on Facebook per month. 
4. 500 BILLION. The number of minutes spent on Facebook per month. LAST YEAR, THAT NUMBER WAS A MEASLY 150 BILLION. 
5. The amount of content 25 BILLION. (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month on Facebook. THAT’S MORE THAN 6X LAST YEAR’S VOLUME.
6. 500 BILLION. The number of peer influence impressions Americans generate per year via social media. 
7. 500 BILLION. The number of peer influence impressions Americans generate per year via social media. 62% of those impressions come from Facebook.
8. 24 HOURS. The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. 
9. 24 HOURS. The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. THAT’S MORE THAN DOUBLE LAST YEAR’S VOLUME. 
10. 2 BILLION. The number of YouTube videos viewed per day. 
11. 2 BILLION. The number of YouTube videos viewed per day. THAT’S TWICE AS MANY AS LAST YEAR. 11
12. 4 BILLION. The number of images hosted on Flickr. 
13. 4 BILLION. The number of images hosted on Flickr. THAT’S 13X MORE THAN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
14. ONE-THIRD. The proportion of women aged 18-34 who check Facebook when they first wake up—even before going to the bathroom. 
15. NINETY-FIVE. The percentage of companies using LinkedIn to find and attract employees. 14
16. NINETY-FIVE. The percentage of companies using LinkedIn to find and attract employees. 59% use Facebook and 42% use Twitter. 
17. 1 in 6. The number of marriages last year between people who met through social media. 15
18. 1 in 6. The number of marriages last year between people who met through social media. THAT’S MORE THAN TWICE THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO MET AT BARS, CLUBS, AND OTHER SOCIAL EVENTS COMBINED. 
19. 27 MILLION. The average number of “tweets” per day on Twitter. 16
20. 27 MILLION. The average number of “tweets” per day on Twitter. THAT’S 8X LAST YEAR’S VOLUME. 
21. 7 HOURS. The time it took for LeBron James to amass his first 150,000 Twitter followers. 
22. 7 HOURS. The time it took for LeBron James to amass his first 150,000 Twitter followers. It took Bill Gates 8 hours to reach 100,000. 

And of course I had something to say about social media. I stated the obvious:

Social media is the crack cocaine of the Internet. We want it, we need it, and we go into withdrawal when we don't get enough of it.

For me, that pretty much says it all. Translation: it's here to stay and we're all going to have to get used to getting our fix as part of our daily lives.

It's Time to Clobber Social Media

Originally posted on the Collaboratory

Jeff Dachis and I recently returned from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York—a near week long flurry of activity that brings together technology, business and design amongst other things. We co-presented a somewhat uniquely titled session called “Social Business Design: It’s Clobberin’ Time”. So what does this mean? Simply put, it means that we are fast approaching a time where there will be a de-emphasis on the “media” portion of “social” and an emphasis on a business being socially calibrated. By this, we mean a business being more real time, adaptive, and in tune with all of its constituents (not just consumers/customers). If you want to make this really simple, you can use the word better. We believe that a socially calibrated business will be better.

Our presentation provided the rationale for why we feel this (we think many business functions have the potential be socialized, not just marketing). We explained our position on why we think the intentional act of design (or business re-design) is needed to achieve the end result of “moving the needle’ or realizing significant cost reduction or profit. We cited several early examples of success while noting the challenges they also pose. Providing customer service on Twitter is great, but how do you scale and integrate it? What’s the right metric to measure? Do your “social initiatives” live in a silo or are they integrated into multiple facets of the organization? These are not media questions—they are business questions. We injected a bit of personality by starting the presentation by saying “we didn’t come to save social media, we came to demolish it”.  An exaggeration to be sure, but we think there is something deeper and we’re just seeing the tip of the Iceberg.

We broke down what we think will be the building blocks of a more social business. Adaptations in people, process and technology. We talked about the benefits and value of “open cultures” (think Zappos) and the potential of connecting the ecosystem of an organization so that a new way of collaborating could co-exist with traditional hierarchy.  The audience seemed receptive. More importantly, they seemed hungry. Does social media really need “clobbering”? Not really—many businesses are reaping the benefits of communicating and engaging with their customers in new ways enabled via social technologies. We applaud this. And we think it’s only the beginning. Have a look at our presentation and let us know what you think. More importantly—ask yourself this: How ready for social business are you?

Social Business Design: Web 2.0 NYC

View more documents from Dachis Group.

Tweeting at the Speed of Scale

Originally posted on the Collaboratory
From a holistic perspective, we talk about the need for organizations to become more socially calibrated—able to adapt and respond to changes both externally and internally. The three areas where emergent outcomes can manifest are, participation with your customers, collaboration between your employees and optimization in the interactions/transactions between your business and its partners. Digging into customer participation, it’s clear that in a networked economy customers demand engagement, information, support and ultimately, value and ecosystems such as Twitter are beginning to deliver here.

In true agile fashion, we’ve been working on our service offerings simultaneously as we service clients. One of our offerings is built upon the belief that a socially calibrated organization will desire to engage in ecosystems such as Twitter with both efficiency and scale without sacrificing quality. It’s a tall order but one that we see as a natural evolution of organizations looking to engage customers effectively and perhaps generate a bit of positive word of mouth in the process.

To date, we’ve seen several companies find success using Twitter ranging from the spokesperson model (Ford’s Scott Monty) to the nimble customer service team (Comcast) to literally hundreds of employees engaging within the ecosystem (Best Buy’s Twelpforce). While there is no one size fits all solution, it’s clear that the Twitter ecosystem is ripe for interactions between constituents and as Best Buy shows, it is indeed possible to scale. But currently they are one of the few organizations doing this. For organizations looking to engage large numbers of their employees within Twitter, they will also need to factor in speed as this particular medium is as real-time as it gets (see dynamic signals). There can be many complexities that exist as a barrier between moving from a current ad hoc model to a more systematic scalable solution. When exploring this opportunity (if it makes sense for your organization), there are several key factors to consider (and I’m only scratching the surface for the sake of the blog format).

People
One of the most significant obstacles to overcome is to determine if your organizational culture can grow into something which supports large numbers of your employees effectively engaging on Twitter. People fuel the ecosystem, not automated technologies. Issues such as competency, incentives, scheduling, job descriptions, policies and guidelines all need to be addressed. This is likely to be different for every organization and as distinct as your culture.

Process
If an organization finds that their people are ready, able and willing to participate in an appropriate fashion—there is still the issue of process. Having a handful of employees providing support, help or engaging your customers may be one thing, but when you’ve got a small army of them it’s another. A process needs to be designed which allows for employees to engage without stepping on each others toes. Tasks may need to be allocated. An organization may need to architect a series of flows which can handle a multitude of scenarios. With scale comes the need for a flexible structure.

