How to Become a Social Business

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This compact article by Christine @comaford tells much of there is to tell about how vital it is for a business to engage with social media, and how to go about it. It’s a challenge and a primer (scroll down for link).

And in a context in which most business organizations are either not engaged or engaged in a sloppy and amateurish manner, it points the way to significant competitive advantage that, pretty much independent of industry, will follow from closing with the opportunities of social.

Two disturbing points I have noted in the past.

1. There is growing evidence that businesses are not anywhere near where they need to be in their use of social data. So, 69% of B2B companies have no way of systematically assessing social response. https://futureofbiz.org/2012/06/05/69-of-global-b2b-orgs-ignore-social-feedback/

2. Back of this, the evidence is that very few CIOs are personal engaged/competent on social media. The numbers are dire. Of the Fortune 250 CIOs, 25 are on Twitter, and 4 have their own blogs. They are therefore quite unable to make informed judgments about social, even if they hire people to handle it.

Social Risk: Seems CIOs think Social is beneath them

If You Aren’t Social, You’ll Shrink: 10 Steps To Becoming a Social Business – Forbes.

Three Caveats for Social Search

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Many strands are brought together in this smart review of the coming merge of social and search, which will take much further the secondary role social is already playing in some search engines.

It raises 3 core questions.

1. I am entirely happy that clever algorithms should put together the strands of my digital (and analog) life to my benefit. I am entirely unhappy if there is no clear way found to keep this info entirely, forever, private to me; unless I choose to part with it for cash or some specific service.

2. I am also happy to have a tailored version of search operating in particular situations (so when I search “weather,” the first hit is my local weather not the dictionary of meteorology. But in less obvious cases not only do I want a choice, of social search and, as it were, asocial search; I want a flashing light to remind me that my private universe is being mined, not the universe out there.

3. There’s a fundamental distinction to be drawn between biographical, geographical, or personal preferences in matters of, say, food and music; and broad issues of information and opinion. So it is not at all OK that a Democrat should get a view of history and politics designed to be favorable to him or her; or that doubters of human causation of climate change should receive preferentially material favorable to their cause.

Search and Social: How The Two Will Soon Become One | TechCrunch.

via Three Caveats for Social Search.

Spreading the Word: Knowledge Diffusion now we’re Digital

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I recently addressed a conference on global education, and was asked to look in my keynote at the special situation of “resource-poor” areas. I don’t think my approach went down very well (one senior figure in the room, a former UN official, described it sweetly as “crap”), but I still think I’m right!

What I said was that the digital revolution, combining the digitization of books and the spread of mobile in Africa, was re-weighting educational resources; and would soon allow the delivery of high-level educational programs with almost none of the traditional resource pre-requisites in place.

Here’s a case in point: Nice report on the use of e-books in exactly that situation. At the other end of the opportunity scale we have the new programs being launched by Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. But we have just made a very small beginning. In general, education has been very slow to be disrupted, and my sense is it will change very rapidly over the next 10 years – on the same scale as publishing at the moment. This will not all be good, but it will be enormously good for distance delivery at very low cost of what have been expensive western educational perquisites.

Worldreader: An E-Book Revolution for Africa? – WSJ.com.

Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy – and Business: 5 Principles

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At the core of 21st century business lies data. And as the digital revolution envelops more and more of our activities that core will only get bigger.

We have become most aware of these issues in the context of social media and the biz models that have grown up around advertising as a way to sustain enterprises that are free to the user/consumer.

But of course it goes deeper, much deeper. National security issues, health, transportation – a thick strand of data/privacy concerns and opportunities runs through sector after sector. In this illuminating piece in the NY Times, the spotlight is on Acxiom, a vast aggregator of consumer data whose name is known to few.

These 5 Principles are clear:

1. Every day, more of our lives will be digitized.

2. Every day, there will be more business opportunity in the mining (refining is the word Acxiom likes) of the data.

3. For a stable business environment to flourish, without GMO-style revolts or data scandals such as have punctuated the short history of social media, we need to move towards consensus policies that give business maximum freedom and citizens maximum control over their lives and their digital output – through the optimal mix of self-regulation and legal oversight.

