Monkeys with typewriters

David Terrar recently argued that social media consultants should drop the "social business" moniker and start using "amplified business" instead. His reasoning was that the term "social business" has become too ingrained in people's minds with "social enterprise" and not "social media".

While I'm sure a lot of you will be thinking "Well, what's the difference there, anyway?!", here's the comment I posted on David's blog in response:

This is an important debate. The problem is, it’s all too easy to get bogged down in technology again. You say the common perception of “social business” doesn’t involve “micro-blogging, collaboration and social media monitoring”.

But, as I’m sure you constantly tell clients: micro-blogging and social media monitoring (as with any other aspect of the social media toolkit) are not ends in themselves, they are simply the means to an end.

And if the social media consultants’ version of social business is NOT about technology, but about people (as I think you agree), then we need to focus on what exactly it is that the people (our clients) are trying to achieve.

Okay, I agree it’s possible that a client may work for Mr.Evil Inc. In which case, his/ her goals will be along those lines familiar to any James Bond fan: world domination, unrestricted access to global resources and endless pots of money for Mr.Evil.

But, to give them their due, most modern organisations are at least trying to shake off this sort of image. If today’s businesses do not actually have a social conscience, philanthropic goals and ethical conduct, they are, at least, pretending to (some more convincingly than others).

Ironically, the number one tool for putting an ethical gloss on business is social media, but any company that’s become tarred by social media appreciates that its pretty much impossible to preach humane values without practicing them.

As I wrote on this blog a few months back, the wheel has come full circle. To my mind, social business (as social media consultants define it) and social business (as social entrepreneurs see it), are two sides of the same coin. They are both about putting people first. And ethical and environmental concerns are fundamental to any people-centric approach.

By the way, as King Cnut (or Canute) himself knew, it’s never easy to reverse a wave. As O’Reilly’s Josh Ross wrote a while back: railing against the popular lexicon is always a losing bet.

Having said all that, please keep me posted on the Amplified Enterprise meetup – I’d love to have a further rant!

Big thanks to James Yu for the photo.

It’s a bright sunny day outside (this is the view) and JP Rangaswami (Salesforce.com) is up on stage speaking at the Social Business Summmit (London) 2011. This is bound to be good because JP always talks with visionary zeal:

09.15: (JP) It’s ridiculous that we have to say “social business” because surely all businesses  are “social”? Businesses have been social long before the last few decades of mono-directional, broadcast messages, the age of advertising.

Until recently, people have been told they can’t have a loan, for example, because the system says no (not the individual dealing with them). That’s because of the way our businesses have been built.

We are seeing a change in the way we work: Ricardo Semler’s “Maverick”, John Roberts “The Modern Firm”, were published 30 years ago. We are seeing changes in how we account for the interactions we have with customers.

This firm which used to be hierarchical is morphing into a network of relationships. If you cannot value something you’re not able to move it onto a balance sheet: we must be able to measure capability and relationship in some way.

We’ve been talking for some time about the fact that, after the agricultural and industrial ages, we are now in the Information Age. In the industrial age, we could build many processes that were linear, and we could build pipes for the work processes, and we could predict what was going to happen.

09.30: Why do we want to increase our fixed costs? Because that’s what we do by filling our day with meetings. But workers are changing (Millennial generation) and tools are changing.

The thing is, change is a constant, the exiting of the graphical user interface, and the use of touch, is happening at almost the speed of light. The child expects the screen to talk back. And touch will be augmented with voice. I was at a google zeitgeist last year and I was amazed to see how much I could do just using my eyes: it’s not commercially viable yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

We are moving from process to pattern. We’re spending more time dealing with the exception than we’re dealing with the rule. We need to build systems that allow us to identify patterns, that enable us to have a wider and wider group of people say, I’ve seen that movie before, I know how that book ends, and stop focusing on the repeatablitly and start focusing on which pattern is this pattern nearest to, and how should I respond. Start capturing things that do not work, because you can embed them in your learning, and revisit them later. It is not failing, it’s an opportunity to learn.