Technology
Tweetdeck and your personal account may be enough to sustain the “spokesperson” model of engagement via Twitter, but moving into having a legion of employees actively participating in an orchestrated fashion can require the use of a TAM (Twitter Account Management) system such as Hootsuite or CoTweet (disclosure, CoTweet is one of our partners). A “TAM” with robust features would likely be needed to manage workflow and integrate data. It’s worth noting that for a fee, CoTweet will support storing data of the interactions you have with your customers on Twitter (in addition to other services). But regardless of what you choose, in order to scale by design it’s likely that you’ll need more than what the native platform offers.

At the end of the day, business will have to move at the speed of real time and to do that at scale, you’ll need to plan, design and cultivate the right people, process and technology—all which ideally function under a business framework that is social by design. If you are looking for guidance in this area, we’d be happy to work with you.

Overcoming The Obstacles To Social Business

Originally published on Harvard Business

While social media often commands favorable media attention, the less often told story is that successful initiatives are rare to come by and that there are still a number of organizational roadblocks that managers need to overcome in order to make progress.

Still, we are seeing signs of progress in the form of new efficiencies, more direct ways to connect with customers, and ways to make products and services better. From my experience working and talking with people in large, complex organizations, here are a small sample of obstacles to look for with suggestions on how you might overcome them:

1. Culture shock

Externally, social media is a vastly significant iteration of the Web which has empowered the public in ways we never imagined. It's also highly disruptive. The same potential for disruption exists internally for organizations. Instead of everyday consumers becoming empowered, everyday employees now have this potential as well. And this could cause a culture shock to the system of an organization structured upon decades of tradition, hierarchy, middle management and incentives. An inconvenient truth remains that change is often perceived as a threat.

How to overcome it

Find the change agents within your organization who are passionate about making your company better and harness their passion for the benefit of your business. Comcast's Frank Eliason was a customer service manager who began engaging (and, more importantly, helping) customers via his personal Twitter account. When the rest of the company was made aware of the initiative (and the ensuing positive attention), they decided to reward the effort as opposed to doing a u-turn. A great way to overcome culture shock within a large organization is for leadership to recognize and embrace the mavericks driven to change things for the better. The next challenge then becomes scale.

2. The legal treadmill

The changes sparked by technology are giving the lawyers a headache. Legal teams must be on full alert to changes in the social media landscape, such as the FTC's recent decision to force bloggers to disclose when they've been given payment or products. The legal department of any organization exists to protect it. But sometimes doing business at the speed of real time makes it feel like you are on a treadmill when you need to be sprinting to the finish line.

How to overcome it

Legal needs to be engaged early on and by the right people. There also needs to be support from the top if it means doing something that pushes the boundaries. Michael Dell fully supported Dell's pioneering social media efforts from the top down which no doubt influenced decisions made in the legal department. That said, not everything has to involve the CEO. When I recently approached The Art of Shaving (a P&G brand) to sponsor our Movember team, I advised them that the first thing they should do is talk to their legal department. The brand manager did just that and legal produced clear guidelines about how the social sponsorship would work. In order to get off the legal treadmill, you need a combination of leadership and collaboration.

3. Riskphobia

Making strides toward thriving as a more socially calibrated business means taking a risk or three. And in this economy, no one wants to do that. Unless your organization has a serious entrepreneurial streak running through it, it's likely that the people who work in it are generally risk averse and rewarded for playing by the rules. However, riskphobia is a serious problem for large companies who are finding their businesses disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. Tower Records probably wishes they took some more calculated risks before the industry came crashing down around them.

How to overcome it

Risk can often be managed by piloting small initiatives to see what happens — while learning, gathering data, and iterating on them while they inform bigger and better initiatives. When our company launched our website, we included a real-time stream of our activities and content on our homepage. The stream even includes information about who we email (you don't see names, but you do see the domains). Some view this as risky business, but we felt that the gesture would help us help others manage the risks of transparency and we can manage what gets shared. It's a small gesture, but meaningful as we hope to help others manages their own risks.

These are just three of many obstacles. So, I'm curious — what obstacles have you encountered? How have you dealt with them?

Social Business Design in 5 Minutes

There's been a bit of discussion not so recently about the meaning of Social Business Design. As I thought about this, and the language we use—I recalled the 1/2 day talk I gave in Melbourne recently. The audience seemed to fully grasp the concept and Simon was kind enough to record a few portions of it. In this clip, I discuss the 4 key archetypes that we believe a social business will embody. What do you think?

Give Before You Get

After recently updating some visuals to my Flickr collection, it occurred to me how much of my precious time has gone into producing these artifacts only to "give" them away (specifically for use of blogging and presentations—I ask for attribution, a link is always appreciated). I've had hundreds of people come up to me and tell me they've used my content to further their business more or less. People have benefited off me. But I've benefited off them as well, as I've enjoyed stimulating career opportunities and even received some help when we needed it.

This is a value exchange—a sort of currency that fuels an ever increasing networked economy.

It's not a perfect system by any means. I often wonder if I did the right thing by sharing so much or if I "monitized" my efforts properly. I don't know the answer to this (yet). But here's something I do know. The concept of providing value to your customers or any constituent is a tough pill to swallow. It takes a lot of effort and there's no short cut. So for a company that wants to convert consumers to customer advocates, you have to give. For the Fortune 500 corporation that wants their employees to collaborate more effectively, or perhaps retain their best talent—you have to give. For the brand that wants to leverage a social system to better market their products and services—you have to give.

And giving is hard. But you have to be prepared to do it if you want to thrive in the network economy. Think about it.

Nussbaum on Design, Disruption and Innovation

Originally posted on the Dachis Group Collaboratory

Sharing ideas and insights with Bruce Nussbaum, contributing editor at BusinessWeek, is always a pleasure, so it's fitting that he's one of my first round table interviews. Previously assistant managing editor in charge of BusinessWeek's innovation and design coverage, he was named one of the 40 most powerful people in design by I.D. Magazine in 2005. Nussbaum wrote The World After Oil: The Shifting Axis of Power and Wealth, and Good Intentions, an inside look at medical research on AIDS. He has received awards from the Sigma Delta Chi Journalism Society, the Overseas Press Club, and the Industrial Designers Society of America. Nussbaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. For more of his thinking and writing, you can read Nussbaum on Design or follow him on Twitter. Photo credit to Alex_Cheek.

David: You've been a huge advocate for the field of design and a believer in what's commonly known as "design thinking." Movements in how people collaborate in an open fashion or trends such as crowdsourcing are positioned to influence how designers think and work. What do you think are the challenges and opportunities for designers as these shifts take place?

Bruce: Crowdsourcing and client participation in design are huge new opportunities that are really exciting.  We now have the technology to engage consumers, learners, drivers, patients - everyone - and make them part of a process that generates new options, services and experiences. Of course, that means "experts" have to give up some control and that includes managers, designers, branders (is that a term?). Yeah, this is especially true in branding where social media empowers consumers to demand control of the brand, brand strategy and, increasingly, the products/services that make up the brand.

