Last weekend, I was woken abruptly by a high-pitched electronic “chirp.” Half-conscious, I knew exactly where it was coming from – a dead battery in a carbon monoxide detector. The problem wasn’t a potential CO hazard (there are lots of other detectors in here) or that other people would wake up (some already were). No, the problem was my dogs, who were trembling at the sound of the electronic chirp.

As I stumbled around the house in darkness trying to pinpoint the dying battery, I felt sorry for the dogs and also started thinking about social business.

Regarding the dog part: in our previous house, we had installed an invisible fence; training the dogs on its boundaries involved a process of planting small red flags around the yard to mark boundaries. Proximity to flags was also correlated with a beep from a collar-based electric receiver that would deliver a shock if a dog wandered too close to a boundary for too long. In practice, the dogs learned quickly and stayed away from the boundaries. We’ve moved away from that house but the dogs still fear electronic signals close to a particular pitch.

Now, regarding the social business part. In particular, my thoughts turned to brands monitoring social media for mentions and keywords, using approaches similar to the way they’ve been trained to listen to mainstream media. The trouble is, the landscape is different but the signals are usually being interpreted in the same way. Unfortunately, that’s not going to drive effective solutions. So some brands are just scared of everything and hesitant to engage or interact. Others are trying to learn and solve for finely tuned discrepancies in signal pitch.

In this space, it’s imperative for old dogs to learn new tricks. Hopefully the ones you’re working on aren’t “roll over” and “play dead.”

We spent months conducting research, planning the strategy, establishing the KPIs and measurement plan, creating content and designing the site.  Now that we are weeks away from launch, community planning has suddenly become tracking a growing ‘to do’ list.  Instead of ‘call the caterer, meet with the photographer, email the DJ,’ my list includes ‘email Compliance, call Legal, follow-up with IT’ in addition to daily communication with our client partner and platform provider.  The ‘to do’ list scrolls in my head creating what one of my friends referred to as the [wedding] planning head fog.  The stress hits when you realize one incomplete item on the list will throw off the entire schedule.  This is why each time I mark something complete on the list, I feel compelled to do a little dance in my chair.  Each checked item means we are closer to launch.  It’s exciting.

However, it can also be wearisome.  I’ve been exposed the darker side of community planning as well.  A community planner who has invested lots of time and energy into planning the community may also grow easily frustrated and impatient over details.  (‘How did they miss this important request?’) 

I confess that I came close to turning into the bridezilla of community management.  This image became the stress-relief joke among the team as we plotted how to get everything approved in time for the targeted launch date.  ‘Did you go bridezilla on them?’ we would ask each other.  When things got particularly tense, there was a strong temptation to ‘go bridezilla.’  But in the end, keeping a cool head prevails and we’re right on track for launch.

To avoid turning into bridezilla before launching an online community, I offer 7 lessons learned from my experience so far.

1. Meet with Compliance and Legal during the initial planning stages to provide context around the project, give notice about content approvals, find out if training is available (goodwill effort that goes a long way) and if Terms of Service language exists for social media sites
2. Conduct interviews with other groups inside and outside the organization that interact with your target audience (PR, Customer Service)
3. Don’t assume that Facebook-like features will be supported by every community platform
4. Allow for plenty of time to receive approval of a new community manager position and to find the right candidate
5. Avoid ghost-written blog posts (they are awkward and no one wants to endorse before the community is launched anyway)
6. Allow at least a week for website quality assurance testing (you may need more time depending on how many people need to be involved and their responsiveness)
7. Schedule time to pre-seed the community site with user-generated content before launch to kick-start sharing activities

I’m sure I’ll have more to add in the future.  For now, I’d like to know if you have any lessons learned in community planning to add.

Source for bridezilla photo: http://pdbb.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/bridezilla/bridezilla/

Brian Kotlyar

Here at Dachis Group, and most likely for much of the audience of this blog, collaboration is typically discussed in the context of technology. When we think about collaboration we spend our time pondering how best to apply technology to first facilitate and then capture the fruits of group work. In all of our thinking about technology, we sometimes forget that no amount of software can compel people to innovate or create a culture of transparent dialog. The fact is that at its root, collaboration still requires a meeting of minds that is difficult to foster and even harder to replicate.  It is interesting then to think about the relationship between technology-enabled collaboration and Gamestorming – where the most advanced technology to be applied consists of a blue sharpie marker and perhaps an oversized Post-It.

After thinking hard about what Gamestorming means for Social Business Design, it seems that, even beyond the clear practical uses, as a practice it reminds us to consider enterprise collaboration in two equally important tracks: First, we must learn to think in terms of social technologies and structures for establishing a collaborative organization. This is the kind of thing that today’s social software is so very good at. Second, we must focus on the grassroots nature of collaboration – the sessions occurring every day in conference rooms and via e-mail where business gets done. This is the kind of thing that Gamestorming codifies and makes a whole lot easier. By applying both tracks of thinking to a clients’ problems we can create a system whereby social technology enables the amplification and documentation of the grassroots collaboration that Gamestorming promotes.

Gamestorming teaches us a valuable lesson that can sometimes be forgotten in the constant excitement over the latest and greatest enterprise social network or crowdsourcing platform.  The fact is that social technology doesn’t have very much to amplify in an environment without grassroots collaboration and grassroots collaboration doesn’t get an organization very far if it isn’t recorded for posterity and shared widely.

Ellen Reynolds

In the opening chapters, the authors discuss the importance of “fuzzy goals.” As opposed to clear and quantifiable goals, fuzzy goals are vague. These are the situations where the desired end state is not easy to see, and for knowledge workers, these are the most important situations to visualize, i.e., “What will success LOOK like?” These are also the situations where gamestorming can be instrumental to success.

Fuzzy goals give your team “a sense of direction and purpose while leaving team members free to follow their intuition,” and gamestorming is the means to move you closer to your end goal. This concept is extremely applicable to social business design – because the idea is new, we’re not exactly sure what a world of social businesses will look like. Setting fuzzy goals “motivates the general direction of our work without blinding us to opportunities” along the way. As a result, we’re able to adjust quickly based on what does and doesn’t draw us closer to our visualized end state.

Kate Rush Sheehy

Early adopters of ideas or technology are the masters of improvisation. When the rules and guidelines have yet to be written, it is anybody’s prerogative to define the future state. Gamestorming talks about using improvisation to create a new world of possibilities to explore. That’s a lot like what we’re doing with Social Business Design.

Some practitioners have been delivering socio-collaborative and 2.0 initiatives to their companies for several years. When those practitioners began, there wasn’t a community, or Council, to provide support and guidance. They had to improvise and create a plan from scratch. A major component of successful improv exercises and successful social business constructs is laying out basic principles that will help you to create simple, but loose structures to guide people’s thinking. The loose structure fosters spontaneity, which in turn spurs the process of discovery. If you can get  your team into discovery mode, you’re laying the groundwork for the possibility of some emergent outcomes.

The most interesting parallel I found between improvisation and social business solutions is that the learning is in the doing. You can’t realize the benefits of either until you dig your heels in, set up structure, and start discovering.

Lars Plougmann

Starting out my professional career in a big consulting firm, lots of great training was lavished on me. It would have been great to walk away from the training with a manual that set out everything in a logical fashion and offered further ideas on how to facilitate client interaction. Gamestorming is that kind of book.

Games, in this context, are exercises to help discover information or facilitate decision making. Referring to the exercises as games gives you permission to suspend the usual behavioral standards for a limited time, allowing creativity to surface. When the game ends you have a slew of fresh input for change and innovation.

I have already had the opportunity to put some of the games in the book into practice on real projects that we are working on at Dachis Group. While some games are proven classics of the consulting trade others are innovations. Some may seem silly on paper but prove their value in a real life situation.

Oh, and another thing you will learn from the book is that you already know how to draw [ed: here is proof]. That alone is totally worth it.

Have you read Gamestorming? What did you think? Also, what should we read next?

We realize that it sounds easier than it actually is – there are many moving pieces to consider, not the least of which is your employees. Assumptions are made that because people have a Facebook profile or a Twitter account, they get it. Not true. Often, small teams of digital and social practitioners are left to explain strategy to the company – to people who do not really understand and to naysayers who still don’t see the point.

We don’t see social as merely a form of media, another outlet to use for broadcasting; instead, we see it as a cultural change. We’re advocating for a whole new mode of business, which will require a massive shift in thinking for most organizations. You must build a strong backbone to support that cultural change.

Training is a critical step on the road to culture change. If your organization is to become truly social, people need to know what that means, both for themselves personally and for the company at large. Uncertainty breeds tension – use training to help stakeholders understand how you plan to get from Point A to Point B.

In programs we create, we recommend a few things:

1. Think globally: make training content regionally applicable. Invest extra effort and resources to customize content per region. Include cross-regional examples and statistics – help employees understand what their global counterparts are doing, and promote best practice sharing.
2. Create different tracks and consider your internal audiences:
   • What knowledge will help your management team make informed decisions?
   • What information will help your practitioners do their jobs better? What information will help them take your efforts to the next level?
   • To raise overall corporate social IQ, what is the baseline knowledge base for all other employees?
3. Create compelling, hands-on training content: there’s a difference between observing a Twitter account and actually tweeting. Likewise, there’s a difference between tweeting and understanding when and how to engage.
4. Identify and recruit internal subject matter experts to help create and deliver training content: do you have a blogger outreach expert? Pull him/her in to approve content and embellish it with examples and case studies.

It is possible to achieve the “blue sky” vision, and training is a good place to start. Figure out what people are currently doing, what they should be doing differently, and what they will need to know to effectively change their behaviors. Then, design a training program that will engage employees as they get up to speed.

Does your company have a training program? How are you preparing your organization to embrace social?

The concept of a strong center has interesting applications outside of dance. A strong center maintains connectedness across disparate parts. Dachis Group has observed one of the major frustrations of large companies is the fragmented state of social – each department going out on its own, developing different social tactics, using different social technologies – all guided by different principles and no common strategy. Each department is like arms and legs moving wildly out of sync in different directions. This decentralized structure lacks the important connections between systems that leads to an intelligent network. At some point, the stress and strain of uncoordinated social systems will cause the organization to flail – like a dancer attempting multiple turns without ensuring arms and legs are aligned and coordinated with the central body.

At first it may seem to go against everything social represents to centralize social. The power of social is in the ability to scale the sharing of information without anyone owning or controlling it. What I have learned in my work with clients is that centralizing corporate social strategy, policy and training does not mean social is owned or controlled. Instead, centralizing governance means creating a solid command center to lead the organization and help connect the dots. The edge of the organization can therefore operate with autonomy but still maintain connection and coordination with other parts. Otherwise, the brand is at-risk for social chaos:

• social intelligence is siloed which prevents a centralized view of the customer (internal)
• fragmented experiences and mixed messaging confuses and frustrates customers (external)

While the goal of social business is to distribute social responsibility for scale, the organization starts to flail if it doesn’t operate from a strong center. This social center, also known as the social business center of excellence (SBCE), is a cross-functional team that guides innovation, strategy, policy and training for the organization. The SBCE consists of representatives from each department who come together to collaborate on corporate vision, strategy, policy and training so that ownership is shared and distributed across the organization, not owned or controlled by a particular department.

Below is a visual of how a social center governs while empowering the edge of the organization to take accountability and responsibility for executing.

So many of us are eager to dive into social tactics. The forward motion of execution feels good. Conducting an audit of properties and initiatives, answering the ‘why,’ establishing charters and policies feels like we’re standing still. We resist standing still under the pressures from executives to move the needle and report the results. But taking time to establish a strong center is what’s going to allow large companies to manage multiple moving parts in a way that provides more momentum and power to support the desired results.

Take a look at how your organization is structured for social business. Do you have a social center guiding and coordinating the edge?

As my colleague Kate Rush Sheehy pointed out recently, forming a company’s social business strategy and resources requires speed and scale — and for some organizations these two qualities don’t come naturally. Many employees fear the departmental silos they don’t understand. The complex processes that don’t always work. And the colleagues they don’t know — constantly concerned these people will object to their ideas, plans, or points of view. This sometimes irrational worry can frustrate employees, but inactivity typically persists within their organizations anyway.  Some companies refuse to let these concerns constrain them, and are trying to do things a little differently.

One example is a social business center of excellence (SBCE); an organizational structure that exposes each of these fears. The people you work with, how you communicate, and perhaps even your role are different. It’s exciting and jarring all at the same time, but slowly each member of this group comes to the same realization. The people you work with share your motivation for creating resources, educating the organization, and innovating to reach business goals.

But herein lies the problem: How do you shift from discussing the ideas you have to executing on them?

• Focus on specific  goals — and how and when you will attain them. Even the best ideas are left inactive without a realistic plan to achieve them. Typically SBCE involvement rests outside of an employee’s regular responsibilities. A clear roadmap marked with a relevant timeline, defined activities, and targeted accountability will decide how many tangible outcomes this group achieves.

• Resist gaining consensus on decisions. Agreement creates comfort no matter what decision you’re making. But this same process can dilute ideas and decrease how quickly the work gets done. For projects that require multiple rounds of input, assign a lead contributor whose job is to facilitate and incorporate group feedback — and communicate the final product back to the team. This way you can protect the group’s progress and ensure the openness initially created stays intact.

• Address member hesitancy early. While information flows within SBCE meetings, members’ contributions stem from the role they perform every day. This inability to see the bigger picture can sometimes cause uncertainty. Combat this feeling early by fully explaining the facts that support your perspective. Sharing provides clarity and gives members fodder to ask questions, ones they might not have felt comfortable asking otherwise.

What do you want to know about centers of excellence as they relate to social business?

Leave your questions and thoughts in the comments and we’ll incorporate them into our SXSWi 2011 panel on this very topic: Social Business Zen: Finding Your Company’s Social Center.

Kate Niederhoffer joined Dachis Group early on, having built up Nielsen Buzzmetrics, one of the most important service companies in the early social computing market. She intends to share her knowledge through the South by Southwest 2011 panel The Biz of Buzz.

Her thoughts in brief: What do we know from being in the business of buzz since the early days? What can we learn about where we are going by analyzing trends from way back when Listening was referred to as social media monitoring to today where social media is primarily a vehicle for personal brand-building and promotion? With a combined 21 years working in social media and monitoring “buzz” these panelists have learned to separate the hype from the truth and will share top trends and lessons learned from working in the trenches of emerging media.

Kate’s session will address these questions:

1. How do social media monitoring tools/ listening platforms really differ?
2. What are the top themes in social media that have emerged over the past 6 years?
3. Are things like engagement and influence really possible to capture?
4. How do you rely on social media to make business decisions?
5. Which social media metrics are meaningful?

If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up toThe Biz of Buzz.

Peter Fasano is a Dachis Group engagement manager with deep experience in making social business work for big brands. Like The Coca-Cola Company.

Peter’s panel proposal is In the Hive – Activating Business Social Graphs. Let me know if this sounds familiar:

The state of now for you is a game of whack-a-mole. You are looking for a future state of scalability for you, your team and your business. Social Media Marketing, Servicing or Communications has matured through your enterprise and so must your integrated approach to becoming a socially calibrated business. Your internal band of rockstar marketers, service agents or PR teams have risen from the early days of passionate workers and social media hobbyists to the formal or informal social media leadership of your organization.

You have engaged your community on nights and weekends to meet their growing demands and growing numbers. Your social outposts have grown to include private or public communities, social networking sites, blogs and the works. Your communities are diverse and have moved from self-policed to moderated. Communities have moved beyond your “official outposts” to Twitter posts, blogs, or YouTube channels about your business – to keep up with the growing voices you have now activated Listening Services to keep track of conversation on your “owned” social outlets and then to the “outside” voices. Your efforts have earned additional resources and the attention of the Marketing or PR teams that want to push messages through status updates.

Has the organic collection of people, process and technology reached its limits?

Peter’s panel will address these questions:

1. Does your org chart map to your knowledge chart?
2. How to identify and map your knowledge centers?
3. What are the incentives needed to activate your business graph?
4. How do you optimize information flow through the enterprise?
5. What is the business justification for this resource shift?

To learn more, give a thumbs up to In the Hive – Activating Business Social Graphs.

Do you want to work with a group of creative, progressive, and talented social business professionals in a fast-paced but relaxed office in downtown Austin?

Do you have “Social DNA”?

Dachis Group is growing and we are hiring for numerous positions and want to meet the brightest Austin has to offer! Come have a drink on us and check us out, and we’ll check you out, too. (So dress to impress)

Open bar for all candidates who follow the instructions below and get on the list.

To be on the list for the party, we ask you to do three things:

1) Tweet this:

“It’s Hot and I’m @*&#! Thirsty! @dachisgroup http://dach.is/6j ”

2) Follow @dachisgroup on Twitter – http://dach.is/6I

3) “Like” Dachis Group on Facebook – http://dach.is/6H

See if you think you are a fit: http://www.dachisgroup.com/about/employment-opportunities/

See you at The Gibson at 6pm on August 23rd!

Today’s announcement will definitely launch the location based social network conversation into the mainstream (besides being the talk of every tech blog, it was also front and center of cnn.com).  The question is, will it launch location based social networking into the mainstream?

Some initial thoughts on Places, based on information from Facebook’s post:

The Good

Enhanced Privacy.  Facebook clearly took notes on the privacy backlash that Google Buzz faced in February.  The sharing of places is immediately defaulted to “Friends Only” and users have to enable two other separate opt-in features: inclusion in the “People Here Now” list and the ability for your friends to tag you at a location.

Only check-ins.  Facebook isn’t trying to over-shoot the features on the first day of launch.  There’s no games to learn, no complicated features to worry about, no integration with your email.  At this point, it’s simple: if you want to tell your friends where you are, click “Check In”.  That’s it.

Tag your friends.  Just like the functionality with photos, I can ‘tag’ a friend to my check-in.  This is a clever way to pull non-users into the service (at which point, they can either opt-in or stay opted-out).

The Bad

Only for mobile.  While your check-ins will appear in your News Feed and on individual Place Pages, there isn’t a Places tab on facebook.com.  I was hoping for a “where are they now” feature on the homepage, that would let me see an aggregated list of all my friends’ check-ins (bonus if I could sort by region).  Instead of truly integrating location based services into the social network, Facebook instead launched a complementary mobile feature.  I’m going to cross my fingers that this will change.

Only check-ins. Yes, this is also a negative.  Part of the appeal of apps like Gowalla and foursquare is that there is more to it than just letting your friends know where you are — you can collect badges, compete for mayorships, and receive specials and coupons for businesses.  It’s a game, and there are starting to be real world rewards. We’ll soon find out if sharing your location for the sake of sharing is enough motivation to participate (or the flip-side: if just letting your friends know where you are is all people wanted from location based social games in the first place).  Of course, Facebook also announced that check-ins from an initial set of partners (Gowalla, foursquare, Yelp, and InCrowd) will soon be integrated into Places — time will tell if adoption of the 3rd-party apps will increase or decrease once they are fully integrated.

The Big Problem

Privacy: Yes, Facebook took a huge step in respecting users’ privacy by making the opt-in system clear and straightforward.  Still, I’m expecting the first “busted by Places” stories to surface in the immediate future (the ACLU has already issued warnings).  It’s one thing to sign up for a Gowalla account and carefully choose who you want to have access to your location.  It’s another to start publishing your current and past locations to a massive network of friends, acquaintances, ex-girlfriends, employees, coworkers, employers, and potential employers. Users should definitely proceed with caution as they choose to opt-in and experiment.

The Big Potential

Graph API: Already being overlooked by many is the announcement on Facebook’s Developer Blog that Places will be available for integration into 3rd-party apps and sites.  The massive potential of Places isn’t for Facebook to wipe out smaller players by cornering the market on check-ins (which may or may not happen).  Instead it can become fully ensconced in a slew of future location based applications.  Think of it as the Like button, the goal of which wasn’t to bring every website to Facebook, but rather to bring Facebook to every website.   Facebook may have just laid the groundwork to becoming a part of any application that can benefit from knowing a user’s exact location — something that’s infinitely more valuable than winning the check-in battle.

