On the surface, it seems like a simple concept. People working together for a common goal, or hopefully to improve something through collective effort. Right?

The trouble is that when we start putting that into practice, we need to get a little more specific about what we mean by collaboration. Because when you start actually outlining projects, organizational structure, and processes to meet the goals of specific initiatives, you need details.

And if you’re adding collaboration as something you want to improve through your company’s social business efforts, you need to know what you mean by that so everyone is working from the same definition and understanding (and therefore can be sure they’re all designing their work for the same purpose).

The easiest way to look at this is to determine how the collaborators will work and how they’ll be accountable for results.

Here are three different ways to consider collaboration. (There are surely more and several hybrids of the below, so feel free to add your take in the comments).

1. Independent Goals, Individual Accountability

This is the way most people work today.

We each have the projects and initiatives we’re responsible for, and we’re pretty much responsible for whether or not they succeed. “Collaboration” is a loose concept here, mostly in terms of asking for input from multiple places or other areas of the business.

But ultimately, the outcome is independently owned by a person or a department, and the input they get may or may not shape the direction of the project itself. You could argue whether or not this actually qualifies as “collaboration” in the purest sense, but technically by the definition of “working together to solve a problem”, it probably lines up.

The challenge is that you’ve got a bottleneck on both ends of the spectrum: the initiation of the project, and the conclusion of it. So the collaborative aspect is often short-lived, heavily biased in favor of the role of the person accountable for the outcome, and often conducted more for appearances than true outcomes.

2. Common Goals, Individual Accountability

Many organizations are working on projects just like this.

They might be internal or external initiatives, or a combination of both. The projects typically have broader implications because the goals are common to everyone involved, often times either related to a higher-level business objective or a challenge that’s department-agnostic yet affecting several different aspects of the company simultaneously.

Because of the way lots of organizations are designed, the accountability and reward programs aren’t as sophisticated, however.

In spirit, you’ve got a group of people working together to achieve something that affects everyone involved. But in practice, you have accountability and reward systems that focus on individual (or at least departmental) performance and achievement, so the best you can hope for when evaluating the impact of the collaboration is “how effectively did this individual person outline their contribution to this initiative?”

It’s a collaborative mindset, but not a fully collaborative practice. So the intent is really good – having people work together for a common goal and mutually beneficial outcomes – but there’s a fundamental disconnect between the spirit of the work and how it’s actually recognized in the performance systems and planning mechanisms of the organization.

That means you’ll have a lot of people participating in group discussion and doing their best to be part of the team, but they’ll always be aware of the fact that their performance is measured on an individual basis (for both the collaborative projects and whatever else is on their plate), so their contributions will be shaped accordingly.

3. Common Goal, Individual AND Collective Accountability

This is the vision of ‘collaboration’ that I think most aspiring social businesses have in mind. It’s certainly the one I’d most consider “true” collaboration, and the one we push our clients to consider when discussing “collaboration” as part of a social business plan.

In this scenario, the goal of the collaboration is one that’s shared by all, much like the one above. The problems are outlined collectively, the challenge articulated by collective agreement by finding the most common intersections that have the most impact, and then the solutions are co-created by everyone involved.

Here’s where it starts to get fancy.

The organizations who are embracing this kind of deep, far-reaching collaboration engineer for a few different things.

First, they capture the mutual goals and objectives of the collaboration actively and officially as part of strategic planning. Whether it’s an external partnership initiative or an internal group working to solve a business problem, the outcome is considered an imperative that will be measured against and is believed to have important business impact. It’s not just a “nice to have”.

Second, they build in systems that acknowledge both individual and collective results. That means that the collaborators *have* to find success together in order to fully realize both individual credit for their contributions and the results of the group effort. That could be simple things like compensation structures that only allow for bonuses as a group, or visible recognition programs that focus on the group rather than individual contributors. The results of the collaborative efforts will also be considered in more formal performance evaluation programs, so that individuals know that it’s an important part of their overall contribution to the organization, and that the company will recognize and credit that contribution accordingly.

