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?

Today’s Tech Monday supplement in the Austin Statesman includes a very good article by Lori Hawkins about the Google Wave Meetup Kevin Leahy and I have been hosting for the last few months. [Link]

Social Web Strategies colleague Rob Matney described one way he’s using Wave:

Matney said he thinks Wave will be ideal for a new project he is beginning with Austin theatrical director Graham Schmidt. They are just beginning to brainstorm on their next production, a play by Anton Chekhov.

“Wave will allow us to grab images and video and sound from the Web that we can use as inspiration for the production,” Matney said. “We can translate Russian text, and we plan to work with scholars in Moscow, who will be able to join the Wave and add their own content.”

Wave, he said, will preserve thoughts and observations that often get lost when e-mail is flying back and forth in a large group.

“I think it will be kind of a dripping pan underneath the work that will let us catch what was valuable….” he said.

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.

I followed a link that said “26 social media marketing sins,” and as I clicked through, I was thinking “yet another bogus list.” However the blog post that I found, “We Have Sinned” by David Berkowitz, is quite good, very clueful. I’m feeling a bit holier than thou because I haven’t committed many of these sins, mainly because I’m not coming to social media from a marketing background, but as an Internet maven/web developer/online community proponent who was jazzed about “social media” before the marketing world gave it that name. I was part of the brew club that was cooking up the next generation web in the early 90s and 2000s, and most of us weren’t thinking about marketing applications at the time. We were thinking about virtual communities and online social networks and social software – various labels we used for the social web that we were weaving.

But as our business is more and more about marketing, and our clients tend to be marketing groups, I’m getting how easy it can be to make these mistakes. Social media marketing – and marketing in general – isn’t easy to do well and do right. Berkowitz’ list is valuable. Some examples:

We have failed to monitor social channels for discussions of our brands and competitors.

We have guessed at our target audience’s interests and activities rather than conducting research that could have provided real answers.

We have lost consumers by organizing social architectures that were impossible to navigate coherently.

We have repurposed creative and messaging from other channels when we should have adapted or created it for these social spaces.

We have shortchanged social marketing by planning campaigns instead of ongoing programs.

You get the idea. Read the whole post, it’s insightful.

Social Web Strategies is a project company inspired by the same kind of thinking that Tom Peters discussed in his Fast Company piece about “The Wow Project,” and I’ve been doing project work for decades, so Matthew May’s article “The Seven Laws of Projects, and How to Break Them” resonates very clearly. These laws are about the very human dysfunction that can creep into project work. Many projects fail, but many more kind of succeed, but are broken because of these laws, which according to May exist

because our eyes are bigger than our tummies. We have delusions of success. We take on more than we should, routinely exaggerating the benefits and discounting the costs. We over-scope, over-scale, and over-sell. At the same time, we under-estimate, under-resource, and under-plan.

He follows with another paragraph about the fundamental truth of projects:

Projects—even small ones—are complex and challenging. Interests often compete and conflict. Individual performance varies widely. Continual shifts in direction and frequent stalls that slow momentum demand constant planning, adjustment, and improvisation—skills that only come with battle scars.

He then gives an example of a project that broke the laws – the Mars Pathfinder project – and succeeded in big ways, with a combination of creativity, obsessive testing, and incorporation of speed and flexibility into the design.

(I’d like to read, or maybe even write, a whole book on how to break the laws, with case studies!)

Social Web Strategies is well-aligned with the 20:20 Social approach to social business strategy, described in this position paper written by Gaurav Mishra and Dave Evans (who is also a principal with Social Web Strategies in the U.S.) We’ve been discussing for the last two years how business will be moving to the web, and the technologies and patterns described as social media will become essential communications infrastructure for highly collaborative and transparent business environments. We love the concept of “The Experience Ecosystem”; I’ve been involved in a real world experience ecosystem development, building “scenes” via The Austin Equation project, where we say that “experience plus community equals scene.” Social media is all about conversations and stories that emerge from experiences and support emerging connections and relationships; this paper captures the relevance of that process for business particularly well.

2020 Social Position Paper Social Business Strategy

Here’s an example of a mind map for one of the ATX Equation “scenes,” suggesting how an experience ecosystem might be described: