This was my 5th year attending SAP‘s gala SAPPHIRE event.   You can see from my previous blog posts, a recurring theme in all of them is SAP’s cold shoulder toward all things social.

2008: What I-know-I-don’t-know about E2.0 and SAP from Sapphire ’08

 ”Enterprise 2.0 is just not a burning issue on the minds of top SAP execs… SAP execs mirror the same sentiment as our executive clients: they have serious businesses to run– not a lot of time for the giddy consumery stuff. SAP software fuels the nitty gritty of hard-core business processes for most of the largest enterprises in the world. Where blogging (for example) fits into getting a raw material through the factory floor to a finished product, booked in inventory and ready to move through a supply chain is just not obvious to me right now. So the likelihood of an Enterprise 2.0 bolt-on to SAP is just as slim as it is naive.”

“So, once again, SAP invited me to its annual SAPPHIRE and ASUG event. I find myself wondering if SAP will get return on their investment in me once again. The answer is, probably not…  The reality is SAP and its global customer base are just not ready for the socialization of the enterprise. It’s just not a topic that commands attention at this massive event (despite my valiant efforts to bring it up in every executive briefing). The majority of conversations at SAPPHIRE revolve around common themes such as decision-making, analysis, data, spreadsheets, databases, reports, statistics, and business processes. In other words, the real work that goes on in real businesses.”

“For me, SAPPHIRE presents a unique opportunity to re-calibrate and diffuse the hype chamber that self-perpetuates around the 2.0 phenomenon.   SAPPHIRE is the 2.0 Rehab that I voluntarily commit myself to every year for one week. Only at SAPPHIRE do I get an opportunity to see the world the way my Council members do– that the 2.0/social business hoopla is enjoyed and shared by a small minority of corporate professionals.  Through the eyes of SAP customers and the SAP eco-system, I gain unique insight into the tremendous task ahead which involves a host of issues, not the least of which is tying 2.0 transformation to the enterprise business processes that run the world’s most successful businesses.”

This year, in 2012, it looks like things might be taking a new turn.  At least the lip service is on message.  Readers of this blog should know SAP recently hired the #e20 community’s good friend Sameer Patel to assume the position of Social Czar at SAP.  Patel has his work cut out  for him, however.  The two social platforms that qualify as social at SAP are StreamWork and SuccessFactor’s Jam (formerly CubeTree).  Two platforms that, frankly, don’t see much social traction in large enterprise. Neither one ever comes up in a landscape conversation of social collaboration software, and turning up examples of hard core users has been pretty slim among those of us who keep an eye on this category.  CubeTree, in fact, was never a player.  With Patel’s new position, SAP recently moved “social”  into its cloud group where it will support all SAP suites and concentrations (CRM, for example) in a new social platform that will be structured to support the business horizontally and seamlessly across on-premise and cloud offerings.  The group is building what they’re calling, “Project Robus.” (Latin for resolve or purpose.)

What’s probably most significant about Project Robus is that all development is being led by SuccessFactor’s co-founder and  technical cloud guru, Aaron Au. Au  is the lead architect and will run engineering for the project.  The operating vision behind the socialization of SAP’s massive ENSW footprint hinges squarely on integrating social with business process.  As Patel describes it, “This is core infrastructure.  It’s like application servers and middleware.”  The orientation is on business activities first, and social features second.  In other words, use cases will drive how and when social interacts with a business process.  All social presentations within the SAP product suite will touch the Robus platform.  My blogger colleague Alan Lepofsky describes it as “social plumbing.”

The pressure to deliver social is on SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard who is the Board executive advocate for social. Dalgaard is breathing new life and new ideas into the software behemoth.  He appears to have much support from co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Snabe, as most cloud and social questions asked at the scheduled media/analyst interview were turned over to Dalgaard.   There is evidence in the market that SAP has finally embraced the principles of a more collaborative, social business world (see Jim Snabe’s opinion piece in the Financial Times, “Social Networking and the Future of Business“).

