A good friend, and intellectual sparring partner on the subject of ‘The Agency of the Future’ - Rand Leeb du-Toit, recently ‘keyboarded’ an article that got plenty of much deserved attention..
His 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 Headshift by The Dachis Group. Effectively, this acquisition brings together some of the biggest brains on the planet around social media strategy, and social business design; social media megastars such as David Armano, Jeffrey Dachis, Kate Niederhofferand Jevon MacDonald
Rand quoted Anne McCrossan’s definition of Social Business Design the help explain the flexion point of Enterprise 2.0 and other social media strategy concepts he speaks of;
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.
Rand believes that with the natural evolution of Enterprise 2.0, and the coining of the phrase Social Business Design by The Dachis Group, we have just witnessed the dawning of a new age; the beginning of a new industry!
But does the concept of Social Business Design sound familiar to anyone else?
So much of the theory and practice that resides at the core of Social Business Design sounds like the same principles tha successful villages and communities existed upon largely up until the early 18th Century. For these villages, commerce was very much about the community, and conversations and relationships. With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of globalisation most recently, corporations have forgotten the notions of community, collaboration and consultation. Before the advent of advertising and the ‘agency’ people were persuaded to buy products by the people who made and distributed the products…and this all took place on local markets, where everyone gathered to enjoy the social aspects ofo business!
What has changed, has the toolset that is ’social media’ simply made the notions of community more possible in our ‘bigger world’ or has human behaviour gone back to the future, and created these tools to help us live under the same principles as we did in the past…
A bit like the chicken and egg debate really. I just think we have gone back to the future, and I look forward to helping businesses understand the importance of our past values, and use the tools of the future to make business ‘more social’ again!
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Please put whole posts in RSS reader if you want to be read… I like your blog but I am tired of clicking each time opening new window and closing it again trying to find reader again…
Thanks for the feedback Zoka…I will have someone look into this!
really great to hear some more insights from people. It is a new business and it is something new we’re struggling with in our business. Internally people understand it bit by bit, but making our external stakeholders part of this process needs much more attention and time.
Just subscribed to your blog, interested in more of this