4. Concerns over cybersecurity are growing. Every expert I know is more more worried all the time – as we aggregate data and in the process raise the risk of its being released by accident (another laptop left on a train) or theft. Some of the smartest people on the planet are entirely focused on hacking into our securest systems, and they keep scoring. Risk assessments need to be candid and – unless this raises its own security issues – public.

5. In these days of globalization and cloud, there is no way to avoid global standards.

Acxiom, the Quiet Giant of Consumer Database Marketing – NYTimes.com.

10 Amazing Facts about Twitter

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

10 Amazing Facts about Twitter

1. It is far simpler than Facebook and yet has far more uses.

2. It is accessible from almost any point on earth and at any time.

3. It connects people and knowledge seamlessly.

4. You can have one-on-one chats with friends and strangers 24 hours a day, either in semi-public through @ messages or in private with DM.

5. It supplies me with a free staff of hundreds of expert researchers and communicators, whose chief delight day by day is to tell me what’s new and what to make of it.

6. Twitter relationships can lead quickly to real-life connections, and when you meet a Twitter friend IRL it’s remarkable how much you already know of each other. Whitney Johnson, author of Dare Dream Do, has called this TWIRL – Twitter – In Real Life. Twirl can be an amazing experience. That’s how I met Whitney! @johnsonwhitney

7. As knowledge is expanding exponentially – faster every day – only one thing can enable us to digest, focus, grasp, what’s new and important: The Miracle of Reciprocal Curation. Each of us scans what’s new for each other, in a mutual gift relationship that has enormous power. Twitter is the best mechanism for it we have yet devised. It’s a Reciprocal Knowledge Engine.

8. A Reciprocal Knowledge Engine is key to enabling us to scan the future, as the future is coming in faster every day.

9. Every corporation and government can use Twitter to engage one-on-one with customers, prospects, and citizens. Forget focus groups and traditional market research. And turn elections from 2-yearly, 4-yearly events into continuous engagement.

10. Twitter opens the organizational boundary of the corporation. We now have two-way communication – the key to transformation in every institution, as the values of customers and employees sync – and customer needs reshape corporate culture.

Tech and Corporate Culture: #social #DC #Gov2.0

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Two great posts today – an interview with the “federal CTO” and a book review in Atlantic – come to a neat focus: the core problem of corporate culture, in government and business. I’ve written about it before, and I shall again. We have not quite exhausted the issue. For now, a brief comment, and a suggestion that you read these two pieces in parallel, one with each eye, and see what you see.

The book is about how our elites are failing us. Part of its argument resembles mine yesterday on the problems of the “expert” and an expertise too narrow to bring with it judgment or innovative capacities. Part is more focused, and like the reviewer Conor Friedersdorf I am more taken with his summary of the analysis than with the solutions proposed by the writer. But the book looks well worth a read, and I plan to add it to my list.

The interview draws my attention to one of the deep problems of Washington – that its assemblage of thousands of smart, hard-working people seems increasingly inadequate to the task of leading the world’s most advanced civilization through fast and cumulative change. My point is entirely bipartisan. I was interested that the panel I moderated at the Tech Policy Summit last week in Napa agreed that whoever wins the upcoming election will not make much difference to the tech/innovation agenda. There’s no question that the current administration has taken many steps in the “right” direction, including the CTO/CIO appointments. Yet (read the interview) these smart people have little strategic impact. They are some way down the totem pole. The brief campaign suggestion (did I imagine this?) of a CTO in the cabinet did not go far. (Fyi, I have argued for “under-secretaries for the future” in every department and agency; a new White House Council along the lines of NEC, NSC, DPC; and the inclusion in cabinet of the science adviser as well as these two C guys. Still waiting for a call asking me to fill in the details so the executive orders can be drawn up just right.)

Point is, and this needs to be shouted from the roofs and stuck on every bumper, DC’s core problem is a corporate culture problem. It is, as it were, the ultimate old-economy corporation, with guaranteed revenues, tenure for most of its operatives, and the most elegant blinkers that elegant minds can design.

