"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." - Thomas Gray, 1742
"I always feel like...somebody's watching me." - Rockwell, 1984
This month's Scientific American contains a feature called The Story of Grand Central Station and the Taming of the Crowd. If you've ever been in a public transportation terminal at rush hour, you know that commuters expect the crowd to flow. In fact, when people disrupt flow intentionally or not, it causes issues. When a friend of mine first moved to New York, he told me how he used to stop to let people pass, which was courtesy in the south. The result was that other people had to stop moving as well, impeding flow, and making people angry. No wonder JetBlue hired a Broadway choreographer to help redesign JFK's terminal 5 - flow is critically important.
Well designed spaces facilitate better outcomes. In the case of transportation terminals, passengers move freely and avoid congestion. Within a business, employees are able to access resources easily and work more efficiently. Organizational design applies to both physical and virtual spaces.
One common approach to dissecting social business into its key components is separating people, process, and technology. You can find plenty of discussion out there about technology - just read TechCrunch every day. There have been a couple of good social business books written about people, like Open Leadership and Empowered. In The Connected Company, Dave Gray has written a book that brings it all together with an engaging and lucid right-brain perspective.
There are a lot of voices out there when it comes to social business. There are also a lot of opinions on which voices matter. Who are the best experts? Who has klout? What about skills?
When you step back and take note of topics that people generally focus on and engage around, patterns emerge. To get a full perspective on social business from theory to practice, it's important to subscribe/follow a cross-section of these key archetypes.
"If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and the current level of technology, what would it look like?"
Sounds like a contemporary social business question, right?
It could be, but the original context predates "social business" by two decades. It's the key question from "Reengineering the Corporation," a classic business text. Its subtitle? "A Manifesto for Business Revolution."
You probably know what happened with reengineering. It quickly gained a negative reputation for being a management fad and excuse to lay off staff. Not exactly business revolution.
But no question, social business seems to ask the exact same key question of organizations today -- with an intent of corporate revolution.
"Social business" is a term you can't escape these days---even if your work just remotely touches on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, or collaborative technologies, such as IBM Connections or Yammer.
But what does "social business" mean? And why should you care?
We published this a couple weeks ago at CNBC. Although Facebook's IPO has been widely panned, it's important to keep in mind that the company still has a market cap of over $65 billion - that's pretty big. And that valuation has meaningful implications for social business.
Social Business By Design has been out for a couple weeks and we're hearing great feedback on the book:
"If you work in social media you have to buy a copy." - Forbes
"For those trying to sell their companies on why social business makes sense, passing around a few copies of this book would be a good way to start." - Information Week
"The graphics in this book are worth the price of the book alone." - ZDNet
Today is the official publication date of Social Business By Design. It's been a whirlwind three-year journey from the original blog post that introduced the world to "social business" to a full book describing how to make strategy and tactics succeed.
If you're a seasoned social business practitioner, you'll find value in the frameworks, outlines, and visual thinking. As one early reviewer wrote, "the graphics in this book are worth the price of the book alone." We relied on the information design talents of our colleagues formerly known as XPLANE to help make the 30+ graphics make sense, in addition to the decades of strategy, technology, and marketing experience incorporated into our thinking.
There's no doubt that social business has arrived. In three short years, we've adopted this umbrella concept to encompass function-specific concepts like word of mouth marketing, consumer advocacy, and Enterprise 2.0. But what exactly is social business? As a definition:
a social business harnesses fundamental tendencies in human behavior via emerging technology to improve strategic and tactical outcomes
There's a lot more to unpack in support of that statement - so let's talk about what matters in social business.
Last week I visited Ford and attended the North American International Auto Show, along with around 150 other social media folks from around the world. (Ford paid the bill for my travel and hotel; I wasn't paid for consulting and this post is a personal opinion.) There were Mom and Dad bloggers, design bloggers, green bloggers, and a collection of random others. Besides US attendees, I met people from Canada, Germany, and China. It was - to use an old Ford tagline - a bold move: invest in hosting a big group of virtual loudmouths in your backyard and at your facilities and let them talk about whatever they want.