So will today’s announcement immediately launch a location based revolution?  No.  As Forrester reported last month, only about 4% of US online adults use location based social networks.  And according to Nielsen, only a quarter of US adults even own a smartphone.  As we’ve observed, most users — never mind companies — are still experimenting with sharing their locations.  And many companies still can’t even properly manage their current Facebook presences, so how they can be expected to immediately coordinate a feature that brings a myriad of practical and tactical issues to the forefront (if you think it’s hard running your brand’s Facebook page today, then good luck keeping track of all of the Places Pages that are created for each of your brand’s thousands of locations).

Today’s announcement will be the beginning of the mainstream location based evolution.  Let today serve as the major wake-up call.  As location based behaviors evolve and smartphone adoption continues to rise, the limitless possibilities of location based apps and services will rise as well — be ready for more and more apps that blur the line between the social world and the real world.

But before companies can begin to take advantage of the potential for Places, they’ll need to first prepare their social business strategies.  That doesn’t mean running out and setting up a Places reward program or dedicating an inordinate amount of time to your new Places Pages.  It means thinking now about things like identifying and training Social Media Middlemen, coordinating agency efforts (remember Old Spice?) setting up internal policies and procedures to handle new and emerging social technologies, and coordinating multiple couponing and incentive systems.  And the faster you have your strategy in place, the faster you’ll be able to start experimenting (and maturing) your programs.  Which means your company will be ready to think about social nurturing and social CRM and the rest of the Social Business Landscape while your competitors are still scrambling to even contemplate the next step in social networking.

Special thanks to my colleagues @bmenell, @cdangson, @cpflaum, @larsz, @leebryant, and @peterkim for providing some early morning thoughts on this post!

The main office finally wants to activate social business programs – great. Now, are the front lines ready to follow through?

Dachis Group consultant Tom Cummings has proposed a panel for South by Southwest 2011, titled Leveraging Social Media Middlemen. Tom has worked with clients to structure social business operations and will share that experience in this panel.

In Tom’s words: For B2C companies, almost all social media strategy and advice is aimed towards how the corporate brand can leverage the unprecedented opportunity to interact directly with consumers. But as adoption of social tools increases – and new applications like Foursquare and Yelp combine online and in person interactions – corporate brands will need to make sure that all employees who engage with consumers are familiar with and understand the implications of social media campaigns. The frontline employees who interact directly with your target consumers will have to be increasingly familiar with social tools. They will be your social media middlemen. This panel will help you to identify them, train them, and develop ways to best leverage these employees who your customers will go to for help when their online and offline worlds begin to merge.

His panel will address these questions:

1. What are social media middlemen?
2. How can you identify your brand’s middlemen?
3. How will leveraging middlemen increase effectiveness of your social media campaigns?
4. How will leveraging middlemen increase the effectiveness of your traditional media campaigns?
5. Why are social media middlemen the critical missing link for all future successful social media campaigns?

If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up to Leveraging Social Media Middlemen.

I keep hearing this come up… with respect to LEED certification on buildings, Wal-Mart’s sustainability index, and several other newsworthy scoring systems of late.

Is a nutrition label the ultimate scorecard?

What’s interesting about nutrition labels is that they present several numbers– everything isn’t added up into a single grade or score. In today’s business world, there’s a tendency to add everything up, particularly when it comes to incorporating social media metrics as KPIs.

This is a trap!

One number doesn’t necessarily provide a shortcut to all the varied aspects of business. That’s not to say we should open the floodgates and serve up raw data. Like individual food items impacting your nutritional profile, several variables play roles in your overall social media presence and your overall business performance.

A scorecard should provide guidance on what we cannot immediately discern the health of, be it a food, community, or business. The trick is to find the right level of aggregation. That is, we need to elevate low level behaviors to the appropriate categories and then leave them there, not continue to aggregate (i.e. create one score).

Edelman’s SMI was one of the first to add things up across platforms. At the time, it was pioneering and innovative. Jonny Bentwood and David Brain were creative and transparent about their methodology. They were also wary of and vocal about the subjectivity involved.

“This is definitely adding apples to oranges we admit. So for example, we are placing a score for Facebook depending on the number of friends someone has. For Twitter, it is the number of friends, followers and updates. And if that is not insulting enough, we are then coming to a comparative weighting of someone’s Facebook score against their Twitter and blogging score. And the most sinful step is of course the final one where we have added those scores together and come up with a total Social Media Index.”

You, like the rest of the business world, are probably interested in building the ultimate scorecard. You might even be engaging in methodology like the above.

Make sure you are highlighting the right aspects of your business– things that measure important movement and things that matter to those who consume the numbers. Choose metrics that impact your “overall meal”– like calories and fat, but also recognize there is value in certain parts of the whole, like qualitative assessments.

What does your organization’s nutrition label look like?

We’re spending more and more time using social tools for personal entertainment and productivity. So what about work?

Dachis Group’s head of alliances Bryan Menell has proposed a panel for South by Southwest 2011, titled Work Should Be Social Too. Bryan works with our technology partners and a fundamental element of social business design is the belief that communication should happen as work, not for work.

Here’s what Bryan will cover: Collaborating with friends is easy with today’s public social tools. They require no training, and make the fun things in your life seamless to organize. So why is it more difficult at work? Join us for a panel consisting of executives from some of the leading collaborative tool companies, as we discuss some real corporate case studies, and the social barriers to sharing at work.

His panel will address these questions, answered by the experts:

1. What is the business case for being more social?
2. What other businesses have seen benefits from enterprise social tools?
3. What social technologies have crossed over from consumer to the enterprise?
4. How can you pitch your superiors on embracing social tools?
5. What are the people issues surrounding social adoption at work?

We have several executives from the leading collaborative software companies that have committed to being on the panel if if gets selected. If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up to Work Should Be Social Too.

Sure they do, until someone asks what all the fans and followers mean… What’s the point?

Many brands get caught up in increasing their fan and follower count. They forget that without some higher purpose, there really isn’t a point. In addition to building a network of enthusiasts, companies need to think about what’s in it for their fans.

• It starts with dialog. The brand needs to interact with their fans and followers. People are inherently social creatures, so interaction typically earns a deeper level of engagement. While it is certainly important to initiate dialog, it is equally important to listen and respond to encourage conversation.
• Regular interactions lead to advocacy. The conversation has started, so keep it going. Once your consumers have started talking, they will likely want to continue talking. Activating consumer word-of-mouth indicates a strong level of advocacy. Research shows that an increase in product “cues,” or mentions, is directly correlated to an increase in purchase patterns of the product. The recent Old Spice Guy campaign is a great example of this, with their recent campaign increasing sales by 107% in just one month.
• Call your fans to action. Once your brand has established a strong sense of community across your social presences, seek to unite and mobilize those fans and followers around a common purpose. That purpose could be something philanthropic, like the American Express Members Project, or something that simply strengthens the brand-to-consumer relationship, like the Redbull Stash initiative.

Most importantly, as companies shift budget towards social, it is vital to keep the ultimate purpose of any media in perspective. Whether that is moving units, selling products, or other revenue generating activity. As your company is developing a social media strategy, keep in mind how you’ll build your “community of common interest” and mobilize them. Meanwhile, keep the fan count in perspective.

What’s more valuable to you: 100,000 super-engaged and participating fans or 1,000,000 fans that could care less?

You’re not still using a social media policy that you found on the internet and ran a find-and-replace using your company name, are you?

From our work over the past two years, I can tell you that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to social media policy. Based on our client advisory work, Ellen Reynolds and Kate Rush Sheehy are proposing a panel for South by Southwest 2011, called How Social Policies Affect Company Culture. If selected, Ellen and Kate will share their experiences with you that they’ve gained across multiple client engagements while assisting with policy creation and launch.

They will cover:

• The importance of having a defined social media policy.
• The non-negotiable points that all social media policies must cover.
• How to successfully create, approve and enforce your social media policy.
• The importance of accurately reflecting your unique company culture in your policy, and how to use your policy to encourage the right level of internal and external participation.

They’ll answer these questions from a client-side perspective:

1. What information must my social media policy cover?
2. Who should be involved in the creation and approval process?
3. How can I make sure my social policy is a good fit for my company/company culture?
4. How do I make sure that my policy is encouraging participation rather than hindering it?
5. How often do I need to revisit my policy?

If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up to How Social Policies Affect Company Culture.

Interested in learning more about how to build a social business “center of excellence”?

Two Dachis Group consultants, Brian Kotlyar and Cynthia Pflaum, have proposed a panel for South by Southwest 2011, called Social Business Zen: Finding Your Company’s Social Center. If selected, Brian and Cynthia will share their experiences with you that they’ve gained across multiple client engagements this year while constructing social business centers of excellence.

Their description: Large companies don’t turn into social businesses overnight – they evolve toward an improved state of collaboration and transparency. One of the key steps in that evolution is establishing a center of gravity from which policy, process and technology guidance flows. After this presentation you will know the answers to these questions: what is a Social Business Center of Excellence? Why do I want one? How do I build one? What do I do with it once I’ve got it?

They’ll answer these questions from a client-side perspective:

1. Do I need a social business center of excellence?
2. How do I start a social business center of excellence?
3. How should I structure a social business center of excellence?
4. What responsibilities does a social business center of excellence have?
5. What does a social business center of excellence do?

If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up to Social Business Zen: Finding Your Company’s Social Center.

Content crowdsourcing for the South by Southwest 2011 interactive festival is open.

Over the next week or so, I’ll be highlighting panel proposals that have been submitted by our Dachis Group team. These ideas originate from the work that our consultants have partnered with clients on over the past year – so you’d be hearing from people that have rolled up their sleeves and worked through tough social business issues.

Last year, we also hosted our first Social Business Summit that exceeded expectations for everyone involved. We’re working on the follow up and will let you know more as we are ready to release details.

And one final note of advice – the event may be seven months away, but I recommend buying your badge and booking your hotel now. You’ll have a much better experience if you stay somewhere within walking distance of venues and hotels sell out quickly. If you’re not familiar with Austin, this map might help you as well.

To help with keeping up with the fast moving pace of Social Business, we’ve created a useful new model aimed at helping you stay up-to-date with the major moving parts of Social Business today. We define Social Business here as the distinct process of applying social media to meet business objectives.

Click to Enlarge

The Social Business Power Map, presented above, is an attempt to identify the major social media trends, how they can be mapped generally along consumer/enterprise axes, and where they are in terms of their overall maturity level today. Note that many of the aspects of social media in the consumer Web side is also heavily used in the enterprise side, while the reverse is generally not the case. This map is as exhaustive as space allows but inevitably some items had to be omitted. Any all such omissions are my fault alone. The items on this Power Map are rated on the following scale:

1. Buzz: A newer social media trend, technology, or approach that is both compelling and getting attention at the moment but its staying power and ultimate fate are still unclear.
2. Experimentation: These currently have some fairly widespread interest but lack of broad commitment from either Web companies or businesses. They may eventually hit mainstream adoption, but may also enter the dustbin of Social Business if they fail to show promise.
3. Adoption: These are aspects of social media which are currently experiencing broad uptake but have not yet broken out to a majority audience. They are all likely to become mainstream. It’s still possible that some of them will fade away before then or be replaced by something newer though it’s not highly likely.
4. Maturity: These are all widely used and very popular aspects of social media. They all have global reach and most Internet users either consume or participate in them. Note that enterprise social media currently has no aspects that are yet in a mature state, but that will likely change soon with Enterprise 2.0, customer communities, and Social Media Marketing about to cross over.

The following major social media trends were identified as significant players at the moment, either because they are currently receiving a lot of attention or they are getting a notable real-world uptake.

The Elements of the Social Business Power Map

In rough order from top to bottom, this list represents what those in social media need a good grasp of at a strategic level in order to be effective. Depending on your industry, specific ratings on the maturity scale may be slightly different, but all of these elements must be in the vocabulary of those seeking to tap into the business benefits.

• Social Analytics. Effectively participating in social media as an organization requires a lot of listening, but how do you make sense of the totality of what you’ve heard? Enter social analytics, which has recently seen a major uptick, from virtually no discussion of it in 2008. Many organizations are now realizing that, like Web analytics was early on in Web, social analytics will be crucial for obtaining a strategic understanding of what’s taking place in social media, either on the Internet or within their organizations. The hold-up preventing widespread experimentation in social analytics at the moment is that there are still too few vendors and even fewer compelling and mature products.
• Social Dashboards. iGoogle showed how many people would use a dashboard (hundreds of millions) and now there are now too many dashboard products for social media to count. They range from feed readers to apps like the popular TweetDeck, which provide a convenient way to consume and participate with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FourSquare, and others. Enterprise equivalents now exist, and are typically included as features of the more mature enterprise social software suites. At this time, most users are experimenting with social dashboards but they have not collectively broken out into a full-on adoption climb. Aggregating of social experiences will become increasingly important however and dashboards are well positioned to solve a significant portion of the channel fragmentation challenge of social media.
• Microblogging. With the rise of Twitter and its approximately 200 million users, microblogging has hit it big though it’s still not quite mainstream. The convenience and format of microblogging ensures that just about anyone can participate and this has made it very popular online and increasingly so in many businesses today. However, social networks remain overall more compelling for many despite often having a similar status message format. Those seeking the simplest and most straightforward social experience however are finding microblogging attractive. Expect microblogging to proceed to the mainstream level in the next year or two in the consumer side and a year or two later in the enterprise space, for which the tools are still emerging.
• Mobile Social. I covered this more detail in my recent Six Social Business Trends To Watch post. The world of social media is moving to mobile devices in a big way this year. Social networking apps for iPhone and Android remain among the top applications for those devices, particularly each platforms’ respective apps for Facebook. More compellingly, some of the most interesting new mobile social apps, like FourSquare, will only really function on GPS-enabled devices. Mobile social is on a fast rising adoption curve and will hit the mainstream in relatively short order (as in next year) as new large-scale usage trends take hold, such as the move entirely away from desktops, and even laptops, towards truly capable mobile devices like smartphones and slates (also known as ultra mobiles) such as the iPad. As for enterprise adoption, a recent survey by Citrix indicated that surprising 84% of businesses will not only allow iPads in the workplace but will actively support them. What this all means for mobile social in the enterprise is less clear but it will be significant.
• Social Location. This trend is tightly coupled with mobile social since effective location-based services typically requires hardware-based GPS. More and more social applications are becoming location-aware and it’s telling that Facebook has apparently decided to join in the ‘check-in’ bandwagon to compete with potential location-aware rivals like FourSquare. That said, location is definitely a good bit behind the broader adoption wave to mobile social. However, it’s on target to become an integral part of Social Business as location-enabled mobile apps get better at mining the value of physical location with new features and capabilities such as better contextual advertising and improved Social Shopping.
• Federated Social Identity. While OpenID and Facebook For Websites (the identity feature formerly known as Facebook Connect) are taking the lead at the moment, there is still a long way to go before there is a real social identity victor. Federated identity, a technical sounding term that really just means you can select the user ID service of your choice and use it on any social service you’d like, inside or outside of the firewall. A robust and usable federated social identity that automatically brings your social graph, avatar, and other personal data is barely on the radar today and mostly consists of individual standards (see Open Standards for Social Media, below). There is a good chance that OpenID will add many of the needed capabilities, but the jury is still out and most social identity today really isn’t very social, yet.
• Crowdsourcing. I’ve explored the growing promise of crowdsourcing many times in the past and great many experiments over the years have proven the model out fairly conclusively. Yet uptake has not been as broad as it might be because of the perceived shift of control issues combined with lack of familiarity and competence in crowdsourcing by most businesses. Fortunately, given the rise of innovation programs based on the crowdsourcing model, recent success stories, and other independent data points. Expect it to start climbing the adoption curve in 12-18 months. Most organizations should start planning this year to ensure they get first mover advantage, which really matters when trying to build a community of contributors in an industry or vertical market.
• Facebook Connect/FFW. Now called Facebook for Websites, the uptake for this feature has been very strong across the Web given how much it increases the percentage of users that register, up to 2 out of 3 new registrations by some estimates. Over one million Web sites have integrated with Facebook and climbing fast. Though many organizations are reluctant to overly depend on Facebook to manage their user data, the risks can be managed and it has become a leading way to access a user’s personal information and social data upon request. FFW will probably remain in the adoption phase for a couple of more years and has the potential to be disrupted by more open social identity systems.
• Social Search and Recommendation. The information that our friends are interested in is what we’re likely to be interested goes the theory. Social search is already part of the Google search engine, making it score higher on the Power Map than it otherwise would. Another way to look at timely knowledge that flows through the news feeds and activity streams of our favorite social networks is “search that finds you”. Mostly a consumer Web phenomenon, with leaders such as Mahalo and Wikia there are some business players. For example, Vivisimo’s Discovery Module has an especially interesting enterprise social search capability. Thus social search as well as recommendations are a significant and growing element of the social Web today. Social recommendations are already featured in many Facebook applications and other popular services such as Yelp. Social search has not, however, consistently found its way in terms of prime mover utility to grow a major service or revolutionize business processes yet. It will likely enter the adoption phase in the coming 24 months as more products are designed around the potential and ways to access ROI is more focused.
• Community Management. All social communities require some level of community management, which I dubbed an “essential” capability for Enterprise 2.0 last year. Almost always under anticipated at first (after all, most of us are just learning about large scale online communities and what they need to survive and thrive), community management has steadily gotten more respectable and the some of the credit it so richly deserves, though there’s a long way to go. As a result of the growing community management competence of many large-scale commercial communities and many successful customer communities, ad hoc and otherwise, this capability has had a great year. One part best practices, one part enabling technology, and two parts dedicated people, this skill is well into the adoption phase (all successful online communities today have the skill set and staff). Community management is on target to become mainstream in the enterprise within 36 months, even if it’s nearly mainstream on the consumer Web today.
• Social Networks, Blogs, and Wikis. As we start heading into 2011, it’s clear that social networking has become truly mainstream at a global scale. The data on the right shows that social networking is the now most used Internet communication tool today, with usage having eclipsed e-mail — the previous #1 method of communication — entirely. This is a sea change in societal behavior for which businesses are still now only beginning to understand the implications. Blogs have been mainstream for years and wikis exist by the tens of millions. In fact, virtually every medium and large sized business now has at least one wiki installation. What’s left? Social networking is now expected to surpass the top used application online, Internet search, in the near future. There is little likelihood that social networking will be disrupted in the near term though certainly most businesses have not yet adopted them internally and many current block their use from inside the firewall. Unfortunately, the number of businesses blocking access to social networks is going up, not down as they continue to get a handle on managing the perceived risks of social networking.. See my discussions on CoIT and how workers are increasingly using their own IT to route around excessive control of their channels of communication.
• Social Gaming. As my colleague Bryan Kotlyar said to me recently, “many people’s primary experience with social networking is with Farmville”. Farmville has become an enormously popular social game that has proved out the sector to be a rapidly-growing one. There have been many discussions of social game theory as a high-engagement way to maximize the value creation of structured user participation. Strategic thinkers like John Seely Brown has famously extolled multiplayer games as a better way to manage knowledge and work together. For now what’s clear that social gaming is a rapidly expanding consumer phenomenon that combines the high virality of social media with the focused outcomes of structured play. Expect social gaming to start to enter the enterprise world within two years (prediction markets are an early herald of what’s to come here), it will only become more significant and mature in the social media universe.
• Social Shopping When friends come together in social media to participate in the shopping process, the result is referred to as social shopping. While sites that are built around or offer social shopping features have been around for years, often tied closely to the fashion industry, it’s only be in the last year that social shopping has started to get serious attention. Grouped into three major categories, social shopping services can include group-buying, shopping communities, and social product recommendations. Typical offerings include BazaarVoice, Kaboodle, and Shop Socially. As retailers and other businesses catch on to the techniques and the features become more integrated into e-commerce platforms, social shopping is poised for major experimentation in the coming several years.
• Open Standards For Social Media. Standards for social media have not fared very well other than for the syndication standards RSS and maybe Atom. Standards are vital for new technologies to thrive because they create choice, reduce costs, increase the pool of knowledge, reduce the risks of lock-in and many other benefits. On the downside, standards can create a lowest common denominator effect and reduce innovation by proscribing advances that color outside the lines. Yes despite this, some Web standards specific to social media are climbing the maturity curve, mostly around the key functions of social networks. Except for OpenSocial, these standards are largely being ignored by businesses at this time, despite the great stake they have in shaping their future. For more details on these standards, you can consult my in-depth examination of the Social Web Technologies for 2010, but the ones to track are Portable Contacts (PoCo), Salmon Protocol, OStatus, PubSubHubbub, and xAuth in the Buzz category, Activity Streams (now used by Facebook, MySpace, and others), OpenSocial, and OAuth in Experimentation, and OpenID in the Adoption phase. For now, most organizations should focus on OpenID and keep an eye on the uptake and adoption of the others. See here for my in-depth discussion of OAuth, OpenID, and FFW and their significance to user adoption of social applications. Few social standards have lasted long or been successful but there is a sense now that we are starting to zero on the ones that we really need. Future Power Maps will track their progress.
• Social CMS. Drupal has apparently won the social CMS wars in the open source space with literally tens of millions of users. With this, traditional content management systems will never be the same and Drupal has shown how success is defined in this space by having a common sense open architecture, a rich plug-in ecosystem, and embodiment of best practices for social CMS. I’m also bullish on enterprise versions of Drupal, like Acquia. Yet there remains a nagging feeling that social software suites (see below) may ultimately become the center of focus for social in the workplace. Social CMS is the last mainstream model of social media but there is long-term potential for trouble as consumer social networks and enterprise social software suites begin to encroach on the feature space.
• Unified Communication with Social Media. The enterprise world of unified communication has amazingly had very little unification with social media. But that is starting to change with the advent of social media aware unified communication products such as Lotus SameTime and arguably Cisco Quad, which got the lion’s share of attention of such products recently. However it’s mostly buzz at this time but unified communication will reconcile with social media soon enough as I predicted earlier this year in my 10 Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Technologies To Watch list.
• Expertise Location. Despite years of promoting the fact that social tools let people find out who knows what, dedicated tools like FineBrain and features in well-known tools such as Jive’s Social Business Suite are finally coming to the fore. While still an emerging category, expertise location is expected to become a key capability as enterprise start going social in a major way.
• Social ECM. The often-stodgy vendors of enterprise content management (ECM) platforms have been incorporating more and more social media capabilities into their products in the last year. OpenText is leading the way here and most other vendors I’m tracking are following suit. You can get a sense of how many by looking at the blue space in my full breakdown last year of Enterprise 2.0 tools.
• Enterprise 2.0. The use of social media to drive collaborative performance has been a hot topic for several years know. I’ve covered this in great detail elsewhere and we’re now seeing that adoption is well under way and is likely to be the first major enterprise use of social media to hit the mainstream (most people in most enterprises engage in it) sometime in the next 12-24 months.
• Social Media Command Centers. Gatorade famously made a splash earlier this year with their high-gloss social media command center and I think it’s safe to say that generated enormous interest in the concept. As social media becomes a critical channel to engagement in and deal with, command centers (more practically realized as virtual tools and teams than physical ones) are going to be a hot topic with widespread experimentation consisting of integrated sets of monitoring, analytics, and engagement tools increasingly happening in the next year..
• OpenSocial Apps for the Enterprise. Jive and SocialText have added support for internal only OpenSocial applications that lets enterprise build or buy business apps that tap into their worker’s social capital. It’s still very early stage yet but now that the app containers and providers exist, it’s likely that this will grow into a strong ecosystem in the next couple of years particularly if an enterprise app store is successfully built to create a low-barrier distribution conduit for business-grade OpenSocial solutions.
• Enterprise Syndication. The proliferation of social media on the Web drove the need for syndication. Now enterprises are in the same situation but vendors have been struggling in this space for a long time now with poor enterprise-friendly syndication management tools and inadequate feed readers. That’s still only changing slowly as enterprise users are just now grasping how much their intranets are starting to look and work like today’s highly social Web. I expect this functionality to increasingly appear in social software suites and enterprise integration platforms like ESBs.
• Social Media Monitoring. Being able to listen to social media has now become an imperative for a large percentage of organizations and it’s been a banner year for listening platforms from organizations such as Radian6, Sysomos, and BuzzLogic. Expect it to remain a high growth adoption-phase trend for the next 12-18 months and the move to maturity.
• Social Media Marketing. Marketing departments were one of the very first groups to get involved in social media and they are nearly ready to move into the maturity phase of adoption. While the best social media marketing campaigns are combinations of traditional and social media as part of an integrated approach, social media is where the growth and deeper opportunities will lie for the foreseeable future.
• Crisis Management. Combined with a good social media listening capability, identifying brand and customer crises and then responding effectively to them will be a capability that many organizations will build in the coming years. Expect lots of improvement in practices and methods as companies determine where best to locate and organize around this increasingly important capability that wasn’t required in the days before customers had louder voices collectively than most organizations.
• Social Software Suites. The premise with suites is that it makes sense to create an integrated whole out of the standards set of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, activity streams, social networks, social dashboards, and microblogs with the security, audit, archiving, and other business requirements that enterprises expect. Collaboration industry-leader SharePoint 2010 recently added many of these features while others such as Lotus Connections, Jive Social Business Suite, and SocialText have had them for a while now. Most CIOs and other senior decision makers looking to activate on the promise of Enterprise 2.0 are going to focus on the proven and ready-to-go aspect of suites in their evaluation efforts and it appears that they are increasingly favored for company-wide deployments while individual tools are selected to match specific, high value problems.
• Customer Communities. Creating or participating in customer communities is something that most organizations must do yet many of them are missing the opportunity, despite 70% of senior managers recently reporting that they offer significant business value. I’ve explored this paradox before and the urgency of letting customers engage before they go elsewhere to create their own or find companies that will work with them. .
• Enterprise Microblogs. Twitter virtually created and proved out the value of making social communication simple and compact. Now the command-line of social media is coming to the enterprise. While still in the experimentation phase for most organizations, microblogging will be commonplace and growing in adoption towards a mainstream breakout in 18-24 months.
• Social Supply Chains. Companies such as Inovis have been proving out what is possible when you bring social computing to the supply chain. I explored social supply chains in detail recently and while it’s still in early stages, those who are using it are achieving significant benefits. At this point, social supply chain will be well in the adoption phase in 24-36 months.

