Austin’s Dachis Group talks about social business design, defined as “the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.” I find the Dachis overview (pdf) interesting, if a bit scattered. David Armistead and I at Social Web Strategies had been having conceptually similar conversations for the last couple of years, looking at the potential culture change associated with social technology and new media (with Craig Clark), the need for business process re-engineering (with Charles Knickerbocker), and the power of value networks. This morning while sitting on my zafu, I had a flash of insight that I quickly wrote down as five thoughts that came to me pretty much at once…

1. Organizations are already using software internally and have been for some time – email lists, groupware and internal forums, various Sharepoint constructions, aspects of Basecamp, internal wikis and blogs, etc. What’s changed? I think a key difference is high adoption outside work – more and more of the employees of a company or nonprofit are having lifestyle experiences with Facebook Twitter, YouTube, Flickr et al. The way we’re using social media changes as more of us use it (network effect) and our uses become more diverse.
2. Organizations see knowledge management as storage, basically, but we can see the potential to capture and use knowledge in new and innovative ways, e.g. using multimodal systems (Google Wave, for example) to capture and sort knowledge as it’s created, with annotations and some sense of the creative process stored with its product – knowing more about how knowledge is produced improves our sense of its applicability. (It’s exciting to be a librarian/information specialist these days.)
3. Organizations will increasingly have to consider the balance of competition and cooperation with internal teams. I’ve seen firsthand how a culture of competition can stifle creativity by creating a disincentive to share knowledge. I’m thinking we’ll see more “coopetition.”
4. Who are the internal champions within an organization? There will be more interest at the C-level as social technology is better understood and success stories emerge from early adopters. It would be interesting to know what current champions of social media are seeing and what they’re saying. Also – how much of the move toward “social” will come from the bottom up, and how will that flow of new thinking occur?
5. How does the new world of social business (design) relate to marketing? Operations? Human resources? To what extent to the lines between departments blur? How will the blurring of the lines and potential cross pollination transform business disciplines?

A final thought: all the minds in your organization have a perspective on your business, and each perspective is potentially valuable. How do you capture that value? Do you have a culture that can support a real alignment of minds/perspectives/intentions?

Social Web Strategies colleague Rob Matney described one way he’s using Wave:

Matney said he thinks Wave will be ideal for a new project he is beginning with Austin theatrical director Graham Schmidt. They are just beginning to brainstorm on their next production, a play by Anton Chekhov.

“Wave will allow us to grab images and video and sound from the Web that we can use as inspiration for the production,” Matney said. “We can translate Russian text, and we plan to work with scholars in Moscow, who will be able to join the Wave and add their own content.”

Wave, he said, will preserve thoughts and observations that often get lost when e-mail is flying back and forth in a large group.

“I think it will be kind of a dripping pan underneath the work that will let us catch what was valuable….” he said.

Wiki, for instance, is a tool (or a set of like patterns implemented in various tools) designed to support collaboration, but a wiki often fails to support successful collaboration because one or more essential members of the group don’t (or can’t) use it. This is often because wiki is so undesigned – which can be a strength in making it adaptable, but turns out to be a weakness for those who need more structure, more of an imposed information architecture. Just one essential member’s failure to adopt can produce failure, so the wiki format has succeeded only where it’s been modified (as in the SocialText “wikiblog,” which became less of a wiki as it became more of an enterprise application).

I’ve seen resistance to pretty much any collaborative tool. We tend to use Basecamp, which combines several communication patterns (messaging, wiki, shared to-do lists, file sharing), and we find that among those who have used Basecamp before, there can be a small but significant percentage who push back – who are looking for an effective alternative for whatever reason.

A few years ago I was involved in multimodal “happenings” to create collaboratively a paper published by Joi Ito, called “Emergent Democracy.” We initially combined audio teleconference with a form of realtime chat that included color-coded flags and a “hand” you could “raise” if you wanted to talk. The chat was partly used for these visual cues, and partly as a backchannel that added more depth to the conversation. We took notes on a wiki. The draft of the paper was intially shared as a Word document with change tracking, then dropped into QuickTopic where it could be collaboratively edited. It was finally dropped into a wiki for more collaborative editing. The collaboration was very successful. Today we have reasonably inexpensive tools, like GoToMeeting, that incorporate voice, chat, and shared presentation – very similar to the combination of patterns in the happenings.

More tools are emerging for collaboration, and one that we’ve been studying with keen interest is Google Wave. It’s still very beta, with limited adoption, so our experiments have been limited so far. However it’s promising: in Wave you can create a conversation, add participants at any point after the conversation starts, and play back the conversation as needed to keep track. Wave accommodates collaborative editing as well as conversation. It’s not an application that Google is developing, but a protocol that is being developed with Google in the lead, but with many external developers participating. The intention is to have a far more robust communication protocol that will replace email.

Finding the right tool set is key, but another crucial challenge is social: how do you keep a conversation on track and focused on decision and action? This is especially challenging with flatter hierarchies and headless organizations. In the emergent democracy discussions, we talked about a concept of emergent leadership, which was an acknowledgement that you must have leaders to make decisions and get things done, and in a context where no one is elected or appointed to lead, we look for one or more leaders to emerge. There are questions around how that leadership emerges, how it’s identified, acknowledged, accepted by the group, etc.

In companies and organizations where leadership is based on assignment or election, the questions about leadership are more traditional: how to get buy-in from the group, consensus on decisions, agreement on action items. This is partly about leadership quality (is the leader acknowledged and accepted by the group?), but also about organization (how well is group input and ultimate consensus orchestrated and managed?)

Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin and I recently worked together on a presentation called, an earlier version of which can be found on Slideshare. In defining how to create effective communities – communities that get things done – we considered Bijoy’s “human fabric” of three personality types: maven (knowledge-oriented), relater (relationship-oriented), and evangelist (action-oriented). We suggested that communities, like individuals, can be characterized on a scale between any two of the three personality types. For instance, a community might fall on the axis between maven and relater – i.e. be focused on knowledge and relationships. This is where we would place an online community like the WELL, where members “hang out” and have casual conversations that are not focused on any action or deliverable. We went on to say that action-oriented communities would have a strong evangelist flavor, and would include one or more evangelist types who push for specific results.

This is probably true for any collaborative environment, including a small meeting. An evangelist or action-focused leader could be more effective in getting specific actions accomplished. This person might fall naturally into the leadership role. However a strong evangelist should be sensitive to the relevance of the other personality types: it’s important to have enough of the right knowledge to move forward, and getting things done can require attention to relationship.

In summary, effective online collaborations (meetings, projects, organizations) depend on tools that work for all stakeholders, or at least on a shared commitment to adopt and use the same tool set and patterns for communication/collaboration. Social considerations and leadership are as important as adoption of and commitment to the right tool set. It may be effective to include evangelists in action-oriented workgroups, and to have them lead, but sensitivity to the balance of personality types and strengths is important. And, of course, the reality is far more complex than we’ve taken time to capture here.

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience.

Brian Solis at Social Media Today writes about Forrester’s report, saying that social networks are evolving into a social operating system, and that “social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior….I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.”

None of this is really news, maybe clarification. I was in conversations with Tim O’Reilly and others in the early 2000s that acknowledged that the Internet/Web was an operating system and inherently social. Those conversations led to the paper Tim and Dale Daugherty wrote that loosely defined concepts labeled “Web 2.0.” The Data Portability Project kicked off in 2007, and we’ve been trying to get our heads around individual data management since the 1990s (thinking of P3P). Thinking about the semantic web has been brewing since the turn of the century. Various data interchange formats and semantic web projects have emerged since then.

What’s interesting in Solis’ piece is the concept of SRM – Social Relationship Management – vs Customer Relationship Management and Doc Searls’ idea of Vendor Relationship Management. CRM and VRM combined make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We get to a point where customers and vendors are transparent to each other, and are part of a larger social ecosystem that can facilitate authentic and symmetrical relationships. Solis says

The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.

The Personal Democracy Forum explores the social relevance of the decision to adopt Drupal, which is known for its interactive community features:

Let’s really try to extract the last drop of possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it’s possible to see the White House’s move to open-source software as a move towards the idea that collaborative programming can inspire — or at least, support — a more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean campaign into the Howard Dean network. [Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies was part of that effort.] This idea, that a politics crafted by the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps.

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.

Read the complete post by Derek Powazek.

Derek argues that most of what you need to know about SEO can be described in a paragraph or so, and I’ve said so myself. However we wouldn’t steer business clients away from SEO, as long as they understand that it’s not magic, and that it’s part of a larger strategy where the emphasis is on great content, as Derek says. For many clients, an SEO consultation or relationship with a clueful, ethical search company – Apogee Search, for example – is a path toward transformation of a good site to a great site. This is because the best SEO consultants will tell you that you have to do the things Derek mentions, and they’ll work with you on content as well as keyword development. They’ll tell you that SEO isn’t voodoo. Much of what they will do is help you determine keywords and site adjustments that are most likely to increase exposure and produce conversions.

We do something broader – help you develop a strategy and roadmap for creating a compelling presence across relevant social platforms – but we start with your web site, which is the core of your web presence. Increasingly people will find you through your social media presence, as well as search, so you have to consider both part of your strategy for building a successful online presence. We address SEO as part of our complete strategic web service, but we focus more on helping you create a compelling presence – making something great.

What we’ve been talking about is <em>social business,</em> and others are starting to pick up the conversation. The Dachis Group here in Austin has been talking about these points, prompting the Neville Hobson post “Is ’social business’ the new black,” and a response from Dave in his ClickZ column. I posted a link to Dave’s column in our LinkedIn Group and on our Facebook page. We invite you to comment either place, and join the conversation.

But as our business is more and more about marketing, and our clients tend to be marketing groups, I’m getting how easy it can be to make these mistakes. Social media marketing – and marketing in general – isn’t easy to do well and do right. Berkowitz’ list is valuable. Some examples:

We have failed to monitor social channels for discussions of our brands and competitors.

We have guessed at our target audience’s interests and activities rather than conducting research that could have provided real answers.

We have lost consumers by organizing social architectures that were impossible to navigate coherently.

We have repurposed creative and messaging from other channels when we should have adapted or created it for these social spaces.

We have shortchanged social marketing by planning campaigns instead of ongoing programs.

You get the idea. Read the whole post, it’s insightful.

because our eyes are bigger than our tummies. We have delusions of success. We take on more than we should, routinely exaggerating the benefits and discounting the costs. We over-scope, over-scale, and over-sell. At the same time, we under-estimate, under-resource, and under-plan.

He follows with another paragraph about the fundamental truth of projects:

Projects—even small ones—are complex and challenging. Interests often compete and conflict. Individual performance varies widely. Continual shifts in direction and frequent stalls that slow momentum demand constant planning, adjustment, and improvisation—skills that only come with battle scars.

He then gives an example of a project that broke the laws – the Mars Pathfinder project – and succeeded in big ways, with a combination of creativity, obsessive testing, and incorporation of speed and flexibility into the design.

(I’d like to read, or maybe even write, a whole book on how to break the laws, with case studies!)