Socializing Business

I have been reading "Groundswell" (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff). It is not my favorite kind of book - it makes a couple of key points, and most of what they say seems kind of obvious, or rather, it would to most consultants. The book mostly focuses on showing businesses, how they could use Social Technologies and join the whole movement, rather than getting sidelined. Most of the examples have to do with interfacing with customers, reaching out to groups which already exist or creating some proactively.

There are some things in the book, that will probably come up in conversations related to this topic. One is what they call the Social Technographics Profile. The profiling framework classifies web users into the following categories:

• Creators
• Critics
• Collectors
• Joiners
• Spectators
• Inactives

I do not personally like the linearity implied in the ladder metaphor. This, however, is a useful way to think of any population of users, and makes us aware that in any particular user group, we are likely to see different behaviors. Further, the patterns of distribution among these categories is not necessarily universal. So, it helps to know what the population you are interested in looks like.

As one reads through the various examples in the book, about using the web as a marketing tool, listening for feedback, spotting possible issues early, engaging people in conversations, building relationships and so on, it occurs to me that one's starting point is always the business context.

If one were to take the marketing process and look at it from two perspectives - opportunities for re-engineering the process in the context of the new technologies, and socializing the process, we can start developing a framework for how to apply these technologies to business.

Elsewhere in the blogging world, there are conversations related to HR for example. I would look at HR in the same way - how is the process designed today, which element of the process is amenable to a social approach, and then figure out the technologies which are best suited to transform (incrementally or radically based on the enterprise's appetite).

Since we used the ‘'T'’ word, obviously there are changes in the way the process is governed, managed and so on, there would be changes in the organizational design that supports the process, and as I had mentioned in an earlier blog, it would require a move to an Open Social System. If the organization is not completely comfortable with an 'open' approach, it would have to appropriately scale back its expectations of what one could get from socialization of the process.

I think, this leads to the main point I wanted to make. There are certain aspects of a business which are more amenable to 'socialization' than others. Broad-based approaches, lead to situations, where the expectations are set high and could lead to disappointments with the technology. We know this anecdotally of course - we now need to develop our own framework or Point of View to identify an approach to socializing an enterprise.