Everything that should be digital will be
WHERE WE’VE BEEN Ten years ago, I wrote the post coining the term “social business” to describe a growth opportunity for brands beyond social media strategies at that time. Dion Hinchcliffe and I eventually wrote a book to unpack the concepts, illustrated in this graphic: Today, “social business” has reverted back to its original meaning …
Continue reading “Digital Transformation: easy to say, hard to do”
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
Is it any surprise that brands, no matter how hard they try to “humanize” via social media, are never allowed to succeed?
Social business is mainstreaming. Most companies have figured out that social media can help build consumer relationships, especially when integrated with marketing campaigns. However, social media marketing still falls short when brands fall back to a stance of being a monolithic logo communicating in corporate-speak. Recent kerfluffles involving Chipotle and Bank of America demonstrate just …
Continue reading “Social Business: It’s what’s on the inside that counts”
MIT Sloan Management Review: How Companies Can Move Past a Trough of Disillusionment in Social Business
“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.
I usually don’t upload presentation decks, but here’s a summarized version of a topic I discussed a couple of times last month. Social Business and Beyond from Peter Kim For more detail on speaking sessions, there’s a section on that. Tweet
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.
Consider this consulting question: “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,” …
“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?