This is a lot to track and we’ll be expanding and updating the Social Business Power Map in the future as needed. We very much welcome your comments, contributions, and requests for correction and you can contact me directly via e-mail or in comments below. I’d also like to thank Dachis Group contributors Bryan Menell, Lars Plougman, Bryan Kotlyar, Tom Cummings, Peter Fasano, and Cynthia Pflaum.

FINRA, FDA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR, are regarded as curse words in social media and workforce collaboration circles. People don’t want to say them. They don’t want to hear them and they really really don’t want the regulators to swing by for a “chat.” The outcomes created by this mentality are predictable: hesitancy when approaching new technology, over-engineered solutions that inhibit adoption and the pursuit of risky grassroots experimentation.

These approaches are born out of hard-learned lessons, because let’s face it: collaborating in a regulated industry is hard. Regulations change, are enforced with different points of emphasis and are frequently incomprehensible to everyone except their authors. Our colleague Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) has a great phrase for this: regulatory quicksand. Nonetheless, we can’t ignore the value that social technologies can bring to regulated industries. So, what’s the answer to regulated collaboration and social media implementation? Plan better and execute smarter.

The rest of this blog post will focus on a high-level methodology for the strategic implementation of social technologies in regulated environments.  The aim is to provide a framework within which regulated businesses can maximize social media and workforce collaboration tools in a compliant way*.

Framework Overview

The goal here is to create a simple, repeatable strategic process.  In a nutshell: start by building your business case, then identify your lowest compliant denominator, don’t miss the last responsible moment, and finally roll out to your workforce.

Build a Business Case

The first step is to establish a collaboration pilot in a controlled environment. Before you get antsy – this is not the same old advice to start with a ‘small pilot.’ The key difference here is the realization that even the most highly regulated business has processes that are just not that risky, but do offer high value returns on collaboration. The implication is that by identifying an internal area where risk of external data leakage is minimal and the fruits of collaboration would be valuable, an enterprise can initiate a much larger and more meaningful ‘pilot’ than otherwise possible.

For example, a financial services firm might identify expertise location as a key challenge in their trading operations. Knowing that the regulatory expectations are the same across the whole of the ‘trader’ job role and that information would be bounded by that department’s lines it becomes feasible to pilot ad-hoc information seeking tools like enterprise micro-blogging to aid in expertise and knowledge location.

Find the Lowest Compliant Denominator

The second step is to synthesize all the data captured from the pilot (you were capturing data right?) into a collection of requirements and outcomes for broader implementation. One of the odd nuances of social software is that the best use cases are frequently only discovered once the users actually have their hands on the tools. The key insights you are scanning for are lowest common denominators for compliance or, “lowest compliant denominators.” Say to yourself: “What is the lowest barrier we can set while facilitating collaborative outcome X?”

For example, the financial services firm we discussed earlier might find that their pilot revealed a mass of associate level employees asking questions that only more senior colleagues could answer with any confidence. This manual process might be a blessing in terms of knowledge transfer, but a curse because senior employees have better things to do with their time. The answer would be to maintain the emergent Q&A culture while also instating a better system for capturing and sharing institutional knowledge – perhaps a wiki. This need and solution might never have surfaced and been synthesized if not for the advanced ‘pilot.’