I want to believe SAP will pull this off, but there is a small part of me that wants to scream, “You’re doing it wrong!”  It’s as if SAP is looking for a software solution to a human opportunity.  Focusing on the unstructured data and time spent between workflows is anathema to SAP’s heritage and corporate culture.  And even if the executive and management ranks see the opportunity, the rank and file are going to be puzzled.  We were sitting at dinner with a number of SAP mentors and I asked if any of them were using StreamWork.  All heads shook no.  One mentor said he wouldn’t even bother logging on.  My enterprise blogger friends roll their eyes when I talk about how social is about reinventing the way we work.  But they’re not seeing the changes I’m seeing in large organizations that are successful with social reinvention.  Luckily, I’m not the only one talking about this.  The enterprise is ready for a different way to work.

But, like Kermit, it’s the lovers, the dreamers, and me.  Those of us who are under Social Business’ spell are true believers.  I hope Lars Dalgaard and the SAP executive team can execute on the human potential of social, but I’m still a bit skeptical.

See Dalgaard’s “dream” app.  Here’s to hoping they pull it off.

Why now for employee advocacy?

Employee advocacy as a concept, and employee Employee Insights as an application, comes into the market at a critical juncture in the evolution of marketing. Large brands have awoken to the opportunity to drive significant business impact using social media and have allocated staff and budgets accordingly over the last 12 months. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the social business teams wielding these budgets there is a problem of scale that has yet to be solved. The issue is that at every large brand the masses of customers, prospects, partners and employees vastly outnumber the resources of even the most sophisticated social business team. This asymmetry is a very real and intimidating barrier to the kind of social business outcomes that large brands are seeking.

The solution to this problem lies in the programmatic activation of these key constituencies on behalf of the brand. Sophisticated organizations must transform the masses of their constituencies from a liability into an asset. The best place to start the transformation is with employees.

Why are employees so valuable?

Employees are uniquely valuable to an organizations social business ecosystem. They represent an unusual combination of expertise, authenticity, and direct relationship to a brand that enables the holy grail of social business: coordinated activity and granular measurement. Leaders at large brands are coming around to the notion of employee satisfaction as a mantra for social business readiness. Successful executives turned business thinkers like Tony Hsieh (Zappos) and Colleen Barrett (Southwest Airlines) have spread the gospel, but large organizations haven’t necessarily cracked the code on management and measurement of their empowered employees.

The role of Employee Insight

Employee Insights offers three critical pieces of functionality to solve these problems. First, the application can rapidly and easily locate the staunchest employee advocates for any one of the 30,000 brands and 100,000,000 social accounts that Dachis Group tracks on an hourly basis via the Social Business Index. Second, Employee Insights offers a portal for the management and measurement of these advocates. Third, Dachis Group now offers a set of packaged services based upon years of consulting expertise in the arenas of Performance Brand Marketing and Connected Company that can help any large brand quickly embrace the employee advocacy opportunity to affect both their brand and their bottom line.

What do I do now?

We understand that for many organizations the notion of employee advocacy programs is quite new, let alone applications and services to manage them. To help get you started on your journey we are offering a 1:1 product tours with the Dachis Group product managers responsible for Employee Insights and a free webinar with industry thought leader Dion Hinchcliffe.

• Sign up for a 1:1 Employee Insight Product Tour: The Dachis Group product team is excited to share the insights behind this new application as well as provide demonstrations of its features and functionalities to those who are interested. Simply contact us and we can schedule a tour at your convenience.

Sign up for a product tour at http://social.dachisgroup.com/tour/

• Register for ”6 Steps to Launching an Employee Advocacy Program” Webinar: This webinar, to be held at 2:00pm ET on May 31, 2012 will use cases from the recently released book “Social Business by Design” by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim to illustrate the value and importance of employee advocacy. Furthermore, Dion will review key tenets of social business and how they relate to launching employee advocacy programs at large brands.

Register for the free webinar at http://social.dachisgroup.com/webinar/

Do you have additional questions about Employee Insights? Please feel free to contact Doug Kern at doug.kern@dachisgroup.com to learn more.