Third and perhaps most complex to actually implement is the self-organization and management of the collaboration group. That means the groups come together to solve a problem on their own and are empowered to do so as a part of their professional responsibilities within the organization. It doesn’t have to be mandated or directed, it’s just something that gets initiated by an individual and then becomes a collective effort by a self-organized group.

In the most sophisticated of systems, these groups may actually be able to secure and allocate budget of their own specific to the project, including making recommendations for awards, bonuses, or promotions based on the success of particular efforts or awarding them outright at the conclusion of the project. In addition, they have the collective authority to hold individuals accountable for a lack of contribution by removing them from the group and contributing feedback related to that project performance to individual performance review programs.

Is all of this easy? Heck no. Is it possible? Is it the future? Absolutely.

As theory gives way to practice in social business and other more advanced concepts in organizational performance, it’s becoming increasingly important to talk about our favorite terms and ideas and what they actually look like in practice.

Many of them are going to be messy, imperfect, and based on a progressive evolution from today’s realities to tomorrow’s visions.

‘Collaboration’ is just one example of a concept we need to better define through the lens of functional, operational reality. One size definitely doesn’t fit all, but there’s more to collaboration than just a bunch of conference calls, meetings, and a shiny new software platform. When it’s done well, it’s part of the ethos of the company, and the practices and programs that support those projects reflect that.

What does collaboration look like in your organization today, and how do you hope it will look tomorrow? Do you have a plan for defining it in your own terms? What other concepts do you think need more clarity as social business matures?

For many organizations, social is an apparent solution to a problem.

They feel pressure to be faster, to be more responsive, to be more visibly present online and to ensure that they’re adhering to the shifting standards we’re setting for things like communication and accessibility and the almighty transparency.

So we give them social media tools, and tell them that the right technology combined with some time spent “being social” will meet these emerging demands, and send them on their way.

Except, as Matt pointed out this week, that’s not the solution. In fact, that’s adding complexity to the problem.

Social is simply the catalyst.

It’s the thing that lays bare some of our strengths and weaknesses as an organization in light of changing expectations. Social shines a spotlight on our ability to communicate at speed.

It highlights our culture, because that culture is apparent in the independent — whether officially sanctioned or not — participation and attitudes of the people that represent our company. That impression makes a difference to prospects, customers, and employees alike.

Social also exposes the inherent or emerging pitfalls in our processes and the way our organizations are designed and structured when the new activities find themselves lacking a scalable support system and infrastructure.

And most of all, it emphasizes how resistant we are to changing things around us that are familiar, that have a past pattern of success, and yet may not be relevant to a changing dynamic both within and outside our walls.

One concept I’ve come to love when illustrating this to our clients — especially those in particularly complex industries like healthcare and financial services — is one known as organizational memory.

Knowing is half the battle.

Organizational memory is the picture we have in our minds of “the way we’ve always done it”, and that memory creates biases about the way things “should be done” in the future, as well as the burden of outdated processes, assumptions, and mindsets that aren’t relevant for a shifting organizational context.

If we don’t make the effort to consciously evaluate that organizational memory once in a while and take stock of what we need to keep doing, stop doing, and start doing in context of new dynamics around us, we’ll always be mired in looking for an easy, obvious solution — like a social media platform — instead of getting to the root of the problem.

Lots of organizations will tell you that they need a social media strategy when what they really need is revitalized cultural alignment, or a new approach to hiring and educating their teams, or updated processes and organizational structure to accommodate and make use of an influx of information. Social strategies might be one way to help those things on their way, but they’re rarely the self-contained solution.

If you’re trying to solve the wrong problem, you’re going to find yourself frustrated and lost more often than not.

Being self-aware as an organization is hard.

It requires asking some really difficult questions and everyone in the organization making enough time and putting forth enough effort to ask them in the first place. Then you have to do that with enough regularity that you can spot disconnects as they emerge, and validate the things that are working enough to continually justify the investment.

As we continue to hear from companies that they’re struggling to find the value in “social”, I think it’s imperative that we dig deeper and understand the organizational memory of the organizations we work with and for.

Otherwise, it’s too easy to make social itself the scapegoat, when it’s really the thing that’s exposing much more fundamental issues in our companies that we probably should have addressed a long time ago.

Only once we see the truth of who and what we are as a business — both culturally and operationally — can we know if social is causing our pain, part of our salvation, or both.

Do you think your organization is self-aware?

We

We talk about how we have to become more transparent.

We talk about how we have to become more authentic, more human.

We talk about how social media enables us to get closer to our customers, to have a dialog vs. a monologue.

We talk about how we have to become a part of the conversation, to be where our customers are.

The Royal We

The problem is that the ‘we’ in these examples is rarely, if ever, truly viewed as ‘the organization’.  It’s departments like marketing, customer service, or social media consultants looking through their own lenses instead of the ‘Royal We’ of the organization itself.

And that is one of the primary differences between social media and social business.  A social business understands that for marketing or PR to ‘be transparent’ means that it has to first become an organization which can afford to be transparent.

Platitudes Don’t Build Ships

There are hundreds of platitudes about social media, all true in their own way, but all meaningless (and in some cases dangerous) if the ‘we’ referred to in those platitudes is viewed through the single lens of a person or department vs. the organization as a whole.

You can follow all the great soundbites you like, you can pretend that you can make them happen in just your own little corner of the organizational world, but until you dig into the hard work of applying those soundbites to the Royal We of the organization you may very well find you’ve done more harm than good.

Truly being transparent or authentic means that what you’re exposing had better be something you want the world to see. You can’t solve that at a departmental level, these are organizational issues not social media issues.

The Catalyst But Not The Solution

Social media may give you a means of quickly responding in a PR crisis (or creating one), but it doesn’t magically align PR, Legal, HR, Marketing and the executive team so that they can process the implications and devise a response in an hour. That’s an organizational issue.

Social media may give you a means of having a dialog with your customers in public, but it doesn’t empower those people at the edge of your organization with the training, education, and accountability that comes along with that. That’s an organizational issue.

Social media may have changed the expectations and values of the new workforce, but it doesn’t make your organization suddenly appeal to that workforce for hiring and retaining the best talent. That’s an organizational issue.

Ask The Right Questions

None of these or the myriad other impacts wrought by social media can be resolved within a single department, nor are they ‘resolved’ by social media itself. Not one. The progressive companies that understand this have taken the blinders off. They are meeting this challenge head on and using the Royal We. Where do ‘we’ start? Who do ‘we’  involve in the process? Do ‘we’ have a vision? How do ‘we’ bridge the gap between the short term reality and the long term vision?

Who asks these questions, or what department they are in, is much less important than the fact that the questions are being asked at all. Are you asking the right questions?

Cheers,

Matt Ridings – @techguerilla

Image courtesy Simon Ingram

In it, we’ll be sharing a few stats about the benefits companies are realizing from social business, and some of the reasons they’ve given for why they haven’t invested more in it.

If you’re struggling to illustrate the value of investing in social business in your organization, the following resources might help you. We’re talking more than just justifying a Facebook page here. This is about articulating the fundamental business value of making transformational changes to your organization to communicate more openly, to be nimble and agile with your decision making, to empower people at the margins of your organizations and engage everyone from customers to partners to employees better than you ever have before.

It’s a daunting prospect for many organizations. But it’s the new normal.

These resources will help you and your colleagues understand the shift, and what smart people and companies are saying about how it benefits them, what the risks are, and where the potential is.

McKinsey Quarterly: Evolution of the Networked Enterprise

This is a pretty compelling report, outlining how widespread the adoption of social tools is in organizations. BUT. They’re recognizing that just using the tech isn’t enough, and that organizational changes have to happen in order to address the emerging risks that come with social participation and to provide the cultural and operational infrastructure that they need to scale and sustain those activities long term.

MIT Sloan Management Review in collaboration with Deloitte – Social Business: What are Companies Really Doing? 

