 When CSRA released the Social Network Roadmap in Q2 2008, we were a unique voice speaking at conferences about enterprise adoption. Due to my prior work helping enterprises adopt disruptive technologies like distributed computing, Web applications, service-oriented architecture and Web services, it was easy to see what enterprise adoption would look like, so I designed Social Network Roadmap several years before most of the market was ready to use it. Our client work has enabled us to test, tweak and expand the roadmap since then. As 2012 draws to a close, enterprises have experimented, adoption of social technologies (“social media”) among most stakeholders has set records, and executives wonder how they can coordinate social business across the enterprise. To realize “compounded” enterprise social business benefits it’s important to understand the social business life cycle, so here is a brief treatment.
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How to Outperform by Managing the Social Business Risks that Slow Your Competitors
 By understanding the dirty dozen social business risks, you can make fewer mistakes than your rivals and get more done for less money, so this may be one of the most valuable posts you read this year. Having advised executives in adopting disruptive technology since the 1980s, I have learned that hidden assumptions sabotage early adopters’ investments and delay desired business outcomes. Happily, early adopters can significantly diminish social business risks by looking for them and mitigating them with agile development methodologies. CSRA’s client work has shown that using a risk mitigation approach is the most effective way to increase social business return on investment.
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 Banks are under intensifying profit pressure, so all are reexamining the size and value of bank branch networks. In How Many Bank Branches Do We Need in the U.S., posted in Celent Banking Blog, Bob Meara offers a brief discussion of the concept of “branch flexing,” as coined by Oliver Wyman to describe optimization. It’s no surprise that banks are questioning their massive branch expansions during the 2000s, especially in light of increased capital requirements and regulatory costs, which increase cost of operations. Moreover, margins are razor thin as interest rates are at historic lows.
What does this mean for branches? I’ll offer a surprising alternative.
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 Putnam Investments has been a financial services social business pioneer for many years, so here I’ll summarize their pioneering initiatives that show that regulated financial services firms can communicate with clients and prospects in many-to-many social venues without going astray. True, it helps having a CEO that was the first CEO from a mutual funds firm on Twitter.
The point remains, imagination and inertia are preventing financial services firms from engaging with clients and prospects in digital social venues, not regulators. Here’s how it’s done.
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 The Social Channel of Value explains our era’s drivers of economic transformation and how leaders can use them to strengthen their careers, organizations and communities. Profound shifts in human beings’ means of production restructure society and business because they alter the amount of “value” human work can create as well as the type of “products” that encapsulate people’s work. Individuals and organizations that notice, observe and understand these shifts early on can improve their relevance and competitiveness. Many of those that do not respond quickly enough go down with the ship.
Since the Social Channel is so important, I have published the Social Channel Trilogy, which is summarized here. Find even more information on the Social Channel home page.
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 Social business policy (social media policy) engagements are some of the most interesting, revealing and critical engagements CSRA has done. Of course, organizations’ main motivation for creating social business policies is protecting themselves against possible legal threats caused by employee interactions online; however, a far greater threat is overemphasizing the legal threat and sabotaging employee engagement online. Well researched and crafted social business policy increases trust between the employer and employees—and among employees, leading to more appropriate online interactions, which burnish the firm’s reputation. Here, I’ll outline how you can use the process of creating the policy to manage legal exposure while increasing employees’ trust and productive social business activity.
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Bill Snyder at Infoworld posted some amazing statistics that support the end of social media as we know it, which I predicted in 2009. Marketing and public relations have been losing influence for years because they are impersonal, and people prefer personalized interactions (deep dive here), so marketers and their vendors are grasping at straws. In this context, “social media” has generally been practiced as a shallow promotional activity, and my premise in predicting its demise is that the true potential of social technologies is creating and maintaining relationships, which are based on personalized attention and caring.
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Social Channel Three: Using the Social Channel to Defend Native Markets and Penetrate Foreign Markets
The global Social Channel will reintroduce “home court advantage” to national brands because those that use social business to compete globally by collaborating with users will have the cultural advantage; “foreign” firms may have better product features for the money, but they will not match home brands’ cultural fluency. Personalized service and attention are culturally specific, and deep cultural fluency directly correlates to intimacy. However, brands can only develop the home court advantage by practicing social business at an advanced level. Most have a long way to go and, meanwhile, they will get hammered when they persist in competing on product features in the Productized Channel of Value.
The blade cuts both ways: the home court advantage will make exporting to emerging markets much more difficult in the years ahead. The Social Channel will raise the bar because users in all markets will increasingly expect brands to relate to them and to solicit their input and advice. Brands will have to invest significantly in developing in-market social […]
Social Channel Two: Understanding the Social Channel of Value by Examining Its Precedents
Meet the Social Channel of Value, the new arena where brands compete for user (customer, client) attention and loyalty. Product features are losing their ability to differentiate because they are copied so easily. Moreover, the Social Channel of Value will transform human decision-making, organizations and institutions because it digitizes sociality, a core human trait, and its power will dwarf the power of the product and the brand. CEOs, CMOs and CPOs have a very rare social business opportunity to harness the Social Channel ahead of competitors and remake their markets. These are strong statements, but bear with me and I think you’ll appreciate why I’ve made them.
The Social Channel is the Knowledge Economy‘s analog to the Industrial Economy’s assembly line, which led to today’s brands and mass-produced products. Where the assembly line made fabrication ten times more efficient, digital social technologies will boost human communication and sociality by an order of magnitude. The “Social Channel of Value” shows how product and service features will […]
Social Channel One: Building Post-Product Relationships with Customers is how to Build Brands
Pioneering brands are building post-product customer relationships in the social channel because they realize that product features are copied easily and serve as weak differentiators, which leads to pervasive commoditization. Moreover, people’s preferences for individualized information dealt mass media a lethal blow, and products firms will have a similar fate. Here’s why products will become extinct and how to guide your brand in building post-product customer relationships and profits.
I have predicted for years that mass customization would be the fate of “products,” and social business is bearing this out in spades, so here I’ll delve into how impersonal “products” will be rejected by customers in 5-15 years. More important, CMOs and brand stewards who appreciate this transformation will enjoy unusual advantage, and smart ones will prepare for it now. Brands that don’t get it will simply perish, and no one will even notice except their producers and vendors. Just think about the local papers and TV stations you have known.
This is Part One […]
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