Social Business Design (Flaw)

The Dachis Group is ringing up successes. They’ve hired a talented team. Been backed by big dollars from Austin Ventures. Gone global with the acquisition of London-based Headshift. And, introduced a new business term: Social Business Design.

Kudos to everyone involved.

However, I need help with the term, Social Business Design. The current design of its definition seems flawed to me.

I tried explaining/defining the term to a friend the other day but did it poorly. (I think I know what it means, but I don’t.) It’s about using online applications (like ‘social media’ tools) to help businesses improve communication across all departments inside the company and communication across all vendor partners and customers outside the company to create a more efficient and more coordinated way of doing business.

At least that’s what I thought. After reading Dachis Group Managing Partner Peter Kim’s short explanation of what Social Business Design is, I’m totally lost.

Read through Peter’s explanation and see if you can make sense of it. If you can make sense of it, do us all a favor and leave your easier to understand definition for "Social Business Design" in the comments section. (Thanks.)

Peter Kim writes: “Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.

Its goal: helping organizations improve value exchange among constituents.

Social Business Design uses a framework of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes: ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter. This model can be applied to improve customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization. Doing so provides insight to help measure and manage business to produce improved and emergent outcomes.”

Comments

[David E. Bowman]

John,

Peter gave a great presentation here in Ohio on it a couple weeks ago. I will send you the video. It explains the idea much better than does the text. Having seen the presentation, terms like ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter make more sense. Although this does raise an interesting issue in terms of the ability for people to understand the concept without the context offered through a presentation. It would seem that if they can get enough people through the adoption curve, they can begin to show more examples of this in action - solving the problem of ambiguity to a greater extent.

[Paul Hebert]

Uh... yeah... "so do we need a blog or twitter account or not?

That is the funniest thing that is real that I've read in a long, long time. Thanks for making my day. I don't know how they could say that with a straight face. Or how you could read it with a straight face.

[barchbo]

That paragraph needs an attached glossary. There are three terms that are either egregiously trade-specific or completely manufactured. In addition, "mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes" just cracks me up. As someone commented above, the presentation explains it better. If someone needs a presentation to explain his content, then perhaps the content is best restricted to presentation.

As a former English teacher, I taught my students to be concise writers; they should express the most content with the least possible words. Otherwise they would be left with that unfortunate combination of bloated vocabulary and tangled exposition: le BS.

[mikey]

Agree that a required glossary for the definition of an exciting new business concept is absurd.

I'd restate his definition as, "changing corporate cultures to effectively empower employees to embrace collaboration among internal and external constituents to create a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace.

[Bill Yeadon]

This sounds like it should be in a Dilbert cartoon.

[Debby Peters]

Hmmm, I think this is all rather funny since I think what he is saying that they want to promote better and more valuable and profitable communication. Doesn't seem to be working. Or maybe I just didn't understand. If I were a prospect, I think I'd be turning tail. (That means running away!)

[jacob morgan]

John,

I was just thinking about writing something about this. I'm also a bit clueless as to what dachis does. The wording sounds like reading something from a text book and uses terminology that is really not relevant nor practical "mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes" sounds like something from a psych book. I know the folks there are smart and I respect the work they have done as individuals but as a company I have no idea what it is all about.

[Kate Niederhoffer]

John - thanks for bringing this up. As you know, you can always call me if you're genuinely confused. I think you do understand what we do-- we're trying to make businesses more effective through better collaboration, largely enabled through social technologies like wikis, communities, and microblogging platforms; but, primarily through culture and process change.

The story around the framework is that it's a helpful way to map out all the activity in a business and figure out the right people and projects to connect ("ecosystem"), which aspects of culture need to be strengthened ("hivemind"), which business processes are static ("dynamic signal"), and whether there's an effective system in place to make sense out of the signals in the noise ("metafilter").

[Michael J Lis]

Hey John , great post. I've been pretty critical of Dachis Group the past month on my blog (http://speckmedia.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/social-business-design-part-2-0/) not only for the term Social Business Design but also for some of the key moves that you pointed out

"Hired a talented team. Been backed by big dollars from Austin Ventures. Gone global with the acquisition of London-based Headshift."

It's funny what money can do and Jeff Dachis does seem to have a lot of it. I believe David Armano is doing a good job of spreading the word on Social Business Design but sometimes even on Twitter I really wonder how many people are paid off to (RT) his presentations and comments.

In social media there's a lot of false promises and questions - when you really look at some of the major firms like Dachis Group you stop and say...

"What is it that they do?" and more importantly how do they do it?

I continue to say that Dachis Group might be wrong in selling huge change in organizations. Making a cultural shift to social media is not easy. Organizations struggle with just trying to open communication channels among business units and Dachis Group now wants them to focus on social business design... hmmm. Not good.

Of course, I'm commenting because I own a social media strategy firm myself (SPECK Media http://www.speckmedia.com). We specialize in social media strategy, but also believe that organizations are looking to take small steps in this media before committing to a huge cultural shift.

And in regards to the focal point of this article and comments - we have outlined terms, definitions and a design process that pretty much shows everyone the what's behind the curtain of social media.

So I'll stop promoting and say that I agree with the comments on this post and say that the takeaway is: that the industry needs to find a common ground in social media - not a bought presentation stage - paid for by one firm.

