Extended social media strategies (or is it “social business design”?)

I am currently preparing two in-house social media workshops (both will be borrowing heavily from the Enterprise 2.0 playbook as well). While one will lean a bit onto social media monitoring, the other one will focus on using social media instruments for internal knowledge dissemination in yet to be formed professional social networks.

Now, I am trying to pursue an open ended and flexible approach to both talks and was thus looking around for some nifty visualizations to provide some additional structuring without being too restrictive (yes, I was shortly pondering the use of wordles too) . Honestly, there are a lot of nice looking social media whatever visualizations – including David Armano’s take on social business design which I bookmarked then and which served me as kind of starting point:

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Basically it’s a visualization that guides us onto good questions, and a lot of room for improvisation in an adaptive workshop setting too: What would businesses be like if they were truly social?:

Imagine if a company like GM, was at the core “social”. Not just participating in “social media”—but through every part of their business ecosystem, were connected—plugged into a collective consciousness made up of ALL their constituents, from employees to consumers to dealers, to assembly line work[er]s etc. What if big organizations worked the way individuals now do. We’re actively using cloud services, mobile, networks and applications that offer real time dynamic signals vs. inefficient and static e-mail exchanges. In short, imagine if what makes “Web.2.0″ revolutionary was applied to every facet of an organization transforming how we work, collaborate and communicate? We think this is possible. And we’re calling it “social business design“.

I really like that approach, for one it’s probably one small step closer to some kind of nice and “easy as it gets to explain” consultancy “products” (probably neede for the Enterprise 2.0 field to flourish, see comments #2 and#4 at the link, alas german language), second it’s incorporating a good part of the fuzzy social stuff we all know is important into the concept, while not talking tools:

[there are four] archetypes of Social Business Design:

Ecosystem – a community of connections
Hivemind – the socially calibrated mindset of individuals
Dynamic Signal – the constant multi-faceted means of collaboration
Metafilter– a method of finding signals in vast amounts of noise

Think informal social networks and their role for the real workings of organizations. Or think of the importance of “social capital”. So while some differentiation and clarification is still necessary, this may be an interesting social media (implementation) heuristic (aka “consultant’s product”).

OK, for posts on the concept see these interrelated posts (this seems to be the Dachis team together with David and Jeff Dachis, of course):

# Peter Kim: Reflections on Social Business
# Jevon MacDonald: Taking the Leap: Social Business Design

Peter Kim: Reflections on Social Business
Kate Niederhoffer: Social Business Design: a social psychologist’s take
Jevon MacDonald: Taking the Leap: Social Business Design

Especially Jevon is expanding on the intricate tasks that arise when companies become more (inter-)active, ie. matters of organization. Lately he’s been posting Understanding the role of Enterprise 2.0 and moving towards a Social Business and then Social Business Design and the Real Time Enterprise (now I get the underlying pattern behind all those scattered posts, Jevon – all the best for the dachis team).

upLIFTing conference videos – being an innovative traditionalist and ideas on changing innovation

What makes conferences special? Is it the athmosphere, is it people, is it food? Is it after-conference provision of videos or blog posts?

Well, even when I say that it’s easier to scan through blog posts after conferences sometimes having video content available is just cool. TED is in fact offering many cases in point (and I am waiting for the idea of organized TED video screenings to take off), reboot videos are probably a good example too. Then there’s the LIFT conference, a

[…] series of events built around a community of pioneers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social implications of new technologies. Each conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.”

Some of the talks are free to see, like the one from John Thackara on Changing the Planet:

[…] gives a provocative talk about the role of design in finding solutions to the ecological crisis. After inviting us to avoid terms such as “future” or “sustainable” as they maintain a certain distance to the problem we face, he shows a rich set of projects he participated in. He makes the important point that the resources to be put in place already exist and that they might not necessitate complex technological developments.

And there’s also Bruce Sterling, who talks about the “Internet of things”:

[if it was] just about adding chips, antennas and interactivity to the things we own, it would be no big deal. Discover a wholly different perspective: Open, unfinished objects which can be transformed and reprogrammed by their users; Objects that document their own components, history, lifecycle; Sensitive and noisy objects that capture, process, mix and publish information. Discover an Internet of Things which intends to transform the industrial world as deeply as the current Internet transformed the world of communication and media.

From an collaboration (or shall I say organizational structures and design, or even more cheekily, Enterprise 2.0) point of view this little talk by Lee Bryant is most interesting, take 5 minutes of your time and see if you’re a traditionalist like him:

Equally interesting (but with no video to be checked out so far) are the talks by Marc Giget (Cnam) and Catherine Fieschi, Counterpoint/British Council on Changing Innovation:
First one on the end of IT (#yesyesyes), where Euan Semple got involved obviously (as living and walking proof for “Social computing for the business world”), second one on “Innovating with the non-innovators”:

  • Today, corporate information systems are innovation’s worst enemies. They set organizations and processes in stone. They restrict the enterprise’s horizons and its networks. They distort its view of the world. But ferments of change emerge. Meet those who breathe new air into current organizations, those who design tomorrow’s Innovation Systems.
  • Innovating used to be a job in itself. It has become a decentralized procès which includes, in no particular order, researchers, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, activists, and users who reinvent the products they were supposed to consume. Why is that important? What does it really change? And where will it stop? WILL it stop somewhere?

