In recent months, I’ve posted updated views on how to go about social business transformation using strategy as driving force to achieve cultural, organizational, and operational change. In my last post, I explored how you can employ a maturity model to baseline and guide your social business strategy and make sure your roadmap is on track. This is a considerable advance forward in our thinking. Yet, while our understanding of what it takes to be successful has become refined from less sophisticated views of what it takes to deliver on enterprise social media, most of us are still learning what the key details are.

An effective strategy of any kind can’t consist of the kitchen sink. As we see large organizations try to apply social across the board, to marketing, sales, product development, workforce collaboration, and customer care, the size and scope of the strategy effort often becomes 1) large and unwieldy and 2) hard to coordinate and align across the various areas of responsibility in the organization. Business leaders very much want intellectual control over their social business evolution, but the bigger the effort is, the longer it takes and the less likely it is that they will maintain effective oversight. Centralized strategy that encompasses everything, as more and more things become social, means that the strategy is usually quite challenging to maintain, keep updated, and meaningfully communicate across the organization.

Instead of attempting to boil the ocean, what I’m seeing is — despite a strong and growing desire by large organizations for a global master strategy — that highly successful social business initiatives tend to focus on one particular area of the business and loosely coordinate with other areas engaged in social business to ensure consistency. Ongoing governance and oversight is frequently provided by a social media committee or social business unit/center of excellence. This cenral group also performs periodic reconciliation with the global social business strategy, typically sponsored or personally driven by a C-level leader. This means that social business strategy seems to be most effective not only at the very top of the organization, but one step down as a part of a program-level strategy portfolio. Sustained focus on a particular business function while maintaining a broader view of the whole organization seems to be the success factor for a strategy effort.

Consequently, one of the questions that seems to come up most often is this: What are the necessary moving parts in a social business strategy? What exactly needs to be included and what can be left out? While the short answer tends to be frustrating and uninformative, namely that it depends on what you’re trying to do. The longer answer, fortunately, is more interesting.

While some aspects of social business strategy are essential and can’t be omitted (examples: stakeholder requirements, IT strategy, change management plan), there’s a 2nd tier of strategy components that are less cut and dried. In general, I find that these break down to the following topics:

• Community management. I’ve long been a advocate of having a strong, well resourced, and professional community management capability. While there are certainly some social business efforts that claim they haven’t needed them, the outcomes from case studies are clear: A social business effort will have better and faster adoption, create more business value, and have lower risk profiles if there is a strategic commitment to create a robust community management capability. Therefore, most social business strategies, global or at the business function level, should address this as a first class citizen on their roadmaps and in their business case.
• Social platform strategy. This can be a tough topic since platform decisions tend to have the quality of a religious debate. There are usually loyal and committed camps in most organizations with a strong preference for particular social media tools and technologies. In reality, there is no one single tool that can deliver all needed social business capabilities. I’ve delved into the elements of the “social business stack” over the years, but one lesson stands out: An effective social business strategy consists of a managed portfolio of on-premise and cloud-based tools across a wide spectrum. The strategy should, when possible, account for how all this social technology should co-exist and where it should be consistent and integrated when they overlap. Functional overlap of social tools and platforms remains a major source of frustration, confusion and duplication in most organizations and needs to be dealt with pro-actively.
• Risk management. If you’re a regulated industry or have many legal and/or corporate governance obligations, it can be very challenging to determine if your social media strategy stays within the boundaries of what’s allowable. Frankly, robust risk management efforts are a frequent reason that social business strategies slow down or stall. Once the risks are identified and articulated in writing for all to see, it can be very hard for business leaders to get past them and authorize the exposure to risk. I find that the most effective social business strategies often call this something else entirely and plan from the beginning to address risk in simple, straightforward terms without making it a highlight of the effort.
• Business process redesign. One of the big lessons in social business is that the way the organization works on the ground must be directly addressed by the strategy effort. It goes beyond the problems that occur when we perpetuate the artificial divide between our systems of record (transaction systems) on one hand and our systems of engagement (social tools) on the other. A strategy must articular how a business is going to change the way it works in terms of its structure and process. This means re-engineering business processes from the ground up to be inherently social, open, and participative. How to determine what the changes should be and the process to go about delivering on them must be a primary focus of the strategy effort.
• Organizational design. Recently, I’ve seen an significant increase in interest around organizational design as part of a social business strategy. If peer production, community-based processes, and the outcomes of the other power laws of networked organizations change how things get done, doesn’t that have significant impact on both the org chart and how we staff and connect together business functions? It certainly does but it’s often omitted from many strategies, sometimes because the subject is politically sensitive. In my view, org design is best split between the global strategy and the functional strategy, with a long-term plan in the former and more immediate changes in the latter. At first, this may just be the establishment of a central support unit for social business.
• Communication plan. While change management is almost always present in any mature social business strategy, I often find the communication plans are given short shrift. Yet we clearly see in almost all the recent success stories, that extensive, pro-active communication company-wide was central to the success of their uptake, adoption, and ongoing use. Communication plans should be multi-modal, compelling, and consist of education, workshops, just-in-time training, and outreach to areas that are having challenges.

