Originally published at Weblogsky.

Austin’s Dachis Group talks about social business design, defined as “the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.” I find the Dachis overview (pdf) interesting, if a bit scattered. David Armistead and I at Social Web Strategies had been having conceptually similar conversations for the last couple of years, looking at the potential culture change associated with social technology and new media (with Craig Clark), the need for business process re-engineering (with Charles Knickerbocker), and the power of value networks. This morning while sitting on my zafu, I had a flash of insight that I quickly wrote down as five thoughts that came to me pretty much at once…

1. Organizations are already using software internally and have been for some time – email lists, groupware and internal forums, various Sharepoint constructions, aspects of Basecamp, internal wikis and blogs, etc. What’s changed? I think a key difference is high adoption outside work – more and more of the employees of a company or nonprofit are having lifestyle experiences with Facebook Twitter, YouTube, Flickr et al. The way we’re using social media changes as more of us use it (network effect) and our uses become more diverse.
2. Organizations see knowledge management as storage, basically, but we can see the potential to capture and use knowledge in new and innovative ways, e.g. using multimodal systems (Google Wave, for example) to capture and sort knowledge as it’s created, with annotations and some sense of the creative process stored with its product – knowing more about how knowledge is produced improves our sense of its applicability. (It’s exciting to be a librarian/information specialist these days.)
3. Organizations will increasingly have to consider the balance of competition and cooperation with internal teams. I’ve seen firsthand how a culture of competition can stifle creativity by creating a disincentive to share knowledge. I’m thinking we’ll see more “coopetition.”
4. Who are the internal champions within an organization? There will be more interest at the C-level as social technology is better understood and success stories emerge from early adopters. It would be interesting to know what current champions of social media are seeing and what they’re saying. Also – how much of the move toward “social” will come from the bottom up, and how will that flow of new thinking occur?
5. How does the new world of social business (design) relate to marketing? Operations? Human resources? To what extent to the lines between departments blur? How will the blurring of the lines and potential cross pollination transform business disciplines?

A final thought: all the minds in your organization have a perspective on your business, and each perspective is potentially valuable. How do you capture that value? Do you have a culture that can support a real alignment of minds/perspectives/intentions?

At Social Web Strategies, we’ve been saying that the future of the social web includes data portability. An April Forrester report drew the same conclusion.

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience.

Brian Solis at Social Media Today writes about Forrester’s report, saying that social networks are evolving into a social operating system, and that “social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior….I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.”

None of this is really news, maybe clarification. I was in conversations with Tim O’Reilly and others in the early 2000s that acknowledged that the Internet/Web was an operating system and inherently social. Those conversations led to the paper Tim and Dale Daugherty wrote that loosely defined concepts labeled “Web 2.0.” The Data Portability Project kicked off in 2007, and we’ve been trying to get our heads around individual data management since the 1990s (thinking of P3P). Thinking about the semantic web has been brewing since the turn of the century. Various data interchange formats and semantic web projects have emerged since then.

What’s interesting in Solis’ piece is the concept of SRM – Social Relationship Management – vs Customer Relationship Management and Doc Searls’ idea of Vendor Relationship Management. CRM and VRM combined make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We get to a point where customers and vendors are transparent to each other, and are part of a larger social ecosystem that can facilitate authentic and symmetrical relationships. Solis says

The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.

The Obama Administration is moving Whitehouse.gov to the Open Source Drupal platform, based on a set of requirements for a platform “where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site’s infrastructure.”

The Personal Democracy Forum explores the social relevance of the decision to adopt Drupal, which is known for its interactive community features:

Let’s really try to extract the last drop of possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it’s possible to see the White House’s move to open-source software as a move towards the idea that collaborative programming can inspire — or at least, support — a more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean campaign into the Howard Dean network. [Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies was part of that effort.] This idea, that a politics crafted by the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps.

Those of you who are following Social Web Strategies, especially those that have met with us, have heard us say for the last two years that <em>business is moving to the web.</em> We’ve discussed how the internal uses and implications of social media will have more impact and be more interesting than the marketing applications that have been evolving (with some difficulty and controversy, I should add). Since Dave Evans joined our company almost a year ago, we’ve had many conversations about how the social web is more than a marketing channel or awareness platform. We’ve also discussed how social technology can disintermediate the space between operations and the customer (which was mediated by marketing and PR, lacking scalable tools for more direct communication). There’s also the idea of marketing within the company, and facilitating a mashup of marketing and operations, an alignment that requires robust communication between the two usually siloed parts of the business.