Every week, The Atlantic Wire takes a look at weekly top movers in the Social Business Index. Last week, The Atlantic Wire discussed shifts for Fiat, The Gap and LVMH. However, a number of other big brands were on the move including Etsy, jumping 38 spots in the SBI from 166 to 128.

Etsy is a brand that enables individuals around the globe to make, sell and buy things from various creators around the globe. The brand’s social presences do a good job of consistently engaging social fans with a variety of powerful media, and ultimately driving viewers back to etsy.com. Etsy showcases it’s creators, allowing them to contribute his/her own viewpoint in a new and creative way that connects individuals around the globe. In putting it’s sellers first, Etsy is able to leverage content, maintain a fresh Twitter presence and increase its rank on the Social Business Index.

This past week, Etsy promoted a particular tweet that told fans of B Corp Certification and a new round of funding to help Etsy businesses by providing more products and services around the world. This exhilarating news gave Etsy fans something exciting to share with friends, and since the brand promoted the tweet, the content stayed in front of fans for an extended period of time. The stickiness of this content enabled it to be favorited and retweeted more than any other tweet on their page, creating a ripple across the Twitter-sphere and on the SBI. The combination of this promoted content and Etsy’s consistent and responsive tweets led to the sizable 38 point jump for the brand. By coupling engaging content with the power of a promoted tweet, Etsy was able to grab the attention of fans reach a larger than normal audience.

The Social Business Index provides ongoing real-time ranking, analysis and benchmarking of Social Business adoption and performance of the most connected and engaged companies based on Dachis Group’s Social Business Intelligence as a Service data services platform. To learn more, visit socialbusinessindex.com and follow @DGSBI on Twitter.

It was back in May of 2007 when Facebook had less than 20 million users when I decided to bet the future of my company on Facebook. I remember it clear as day, going into the office and telling our team that we’re done being who we were up until that day. From that day forward we were building consumer-facing experiences within Facebook. Most of them were shocked and somewhat worried, but I knew that it was the right thing to do for the company. I had been on Facebook since its early days and saw the writing on the wall (pun intended). Facebook would one day be bigger and more profitable than Yahoo!

Fast forward five years, and people are still questioning the validity of Facebook, and its capability to generate meaningful revenues and profits as a public company.  I’m sure that these are the same people that see Facebook as yet another Social Network – one that will come to pass in the same manner as Friendster and Myspace did.  It is to those people that I speak to today. To the layman, Facebook may be just another social network, but the smart money knows that Facebook is far more than that.

Facebook is the Identity and Relationship Management Platform of the web, consoles, and mobile devices.

• For consumers, it enables the development and management of their individual identity and relationships with family, friends, and coworkers.
• For brands, it enables the development and management of their brand identity and relationships with constituents – consumers, partners, and shareholders.

Facebook has, and will grow to have, an even more profound impact on the lives of billions of people and the way that brands engage with their constituents.  It has forever augmented consumer behaviors and is singlehandedly reshaping marketing and advertising, as we know it.  The days of interruptive ads are numbered. Storytelling and relationship building are the future.

As for GM coming out and saying that they’ll stop advertising on Facebook this week, the move was about as classy as Kim Kardashian’s recent marriage and will have as much of an impact to the future of Facebook as me telling a someone on the street that I won’t buy a Chevy will have on GM’s bottom line this quarter.

My friends, Facebook is here to stay…and grow.  While they don’t have everything figured out quite yet, the company is well on its way and has already done more for mankind than most companies. I have built a business on top of the Facebook ecosystem that has had 18 quarters of consecutive growth in profits since 2008. Facebook is taking the right approach to making money; they are putting users first, while at the same time redefining what it means for marketers to build relationships and engage consumers at unprecedented scale.