While your mileage will vary and there are certainly many other minutiae in a social business strategy that can unexpectedly contribute to a better than expected outcome, the areas above are the ones I see as high-impact yet often neglected or misunderstood. Despite a current wave of backlash against strategy efforts, I find that companies that have cultures reception to positive change can take great advantage of them. I’d love to hear your experiences in formulating social business strategy below in comments.

Well, we made it through another work week, amigos! Sadly, there’s still a few more hours for us to kill before we can start seriously plotting a way to cut out early without the boss noticing. In the meantime, here’s a nice little distraction for you that should be slightly more enjoyable than pretending to read that Excel sheet that’s been up on your screen for the past 2 hours.

This week we entertained ourselves with another annoying internet meme, we learned some uncomfortable truths about procreation habits from a couple in Omaha, we found a way to make our Facebook cover way more edgy, and we watched Abe Lincoln audition for the color guard.

• Time for a Friday dance party!

• A video headed for 50 million views and a Disney script – warning: it’ll make you vomit rainbows.

• Create a pretty badass Facebook cover courtesy of Adidas Originals.

• Awkward as hell but way to go dude…we think.

• A dog doing something your 12-year old son refuses to do.

• Always down for a poke!

• This looks a little different than how I remember it in Aladdin.

• Self-explanatory.

• Had Abe Lincoln not been so presidential he would have made a real name for himself in competitive baton twirling.

• Crank your speakers so you can hear the narrator in the background.

• The rise and fall of an internet meme.

To underscore this point, an important new post by Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang this week explores how we’re only getting started with social business, even as the whole social and 2.0 movement gets ready to reach its first full decade. In the post, Jeremiah presents some of their latest survey data showing that only a few organizations have reached an advanced stage of adoption, that there is limited integration across business units, products lines, and customer databases, and that only a leading cadre of companies are highly organized or systematic in their use of social media. In other words, a lot of useful work has been done but most of us are only getting started and we know it.

I’d also be very clear about the overall global progress towards social business so far: It’s not that companies as a whole aren’t increasing their social business maturity, in fact, they are largely well on their way. We can clearly see this in the most recent McKinsey data I presented at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in Paris last week (slide 11) and have delved into recently elsewhere. From this, we see that the number of large companies that are fully networked — meaning they are genuine social businesses inside and out — now number in the low hundreds. As for the remainder of Global 2000 firms, the data clearly shows a steady and inexorable rise in social business adoption over the last five years.

What does this all boil down to for organizations that want to reap the benefits and avoid the potential for disruption and competitive stagnation? Generally it means understanding where you are today and measuring the gap between that and the full on, high scale, high impact realization of social business. In this way, understanding your organization’s maturity level when it comes to social business is an excellent means of mapping out where the greater opportunities are. Unfortunately, I see companies all too often squandering even the the low hanging, easy-to-reach potential to re-conceive and galvanize key processes in customer care, product development, marketing, sales, and operations. Usually it’s because they look at it through the lens of what they do today, versus what the industry norm will be in five years, or even what leading companies are already doing today.

In short, this means that organizations updating their structures and processes based on what they do currently are often preventing themselves from moving into the future. This is rich and opportunity-filled future of customer, worker, and partner engagement is one that is fundamentally social (it’s also highly mobile, cloud-centric, and data-driven), and to get there organizations must strategically aim their evolution in this direction. This then is the real benefit of understanding your present state in order to calibrate from ground truth and make strategic decisions.

Baselining Your Social Business Maturity

So this begs the question, and one that Jeremiah asked as well, what then are the indicators of maturity and how should they be measured? Fortunately, we’re now a number of years into social business and have the lessons learned from many companies having gone fairly far down the path. We have a growing sense of what the maturity measures are, although they can vary greatly based on a number of factors. These include whether it’s an internal or external social business effort, what the business objectives are, what industry the organization is in, and what technology and platform choices have been made. For many, their level of maturity is also deeply impacted by governance, social media policy, and legal/regulatory constraints. Getting a handle on all of these requires work but as we’ll see, it’s getting easier.

The broad outlines are clear enough, however, and there are a number of factors that virtually all organizations should be measuring and tracking going forward in terms of the maturity of their social business efforts. For most enterprises, this will break down to the following criteria plus whatever industry/business specific elements that are important:

• Level of organization for social business. This is a measure of how systematic, strategic, and intrinsic social business has become with the people, processes, and policies currently in place within the business. The progressive scale that is most often cited, and which I largely agree is the following:
  
  Ad hoc – No management, no budget, no real structure or resources
  
  Engaged – Executive awareness, some management engagement, pilots and experiments, mostly volunteer and part-time resources
  
  Structured – Dedicated budget, management responsibility, formal projects, high-level roles
  
  Managed – Active executive sponsorship, daily management, social business program office, professional staff, well-defined roles and responsibilities, requirements driven
  