David: Business models are being disrupted in real time. You recently shared an opinion on how this affected BusinessWeek. In your opinion, what should a business be doing right now to ensure that they are positioned to thrive?

Bruce: The same forces decentralizing power and participation in media are sweeping business organizations. So we have social business models arising in the same way that we have social media models. I think you guys are pioneering in this area, David. You know, there is a health practice in Brooklyn called Hello Health where young doctors organize their practice around a Facebook platform--maybe it is Facebook itself. I think that's the model of the future for many business organizations. It's beyond flat. It's networked. Changing big corporations to do that will be a huge task. AG Lafley, before he left as CEO of P&G, said his job of just opening the silos there was only 10% done after nearly 8 years. So moving from hierarchical to horizontal to networked is an immense task--but it has to be done to compete in the global economy. I'd guess that one out of 10 big companies will be able to make the switch. Maybe 1 in 20.

You have to be in the culture of your consumers and clients and certainly with Gen Y, that's how they live, that's where they live. It's not just the future, it's like tomorrow.

David: You've written on the topic of innovation for some time providing alternative perspectives on processes such as Six Sigma etc. Has your view on innovation itself changed or is it the same? How do you personally define innovation?

Bruce: Innovation, for me, is invention that generates value for people.  Often that value is monetary and commercial and produces profits, jobs, taxes and economic growth. Increasingly innovation is happening in non-market civic arenas--health, education, transportation, warfare (yes warfare), where the increased value is not necessarily monetary alone but hugely beneficial to the people it effects. The fastest growing field in innovation and design consulting is health care. Yet, there is a lot of money to be saved and earned in that space, but the biggest beneficiaries are patients, doctors and nurses.

David You've recently joined the ranks with many of us on networks such as Twitter. Why did you do it? What have you learned and what in your opinion is the opportunities and or risks that networks provide to the business world.

Bruce: I touched on the importance of networks earlier. They are the crucial building blocks of organization for the future. And hey, they were in the past. Church groups, unions, political parties, block associations--all networks. Just without the technology that binds these days.

I use Twitter to create a human search engine that screens information and links it to me quickly. It is so much better than a mathematical algorithm that doesn't know me. This posse is my information curator.  Increasingly, I wake up in the morning and use Twitter to get my information, not the NY Times or the WS Journal. I rely on my Twitter-mates (don't go there) to put me onto trends way before they show up on data bases. And yes, I also am entertained by them. I hope I give them giggles from time to time as well. And I hope I serve them as well as a curator of information.

David: You've written a good deal about the current economic climate, how we got here and what we could be doing to get out. If you were a CEO of a large business today, what would you do to fuel economic growth? Do you think business leaders can help turn this around?

Bruce: CEOs should have been innovating throughout the recession and need to innovate even faster as we exit it and move toward growth. Every serious study shows that when companies innovate in an economic downturn, they pick up market share vis-à-vis their competitors once growth accelerates. Apple does this so well.

But most executives just cut costs and then find themselves with nothing new to offer consumers when the game changes. I think we'll have a new normal consumer culture  in the next business cycle and companies that figure out the needs and wants of people in that culture will do exceedingly well. Also, Gen Y is beginning to move into the workforce. It has a very distinct culture that very few companies understand. I'm talking different values, behaviors and platforms of interaction and delivery. Those who "get" Gen Y will do well.

David: "Social media" for the lack of a better phrase seems to be on everyone's mind. What's your take on the current state of matters related to this? Where specifically do you see opportunities and what should we as both citizens and members of the workforce be mindful of?

Bruce: "Social media" has evolved to the point where we should drop the word "social." Most media is now networked, engaged, participatory, looped. It's the norm. Social media is where Gen Y live and social media is where aging Baby Boomers are gravitating toward. We are still sorting out the technologies and rules of the game for social media. There are different cultures for different platforms. You have to study these cultures as if they were different villages in different continents.

I see virtually all corporate consumer business, retail, media, education and health moving onto the social media platform. Think Mint vs. Intuit (which just bought Mint). I believe hybrid social media models will develop that integrate the personal with the network. I think one of the next big things will be in cheap, portable video conference systems that link to social media systems that make them much more personal. Let's face it, Skype sucks, especially compared to HP's Halo system but Skype is free and Halo is expensive. So far. A disruptive technology in video conference could make a huge difference in both social media and social business platforms.

I'm hoping that all this will change our political system which has become hugely corrupt. Unlike Asia, where corruption is rampant and fought, we in the US have simply legalized it and call it "lobbying." Social media has the promise of taking power away from the few in Washington and giving it to the people. Yeah, yeah, I know. Be careful of what you wish for. But, hey, this is all good and fun and, yes, important too.

The Value of Visual Thinking

Originally posted on The Collaboratory.

I'm leaving for Las Vegas later this week to speak at Blogworld. I'm on a panel discussing the intersection of social media and brands, but what I'm really excited about is a presentation on Friday where I will discuss the value that visual thinking can bring to any organization. I have a passion for visual thinking. Being able to think visually, break down complex ideas and synthesize them into something meaningful is my forte. It's a skill that has landed me in the company of the smart and capable folks I currently work with. More importantly, I took whatever abilities I had and I gave them over to my ecosystem. In any social system, you always come to the table offering something of value rather than seeking it.

Educating
So what's the value of visual thinking for business? For starters it can help educate, especially if you are launching a new product, initiative or idea. Take for example our own vision for Social Business Design. When I first joined the team, Jeff immersed me in the company vision and I spent several weeks wrapping my head around the idea. During this process, I knew that we would need more than words to communicate such a big idea. One of the first things I did was to begin to visualize what critical elements looked like so that other people would have a "mark" they could file mentally and recall whenever they heard a word such as "hiveminded" or "metafilter." and the image with "yummy." Education is one value that visual thinking has. When I present our ideas on Social Business Design, I display screen shots of websites and social networks, and I watch the audience as they take notes. But when the visualizations of our 4 archetypes flash on the screen, the note taking usually stops and eyes fixate on the screen studying the image and the words. It's almost as if I can see their thought process in action. 

Communicating
It doesn't matter if we're talking about consumers or employees — attention is becoming scarce. If you want to communicate something, you need to capture attention and communicate your point quickly. It doesn't matter if it's email, Twitter, Facebook, Ebay, Youtube, phone calls, or spreadsheets. The average person is inundated by information and doesn't have the time or the focus to sit and watch a 20 minute video or read through your 50 page document filled with nothing but text. The value of effective visuals is to stop someone in their tracks, engage them, draw them in and inform them as they absorb what it is you are trying to communicate.