The Last Responsible Moment

There’s not a bad time to begin to plan for compliance, but there is a point where it is too late not to have done so.  Now that you’ve run your pilot and with metrics, survey results and anecdotes created a business case, you are no doubt postulating how the benefits of collaboration multiply across your company.  With the momentum and demand you created in the pilot, if you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to partner with HR & Legal to create a compliance map.

Employees and artifacts in your business have characteristics.  Characteristics are things like: geographic location, security training, department, job title, or government clearance.  A compliance map simply details which combinations of characteristics are off-limits.  As an example, US-defense industry employees have to abide by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).  Employees without ITAR training (characteristic) should not have access to ITAR protected artifacts.  So, when an employee without ITAR training uses their company’s search engine, no ITAR protected artifacts should be returned.

Scale and Train

Once you have developed a compliance map, you can identify your boundaries and then roll out your solution as far as those boundaries allow.  Of course, sufficient technology will be necessary to scale as well, but you’ve likely charted that course before.  Linking departments together is technologically nothing new, understanding whether or not you can link them from a compliance stand point is.   Your compliance map gives you the advantage of scaling accurately and aggressively.

But, just as spell check doesn’t turn you into Hemingway, having a compliance map won’t turn every employee into a compliance officer.  Training employees on compliance issues is the ultimate fail-safe.  Where technology fails, humans should know better.

Conclusion

Regulated companies can be collaborative, but they must plan better and execute smarter than others.  For many companies looking to become more collaborative FINRA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR represent reality checks.  However, these reality checks are not blanket cease and desist orders.  You can remain in the good graces of your legal and HR departments AND still bring effective and beneficial collaboration to your company by following the framework outlined above.  Of course, this framework will need to be customized for your company.  Reach out to us if you’d like some help.

For additional reading on this topic, check out Ellen Reynolds‘ case study on Managing Risk in Regulated Industries.

*One caveat to keep in mind is that this methodology presupposes a strategic executive commitment to adopting social tools and while it could work for a grassroots implementation the entry points into the process would be quite different.

Even as organizations have strategically started to embrace social business, the global changes driven by widespread social computing are still ongoing. A confluence of large scale behavior change and co-evolutionary Internet-based technological progress are driving important new trends in 2010. While some of these are somewhat early stage, a few are more advanced and nearly upon us. By and large, most of these are still under the radar of enterprises today. Yet each of these trends highlight key developments that will be absolutely essential for businesses to succeed in the very near future. Make no mistake, the future of business is now tied directly to whatever strategies and techniques work most effectively in a profoundly connected society. It’s a world where knowledge is not only already produced primarily using social media but is instantly findable, accessible, virtually free, and superabundant. Thus, as businesses seek to address the disruptive challenges of social media using Social Business, anticipating what comes next will be an essential exercise.

Here are the major trends that all organizations seeking to become 21st century digital natives should watch closely this year:

Six Social Business Trends To Watch

1. Value creation shifting from workers to outside the enterprise. Anyone who has been involved in social media understands that they personally are just part of a much larger ecosystems of conversation, innovation, and participation. So goes it with the enterprise. In this new world success is defined by how well you can connect with and tap into the global network, both for obtaining value and delivering it. And to be perfectly clear, I am not saying that all value is going come from outside of enterprises in the future, far from it. But in general, organizations are now greatly outnumbered by the resources on the network and real business value is increasingly coming from the social world as we learn how to participate in it. I’ve tracked major trends in this area such as crowdsourcing, open and social supply chains, and other closely-related practices such as social media marketing and Social CRM as ways to apply Social Business to greatly amplify and transform what your organization does. The lesson here is that the network will always greatly outnumber you, so you must enlist it to participate in objectives everyone jointly values. The good news: Organizations are starting to listen this year.
2. Business processes as opt-in community-powered activities. Social engagement promotes openness and builds community. Today’s workstreams are becoming ever more social and can tap into a wider and wider pool of inputs and contributors. Trends like Enterprise 2.0 are starting to put the tools that make this possible into millions of workers hands. Now it’s up to organizations to ensure that organizational support and social media literacy is in place to deliver on the potential. The fact is, however, today’s business processes are mostly still closed, private activities between obscurely identified groups of people that happen largely inside little known silos of organizations. Not only are the processes themselves typically isolated and often disconnected from ground truth and many of their key stakeholders, but as the open source world discovered a decade ago, there are just too few eyes to ensure they are doing what needs to be done and in the best way possible. While the success stories of open innovation and other open business models have started to pave the way, only now are we seeing organizations realize the value of community-based processes conducted in the open and with network effects by default (everyone’s contribution creates observable value, large or small). While Social CRM is probably the lead exemplar this year of how to turn general purpose social activity into community-powered transactions that are focused on specific business outcomes, there are now many other emerging areas where social media is directly informing business processes for the better.
3. Mobile experiences as the primary social channel. The latest June, 2010 research from Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker and team tells the story here. The mobile Web is currently experiencing unprecedented growth in use. The iPhone and Android platform in particular are fundamentally changing the game when it comes to our new usage of mobile Web applications. Notably, this includes providing powerful monetization and usage safety nets that are very attractive to both consumers and the businesses that want to engage with them. As importantly, smartphone shipments are now expected to be greater than notebook and PC sales combined by 2012. When coupled with the sea changes taking place in social (the Morgan Stanley deck also provides the Comscore data I’ve cited in the past that shows how Web communication is now led by social networks), and you have a social computing revolution that is going mobile. This new mobile reality is based on smartphones, with all their unique capabilities such as location awareness, video/audio capabilities, and arrays of other sensors. In other words, most businesses need a plan for a near-term future where most interaction with workers, partners, and customers is through task-specific and social applications on mobile devices with all their attendant strengths and weaknesses.
4. Business engagement driven by social analytics. Any business processes that runs without a closed feedback loop is almost always going to underperform. It’s only through sustained contact and understanding of the marketplace that engagement can succeed. Much of the world has now migrated from the familiar, well-known places to interact and gone elsewhere, to new social environments. There are hundreds of social networks with a combined audience of over 1 billion users today. Beyond the Internet, there are many private social environments that exist within most organizations today (even if it’s just local e-mail.) Given that social networks are increasingly open and, well, social, and you have the unique, generational opportunity to actually understand what’s happening, what’s known, and who knows it, all in near real-time. How can this accumulated knowledge be used to drive business goals? Without tapping into what we would call the dynamic signal, there’s no way to know. Mining the collective intelligence of the social Web or an enterprise network is a tall order but there have long been concerted efforts to do so, with a growing number providing meaningful, actionable approaches. Whether it’s finding new ideas, identifying important trends, measuring sentiment, supporting customers, or whatever it is that needs to be done, keeping track of the galactic conversation still isn’t easy. However, the good news this year is that the tools and techniques of social analytics that deliver results are emerging, such as WebTrends’ Social Measurement capabilities, Infegy’s Social Radar, or the growing interest in enterprise social analytics for performance management, as just three examples of many. Starting now, businesses must deeply access, understand, and react intelligently to all the important currents of activity that affect them across the social universe.
5. Engagement strategies that scale across all important social channels. Listening to the social universe, both outside as well as within the enterprise, and then developing a desired response can be readily achieved by most organizations today. But effective delivery of that response across the myriad social channels that exist is another challenge entirely. Fortunately, we are beginning to see approaches that can aggregate and scale out to the large number of channels and people in today’s massive social environments. For example, companies like Radian6 and GetSatisfaction are already providing some of the capabilities to scale social media engagement and community management as widely and deeply as it must be done today. Scale has become the signature business challenge of social media and will be for the foreseeable future, whether that is the explosion of knowledge when workers engage in Enterprise 2.0-style activities or being a part of the hundreds of millions of daily social media conversations taking place on the Internet. Creating strategies, infrastructure, and processes to deal with this is what I am seeing organizations working on around the world this year.
6. Anticipating and designing for loss of control. At this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, my friend and colleague JP Rangaswami delivered a terrific opening keynote where he dropped the phrase that became a hot topic of conversation for the rest of the week. In his keynote, he talked of the necessity of enterprises today needing to “design for the loss of control.” A combination of Web access, SaaS, cloud computing, social software, and smartphones that are more powerful than many laptops are leading to a world where anyone can access the IT solutions they need to get their work done and don’t need any permission to do it. Enterprises currently expend considerable resources trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears like it not only can’t be controlled, but almost certainly doesn’t need to be. The level of control being imposed over IT today is excessive, counterproductive, and undesirable from a business results standpoint, the argument goes. Routing workers away from the applications, social networks, and devices that they clearly prefer to use is a strategy that, like most modern urban conflicts, is almost certainly a losing proposition in the long run. Instead, focusing on enabling the safe and effective use of cloud-based solutions that fit local problems, leveraging workers’ growing social capital and their own mobile computing devices can be looked at as just another form of outsourcing. In other words, letting go of non-essential control will be a key success factor for Social Business leaders going forward. Certainly there are still real challenges to doing this but the point is that the opportunities are certainly significantly greater than the cost. Together, we must learn how to fix IT in the Social Business era.

I’ll be tracking these trends and other important ones we’re beginning to detect in the coming months. What is becoming abundantly clear is that we’re seeing a major inflection point this year with social computing that made the original uptake a couple of years ago look like a niche trend. This also means that the next generation of products and services must be deeply informed by these pervasive trends, and therefore seeing deeply into, understanding, and responding to their implications will be the key hurdles for most organizations.

What other trends are you seeing in Social Business today? Please add your ideas and insight in the comments below.

Not dynamic signal.

Adapted from the Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology

During the same week of learning this strength about myself, I discovered this strength in a total stranger. She works as a shift supervisor at Starbucks in Austin, Texas (where Dachis Group headquarters is based). Chances were greater that we would meet in-person during one of my 4pm coffee runs, but we met via Facebook first.

The notification arrived before I even realized my wallet was missing. I had made a Starbucks run with a colleague earlier that afternoon and in the chaos of sugar, cream and conversation, I left my wallet at the store. My wallet did not include any identification with a telephone number.  The Starbucks shift supervisor noticing the credit cards and cash (I had just recently visited the ATM), decided to immediately look me up and contact with me via Facebook. When I met her at the counter to retrieve my wallet she explained how she too had recently experienced the nightmare of losing her wallet. We connected.