This report has some great concrete examples of how companies are leveraging social to do more than just marketing stuff. There are some particularly interesting insights about the perception of C-suite executives around social business initiatives, and some strong indicators again that organizational change over time is the thing that will support social business’ long term success.

Altimeter Group – The Evolution of Social Business

Altimeter Group looks at the stages of social business adoption and maturity. We’re not totally bullish on ‘maturity’ models per se — they tend to overlook the complexities and nuances of individual businesses and how to bridge between the current and desired states — but this is a good way of getting your arms around the characteristics that organizations need to possess as they evolve and progress in social.

Stanford Business – What do Corporate Directors and Senior Managers Know About Social Media? 

This study really highlights the gap and steep learning curve that’s still in front of many companies around social. It’s valuable when you’re trying to make a business case because you need to understand and embrace that gap, and focus on how to bridge the learning and understanding (vs. simply evangelizing an ideal). Particularly helpful is the emphasis on auditing and assessment, something we believe in very strongly.

Dachis Group – Engagement At Scale in the Large Enterprise

Our colleagues at Dachis Group surveyed execs around how their companies are adopting and using social technologies. It’s a bit heavily focused on the technology side of social business vs. the cultural and operational side, however, the insights it provides underscore the importance of those things anyway.

McKinsey – The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies

This says it all: “To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected. Creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing the technologies themselves.”

Capgemini – The Digital Advantage: How Digital Leaders Outperform Their Peers In Every Industry

This report is much more focused on digital overall than social, but there are most certainly parallels and some interesting findings around the advantages that more digitally-savvy companies have over others. Eventually we’ll bridge the divide between companies that are ‘digital’ and not (and they’ll all be part of the same thing) but until then, reports like this help highlight the disparities and ways to perhaps bring the lagging companies up to speed a bit.

eMarketer – Marketers Value Social Media for Both Branding and Customer Acquisition – January 30, 2012

Obviously  marketing-centric, but it’s a substantive survey (700 companies) and has some solid stats for the benefits they’re reaping from simply being active in social media (not necessarily a fully integrated social business, but we’ll get them there).

IBM Global CEO Study – Command & Control Meets Collaboration

This is one of the more compelling studies that has come out in the last couple of years. If you really want to be able to speak the language of CEOs and understand what they value and why, there are some incredible insights in this piece. Check out the video interviews, too. They’re really good.

Economist Intelligence Unit & PulsePoint Group – The Economies of the Socially Engaged Enterprise

It’s about a year old now, but there are still some really great statistics in here about the benefits that ‘engaged enterprises’ are realizing. More telling, though, are the challenges that CEOs cite for why social isn’t being better integrated into the organization, and how the numbers are starting to show that they realize social’s potential beyond marketing (even if that’s where its concentrated right now).

IBM – The Social Business: Advent of a New Age  

It’s amazing how relevant this paper is even two years after its publication. There are some great little examples in here (like one of our favorites, CEMEX), and some very good talking points around what a social business is, what it does, and why it should matter. It’s particularly nice because it really does make the distinction obvious between “doing social media” and driving a broader, more holistic approach to social business.

McKinsey Quarterly – Rise of the Networked Enterprise: Web 2.0 Finds Its Payday

Again some research that’s a little older, but still incredibly relevant. And McKinsey does a great job of tying this research to some of the newer stuff they’re doing around adoption and resulting benefits of social business. It’s interesting to note that some of the results they predicted might not be happening quite as fast as they (we) thought they might, but it’s also interesting to note that the track and direction is still the right one.

It’s worth noting that we’re picky about our resources.

We talk to complex companies and experienced executives, and the latest thinly-constructed “survey” from a company to create an infographic isn’t going to cut it with our clients. The resources above are from reputable companies who have solid methodology behind their research.

Always, always read the fine print when you’re looking at numbers, statistics, and research findings. How many companies were surveyed, and who were they? How did they select the sample? Who paid for the research, and how might their bias come into play? Are there obvious advantages to the company presenting the research that might skew how they represent the numbers and what findings they highlight? The wording of results can tell you a lot, as can what is not included in the numbers. Always look at research and research studies with a critical eye, and take them at face value.