  Optimized – Strategic executive focus, support unit-sized budget, integrated multi-channel initiatives, social business unit/center of excellence, guided by business intelligence.
• Extent of social business adoption. When it comes to organizing for social business, there are a number of phases that organizations go through. This includes tactical experiments, departmental adoption, grassroots efforts, and so on that ultimately lead to social media committees, enterprise-wide strategy efforts, business process re-engineering, governance programs, education and communication efforts, and so on. Mature organizations have a well-defined social business program (and one that actively enables emergent outcomes), with multiple loosely integrated projects that cover the spectrum of line of business functions and internal IT capabilities (intranet, collaboration, doc/content management), etc. The greater the number of areas the business touches and IT systems engaged in working in a social business manner, especially when they are cross-departmental and/or integrated into the global strategy, the more sophisticated the organization has become, though this measure is often insufficient by itself to determine overall maturity.
• Social engagement level of workers: Internally, externally, and cross-border. Are social business processes well defined? Does everyone know their role in them? More importantly, when they are drawn in, do they participate effectively? Maintaining and keeping these measures up to date, typically via social analytics, is vital to understanding social business maturity as well as to support and drive their optimization. Measuring this is also key, even to the point of tying compensation, bonuses, and employee recognition/promotion.
• Measures of effectiveness. This is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to business value and making sense of return on investment (ROI). Even today, a large percentage of social business efforts don’t measure the results other than some high-level operating KPIs (key performance indicators.) Some of the reason for this is that it was very difficult until recently to measure the results, particularly if it had to be done frequently, which is typically the case with the fast moving conversations, trends, and opportunities of social business. Fortunately, with the rise of social analytics and big data tools to aid in this, it’s easier than ever to create a continuous and scaled listening, analysis, and engagement process with real feedback loops and matching social business intelligence. Measures vary widely but increasingly we are advocating a scoring model that can be used to objectively compare points at regular intervals in time to measure the effectiveness of social engagement across relevant participant segments such as audience and industry (external) or project/team/function (internal.)
• Progress along the digital business ladder. In its more transformative and strategic form, social business alters and then recasts the very business models of an organization, including how its products and services are produced, delivered, and supported. I’ve explored the four rung social business ladder in detail before, and unlike measures of adoption or number of tools deployed, it’s a very effective cross check to understanding if the inherent shifts that social business represents are actually taking place. Most organizations will need to create a more detailed version of the ladder that’s applicable to their business in order to complete the strategic effort to understand the full range of possibilities and road ahead. It’s thus also a powerful maturity measure.

Hopefully this has explained why baselining the maturity of your social business efforts is much more than a dry, academic exercise. It helps focus an organization around objectives and possibilities, while understanding the nature and scope of what’s left to do and where investment should be made. I rarely advocate large formal efforts for this, though I’ve certainly seen some clients do this. Instead, enabling tools and methods are rapidly emerging to make this more of a diagnostic process that is easily and inexpensively repeatable. I’ll take a look at examples of how organizations are increasingly applying new analytics and business intelligence tools to build snapshots of where they are in their social business journey to direct their work.

In the meantime, I urge companies to explore the options as they organize for more ambitious and complex social business processes. One easy way is to see your company’s current measures of performance in our Social Business Index. It’s free and only takes a few minutes to see how effective the social business engagement of your company is.

It’s Valentine’s Day and what better way to think about social business today than in the context of brand love?

The Dachis Group Social Business Index measures activity related to over 30,000 brands and 100 million social accounts. We produce composite scores based on four fundamental business outcomes: awareness, mindshare, advocacy, and brand love.

I asked our data team to isolate the brand love metric to determine how companies rank according to the Index. In our methodology, this metric reflects the passion, satisfaction, and affection with which market participants react to, and engage with, brand content.

The results:

1. L.L. Bean
2. Debenhams
3. Darden Restaurants (Red Lobster, Olive Garden, et al)
4. Wendy’s
5. The Hershey Company
6. Whole Foods Market
7. General Mills
8. Procter & Gamble
9. Apple
10. The Estee Lauder Companies

Like a grain of sand on the beach, here’s one example of 300 trillion possible permutations, showing how L.L. Bean generates brand love:

(Personally, I love my old Maine Hunting Shoes.)

To see a real-time ranking for all four outcomes quantified, aggregated, and benchmarked, visit the Social Business Index.

The Tactical Difference 

Coca-Cola brought a set of novel tactics to bear on the big day all packaged under the moniker “The Coca-Cola Polar Bowl.” These tactics had a major impact on Coca-Cola’s performance, but while AdMeter had no real way to reflect them in its Facebook poll the Social Business Index was able to capture their effect.

“The Coca-Cola Polar Bowl” consisted of a massive initiative to encourage a new behavior for this year’s Super Bowl – interacting with a Coca-Cola experience alongside the viewing experience of the big game. Tactics for ranged from a hashtag on Twitter to a  live feed (now archived on YouTube) of two animated polar bears reacting dynamically to in-game events. The surface level impact of these activities is apparent in the volume of activity across Coca-Cola’s social media channels - 889,847 new YouTube views and 4,619 Tweets were driven by Coca-Cola’s three television spots. However, a deeper analysis yields a more interesting picture of this huge volume of activity.