What we’ve been talking about is <em>social business,</em> and others are starting to pick up the conversation. The Dachis Group here in Austin has been talking about these points, prompting the Neville Hobson post “Is ’social business’ the new black,” and a response from Dave in his ClickZ column. I posted a link to Dave’s column in our LinkedIn Group and on our Facebook page. We invite you to comment either place, and join the conversation.

Kevin Marks has an insightful post about how Twitter works (in theory), noting how the act of following on Twitter is asymmetrical, meaning that you can attend to tweeters who aren’t necessarily your friend. On the other hand, because you can reciprocate, you have the possibility of hanging out with friends, so Twitter can be at the same time a water cooler and an auditorium. I especially like Kevin’s comment that “the key to Twitter is that it is phatic – full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other.”

Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you’re looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you’re declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don’t care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.

I also like his explanation of mutual media:

What shows up in Twitter, in blogs and in the other ways we are connecting the loosely coupled web into flows is that by each reading whom we choose to and passing on some of it to others, we are each others’ media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. Although we each only touch a local part of it, ideas can travel a long way.

Evolution of the social web: while we were thinking about the implications of Google Wave and starting the Austin Google Wave Meetup, Facebook was arranging to buy FriendFeed, our favorite digital lifestyle aggregator. Smart move? Depends how Facebook integrates FriendFeed, but it feels like a helpful crack in the Facebook walled garden. Friendfeed takes feeds from all kinds of content, has useful discussions, and you can upload images and files. It already integrates with Facebook and Twitter. Playing with these tools (and the iPhone) is a realization of our early 2000s vision of the web as an operating system, an environment for many media and many platforms that should, dang it, be interoperable, mashable, jammable. We often say Facebook is the AOL of the 21st century, a walled garden that could fail fast as convergence synapses start to fire across the open web. Facebook has to find a way to hold those eyeballs and rub ‘em against ads, tough to do if people keep walking outside and climbing the virtual trees, getting a view of the bigger World Outside. Buying FriendFeed is like buying a few of those trees, bringing them inside the garden… and maybe the future is in building a few treehouses with telescopes and ads on various surfaces. Hope we won’t see Zuckerberg brandishing a chainsaw.

Mike Gotta has a very interesting post about the need within the enterprise to consider construction and represenation of identity by employees in the context of online social networking tools and applications increasingly prevalent, and see identity management within the enterprise as a shared responsibility between the company and its employees. [Link]

Finding the optimal balance between the social needs of employees and management needs of the enterprise must be a core design assumption for identity management strategies. As employees redefine, extend, or contradict these formal identity assignments, there may be unintended consequences to identity management practices of the organization at-large unless action is taken to view identity as a shared responsibility. Increased use of social tools and applications that span internal and external environments will only compound the situation unless organizations begin to act now.

Sam Decker of BazaarVoice posts about “Ghost Town” Brand Communities, and his post makes good points, beginning with an acknowledgment (via Gartner) that 50% of brand communities will fail. Within the remaining 50%, degree of success isn’t clear. “These failures don’t mean that online community-building is a waste of time,” Sam writes, “or that it can’t be done.”

But it’s complex, and the appropriate strategy could be markedly different from one brand to the next. Before beginning the virtual barn-raising in a new community initiative, tread carefully and consider what success means to you.

He goes on to say that

From a marketer’s perspective, the idea of a brand community sounds great. The expectation is that it will be a petri dish which will virally grow customer engagement, and this type of engagement will lead to sales. The problem is, few customers jump into that petri dish, fewer still will stick around, and the community interaction usually has no contextual bridge to purchasing. That’s three strikes. Most brand communities serve a very, very small set of customers (in relation to their customer base or market size) with either a lot of passion or a lot of time on their hands. And let’s face it, not every brand has the potential to inspire lasting passion and sustain a Facebook-type community. Exceptions are cult brands that have passion and community built into their product ethos, such as Harley Davidson or Apple. But you can’t create that by putting up a community. That starts way upstream, with the product and the brand.