There’s no question that social business has potential. There’s also no question that we’re seeing very real, tangible results from the companies that are investing in it beyond just social media programs.

When making a business case, it’s up to us to understand the business benefits that are specific and unique to each company and how social business practices can help them achieve their specific business goals. But good research, statistics, and numbers can be reassuring, validating, and interesting attention-grabbers when your executives, colleagues, or partners need to know that they’re not taking these risks alone.

Do you have particular research, resources, or studies about social business that you’ve found beneficial? Share them in the comments!

This is a good thing.

This topic often makes us uncomfortable as individuals, though. The minute we start hearing about “policies”, we immediately think of all the things we can’t do, shouldn’t do, aren’t allowed to do, and how our individuality and our voice could be quashed.

What we want is to assert our individuality and independence online, and say that our “opinions are our own” as a way of somehow drawing a hard line in the sand between our “personal” presences online and our “professional” ones.

The trouble is that putting some kind of meager disclaimer on your Twitter profile isn’t really doing much legally to protect you. And in reality, it doesn’t do what you think it does.

A quick recap from a previous post on employee social media participation:

The whole point of saying “these posts are my own” isn’t to protect individuals from their own poor judgment or missteps so much as it helps a company disavow an individual’s tweets or statements and distance the comments from being considered “official” on behalf of a company or organization. It’s a failsafe for the company, not for the person.

So more and more organizations are getting smart, walking through the scenarios that have already affected them or that could in the future, working with their employees, and developing good guidelines and governance to help steer the social business ship.

Desires vs. Reality

I understand that what we want, as individuals, is a neat and tidy line. A switch we can throw when we say “I’m on the clock” and “now I’m off” and can cast off my professional responsibilities or associations while I post whatever I’m thinking about.

It would be nice if it was that cut and dried.

But the reality is that our actions, behaviors, and participation online reflects on the people and organizations we associate with to varying degrees. The more public the platform, the stronger the likelihood that someone, somewhere is paying attention.

If we’re known as a visible, valuable employee of an organization and our association with our company is a strong one, there is no way that our behaviors – no matter how much we’d like them to be separate – don’t reflect at least in some small part on the organization we serve. Same goes for, say, a charity that we’re active with. Or our local PTA.

The association and impact decreases, of course, with looser connections that aren’t as visible a part of who you are online and off. But denying the existence of that impact just because it’s uncomfortable or potentially complex is ignorant at best, and irresponsible at worst.

The answer isn’t as simple as “having separate profiles for personal and professional use”. Again, that might allow the company to deny involvement or knowledge of your behavior if you post a bunch of drunk pictures from spring break.

But if you’re a sales star at a growing organization, whether or not you posted those pictures “officially”, someone is going to see them, make judgments about you, make judgments about your employer for having someone like you on the team, and there could be fallout depending on the culture of your company and the nature of the post. You can’t disclaim your way out of the consequences of your behaviors.

It’s all good to wish reality was different and to actively work to change perceptions, cultural norms, and attitudes in order to make that reality a little more palatable or nuanced and appropriate for an increasingly complex on-and-offline world.

But in the meantime, it’s really important to recognize what the current reality is and work within it.

That reality is that your behaviors matter, you can’t separate your personal and professional behavior online so easily, and how you conduct yourself as an individual can (and should!) reflect on the organizations you’re associated with. You can’t pick and choose the ones that make you look good without accepting the potential of the ones that carry risks.

What You Should Be Doing

So how do you address that problem? Constant dialogue and making governance not something you print and park in a binder to be distributed at orientation meetings, but an active and iterative part of your entire strategic planning process.