These tactics had a measurable impact on Coca-Cola’s performance across four key variables in the studied period – conversation participants, conversation strength, conversation passion and conversation sentiment. To start with Coca-Cola had the highest number of distinct participants involved in direct discussions with the brand. This was evident in the 48% increase in conversation strength (the strongest of any brand) that Coca-Cola enjoyed from the Saturday before to Super Bowl Sunday.  In addition, this conversation was a passionate one – Coca-Cola’s score for passionate signals on game day was nearly 4 times higher than the next closest (H&M), and outscored Doritos by 9 times on this measure. Finally, the lift in sentiment was also higher for Coca-Cola than any other brand, followed by Chrysler and GE.

Overall, these measures and their outcome align well with the findings of Dachis Group’s holiday shopping analysis, which indicates that real-time tactics anchored by content and wrapped in an engaging personlity are essential to winning attention and strong brand outcomes during major cultural events.

The Methodological Difference

Coca-Cola’s tactics were effective, but their exceptional performance in the Dachis Group rankings is also driven by key methodological differences between the Social Business Index and AdMeter. While these are outside of brand control, they are essential to understanding discrepancies in ranking outcomes.

AdMeter views each commercial as a discrete, self-contained, brand entry into the Super Bowl lottery. As a result neither the voting on Facebook nor the panel in a room in Virginia can accurately capture the cumulative impact of three commercials plus their associated tactics on the health of the Coca-Cola brand. Dachis Group obtained a deeper view into the full impact of Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl participation by capturing and analyzing data from every major social media source. As a result, the Dachis Group analysis can give credit by reviewing combined data across all three advertisements as well as other web tactics and score the brand impact accordingly.

Overall, Coca-Cola really stands out as a successful presence this Super Bowl. Other brands have an opportunity to learn from these tactics and embrace them for the next big U.S. cultural event – March Madness.

Wrangling complexity.

Technologists started wrangling with complexity before anyone else. The wave of complexity, change and coevolution that is now cresting across the business world first appeared in the technology realm, as computer scientists tackled complex software design problems and struggled to interweave multiple systems into large-scale “systems of systems.”

Since the 1950s, technologists have adopted new approaches that allow them to better address complexity and ongoing change. One, called agile development, is a different way of doing work. The other, called service orientation, is more focused on how bits of work are connected to other bits. Both of these approaches emphasize continuous learning, adaptation, and distributed control, rather than planning, prediction and central control. They are specifically designed for managing work in fast-changing, complex, uncertain environments.

These approaches function like complex adaptive systems, where the parts of the system can learn, adapt and coevolve like a biological community.

Agile development.

As early as the 1950s, IBM programmers were working on software for things like submarine control systems and missile tracking systems, which were so complex that they could not be conceived and built in one go. Programmers had to evolve them over time, like cities, starting with a simple working system that could be tested by users, and then gradually adding more function and detail in iterative cycles that took one to six months to complete. In a 1969 IBM internal report called simply “The Programming Process,” IBM computer scientist M.M. Lehman described the approach:

“The design process is… seeded by a formal definition of the system, which provides a first, executable, functional model. It is tested and further expanded through a sequence of models, that develop an increasing amount of function and an increasing amount of detail as to how that function is to be executed. Ultimately, the model becomes the system.”

This iterative approach to software development, where programmers start by creating a simple, working seed system and expand it in subsequent cycles of user testing and development, has become a common approach in software design, known under a variety of names such as iterative development, successive approximation, integration engineering, the spiral model and many others, but in 2001, when a group of prominent developers codified the core principles in a document they called the Agile Manifesto, they gave it the name “agile” which seems to have stuck.

Agile is about small teams that deliver real, working software at all times, get meaningful feedback from users as early as possible, and improve the product over time in iterative development cycles. Developing software in an agile way allows developers to rapidly respond to changing requirements. Agile developers believe that where uncertainty is high there is no such thing as a perfect plan, and the further ahead you plan, the more likely you are to be wrong.

Service orientation.

Early computer programs were written as sets of instructions, like recipes: First do this, then that, if the user does this, then do this; otherwise, do that, and so on. This worked just fine for simple programs. But software tends to get more complex over time. When programs reached about a million lines of code, they hit a complexity ceiling and started to break. And as software and systems were connected with other systems, the number of dependencies and interconnections increased to the point where the tangled web of interdependent functions was impossible to modify or adjust in one place without breaking something somewhere else.

In the 1960s, computer researchers started to code modular, reusable building blocks instead of procedural instructions. Computer pioneer Alan Kay named the approach, calling it object-oriented programming:

“I thought of objects being like biological cells… only able to communicate with messages,” he later explained.

Object orientation allowed programmers to design software as a system of interacting objects instead of a list of instructions. They could modify a single object without worrying about complex interdependencies. Each object could be seen as an independent machine with its own roles and responsibilities within a larger system.

Object-oriented programming was primarily used inside large enterprises, and not so much for interactions between companies. But the advent of the internet added another layer of challenge and complexity – as well as opportunity. Suddenly it was feasible for software to exchange information not only within the business, but between a business and its partners, suppliers and customers.

The next phase in programming’s evolution, service orientation, emerged to solve this problem. It delivered a way for software objects to interconnect with each other over the internet, at a massive scale.