Training
In the design of business, visual thinking will be key in the design of new processes, systems, and structures. Expect to see the mapping of ecosystems, flows, org charts, social systems and data visualization. All of which can help people understand and get behind change. Visual language can also be an effective training tool as businesses retool and re-equip their employees to compete in blisteringly fast paced environments. Before employees actually perform new tasks, they will have to visualize themselves doing it. I'm a firm believer that visual currency will play a big role in the value exchange we see influencing the business world. But don't take my word for it, in the words of an ancient Chinese proverb: “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” Visual thinking equates to "show me", and that's the bridge between telling and understanding — that's the value it brings to any context.

We're not all visual thinkers (though we all have the potential). However we are all visual learners. Don't believe me? Simply pay a visit to any gradeschool and you'll see evidence of it everywhere. "A is for Apple," showing both the letter and a picture of an apple next to it. The cognitive recognition of the image often happens first. A child sees the object, thinks "yummy," learns the word, and when they do — they associate the word

Strength in Numbers

 
The firm that I am helping build is primarily services oriented—which means we'll lead with strategy and won't make technology recommendations until the time is right. That said, we do think there are some good technology solutions which can help organizations become more socially calibrated. In short, if the the right culture, people, and processes are in place—these technologies can help connect the nodes within and outside of your organization leading to a more real time, collaborative and informed way of doing business.

Our current roster of partners will include:



* IBM Lotus Connections - Enterprise Social Networking tools
* Telligent Community Server - Customer and enterprise facing forums, profiles and social networking
* Atlassian Confluence - Wiki-based collaboration
* ThoughtFarmer - Social Intranet Software
* Cotweet.com - Twitter for Business
* SocialWare - Social Media risk management
* Socialcast - Enterprise Dynamic Signal platform
* Photon Infotech - Social Media Framework, Open Source Development
* Bamboo Networks - Custom Application Development and Rehabilitation
* Starpoint Solutions - Telligent implementation and integration

These partnerships are one piece of our delivery capability, which includes developing on top of Open Source tools that are available as well as the integration of web-based services (facebook, twitter, salesforce.com, etc) in to the enterprise right alongside on-premise software. Each partner has committed to work closely with Dachis Group not just during the software deployment, but during the entire consulting engagement where needed

We have a way to go in order to make Social Business Design a reality—and in order to do this right, we will need to partner and align ourselves with other smart organizations that can help deliver upon the vision. And lastly, we are officially out of stealth mode. I've met many of you in person and know that you're working to move your own organization forward beyond tactical social marketing initiatives. If you are really serious about it, now is the time to talk to us.

Dynamic Signals For Business

Consider how business really gets done. A group of professionals agree to meet for lunch or perhaps dinner to discuss the details of a deal. Each of the members of the meeting is in a constant mode of signaling. Their body language, the tone of their voice, the grip of their handshake, their eye contact. These are each signals that we as human beings send to others. Some of us are better at influencing the conscious and unconscious signals we send. Some of us are more sensitive at picking up and deciphering the signals we receive. Body language experts discuss this signal exchange and measure them in "microseconds" because that's how quickly a signal such as blink, furrow or nervous twitch can be broadcast.
Continue reading on The Collaboratory

Social Business By Design 2.0

Social Business By Design

View more documents from David Armano.

If you found some value in the first iteration of "Social Business by Design" you may want to take a look at this current version. It includes double the content including video footage from the Drupal7 open design initiative. Also, you'll notice the slide design has been updated to reflect the current identity system of Dachis Group. There's also additional thinking around business culture and the dynamics between networks and hierarchies. Hope you find it useful.

Eating Our Dogfood: Welcome To Our Collaboratory

I’ve been with our new company for just about six months now and in this compressed timeframe I’ve grown by leaps and bounds surrounded by very capable people who are looking to move the industry forward.  We believe that “social media” (for the lack of a better phrase) isn’t merely the latest communication channel nor a fad but will in fact alter the way business gets done. In order for this to happen, a transformation must take place deep within the organization which manifests itself in nearly every business function. The transformation will result in a business becoming a social business—one that is connected both inwardly and out, and benefits from this in measurable ways. So when it came to our own "Website", our intention was to lead by example. Welcome to our Collaboratory, it’s less a website and more of a digital ecosystem where we will aggregate our collective thinking and engage all levels of participants from clients, to peers to individuals in other ecosystems. 

The first thing you may notice in our Collaboratory is a somewhat unconventional homepage. I’ve talked before about the idea about attention moving from “pages” and earning trust in streams.

This is exactly what you’ll see when you visit the Collaboratory. You’ll be greeted by a living, breathing, visual representation of our activities. You’ll be able to see what we tweet, how we work (we currently use 37 Signals Basecamp and Highrise to collaborate), when we signal internally (we use Yammer) and when and what we blog. You’ll even be able to see when we e-mail and to which organizations we e-mail to. Of course we’ve thought this through and can control what gets shared and how, but the concept is to provide a window into how we operate. It’s a glimpse into our “hivemind” you could say.



The stream constantly updates in real time and makes for less of a homepage and more of a dynamic representation or our organization. 

Other features that our site includes is a calender of events so you can see where we are giving talks and participating within the industry. All content from blog posts to our events can be subscribed to via an RSS feed. The Collaboratory will act as a meta aggregator pulling in all of our content from blog posts, to videos to bookmarks and you’ll be able to share your thoughts on anything that gets posted. Additionally, there has been quite a bit of chatter in the industry about the idea of Social Business Design and even requests that we firmly define what this is. We’ve also written a whitepaper on the topic and have defined it in short as the following:



“Social Business Design is The intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.”



Our goal with the collaboratory is to provide a value exchange, This means we are tasking ourselves to provide value to our ecosystem and expect to receive value back. But the exchange is not merely two-way, our hope is that all constituents in our ecosystem benefit from the experience we help facilitate here. This is what value exchange means. The Collaboratory was designed specifically for this—leveraging a Wordpress foundation for rapid content updates and integrating all kinds of technologies which make the stream, feeds and interactions possible. It’s designed to be content rich as opposed to heavy on the special effects, and made to evolve and scale as our needs change. We’re emphasizing substance over flash. 

So welcome to our Collaboratory and feel free to eat our own dogfood along with us. It might not sound glamorous, but we’re counting on your participation as we navigate the course toward creating more socially calibrated organizations. See you in the stream.

Designing The Social Business

I recently had a chance to sit down (virtually) with Bob Thompson of Customer Think. The result was a 30 minute podcast (listen here). We discussed some of the following topics and more:

• Social media as communications channel vs. paradigm shift
• Should a social business include collaboration within an organization (Enterprise 2.0) and outside (Social CRM)?
• Cultural changes required for an organization to develop a "hive-minded" mentalty
• What the CEO should do to help support a shift to a truly social business

If you have some time to spare, have a listen and let me know what you think. Is being socially calibrated a true paradigm shift or the latest evolution of communication? It's a worthy discussion and warrants some definition.