When I hear about people building seed banks 60m below the ice in Sweden, I used to think, but how about survival of the fittest, but then I realised that human beings are accelerating damage to the environment and we need to start having a steward-like approach, but it may come too late: some species may have been killed off during that time when we created an artificial environment.

We need to start looking at failure as a way of future-proofing.

09.45: Kids are pretty smart about privacy. But their privacy is a lot more granular: my kids are friending me, but they are inviting me to sleep in the guestroom – they don’t expect me to go up into their bedroom and start rifling through their drawers. Stop trying to automate things that are essentially social.

Their concept of ownership is different. Kids are into sharing stuff much more than us.

In India, if you’re living 7,8,10 to a house, what does it mean to have privacy?

Linear vs non-linear: I think of work very much like a video game. I came into Salesforce.com and spent a bit of time in the sandbox. And learnt about the rules of engagement of the game. Then I went looking for missions I could actually do. Every organisation is a video game today. Gamification is starting to enter everything: you can win badges (for example). We are getting back to grips with something we have lost for 50 or 60 years.

Next up, David Richard Hare from BAT. 

For a couple of years now there's been a social business debate, led by the likes of Stowe Boyd and Andrew McAfee, which has focused on the distinction between "social business" and "Enterprise 2.0".

The discussion has inevitably been skewed to the technology side of things. But as Stowe (and any other social media consultant worth their salt) will tell you, social business is, first and foremost, about people.

I’ve been meaning to write on this for a while now but keep getting sidetracked. The question banging on in my mind has been: how does the "social enterprise" fit in to all of this?

Last Monday night, there I was again sitting in an audience (this time at the RSA, during the latest in their fabulous free lecture series), listening to yet another speaker bang  on about “social business” but not meaning anything at all, no, not in the slightest bit, related to software.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Because over on this side of the debate, we have a completely different definition of social business:

“A cause-driven business.” (Muhammad Yunus)

“A non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective.” (Wikipedia)

“A business that integrates two objectives: a commercial objective – to achieve and increase profits and realise growth (like any traditional business) and a social (and ethical and environmental)objective.” (ClearlySo)

On his blog, Andrew McAfee argued that the likes of Douglas McGregor and Chris Argyris have been proposing “social business” for decades. I'd say the wheel has come full circle:

Through new C21st social tools, we now have the ability to realise the C20th vision of a truly social organisation, one that puts people at the centre of everything it does. In the C21st (with all that we now know), we would be foolhardy not to appreciate that ethical and environmental concerns lie at the very heart of any people-centric approach.

This is the basis of a broadbrush, holistic definition of social business that I think we desperately need.

Photo: Matt Burns

A friend of mine has set up a new business. It’s a modest operation at present and he’s the only employee. Should he create a new Twitter identity specifically for the business or should he switch the direction of his existing personal Twitter account?

My advice: stick to the identity you've got. Key reasons:

1. Time. It's going to take twice as much out of your day to manage two (or more) accounts - coming up with "original content" for second (or even third and fourth) feeds can be taxing ;)

2. If your business identity is closely aligned with your personality and values (as, in this day and age, it should) then you might as well be one and the same account, rather than "pretend" to be two completely separate identities.

3. If you'd like your business account to be along the lines of friendly, irreverent, informal but useful (and you'd be living in the last century if you didn't), then you might as well keep it as the (hopefully) loveable person you already are, rather than struggling to find an informal "voice" as a non-human entity.

4. Yes, you may well loose some followers if you bang on about your business, but if your followers generally like you and you inject a reasonable amount of humour into things, any you loose will be those of least value to you.

5. If you want to be transparent and open in your business (as we all do, right?), then Tweeting as your self rather than a third party really makes the most sense.

Photo credit: Saaam

Bronin Bough from PepsiCo talks about how social media has transformed the way his company thinks (not only individuals). PepsiCo's new mission is to do more good in the world (yes, really)!