Software services are very similar to software objects. They are modular functional units that can operate independently and interact with other services using an agreed-upon set of common standards. The big move forward comes from the way that they interact with the larger world. In service orientation, technologists have now agreed to a set of standards that allow any service to interact with any other service, over the web, regardless of the service’s underlying technology.

Services can be made available over the web or any other network. They can be made available to the general public, or to a defined set of authorized users. The power of a service-oriented architecture is that each service can learn, adapt and coevolve without wreaking havoc on the overall system, just like species coevolve in a biological community.

Three principles for the core of service-oriented design: service contracts, composability, and loose coupling.

Service contracts.

A service contract is a simple description of the service, including what the service provider needs from customers, what it will do for them, and any rules about how the service provider and customer will interact. Like any business contract, it represents an agreement.

Business examples abound. The contract doesn’t need to be specified in writing as long as both parties understand the agreement. For example the service contract of a fast-food restaurant is different than a sit-down restaurant. The agreement is that customers will stand in line and order by number in exchange for faster service. If you sit down at a table in a fast-food restaurant and wait for a server to come and take your order, you will be waiting a long time. The reason fast-food works is that providers and customers both understand the promise of the service and agree to work together in a certain way.

A service contract specifies what the provider will do, but it doesn’t specify how the work will be done.

The advantage of this is that a service can hide its internal complexity, and even change the way it operates, as long as it continues to keep the promise of its contract. This is important because it allows the service to independently evolve and improve its operations without affecting customers or other services. A service can be as complex as it likes internally, so long as it provides a simple contract describing what it does and how it will interact with its customers.

Most services have some kind of complexity that is invisible to customers. For example the kitchen and dishwashers in a restaurant are not usually visible to diners, and most stores have areas such as storerooms and shipping/receiving docks that are not obvious to customers. The iOS operating system that powers iPhones and iPads hides a lot of internal complexity. There are no files or folders. There are only apps that you access to do things. Amazon customers don’t have to know anything about Amazon’s warehouses or distribution systems. They just order on the website and sign for the package when it arrives.

The reason to hide complexity is that it makes a service easier to understand and use. Since customers see only the things they can act on, make decisions about or buy, they can make better, faster choices.

Composability.

Most services are combinations of other services.

For example, any kind of food service, from a vending machine to a five-star restaurant, must provide a few core services: it must be able to take orders. It must be able to take payments. It must be able to store and deliver it to customers. Every food service must make decisions about how it will do each of these things, and how it will combine these services with other services to deliver value to customers.

Common standards make services more useful by making them connectable and composable, so they can be easily combined into larger services.

For example, consider a restaurant with a bar and a kitchen. When they use a common ordering system they can work together more effectively. Wait staff can easily access both the bar and kitchen services, and the total charge can show up on one bill. This means the larger service works better, and it’s more convenient for the customer. At the same time, the bar and kitchen services are separate in the sense that they are not dependent on each other – they can exchange information, but each can also operate independently of the other. If the bar shuts down people can still order food, and vice versa.

Loose coupling.

Loose coupling simply means that services agree to use a set of common set of rules about how to connect. So as long as a service follows the rules, it can update, change or modify itself without having to worry about the impact on other services in the system.

Web pages, for example, are loosely coupled, because one web page can link to another without knowing anything about the other page, beyond its address and the rules for connection, which in this case is HTTP, the protocol common to all web pages.

The opposite of loose coupling is tight coupling, where elements on both sides must be designed to complement and fit one another. For example, most mobile phone companies have a unique interface for attaching the charger to the phone. There’s really no benefit to customers in this. The primary reason is so they can sell more chargers. This is why you have a drawer full of perfectly-good chargers that are useless to you or anyone else.

But there can be good reasons for tight coupling. Things that are designed to work closely together can deliver better performance, more efficiently. For example, most of the components of your car are tightly coupled, because each part is designed to fit smoothly and integrate with every other part. You can’t take a door, or an engine, out of a Honda and attach it to a Ford, at least, not easily.

But your car is loosely coupled with many other elements in the road-and-car system, and for good reason. For example, when you pull into a gas station to fill up your tank, you don’t have to worry about whether the pump nozzle will fit, because there is a standard for that. If you need to put air in your tires, you don’t have to worry about whether the air hose will fit your tires, because there is a standard for that. Cars are tightly coupled internally but loosely coupled with the overall system that they operate in.

Service-oriented architecture works in the same way. Internally, a service can be as complex as it wants to be, just like your car. But when it needs to interoperate with the larger system, it follows a common set of rules.

Standards can be proprietary and closed, such as Apple’s iOS, Microsoft Windows, and Facebook’s application development platform, which are provided and managed by a single company; or they can be open, like HTTP and TCP/IP, which govern web interactions, and the electrical sockets in your home. Open standards are defined and managed by technical communities, or sometimes they just evolve naturally over time, like the standard for the width of cars and roads, which can be traced back to the width or Roman roads, which was determined by the width of the two horses it took to pull a Roman chariot.

Regardless of whether the standards are open or closed, it is the number of people and businesses that have adopted them that make them valuable. The more that have adopted the standard, the more valuable it is.