How Filter Failure Contributes To Business Failure

Watch this video by Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek's innovation editor and veteran employee with the company. It's a fascinating illustration of the shifts in business we are seeing in real time. Media outlets in particular have been on the front lines of this shift. As I've said many times before, the Web and its latest social iteration has introduced ultra deep and pervasive niche content and experiences which directly compete with many business models. There is a unique online destination for everyone, no matter how specialized the interest. The network economy is the opposite of mass—it's niche, fragmented and content distributers are feeling the heat.

There was something about Bruce's talk that stood out to me in particular. While he calls out corporate culture as a main factor which may have contributed to BusinessWeek ending up on the buyers market, it was this insight that really stood out for me.

"somehow BusinessWeek lost deep contact with its readers"
"surveys...in the end they were misleading. The message was, be general—go horizontal"

Now this kind of blows me away. Right now there are scores of vendors telling us to "listen" and selling software to do it. There are several platforms offering dashboards that will allow you to actively hear EVERYTHING your customers tell you. You can post a poll on Twitter in minutes and get responses in real time. So is it possible that surveys contributed to BusinessWeek's situation?

First let's examine what surveys do, They tell us what preferences people have. There is nothing wrong with this, and they can be boiled down to percentages and stats. They can also generate a lot of data, and this is where the idea of filter failure comes in. Obtaining large quantities of data is becoming a commodity due to the technologies available—it's what we do with that data that makes the difference. Finding the signal within the noise which can help generate an insight that leads to perhaps a game changing business model is much more difficult than the act of listening itself. Listening and discernment are not the same.

Here's a true story I recently heard—I have to use generic terms to describe it. A large consumer product company found out about a group of people who were brainstorming a way to solve a problem which was related to this company. Because this consumer product company has people working for it who actively participate in networks, and monitor the space, they found out about it. Someone identified this idea as a signal in a sea of noise—there are a lot of people who talk about this company daily, but this was different. The people who independently brainstormed this idea outside of the company's ecosystem are now talking to the people who work for the company about making the idea into a reality. 

No survey needed.

Scenarios like this get me excited because they underscore several tenets of social business design.

1. The company realizes that value can be produced outside of it's own ecosystem and monitors for dynamic signals
2. The company likely has a combination of people, process and technology to filter the signal from noise
3. The company has a open culture in place that realizes value exists outside it's ecosystem and looks to maximize it

Listening is one part of the equation. Being able to discern what's valuable and then act upon it is another. The more I think about the concept of applying a metafilter to your business, the more I'm convinced that it's something that will rely on the combination of not only technology but people. Technology can help us listen to everything that's ever been said about ourselves our company, brand  etc.—but finding that one key, game changing insight in a sea of infinite chatter and then actually doing something about it is another story.

Re-designing Your Business Culture

When thinking of any Social Business Design problem, it's important to realize that there are three areas which will define all of the challenges which will need to be resolves in order to move any business toward a more open, collaborative model which benefits all constituents (employees, customers, partners). These areas are:

People
Process
Technology

Right now the industry is focused on technology, which is understandable since advances in it have enabled us to do so much more with less. However, I wanted to focus this short post around a subset of people. It's a thing commonly referred to as "corporate culture".

I'm not interested in debating the validity or not of the term, but it's a fact that every organization has an ecosystem and within the ecosystem, especially on the internal side, people act and behave a certain way within a pre-defined hierarchy. To underscore the "culture" issue, here are a few phrases I hear from the people who work in the trenches of very large organizations as it relates to social initiatives:

"We implemented sharing platform X for employees, but the results are not what we expected"

"We tried social media but we're just not ready to engage customers"

"Our legal department shut that down before we could try it"

Now assuming that the tech products worked and that the organization had some form of process in place, these are by and large people/culture issues at the core. The fact is that you can bring in the best of technologies or have the best of intentions for opening up your organization, but if at the core the organization isn't calibrated for it, efforts cannot scale or potentially be ineffective.

When we think of culture, we apply the notion of what we call being "hiveminded". We believe that a social inclination resides within a company’s culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output.  Employees approach work with a social mindset; customers expect dialogue and engagement; suppliers anticipate collaboration towards common goals. This "hivemindedness"  (think of bees to a hive) is linked to a strong cultural identity which is shared by all.  Whether your social initiatives are internal or external, it's worth asking the following questions to determine if your organization is in the correct mindset when it comes to dealing with the changes in work, society and technology. 

If we are listening, what are we listening for? 
What do we do when we hear something we don't like?
Do we want real connections established between employees, customers, partners? 
How can we reward those in our ecosystem who actively contribute?
Do we actually want to engage those who want to engage us? Can we?

Many organizations work in industries which simply can't support some of the things we hear thrown about in the social media space. However, all organizations will have to deal with these changes in some way that will better position them for the future. One of the biggest opportunities right now is tapping areas in your internal ecosystem which can benefit your organization. But buying the best tool out there will never change the hearts and minds of people who have been trained to hoard what they know (and rewarded for it) vs. sharing openly. In a newly emerging network economy a cultural shift will be required for best results. 

Dachis Group Expands Internationally With Headshift

It’s been five months since I joined colleagues Peter Kim, Jeff Dachis, Kate Niederhoffer, and Jevon MacDonald in a new venture that we believe will alter the way business gets done. In this time, I’ve immersed myself along with the team in fine tuning the vision we’ve developed which we call social business design—a holistic approach to transforming organizations from traditional infrastructure toward a more open, socially calibrated ecosystem. We believe that this is the only way businesses will be able to scale and integrate what’s now commonly known as “social media” on one side and “enterprise 2.0” on the other. And I’m pleased to announce that we are no longer a team of six people. We’ve just acquired Headshift, a European social business consultancy with offices in the United Kingdom and Sydney, Australia. This is the biggest news we’ve had since I joined the team and I’m really excited about the global opportunities it presents us.

We believe that organizations across the globe will begin to view “social media” as social business and when this happens, integration, scale and adoption will become complex issues which will only be solved through a purposeful act of coordinated activities built upon a solid strategic foundation. Enter social business design as a systematic, comprehensive approach that orchestrates social business across three core areas: business partner optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation.

These three areas of business possess ripe opportunities for the emergence of improved outcomes ranging from cost savings to new product/service innovations and increased revenue streams. These are outcomes which happen when organizations connect and expand their ecosystems, evolve toward a more open culture and empower employees, business partners and customers to actively participate in their business.  The acquisition of Headshift will allow us to service the increasing demand for global organizations to tap into these benefits. It will also allow us to attract the best talent at an international level while creating our own culture focused on collaborating and doing the absolute best work in this space. Headshift’s client relationships include extensive work in: Professional and Legal Services, Consumer Products, Media and Publishing, Health Care, and Government verticals as well as global companies including AXA, British Petroleum, and the BBC. The official press release for this news can be found here. For more on the Dachis Group and our services, visit our current site.