I think that both points are of interest to Enterprise 2.0 practitioners (who are – when they understand their job right – designing tomorrow’s IT systems, err, innovation systems), while catering for both the needs of their corporate users and allowing for the freeform emergence of user-contributed solutions. And yes, it’s funny in a way that “old and basic” tools like wikis excel at both of these tasks …

Upcoming: Enterprise 2.0 Luncheon und WikiWednesdayStuttgart

Short english summary: I am announcing two community events at Stuttgart, both on July 15. Enterprise 2.0 Luncheon is a freeform meet-up of Enterprise 2.0 people, WikiWednesday a more wiki-focussed get-together of wiki enthusiasts (and consultants I dare say).  I want anyone to be able to contribute, so if you’re having ideas/suggestions/complaints go ahead.

Wiki Wednesday Stuttgart

Nächste Woche findet der siebte WikiWednesday Stuttgart statt, nach einer ausgedehnten Pause ist es wieder an der Zeit. Und nachdem sich der Stuttgarter Webmontag noch etwas verzögert ist das vielleicht eine gute Gelegenheit für ein informelles Treffen der #0711 2.0 Szene (gleichzeitig verweise ich gerne auf den ersten Ludwigsburger Webmontag am 27. Juli).

Wie immer wäre eine Anmeldung im Wiki prima. Zwar sind die Räume der MFG Innovationsagentur recht groß, aber für die Übersicht und ein eventuelles Getränkesponsoring wäre es schon besser …

Am gleichen Tag findet zudem der Enterprise 2.0 Luncheon statt:

Mit dem “Enterprise 2.0 Community Luncheon” bietet Kongress Media ein neues Networking-Event zum Thema “Enterprise 2.0”. In ungezwungener Atmosphäre treffen sich dabei Enterprise 2.0 Praktiker zum Lunch und tauschen sich über ihre Erfahrungen aus.

Ich organisiere das Event in meiner Rolle als Communitymanager für den Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT (und Mitblogger bei enterprise2open)- Anmeldung idealerweise via der Enterprise 2.0 Gruppe bei Xing (hier der direkte Link zum Event).

Here comes everybody – true on many accounts

Steve Cunningham is summarizing books via video, nicely produced as he’s using a mixture of visualizations and “key point”-slides. And he’s asking his followers on Twitter which book he should tackle next, cool.

Here he’s reviewing Clay Shirky’s “Here comes Everybody” (btw, he claims to not being related with Ward Cunningham):

Nice blurb too:

Question it answers: Why we are going through the biggest change in how we communicate the world has ever seen.

Why you should care: Most books on “new media” focus on the what. This is the only book truly dedicated to the why.

Oh and btw, you may enter into my writings on Shirky and more videos via this post: Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

reboot11 – recapping day 2 and wrapping it all up

Time for a wrap-up, huh? Blogged about day 1 here, now onto the remainders, which included favourite talks by Lee Bryant, Euan Semple, JP Rangaswamy, Stowe Boyd and Bruce Sterling (interview here).

And with favouriote speakers on stage I am a bit hesitating to see it like Anders who writes:

[…] the slightly holier-than-thou tech-savvy social media web crowd in the hall. And the ribbing was needed, in my opinion, since the first keynotes of the day – Lee Bryant and Evan Semple – had been gagfests of we-know-what-it-is-about-and-they-do-not-comments on enterprises and old media, entertaining and insightful though they were.

I don’t think this was only for the converted, the smart guys who get it – talks like these provide us with inspiration and things to think about. Granted, from the outside “cyberutopianism and activism” look very much like a sick insider’s joke, yet it’s more mainstream than one assumes at first. The changes are underway, both in social media as whole and in the enterprise.  And the topics of this year’s reboot are probably more mainstream than we realize, like we can see e.g. in the race for the colonization of social media. As Stowe Boyd demands:

[…] we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

So reboot11 was a success in my mind – giving us stories and storylines (or shall we say a Reboot mythology) to proceed. And some nifty action projects like the solar bike went live too (the rebike in fact turned out to offer better wifi than the regular reboot one, watch the video …). After all you can’t fit everything into two days, sometimes you just have to be content with what you’ve got, it’s like Casper says:

[…] a lot of friendly people and generally the conference went beyond my expectations for a reasonably small tech (not in the real sense anyways) get-together as this was. I hope to join next year as well.

To close, my short video interview with Ton Zijlstra, talking about what makes reboot so special (and yes, some systems work best when they’re not stable):

ps. reboot presentations get collected on slideshare, tagged with ‘reboot11’ and then probably added to the reboot group on slideshare

Dinner talk with Dion Hinchcliffe

Another addition to the video section – here’s the recording of the dinner talk with Dion Hinchcliffe we arranged at CeBIT in preparation of the E20SUMMIT (so I will crosspost this at the Enterprise2Open blog as well). You can see me sitting in the back, listening in on closely to what Dion says (although I met him already at the hotel and accompanied him to the restaurant, chatting) – this was an intimate setting and lots of good questions got asked. Sound quality isn’t that good (and you can hear the restaurant staff shuffling around) but Dion is coming across quite clearly:

Elephants can dance

While I wasn’t in Boston for the e2conf I tuned into some of the live-streamed keynotes and monitored the backchannel on Twitter as good as possible. Plus there are some videos coming up, like this one from the Democamp arena, where David Berlind is talking with IBMs Suzanne Minassian about the capabilities of the new Lotus Connections (he’s opening his questions in a kind of stingy way, claiming cheekily that IBM is just a dodgy software company, hehe, this isn’t the IBM I know and Suzanne stays calm and makes the best of his rhetorical opening for sure …):

I also had the good luck to listen into the stream when BAH’s Walton Smith was talking about their hello.bah.com effort – they won the Open Enterprise Innovation award this year. So who says elephants can’t dance? Even large and mature companies can innovate with new ways to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge. Steven Walling compiles five lessons to learn from them at ReadWriteWeb:

1. Empower Evangelists
2. Draw on Past Experience
3. Know Thyself
4. Create a One-stop Shop
5. Just Solve Problems for People