• “If you work in social media you have to buy a copy.” – Forbes
• “For those trying to sell their companies on why social business makes sense, passing around a few copies of this book would be a good way to start.” – Information Week
• “The graphics in this book are worth the price of the book alone.” – ZDNet

And on Amazon:

• “Earlier books I’ve read about social media — Groundswell, The Social Organization, Get Bold and others–seemed more forward-looking about how social media could change organizations based on early findings and early case situations. Social Business by Design feels a little further ‘down the road’…” – T. Sales
• “In a field where snake oil consultants offer vague prescriptions and poor advice, this book rises to the level of “must read.” – Michael Krigsman
• “If you’re looking for THE book to help you understand and explain Social Media’s impact on business, look no further.” – Todd Defren
• “Technically, I compete against these gentlemen, so if I’m willing to come here and give it high praise I hope that would give you confidence in making this purchase.” – Matt Ridings

We’ve also done Q&A with Fast Company and Social Nerdia.

If you’ve bought a copy, thank you! We’d appreciate if you would share your thoughts on Amazon.

If you haven’t yet read the book and the early reviews haven’t yet convinced you to buy a copy, we’re happy to share parts of the book with you in this excerpt in Fast Company, a download of Chapter 5, and an opinion piece on CNBC. You can also read the first chapter free on Kindle.

Finally, we’d like to engage with you in person! Keep an eye on our speaking page for where we will be around the world.

Earlier this week I explored the social business ramifications of Facebook’s IPO in detail and noted the significant opportunities and challenges both. Near-term challenges clearly abound: Successfully shifting the full power of Facebook’s social networking platform to next-generation mobile devices in ways likely to preserve the unique value of the service will be one of two signature challenges of their early public days. So much so that it will likely define their continued growth and success in the next couple of years.

At the same time as the transition to smart mobile, is the second major challenge: Facebook must significantly beef up its business model. Even though the company’s revenue stream was $3.7 billion last year, with an additionally impressively double-digit jump in net profit, it’s clear that much of the value of the social network is being delivered to businesses for free and in a way that can’t easily be charged for. This is a conclusion that GM came to recently and announced this week to considerable coverage and debate: Specifically, it pulled its ads from Facebook’s advertising network. What was notable about this decision was that GM’s formal ad spend only represented about a quarter of what the auto giant actually invests in Facebook, the rest is in staffing, content development, and agency work in order to engage where its customers are today. The lesson: Businesses feel they must significantly engage in social and in Facebook in particular, but the best way to do it probably isn’t the captive push advertising schemes that have been devised so far.

Therein lies the strategic challenge for Facebook: It’s currently sitting on the most significant mountain of personal user behavior and insight in industry history. It’s a dataset that’s much deeper and more relevant even than Google’s, which is still probably larger but not nearly as insightful. If Facebook can help businesses tap into this data ways that also truly protects its users, then there is a real long-term path for them towards a bright future of essentially untold value creation. As I’ve suggested before, there are other, less fraught paths to value for Facebook as well. While successfully leveraging user data in the form of increasingly refined consumer analytics and engagement services is probably the single largest and most valuable way forward for the company, there’s plenty of value in just being a highly effective conduit to that same vast sea of largely captive participants. Plugging into the reinvention of CRM that’s currently taking place in the industry is a great start, and enterprises would pay a lot for better tools to enable improved self-service, customer support, marketing, sales, and advocacy in social channels.

Why would Facebook choose merely to be a conduit to its users and not their data? Because there’s an extraordinarily fine line between trust and any strategy that taps into their users’ data for business purposes. In practice, it’s perhaps too tempting, and frankly, all too easy a line to cross unintentionally, to use their truly invaluable social datasets to fuel products and services to businesses that — in the final analysis — unfairly take advantage of Facebook’s users. Clearly and unequivocally putting users first and unquestionably beyond the realm of exploitation would go a long way towards keeping their network effect alive and healthy long term. But it would also fundamentally blunt the full potential of their business. And so I think we’ll see the company continue to, and certainly investors call for them to, walk that extremely fine line, as difficult as that may eventually become.