Bronin was speaking at Social Media Influence 2010. See the live blog report (over on iKnowHow) for details of his talk (plus the low-down on many other speakers at the conference).

The other presentation that inspired me at The Web and Beyond was by Josephine Green. Her proposal is simple: we are moving from an age dominated by pyramids to one made up of pancakes.

I read Doug Rushkoff’s Cyberia back in 1992 and loved it. Rushkoff is great at weaving a load of cultural trends together and coming up with a seductive bigger picture. In the early 1990s it was cyber-culture, house music and “smart” drugs; today he’s moved on to business, post-capitalism and social media.

These are my notes from his talk at the Social Business Summit in Austin (Texas) last month. Rushkoff begins with a gentle ramble about Feudalism and the Middle Ages and then moves on to a humourous deconstruction of everything that’s wrong with a classic, textbook business today. A compelling argument (even if you don't agree with everything he says)! 

1. In the late Middle Ages, people had lived under feudalism for 100s of years; people began trading using their own currencies; trade boomed; towns got so rich, people started building cathedrals just to have somewhere to store their wealth.
2. This was a problem for the aristocracy; they wanted to continue making money from being rich and doing nothing. So they outlawed local currencies. They said you have to use centralized currency – you have to borrow our money in order to do business and pay it back with interest: this was Centralised Banking: the “coin of the realm”.
3. The second thing the aristocracy came up with was centralized monopolies: they approached businesses and said I’ll give you a license to be the only business in this market if you pay me 10-20 per cent. If you are a monopoly, your only purpose is to extract the most value from what you do. This was really bad for specialization and skill because if a factory owner wants to make more money, and s/he has a monopoly, then s/he is only interested in hiring [expendable] labour at the lowest possible cost.
4. So, the industrial age was not necessarily about doing things better, it was about doing things more efficiently in a very particular type of economy.
5. Mass media/ advertising/ marketing was all about promoting brand images (eg, the quaker from Quaker Oats) that become more powerful than the images/ stories of the craftspeople next door. It was a commodified relationship. This is not evil. It’s just the way things went.
6. Once you de-socialise in one area of your life, you start de-socialising in others (because you’re embarrassed to go to the local PTA with the lady who runs the local pharmacy because you’ve stopped buying your drugs from her and now buy them from Walmart). All this is dehumanizing. And competencies decrease because the branding is the only differentiator (“Oh, we buy these [Keebler] cookies because they’re made by elves”).
7. Go to Harvard Business School and they’re still teaching the Jack Welch style of business which is basic Renaissance Corporatism: take everything you actually do and understand that if you’re actually doing something you’re not making as much money as you would if you sold that off and got up a level closer to the bank. Anyone who’s actually working? That’s inefficient. Welch looked at GE and said “Let’s sell off anyone who’s actually doing something. So we can get away from this manufacturing of stuff and materials and competencies. Let’s become capital. Let’s become the bank, because the whole game was built for the bank”.
8. The net broke this. The net killed brands by leading to a non-fiction media space. It allowed people to deconstruct brands from the images. Keebler is no longer elves. It’s a place where people make cookies. The net broke the oligarchy-led, bank-driven, economic growth model. You don’t need massive infusions of centralized cash to run a business. That’s what happened with the crash. The banks needed somewhere to put their money. They tried dotcoms and they didn’t need all that money – so they put it into real estate – and look what happened!
9. Facebook is a brilliant exercise in “How far can I reduce people’s sense of who they are to a consumer profile?” We went from wacky web pages to Myspace (which is kind of modular web pages) to radio buttons (Facebook), which is “I’m straight and married”. But real “social” is not about marketing. It’s about re-connecting the people who actually care about the industry you think you’re in. Reconnecting consumers to fans to employees to management to shareholders to partners.
10. Your competitors are no longer your competitors in a social media space. They are fellow stakeholders in the industry that you all care about: the thing that you do. Imagine you’re in the lemonade industy: you don’t care if he came up with a better lemonade idea – that’s great! You can use it too. Here’s my idea: let’s talk! The distinctions don’t matter when the thing you do is the thing that you do.
11. Most people still don’t do the thing they do. They outsource the thing to someone else and do the banking and marketing of it. They don’t do the thing. If you don’t do the thing that you do, do not get involved in social media. It will kill you. You want to be transparent? Then there has to be something inside. You can’t be social, you can’t become transparent if you’re just going to show that you’re a bunch of paper pushers using some Chinese outsourced something.
12. Moving into social means becoming dedicated to the expertise, the culture and the intelligence of whatever your sector is. You don’t have a chartered monopoly any more so your competitive advantage is going to be actually tied into your ability. And the good news is we’re finally in an environment when your ability can be communicated directly. That is the new story for a social media area. It’s not about the elves. For Kentucky Fried Chicken it’s the chicken crust, it’s not Colonel Saunders. It’s your nerds, your R and D, your bizarre, passionate geeks. And the management is there to protect those people. And your most ardent fans are the people trying to get to work in your company.
13. Instead of being an advertiser led/ brand challenge, it’s a different kind of communications challenge: it’s applied memetics: what do people hear when you talk about the thing you do. It’s truthful. It’s not fantasy. But your truth has got to be good. Use social to message the truth.
14. Most companies are still afraid of it (social media) because there’s this sense that they don’t actually do anything. If you want to introduce social media within a company, first you’ve got to convince management that what they’re doing is actually good. Or (and this is harder), if they don’t already do anything then you actually have to get them to do something good.
15. We are no longer in the universe of messaging and marketing, we are in the universe of doing.

