Social Business Design: Birth of a New Industry
New industry sectors coalesce and crystallize as a result of a number of factors converging.
In the case of Social Business Design this is an area that has been bubbling under for about 18 months with a range of different tags, such as Enterprise 2.0, but it never really gelled together. There were differences of opinion on who the market was, how to approach it and what exactly did it constitute. Was it simply setting up a corporate blog, an internal wiki and a customer forum or was there more to this area?
Charlene Li’s book Groundswell went a long way towards gathering impetus behind this new industry sector, but still the gel wasn’t quite there. When she left Forrester and set up the Altimeter Group people took notice, but their attention wasn’t galvanized.
And then Jeremiah Oywang left Forrester as well and joined Charlene. People started to sit up and really take notice – they were primed for something to happen. Around about the same time David Armano, an exec with the Dachis Group gave a presentation at the Social Fresh conference titled Social Business by Design. The industry now had a moniker to focus around.
The key inflection point though came last week when Dachis acquired Headshift. Much has already been written about this and most industry commentators will agree with the following tweet from @amayfield:
Headshift/Dachis is massively significant. Not marketing…this is a new sector shaping up: social business.
The Social Business Design meme is now starting to spread rapidly courtesy of one of the classic tenets of this industry: sharing. David Armano had placed his deck of slides on Slideshare two weeks ago. It has since been featured on Slideshare’s new “hot on Twitter” section and is gaining a lot more viewers.
This depth of attention around the topic is rapidly turning to more widespread adoption of the term, both by potential industry practitioners and by their potential clients. An industry is born.
What is Social Business Design?
Anne McCrossan has delivered a cogent summary of this arena:
Social business design sits at the intersection of organizational development and marketing, and can loosely be described as the practice of developing communities of engagement to develop ideas, activities and outputs for commercial and social benefit.
As organizations adopt the principles of social business design, intangible, soft assets like brand value, purpose, human resources, processes and capabilities come to the fore. Social business design is about engendering involvement and it’s inbound.
Slightly differently, marketing services and ‘broadcast’ media operate on the basis the message and transaction are the means to the end. Marketing services communicate primarily outbound.
Her entire post is pure gold and I highly recommend anyone who has read this far to jump over to her site and continue reading.
You will be hearing a lot more on the topic of Social Business Design and I will aim to synthesise and analyze as much of it as I can.
ADDED: Gaurav Mishra has posted a comprehensive summary of this burgeoning space and I wanted to point to his thoughts as they complement the thread in this post.
The key take out, for me, from his comments are that both Altimeter and Dachis focus on using emerging social technologies for transforming businesses, instead of merely reaching out to customers.
This is a salient point. As the social technologies shift, so can the emphasis that an agency puts in those technologies. For example, Augmented Reality is still in its early infancy as a technology and a few years out from being of use within the enterprise. However, when it does mature as a technology it will have an immense impact, until then it is on all of our watchlists, but it’s not worth confusing clients with until it matures somewhat.
September 10th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
As I noted regarding social business design back in May,
“The common goal of the discussion involves transforming business practices to incorporate social relationships into the value proposition to customers and other stakeholders.”
[Reply]
September 11th, 2009 at 9:04 am
[...] article titled; Social Business Design; Birth of a New Industry raised several great points off the back of the recent waves created by the acquisition of [...]
September 11th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Rand…great timely post! I read this, and think it sounds all too familiar? The opportunity now is to consolidate the wonderful technologies we have at our disposal, and capture the sentiment that exists around the need for a more ‘social business’ – and there could be some magic!
[Reply]
September 11th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
I totally agree that social business design represents new opportunities and calls for new approaches, to design, business strategies, and more. Specific to design, a holistic approach that accounts for conversations and interactions online and which starts from users not from brand is IMHO the way to go.
thanks for this!
adrian
[Reply]
September 12th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
[...] just read metarand’s article about Social Business Design. It reflects Anne McCrossan’s article Re-turning the returns which assumes that a new [...]
September 13th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
[...] idea would be more stable if the social was implied. Why go through the hassle of establishing a whole new industry? From what I’ve been reading it seems a lot like consulting. The differences can only be [...]
September 14th, 2009 at 9:02 am
[...] Social Business Design: Birth of a New Industry [...]
September 16th, 2009 at 1:56 am
[...] cheapen Jeff’s presentation by trying to rephrase it. Instead I will point you to a post at metrand and a Slideshare presentation by David Armano (Jeff’s associate) is [...]
September 16th, 2009 at 10:44 am
[...] Leeb du-Toit went a long way to explaining what Social Business Design is in his piece “Social Business Design: Birth of a New Industry?” – and to paraphrase Anne McCrossan; Social business design sits at the intersection of [...]
September 17th, 2009 at 6:27 am
[...] I strongly applaud the team at Dachis Group for coining the term and providing a rallying cry for a whole industry [software suites, authors, consultants, etc.] of folks that will contribute to transforming [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 3:09 am
[...] Leeb-du Toit went a long way to explaining what Social Business Design is in his piece “Social Business Design: Birth of a New Industry?” – and to paraphrase Anne [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 3:11 am
[...] article titled; Social Business Design; Birth of a New Industry raised several great points off the back of the recent waves created by theacquisition [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Steven Keith has been at the forefront of “Social Business Design” for the last 5 years. You should check him out…http://antigency.com/ His analogy “Innocultating companies against inaction, irrelevance, inflexibility and instability.” is interesting in itself.
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September 20th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I think that for social business design to really take off we are going to need a new brand of professional with the right blend of skills.
I still feel that many businesses – and I am referring here to big businesses – have not embraced as yet the new social media realities and continue to use the social media as just another means to monologue.
We need a thorough transformation of the western PR, marketing and corporate communications ethos for the social media to flourish. In that sense, I envisage social business design as a pioneering but prone to be misunderstood effort.
[Reply]
September 20th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
[...] The Dachis Group coined the phrase “social business design” David Armano from Dachis has presented some thought provoking presentation son the subject; (and rocketed to the most favorited on Slideshare with this presentation), Rand Leeb-du Toit has weighed in with a timely article called “Social Business Design: birth of a New Industry?” [...]
September 20th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
[...] The Dachis Group coined the phrase “social business design” David Armano from Dachis has presented some thought provoking presentation son the subject; (and rocketed to the most favorited on Slideshare with this presentation), Rand Leeb-du Toit has weighed in with a timely article called “Social Business Design: birth of a New Industry?” [...]
September 21st, 2009 at 4:42 pm
[...] Design“, i David Armano iz ove kompanije detaljnije objašnjava zna?enje ove fraze, i nova industrija (privredna grana) je ro?ena. Istovremeno se pojavljuje i fraza Social Business Strategy, koja prakti?no definiše istu pojavu [...]
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 pm
[...] twitter buzz yesterday was about two posts by Stowe Boyd and Randal (Rand) Leeb-du Toit advocating Social Business as terms for Enterprise 2.0, along with the launches of new consulting [...]
September 25th, 2009 at 12:36 am
A work-flow for social business design: Human interaction and commitment management. http://www.humanedj.com #Lean
Disclosure: No affiliation, no direct experience with humanedj.
[Reply]
October 21st, 2009 at 2:22 am
[...] Social Business Design: Birth of a New Industry focus on using emerging social technologies for transforming businesses, instead of merely reaching out to customers. via metarand.com [...]