Service contracts make services simple, modular, understandable and easy to access, like building blocks. Composability makes services combinable and connectable. Loose coupling is the standardized interfaces and connections that make it all work.

Organizing for agility.

Agile and service-oriented approaches are designed for complex, uncertain, fast-changing environments. They are proven methods for organizing systems and work. And the same approaches that solved complex software problems can also work in business.

For example, Whole Foods Market operates on agile and service-oriented principles.

Small, agile, autonomous teams.

Each store is an autonomous profit center made up of about ten self-managed teams, who manage various aspects of the store, like produce, deli and so on.

Teams determine their own staffing levels and manage their own part of the store. Teams are responsible for all operating decisions within their group, including pricing, orders and point-of-sale promotion. Teams buy locally and stock the things they feel will be most interesting to local customers.

New hires are subject to peer review: after a one-month trial, team members vote and a two-thirds majority is required to keep the person on the team.

Service contracts.

Each team is bound by a service contract, that specifies what it is accountable for, how it is measured and how performance will be rewarded.

Each team is measured and managed as its own profit center. Every four weeks, the company calculates profitability for every team in every store. Teams get bonuses when they meet or exceed profit targets.

Ten times a year, a regional leader or executive from company headquarters conducts a surprise inspection and gives the store a report card that rates it on 300 items. Once a year the company does a survey to probe for employee morale issues.

Composability.

The teams are also composable: Each store is composed of about ten teams. On average, ten teams make up a store, and each team’s leader participates in a higher-level team that manages the store. The team leaders of each store in a region make up a regional team, and the six regional presidents make up the team that manages the company.

Loose coupling.

Each Whole Foods team operates as an autonomous unit that has control over its own fate. Performance data is available to all the teams, so they can compare their performance against other teams in their store, similar teams in other stores, or against their own team’s historical performance.

Teams also have access to detailed financial data, like product costs, profits per store, and even each others’ compensation and bonus information. They can look up the best-selling items at other stores and compare them to their own. Employees at Whole Foods are so well-informed that the SEC has designated all employees “insiders” for stock trading purposes.

This data transparency both builds trust and fuels a spirit of intense competition between teams and stores, since every team can compare itself with every other team and try to raise in the ranks.

Whole Foods has created a platform that makes it possible for the company’s stores and teams to compete with each other so they can tune and improve their performance over time.

At the same time, each team has the autonomy to make local decisions as they see fit to improve their performance. So every Whole Foods store carries a unique mix that is tailored by self-managed teams for that particular location. Whole Foods’ agile, team-based strategy allows it to target extremely small locations with customized stores. They are starting to open small stores in suburbs and college towns where rents are lower and competition less fierce.

Customers like the system. The industry average sales per square foot is about $350, and Whole Foods is one of the top ten retailers in the US, with sales of about $900 per square foot, higher than Best Buy and Zale jewelers. Not bad for a grocery store.

Employees like it too. Whole Foods has made Fortune’s “100 best places to work” list every year since the list was started in 1998.

Most companies are not built for agility.

Most businesses today are not designed with agility in mind. Their systems are tightly coupled, because their growth has been driven by a desire for efficiency rather than flexibility.

Consider the difference between a car on a road and a train on a train track. The car and the road are loosely coupled, so the car is capable of independent action. It’s more agile. It can do more complex things. The train and track are tightly coupled, highly optimized for a particular purpose and very efficient at moving stuff from here to there – as long as you want to get on and off where the train wants to stop. But the train has fewer options – forward and back. If something is blocking the track, the train can’t just go around it. It’s efficient but not very flexible.

Many business systems are tightly coupled, like trains on a track, in order to maximize control and efficiency. But what the business environment requires today is not efficiency but flexibility. So we have these tightly coupled systems and the rails are not pointing in the right direction. And changing the rails, although we feel it is necessary, is complex and expensive to do. So we sit in these business meetings, setting goals and making our strategic plans, arguing about which way the rails should be pointing, when what we really need is to get off the train altogether and embrace a completely different system and approach.

This seems simple when you think about it. But it’s difficult to do. It’s hard to even think about it, especially when you are sitting on a business train that’s going a hundred miles an hour and you feel like it’s headed in the wrong direction.

Focus groups, clip-boards and M&Ms

Like many old-school measures of brand success, the AdMeter relied on an in-person panel (focus group) to measure success. Panels, surveys and polls have long been the “insight vehicle of choice” for brand marketers due to the difficulty in scaling brand measurement across a market. As appealing as it seems, it’s always been unattainable for marketers to peer into the living rooms of television viewers and see if they are laughing, crying (or for that matter, watching at all), just as it’s been a stretch to get visibility into the universe of coffee shop and water cooler conversations the day after the big game. And now that standalone Super Bowl ads have evolved into week-long, multichannel, pre-game campaigns, the measurement challenge has deepened.

The Promise of Social Measurement

2012 represents a watershed moment for brand marketing. Specifically, the last few months have seen the rise of social media as the most promising channel for brand marketing activities and the dominant vehicle for measurement of brand marketing success.Social has two characteristics not seen in other channels. First, social is now at scale. While this year’s Super Bowl broke viewership records to become the most-watch television show in US history (for the third straight year) with more than 111 million viewers, social represents a brand marketing vehicle that can potentially reach Super Bowl sized audiences the other 364 days of the year.