That includes:

• Routine Scenario Modeling  sessions so you can address the “what if” scenarios that change, shift and emerge as new technologies arrive and as your business culture and processes adapt and change
• Governance programs that are collaboratively built, owned by a cross-functional group, tested actively in the real world, and revisited on a regular basis.
• Social participation guidelines for employees that are clear, positive and encouraging, and that include lots of information about how you’re hoping employees on social can be assets to your company (rather than treating them as one giant collective liability).
• Lots of feedback and input mechanisms for everyone in the organization to contribute ideas, thoughts, and recommendations around the policies and governance practices that affect them.
• Resources and professionals that can be real-time sources of feedback and advice for employees with questions about their participation, responsibilities, impact and value in terms of both their personal and professional participation online.
• Aligning your organization for social business with frameworks that bring many disciplines and perspectives to the table, provide unifying vision and direction, but enable every area of the company to review, shape and customize the social strategy that works for their discipline.

Governance Is a Verb

Guiding social within your organization and understanding your individual role and intersections with all of the people and companies you might impact is an active state.

You have to be working on it all the time, in parallel with how things always change around you. If it’s static, it’s already out of date.

Don’t put it on a shelf. Don’t stick it in the HR process and forget about it. Don’t make it part of orientation training and never touch it again. Don’t train your team on what not to do and then expect them to invest the effort into participating in ways that benefit the company.

If you want to reap the countless rewards of having an engaged, active and collaborative organization, you have to embrace and roll with the risks and challenges, too. It’s critical to shape your governance programs around not just what might go wrong, but how you hope your employees can help both themselves and the company as a whole do things drastically right.

In fact, if you’re proactive about looking at those implications from the start, you’ll always be prepared, informed, and ready to make the most of what might happen next.

We do lots of presentations each year about social business stuff. We also do lots of webinars, mostly in partnership with other great companies or clients who want to explore social business topics with their communities, and do it easily online.

But we haven’t done any ourselves…until now!

The first SideraWorks Webinar will be held on Tuesday, April 23rd at 2pm ET. It’s free, and you can register here (space is limited, so if you want in, go click and reserve your spot right now while we wait).

The Topic

For this inaugural webinar, we’ll be talking about something that’s on a lot of people’s minds these days.

How do you outline a case for social business in your organization?

Whether it’s convincing the CEO, getting buy-in from your team, or expanding the social business philosophy throughout your organization, there are some key elements that are essential to making sure your company can view social business’ potential — and potential challenges — through the right lens.

Led by Amber Naslund, this webinar will talk about:

• Key “altitudes” to understand when presenting your social business plan
• How social business – not just social media – can change your business for the better
• The pillars of a sound, convincing business case for social initiatives
• What role you play in securing buy-in and enthusiasm for these ideas

If you can’t yet make it to a SideraWorks MasterClass or bring one to your organization, this is like a condensed and high-level version of our super popular MasterClass on the same topic.

Sound good? Go register.

What’s Coming Up

We’re going to do more webinars in our series, both free and premium. (Don’t worry, they’ll be affordable, but the premium ones will be designed for smaller audiences and more intensive, advanced content).

If you want to hear about them when we make registration available, sign up right here for our nifty email list. We’ll let you know when the next webinar is coming up.

If you have an idea for a topic that you’d like to see us cover, leave it in the comments!

Remember: Tuesday, April 23rd at 2pm ET. Making the Case For Social Business.

You won’t want to miss it! Can’t wait to see you there.

A business sends out a clever tweet or a witty repost on their Facebook page in the midst of a big event, and everyone is clamoring to laud how “social” they are, how much they “get it”, how they’re such an amazing example of a “social business”.

I say not so fast.

Since when is a witty bit of advertising or a quick-thinking response from a community manager enough to qualify a business as “social”, much less strategically smarter than another?

True, activity on the surface can be an indicator of things that are much more fundamental: a culture that empowers people to make fast decisions, a company that doesn’t take itself too seriously, an organization that understands how important a peer relationship is with their customers.

But as critical observers of these things, can we please make that distinction, and do our best to include that as part of the conversation?

We’re not doing ourselves any favors celebrating how very “social” a business is just because they can get an ad up on Facebook in five minutes. Not unless we’re focused heavily on why their audience cares, what that does for the brand in the long run, and how that’s an indicator of cultural and operational strengths that carry into areas of the business other than marketing.

