Paradigm Shift: Designing the Social Business

Social Business Design

Great interview, Bob.

My key takeout - David's point that social business design "is less about the words, but what happens when you string them together".

In my opinion there is a huge opportunity to provide an order of magnitude improvement to the way business is done.

Socially Engaged Efficiencies and Changing Behavior

I think the example of the plane in the Hudson is a good example of one facet of the social media paradigm. Another aspect is how Twitter and Facebook have given people the means of taking their behavior from a computer environment to a mobile device. Large groups of people can speak exclusively or publicly via text messaging. This type of collaboration was really never before possible. As a first hand example, our Formula 1 podcast group, @fpodder has become the extension of conversations between people that met and communicated in forums and group live chat. Now, they continue to share thoughts, ideas and laughter via Twitter. Followers from Norway, Japan, Canada and the US all follow the greater conversation and jump in when they have an opinion. As a result of this technology, their behavior has been permitted to change significantly.

The notion of Social Business Design seems to be inevitable. The internal portion of the social in business equation is about understanding the online expectations of stakeholders in their personal use of the social space and translating that into the business environment. Indeed silos and maintaining power seem to be the largest obstacles to overcome, lest we get into the 'legal' department, which may have a virtual stronghold on any good idea. But for one moment, imagine what it would be like if your company ran on a system like Facebook? There are still permissions, and still private messages, but the ability to communicate, collaborate and share at that level of intelligence would be incredibly agile.

Perhaps the best way to get a CEO or CFO on board with a potentially expensive infrastructure that would be to: a) help them recognize that consumers do not see the difference between licensees under a single brand, b)don't appreciate being shuffled around between departments to accomplish simple things, c) now expect a higher level of service, transparency, and accessibility online, and d) work your agency to help sell this through!

In the end, business collaboration could be the win or lose success measure for many companies. If analytics isn't in-step with marketing, if customer service isn't listening to Twitter and conversing with brand, and if product isn't in sync with manufacturing, and the rest of the supply chain, then you have a company of little more than mice running on wheels to power the technology engine, not leveraging capabilities and efficiencies. Which . . . may suit some, but won't win the race.