Second, while massive in audience size, social data also offers the ability for incredibly deep analysis of customer interactions. This direct quantitative analysis of brand interactions cuts out the survey and poll-based methodologies of the past (and their associated cognitive biases).

Ranking the Social Bowl

Recognizing this shift, Dachis Group took a deep dive into the social analytics behind the Super Bowl ads and published two reports this week (leveraging our in-house infographic gurus).

The first report, published on Monday, ranks the social performance of the 45 Super Bowl ads against the brand marketing business outcomes they were aiming to achieve: brand awareness, brand love, and mindshare.

The second report, published today (inline below), compares the new world of social measurement against the historical panel approach of the USA Today Admeter. This year, the USA Today AdMeter recognized the potential power of social as well by combining Facebook voting, but were unable to let go of the historical bias to measure with in-person polls. We hope you enjoy the infographic —  a side-by-side analysis of the AdMeter results to the Dachis Group approach.

Update: GigaOm has provided a deep dive into the role of Big Data and brand performance monitoring. Read it here: How Social is Making Polling Obsolete 

Hola, amigos! The Super Bowl and all its pageantry descended upon pop-culture this week, bringing with it a slew of overhyped commercials, a nail-biter of a game, and an uncomfortable half-time show that reminded 114 million people that Madonna’s best years are roughly a decade behind her now.

We also got a lesson in the proper pronunciation of certain words, we learned that the Green Bay Packers have itself quite the devil of a quarterback, were reminded that some kids take stickers very, very seriously, and are treated to a melodramatic interpretation of 7^th grade angst.

Happy Friday, everone!

• Will Farrell made a Super Bowl ad for Old Milwaukee and it aired in just one TV market in the entire country: North Platte, Nebraska.

• Aaron Rodgers is more than just an NFL quarterback and classy insurance spokesman – he’s also a master photo-bomber.

• A 7^th grader’s comment thread on Facebook is read verbatim.

• This is pretty neat.

• Probability that this kid will be dateless for his senior prom 8 years from now? A million percent.

• So that’s how you pronounce hors d’oeuvres!

• Who needs Barry White when you’ve got these super romantic Valentine’s Day cards?

• Here I come, 1936! Here I come, 1936! Here I come, 1936!

• I think we’ve spotted a rebel fighter.

• So that’s how you pronounce haute couture!

• What’s wrong with these dogs? Oh. They’re upside down. Got it.

• The new Expendables sequel looks bloated and lame.

Brazil

Orkut

• The Facebookers are Coming – Probably the biggest news of the month in the region, Comscore recently reported that, for the first time, Facebook received more monthly unique visitors than Orkut (it should be noted the jump took place in December and the data was released in January). Looking at trends from the past year, the leap seemed imminent and reinforces Facebook’s increasing global appeal. No less, it will be interesting to see if this trend continues (I suspect so) and what measures Orkut will take to remain relevant in the market.
• Community Command Central – Focused on creating strong communities with high-levels of interaction, Orkut announced platform updates that ease user and moderator experiences. Most notably, the changes provide both parties a centralized stream to monitor the communities they are part of and topics they find interesting. With these filters in place, active branded communities may stand to gain engagement from feverish advocates who wish to closely follow multiple topics.
• Apps on Apps on Apps – Orkut has been busy improving the capabilities of and expanding their mobile offerings in recent months.  In January they announced an update to their Android App, enabling users on-the-go access to the all of their Orkut communities. They also released Version 2.0.0 of their iPhone/iPod Touch app, which includes basic, but essential features for their users who live life on the go. Mobile will be a key channel to watch in Orkut’s quest for continued relevancy amongst its users.

Noteworthy

• In Da Club – Speaking of Facebook’s rising prominence in Brazil, one Brazilian entrepreneur wants to make the social scene more social.
• SBS de Rio – Dachis Group announced a date change for our 2012 Social Business Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The Rio Summit now takes place on May 9th and you can request an invite here.

Russia

VKontakte

• Faceshift? – According to Russia Today, VK is intent on making a splash outside of Russian borders and one way the social network is preparing for expansion is by enhancing their logo to give it a more familiar look. RT has gone so far as to say that the new logo “bears a strong resemblance to “big brother” Facebook.” If this is the case, only time will tell whether this tactic will drive a positive brand association and enable them to forge into foreign markets. Do you think it will work?
• The Day the Music Died? – While American Internet companies were battling PIPA and SOPA on Capitol Hill, VKontakte was in the midst of (what would eventually prove) a losing copyright battle against Russian Gala Records. The difficulty involved with policing user-actions was a key concern for U.S. companies fighting the legislation and, in a similar light, the Russian social network took a small blow for what the court deemed to be inadequate policing of users sharing copyrighted content.  Could this open the door for foreign precedent to be cited in future U.S. lawsuits?
• IPOn hold – Reading between the lines of this Moscow Times reports, speculation abounds around the time frame of VKontakte’s initial public offering. Stay tuned.