This is where most discussion of social business swings and misses, and misses badly.

Marketing is a catalyst for social business.

Because the nature of social and the web lends itself to communication first and foremost, marketing, PR and customer service have been very fertile breeding grounds for the strategies and tactics that embody the open, agile and collaborative philosophies behind a more adaptive organization.

But none of those are the end goal.

The end goal is a better, smarter business that makes more intelligent decisions faster and involves more people in the entire process of moving the business ahead into its future.

Marketing is one piece of that, just like it’s one piece of the company. It contributes to the spark, but it isn’t the fire itself.

Starting ‘somewhere’ can be a good thing, if it’s well considered. An approach we’re very much in support of, in fact, because when you do something well at a small, focused scale, it becomes much easier to carry that to the rest of a business progressively and methodically. A starting point for social in one area can be a wonderful proving ground for strategies that pervade the business.

But too many of our examples of “social businesses” or “great social strategies” start and STOP with examples of someone being clever on Twitter or poking fun at themselves on their blog while they incorporate the internet meme of the moment and have their five seconds of fame.

We need higher standards than that if social business is going to reach its real potential to transform organizations, not just be the latest veneer on clever campaign work. We also need to talk about how activity – social engagement, content, and the like – are (or maybe aren’t) evidence of a strategy that prioritizes becoming an adaptive organization for the long term.

So yes, let’s celebrate the great examples of “human” business. Let’s absolutely show companies that we want to see their faces and their humor and their fallibility. Let’s demonstrate through our praise (or our criticism) that we both see and understand how important their intent is when we’re making judgments about the kind of people and businesses they are.

But let’s also remember that business as a whole is on the edge of a major shift.

One that emphasizes partnerships and communication, agility, and brilliant internal alignment in a way that we’ve never really seen. A shift that empowers customers and employees, one that rewards companies that are capable of taking a hard look at themselves across the board and making key cultural and functional changes that improve the workplace, the customer experience, and the products and services they sell.

That has a heck of a lot more implications than getting a cute tweet to go viral on a tech blog.

Hooray for the companies that are trying their hand at engagement and fun and tapping into the fast-moving, emotional side of the web. That’s progress.

But let’s keep our eye on the ball. There is big work to be done here still, and we’re only now starting to see just how complex and involved it will be. It’s easy to stop at clever because it’s easy. It’s obvious. It gets attention. It’s much easier to see and touch and understand when we put it in our blog post as a “case study”.

The true transformation, however, is in the messy bits.

It’s in the inside of an organization where all of that fun marketing stuff has pretty big implications for how we support customers long term, for how our employees work with each other and communicate, for how we need to adapt the way we work to accommodate a new why and all of the evolving expectations that come along with that.

The ripple effect after the clever marketing is where the real work is.

We need all hands on deck, and we need people like you with the vision to understand when a surface social success is an indicator of something much more important at work…and when it’s just window dressing.

Can we count on you to keep our standards high?

How do you build a sound, sustainable case for social business initiatives in your organization?

Maybe you need to sell it to the CEO. Maybe you need your boss to understand. Maybe you need to articulate for your teams and colleagues why it matters and why they should care.

The trick is that it’s not about convincing people they should be blogging, or on Twitter, or anything of the sort.

Making a case for social business requires building a vision that:

• Articulates the impact that the social web is having on your organization
• Shows that you understand where your organization is today
• Illustrates a compelling plan for getting you from today’s state to the kind of organization you hope to be tomorrow.

We did this webinar this week with the outstanding folks at GoToWebinar and Citrix online.

It was really well received, so we thought we’d share the slides with you here, too, in case they’re helpful. (There are presenter notes included in the download since the slides themselves don’t tell you much). We’ve even got some pretty compelling statistics in here – and their sources – for the tangible benefits companies are seeing from implementing holistic social business practices, and the real reasons why executives hesitate to implement them.

Enjoy, share, download, or let us help you personally build your own case for becoming a truly social business.

One problem, though, is that mainstream adoption of any terminology gives rise to lots of confusion about what it means.