I’m terribly excited by this news as I’ve met Lee Bryant of Headshift personally and was blown away by his combination of intelligence, knowledge of the industry and humbleness as a human being. If you take a look at some of Lee’s presentations, you’ll instantly realize that he’s one of the few people who truly grasps how social will integrate with business at the macro and micro levels respectively. I’m looking forward to collaborating with the entire Headshift team both here and overseas and predict great things for our collective future.

Additional links related to this news:

Jevon MacDonald: We are growing: Dachis Group expands with Headshift
Peter Kim: Welcome Headshift
Kate Niederhoffer: Dachis Group Ecosystem Expansion

Reactions from others:

• ReadWriteWeb Enterprise: Dachis Group Acquires Headshift: Say Hello to a Social Business Consulting Powerhouse
• Neville Hobson: Is 'social business' the new black?
• Sierralog: Dachis group acquires Headshift
• Drew B's take on tech PR: The role of social and digital media in business consulting
• Austin American-Statesman: Austin Ventures makes a move in the corporate social networking arena
• Euan Semple: Headshift and the future

Social Business Design @ Social Fresh

View more documents from David Armano.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to share a few high level thoughts about the state of social business at the first ever Social Fresh conference held in Charlotte North Carolina. It's been several months since I've joined the Dachis Group and the majority of my time has been spent helping to build the business, and positioning while working on some limited engagements with clients and planting seeds for future relationships. If you've followed my work in the past—you'll find a few familiar thoughts here combined with new ones which we will continue to develop as we move forward.

As for the event itself, Social Fresh was a unique conference which attracted social business practitioners, educators as well as large organizations such as Wal Mart, Bank of America, Duke Energy, Ruby Tuesday and Lowe's to name a few. Sessions ranged from panels on Twitter featuring Kathleen Hessert (the woman who put @the_real_shaq on the map), to real world case studies from Jim Deitzel of Rubbermaid on how his company leverages social business techniques to create customer advocates. See video clips of both below:

There were many great presentations and case studies and I got to greet old and new friends such as Spike Jones, Gia Lyons and Olivier Blanchard to name a few. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present the keynote in the afternoon. You can probably get the idea from the slideshow, but mainly what I had hoped to emphasize was that in order for social media to make the transformation to social business—change must happen deep within the organization and spill out into every way that the business operates—from how it interacts with business partners, deals will employees and allows it's customers to actively participate as part of the entire business ecosystem. Most of the presentation outlined some of the challenges we'll face but I also threw out some high level thoughts around potential organization model.

Me addressing the room at Social Fresh. Source: Charlotte Observer

Right now, a key theme is emerging for me through all of this and it's something I think all organizations will have to figure out.

Orchestration.

A business that operates in a socially acceptable way (think open, collaborative, efficient, participatory) will have to transform it's internal and external business practices and orchestrate social initiatives across multiple business units, groups, brands and functions rather than establishing new departments which operate on their own. That is if the business is really serious about these things as opposed to being merely interested in tacking on a new way to market their products or services. These challenges we face are here now. I've had several conversations where people in the trenches are about to launch revised policies influenced by social media and others who are just getting educated. We're heading into an interesting phase of this industry—moving away from awkward puberty to something more mature. In order to do that, we'll need things like employee training, guidelines, rules of engagement etc. As Peter Kim notes, we'll have to scale—and as my friend Spike Jones says, we'll need a "movement". So get ready.

5 Challenges Social Business Will Face

Published on Harvard Business Review
A recent survey conducted by Proofpoint found that 8% of companies had terminated employees due to social media usage (common causes including sharing sensitive information on a network). And while the statistic seems significant, it only underscores one of several upcoming challenges nearly every organization will face as changes in people, process and technology fueled by the collective movement we call social media begin to transform business. Here are a few challenges that every organization should be planning for right now. If you aren't you will be.

1. Integration
Becoming a social business can impact nearly every function of a business. Marketing, PR, communications—even supply chain and any function that deals with employees. So where does it live? Is it a department? Do organizations hire a "Chief Social Officer" much like they would a Chief Technology Officer? All organizations will eventually grapple with integrating social somehow into their entire ecosystem adopting either centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches.

2. Governance
Many organizations now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the internet will be. The good, the bad, the ugly. And this includes content produced not only from the general public, but also from internal constituents such as employees. Organizations will not only need to begin actively listening so that they are in the know, but they will need rules of engagement for how they deal with multiple types of scenarios from responding to a compliment to dealing with a detractor to following up with an employee who just posted something inappropriate or sensitive.

3. Culture
All organizations fall somewhere on a spectrum of being "open" or "closed" meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally. Consider that it's probable that the Zappos purchase by Amazon had a good deal to do with their notoriously open culture. Likewise, even Apple which can be notoriously secretive is benefiting by leveraging a strategy that opened up their iPhone application ecosystem. Sure Apple has a great deal of control over it, but for the first time in history—they have legions of people developing applications which run on their hardware. Organizations have the potential to benefit from embracing customers, employees etc. but will have to manage it intelligently and with purpose.

4. Human Resources
In order to transform from a business to a social business, (meaning true participation as opposed to leveraging social media as a new form of marketing), businesses are going to have to upgrade their HR protocols, as well as legal. And it's likely to be a never-ending process as new technologies continually hit the scene. Before there was Twitter, companies scrambled to publish blogging guidelines for employees, now the wrong tweet or Facebook status can get you fired. Organizations will not only need to update guidelines but actually train their people who may be leveraging social technologies for work. Customer service in particular comes to mind.

5. Measurement & ROI    
Every organization will continue to struggle with how results get measured and how ROI is reported. Philosophically, this question can be answered with another question: "what's the ROI of e-mail"? But it's a question that won't go away. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives such as attention (the size or number of participants actively engaged) or authority (the amount of influence a participant has in the ecosystem). Because social business is enabled by technology, it is by definition measurable. However, tying it to revenue made or saved becomes more of a challenge.

There's more, but I think these represent some big ones. What are your thoughts?

Social Business By Design

From my latest contribution to the Harvard Business Review:

In nearly every conference room across the business landscape it's inevitable that at some point the phrase "social media" enters the discussion. Marketers, PR and salespeople are among the first to engage in the discussions, trying to figure how networks can be leveraged to sell more stuff. But I'd like to propose another way to approach the topic. What if we looked at "social media" as a design problem? If you take a trip over to Wikipedia and enter the word "design" you'll see this at the very beginning of the entry:

"Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb and, in a broader way, it means applied arts and engineering. As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention."

Notice any key words in this small excerpt? There are a few, but the two that stand out for me are the words "planning" and "intention."

As someone who started a career as a designer (graphic design and user experience design) and is currently exploring business opportunities in social media — which I think of as social business design — I can't help but see the challenges and opportunities in this definition as it applies to social media.
Read the entire article

The Value of Dynamic Signals

It's been called micro-blogging, micro-sharing and a variety of other phrases including the word ambient. But there's a significant attribute that's been less discussed and is critical to both business and social implications regarding how we live and work. Technology allows us to signal our every movement, thought, action and status in real time. It's pretty powerful stuff and why millions of people are addicted to telling their own social sytems what they are doing whether it be a status update on Facebook or a tweet.