[business services]

yeah,Social Business Design uses a framework of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes: ecosystem
thank you for the posting

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Kate ... as the comments have pointed out, the definition Dachis is using to explain "Social Business Design" is full of jargon. The marketer in me believes Dachis would be better served by dumping the jargon for real words people understand.

Thanks for validating that my super simplified understanding of how Dachis defines "Social Business Design" is indeed the gist of what y'all use business buzzwords words to describe.

[Rob Paterson]

I thought that maybe I was stupid - I know several of the team - people that I respect and am more than fond of - but for the life of me I cannot understand their material - it goes beyond jargon.

I think that are saying that it will take more than tools to make a social organization - I agree with that - but I cannot see what they intend to do and where they see the key points?

I am a bad example of 60,000 foot thinking myself but I am stumped.

[David Armano]

John,

Appreciate your opinion. The best design is often iterative meaning it evolves and improves with each iteration. Take that as you wish.

Michael, you said

"but sometimes even on Twitter I really wonder how many people are paid off to (RT) his presentations and comments."

I'm sure as a leader in a social media strategy firm you understand how the concept of value exchange works. If you put something of value into your ecosystem, people share it.

[Michael J Lis]

Hey David - glad to see you checked in with your thoughts, I was getting worried that you might have a hangover from Vegas.

On my comment:

"but sometimes even on Twitter I really wonder how many people are paid off to (RT) his presentations and comments."

Two points -
1 - Twitter bots account for 24% of tweets
2 - I agree with value exchange, but I would argue that there is also just exchange (with no value). How many meaningless tweets and made-up stories are there in the ecosystem?

[TheCluelessCrafter]

Thank god I didn't skim through this and read all the comments.

When I read the definition, I immediately felt like a chump. I figured I knew nothing about business nor the topics of this blog. Helping people feel inadequate for the sake of sounding business savvy is one thing that I know is NOT a good strategy.

[microgaming]

This one sounds perfect to me:

“Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.

Its goal: helping organizations improve value exchange among constituents.

Social Business Design uses a framework of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes: ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter. This model can be applied to improve customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization. Doing so provides insight to help measure and manage business to produce improved and emergent outcomes.”

[Elizabeth]

Even for someone familiar with the Social Media Design, I had to read that paragraph a couple times to grasp what he was trying to say! He uses too much jargon and definitely not enough layman's terms. It is confusing and loses the interest of the reader within a few lines. Let us use this as an example of how not to explain things to people.

[David Gerard]

"Lean customer engagement value justification social media benchmarking personalized interconnected sincere voice user-directed market identity. Strategic promotainment visibility 'wow'-factor network actionable content optimisation wiki analytics B2E brandstorming corporate DNA semantic mapping please dear Lord stop me before I kill again Obama effect synergy ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn research embedding. It's so obvious if you think about it!"

(originally from http://is.gd/4AHWZ )

[Peter Kim]

John, words matter. Sorry you don't understand.

[Lee Bryant]

Hi John, never heard of you before in this field so pleased to meet you. I help run Headshift, which as you mentioned is part of the Dachis Group, and we have been doing this stuff for nearly seven years.

Aside from you not understanding Pete's prose, I don't get what the flaw is in the concept. I appreciate you find the definition slightly jargony, which is fine, but working in marketing - and calling yourself a marketingologist (!) - I would imagine you have come across far more opaque text before before. At least this example has *meaning* and is distinctive, compared to the output of the usual self-proclaimed "social media experts" / kitten fiddlers.

Anyway, I don't know if you caught it, but I published a piece recently that offered another take on the journey from social tools to social business design - or, if you like, from thinking about implementing technology to thinking about how we can re-wire organisations to take advantage of the lessons we have learned from the social web.

Does this help?

http://www.dachisgroup.com/2009/10/the-archetypes-of-social-business-design/

[Geoffrey Morton-Haworth]

An American teacher, LouAnne Johnson, famously noted that “Words are thoughts and if we don’t have enough of them we can’t think”.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Lee ... I never said the concept of Social Business Design is flawed. I did say, "The current design of its definition seems flawed."

The jargon used by the Dachis Group in the definition of SBD reminds me of all the jargony language used in press releases from Silicon Valley tech companies in the late 90s to describe their holistic and frictionless paradigm-shifting approaches to reengineering mission critical client-focused applications, resulting in scalable and emergent outcomes. (Huh? My point exactly.)

I believe, like you, using social media tools can knock down communication walls between departments inside a company and outside a company with both vendor partners and customers. Doing such, will improve how a business does business by being more coordinated and efficient.

I just believe in using more elementary words to describe solutions to complicated problems.

[DUST!N Staiger]

One question: does Social Business Design teach me how to properly respond to criticism on blogs?

Based on what I'm seeing, there's a market for that.

[B. Wong]

Cut through all the jargon and I think there is a useful, meaningful idea here. The Dachis presentation on SlideShare does contain some simpler, straightforward concepts. Social media and unrestrained blogging is very "look at me", it's marketing. Social business, to me, implies something more encompassing and community-oriented. I think a great example of a social business is threadless.com. The designs for t-shirts are contributed voluntarily by the community, the community votes and provides feedback (positive and constructive), the community buys the product, wears the product, tells their friends about it. Threadless enables the community and provides the service of printing highly rated designs onto t-shirts, sells them online, ships them internationally. Great product, great business model, great reach. Community-oriented and nurtures graphic design creativity.