Noteworthy

• New “Microbloving” Channel – Russian Internet conglomerate Mail.ru apparently didn’t want to be left out of the microblogging game and entered the space with the launch of Futubra. If my translation is accurate, the company’s mission is to “Make life more interesting!” and they plan to do so by allowing users to subscribe to “Both famous and interesting people and your friends, share pictures and interesting video, organize meetings, read the news from the world of technology, sports, fashion and entertainment, and discuss them with your friends and associates.” Sound familiar? Moving forward, they apparently amassed 17K users in one day. Assuming the unlikely, keeping this pace would mean 6.2MM users in a year. I guess crazier things have happened.

India

Orkut

• The last two bullet points from the Orkut updates listed above under Brazil also affect users in India.

Noteworthy

• Censorship in India (and elsewhere) – For different reasons, forces both internal and external to India are concerned with government defectors active in social channels.  Internally, there are government threats to “[Pull] a China” being aimed at Google and Facebook–the two most visited sites in all of India. Given a tall order, the Internet giants have been asked to remove “offensive and objectionable” content or risk the consequences. Externally, and signifying at least a slight willingness to cooperate with concerned nations, Twitter launched a new policy that provides for censorship on a country-by-country basis. This announcement affects users across the globe, but has sparked considerable outrage and buzz in India–the world’s second most populous country. We’ll be watching closely to see how these measures affect activity and traffic in the region.
• Social Burnout – Thinking about a running a Youth Marketing campaign to engage teens in India? Not so fast. ASSOCHAM (The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India) recently released survey results which claim “Youngsters in urban India have started experiencing social-media fatigue.” Worth a read, the report makes some fairly damning indictments on the state of social amongst Indian youth. No less, this report shouldn’t deter brands from dabbling in the market, it should inform your approach. There remains plenty of potential and opportunity for those who are determined to creatively engage their audience. To start your brainstorm, check out recent research from Nielsen which suggests that company interaction and an aspirational brand may be the keys to the social castle in India.

China

Renren Guangjie

• Renrenterest? – Renren is expanding their social platform by allowing users to pin images to their site. Take a look at the above link and you may be surprised that it eerily resembles one of America’s fastest growing social platforms: Pinterest. We’re under the belief that some Chinese netizens have knowledge of Pinterest and we’re curious about how this will affect Guangjie’s ability to gain traction. Renren already has a sizable audience at it’s disposal, but will users take the bait in turn for a more unified personal social presence or will they chose to go with the market pioneer? Even if Chinese users do opt for Pinterest, will they soon be stymied by a government ban of the channel?

Sina Weibo

• Weiboing in the New Year – Wanting to share their enthusiasm for the Chinese New Year, Sina Weibo users sent over 32K celebratory messages per second on the Chinese microblogging platform. This number is symbolic in that it is greater than the record number of Twitter tweets/second, which sits at just over 25K. Apparently it’s not the first time this has happened and, interesting because of geographic context, the tweets/second record came about when “Japanese users took to [Twitter] during a national broadcast of popular Anime series Castle in the Sky in December.”  Congruent with both data points is the academic theory that Eastern cultures show favor toward collectivism (as opposed to individualism), perhaps supporting why this demographic takes to the social web in droves during cultural events. At odds with both data points, however, is the academic theory that Eastern cultures rely heavily on non-verbal signals to communicate. Is social driving this shift in communication or is this change burgeoning from another (collection of) source(s)? Also, should the above number be cited with a Barry Bonds-esque asterisk? You be the judge.

Noteworthy

• Ain’t nothing like your Real Name, Baby – Seems like Chinese microblog users are going to be required to provide their real name in exchange for the ‘privilege’ to participate.  As the BBC reports, the Chinese government plans to pilot a program in five cities that will require users to post under their real names, with the ultimate goal of mandating the policy upon all new and existing microbloggers throughout the country. Long criticized by Western governments for their limits on free speech, this move by the Chinese government isn’t particularly shocking. As the plan comes to fruition, could a social buzzkill be the price for the government’s desired state of authentication?
• Shout-out East – The staff over at Penn Olson deserves an abundance of credit for the admirable job they are doing at covering social in China. Self-dubbed as ‘Asia Tech News for the World,’ numerous Google and Twitter search queries seeking ‘China AND Social Business OR Social Media’ oft-lead me to them as a source. Many props. FYI, you can consume from their trove here and follow them here.

The BRIC world is BIG: what key events in January did I miss? Tell me in the comments below and/or by tweeting @DachisGroup and @joeknowsjoe using the hashtag #BRICsocbiz.

The Dachis Group approach focuses on the aggregation of millions of signals across brand social accounts to determine lift in key metrics that matter to marketers: Brand Awareness, Brand Love and Brand Mindshare. These signals are rooted in actual consumer actions and as a result our data is a powerful measure of  how consumers behave. This differs from other approaches in that it focuses on what people do, not what they say they will do.

This infographic is our comprehensive ranking of Super Bowl advertisers in the hours during and immediately following this year’s game. In future analyses we will review the cumulative impact on brand over a longer period of time and compare it more specifically to existing measurement methodologies.