But we're signaling in our everyday lives—in nearly everything we do. I used to work for someone who was very comfortable using e-mail as their primary form of communication. The problem is, signals often got mixed in e-mails. I couldn't decipher exactly if the tone of the e-mail was sincere, sarcastic or something else. Often times e-mails were irrelevant by the time they were sent—an issue had already been resolved only it wasn't communicated to the person sending the e-mail. The signal had become static. Then, an interesting thing happened. For nearly a year, I sat outside this person's office. All of a sudden, I had access to all types of signals that I had not seen before. I knew when the person was in a meeting, often times with who—when they were on the phone and could even decipher mood by the volume of voice, laughter, or an audible sight that might penetrate the office walls.

Signals.

My proximity to the office also allowed me to bypass e-mail, often times stopping by to deliver a quick update. The quality of interactions was greatly improved and more efficient due to the proximity. Because I had access to signals happening in real time, I was able to modify my own communications and interactions. As the saying goes, there is no replacement for face to face interactions—that's because interpersonal interactions are filled with all kinds of dynamic signals that happen in real time and are processed by our brains in microseconds. Body language? Another form of dynamic signals. It's no wonder why people can get so much done when they actually sit down and roll up their sleeves. Bigger groups (meetings) can often lead to signal overload which needs to be filtered. More on that later.

As I reflect back to that experience and see the evidence of dynamic signals occurring in many facets of technology from Basecamp letting you know when a team member is logged in to editing documents in real time using Google docs, there's no doubt in my mind that this is bigger than blogging, or even sharing. The ambient nature of ecosystems such as Twitter mimic things I've just described in my office experience. When nodes on the network (people) are traveling, we see the signal—when there is work happening, the signal gets sent. When they are at play, the signal is there. Sometimes the signal is mixed all together, but still strong. And of something traumatic has happened—signals are often sent. All of these signals inform us, and provide something of infinite value.

Context.

Signals which provide context really gets me excited about all of this because with context everything gets better. Collaboration, work, communicaiton, and of course business. Good sales people know all about context—they are masters at reading signals and it's often why they will prefer to pursue interactions in the flesh. These are where dynamic signals are most rich and saturated. As a small group working remotely, we've come to depend on all types of technologies which attempt to mimic the level of dynamic signals we send off when we work together in person as a group. Sometimes somthing like Yammer can fill a gap, sometimes it doesn't. The technologies are still coming together—but the sociological driver has been building up slowly for years. More teams working remotely, work happening during all types of shifts vs. 9-5. And communications happening 24-7. These communications can be about your product, brand or service from all over the world. The signals are out there, they are real time and they need to be made sense of. When thinking about why all of this "social stuff" matters, consider this equation.

Signals + context = better.

Here's the opportunity dynamic signals provides. Or as colleague Jevon MacDonald puts it:

"For the first time we are seeing a complete set of ideas emerge which are applicable on both a strategic and implementation level. The four major archetypes of Social Business Design can be integrated to move past simple data interchange and in to a world of work in which end-users are in control and through which they can collaborate in real time."

Here's to business, like life—happening in real time. Real time means better, more efficient, streamlined and contextual. All things which can lead to improved productivity, and better quality. Stuff that can be measured. That's the value of dynamic signals.

Debunking The Myths of Social Media

Moving forward I will be contributing to the Harvard Business Review when time permits. My first contribution is up, you can view the entire article here. Below in an excerpt:

"There are a few considerations every organization needs to consider when developing their blueprints for their own unique social media design. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are few things you can plan for as you review the many options before you.

Here are three to consider:

Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take into account that you'll have to invest to grow your effort into a healthy ecosystem that can produce data, insights or even new ideas. People will be required in order to do this.

Feeding. Whether it's a community, Wiki or internal collaboration solution you've put in place, it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content. Some of this can be automated and some of it can come from your participants--but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.

Weeding. A productive social business design will require efforts to prune and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a garden). In some cases, automated moderation services can do this--but in others people will be required to ensure that interactions are productive. Weeding can also include creating a separate environment--for example, Nokia's "blog hub" encourages employees to vent freely internally (using anonymous aliases).You can bet that someone is looking at the data and analyzing it. If not, they should be."

Special thanks to Dachis Group colleague Peter Kim for developing the above framework. A nice sticky way to remember how much effort is really required for any social business initiative. I've also used the garden analogy before:

"The word you need to hyperfocus on is cultivate. Think of how one cultivates a garden. It takes several factors:

1. Passion for gardening
2. Patience
3. Willingness to weed, prune, seed, and grow. All the hard work that comes with producing fruit
4. Appreciation for the fruits that have been yielded
5. A desire to share the fruits of your garden with your neighbors"

Hope you enjoy the read, and it helps you think about the big picture as we all move quickly through this space and begin cultivating healthy social systems. Also, if you have ideas to the types of topics you'd like to see me cover on the HBR, leave a comment.

Is The Hub And Spoke Model Adaptable?

We've been doing a bit of thinking on how organizations can re-design themselves as social systems which produce emergent outcomes—that is, results which move business forward and tend to emerge in an organic fashion. Twitter's growth due to end user innovation, an open API, and other drivers are an example of this. When I first wrote about Twitter in Businessweek back in 2007—I called it an "ecosystem"—that's because it is. It's a living, breathing organization with thousands of nodes in place which facilitate real time dynamic signals. In my new role, I was recently able to take a high level look at an organization and how they wanted to evolve their communications system. Essentially they had a "hub and spoke model" in place—but it was based on one way vs. two way communications. The next phase, included transforming this in to a more dynamic two way model. Which makes sense. But, I'd like to make the case that a hub and spoke alone—does not make for a connected ecosystem.

The Limitations Of Hub And Spoke
Jeremiah Owyang recently published a Forrester report which advocates a "hub and spoke" model for organizations who are serious about adopting social technologies. When compared to his other models (tire, and tower) it's definitely a step forward. Jeremiah describes the model as such:

"We believe the most sophisticated and efficient way is the Hub and Spoke, which provides centralized resources that can support business units.  The business units still have the freedom and flexibility to dialog with the market –and should be in alignment with what other spokes are doing.  Social doesn’t impact one department –but impacts marketing, pr, product, services, support, and development –every customer touchpoint."