The business impact of a public Facebook

So what does all of this mean to businesses currently employing Facebook in all its many forms, from simple Facebook pages to full-blown apps? There are a number of things that I believe will fundamentally change the way most companies engage with the world through the service. These will also ultimately decide how Facebook itself will fare:

• User data experiments. As social analytics and business intelligence move to the core of the engagement cycle (listen, analyze, engage), Facebook will conduct many experiments in how to make the most of the insight they can derive for businesses, while also protecting their customers. The pressure to do this well will be intense once they’re public and so prepare to encounter and evaluate a lot of these beta services until they are able to assemble a portfolio of successful offerings. One wild card will be what users will think of all this, much like the sometimes maligned Promoted Tweets on Twitter.
• Social data protection services. While it’ll take a while to ramp, an industry will likely form to provide people with the ability to see how their social data is being used online. Like a credit bureau protection service, these services will may become the bane of the business models of social networks like Facebook, putting pressure on their financial results as their use of user data creates.
• Government regulation of social data. Many countries already have laws protecting consumer privacy which already affects most social networks today. These are only going to get stricter as the use of social data becomes more embedded in products and services sold to businesses. Ultimately the patchwork of regulation and the restrictions they impose will limit the upside potential of many business models based on social data, again, limiting financial results. Social media can be a “difficult business” in this regard.
• Evolving their social data platform. Ultimately, and the major challenge of digital business today, Facebook will itself never be able to realize most of the innovative ideas that are possible with its platform. Continuing to strategically open up the platform’s data to 3rd party partners through APIs will let them do far more than they could ever do themselves and APIs have become an important business model for Internet firms. While Facebook has largely been successful doing this with apps, these apps are also largely consumer facing. Doing this well so that startups can build highly valuable business-facing apps is going to be harder, yet where the longest term value is. Entrepreneurs should plan for opportunities in extending Facebook’s value chain as the platform continues to open up. Investors should observe these experiments to see which ones will fuel revenue growth for the company. Remember how Amazon ultimately leveraged its platform for record-breaking growth? The same route is likely for Facebook if they can solve the data protection issues.

For now, the book is far from written on how social networks will be turned into highly successful global businesses. While LinkedIn, for its part, has been particularly successful in developing business models around its services, it also has an advantage: It was all about the business world from the outset. It’s simply less clear that there is a safe way to fully take advantage of Facebook’s uniquely compelling industry leading position in consumer social networking. That there is a way forward for them I have little doubt however, but what that path remains somewhat unclear for now.

For more analysis, please read With Facebook IPO, Social Business Becomes Key, which my co-author Peter Kim and I just published on CNBC. For further insight, please see Social Business By Design, our new best selling strategy guide to enterprise social media.

My two biggest takeaways?

Lesson #1: Word of mouth marketing is not free.

Sure, most of us already knew that a major advocacy or ambassador program takes time and money to roll out… But, I didn’t have a good sense of just how much time and money it might take before last Thursday. Todd Spencer of Doe-Anderson led a great case study session on the Maker’s Mark Ambassador Program. He shared several fantastic anecdotes about Maker’s empty bottles for charity, the holiday gifts Maker’s sends to ambassadors, and the business cards those ambassadors can hand out to people they meet. While the entire case study was fascinating, the most interesting thing that Spencer shared was this: rolling out an ambassador program of this scale wasn’t easy. It took 2.5 years to reach critical mass and today the program is supported by 30% of the Maker’s Mark marketing budget. Talk about a reality check.

So, for those of you who are knee deep in an advocacy, ambassador, or influencer initiative, don’t despair if you aren’t seeing the results you want. It can take blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention ample time and $$$) to get the program where you want it to be.

Lesson #2: We need to standardize our vocabulary.
During the 10 sessions I attended, I heard 10 different definitions of advocacy, influence, and clout. How difficult it must be for brands looking to impact their business through fan advocacy and influencer outreach! In one session, we were told that there’s really no real difference between advocates and influencers nor how you utilize them in marketing. In another, that the most important metric to measure word of mouth effectiveness is advocacy. And in another, that utilizing influencers is more effective than email marketing. If I’d attended another 10 sessions, I’m sure I would have heard another 10 outlooks. What it boils down to is that it’s not always easy to generate word of mouth – if it was, then we’d all be singing the same tune. But, from a strategist’s perspective, I think it’s important that we – agencies, consultancies, marketers, and brands – try and speak the same language, especially as we work on, with, and for major brands so that we’re helping to drive outcomes instead of creating confusion.