This is where the power of “social” to transform institutional culture is potentially vast, since it opens the doors to fresh and powerful forces that will if unimpeded force the (re)alignment of the organization with its customer/citizen base. We tend to call this “social” when it comes to biz, and “Gov2.0/3.0” when it comes to democracy and its systems of governance. Point is: This is the strategic rather than the tactical significance of social media. It’s a huge challenge to take this in, especially as so many of the leaders in government and biz are, ahem, decidedly old-economy in their thinking. And talk is not enough. I keep referring to the bizarre fact that hardly any of our top 250 corporate CIOs use key social media (Google Mark Fidelman’s HBR piece or search this blog for my discussion of it). Here’s another (sorry, enthusiasts for the present administration). In a revealing speech in 2010, the President shared the fact that he does “not know how to work” the iPod, iPad, XBox, or PlayStation – the whole speech is worth reading for the decidedly negative context in which these technologies are viewed. Point here is simply this: Like the aforementioned CIOs, the President hires good people and tells them, at a certain level, to get on with it. Until corporate culture fundamentally shifts, that is going to make only a tactical difference. Strategic shift is awaited and will depend on two things: The appointment of leaders at the highest levels who are intuitively in sync with radical innovative approaches and can lead from the top; and the co-ordinate opening of the organizational boundaries to unstoppable pressures from the customer/citizen base.

There is much more to be said, not least in that the mitigation of the ill-effects that can also flow from these technologies (from uber-surveillance to killer drones to job destruction to fundamental dehumanization) will only ever be addressed in the context of an embrace of the pace and scope of change that is implied in the Moore’s law-driven digital revolution.

The Obama speech:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hcoyG-Ck3-VwZB7fqpUFXbffoObg

Atlantic book review:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/why-our-elites-are-failing-us-and-how-to-fix-it/258492/

CNN Interview with the US CTO:

Obama’s chief tech officer: Let’s unleash ingenuity of the public – CNN.com.

The Real Point about Social: Value and the Culture of the Organization

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It’s unfortunate that I wasn’t able to be in Milan last week for the Social Business Forum. Aside from the fact that any reason to be in Italy is a good one, the Forum brought together some of the most illustrious names in the social space together with major corporate players. See the valuable links below.

Reports from the Forum plus my own participation in SOBCon in Chicago a few weeks ago and last week’s Tech Policy Summit in Napa have focused my thinking on the question of “corporate culture.” It’s a term we use lightly though we know its import is huge. Many are the mergers that have failed for lack of matching cultures. Culture is an extraordinarily difficult thing to shift. It is difficult enough even to define. For a terrific book-length exploration, see my friend Naomi Stanford’s Corporate Culture: Getting it Right (published by The Economist). For the moment, a simpler reflection.

Let’s look at the two core aspects of the digital age in which we are working.

1. Change, innovation, Moore’s Law – the marks of products, markets, and the context for both are shifting; in many cases quickly, and in all cases faster than they have ever before. The more digital the effort, the faster the actual or potential change. We know this well. We forget it every day. It is more important, more disruptive, more full of potential value, than almost anyone has realized. Only by looking back will you see.

But the same tech revolution is bringing us answers.

2. The disruption of communications, marketing, sales, all aspects of the company’s interface with the wider world (and B2B as much as B2C, though that is not much grasped) is also the corrective. For the business significance of social is to open the steel barriers that we have erected around the organizational boundary to enable coming and going with that party for whom the entire enterprise exists: the customer. Not the customer as defined by marketing departments and product designers, by focus groups the kind of polling that still leaves most new launches a failure, but the actual customer, the end-user of the fruit of the business effort, that living, breathing, tweeting, Facebooking, always changing, creature in whose hands lies the power of success and disaster.

Social marketing has recognized this, even though it is in its infancy and we keep reading bizarrely unworldly statistics – like only 10% of CIOs are on Twitter, or the average Facebook page is only change twice a month, or 69% of B2B companies have no systematic way of tracking the gold dust which is social feedback (I’ve blogged about each of these; go search if you are interested). Point is, we are ambling along toward a social understanding of marketing and customer relations. We have hardly even noticed that the key to revamping corporate culture – the value holy grail in the context of disruptive change – lies also exactly here. For what social has begun to do is connect corporate culture with the culture of the market. And it is precisely in the alignment of those two that there lies competitive advantage.

http://www.socialbusinessforum.com/

http://www.socialfish.org/2012/06/can-social-business-reshape-the-organization.html

What social business is. And isn’t. | johnstepper.