I doubt that Starbucks trains employees to service in-store customers this way on Facebook, but it is evident that making a commitment to increase points of connections with customers is a big part of the company’s culture.  Facebook enabled the shift supervisor to contact me when she had no other means than the mailing address on my license. The shift supervisor could have kept the wallet until I connected the dots about what happened (which I could have, as it is also a strength) and returned to the store. Of course, that would most likely be proceeded by the anxious discovery that the wallet was missing at the moment I needed it and a frantic retracing of steps in my head of where I could I have left it. The shift supervisor saved me this emotional energy by making the extra effort to search for me on Facebook and send me a message immediately.

So what does this really have to do with customer service?  It has everything to do with me – the customer. I feel more connected to that particular Starbucks location and I feel safe shopping there. Although Starbucks coffee is available at the hotel where I typically stay in Austin, I made a mental note of wanting to give this Starbucks my business, even if it means walking an extra street block. Someone there cared about me and I will reciprocate.

While this story has nothing to do with innovative social CRM strategy, it has everything to do with how a social savvy shift supervisor connected the dots and leveraged Facebook to send a high impact signal to a customer. To the shift supervisor, it was a no-brainer.  While social technology can automate and innovate many processes, I still believe it is the human behind the technology that makes best-in-class customer service. To that end, connectedness is a quality I would recommend Starbucks preserving and nurturing at the front lines.

What are your thoughts? Do you believe connectedness is an important quality for customer service?

A few key elements of Social Business Design include a staffing model and a policy that integrates with your business. At a smaller company one person may be able to coordinate a successful social strategy; at larger and more complex organizations, there is a need to implement a model that not only gets the job done, but also allows for scale.

Creating a cross-functional team is a way to scale your strategy and create a strong foundation for a social media program. Each member of the team should bring relevant expertise to the table. Most people turn to the “usual suspects” when putting together a social team: Marketing, PR, and Customer Service. However, there are other job functions to be considered, such as:

• The Sales team as you incorporate Social CRM
• HR as you begin to craft corporate policies
• The IT and Information Security groups as you consider social platforms
• Consumer Insights as you develop your listening program
• Product Innovation/Development as you glean insights from listening
• The Legal/Compliance teams who can help avoid potential legal roadblocks

It doesn’t necessarily matter which group leads the team of social experts and enthusiasts so long as they are smart and knowledgeable; the key factor is that the people on the team be embedded across the organization. A cross-functional team would be responsible not only for creating resources to help the organization participate socially, but spreading them as well.  As a result, people from disparate areas of the business are meeting regularly, sharing ideas, and spreading those ideas across the organization. This could increase knowledge sharing and openness in a coordinated and intentional way. In addition to developing your outward-facing social media program, you would also set the stage for collaboration and emergent outcomes.

When it comes to your company’s social team, who will you include? What barriers do you want to break down?

While much of the discussion around sCRM correctly begins with a focus on customers, there’s an opportunity to use social tools to focus on consumers.  The distinction being that customers already pay your brand for a product, whereas consumers have yet to make a purchase.  Put simply, consumers make up your pool of prospects.

But not all consumers are your prospects.  So why do so many social media programs treat them as such?  Why is the focus for many still on building the highest aggregate number of fans or followers or viewers and then attempting to appeal to all of them with the same content?   You’ve probably been followed or friended at least once by a company you’ve never heard of, in a region you’ll never visit, in a category that you don’t shop in (this seafood restaurant in Georgia comes to mind for me).  How does that relationship benefit the brand beyond boosting an arbitrary number?

Social nurturing is that idea that at the very beginning of a social CRM program sits the strategy for attracting the right prospects to your brand – and then nurturing them into customers through targeted social communications.

Companies should start implementing a social nurturing program to segment their social networks, identify potential customers, and create a strategy for interacting with the most highly desirable members of their community.  In other words, they must actively seek out, engage with, and influence their actual prospects. Social nurturing can even help your efforts scale, since you’ll be focusing on a smaller – but more valuable – group of consumers.

Some simple ways that your brand can immediately start using social nurturing to increase the strength of your social networks:

• Actively spend more time interacting with consumers who have identified themselves as enthusiasts or influencers in your brands’ product category.  If you can only respond to a limited amount of comments, engage with the consumers who matter the most to you and who are most likely to actually convert to customers.
• Use your already segmented email lists to search for your consumers who are active on the same sites that you are – then seek them out and engage them.
• Balance the content on your social site based on who you want your followers to be, not necessarily on who they are right now.  If your product is geared towards 18-24 year old males, are you spending most of your time talking about topics that interest 18-24 year old males?
• Create an account that is geared towards specific consumers (i.e., regional, age group, etc) and invite them to join you there – similar to how Dell has approached Twitter.  Yes, your follower count will be lower, but ask yourself what’s more valuable:  1,000,000 people who “like” your brand, or 100,000 true fans in your target segment who are actually interested in your content?

If you still need convincing, just think about Old Spice’s much heralded recent social campaign. They chose who to interact with based on the potential value of their fans – influencers, celebrities, and those whose responses would gather the most attention.  Why should your day-to-day social campaigns be any different?

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Properly implementing social nurturing will take a coordinated effort between several departments and is dependent on committing resources to social media and social CRM for the long haul.  What is your company doing right now to make sure it is attracting, keeping, and nurturing the right – not more – consumers?

Two years ago, I joined Dachis Group as employee #1. This week, I start my third year with the company and it’s fun to glance back and see what we’ve accomplished. But it’s even more energizing to look ahead and see where we’re going.

Our strategy is hiding in plain sight. Companies have the world to gain by becoming social businesses and we help them get there. The hows and whys are summarized in the idea of social business design.

It’s clear to me that our continued success depends on several key factors, namely:

• Clients who desire to lead the way. We are working with leaders from world-class brands who are breaking new ground with their initiatives, from new organization structures and governance frameworks to global education programs and collaboration approaches.
• Consultants who are never satisfied. Our people are relentless when it comes to delivering results for our clients and for ourselves. And then we push each other to do more.
• Management with a big picture focus. It’s easy to get caught up in the short-term. Four acquisitions, over 100 professionals, multiple seven-figure contracts – you’d think we’d be pretty proud of ourselves. Actually, we are still only at the beginning of what we set out to accomplish and all of our senior managers are committed to a long-term vision.

It’s not easy to start a new company that espouses a new way of doing business. But as we’ve done so far, we will find a way or we will make one.

Interested in joining us? We’re looking for global clients who want to make a difference and professionals who want to help them.

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

- Abraham Maslow (the same Maslow who wrote about the hierarchy of needs)

Nobody minds receiving email when it is a customer placing an order for your services. Besides being good news it is actionable, auditable and appropriate communication addressed from one person to another.

When a client of ours recently did a tally of the emails in their inbox, they found that more than 90% of it was internal messages from their colleagues. While communication is appreciated and encouraged in this professional services firm, the deluge of email generated as a result is not seen as adding value. Information is shared in good faith and there is a probability that the knowledge is useful to the recipient, just not right at that moment and not mixed in with the feedback from customers.

Based on the volume of email traffic experienced (the CEO of the aforementioned firm counted 438 emails received over a three day weekend), I look at my inbox and wonder if I am unpopular with my colleagues. But the comparative trickle of email may be explained by our use of multiple modes of communication.

Depending on the velocity of communication we have a number of choices:

Fast-moving discussions are handled in an instant messaging application. This is a replacement for quick get-togethers when people are in different offices or the topic does not merit interrupting what a colleague is doing. Technically, the transcripts can be copied and stored somewhere else for posterity but most of the time it is the result of the interaction that is important and not the conversation itself.

Fleeting thoughts and questions find their way to our microblogging tool. Statements act as useful signals about what is going on and may attract comments from colleagues. Questions are asked and replied to, often with links to our knowledge platform or external sites.

Slow-moving, larger pieces of analysis are developed on our knowledge platform (which happens to be a wiki). Groups can work together to co-draft presentations or strategy papers, and pages can be tagged and linked together. Each project has its own area on the platform and we use it to store notes and prepare project deliverables. Working in this way has the useful side effect that work product is automatically shared (unless we need to react to information barriers) obviating the need for a specific “knowledge management” step in the work process.

We use email too, of course, but having a choice of channels means that email gets used a lot less. Often, an email will call attention to new developments on our knowledge platform and ask for input. What would otherwise be a flurry of email reply-to-all manifests itself as pages and updates on the wiki.

Some of our clients go even further in the effort to reduce overall email traffic and increase the relevance of what arrives in your inbox. We have helped redesign their awareness processes from internal email newsletters to subscription-style updates where the recipient has a choice of how to receive information, if at all.

Every email imposes a cost on the recipient in terms of filing. Reducing the list of recipients increases the risk that information is not communicated to people to whom it is relevant. When organisations rely on email alone it is difficult to strike a balance. Expanding the enterprise toolset to support signals and findability is a step towards improved cost and risk levels.

Applying Maslow’s insight to reflect the enterprise communication conundrum might result in something like:

“If all you have is email, everybody looks like a spammer.”

Is email volume a problem? Have you taken steps to reduce email or increase relevance of email? Are you measuring the drop in email volume as part of proving the benefits of the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 tools?

At first, none of these topics might seem mainstream to the lay businessperson. Nothing could be further from the truth and most of us are impacted by this every day. For years the rate of improvement in information technology in the business world has been falling farther and farther behind the rest of the world. Application backlogs and unmet needs are common, while the centralized nature of most IT departments makes it clear that only so much is possible, even as the rate of technological change grows. I want to be clear that the many hard-working people in the IT trenches are not at fault, it’s largely due to the archaic model for how we apply technology to business.

The real purpose of my talk was to examine how much we’ve learned about how we use modern network technologies today to achieve business objectives. As an industry, we recognized the importance of interconnected systems just over a decade ago and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was launched as a top-level business initiative in many organizations around the world. The goal was to systematically reap the benefits of easy interoperability between our business systems, turning our applications into reusable platforms, and drive innovation by fostering unintended consequences that create significant new business value. It largely didn’t happen for reasons that are much clearer now but weren’t then.

Pulling Together The Threads: Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, and SOA

While we were seeking the best way to realize SOA, and often having a very hard time of it, spending billions globally in the process, the Web sped ahead and began to discover many of the solutions to the challenges of opening and connecting our systems. This was true both technically and from a business perspective. Among many innovations, the Web went on to discover the power of Open APIs, which provided a successful model for large-scale SOA. The Web also became social and primarily user-generated, identifying powerful new models for driving both distribution and consumption that culminated in a global remaking of how we communicate. Along the way, it also became clear that social computing wasn’t just another communication paradigm, it was an entirely new way to think about how we relate to our business, data, and ourselves.

My premise is that the Web (and the full realization of it as a source of data, services, applications, and people being referred to as “the cloud”) has become our Global SOA. It’s the world’s most effective example of SOA with countless API providers, hundreds of millions of data creators (us), and an ecosystem of data that can be accessed and made sense of with tools such as search and analytics. This is in stark contrast to the enterprise today where, as I point out in my presentation, “Most of the vast repositories of data in enterprises is not accessible in any practical manner by most people“.

There is where Enterprise 2.0 comes in, with an emergent vision of a federated knowledge ecosystem that is fundamentally open and social (since that is the communication method we’ve essentially adopted globally today). Participation, openness, and self-service are some of the intrinsic elements of Enterprise 2.0 and why it’s a key part of the Social Business vision. It is now likely that social tools will ultimately be the dominant model for how we work together in the business world,  and they are deeply affected by both cloud computing and SOA. You can view my slides above in Slideshare for a more detailed walk-through of my thinking and opinions on this topic.

The key to changing a social media diet is creating structure. Structure comes in the form of a clearly defined charter for every social channel. The elements of a charter will vary, but items like channel purpose, tone, content schedule and measurement should be addressed at a minimum.

Photo by Emily Carlin

These charters in turn govern every communication occurring on the channel. If a message or activity doesn’t conform to the charter – then don’t do it. To some observers this is a kill-joy perspective, but let’s face facts here: even a brand’s lighthearted messaging should have a clearly stated internal purpose. Brands are not involved with social media by mistake or just for fun. Companies are in the medium to accomplish something and if they can’t define what that is, then things have gone awry somewhere.

The benefits of social charters emerge quickly. When someone from product marketing wants to promote the latest widget in a social channel it is easy to evaluate whether it is white or whole wheat: does it fit the charter of an existing channel? If not, does it merit creating a new one? Does the messaging simply need to be reworked? Does it belong in traditional media instead? Initiatives are quickly whittled down from nice-to-haves to must-haves.

In the end, a true social business eats right. So ask yourself: was your last post white bread or whole wheat?

The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order.  We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.

Social Business Design aside:  This conference room is what we commonly refer to as a silo.  A silo is anything (an organization, software…a conference room) that keeps information within its walls, making it hard for an outsider to discover what is going on behind them.  Tom and I were working alone, the rest of the company had no visibility into what we were doing.

Five minutes in to our brainstorm we were interrupted by a much more responsible group of colleagues who actually reserved the conference room for a meeting.  We packed up our stuff, white board included, and as there were no other conference rooms available, made camp in the hallway.  It’s important to note that this is really the only hallway that exists in our open floor plan office, so by default it is the highest trafficked hallway we have.

Social Business Design aside: A hallway is very much like a dynamic signal, a ‘dynamic information flow produced by constituents.’ As Tom and I were working in the hallway we were being passed by other employees with different experiences, expertise, points-of-view and tacit knowledge. Our activities were now visible to the rest of the company.

In the hallway we were being passed by colleagues.  They could see what we were working on and chose to either keep walking or stop and engage us.  We experienced both.  Within ten minutes, Tom and I found oursleves in a conversation with two colleagues each knowledgeable and experienced on the work we were doing.  Over the next 30 minutes we discussed our current situation, the vision and goals for the project, recent trends and developments and lessons learned from having ‘been there and done that.’  Afterwards, Tom and I literally went back to the drawing board to incorporate what we had just learned.

Social Business Design aside:  I mentioned that colleagues in the hallway would either keep on walking or stop to talk to us.  This is an example of a metafilter, ‘what’s important to one person may be meaningless to another.’   Those who wanted to participate could, those who had other interests could keep on going.  By being in the hallway (the dynamic signal) we were making ourselves visible to the rest of the company so they could decide to participate or not.

It’s impossible to compare the Dave & Tom-only project to the Dave & Tom + Colleague Feedback project (because the former will never happen) but everyone involved felt much better about latter: more input, more experience, more tacit knowledge.  We had engaged in communication and collaboration that resulted in a much more holistic approach to our work.  Our path forward became more clear, informed and actionable.

You might not have the collaboration luxury of working in the same office as the rest of your company, so this might not be your everyday experience.  The good thing is you don’t have to be in the same office to collaborate with colleagues.  There are fantastic tools available that will give your company all the virtual hallways, metafilters and whiteboards it needs.  But, tools are the easy part these days.  Your company is filled with smart people, gathering knowledge and insights every day…are you prepared to use them?

Over the long-term, I believe IT departments will split into separate functions with different approaches to service delivery, value and risk, rather than continue to be lumped together with the same risk-averse attitude that rightly surrounds critical systems being applied equally to personal devices and non-critical applications as well. I expect (and hope) that a proportion of the current IT department will move into the business and be given a brief to work as business enablers and innovators, rather than continue with a default setting of ‘no’ regardless of the cost to the business. Projects where internal IT and IT procurement add 500% overhead to technology delivery, and yet still manage to make the delivery worse in many respects, simply should not be happening in 2010.

In the short-term, we have to work with what we have got, and that means constructive engagement with IT departments, understanding their issues and helping to implement social technology in a responsible and business-like manner.

At the recent E2.0 conference in Boston, I presented some of our thinking about how to make this happen, which centres around the idea of technology layering and the use of APIs and data sharing to create consistency without uniformity:

Why is this important? Well, first of all, we must strive for a quality of user experience in the enterprise that is comparable to what we are used to with consumer applications. This is key to pushing forward self-service and it is necessary if we are to achieve the network effects that have proven so powerful outside the firm; but it is also about reducing training and support costs, and striving for simpler, cheaper, more flexible software rather than large all-in-one systems that are too expensive to throw away if they don’t meet changing needs. We are also spending too much time and money re-inventing the basics, because of an outdated obsession with standardisation and single platform plays, or just a mis-placed desire among low-level IT staff to build everything themselves. Instead of struggling to re-create basic social features, we should be deploying platforms and then treating them as a starting point for the development of smart, situated software that hone in on specific business needs.

As social business consultants, we want to be able to paint applications on a platform canvas, where all the basics are a given, rather than have to struggle to work inside an inflexible platform that supports little more than basic customisation. We can already see the need for much more advanced network navigation and awareness, discovery and personal productivity applications, but in most companies there is just not enough joined up social technology to make them viable. If we are to support employees in making sense of the emerging firehose of social data and signals, and turn them into action, then we will need these new applications soon, but IT blockers and the slow pace of implementation are holding this process back.

In the bad old days, our mobile phone applications came with the phone, differed wildly across platforms, and we couldn’t change them. These days, with Android and the iPhone, we expect to use a platform or OS, upon which we can load any number of applications that do very specific jobs, and perhaps look and feel the same across different platforms. We can treat the apps as throwaway, whilst the platform evolves more slowly through updates and point releases, but without needing to change the phone itself more than once every few years if we choose to.

The social layering idea is no different. At the base of the enterprise IT stack, we have expensive, slow-moving technology such as document management systems, ERP systems, databases and so on, which we might change every 3-5 years, if at all. They are good at the heavy lifting and underlying processes that many businesses need, but often very poor at user experience. Assuming these systems expose APIs and data sharing, which most these days do, we ca layer on a slightly lighter, slightly faster moving layer of social sharing capabilities such as social networking, collaboration, micro-blogging, wiki engines, etc., perhaps by using a dedicated enterprise social platform such as Jive, Socialtext or even Sharepoint if that is all that is available. But to really make the most of their features, it is often necessary to go beyond generic social tools and create much more business-relevant and locally-contextualised applications. For example, it is possible to use a wiki for co-ordinating new bids for a sales team, and if you give them one and a little guidance, they might make it work. But it is a lot more likely to succeed if you give them the Acme Bid Management System, which leverages the functionality of the wiki within an Acme-specific interface and workflow. If the wiki platform has an API, then you can do this and continue to iterate your application without having to mess with the wiki engine itself.

Leading social platform vendors Jive and Socialtext are both moving quickly in this direction with their respective announcements of a Jive app store and the Socialtext layering initiative to add to its existing strengths in API-driven applications. This is good, and it creates whole new opportunity for consultants and integrators to add value for their clients above and beyond the products themselves. Out of necessity, we began creating a meta-API above several of the most common social platforms to allow us to do precisely this, and I am very excited at the progress we are seeing when implementing this technique. In the future, I expect we will see a lot more focus on analytics, MIS/measurement, and individual productivity tools built on top of this kind of stack.

By coincidence, around the same time I was talking about this in Boston, my more IT-knowledgeable colleague Lee Provoost was sketching similar ideas at an SAP event in London, looking at the issue from the point of view of pace layering – in other words, coping with tools and platforms that have very different velocities of change:

But, to return to the original reason for this article, the main prize is not just better apps for enterprise users, but rather a constructive, value-enhancing relationship between business and the IT department. If IT departments can continue to own and manage underlying enterprise IT platforms, but expose APIs and data, then business users can define, provision and run their own social applications at the top of the stack without having to defer to IT for every decision they make, or work at a slower pace and in a more constrained way than they need. Based on our experience of the difficulties of implementing social business tools within existing IT department frameworks and culture, this would be a huge win for all concerned, and where we are using this approach, we find it solves a lot of issues and concerns on both sides.