As a sidenote, if you’re interested in hearing the Dachis Group worldview on advocacy versus influence, get in touch with Lauren Picarello, or schedule a demo of the Social Business Index’s Advocate Insight tool which helps identify and manage a brand’s best advocates.

All in all, WordOfMouth.org put on a great event and I look forwad to seeing how some of the themes of the day evolve over the next year. Thanks again to Andy Sernovitz for having us.

This call to arms was supplemented with behemoth ERP software installation and integration contracts.  Other management disciplines such as TQM (Total Quality Management), Six Sigma, and Strategic Outsourcing spread like wildfire across the cloistered boardrooms of the Global 2000.  It was a field day for management consultants and gurus, whose profits soared with each best-selling book they touted as the key to stabilizing and eventually improving business operations. At the time, there was a widely held belief that the software would make the company smarter, force a tight measure of control on business operations, and align the workforce to produce lock-step in a way that would eliminated surprises and churn out predictable earnings every quarter

The zeitgeist of that day is probably best illustrated by the off beat cult classic, “Office Space.”  Masked in dark humor, the film touched a raw nerve that permeated throughout large organizations: fear, frustration, ennui, a powerlessness and emptiness that everyone was feeling.  Job security vanished, job satisfaction plummeted, employees felt as if they were a cog with no voice and no intrinsic motivation to produce.

Essentially, the command and control mechanization demanded by these monolithic systems and management philosophies had stripped the workforce of its humanity — gone was the heart of the large enterprise and in its place, a large mechanical brain.

And that’s no way to live…or run a company.

What began in the late 90s with the dawn of the Internet age, however, has spawned a Renaissance for the corporate worker that’s just now beginning to expand throughout the Global 2000.  The massive introduction of mobile platforms and devices into the enterprise, coupled with the revolution in social connectivity has spawned a kinder, gentler trend that’s liberating organizations by tapping into workforces’ innate sense of belonging, trust, and passion for doing great work.  Where the 90s stripped the workforce of its humanity, this new era is celebrating it.  And coincidentally, it is very good for business.

Welcome to the age of the connected workforce.  Large social platforms, whether internal or external, are reintroducing what it means to be human again at work.  The philosophies that drive this new era of employee productivity are the opposite of draconian. They’re generous, trusting, motivating, team building, honest and transparent.  They’re breaking down heretofore vaulted power silos and binding corporate cultures by distributing institutional know-how and inspiring ad-hoc conversations on everything from Zombie movies to DNA-slicing. The planks of what is commonly referred to as “Enterprise 2.0” were born out of the tenets of the web 2.0 consumer movement.  Resting on lofty ideals such as egalitarianism, authenticity, and trust, social network platforms are encouraging collaboration on a worldwide scale powered by curiosity, shared goals, and intellectual as well as financial rewards.   Employees are discovering newfound freedoms at work, and it’s helping to increase job satisfaction and loyalty by leaps and bounds.

A report released by McKinsey in December 2010 touted the improvements businesses could experience by using Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise and has since become one of the main pieces of research cited by social business advocates. According to the study, businesses reported a 15% revenue increase in marketing and sales, 20% increased time available in R&D to market and innovate, and businesses also realized 15% increased speed to knowledge and experts in the HR & talent management sector.

Since that study’s release, further advancements have been made by companies already leveraging these tools and more companies are beginning to realize the potential benefits that can be realized as a result. For additional examples, I’d highly recommend taking a look at this comprehensive list of 101 social business ROI examples assembled by my colleague, Dachis Group’s Chief Strategy officer Peter Kim. In the meantime, though, let’s take a look at some businesses that have overhauled their corporate culture or are looking to do so in the near future.