So when comparing what Jeremiah proposes to the other models—I'd agree that it's the next iteration. But, I'd also ask if the hub and spoke model, even with cross disciplinary teams at the core could potentially create a bottleneck where signals no longer become dynamic and prohibits the creation of a network effect—built off multiple nodes both animate and inanimate. Consider the case study on American Airline's Web design failure as captured by Fast Company and Core 77:

"The biggest challenge to better design isn't getting better designers. The problem is organizational, and the hub-and-spoke decision-making process that was originally created to slash bureaucracy--that is, to create more decentralized decisions and less hierarchy. But the overriding weakness, which design thinking makes manifest, is that good design is necessarily the product of a heavily centralized structure. Great design at places such as Apple isn't about "empowering decision makers" or whatever that lame B-school buzzword is. It's about awarding massive power and self-determination to those with the most cohesive vision--that is, the designers. Those are the people with the best idea of what customers want. That's the essence of "design thinking." If you were to summarize just how ugly--and self-defeating--the alternative can be, AA's Web site would be a smoking gun."

Both Core 77 and Fast Company articles are worth reading as they highlight the issues many large organizations face when designing products and services—and the issues underscore why there are so few examples of truly great products and services that we celebrate. At the core, effective organizations have effective cultures and effective cultures which often display a collective "hivemindedness" begin with a healthy and connected ecosystem in place. 

An Adaptive Organization
While the hub and spoke model isn't necessarily the wrong model—it's worth asking if there are better models that can lead to an adaptive organization. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, I had a brief but excellent discussion with Deb Lavoy who works at Open Text and is thinking about issues such as collaboration and emergence within organizations. For some reason we both ended up talking about the U.S. military and how it's had to adapt it's own methods to deal with an enemy who operates more like a network with cells and a decentralized structure vs. a top down command and control model. While neither of us have the details, we both made the reasonable assumption that the U.S. military must be adapting their model very quickly to deal with new threats like this as they've shown progress. What's even more amazing is here's a huge organization that has traditional power structures and hierarchies in place which is unlikely to change. And while I'm not in the military, I've been told that the single most important skill to a soldier on the battlefield is their ability to adapt to current conditions.

Multiple Hubs, Connected Nodes

 
 
The backstory behind the above visual was that I wanted to visualize what it might look like if you took a single "hub and spoke" model and turned it into something that resembled more of a network. Essentially, hubs and spokes still exist, but multiple nodes are introduced which are connected to other nodes as well as hubs and even individual constituents. Constituents can be any participant in your ecosystem—the iteration means that they can be directly linked to a hub, but also connected to other parts of the ecosystem including other constituents who may be organized in different departments of the organization. Here is where a collective begins to form. At a micro-level, departments, customer segments, and local area networks remain.  At a macro-level, the network can be mapped to illustrate how the business functions as part of a system comprised of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller ecosystems. Constituants can signal dynamically to each other or plug into a different node being exposed to many areas of the entire ecosystem. Communication becomes instant and real time as it often is in many networks (think status updates, streams etc—all forms of dynamic signals).

Yes, this is high level thinking. Yes, it's still the beginning—but we think the opportunities exist. In it's simplest form you have to ask yourself this question: If you are going outside the walls of your organization's ecosystem(s), sharing knowledge providing value and yes even innovating out in the open, then why are you (or your peers) still hoarding knowledge, emailing and working in silos within the walls of your organization? These are some the questions that social business design can begin to address, if we start the conversations at the right levels.

From Social Media To Social Business Design

We are now seeing conferences dedicated solely to Twitter—the latest was Jeff Pulver's 140Char held in NYC. Like many others who were not at the event, I was able to attend virtually through following tweets.  After a while I thought to myself—wait a minute, we're still just talking about "social media" in silos. What about the bigger picture? And what do you ask is the big picture?

Great question.

Let's start here, the term "social media" itself is indicative of the state of affairs. "Media" limits our view of the movement, and brings with it the baggage of decades of advertising. Marketers are only too happy to view the social web as a new array of channels to market their goods in some shape or fashion. That's because it's a model they've used since the beginning. And there's no doubt that "social media" has become effective as a communications channel. Take GM for example, they've got a presence on Twitter, and in fact were one of the early examples of corporate blogging. They've "joined the conversation" so to speak with several of their executives actively contributing and talking to people in the open. But with hindsight being 20/20, what GM didn't have was a business model (or culture) that could adapt quickly in a rapidly changing environment. So, while it's great for a large organization to be tweeting, blogging and conversing their way into Web 2.0 nirvana—it's also worth noting that no amount of "media" social or otherwise will turn around an organization in need of reinvention. That's the big picture at the end of the day.

Enter Social Business Design 
Imagine if a company like GM, was at the core "social". Not just participating in "social media"—but through every part of their business ecosystem, were connected—plugged into a collective consciousness made up of ALL their constituents, from employees to consumers to dealers, to assembly line works etc. What if big organizations worked the way individuals now do. We're actively using cloud services, mobile, networks and applications that offer real time dynamic signals vs. inefficient and static e-mail exchanges. In short, imagine if what makes "Web.2.0" revolutionary was applied to every facet of an organization transforming how we work, collaborate and communicate? We think this is possible. And we're calling it "social business design". In its purest form, it's a shift in thinking—less about media and more about tapping the benefits of being a social business in a purposeful way.

While I can't go into the full vision of what we're thinking about yet—we're realizing that the bigger picture goes beyond how you can be a great tweeter, blogger or social media evangelist for your organization. It's time to think beyond marketing and building personal brands and time to think about how participation through social technologies can lead to emergent outcomes for any organization. Can "social media" save GM? It's unlikely that media can save any organization grappling with changes in their business environment.  But what if organizations of that size were able to act preemptively before market conditions forced them into similar predicaments? Same could be said for the music industry, they saw change coming, but for whatever reason never made the transformation, even though it was becoming clear that consumer behavior had evolved. Media has never solved these types of business challenges so why would "social media" be any different?

Life After Social Media: Four Core Archetypes
In the diagram above, you might notice the four archetypes we've been thinking about for a while (for more detail, read colleague Jevon MacDonald's post). We believe they represent the four characteristics that every social business will contain. They are: Ecosystem, Hivemind, Dynamic Signal, and Metafilter. Simply put, it's time to think about the big picture and the strategies that drive social technology as opposed to the other way around. This includes how a company's (insert social initiatives) play a role in their entire ecosystem—and this will take our discussions from "conversation" to "transformation".

Enterprise 2.0 And Beyond
We are currently working on rolling out a set of offerings to help businesses understand and apply these constructs to achieve leveraged and emergent outcomes that are measurable. If you want to find out more about this in the near future, visit our temporary site and submit your info. Our team will also be present at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston next week. We'll be live streaming some of the content from that event. I'm looking forward to getting to know this crowd better—it's not the typical marketing bent. While I'm sure there will be a lot of talk about Twitter, I'm hoping the discussion will move beyond this or any other tool. If the big picture is business transformation, it's going to take more than a few tweets to get there.

For related thoughts from the folks I'm working with, see Peter Kim, Jevon MacDonald, and Kate Niederhoffer. And if you're going to E2.0, please say hello.