I wouldn’t call Facebook a community – it’s a crowd within which communities can emerge. I would define community (following Cliff Figallo, former director of the seminal online community, the WELL, as shared relationships that persist and gain a history of interaction. Social network systems like Facebook are more fragmented. Facebook has a group-forming facility which can work as a platform for intentional community, but many of those groups don’t get a great level of adoption and participation. I say all this to make the point that Sam and I probably don’t agree about what constitutes community, and how or whether community can scale. The most successful online communities (e.g. the WELL) have scaled through the emergence of smaller subcommunities as the number of active participants grows, and that’s a good thing if you can meet the community management challenge it presents.

He says “when the community audience is small and unfamiliar with one another, a prospective visitor’s motivation to build social capital or help others dissolves.”

If visitors are not passionate about the topic, they are less likely to jump in. And for both reasons the vibrance and participation in the community are next to go. Which causes the next visitor not to join. This is the domino effect that leads most brand communities to turn into a ghost town.

I don’t disagree here, but there’s a solution to this problem. From my comment on his post: “seed the community early with members who will commit and persist, who care about the subject(s) of the community, and who are articulate.”

I think the thrust of Sam’s post here is that the Bazaarvoice social commerce model – which “creates interactions and contributions around the product or service they’re trying to sell” – is the most effective solution – but I don’t know that it’s a community solution. This model “fosters opportunities for the creation of content that helps others make purchasing decisions, driving more sales and resulting in a quicker ROI.” He goes on to say this:

This type of strategy needn’t require a person to register or become a full-fledged member — they should be able to write a product review, ask or answer a question, or write a story without feeling like they have to make a commitment. Whether that contributor feels like they’ve joined a community by participating is not the point. Their contribution is useful for the visitors to the site, who came to learn more about the brand and get their questions answered — not to “friend” people or help others. And yet, once a critical mass of content is shared, a community of shared interest will start to form. People will write the 101st review because there’s a community around a product! This “accidental community” starts to form, which amplifies the engagement to the content and profiles.

I don’t see much chance of persistence or relationship in this context – this is more of an interactive audience than a community. This is not to diminish the proven value of the Bazaarvoice product – the growth of the company suggests they’re creating real value with their approach.

This leaves the question whether “brand community” is desirable and worth the effort required to make it happen, and I would say that depends on the brand and the goals for the community. You might want to create a community of advocates – or critics – to work as something like a focus group, and that community would not necessarily have to scale large to be effective. You might want to support a very active affinity group – an example is the platform for its community of riders created by Specialized Bikes, where you could find other Specialized writers and set up rides.

If you think community is a good fit for your business, you should pursue a well-considered strategic conversation – make sure your goals are clear and that they would be served by a community solution, and how that would work.

From Business Week: “Researchers at IBM and MIT have found that certain e-mail connections and patterns at work correlate with higher revenue production….Researchers at IBM Research and MIT’s Sloan School of Management found that the average e-mail contact was worth $948 in revenue.” [Link]

This is exactly what Social Web Strategies has been talking about and where we focus. Effective use of social media in and related to the workplace builds social capital and value networks, and this can have a significant positive impact on profitability.

For IBM, research into the networked behavior of its employees promises insights about teamwork, innovation, and the transmission of knowledge and ideas within the company. This is especially important for global companies—say, where experts in New York might be unaware that colleagues in Singapore are untangling a similar problem. IBM researchers fine-tuned management of industrial supply chains a half-century ago; now their challenge is promoting the flow of knowledge throughout the workforce.

W3C has launched the “Social Web Incubator Group” following the report on January’s Future of Social Networking workshop.

The group’s mission is to understand the systems and technologies that permit the description and identification of people, groups, organizations, and user-generated content in extensible and privacy-respecting ways (read also the group’s charter for more details).

From the charter:

The topics covered with regards to the emerging Social Web include, but are not limited to: accessibility, internationalization, portability, distributed architecture, privacy, trust, business metrics and practices, user experience, and contextual data. The scope includes issues such as widget platforms (such as OpenSocial, Facebook and W3C Widgets), as well as other user-facing technology, such as OpenID and OAuth, and mobile access to social networking services. The group is concerned also with the extensibility of Social Web descriptive schemas, so that the ability of Web users to describe themselves and their interests is not limited by the imagination of software engineers or Web site creators.

Thanks to Katrin for the pointer!