I like the analogy from Mark Raskino at Gartner who says that we should compare organisational IT to gardening - rather than architecture or engineering (both of which suggest some kind of permanence and rigidity).

“IT won’t remain orderly,” says Raskino, quoted in the Financial Times. “Architecture gives you one insight but if you leave IT it gets out of shape very fast. It is more an organic thing that needs constant renewal and refresh.”

And tender loving care, of course. 

The same FT article talks about a "guerilla" approach from PA consulting whereby teams are parachuted into companies work on specific IT issues - but won't touch a problem if they think it'll take more than three months to solve.

Ah yes, guerilla gardening.

That reminds me of a great post I read a while back which likens guerilla gardening projects to the hackability and open source movements. I love this idea and wanted to incorporate it into Monkeys but time constraints got the better of me.

There's always this blog, though :)

Yesterday I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion on the future of business ecosystems at the SOMESSO/ Headshift Social Media Summit in London.

The summit had a brave, experimental format. The day kicked off with just two slide-free keynotes (Jeff Dachis and JP Rangaswami) - intended to inspire and set the scene for the hard work to come!

After a quick cup of coffee, the 100 or so delegates split into three streams or discussion groups: internal, external and “ecosystem”. The idea was to discuss, analyse and build upon a handful of social business case studies, the case studies representing breakthroughs in either internal communications, external communications/ marketing or a hybrid of both (ie: ecosystem).

Sounds simple enough, right? Heh. That’s before you start deconstructing.

I was excited about the ecosystem concept because I talk about it a lot in Monkeys, essentially in terms of asking what happens when you compare the business world to a biological ecosystem, ala Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien in The Keystone Advantage.

Needless to say, “ecosystem” turned out to be a rather troublesome, hard-to-define and contentious heading. As the third and most “hybrid” of the three streams it was inferred that we should come up with approaches which integrated internal and external comms in some way, however the end result was more “other”.

While some of our group preferred to look at ecosystem in terms of supply chain, others wanted to focus on social entrepreneurship and environmental impact. Then there was me, stuck with the image of some kind of galactic aquarium.

I’ll post a fuller summary of our discussion, with key points, over on the [longer format] iKnowHow blog next week.

Photo credit: Carol Sawada