The most progressive of the G2000 executive teams are going full bore with social initiatives.  In one case, Alcatel-Lucent, one of the world’s leading telecommunications providers, addressed an internal communications issue with a personal blog penned by its President of the Americas.  The blog received hundreds of comments, encompassing a broad spectrum of opinions on the topic in question, which the executive addressed directly in the encouragement of open, two-way dialogue.  This mass, open conversation quickly diffused internal misconceptions on the issue at stake, successfully setting the record straight amongst employees.  This open spirit is also reflected by the company’s global CEO who blogs regularly on Alcatel-Lucent’s internal social platform on topics close to his heart.  His comments are always open and honest and, where necessary, critical as part of a dialogue of business improvement. Further, Alcatel-Lucent has incorporated global behavioral KPIs tied to advocacy work in its internal social platform for all employees.

Speaking at the Consumerization of IT (CITE) conference earlier this year in San Francisco, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly’s Bryce Williams recalled how social collaboration indoctrinated senior executives into the fruits of crowd-sourcing, co-creation and mass collaboration. An employee blogged internally about his frustration with one of the company’s age-old business processes, referencing published alternatives he’d discovered while leveraging some “innovation time” encouraged by his manager.  The post initially spawned dozens of complaints and pile-on commentary, but eventually led to a constructive conversation about how to improve the process. Employees from the most senior to the least likely rank and file all collaborated to summarize the key themes of the conversation for escalation, resulting in a high level of satisfaction and buy-in from everyone involved. In short, the bottom-up employee voice was heard and openly acknowledged by the very top of the organization. Reflecting on the example during his CITE presentation, Williams offered, “It’s never been easier for the most innovative ideas and the most provocative questions to matter at all levels of the company. Lilly and its employees are realizing the benefits of “Working Out Loud.”

Lexmark International is a Lexington, KY based firm that has traditionally focused on printing solutions and services.  As the company expands into new markets such as content management and business process management, it has begun to closely examine the benefits of overhauling the corporate culture to better align with and reinforce its business strategy.  As this shift occurs, the company has had to ask itself several key questions, namely how to become more innovative and agile as new markets and opportunities emerge. Additionally, after acquiring five companies over a two year span, Lexmark faces another question – how best to bring aboard all of these companies and integrate them into the organization in a seamless fashion.  Dennis Pearce, an Enterprise Knowledge Architect at Lexmark believes that leveraging enterprise 2.0 is at least one feasible approach.

“We see social business as essential to answering these questions,” said Pearce at Lexmark.  “By giving all employees maximum visibility to information and activity taking place across the enterprise, we can generate the raw material for new ideas and the connections that will help us rapidly form the teams needed to take advantage of them.”

The social revolution is just getting underway in the corridors of power among the global elite, but the first shots in this battle are unleashing Fun rather than Fear.  The new 21^st Century management ethos is much more about liberating the workforce to create vast improvements in productivity, innovation, and agility.  New leaderships books such as, “Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World” by Jamie Notter and Maggie Grant are replacing the 90s command and control canons on the executive bookshelf.  The entire management philosophy of how to produce results is pivoting from a dependence on software to suppress creativity to software that unleashes it.  The surge in mobile connectivity and external social sharing only accelerates this trend.

One manager of a leading manufacturer confided anonymously that that success lies somewhere between the old regime and the newer, more social approach. “Companies are realizing Six Sigma isn’t enough,” he said. “It’s time to balance the Quality yang with the Social yin.”

I can highly recommend this conference if you are looking into:

• Enterprise Social Technology (Social Intranets, technical delivery of Social platforms)
• Cultural change aspects
• Challenges to developing a Social strategy
• Enterprise collaboration

Crexia was very kind to extend a 20% discount to Dachis Group (ex-Headshift) blog readers. You can register on the website here http://www.crexia.com/conferences/social-workplace with the promotion code HEADSHIFT20.

Looking forward connecting with you at the event!

Lee – @leeprovoost