Social business — at least how we define it – is about a lot more than social media being used in a business setting for customer service or engagement or marketing.

So we’ve been thinking about what social business means in practice.

In other words, what the heck are we trying to achieve with it anyway? Whether or not we call it “social business”, what does the end goal look like?

We know it’s about more than social media activities. Chances are a social business has some kind of social marketing strategy going on, but it’s hardly the sum total of becoming a social business.

The term “social” is confusing in itself, largely because of just that overlap. It’s difficult to distinguish social business from social media when they share a root terminology that can mean so many different things, from technology to activity to cultural intent to doing good in the community.

Here’s what we think.

Social business results in an adaptive organization.

Really, the overall goal of becoming a “social business” is to improve your organization to be more nimble, more openly communicative, and to adapt the way that you work to accommodate a changing generation of customers, employees, and partners.

The goal is to be the kind of company that values evolution and adaptation and is willing to make the cultural and operational investments it takes to do that on an ongoing basis.

The execution of that is going to look different for every organization. But the intent is the same.

Can “social” stuff aid in that? Sure.

To a large degree, the things that define social media or social networks are the catalyst for this shift. The openness and rapid connectivity of social have given rise to new expectations.

But you can most assuredly “do” a bunch of social stuff online by definition and still not make one small step toward adapting your business in any meaningful way.

What are these new expectations, and what do we mean “adapt”?

An adaptive organization knows and embraces these facts:

1. Culture is the underpinning of any successful business, and it’s more important than ever to have a healthy one since it shines through in everything you do. And people talk about it.
2. Customers need faster, real-time attention across lots of different communication channels and they’re not concerned with how your organization’s structure might get in the way of that.
3. Employees want to contribute, to be empowered, to make decisions on the fly (and be accountable for them), and they want to work for a company that values their contribution as more than a job description. They’re also communicating differently than ever before in their personal lives, so they want to adapt those practices to their professional world.
4. Partners, customers, and employees alike all work better together when they have access to better information and knowledge and can contribute toward building a healthier, more flexible system that better meets their needs.
5. Technology is not the solution in itself. The human element of business has to come first, and technology exists to support that. Not the other way around.
6. The pace of change isn’t slowing down. If anything, it’s accelerating. The companies best poised for a successful future are the ones that can shift direction nimbly, make decisions quickly, and take calculated risks in order to make the most of opportunities without getting mired in cumbersome processes or politics.

Why does this nitpicking matter?

On the one hand, maybe it’s important to banter about the semantics of a definition at a theoretical level. Heaven knows that the CRM, Enterprise 2.0 and Collaboration sectors have been doing it for years, though you could argue at length about whether that’s helped or hindered the causes.

What’s most important is giving whatever term you use meaning through actual application. In other words, if you can see how you’d culturally and operationally adjust your business to make it more adaptive, for example, then that is something you can actively put to work.

You can see what the end state looks like. You can start figuring out what you need to actively build and execute to support that goal. You can ask yourself contextually, all the time, what being more adaptive means to your company, and take concrete steps toward it.

You can do more than conceptualize. You can build it. Which means you can explain it, plan toward it, and get the all-important buy-in from leadership and practitioners alike.

Because they can see how it applies to them. They can say “We do this now, but we’d like to work toward doing more of this instead, and here’s a path to get us there.”

Business as a whole is changing. That’s an inevitability, and we need ways to distinguish between the businesses that will struggle, and the organizations that will learn to thrive with new demands, challenges, and opportunities.

So, when you hear me talk about social business, you’ll also hear me talk a lot about the intended outcome of that: being an adaptive organization. 

Because you can’t be a different organization unless you’re changing things at every level, from people to process, from culture to structure. Social business then becomes an ongoing effort to improve what you do in line with what your business ecosystem is asking of you.

And social media plans alone won’t get you there.

Marissa Mayer

Last Friday, Yahoo human resources boss Jackie Reses sent out a memo telling remote employees that they needed to be physically working in Yahoo offices by June.